Lou Montana/Sandbox – User

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Revision as of 13:14, 29 June 2019 by Lou Montana (talk | contribs) (Add frameworks, table, and mods advice)
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Introduction

This article will try to be a general guide about improving your mission's code and its performance.
As usual, moderation is the key so do not expect to have thousands of AI magically running 144 FPS. Everything comes at a cost, the tweaks on this page will simply allow you to calibrate your mission properly.

This page is about Mission Optimisation. For scripting optimisation, see Code Optimisation.


Before anything

Before optimising anything, make sure you do not have any performance issue running the game itself:

  • Open the editor, place a unit in the area you like and test your computer.
    • Arma 3 displays FPS when you go into video options
    • Steam allows you to display FPS in a screen corner, in Settings > In game > FPS Counter
  • Use (unofficial) Performance Guides to get better performances:
  • Usual bottlenecks:
    • Lower your graphical settings (resolution, textures). If you get way better performances, at least your GPU limits you.
    • If the game keeps having low FPS when running @ 1024×768/low textures then your CPU is most likely the issue. Mission scripts may be performance-hogging too.
Please note that viewDistance (among other settings) impacts both GPU and CPU!


Creating your mission


Performance impact table

Topic CPU GPU Net-
work
Solution

AI units quantity

Template:colorball Template:colorball Template:colorball
  • Use Agents whenever possible
  • If a client has a low-end machine, they shouldn't lead a group of many AIs as these would then be locally computed.
  • Arma 3 Dynamic Simulation allows you to freeze AI that are distant from players. Many distance settings should be set according to the mission.
Most if not all of the mission calculation (objectives, completion distance, etc.) must be done server-side. Local effects should be calculated client-side.
If you own more than one average computers, you could consider Headless client and code accordingly.

Objects quantity

Template:colorball Template:colorball Template:colorball The less objects, the more FPS you will have.
only the on-screen objects will strongly impact GPU.

High-frequency scripts

Template:colorball Template:colorball Template:colorball A while-loop checking without a minimum loop-sleep time is usually a sign of bad conception.
  • while { true } // already "bad" if you don't know what you are doing
  • Triggers check their set condition every 0.5 second (hardcoded value). If a large area is covered or condition code is too complex, this can be an issue. Convert them to scripts then.
  • creating units/vehicles globally implies a network synchronisation.

High-frequency network messages

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View distance can be separately set for each clients independently from the server's value, through scripting.
This can make or break performance for the client.


What else?

You have applied all these recommendations and yet, your mission still doesn't run well in multiplayer (but does in singleplayer); an answer to that is that you are using mods, of which some are not well optimised, if at all.

If you want to be sure, run the same mission with and without mods. If you have a big difference in performance, look no further.