ZDWars Optimization

[Captain Ventris]

It's a well known fact that ZDoom Wars is ridiculous, by its very nature. So, I'd like to enlist some folks willing to comb through the code and/or propose methods by which ZDoom Wars can be made to run more efficiently. This includes any possible mapping tricks, obviously things that won't compromise the gameplay.

Supergod quotes ZDWars as currently sucking up about 150 kb per second, per player. I mean, wow.

So, if you know, or are, someone adept at optimization, do tell. Supergod has stated that he personally has no issue with the bandwidth useage, but that, obviously, certain players do. At any rate, it couldn't hurt to make the whole darn thing work smoother.

[Avernus]

What the hell, does it make 45 MB per hour for 5 players playing ? That's damn much. Luckily for you, Supergod is fine with it xD

Wish I could help you with this, zdoom forums might be the place for help. (Hire a coder damn, use the custard Luke)

[Dancso]

no. 5 players would use up ~45 MB per MINUTE.

That means 2,5 Gigabytes per hour, and 61,7 GB per 24 hours.

now that's a whole freaking lot.

---------------------------------------------

I'm not really sure what could be optimized in the code. I haven't taken too much of a look at it, but I'd guess there's not a wide array of things to do about it.

One thing that comes to mind would be increasing the tics in the decorate actor definitions... say, each monster would use A_look or whatever, slower by one tic. It might not do anything or much, but it's an idea.

[Captain Ventris]

That would also physically slow every actor.

[Dancso]

Well, yes. Though changing the A_look (or whichever detection functions there are) might be not as shockingly different than slowing down their movement commands like A_chase.

[Captain Ventris]

Many things in the balance rely entirely upon unit speed.

[$-$lyfox-$]

Sorry if this doesn't answer your question vent, but this is all ican come up with

It's difficult to put an exact figure on the bandwidth a given action game needs for a really smooth experience, though. Practically all such games have user-tweakable connection settings, which allow you to tell the game how much bandwidth you reckon you've got. But the network code generally just uses that setting as a ceiling figure, and may actually shift a lot less data around.

If you're playing an FPS game hosted on a distant, high latency server, then even with lots of people playing, you may find you're moving little more than one kilobyte per second upstream, and little more than two downstream, on average, regardless of how fast your connection is. On a server run by your ISP with a minuscule ping time, on the other hand, you may average as much as five times that - and have a much less frustrating game. Generally, you're not likely to move a total of much more than eight kilobytes per second, on average.

[evilspacetomato]

Jun 18, 2010 17:26:17 GMT Avernus said:

Wish I could help you with this, zdoom forums might be the place for help. (Hire a coder damn, use the custard Luke)

Actually the Skulltag forum and developers would be better able to help you since they understand Skulltag's network code.
The problems could be due to having a lot of actors, or due to the actors rapid cycling of frames, or it could be due to the large number of fireballs, it could even be the background scripts create a lot of traffic.

The easiest things to do that would cut down on net traffic somewhat (add the client only flag to any actor that does not have an effect on other actors such as Fenix's smoke and corpse gibs, try to find out if any sides generate noticeably more or less traffic than other sides) It would also be good to see how much information you can get about the relationship between games and bandwidth by recording demos of games, as it may be impossible to drop the bandwidth below 120kb per person, or it may be easily possible to cut it in half.

[Captain Ventris]

Where did this background script lag myth come from!? Let me show you the entirety of the repeating scripts in ZDoom Wars:


Script 550 (void)
{
giveactorinventory(1000,"summonmana", 1);
delay (16);
restart;
}

Script 551 (void)
{
giveactorinventory(1000,"heromana", 1);
delay (35*2);
restart;
}

script 552 ENTER
{
Thing_ChangeTID(0,1000);
}

script 553 OPEN
{
delay(1);
if (playercount() != 0)
{
ACS_Execute(550,0);
ACS_Execute(551,0);
}
}


script 554 Respawn
{
Thing_ChangeTID(0,1000);
}



script 887 (void)
{
SetActorProperty (0,APROP_Alpha,0.4);
}


script 3 ENTER
{
         HealThing(1);
if (GetActorProperty(0, APROP_Health) < 1) Terminate;

    delay(35);

    restart;
}

script 555 Respawn
{
         HealThing(1);

    delay(35);

    restart;
}

[Dancso]

Jun 20, 2010 2:09:52 GMT Captain Ventris said:

Where did this background script lag myth come from!?

Simple. It's a common issue with skulltag mods, so it's like, the first thing that comes to mind if a mod seems inefficient in terms of performance.