Nodes slowdown issue: thoughts and conclusions

Re: Volunteers Needed: Jerkstop Testing

Believe it or not, I'd already done some particle effect tweaking on Temple 4 as well as the other lag places, but while it seemed to resolve the lag for me for the most part, it hasn't entirely 'taken' across the board like the nodes and Fire Temple. I think there must still be a stray particle effect or two related to funguses that's stuffing it up, as I got the known ones.

 

Re: Volunteers Needed: Jerkstop Testing

The air and earth elementals were the main offenders, and strangely it was specifically their eye particle effects that did it. None of them anywhere have the eye particles anymore. (That includes things like Ildrisses etc.) So it's some other crazy offender, and the only other thing on Temple 4 that's at all unique are the funguses. Eventually we should redo the testing routine there. (I hope I can find where I set it down lol.)

 

Re: Volunteers Needed: Jerkstop Testing

sigh ... so I fired up Temple level 4 for some testing as previous, approached the fungus area, and got some limited lag (a couple 1 second episodes). My system plays nice with ToEE most of the time so when that happens, it probably means a much more significant lag risk for other systems. Yay, so I'm onto something - it's probably a particle effect of one of the funguses (though not absolutely ... ToEE's just not that predictable).

I turn off the first funguses I encounter (the shriekers), go back and test, and the lag is gone! This means we may have narrowed it down further to one of the many particle effects the shriekers use. Have to be thorough with this though, so I turn the shriekers back on and go back to see if lag has returned. Of course, the lag is still gone. I try it every which way, start new games, unfog the map, scroll all over, delete the map cache, etc., etc. No lag. But it was there the first time.

Makes it impossible to triubleshoot this stuff when even the bugs aren't reliable. :no:

 

(Note - I moved the recent batch of lag posts from the former jerkstop thread to this proper one dealing with lag.)

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Okay, I think I found the (hopefully final) Temple level 4 culprit - the Ascomid!! :angry: Ascomids are those spore-like bouncy purple things that are the furthest back in the fungus area on Temple Level 4.

I had to set up a whole routine where I could get a reliable few ticks of lag each time I'd try, which I did by first killing Hedrack and Co., then saving in that circular area. Then, each time I'd load a save, I'd go on a tour of the level, down to the electric trap and then to each node lane before finally going up to the funguses. Anyway this apparently flushed the system of enough particles to produce some lag hitches upon reloading them.

So I just employed the earlier testing method where I turned off the particle effects for each of the four fungus types there (Hooting Funguses have no particles), and when the ascomid's turn came up, my hitches went away. Turning all the other fungus particles back on did not bring back the lag, so it seems fairly conclusive. (Famous last words with ToEE I know, lol.)

The ascomids have 4 different particle effects that play. Rather than try to isolate the offender further (and for all I know it may have been all of them), I just broke the references to them all. This results in the ascomids going from looking like bouncing purple spores to fun bouncing purple beach balls. Totally worth the tradeoff IMO.

This will be in the upcoming 8.1.0 release btw, so anyone paying attention here, please let us know your play results.

Let's all hope to god this is basically the end of it. Seems to me that the overall trend since the initial fix up the thread has been that the only significantly lingering offender has been Temple Level 4. I don't hear anybody bitch about the nodes anymore.

 

You do love the concealed thing, don't you?

I don't recall that that was ever a part of my testing routine, because I was pursuing the offenders through the basic process of elimination. Looking up the thread though, we can see a few things:

- gazra's test of your efreeti concealment looks inconclusive.
- I know that particle effects still play for mobs that are OF_OFF. Not sure if that's the case for concealed. You wouldn't think so, but ...
- The water and earth elementals in Senshock's area were both concealed prior to the lag fix.

We could try concealing them, but I don't know that there's much to be gained. Losing a few particle effects is better than altering a hidden-or-not condition, assuming those were set the way they were intended to begin with. And if the particle effects are that problematic, I'd feel more comfortable having them entirely gone rather than just off at certain times.

The impact of the lag fix thus far in terms of lost particles has not been significant IMO when compared against the gains -

gains - most significant bug in the history of ToEE is mostly fixed
losses - air and earth elementals no longer have beady red eyes, efreeti no longer have blue fuzzies underneath them, and now ascomids no longer have purple spores

That's a slam dunk in my book.

 

Well I'm guardedly hopeful on that score. (This being ToEE you can never be sure, but at least we have some precedent for success with the original lag fix.) I guess we'll see how players fare and respond accordingly.