Performance Issues with decent system

[zBeeble]

I'm actually recommending you run it through a profiler --- not unity's but say ... urm is Purify still the gold standard? Looks like DTrace on Linux could give you a tonne of insight w/o paying for something like Purify.

Back in the 90's, I worked on a team of C++ coders doing a Satellite image processing system. It was in the several millions of lines of code category and we had even decided (due to targeting 12 platforms as diverse as DOS, WinNT, VMS/OpenVMS, UN*X and MacOS and different hardware for many of them) to roll our own window system. Our team was about 10 coders, IIRC.

We were finally convinced to buy Purify ... and it was expensive ... as I said $1k per seat or so... and multiply that times a couple of the platforms we supported (purify didn't support all of them and we figured that we'd bag the big wins in code that was shared). As you might expect, there were enormous wins in 1% of our code --- and we did make good use of that Purify licence.

Do your own due diligence. I've heard Purify spoken of over time --- but there's a lot more open source stuff like DTrace around than there was then...

[Jiminimonka]

I get the temptation to "doctor when I do this it hurts" -> "Then don't do that" ... but ...

Is this project not boost-enabled? Are you not rich enough to afford good C++ coders?

... Sorry ... that was out-of-line. You should at least acknowledge that this _is_ a problem and it _is_ on a list somewhere. Acknowledging where it is on the list would be cool too .

The fact that a list of 100-ish spells can drag down the window-moving interface says to me that you need to move from an object system that touches everything in the stack when an item in the stack is touched to only touching the items that need be rendered _after_ the whole stack has settled. Simple, but often missed GUI simplification.

But further on, given that you should be able to walk many 100's of megabytes of data per second (possibly even several gigabytes) ... how does a list of 100 items slow you down anyways --- that just begs the astonishment.

And there lies the reason for my post. I realize some of what you done, but even given some of my most pessimal assumptions... there's got to be some glaring bits that are being overlooked. Buy yourself a profiler, maybe? I recall them costing the earth back-in-the-day (in the 1000's per seat), but it's sorely needed here.

Asking users to pare down their spell lists ... well... have you met my cleric? :-/...

I have seen enough posts on the forums from Moon Wizard and other devs to see they do acknowledge the problems. I also see self declared experts comparing totally different systems to FG.

This paragraph got deleted because I don't want a forum ban....

[zBeeble]

I have seen enough posts on the forums from Moon Wizard and other devs to see they do acknowledge the problems. I also see self declared experts comparing totally different systems to FG.

This paragraph got deleted because I don't want a forum ban....

I'm sorry you had something too controversial to say. I have long lost many of the filters I had in my youth, but don't take anything I say as being a "self declared expert" ... or whatever that slur is. I don't believe anything I've said above is controversial. I know by many different means what my workstation can process. I have a good scale of the throughput of a processor, a PCIe bus and peripherals. I don't know anything of FGU code, but I know what's possible. I know this because I test it (for various reasons) and because it interests me.

When I compare this knowledge or (say) Cyberpunk 2077 (for which I also don't have code) I'm comparing things of equal or higher complexity to FGU. It's not that I've counted code points in either, it's that 2077 is clearly a more complex application and problem. But I could have equally compared (say) Skyrim with a large pile of mods (or Skyrim SE ... which is appropriately 64 bit). I can actually compare XML formatted configuration vs XML formatted configuration in that case. Skyrim actually packs it's config in a binary manner --- but if packing the data somehow would solve our problem ... then it's a solution that we should adopt (tho... I don't really believe it is --- I'm just offering a contrarian example).

I asked about acknowledging the performance issues because I was getting a lot of push-back --- as if what I saw was reasonable. I talked about profilers because they said that the unity supplied tools were ineffective. I know effective tools exist for this job because I've used them. Why haven't I used them more recently? Largely because the speed of machines has increased so rapidly that I don't require them for my code and my situations. I also, frankly, have DTrace (in FreeBSD, for me) on my side --- so I haven't had need of things like Purity --- although I did also suggest DTrace (which I use often) might be an effective solution.

Anyways... I'm rambling. I stand by my thought that good profilers are probably part of the solution. The amount of data we throw at FG isn't the problem. Heck, FG is probably one of the smallest steam downloads I've seen in a long time.

I have a substantial investment in Fantasy Grounds. I have substantial interest in it improving. Thus, I appear and make some noise about what's annoying me lately.

Sigh... I feel I won't convince the unconvinceable. I've given an easily applicable test: a cleric with 15 levels of cleric spells in "preparation" mode. Let's start with that problem. It's easy to reproduce and I've heard it from many players ... so it's not uncommon.

[damned]

I've given an easily applicable test: a cleric with 15 levels of cleric spells in "preparation" mode. Let's start with that problem. It's easy to reproduce and I've heard it from many players ... so it's not uncommon.

Its also easily avoidable in the interim, until a fix is found, kill the cleric and let her roll up a new Level 1 toon!

[Trenloe]

I've given an easily applicable test: a cleric with 15 levels of cleric spells in "preparation" mode. Let's start with that problem. It's easy to reproduce and I've heard it from many players ... so it's not uncommon.

See post #8. The devs are aware of the issue but haven’t been able to identify the root cause, nor had the bandwidth to do a deep investigation. The recommendation of only adding the memorized spells wasn’t a fix, but a suggested work around.

[LordEntrails]

I will also add, is a 15th level cleric with all spells really that common? If you parse the data published from D&D Beyond over the last year, the number of active characters greater than 10th level was something like 10 percent (random guess from a faulty memory). So while yes, spell lists are a problem, and performance in general is a problem, perhaps a more common used benchmark would be a better place for discussion.

[Zarestia]

OP hasn't replied once after starting the thread. Originally this was about lighting (TEST channel) which still has problems and is getting worked on. Somehow this got hijacked into a discussion about action tabs and what not. Devs have to priorise some things before others.

A few workarounds for the action tab problem were already said:
- don't pick every spell, only those you need (you wouldn't write down hundreds of spells onto paper when not playing online, right ...)
- play in combat mode for the most time and only prepare once per ingame day
- once the actions tab is clicked the first time, don't close the charsheet. after the initial caching it is way smoother (at least from my experience)

I only got a lvl 11 druid player who doesn't complain too much about it.

If OP still got some errors or issues with lighting, you should post in Laboratory (if the issues aren't already open there).

[LordEntrails]

OP hasn't replied once after starting the thread. Originally this was about lighting (TEST channel) which still has problems and is getting worked on. Somehow this got hijacked into a discussion about action tabs and what not. Devs have to priorise some things before others.

MOD: Point made. Thread closed. BookerGrimm can contact me or a moderator if they would like the thread re-opened.