New Client

[BKBanzai]

Much improved as far as memory leak goes. Thank you very much.

I seem to be one of those experiencing the page file buildup and after porting to Bristugo and then Feladan, my RAM usage dumped in the toilet. After some period of time, oddly enough, it did regain a bit of ground, I never did actually have to log out and this was after some 6+ hours of being online. My framerates did stay relatively stable so overall my gaming experience (from just resource gathering/recalling) was very good.

I have not observed combat situations to see how laggy that can get and I've heard that invisible mobs might be close to a fix.

After these "bugs" get taken care of, fixing the lag monster towns would be GREAT!

Anyway, good recovery. I think the memory leak issue might be better even than pre-version 360.x that fried it originally.

[Fireclaw]

Yes, the new client really helped the memory leak. Logged in at 40 fps in the countryside. Flew to town. Ported several times (including to Tazoon). Went back into different countryside and fps recovered to 30-40 fps. Well done.

Porting did not seem to cause a general slowdown anymore. The graphics engine still needs a lot of work though. I only got 30-40 fps with my view distance set to 25%. And if I went into any town my framerate immediately dropped to an unacceptable 5-10 fps until I left.

[Seranthor]

It appears to be a step in the right direction, that said, what follows it will be more indicitave of whether this is the direction things will go or if its an aberation. I will hold my praise until I can see ifthis continues.

[Shirewood]

We all are hard on the dev's working on this game.. including me.. at times.. I just want to take a moment and say "thank you" to the programmers forfixing the huge lag issues we had after the patch we had a few weeks ago. Before the patch I ran about 475K in mem resources on a normal basis.. now after their hard work.. it's lower than I have ever seen it (290K). So.. I say thanks guys.. and nice job! I was able to craft/plot build all night and never got booted or lagged out once! It makes the game so much more enjoyable when you can play the game the way I was plying it tonight!

My hat's off to you guys....


Good job!!

[Tzael]

Latest client is a good step forward and does a good job of killing off that fps drop that we were experiencing when using portals. I always appreciate seeing the fruits of the devs' labour, the fact they keep working on both the game and the client gives me a lot of confidence when considering how much this game means to the devs (as well as to us players of course !) [:)]

[Mandovar]

seems i am one of the guys with Probs after the Patch. Before i have had 60 to 70 fps when logging in, now i have 15 to 20 going down to1.2 FPS sometimes. Dont know how it happens and its hard cause i have now another 500mb ram in my computer....
Oh, thanks anyway for the hard job you are doing.:-)

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

I seem to be one of those experiencing the page file buildup and after porting to Bristugo and then Feladan, my RAM usage dumped in the toilet. After some period of time, oddly enough, it did regain a bit of ground, I never did actually have to log out and this was after some 6+ hours of being online.

Just a heads up, the page file problem some people were experiencing wasn't an issue with the client. It was caused by the blight server not properly sending info about releasing resources, which explained why people that used the new client on the live servers never had the issue spring up.

From what I can gather after using the new client for a good bit, it's still not perfect, when you hit a large town with lots of NPC's you will hit a framerate drop as all those old assets are unloaded and new ones loaded, but if you wait a few seconds for things to stabilize your framerate will climb back up to reasonable levels. Something the old client just wouldn't do.

Edit:

It appears to be a step in the right direction, that said, what follows it will be more indicitave of whether this is the direction things will go or if its an aberation. I will hold my praise until I can see ifthis continues.

rofl

[Fireclaw]

[img]/Web/Themes/default/images/icon-quote.gif[/img]BKBanzai wrote:I seem to be one of those experiencing the page file buildup and after porting to Bristugo and then Feladan, my RAM usage dumped in the toilet. After some period of time, oddly enough, it did regain a bit of ground, I never did actually have to log out and this was after some 6+ hours of being online.

Just a heads up, the page file problem some people were experiencing wasn't an issue with the client. It was caused by the blight server not properly sending info about releasing resources, which explained why people that used the new client on the live servers never had the issue spring up.

From what I can gather after using the new client for a good bit, it's still not perfect, when you hit a large town with lots of NPC's you will hit a framerate drop as all those old assets are unloaded and new ones loaded, but if you wait a few seconds for things to stabilize your framerate will climb back up to reasonable levels. Something the old client just wouldn't do.

In any town my fps drops to 5-10 fps and stays there no matter how long I wait or little I move. It recovers rapidly when I move away so the town is no longer in my draw distance. Clearly the client has a long way to go.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

Just a heads up, the page file problem some people were experiencing wasn't an issue with the client. It was caused by the blight server not properly sending info about releasing resources, which explained why people that used the new client on the live servers never had the issue spring up.

From what I can gather after using the new client for a good bit, it's still not perfect, when you hit a large town with lots of NPC's you will hit a framerate drop as all those old assets are unloaded and new ones loaded, but if you wait a few seconds for things to stabilize your framerate will climb back up to reasonable levels. Something the old client just wouldn't do.


