TECHNICAL SUPPORT / WEB APPs BUGS

one thing i have noticed in game is that the particle system and the sound associated with an effect often (in my case always) degrades the FPS of the game...in fact there is such a burst of memory usage that the game "lags" terribly when i am casting spells alone, and it is even worse when there is a group of people all casting at once...

my question is, would it be too much to ask if an option for less intensive particles or a more efficient particle system were implemented? this is possible, but it is largely due to (in my opinion from experience) textures in the particles being too large, or the particle model being too messy (such as duplicates being rendered for the same spell effect, or way too many particles per effect being rendered) and possibly in the coding of the particle systems...

i could be wrong, but i have seen particles systems go from nightmares to WOW in other games before...i was on the dev team for the "freelancer" (a space flight sim) mod "free-worlds" which is now called "free-worlds: tides of war" which merged two communities and both teams of devs to make an entirely new mod...one of the goals of the mod was to streamline the particle system so it would not be as resource intensive, and the difference was very very noticeable...it went from the heavy "lag" to almost no noticeable resource/memory drain at all... which allowed for more people on the servers and much larger battles, so realistic looking that it was almost like being in one of the star wars movies...and the particle system was still very awe inspiring...now most of it was in the coding, but some was due to texture tweaking and some bloom effects being better implemented...(like tweaking the exe to fully use the features of dx9 or the equivalent in other operating systems), now im not a coder, and i know that is a lot of work, but it might be worth taking a look at...i do understand particles systems though, and i think that may be also something worth looking at to keep the game resource usage to a minimum...the rresults will be very pleasing if improvement can be achieved...more participation, realistic no lag rendering...and just more immersion into the world of ryzom...

the second part i noticed was that the sound for effects such as spells is very resource intensive, and might be due to several sounds being called at once...which would explain a lot...and im convinced if this is the case that the sounds could be merged in a DAW (digital audio work station) cleaned up and re-combined in the multitracker, and then re-introduced so that only one sound file is played per effect...that is if this is truly the case, i dont know becasue i have not had a chance to look at the code in the scripts to see if there is more than one sound per effect being called...but its just a hunch...if this is the case then i can definitely help on that end, since i have the tools to re-master sounds right here...all it would take is for someone to share those files with me, i could combine them and remaster them, send them each back as a single file per action, and then if there is any changes to what is called in the scripts, those changes could be made one by one until each one is optimized...just an idea...

anyway, thats just my $0.02 on the particle system and room for improvement in the sound effects(if there is nothing i can do to change it from my end in the game settings)

sooo...now that im done explaining my observations, and suspicions, i want to know...am i correct? or is there a way to tweak the graphics and sounds on my end instead? if i am correct, and there is a need to clean both areas up, then im offering help to clean up the sound files for these effects, but i also understand if it is not needed, and there is already someone who is in charge of that...

i did post a ticket on the ryzom core/issues/ on bitbucket also, so this is sort of a duplicate post...it was recommended that i post in here as well as the other thread, and on bitbucket...but i will stop short of sending an email since that is just overkill...

Just here to agree with you on both counts. Whenever you have more than a few dozens of people together, sounds are mashed together anyway so you can't discern any particular spell; also, the game lags terribly once people start casting.

Aside from posting here, maybe try posting this as an issue on the github of the ryzomcore project too? You can ask for directions in the #ryzom irc channel, freenode server.

Original thread: http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/18589

yes i did post a ticket on the ryzomcore page, and i will look to see if there is a workaround, fix or if they are working on this issue...

it was not so much trying to figure out if several sound files played at the same time when several people cast spells, that of curse would be normal, but when i cast alone, i thought maybe some of the issue could be due to 3 or 4 sounds being called at the same time to produce a unique string of sounds for one effect...my idea was to take these sounds and combine them together, or multitrack them (overlapping them together) so only one sound file is called per effect, instead of more than one called...if that is the issue...

if it is not the issue, then i believe it has to do with a particle system being imlemented poorly for spells, but implemented very cleanly for other effects like the glowing effects around the embassies on Silan...those effects never lag my system and run constantly...but spell effects are plagued with this problem of slowing my system down to a choppy crawl until the effects are finished and the CPU and memory can catch up, which should not be happening since my system specs far outclass the maximum requirements for the game to run...and that is why this boggles me to no end...

this is solved, it was a sound issue, as i partly suspected...to fix what i encountered, i simply took the slider for the number of sound tracks played simultaneously down to 4 instead of the high number it was, and it fixed the problem... perhaps a proprietary linux sound driver for my sound card would enable me to bring it back up for a richer sound experience, but im not sure how to do that...but as it is now this is fine...

for reference here is a link to the ticket so the devs can point people here or to the ticket link for reference if they encounter the same issue...

https://bitbucket.org/ryzom/ryzomcore/issue/81/particle-system-pr oblem-maybe-sound-effect