I am not sure how to add these or test them on the empires version since I don't see a particles folder, but I think this what I was using to fix it. Should get rid of most of the smoke on the particles which leaves the fire and explosions so it doesn't really let you have "wall hacks" or whatever they claim. You can't see through the explosions, they still look good to me and I don't like 50 fps. So try it out or let me know how to do it. Do I just make a particles folder in the empires folder? This pack should also get rid of the FPS eating rain on canyon and snow on glycenshitty. http://www.sendspace.com/file/xchp0r Yeah and when we make a "suggestion" we get ignored or yelled at, I mean your jumping down iselores throat when he clearly stated he's not trying to annoy you. And I am sure that if I called you a dickwit I would be banned. So stop flaming me. L4d is a taxing game and has lots of zombies and shit going on and yeah they get paid to do there job unlike you, I am greatful you even do it, but we are just trying to get a playable game out of this. It's nothing personal like you make it out to be. If nothing comes from it we will just move on, but we are a bigger majority than you prolly think, awhile I was the only person suppousdly with this issue and I have a dino comp that's why, yet I can run the newest steam game just fine. Which was my point, these computers we have are not so low end that you should blame them.
I think my point is misunderstood. I hope my tone here isn't too harsh. I made the comment about the smoke trails because I realised the video didn't have them. Obviously, the smoke trails ingame are meant as a tracer. You people with the better computers can run the nicer effects but all we people with the lousier computers just want is a good nice particle pack so that we can run the game smoothly and match the people with better computers. Right now, the effects are causing us to have an disadvantage. And the point is, alot of people have problems! Most choose to be silent, many don't come to the forums but going to 10 fps is the final straw. The people with the better computers are cheating now. Before these new particles, at least most of us were on par. That cheap particle pack is not even a solution as you can see... If you guys are so bothered about cheating, well, people are cheating right now! What wallhacks? You can't compare removing these effects to wallhacks when they weren't there in earlier versions too. We can barely move our tank turret at 10 fps while the enemy easily runs around you with his superior fps and bam, suddenly you are dead. Sonecha explains it well. Maybe only when a 100 people complain, then you'll consider helping us? I'm so angry, it's because suddenly a whole tonne of special effects are dumped into the version suddenly and our computers can't catchup. I've been playing and enjoying this game for 5 years now and suddenly within the last year, the game becomes like this for me and I'm reduced to whining on the board. I believe special effects are not a requirement for most multiplayer games. Most people tune down their game when playing multiplayer as compared to singleplayer. It's not immersive when smoke covers your face everywhere in battles. And the fact that I get low fps even my screen isn't blocked by smoke. What are the specs of your computer, Empty? Perhaps someone can direct me how to make effects? Dubee: Just make a particles folder. Yep.
Yeah, well said Iselore, unfortunately I have been pretty much alone in this debate and just written off as the only person experiencing these issues. But I agree completely and this isn't really a game people play for graphics, its more about the game play. The particles look just fine with out the smoke and they still block the vis. They just don't eat all the FPS. Empty how many seconds of smoke show up compared to the explosion/fire effect? You were saying its not that much so people shouldn't complain. So if its not that much were not getting a huge advantage keeping the fire effect and just ditching the smoke.
I have a present for ya. http://cloud.steampowered.com/...1C846E89EC/ This is a playback of a demo I recorded while suffering unusual performance issues. Note two very important things: 1. The massive 'particle simulation' budget. 2. The corresponding jump in the history graph. There was a particular part of the map that would cause this massive rendering cost if it was part of the PVS (probably the Brenodi base). You could not look away to stop the framerate drop, so I'm guessing it's a CPU rather than GPU cost. Playing back the demo, this only drops my fps to 30-35, but in the actual game my fps was reduced to a crippling 9-12! (Perhaps an unusually high cost from network prediction also contributed?) I've included the demo here. (You don't need to tell me how bad my driving is.)
