Low performance hit addons

[overcharger 0]

Hi, I need a little of help about this matter.

In the last two months I´ve been testing Sanctuary´s WW4 modpack 1 with several vehicles/choppers/aircrafts in order to made a good pack of addons for playing in LAN.

One of the goals of WW4 is to provide a optimized mod “to build massive battles without most addons usual performance hitâ€, as Sanctuary said.

I´m trying to find 3rd party addons that helps to meet this objective.

By now, for testing purposes, I put the addon(s) in the editor between a lot of WW4 infantry and BIS default vehicles and after that I preview the mission.

For example, yesterday I got a CTD using Dkm-Tunguska and some time ago, a lower frame rate using Franze´s air addons (F18/Kiowa/AH64).

Is there any other way to verified the performance hit of an addon without using it in the editor?

Can you recommend me some “low performance hit†addons like that I´m looking for?

Thanks a lot.

[sanctuary 19]

Without having to launch them in the editor, you can have some hints to how optimised a vehicle is for the OFP engine from opening the PBO :

For performance in massive usage in the OFP engine :

(this may not be always true for ArmA1/ArmA2 due to engine upgdates, but for OFP it is valid)

-too much textures for a model : bad

-too much very high res textures for a model : bad

-too much textures with lots of alpha channel and transparency : bad

-too much faces and polys for a model whatever amount of lods it has : bad

-too complex geometry and fire geometry : bad

-not enough resolution lods or in the opposite way too much of them : bad

-too much scripts running in the background for a vehicle : bad

-script with way too small delay for a vehicle : bad

-i don't remember exactly to how much impact, but for quick sounds making them to OGG or WAV quality instead of WSS , i think it was bad

Even most BIS vehicles use an insane amount of texture, you don't notice that much of an impact with BIS vehicles because most of those textures are extremely small and low res to compensate for their number.

If BIS would have merged those very numerous textures into fewer ones, their own vehicles would have had even less impact on performance and could have then be used more massively ingame.

Lots of addons have been unfortunately made to "look good", and as a result they were only really good for the OFP combat photography thread, as they would create lot of performance drop in real gameplay.

Edited June 24, 2009 by Sanctuary

[overcharger 0]

Then, could I understand that more textures/scripts/complex geometry etc. means a bigger addon file?

Remember I´m a newbie trying to learn (a little old, but OFP newbie anyway) and trying to find a perfect mix for making good missions.:o

Yesterday I tried with an assault mission in the island at south of Nogova. WW4 East Marines assaulting an Everon Alliance encampment. 2 BTR80 and 1 BMP3 of the VIT apc pack with 22 marine. Plus 1 OWP Mi8 leaving my team of 8 WW4 East SpecOps. All running very well.

By the other side, 44 Everon soldiers.

Until that moment, all working excellent. I achieved a very good firefight.

The next step was put a Vit Cobra for counterattacking purposes.

In that moment I got an horrible rate of 2 FPS, yes 2.:mad:

I replaced the Vit Cobra with default BIS and all works well again.

About “looking good addonsâ€, probably most part of players like me, spend time looking for an addon that looks good but that offers some kind of feature useful for mission purposes. BAS choppers are a good example of this I think.

[sanctuary 19]

Not necessarly, an addon could have a lot of models that would make it bigger as a pbo than another one that would have only 1 model. So the size of a pbo does not mean that an addon is more optimised than another.

Your only way to know is to open the pbo to look what there is inside , opening the models with either O2 for the ones that are in MLOD format and with ODOL explorer for those that are binarized in ODOL , you can't really see the poly/lod optimisations/amount of textures used without having a close look at the model.

Additionally looking at their config.cpp to check what kind of scripts are running, and then check the scripts to see if their loops are insanely small or not.

[raedor 8]

You might want to check the OFP FDF mod in the latest version, it has a wide range of vehicles, infantry, islands and most of that stuff can be played without a big performance hit.

[arma2disapointed 10]

Was looking for a mod specialized in this area.

500-600 units smooth specialized with 25000 viewdistance mod.

[sanctuary 19]

25000 viewdistance

Not possible in OFP.

Maximum viewdistance in OFP is 5000m

500-600 units smooth

1-Download WW4 modpack 1

2-Download WW4 Modder Ressource Pack 6

3-Edit all the P3D from the ww4_pl_MLODS.rar by deleting for each of them following resolution lods :

0.250

0.500

2.000

Edit the lod 5.000 number and change it so it becomes lod 0.250

4-Once done for each p3d, binarize them all.

5-Once done, put all those modified and binarized p3d into the WW4 ww4_rpl.pbo

6-Open an original BIS config.cpp and copy the whole CfgMovesMC class

7-Open the WW4 config.cpp and paste the whole CfgMovesMC class in the place of the WW4 original one.

That's it, each stock BIS units are replaced with models that features only 1 texture for the whole body and 1 texture for the face, while being +/- 160 vertices / 265 faces, and will use only BIS animations stock classes, no extra/additional WW4 ones.

The pilot view continue to use the full regular WW4 model, so the human player will see the normal hands and arms (this lod exist only for the human player).

That should help you to approach your 500/600 units and smooth goal.