Slaughter Map Performance Booster

[Rachael]

Slaughter Map Performance Booster



The idea is simple - this prevents monsters from running tics too often when they are out of range. Instead of doing their A_Look/A_Chase calls every tic, they do it every X tics (as you define in the menu), if they are too far out of range to really matter. The result is a huge boost in FPS (particularly with heavy slaughter maps like Sunder MAP11).

You are allowed to use this in projects. Just keep in mind some people might autoload this and that will cause this to conflict.

There is a menu for fine tuning.

Special thanks to everyone who's ever written ZScript wikis and tutorials over the years, and particularly to Ed the Bat who helped me figure out the compiler errors while I was making this.

Depending on how you set the settings - this *will* affect how maps play - monsters that are slowed and out of range are significantly less aggressive - this can affect maps that abuse chaingunners, for example, for long-range LOS punishment. (i.e. Plutonia maps) - there's an option to help mitigate this but it does not ultimately fix it - the behavior of slowed monsters will inevitably be changed no matter what.

New feature - Freeze Mode

Some maps might have 30k or more monsters. An example of this is Oversaturation. With previous versions of SMPB, it was possible to get this map to play on a decent system, but performance still chugged a bit.

Freeze mode was added specifically for this map. (And maybe even more maps like it in the future)

A Word of Caution - Freeze mode will alter the gameplay of the map even more significantly than the normal mode of this mod. A monster under freeze does not tick at all - no movement, no velocity, nothing until you get in range. If you snipe a frozen monster, you will not see them die until you get close.

Where this really gets interesting is distant monster closets. A common mapping method to populate a map during gameplay is to create a giant sector with a teleporter line and when your enemies cross it, they teleport to you (the player). From your perspective they are appearing out of nowhere, but from the engine's perspective they are simply in another room. This room is not accessible to the player without cheats - that is intentional and normal.

What if they are in a room out of range of freeze mode? Then they will never come in, and it will be impossible to get 100% kills on the map without cheating or disabling the mod. They will be in an inaccessible part of the map, and cannot reach you.

This can get even worse if you are on a level with boss triggers and you need to kill those bosses to progress. If the bosses cannot get to you, you will not be able to kill them to set off the necessary triggers.

So - you might want to turn off freeze mode after you've thinned the horde a bit and your system can handle it. But that's up to you - the control is in your hands.

Repo: https://github.com/madame-rachelle/Slau ... nceBooster

Download: https://github.com/madame-rachelle/Slau ... b-v1.3.pk3

[Nash]

Definitely saving this one for my reference. :) Thanks!

[Marisa the Magician]

As a "good scripting practice" recommendation there I'd suggest that you cache the thinker iterator and re-init it, instead of re-creating it every tic. This is going to thrash the GC otherwise.

[Rachael]

Thank you - it is actually quite rare that anyone gives me helpful feedback like this on one of my scripting projects. I appreciate it.

[Rachael]

Haven't touched it for almost 24 hours, it's probably stable enough for a v1.0 release. It's a fairly lightweight project anyway.

[Redneckerz]

A reason why the best ideas are simple by heart - Sadly i am not techncially proficient enough to provide meaningful feedback, but this is very beneficial.

Consider this looks at monster count and not line count, question: Would Planisphere 2 or The Given be benefitted from this? Both maps are use a ton of lines to cause their slowdowns, but,afaik, Planisphere 2 also has quite a lot of monsters. I figure the performance boost will be less.

[Caligari87]

Only thing to do is test. Some maps the slowdowns come from monsters, some maps from geometry, some maps it comes from both.

This improves performance by reducing the tic rate for monsters far away from the player. It won't do anything to help with slowdowns related to map geometry processing.

[Rachael]

It also has menu tweaks available too. If the map is giant and has a lot of wide open spaces then you'll want to widen the radius from which monsters get slowed - if the map has a lot of twisty turny corners you can get away with bringing that down without having a noticeable affect on gameplay and that will have a bigger boost.

Also Cali is right - this will do nothing if the slowdown problems are related to map geometry or other rendering issues.

Admittedly my supply of slow computers to test this on is fairly slim. I tested this on my somewhat modern and decently performant computer and was able to push some of Sunder's worst maps from being playable to feeling smooth. This computer simply doesn't choke on Sunder's maps even without this addon - I've tried. So, I don't know exactly every way how this will affect slower computers.