Explosion fire is about 0.5 smoke is about 2-4 seconds dependant on weapon. Hell I wouldn't care about removing smoke but everyone claims its such a huuuuuuge vision blocker and it impacts gameplay soooo much that I don't feel it's fair you guys get to see through it. My specs are 4gb ram 3.1GHz CPU ATI Radeon HD 5700 series Windows 7 If you must know. EDIT: Thanks demented, that's pretty interesting. Particles are one of the more expensive things. No Idea what's actually rendering there, I'm assuming it's an arty impact? That's a lot of the budget being used and I can't tell what it's being spent on. EDIT: Also @Dubee Zombies cause CPU and RAM strain not GPU, their models are incredibly low quality. Also you claim it's not personal but I remember a post you made yesterday claiming I "Shat" on the mod. But yeah it's not personal.
thats something i said all the time but mootant kept telling me im talking bs. well i solved the issue myself then by upgrading to a better cpu (wanted to do that for quite a while before anyway) and what do i get? constant fps. not even the original nukes where a major issue unless you stood in the epicenter of a couple ...
I haven't checked out your demo. Do 2 things first: 1. Set cl_particle_max_count to 1 and play that demo. It'll overflow and write what effects it's running in console. If there's any kind of effect spawned 1000 times then it's particle effect's fault (not retiring). cl_particle_dump_effects might do the same thing. 2. Use cl_dump_particle_stats after playing that demo for a bit. It'll write particle_profile.csv file in your empires directory. Attach it here.
1. Demo started with about 30 explosion_plasma and that number only increased as the demo continued. All other particle effects retired properly. 2. CSV file attached. The highlights: (calculator_impact and Lifespan Decay included for reference) Code: numframes,4797 name, total time, max time, max particles, allocated particles calculator_impact,0.027953,0.000435,10,10 explosion_plasma,38.612240,0.007388,1,1000 opname, total time, max time Movement Basic,38.857635,0.007387 Lifespan Decay,0.040243,0.001000 Collision via traces,38.300491,0.007385
Uh, 1 gig of ram? I don't run XP on less then two. Ram is cheaper then t-shirts. That card is 4 years old, and wasn't that great when it came out. You can buy an awesome one for about 4-5 t-shirts. I'm still not having problems with particle FPS drop, only weapon switching.
Demented: plasma is rarely used and it's possible that particle effect that never retires slipped through. Empty has to check that.
My FPS problems seem to always be CPU related, not GPU. Especially when the game heats up and BE are getting clusterfucked into their main base on emp_coast. That drops my FPS through the floor. Running with showbudget showed "othermodels" coming up as high as particle simulation. But even when things aren't going on, I get huge FPS loss in the BE main base on coast, and there's one specific thing dropping my FPS, and I'm unsure as to what it is. I also noted that my FPS dropped by about 60% when I reverted my overclock on my CPU (Quad core Q9450) from 3.6ghz, back to the stock 2.66ghz. Either way, Iselore and Dubee, you need to get over yourselves. This crying that people who have better FPS are cheating is pathetic. As Foxy said, that card is not only 4 years old, but it was a LOW-END card when it came out. You could get a high-end card that's 6 years old, and it would perform considerably better than that. And having 1gb of ram is inexcusable in 2011, I have no idea how you can even start to bitch. There are cheap-ass netbooks with more ram than that. If you can't afford an extra stick of ram, I'm surprised you can even afford your own internet connection, or to even buy food, because ram is that fucking cheap. At the end of the day, even if you guys are suffering from low FPS, even if you are at a disadvantage, even if a smoke-free pack would level the playing field, what's to stop people with perfectly good FPS using the pack to gain an advantage themselves to gain a considerably advantage? At the end of the day, you have to look at it like this: This game may have been started on source 5 years ago, but how many other games do you know that have been actively developed for 5 years? We're updating, it's as simple as that. Computers have changed considerably over the last 5 years, and we (Empires as a game) already get slammed in reviews due to how ugly the game can be, I even read a review on a German site last night including this. But they said one thing looked really nice and modern. Do you know what that was? The particles, or as they put it, "the explosions from weapons". So for all your whining that no-one cares about them, that they add nothing to the game, that the game should play on shitty computers in 2011 just as well as it did in 2006, because at the time your PC was good enough, all that whining, can fuck right off. If you want help with this, ask, be nice, and understand that the position you are in is not our fault, but your own. The game will get updated, and new stuff will be added, and it won't be developed with 2006 in mind, but instead with 2011. We'll try to help where we can, but the immature accusatory tone will get you nothing. Take Demented for example. He just posted a helpful demo, and we're working to fix it. I myself took a demo with really low FPS, and we're working to fix it. What did you 2 do? Take some screenshots of explosions, bitch about how it is your god given right to play this game with your ancient PCs at 30+FPS, and that we should devote active development to helping a tiny minority of people, who on top of that, feel they should have an advantage over the players with a higher FPS. I also want to note that if your FPS is fine without the smoke, then you're playing at the same FPS everyone else is, but without smoke, thus cheating. So get over yourselves and start acting mature if you want help. Oh, and in closing, Dubee, stop acting like you have any idea what you're talking about with regards to L4D. It isn't taxing in the slightest, in comparison with Empires. The maps aren't wide and open, the server does most of the work handling the AI, and literally all your PC does is process the graphics, which are minimal in intensity at best.
