Fixed Improve Performance in 3D Sailing Mode

[Hylie Pistof]

I have a framerate problem as well and want you to describe your problem as well as possible to help track this down.

For instance when I am sailing a Hoy I get a solid 60fps unless a war fleet happens along and then it can drop as low as 9fps. POTC is capped at 60 fps max. I am sailing the Wicked Wench now and the very best it gets is 45 fps, and sometimes in battles the game is pretty much unplayable. It wasn't this bad in earlier beta versions.

There was a time when I got 60fps most of the time except in large battles when it could drop into the 30s. A new video card did me in, except that it doesn't seem to matter what settings I use. It can be set as low as possible or as high as possible and the frame rate stays about the same. At this time I suspect the drivers no longer support DX8.

So, it would be helpful if you could track down your problem better. You might have a different problem than I do. I use Fraps to monitor frame rates and it is free.

 

[Rei]

To be honest, I wouldn't doubt that the immense coding and scripting of this mod can in fact make the game do this, too.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

There were some optimizations added late in the last beta that makes it run worse with lower overall frame rates and much jerkiness as well. "Beware of unforeseen consequences."

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Rei: When you refer here to DirectSail, I imagine you just mean 3D sailing mode, right?
If so, I think this is a duplicate of this earlier Bug Tracker report: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/lag-on-sea.24641/

Unless you confirm otherwise, I will merge both issues soon.

 

[Rei]

I found that Levis' Build 14 3.5.1 fix helped. He said something about a performance fix was in those files when it came to direct sail. Too much resources were triggered?

 

[Levis]

Only thing I did there was rewrite a function which is called every frame to make it faster. I will try to optimize some of these things soon. There are some functions which are called 'to often' at see. the game would work just as well when they are called less often. It was easy to just add them to the function which is called very often but I will see if I can have a event for these functions with a toggle so we can addept this more easily.

 

[Levis]

@Hylie Pistof could you please put this file in Pirates of the Caribbean\PROGRAM\SEA_AI and let me know if this improves your framerates at sea?
others are also allowed to test, but please first enable the showing of FPS and check without this file in different situations (like, at a port, at sea, in a battle, in a storm) etc and then try with this file and let me know if there are any differences in fps and how much.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I hope this makes 3.4 actually playable.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The change makes very little difference. Shipyard menus are still unsmooth and frame rates at sea are only slightly better.

EDIT: Something else. The Wicked Wench has been a good ship in this install until now. The cannons will fire one time now. After reloading when I fire the bosun yells and the cannons icons on the compass unload, but there is no sound, flying cannonballs, smoke, hits or splashes, and no ammo is used.

 

[Levis]

the things I changed can have side effects like this. Good to know. I will change some more to see if that returns again. Problem is I can't test these things cause I'm on a solid 60 FPS all the time because I need to use the intel fix....

But the things I changed should reduce the processor load quite a bit, can you confirm this? Else there might be something else causing the lag, I didn't do anything about the shipyard interface yet, ths is purely on sea.

Could someone else also test this?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ok, here are loads on POTC 3.3 and 3.4.

POTC 3.3 is leaving Santiago at normal speed with 2 small ships and no other ships around. The frame rate is typical.


POTC 3.4 is leaving San Juan with 2 medium ships with a lot of other ships around but the frame rate is still average.


The ships in 3.4 have a regular stutter to their movement every second or so too. This gets very noticeable when the frame rate drops to single digits. That happens when there are lots of ships around and it is running at 10X speed.

 

[Levis]

Looks to me like the CPU isn't the problem here then (now). but the problem is somewhere else....
If possible could you try 2 scenarions which are the same so we can compare them?
I will see if I can find this stuter somewhere in the code. I now only checked the AI of the ships which had a lot of code running. maybe this is in the interface or somewhere else.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The games are at different places right now.

3.4 is just before the Battles for Bridgetown. I gave up there because I knew it would be unplayable.

3.3 is a little ways before the battle with the Mefisto and long before the Battles for Bridgetown.

Actually those frame rates shown are representative. 3.3 generally gets 45-50fps and 3.4 generally gets 25-30fps. 3.4 drops fast and far when it gets gnarly and I have seen only 4 fps.

 

[Levis]

Why would it be unplayable during the battle for bridgetown?

With 2 the same scenario's I mean, just take the same ship(s) in both version and sail from the same port or sail in open waters and compare it.
It feels to me like this is more a GPU problem then a CPU problem...

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I believe it will be unplayable because with lots of big ships blasting away plus the fort the frame rate will drop into single digits. That is unplayable.

There is approx. 15 fps difference between 3.3 and 3.4. 3.3 is playable and 3.4 is not playable. I have already given up on it.

For most of 2013 I had different video cards and POTC ran as well as it could with it usually doing 60fps and only big battles with more than a dozen ships dropping the frame rate into the 30s. It very well could be this video card that is causing the problem and I have been looking closely at it. But. It does not matter if it is set for minimal settings with everything turned off or maximum settings with everything cranked to the max. The frame rate is about the same.
At this point I can only guess that the GPU drivers no longer support the version of DX8 that POTC uses. I say this because I have other DX8 games that run fine.

But this does not answer the question of why there is such a large difference between 3.3 and 3.4.

 

[Levis]

Did you install ERB? Maybe that helps in your case cause ERB makes it use the DX9 libraries instead, so maybe your videocard works better with that.

I will try to find out what is causing the "lag"

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Hylie Pistof could you please put this file in Pirates of the Caribbean\PROGRAM\SEA_AI and let me know if this improves your framerates at sea?
others are also allowed to test, but please first enable the showing of FPS and check without this file in different situations (like, at a port, at sea, in a battle, in a storm) etc and then try with this file and let me know if there are any differences in fps and how much.

So did I understand correctly that this causes some unintentional side-effects with cannons?
If so, I cannot include it in the game yet, can I?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

My cannons remained operational throughout the sea battle I just did, but the special effects on my steam frigate didn't always seem to work.
And indeed it isn't overly smooth in sea battles now. The one I did was playable, but not brilliant.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I have not used ENB for years as it makes everything "glow". I suppose I could try it in the 3.4 install as I have nothing to lose there.

My ship, the Wicked Wench could only fire her cannons one time, but other ships fired normally.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

So I installed ENB. EEEEEEEWWWWWWW!!!!!!! Truly vile.

Uninstalled it and now the cannons work normally so some good came from it. Methinks installing the installer files fixed them.