In any town my fps drops to 5-10 fps and stays there no matter how long I wait or little I move. It recovers rapidly when I move away so the town is no longer in my draw distance. Clearly the client has a long way to go.

That's partially a matter of how well your video card can render the number of NPC's and geometry the town is displaying. Depending on whether your CPU, Hard Disk, Memory or your video card is the limitation, the client can act differently. Everyone will stutter when they have to load a huge amount of game assets (running into a town) but with the new client the memory shuffling that brings is handeled a good bit better, and at least in my case after everything gets shuffled around my FPS jumps way up inside a town.

[Pharcellus]

From what I can tell, the slowdown is improved, but no eliminated. I still get a slow degradation over time.

However, the memory accumulation is still there. A few hours and I am hitting 1.6/1.7GB memory, though only 700 or so of it says it belongs to the Horizons.exe process. After it gets to this point, crashing is inevitable, so bad that it often requires a reboot, because HZ has hard-locked the system.

Everything still causes lots of stuttering, but towns are awful, especially Feladan and New Rach after hanging around in it for a couple hours. Sometimes I can hardly move for 5-10 seconds while it "loads" Feladan (though I didn't go more than 50-100m out the front gate).

Keep at it, guys.

[Fireclaw]

[img]/Web/Themes/default/images/icon-quote.gif[/img]Fireclaw wrote:


Just a heads up, the page file problem some people were experiencing wasn't an issue with the client. It was caused by the blight server not properly sending info about releasing resources, which explained why people that used the new client on the live servers never had the issue spring up.

From what I can gather after using the new client for a good bit, it's still not perfect, when you hit a large town with lots of NPC's you will hit a framerate drop as all those old assets are unloaded and new ones loaded, but if you wait a few seconds for things to stabilize your framerate will climb back up to reasonable levels. Something the old client just wouldn't do.


In any town my fps drops to 5-10 fps and stays there no matter how long I wait or little I move. It recovers rapidly when I move away so the town is no longer in my draw distance. Clearly the client has a long way to go.


That's partially a matter of how well your video card can render the number of NPC's and geometry the town is displaying. Depending on whether your CPU, Hard Disk, Memory or your video card is the limitation, the client can act differently. Everyone will stutter when they have to load a huge amount of game assets (running into a town) but with the new client the memory shuffling that brings is handeled a good bit better, and at least in my case after everything gets shuffled around my FPS jumps way up inside a town.

3.2 ghz Pentium IV with hyperthreading. 2 gb PC 3200 DDR ram. Geforce 6800 gt video card with 256 mb onboard ram. My hard drive is a year or two old but even then if the hard drive was limiting me I'd expect my fps to drop only while loading a town and then my fps should recover. This is not what happens. Even if I don't move for 5 minutes and the town is empty of other players my fps drops below 10 fps and stays there until I move away from the town. All other games I have run great (I play WoW with all graphics settings at max and it runs far faster than Horizons while looking far better with a much greater draw distance). But Horizons always has and probably always will runs awful when in towns. By the way I get that 5-10 fps in towns with view distance set to 25% and most detail options turned way down.

[Bulgrim StoneCleaver]

From what I can tell, the slowdown is improved, but no eliminated. I still get a slow degradation over time.

However, the memory accumulation is still there. A few hours and I am hitting 1.6/1.7GB memory, though only 700 or so of it says it belongs to the Horizons.exe process. After it gets to this point, crashing is inevitable, so bad that it often requires a reboot, because HZ has hard-locked the system.

Everything still causes lots of stuttering, but towns are awful, especially Feladan and New Rach after hanging around in it for a couple hours. Sometimes I can hardly move for 5-10 seconds while it "loads" Feladan (though I didn't go more than 50-100m out the front gate).

Keep at it, guys.

I still say this has a lot to do with the gem lamps, lightning arcs and lighting in these towns in general. Its not the problem but one big one. Just my 2 copper

[Gordok]

My fear of townshas lessoned but not gone away yet:) Really good job on this one though as I did notice a VERY large improvement when I went a porting.

[Nikodemus]

It doesn't matter what graphic card you have.

I tried it with an old Ati 9700 Pro and an Ati X800 Pro. Theydeliverexactly the same performance in Hz. (though the X800 is like, 10 times better than the lowly 9700in other games).

Thus, Its only the CPU power that determines your frame rate in towns.

The faster the cpu, the more fps you'll get.

[Fireclaw]

It doesn't matter what graphic card you have.

I tried it with an old Ati 9700 Pro and an Ati X800 Pro. Theydeliverexactly the same performance in Hz. (though the X800 is like, 10 times better than the lowly 9700in other games).

Thus, Its only the CPU power that determines your frame rate in towns.

The faster the cpu, the more fps you'll get.

Sad but true (though its the CPU, ram, and harddrive that speed up the game I think). One of HZ's problem is the game doesn't take advantage of the 3d card's capabilities. Its one reason why the game looks significantly worse than other games while at the same time running much slower than those other games.

[Pharcellus]

Oh, stop. ATI cards work fine with Horizons. The quirks that the game had with my 9800 Pro are long gone.

