World Caching

[Squat]

I've noticed that when I first open the editor for the day and also when I first test the game that it hickups pretty much at every new object that I lay eyes on. It's as if nothing's cached. In order to get a clean fps, I basically have to look around 360 and up and down before I go anywhere. Has anybody else noticed this?

I should note that caching in the editor alleviates the in-game and that if I fly around until I stop getting hickups that going into the game is clean. However, the end-users won't have this luxury and I'm afraid they're going to pause around every single corner, especially if things are occluded from your starting position.

Assuming this is here to stay and that it's not something only I'm seeing, I was considering having a script to fly a camera around the entire world right after loading. All the glitches and hickups can get dealt with there. I figured I would work it into a cinematic to disguise what's happening in SP, but I've got to come with an idea for MP since it would be annoying to see that every time you start up. I was thinking of just hiding the fly-through with a menu and using a dummy "caching objects" line to throw them off.

Any ideas or similar experiences or tips for me, or maybe what I might have done wrong? I should note that my world is still well under 50% optimized but this doesn't change the fact that once an object is in my view it's fine.

[pixel_legolas]

GC writes out cache files when you add objects and so on. If this happens all the time it sounds strange

[Ron]

I get this too. I don't think its anything to do with writing bvo or bvj files, more what is held in memory somewhere.

I have not looked into it in detail, but I am sure there is some sort of workaround.

[gekido]

what you are running into is the texture management system loading textures.  you need to look into how much texture memory your scene is using and be careful managing how much textures are loaded.

the bottom status bar of the editor displays how much memory is used by the currently loaded world. Note that in the game editor alone, this does not include the graphics used by your front end menu / interface (which are resident in memory as well while your game is running).  So if you have a scene that is using 256 Mb of memory, and your video card only supports 256, you will likely run into situations where the engine needs to stream new textures into memory / unload old ones.

Objects / textures in the engine that are NOT loaded in the editor - for example if you haven't loaded an object or texture into the editor before, and load it into a world (either in the editor or dynamically on the fly during the game), then the engine will cache & process the content - this takes longer than a simple stream of the texture memory, and 'might' be what you are seeing, but it's unlikely.

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Note: Some people have recommended doing things like deleting BVO files or BVJ texture cache files, which is a very bad idea as this simply forces you to recache them the next time the engine loads the content (resulting in much longer load times).