How important to Community is a SmiteWorks store app to do Extensions?

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Originally Posted by bratch9

Our DM local hosts on his own machine, he has nice new fancy 1gbps fiber, I have to slum it out in the country with 40mbps which we had to fight for in the village as a lot of us are on the last 'BT' box and they did not convert it... because it might 'flood', which has never happened in 20+ years of living in this area... Took us 8 years from the village going FTTC to getting the last box converted, and I could get away from 512kbps...

We were well into hours of play on the map, so everything should be loaded and cached, and as I said turning off LoS fixed the bulk of our issue..

-pete

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Can for sure see a poorly designed LOS map could kill performance. Simple is always better when making LOS. If you have a lot of things jumbled together in a single line of sight for any token I'd say with enough tokens and perspectives you could easily kill the performance of any map. KISS rule in effect when doing LOS for my maps. Mostly in Curse of Strahd where they are fairly straight forward.

It's not just poorly designed LOS maps. It's also just poorly designed game maps in general. Large maps also traditionally kills LOS performance as well. Large rooms with lots of round pillars is a good example of a killer, then add lighting with even more shadow casts. Even though you might only put a 4 occluders around the room the video card and game engine usually has to break large rooms up into sections and break those 4 occluders up into smaller ones on the fly.

It makes a difference on your pillars too, square pillars are much more performance friendly than simiround ones with lots of points.

I spend time as a level designer and one of the things people are going to have to learn to balance is map size vs. LOS performance. When FGU came out with 64 bit performance suddenly, everyone was doing very large high resolution maps because you could. Then LOS cuts back on the performance of these maps. Then individual lighting will cut it back more. It's just a balance people need to find.

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Originally Posted by Griogre

It's not just poorly designed LOS maps. It's also just poorly designed game maps in general. Large maps also traditionally kills LOS performance as well. Large rooms with lots of round pillars is a good example of a killer, then add lighting with even more shadow casts. Even though you might only put a 4 occluders around the room the video card and game engine usually has to break large rooms up into sections and break those 4 occluders up into smaller ones on the fly.

It makes a difference on your pillars too, square pillars are much more performance friendly than simiround ones with lots of points.

I spend time as a level designer and one of the things people are going to have to learn to balance is map size vs. LOS performance. When FGU came out with 64 bit performance suddenly, everyone was doing very large high resolution maps because you could. Then LOS cuts back on the performance of these maps. Then individual lighting will cut it back more. It's just a balance people need to find.

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Actually - for larger rooms? Lighting would REDUCE the load. You don't calculate LOS outside of the radius of light - hence - less to calculate. Was the infinite LOS that killed you. Be happy they are limiting your danger to that type of thing. I assume this based on what I assume has been done on the programming side to keep things simple. If not - then I don't see the load issue at all as it would only be a post op of ruling out things not in radius of light sources (as full LOS would still be done as it is now that would be a minor add on in logic). IMHO

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Originally Posted by LordEntrails

Note, it is the GM computer that does the vast majority of calculations. So they are the bottle neck. And as damned implied, the amount of calculations the DM computer has to calculate for LOS is roughly the number of CT actors times the number of occluders. And some folks get carried away with occluders thinking they have to follow the exact outline of trees and curved walls etc. They don't. imo no occluder should be less than 1/2 a grid long. And that's pushing it.

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That is very good information. I'll try to take that into consideration when doing LOS. I have, unfortunately, quite a lot of occluders that are less than 1/2 a grid because I'm trying to close up gaps in the LOS so that they're not accidentally seeing through walls, etc., or looking through the gap between door and frame (though that actually could be pretty cool). I'll keep it in mind.

FG FORGE!!!!! GIMMEEE!!!!! Just saying - the other thread is Lighting :)

I hadn't been able to reply to the OP yet but see that it's gotten to 10 pgs already. Personally, I use a LOT of extensions/modules and enjoy doing so. I've bought a couple only later to find that they clash with another - I have to gauge which one I prefer and completely understand it's a buyer's beware situation from the outset.....as with ANY software purchase.

For me, the idea of a FG Extension store is rated 5 out of 5 for my desire of it being crucial. My only problem would be if all of the ext authors moved from DMSGuild to the FG Forge, where does that leave my previous purchase and how would I be entitled to the updates I get now? Logistically, I am not sure how that would work.....but if FG Store already has modules for sale, I don't see why we WOULDN'T want them to include extensions as well as other modules released outside of the FG Store (i.e. the Monster Loot modules as well as things like the Ships and Cannon modules to name a couple)

As long as I wouldn't have to purchase it twice, chances are, I am going to be a Forge user for life! /my2cents

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Originally Posted by SilentRuin

Actually - for larger rooms? Lighting would REDUCE the load. You don't calculate LOS outside of the radius of light - hence - less to calculate. Was the infinite LOS that killed you. Be happy they are limiting your danger to that type of thing. I assume this based on what I assume has been done on the programming side to keep things simple. If not - then I don't see the load issue at all as it would only be a post op of ruling out things not in radius of light sources (as full LOS would still be done as it is now that would be a minor add on in logic). IMHO

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That is an assumption at this time. Its also very likely that completely different processes/functions/whatever do each. The LoS is done first and then the Lighting done over the top... This is also an assumption by me...

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Originally Posted by SmackDaddy

As long as I wouldn't have to purchase it twice, chances are, I am going to be a Forge user for life! /my2cents

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That is one of the things that they are working on - how to (if possible) transfer your purchase to the Forge...
Its not trivial because of privacy issues.

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Originally Posted by Griogre

It's not just poorly designed LOS maps. It's also just poorly designed game maps in general. Large maps also traditionally kills LOS performance as well. Large rooms with lots of round pillars is a good example of a killer, then add lighting with even more shadow casts. Even though you might only put a 4 occluders around the room the video card and game engine usually has to break large rooms up into sections and break those 4 occluders up into smaller ones on the fly.

It makes a difference on your pillars too, square pillars are much more performance friendly than simiround ones with lots of points.

I spend time as a level designer and one of the things people are going to have to learn to balance is map size vs. LOS performance. When FGU came out with 64 bit performance suddenly, everyone was doing very large high resolution maps because you could. Then LOS cuts back on the performance of these maps. Then individual lighting will cut it back more. It's just a balance people need to find.

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I hate to get off topic here, but I never have performance issues when I'm the DM, however, as a player some DM's have issues and they don't even have much on the map with LOS in FGU.


I run maps that are 200x200 (1000ftx1000ft) or even bigger of a forest with each tree having it's own terrain LOS and other items on it like buildings and inns for LOS with no lag or performance issues at all.Attachment 43361

I'm not sure what is the problem but I do think it has to do with HD (first importance), internet (second importance), and CPU (third importance).
I can give you my specs if that helps but from what I've seen its mostly those 3 things.

I also have a ton of stuff shared to players but not yet opened up by them.

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Originally Posted by damned

That is one of the things that they are working on - how to (if possible) transfer your purchase to the Forge...
Its not trivial because of privacy issues.

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If it's difficult or impossible to do, I totally understand the privacy issue. However, it WOULD be awesome to be able to transfer it and have it all in one place where it can all update at the same time.