[Tzael]

A few hours and I am hitting 1.6/1.7GB memory, though only 700 or so of it says it belongs to the Horizons.exe process.

This isn't going to make a lick of difference to performance, but I hope this tip helps by offering a more accurate measurement of Horizons' virtual memoryconsumption. HZ VM allocation is still high, regardless. Open up Task Manager in Win2K/XP, and go to the Processes tab. Go to the View menu and choose the 'Select Columns...' option. Enable the checkbox for 'Virtual Memory Size'. Now you have the option to see exactly how much virtual memory is allocated to all running processes.

[Eni]

It helped a lot and they said first part of the fix. So more are comming. Bud memory is not only client issue.
Other thing is window transparency. if i am at a place with normaly 30 fps. i can get up to 45-50 fps with turn of render window (/window renderwindow). If i toggel off only my UI (/toggelui) i get from 30 to 55+.Eben if i move my renderwindow that way (moveable 3d window option) that no hotkey or chat is touching it UI still reduce fps by same.
3rd Problem of client (but not only client) is planning window. After last "fix" it turned more useless than before.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

[img]/Web/Themes/Generic/images/icon-quote.gif[/img]Nikodemus wrote:It doesn't matter what graphic card you have.

I tried it with an old Ati 9700 Pro and an Ati X800 Pro. Theydeliverexactly the same performance in Hz. (though the X800 is like, 10 times better than the lowly 9700in other games).

Thus, Its only the CPU power that determines your frame rate in towns.

The faster the cpu, the more fps you'll get

This is not entirely true. Improving performance in a game as strange as Horizons isn't something that can be easily classified or described, especially with the amount of customization you can do to the game's rendering settings. Someone with a very fast machine can still have the game run horrible if they flip the wrong checkbox or don't take very good care of their system. It is true that if you have at least a DX9.0a-class video card or higher, you're pretty much set in running the game at max detail settings without any change than if you were running it at lowest. I'm still using my Radeon 9700 Pro and fairly old Athlon 2600+, and I can play at 1920x1200 with 2x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic texture filtering without any trouble. I don't get 40 FPS in Tazoon, but the game stays in a playable 15-20 FPS even when in large towns.

Horizons' client runs poorly for a number of reasons, all of which are well-known by Tango and everyone else that works on it. Different people have different systems, and the limiting factor can be many different things, although CPU and disk performance are probably the worst bottlenecks.

The biggest killers of performance that I keep hearing about are these:

1)Client relies on windows file system to fetch resources, with some directories like the world cache reaching 10,000+ files
2)Less than optimal models with very high polycounts compared to other games
3)No level of detail models for many complicated objects like machines
4)No LOD for distant terrain mesh
5)Very detailed UI compared to other games
6)Lack of understanding in the client for determining what nearby assets are actually visible ("World model/overdraw").
7)Fragmented definition system

#1 I don't know much about, it was on Tango's to-do list but was pushed back indefinitely due to some other amount of work I can't remember either. I really don't know exactly how much it'd improve things, but it certainly would give the game a boost.

#2 Is definitely getting much attention from the artists. I've seen several more reasonable models get downloaded in the past few weeks. Some people really don't notice how much more detailed some of the objects in Horizons is. In games like EQII and WoW, once you get past some of the fancier texture effects the models and world objects are very low-poly and jagged. You can often do more with less though, so I hope to see more attention directed to reducing the amount in some of those models.

The rest I don't know anything about, but much of what determines how fast you can play the game from my experiences is how well your hard disk performs. If you have a very large world cache or having defragmented your page file or general directory structure, all the IO reads/writes will seriously destroy you. The textures_agh directory contains nearly a gigabyte of game textures, with many common agh textures being 1024x1024x32 or higher. The same goes with the agf models. For example, the first half of the Aughundell mine shaft contains well over 10,000 polygons, with no way to reduce that amount when you're viewing the mine shaft from far away. The same applies to machines, the 10k polys in the woodworking station don't reduce in any form when you can barely see the workbench.

You can demonstrate this when you first log in, even in a complicated area. Your video card and CPU is more than capable of rendering everything at a nice framerate, it's the loading and unloading of resources later on after you run around the world that causes problems. The new client does to a much better job at quickly shuffling around memory and pf usage when you enter a new area, and other improvements to things like turning in a circle have been made. The nature of a zoneless world is what really hurts here, it's not as simple as defining what packages of resources are to be used in X zone, the game has to intelligently manage what is around it and what might be around it a few seconds later.

Just having to read in all that information when you port to a town or walk by a few plots takes a massive amount of disk work. If you're files are fragmented, or you have many background processes running, no matter how fast your CPU is or how much RAM you have, things are going to stutter.

I've tinkered a little with various installs of the game, and I've always had big improvement after moving the game's installation to a seperate physical disk from the page file and operating system. Just clearing out the world cache every month or so then defragmenting is a huge help with the new and the old client, you should never hear your disk drive clicking all over the place when playing.

[imported_chef]

What are the ideal game computer specs?
Probalby time for me to buy a computer just to run Horizons.