One thing to note is that I never asked for Empires to regress itself back to 2006 just for us. Sigh, I merely asked for a separate solution for poor people like us and I didn't demand for it. Since you made clear your stand, I won't argue anymore. Maybe if you were in our shoes, you might see why we are so stubborn.
@Iselore If your E8400 is a C0 stepping version, it is a very good CPU for overclocking. Since Source (and Empires) is so CPU dependant that might alleviate your fps problems. Use cpu-z to figure out your stepping.
empty it was a joke, nothing is personal about a joke.. And all me and iselore are doing is pointing out something wrong. I did it before and now he is and I am sure someone else will at some point if its not fixed. I couldn't care less at this point though.
E8400 overclocks like a motherfucker. I had my old E84500 running at 150% for ages, on nothing but air.
Oh, derp. I've got a CPU work around to make source (particularly empires) work better. I've only noticed this since I have two screens, and have a CPU monitor on the secondary. When I launch empires, core 0 goes pretty much instantly to 100%, and stays there. All the other cores are in pittance usage. I've found, that by tabbing and opening task manager, and changing the affinity of hl2.exe from 'all processors' to 'all but core 0', empires will start to run across the rest of my cores. I realise, there's no gain in this for those with only two, but I have subsequently found that by going back into affinity, and allowing it to run on all cores again, it will, but without using 100% of one. Just a little tip for those getting high CPU usage. Edit: A piccie!
sigh I feel I should say something since I have a 2-10fps (low) machine that can't upgrade anymore. I feel something should be able to be done without all this anger to make it easier for long time followers to play. I feel there's some kind of memory leak that's bugging everything down, or perhaps a max draw limit that isn't working properly. I feel sad that this issue can't be resolved. I thought your post was a little harsh Trickster. I think the cheating/not cheating issue with particle packs is a little moot and perhaps could be circumvented with pm'ing the packs to these old time veterans of Empires. Perhaps with the penalty of permabanning if shared. Ise, I also think that because you have an ultra high ping and low fps it's a double whammy. My ping is generally quite low which compensates for my (even lower than your) fps to a fair extent, an advantage you sadly don't have. I also, like flasche, think the issue is to do with the cpu.
I should point out that I have always had shitty FPS on empires, I had shitty fps on my old machine, I have shitty fps on my new machine, I have shitty fps with my own fancy particles, and I have shitty fps with empty's standard particles, and I had shitty fps before particles even existed, I had shitty fps in empires version 1. Empires has shitty fps, this is a problem with empires, not a problem with particles. Empires models are pretty badly optimised, it has way more people on screen than source is really supposed to, its maps are almost impossible to optimise due to the requirements of huge-ass open spaces for everything, and basically the engine isn't designed for this so it is straining at the seams to even run. I can play crysis at smoother FPS than empires, with or without particles, hell sometimes even with or without players. If you disable even a bit of the optimisation on emp_atomic it stutters like hell, because it's rendering a lot of shit, empires renders a lot of shit a lot of the time, so it's going to run like shit a lot of the time. It also doesn't help that when OB came out, it kinda made everything run worse, episode 2 runs worse than HL2 and ep1, I don't know why, but the move to OB empires probably messed up your performance more than particles did. Empires is an old game, running on an old engine, which has been upgraded from even older engines, maintained by a minimal staff of amateur developers who have lots of other things to do with their time. You can't make it work better than it does.
