Experiencing Lag While Working on Bases with High Item Counts

[GrapeKat]

Is anybody else experiencing extreme lag while base editing when your base has a high item count? I'm only up to 4000 items out of the 20,000 allowed, but it becomes unbearably sluggish when I try to move or place items anymore. Is there anyway to correct this?

[Redlynne]

17 minutes ago, GrapeKat said:

Is there anyway to correct this?

Use less items.

No seriously.

 

What you're running up against is that the game engine is trying to render EVERY OBJECT in your current viewing angle, even if not all of them need to be displayed.  I encountered this on bases I'd build on Virtue server, where if I pointed my camera towards a part of the base that was item dense, even if most of the items were in other rooms behind "solid" walls, the frame rate would just nosedive towards the single digits per second ... but if I pointed my camera towards a part of the base with hardly anything in it, the frame rate would recover and start flowing "normally" again.

 

Biggest mistake you can make on this front is doing tiling patterns with a single object LOTS of times to make "floors" out of items that have no business being used as flooring (I liked using Small Bookcase 1 for this because it made for a stunningly beautiful dark and rich wood grain flooring) ... and would wind up with 256 items per single level of "flooring" made within a 1x1 room block.  Didn't take a whole lot of that repeated to start making the base lag when all those items were within the camera angle, even from across the base.  Eventually, because of the lag problem I wound up substituting the stone blocks (with the beveled edges) out of the Arcane item set instead, simply because I needed fewer items for large raised floor areas.  Did the same thing with the green Tech Boxes in the Tech themed rooms (and for much the same reason) as a way to build walkable floors without busting the budget on the amount of items that could be within the base in a way that would cause excessive lag/fps loss when looking in those directions.

 

Best work I ever did along those lines was a fully decorated 8x8 Decorative Great Room with less than 100 objects in it that still had plenty to look at and even an upper level to explore and relax in.  I called it the Night & Day Room since it was brightly lit in the center (like daylight) and dark around the perimeter.

[GrapeKat]

Thanks for the response! Like I said, it only happens when I'm actively moving and placing an item down, otherwise the base runs incredibly smoothly regardless of where your camera is pointed.

 

Due to the nature of the base I am working on, there is no alternative where I can substitute the smaller items with something larger. It absolutely needs to be what it currently is.

[KingofMonkeys]

How old is your PC/GPU just curious?

Edited December 27, 2019 by KingofMonkeys

[Dacy]

Your computer CPU and memory will have a great deal to do with this.

 

Note: fx items may only  count as one item, but they take up much more memory proportionately. If you are using a large number of fx, or really, any, I'd save installation of the fx until you are done with everything else.

 

However, side note: if you have problems editing with memory slowdown and general bogginess, people have a much greater chance of problems if you have anything in storage in the base. Items in storage are treated as base items, and each time they are added or removed, the entire base is rewritten. Memory problems and lag abound with this design, and items can be lost, people can be mapserved in the middle of moving items, etc. The higher the memory usage for a base, the greater the risk of memory related problems. If this is a base that is supposed to be functional, I'd suggest a lower item count, or a separate base for storage.

 

-Dacy

[Eva Destruction]

I found the editing process goes smoother when I turn the visscale down to 1, since it renders fewer items (/visscale 1.)  My GPU is crap though since I don't have a decent gaming rig; the rest of the game runs fine because it's so old, only the base editor has any real lag.

 

As for the mapserving, my villain base has fewer than 3000 items and I still mapserve for a few seconds the first time I access storage or when I start editing.  After that it's smooth sailing.

[Dacy]

Great advice on the visscale!

 

Yeah, I experience the mapserve for a couple of seconds when I access storage the first time and when I enter edit mode, no matter the size base. That just seems to be what it does now. It doesn’t seem to be a dangerous mapserve, one that loses things or actually disconnects you; might be interesting to measure the time and see if it’s longer for larger bases, because that could be an indication that it reaches the point of disconnect danger in very large bases.  I have yet to experience actually losing materials on homecoming, or getting mapserved to disconnect simply by accessing storage. Knowing how the base storage is handled by the game, tho, means that that could be a danger at some point, but that might also depend on the actual server.
 

-Dacy