One more thing I noticed: The globe model in Douglas' room is causing a nasty spike on intermap (when it loads)
Not that I imagine anyone is going to be too bothered about what happens on intermap, but if this model appears elsewhere it might become bothersome.
Having so much fun with this now though, really awesome work everyone!
EDIT/ Actually it seems like quite a few models are pretty heavy throughout the game and cause a hitch when they are first loaded, so no need to single out the globe in particular I guess. Is this just down to poly count, or what? I'm just wondering if there's some maximum level of complexity one could target to to make sure it's at least not going to compromise the 35fps experience for the average user. In any case, just disabling the culling alone made such a huge difference for me in the overall experience that I can ignore the one-off hitches for some of these models. Seeing some minor hitches in more asset heavy mods like this isn't completely unexpected for me, but I usually don't run capped at 35fps either, so I'm surprised some of these models are taking too long even for that. Prior to the culling hack though, I could easily and consistently find certain spots in the maps where if I walked back and forth across a certain threshold, I could trigger hitches in the same spot over and over, and now at least there's only one hitch the first time some particularly heavy model gets loaded in, which in some levels never happens at all--it just depends on if one of those killer models happens to be on that map.
EDIT/ I guess I'm also wondering if there's some way to get all the models that appear on a map to load as soon as the map starts, sort of like texture precache. I'd rather get all the waiting done up front, but it's very obvious to me that some of these models don't get loaded until I'm within a certain distance from them, as I can for instance lower scenery LOD, and intermap won't stutter until I get close to Douglas' room, versus before I even get to the HQ main entrance with it raised all the way up. What if you could raise the scenery LOD to such a ludicrous degree that it encompasses the entire map? I'm sure there's any number of engine level changes that could address this sort of thing, preloading, asynchronous asset streaming, etc... but I'm just trying to think of some quick and dirty way to fix it for people like me with resources to burn, cores and ram for days yo
EDIT/ Aaaand never mind the 'ludicrous' LOD idea--at least as an always on solution. I found for instance the city area of c3m0, it's too much for my system to crank the LOD to the current max even, let alone higher. But I think maybe temporarily setting LOD to 'ludicrous mode' just on level load, just to get everything loaded, and then quickly dialing it back down to the current user setting could work wonders, because so far having actor culling disabled is not preventing me from maintaining 35fps anywhere, but having LOD cranked too high definitely can; I was hitting 32fps or so in that city section with the LOD cranked. The way I imagine it working, the level loads and you get one giant hitch during the fade in before you have control anyway, and then you never get any more. But what do I know, it's probably a stupid idea for some reason, and I should just accept this is as good as it's gonna get
