[Wolfenstein: Blade of Agony] v3.1 released (p204)

[JD_Method]

Hey, thanks for the tip about disabling tilt through the script. That fixed the frame skipping for me!

I just tried this tip of resizing all the textures but now the game takes an age to boot up, and I think the hitching might even be worse? How are you editing the files, by the way? Are you using a WAD editor or just opening up boa.ipk3 in something like 7zip or WinRAR? SLADE seems to have trouble opening the ipk3 in my experience.

[Zenon]

Are the percentages on the hud/status bar not working for you?

No they weren't, but I've found the solution to the problem.
The BoA hud clashes with the Fullscreen Huds in my global autoload, so all I gotta do is set it to Doom's autoload instead.

[0mnicydle]

Hey, thanks for the tip about disabling tilt through the script. That fixed the frame skipping for me!

I just tried this tip of resizing all the textures but now the game takes an age to boot up, and I think the hitching might even be worse? How are you editing the files, by the way? Are you using a WAD editor or just opening up boa.ipk3 in something like 7zip or WinRAR? SLADE seems to have trouble opening the ipk3 in my experience.

BIG EDIT/ You know what? Just don't mess with this bit for now. The easy way to do it doesn't let you do it with nearest neighbor scaling, and after looking at the results more carefully I don't like the way it looks without it. When I get more time I'll post a texture pack if the devs haven't done it themselves already. Suffice to say, there is much room for improvement as some of these model textures are absolutely ginormous for assets that aren't preloaded.

[JD_Method]

Ahh, I see. Yeah, I'm running it from a folder now and it loads quickly again, and I'm not noticing any hitching now with the reduced texture sizes, so all seems good! I've gone with 50% scaling in PowerToys for the textures and it seems okay so far. I'm running uncapped fps, but any hitching I have noticed now is minor and certainly not a dealbreaker for me. Thanks for the tips! When I finally have time to play through the mod properly it's gonna be great!

[0mnicydle]

Ahh, I see. Yeah, I'm running it from a folder now and it loads quickly again, and I'm not noticing any hitching now with the reduced texture sizes, so all seems good! I've gone with 50% scaling in PowerToys for the textures and it seems okay so far. I'm running uncapped fps, but any hitching I have noticed now is minor and certainly not a dealbreaker for me. Thanks for the tips! When I finally have time to play through the mod properly it's gonna be great!

Alright glad you figured it out. If you want some nicer ones done with nearest neighbor, here's a pack. For this I only hit anything over 512x and reduced it to 512x, except for some sky related stuff I didn't think I should mess with. It's a nice compromise between speed and quality that maintains the artists' vision more than the hack job I recommended before lol. Files have been stripped/crushed.

EDIT/ Link removed

[Solid_Beard]

What are your pc specs?

Proecssor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz 3.60 GHz
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Ram: 12GB
OS: Windows 10

Are you running it from Delta Touch?

Nope.

Are you using a different version of GZDoom?

No. Just the default version of BOA 3.0.

Did you change some options under Performance Settings?

No.

Are you running other apps in background?

No. But, maybe I just forgot to closed down my browser.

Also nothing happened in the Overlord level.

[riccardoman]

I just tried your resized textures 0mnicydle but I'm encountering some trange issues of whom I have no explanation. After I replace the textures the game boots much more slower and during gameplay some hiccups occur randomly, while with vanilla textures the game boots in 5 seconds and there are no random stutters
Personally I prefer aesthetically your resized texures, low res fits much better

[0mnicydle]

I just tried your resized textures 0mnicydle but I'm encountering some trange issues of whom I have no explanation. After I replace the textures the game boots much more slower and during gameplay some hiccups occur randomly, while with vanilla textures the game boots in 5 seconds and there are no random stutters
Personally I prefer aesthetically your resized texures, low res fits much better

Yeah you know what, I moved over to using my normal dev build of GZDOOM awhile ago, and I just tried it with the shipping exe and I'm seeing the same thing. No idea what to make of that right now, I'll look into it this evening and see if I can get it figured out. There is something seriously weird going on with the shipping exe and ipk3 in general, it's like I can't make any changes without it bugging out. I'll remove the link for now so as not to trip anyone else up, but it was working great in my daily driver environment and I was having an absolute blast with it last night.

[0mnicydle]

EDIT/ This guide has been removed in favor of the new and improved guide found here.

[m1lk]

uh oh. i cannot start C3M3, it wont even load, i just get this error

https://ibb.co/7WFhc2V

even if I goto console and type in "map c3m3_a" I get that error.

[Tormentor667]

What are the script hacks and optimized textures doing actually?

