GoodKarma + Vehicles = lag

[pospi]

I'm having this problem and just thought I would ask offhand to see if any of the goodKarma developers or anyone who has used it has encountered similar.

So I have a mod with lots of vehicles in it, and I've added in some goodKarma objects to spice things up.

It seems as though maps that have a number of these objects make the vehicles lag a bit. Only it's not normal lag. You can be playing with a quite reasonable ping (say 60 or so), and still have your vehicle behaving sluggishly to your commands. Symptoms include a wait before noticing you're holding down your turn key and horrible sideways sliding (the kind that happens when you stop a vehicle, only much much worse and while youre still moving).

All my GoodKarma stuff is set to bKStartEnabled=false, and in fact has a timer system added to it to reset objects after a certain idle time so that they stop taking up bandwith. I've been using 'stat net' to check up on things and they don't appear to use any additional network threads when idle and only a few more when moving. The problems happen regardless of the state of GoodKarma objects anyway.

So that's what's happening. I was considering putting the objects to PHYS_None when reset, instead of just having them in PHYS_Karma but sleeping. Would this have any effect or is it a waste of time?

 

[zupafly]

I'm building a vehicle mod as well and I do notice slight lag on the physics, but overal it drives fine when not too many karma objects are in the screen.

I use karma balls as a powerup so a player could let 2 balls roll out back of the car. I changed it to 2 balls because I used to have 7 little balls but that seriously messed up fps and connection because when like 3 players would use them there would be 21 karma balls in sight... Then the fps would drop from max fps to 50 fps !

I dont know if you can fix this karma related lag but I suppose there are developers out there with more experience on this topic

 

[_Lynx]

Karma is very CPU-intencive. You either need to change physics detail in game settings or decrease the amount of objects. BTW, that's for PhysX PPU is made for, the only problem it supports only PhysX SDK (ex-Novodex).

Some Karma data is being transmitted over the net (hence Epic's requirement of minimum netspeed for DM - 2600 and for ONS - 3200). Even with the 3200 you'll notice glitches in usual ONS gameplay - tank turret may not be visible etc. So increasing amount of independent Karma objects on the map, that affect gameplay (in other words that are not decorations) causes huge increase of the data being transmitted and on server's CPU which is also not good for network connections.

 

[pospi]

well, I've added config variables to toggle those karma objects in any case. So I might just end up recommending that you only use them for LAN games or words to that effect.

What I was really hoping to know is whether I should bother trying to set them to PHYS_None when idle. Does PHYS_None have the same impact performance wise as disabled PHYS_Karma (by that i mean PHYS_Karma when KIsAwake()=false)? Or will the latter in fact have an additional overhead that might be responsible for part of my problems?