Performance and FPS indicator

[gsagostinho]

The fact that the FPS are ok but the experience is not fluid is fishy. Oolite displays and manages almost nothing compared to most other games I run, and is fine even with the sub-optimal Javascript I make it run every frame. There must be a grain of sand somewhere.

Yeah, this is exactly my experience so far. But I did an experiment these days: I made a clean install of Oolite on my secondary notebook and added just a couple of OXPs, including the ones I was working on on those days. The result is lower FPS than on my main notebook but muuuuch more fluid experience and no lags at all. Given that I am using 100+ OXPs, I am really starting to suspect that there might be one or a couple of them to blame. When I have a chance, I will add them one by one and see at which point does the game start presenting the severe lag.

[Cody]

I will add them one by one and see at which point does the game start presenting the severe lag.

Remove half the OXPs. If the problem goes away, change to the other half of the set and try again. Continue removing half the remaining OXPs each time, eliminating the half that are trouble-free. Repeat until you have identified the culprit. Even if you have hundreds of OXPs, this method will let you identify the source of the trouble in less than 10 iterations.

[gsagostinho]

@Cody

[another_commander]

@gsagostinho: Which ATI card do you have on your main system and which OXPs are you using when lags are present? Both of these pieces of information can be found inside Latest.log.

In my opinion, loading too many OXPs does have an impact on performance simply due to the Javascript engine trying to manage a huge amount of (frequently unoptimized - which is fine; not every OXP creator is expected to be a professional programmer) scripts. With hundreds of OXPs you are bound to hit this problem sooner or later. Oolite, contrary to most "standard" games which have fixed assets, shaders etc., can be expanded and loaded up as much as your system's resources allow it to. If you keep things to a "normal" level (i.e. use a reasonable amount of OXPs without going overboard with loading everything and the kitchen sink), then performance should be OK. I believe this is the reason I never experienced gsagostinho's problems with his Dangerous HUD - I am using a grand total of 41 OXPs and I am sure I could do with even less, so my mediocre system doesn't get pushed to its limits

[gsagostinho]

@gsagostinho: Which ATI card do you have on your main system and which OXPs are you using when lags are present? Both of these pieces of information can be found inside Latest.log.

I have an AMD HD 7730M. This is a decent card as far as I know, and my system is relatively decent (i7 + 8GB RAM) but I do have a rubbish HD as mentioned before. The trouble with this card is that it is one of those horrible hybrid cards and they are terrible to configure under Linux... As for the OXPs, I have really tons of them.

I believe this is the reason I never experienced gsagostinho's problems with his Dangerous HUD - I am using a grand total of 41 OXPs and I am sure I could do with even less, so my mediocre system doesn't get pushed to its limits

I will really take a good look at this, I will try removing all my OXPs and slowly adding them in prioritized order, so that the performance can be better measured.