[redsniper]

On a certain mission in Homesick, FSO keeps crashing. The mission starts off shaky but then smooths out. However, it slows down horribly (freezes for several seconds basically) at times. I think the slowdown is tied to effects like explosions and beams being played. There are only a few cruisers and fighters, AFAIK not enough ships to cause such a slowdown.
Also, RT mentioned somewhere that there is a bug where textures are loaded twice and removed once, or something, and posted an exe with the bug fixed; I'm using that exe.
Can someone help me out? my paging file is over 1 Gig!
specs: p3 866, GF4 Ti 4600, 256 MB ram, Win XP

EDIT: well, I was finally able to beat the mission, but just barely. It almost froze several times.

[chris_2xtreme]

it may be your pentium 3

[aldo_14]

Are you using TGA textures?  I think there may still be slowdown issues with them...try openGL - I don't think the TGA textures will show, but I've not had the same slowdown problems using it.

[kasperl]

i'm running something comparable, a P3 800 with a (just new) Radeon 7000 64MB, 192MB and win98se, i get an awfull hit when stuff warps in, or when i look at an explosion. i get knocked back to 7,5 FPS.

[redsniper]

5 year old processor, yeah that's probably it. I'm gonna be upgrading soon anyway, guess I timed it just right. Thanks for the help/advice/whatever.

[RandomTiger]

Could you help us out by narrowing it down for us please. You can do this by trying to recreate the slowdown under each of these conditions:

1. Run the exe with these flags -nosound -nomusic
2. Run the game with your texture sizes set at the lowest setting
3. Run the game with your ship detail set at the lowest setting
4. Try all of these together.

Post the result of the four different tests and that will hopefully show us where the work needs to be done.

[Bobboau]

and if you have any ubbersized textures (LS's planets, FS1 textures) disable them

[redsniper]

Originally posted by RandomTiger
1. Run the exe with these flags -nosound -nomusic
2. Run the game with your texture sizes set at the lowest setting
3. Run the game with your ship detail set at the lowest setting
4. Try all of these together.

1. Made things very quiet and improved performance at the beginning slightly, still got horrible hangs
2. Improved things significantly, framerate still skipped slightly when ANIs were played.
3. Made things look silly and improved framerate modereately.
4. Improved framerate drastically.

I think it's tied to the ANIs, I remember some complaints about this before. All 4 tests were done with -pcx32 NOT checked.

[Bobboau]

see, mid mission file loading

[RandomTiger]

OK, well Im due to restructure the texture system in the hopefully not too distance future. I hope to improve these issues while Im in there, but its all very complex so dont hold your breath.

In the meantime you will just have to keep down your texture and ani filesizes and dont use -pcx32

I'll also have a think about possible other solutions.

[Bobboau]

I think the majority of the problem is in a slightly higher level of code than you generaly work in

[RandomTiger]

Where do you see the problem being?

[Liberator]

I have a similar problem using HT&L, the framerate bombs when veiwing anything bigger that a corvette.  We're talking 25-30 fps down to 4 or 5 fps.  It happens in the techroom also.

I am using 1_20_2004 .exe

[RandomTiger]

Run the same tests as redsniper

[Liberator]

Okay, finally got around to the tests:

No Sound/No Music - framerates still hose.  It was breaking 90fps in a few places.

low textures - runs super fine, never fell below 50fps

low model quality - ditto

BTW, this was on:

Athlon 1800+, operating at 1.533 mhz
384 MB PC2700
Geforce 4 MX 420 w/ 64MB ram
RealTek AC'97 sound

Reslution: 640x480x32

FSO versiona and flags:
01_20_2004_fs2_open_r.exe
 -htl -pcx32 -jpgtga -d3d_no_vsync -d3dmipmap -fps -phreak

[RandomTiger]

You've not got a huge amount of texture memory so I would think about turning off -pcx32 and / or -d3dmipmap

[Liberator]

While I've got you what does mipmaping do anyway?  

The description in the launcher isn't clear.  If I am understanding it correctly, it makes the crap low-lod textures look better, right?

[Bobboau]

no, it is sort of an automatic LOD for textures that blends more smoothly