If there's a better map set to test (that is *NOT* Nuts.wad) - I would be happy to give this a shot. Anything with between 5,000 to 20,000 is a good candidate.

I haven't tried Speed of Doom yet with this mod, so I will give that one a shot.
edit: Turns out that while SOD has slaughter maps, they aren't in the counts Sunder was. The map with the biggest monster population was MAP28 which totaled at nearly 3k, not enough to slow down my computer.

[Delfino Furioso]

what are your specs?

[kalensar]

I tested this on Planisphere 2 on GZD 4.8.2 and its a mixed review mainly for that map. The Good News is yes it does work, but the bad news is that a lot of it it is from map geometry for a lag. To get the most amount of smoothness I had to use Polysoft render or GLES using Doom Software render, using Lowest Possible Scale setting, and a scale factor of 0.25, VSync on but render interpolation turned off.

But Yes, SMPB does have a noticeable and working effect when comparing it with or without the mod.

Heres the machine specs roughly speaking

Code: Select all

CPU:       Topology: Dual Core model: AMD E1-1200 APU with Radeon HD Graphics bits: 64 type: MCP 
           arch: Bobcat L2 cache: 512 KiB 
           flags: lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 5590 
           Speed: 825 MHz min/max: 777/1400 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1032 2: 880 
Graphics:  Device-1: AMD Wrestler [Radeon HD 7310] vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: radeon 
           v: kernel bus ID: 00:01.0 chip ID: 1002:9809 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa 
           resolution: 1600x900~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD PALM (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.4.0-109-generic LLVM 12.0.0) 
           v: 3.3 Mesa 21.2.6 compat-v: 3.1 direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: AMD Wrestler HDMI Audio vendor: Acer Incorporated ALI driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus ID: 00:01.1 chip ID: 1002:1314

[Rachael]

Tried with SF2012 on MAP27 with 10k monsters - still couldn't get it to choke.
Then tried SF2011 on MAP30 with 15k monsters - finally managed to get my system down to 3 FPS.

There was a huge boost enabling the mod after that, went up to about 64 FPS or so with the mod enabled.

what are your specs?

My specs are AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Octa-core @ 3.89 GHz, with 32 gb ram, nvidia gtx 1650.

But Yes, SMPB does have a noticeable and working effect when comparing it with or without the mod.

Thank you - this is what I was hoping for.

[thugsta]

This is fantastic. Any chance you can make this work on LZDoom also? It seems to almost work as is, other then a thinker error on death

[stainedofmind]

Not at my computer right now, so I dont have the exact error message, but I ran into an issue with this and maps that use the SpecialSpot actors, specifically when reloading a saved game, gzdoom crashes quoting a line in the gzdoom.pk3. It can be reproduced by loading up Doom 2 and heading to map 30 and saving. When you try to load the save, it starts throwing errors. What baffles me is why its happening, as I don't see anything in the code that would cause it to happen. If you need the exact error, I'll post it next time I'm at my computer. For reference on how I ran into this problem, I was playing map with all of Doom 2s levels mashed into a single map, with a bunch of gameplay mods that really slowed things down, and this mod helped a lot, but when I reloaded my save, the error popped up.

[Rachael]

Not at my computer right now, so I dont have the exact error message, but I ran into an issue with this and maps that use the SpecialSpot actors, specifically when reloading a saved game, gzdoom crashes quoting a line in the gzdoom.pk3. It can be reproduced by loading up Doom 2 and heading to map 30 and saving. When you try to load the save, it starts throwing errors. What baffles me is why its happening, as I don't see anything in the code that would cause it to happen. If you need the exact error, I'll post it next time I'm at my computer. For reference on how I ran into this problem, I was playing map with all of Doom 2s levels mashed into a single map, with a bunch of gameplay mods that really slowed things down, and this mod helped a lot, but when I reloaded my save, the error popped up.

Yes - I need the exact error please, along with direct links to what mods you are using. I really would like to fix this if I can.

This is fantastic. Any chance you can make this work on LZDoom also? It seems to almost work as is, other then a thinker error on death

I will take a shot at it later when I get some time.

[stainedofmind]

Can do. Not going to be at my computer again until tomorrow evening, but the error occurred even with just Doom 2 and your mod loaded by themselves.