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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 12th Aug 2016 at 2:24 AM
Object Count VS Object Complexity
Generally speaking, what what would cause more lag, lots of simple objects, or a few complex objects?

On top of that, what would cause more lag- large textures or high poly counts?
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Inventor
#2 Old 12th Aug 2016 at 1:57 PM Last edited by douglasveiga : 13th Aug 2016 at 2:00 AM.
What causes more lag is the autonomy system. I mean, several Sims calculating the score and testing the availability of each of interaction on each object. Some of these interactions are extremely time consuming and will keep the main thread busy and the game constantly frozen.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#3 Old 13th Aug 2016 at 9:34 AM
How about for decorative objects that have no interactions?

For example, if I want to have electrical wires, would it be better to use a single plane + a larger texture, or a mesh + an extremely simple texture?
Inventor
#4 Old 13th Aug 2016 at 1:04 PM
Quote: Originally posted by jje1000
How about for decorative objects that have no interactions?


That would be nice.
Searching through the scripts, I found the "Sims3.Gameplay.Core.Null" class. It's a very basic class almost without interactions, that would be nice for decor only object.

Quote: Originally posted by jje1000
For example, if I want to have electrical wires, would it be better to use a single plane + a larger texture, or a mesh + an extremely simple texture?


I think it's the first option.
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#5 Old 13th Aug 2016 at 2:13 PM
You can also make a repeating texture like the halo ramp texture?
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#6 Old 13th Aug 2016 at 5:15 PM
In this case I want to make electrical wires that have a bit of a sag in them, so a repeating texture wouldn't work unless I use the second method of having modeled wires + a repeating texture.

On the other hand, I noticed that textures actually take up a considerable amount of space in file- could it be that:

1.) Textures make games longer to load up
2.) But complexity of meshes is what makes games run slower?
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#7 Old 14th Aug 2016 at 12:43 PM
Well, how higher the polycount, how more effort the game needs to do to render it (if you have used a 3D program and rendered anything with it, you'll know that whenever you render a really high polycount, it needs a lot of time to re-render the frames, same thing with the sims).

Textures however, I guess the reason why they take longer to render is that it needs to gather all the textures that an object has linked to it. So I guess, say you would make a object without any additional textures and only has a Diffuse texture, it might render faster than when you do have the additional textures (Specular map, bump map, mask, etc.)

And then there is this other issue with textures being too big in size. Back in the days games had texture sizes that were like 64x64 (I've seen them in 2005>2007 games as well).
Which I think, is either because of the amount of 'additional' textures, or because the polycount was higher than it should. (Although these are Playstation games i'm taking about.)

Then there is this thing with PC games. When we take a look at TS2, if you would set the game to the lowest quality, it would have 64x64 textures. But Maxis back then had a system called 'LIFOs' which are texture files that where the max setting which were 516x516 >1024x1024 sizes. if a computer was able to handle the highest quality back in the days.

Having the texture history behind us, there are two possibilities why textures might lag: Size, or additional textures. And maybe even the data the game needs to read to gather all the textures together.
Mad Poster
#8 Old 19th Sep 2016 at 7:28 PM
TS3 is from 2009, and in terms of graphics today's computers have no trouble at all making those graphics appear. The only thing that limits what TS3 can do graphically is the damned memory limit, so if you managed to fill your ~3.2 gigs up with only meshes and textures you'd have a problem. But anything below that won't cause problems unless your GPU is an absolute pile of crap. But I might be wrong. I've only ever played TS3 on PCs that were more than powerful enough for it, maybe there are systems that can't handle it.

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( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#9 Old 21st Sep 2016 at 6:26 PM
Hmmm yeah the memory could cause for texture issues. At least i'm more familiar with the 'dump texture' kinda system with console systems but it might actually happen with a pc as well. Not sure though. But I wouldn't be surprised it's the memory limit also causing this.
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