[m1lk]

uh oh. i cannot start C3M3, it wont even load, i just get this error

https://ibb.co/7WFhc2V

even if I goto console and type in "map c3m3_a" I get that error.

ok, I downloaded GZDoom 4.6 devbuild, and it fixed this problem, and also fixed the crash issue i previously reported.

but now im getting a graphic glitch. see screenshot:

https://ibb.co/s5gYPN9

[0mnicydle]

What are the script hacks and optimized textures doing actually?

Script hacks remove the tick override sections from the actor culling and tilt scripts, to stop the negative effects. Of course there is still a bunch of needless overhead related to each still going on since that's all that was done, hence "hacks." Like I said I suck at zscript and killing things and slight modifications is all I'm capable of at this point, but it does make the experience so much better. The tilt script is seriously hampering the user input/visual feedback loop by introducing some sort of interruption of variable severity from, I'm assuming, tick to tick. It looks sort of like a low mouse polling rate, though much more irregular. The culling itself I imagine is not a problem, but the respawning of culled actors introduces frame time spikes in certain areas (unless I'm mistaken and it's the actual culling itself--no idea), again, I'm assuming, when it's a large enough number of actors in one spot because there are spots in the maps where it's very repeatable.

The optimized model textures are just replacements for any model texture with a width greater than 512 pixels, reduced to 512 and scaled using point filtering to maintain sharpness and pixel art aesthetic. Since model assets aren't preloaded, large textures introduce frame time spikes as they are loaded in for the first time. Picking 512 as a nice balance between speed and fidelity keeps these spikes at a more tolerable level, and has the nice side effect of making the models visually blend in with their surroundings better (IMO of course).

I did some testing of the latest repository so I could see how the changes to the culling and tilt scripts are coming, and I am sad to report that the changes to both have not helped much, except for the fact that the negative effects for each (after some quick testing) seem like they can be avoided with the right cvars. Even setting the actor respawn per tick (boa_cullactorlimit) as low as 32 or 16 is not enough to stop repeatable frame time spikes (by walking back and forth over certain spots of the maps) even at 35fps, which is a real bummer. I had high hopes that the changes would allow for a best of both words situation, but the good news is the new boa_culling cvar to false gets rid of the spikes. The changes to the tilt system have yielded no improvement to the nightmare of what that looks like in action, but again, it seems the new cvar boa_tilteffects to false makes things go back to normal. So all in all, bit of a bad news/good news situation I guess. I hope that if further improvements can't be made that you really consider setting both of these new cvars to false by default, so as not to turn off prospective players who are sensitive to such things.

Thanks for the amazing mod! Absolutely loving it so far!

[AFADoomer]

Thanks for the feedback... it's interesting that people with high-end GPUs have worse performance with culling, yet people with lower- to mid-range machines see significant improvement.

EDIT: @0mnicydle - with the tilt code disabled, can you test the end of c3m5_c (or use pukename settilt 15 in the console in some other map). The level tilt handling is currently forceably enabled because it's required in that map.

[0mnicydle]

Thanks for the feedback... it's interesting that people with high-end GPUs have worse performance with culling, yet people with lower- to mid-range machines see significant improvement.

EDIT: @0mnicydle - with the tilt code disabled, can you test the end of c3m5_c (or use pukename settilt 15 in the console in some other map). The level tilt handling is currently forceably enabled because it's required in that map.

It makes sense to me actually; If you're starved for performance, it's an overall win, but if you've got headroom to spare, it cuts into it. For the people it helps, they can't reach that beautiful flat line to begin with at some fps target of choice, so all they see is better average fps. For people who don't need it as much (not that a culling system couldn't ideally help everyone), the overhead of the process itself represents a new performance floor (in terms of CPU time, stalling the game loop, and not being able to keep the GPU fed). This is why I said many times, only people with high end systems looking for the smoothest possible experience should disable it. That was just based on my gut feeling however, not empirical evidence; I am assuming it's beneficial to low end spec because the idea seems good.

pukename settilt 15 in the dev version with boa_tilteffects false results in view tilt and the player moving like center of gravity has shifted. The awful mouse stutter returns however, but a player might just chalk this up to the character not having a firm footing I suppose lol. The view is shaking this whole time anyway during the actual sequence. Obviously not ideal from technical excellence standpoint, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it either if I were you. If you already have an idea on how it could be fixed however, by all means please fix it.

In the release package with the script hack the view does not shift, but gravity still does. Because of the screen shaking and the context of the sequence, I didn't have any problem understanding what was happening however. The end result was that I felt the ******** was out of control and about to *****. Is it as cool as tilting? No, but it didn't ruin the game or anything, and for anyone sensitive to the mouse jitter, playing the whole game with it certainly would.