Questions about performance: Cybran build drones

MadMax

@jip said in Questions about performance: Cybran build drones:

@MadMax ?

you rang what's up are you looking for a model from what little I read

Jip

Essentially this from Keyser:
if you can increase the size or modify the look of the flying drones if function of their tech, then i'm all for reducing their number

Not sure if having t1 / t2 / t3 drones is visually possible without introducing additional emitters (defeating the purpose of the idea). Would you be interested in making two additional drones?

MadMax

yeah I can look into it any ideas on how to differentiate them they are quite small so changes may not be to obvious

MadMax

also do you know the unit name for the drone?

Cyrris

@jip said in Questions about performance: Cybran build drones:

My question to you all is - what do you think, and do you think it is worth changing for the more sim speed?

I don't usually post in these threads as my FAF experience is purely me and a couple of friends doing comp stomps on the weekend. We're filthy casuals, so not exactly uhh... involved members of the community.

But since you asked: Yes I think it is worth it. I am always keen on anything that has the potential to increase sim speed, as that's the number one drag on my games. One of my friends is always playing Cybran.

Jip

I'll be on the FAF discord channel on Thursday 21:00 GMT+2 and on Friday 21:00 GMT+2 - please be there if you have questions. I intent to implement the changes this weekend - that way it can be inspected on the Dev branch starting next week and hopefully be live when September starts.

There was no interest last night and tonight I intent to go to the gym, therefore I'm cancelling tonights meeting. I'm going to make the PR this weekend - received the drones from Madmax.

KaletheQuick

I do not know if it is possible to delve this far into the code, but would it be possible to just make 50 builder drones, then just have them allocated to whatever is on screen, then if anything beyond that needs them to just ignore them. So an object pool of only 50 or something.

Also, what files and such is the code for this all contained in? I have some free time coming up and could look at it.

Jip

The problem with caching units is that they still take part in the sim calculations - slowing it down. The allocation / de-allocation of the units only cause a stutter - their existence cause a slow down.

I am working on it as I am writing this and currently managed to get 150 t3 engineers down to 'just' 6 - 7 ms increase when building. I'm aiming for this to be a lot lower than that. I'm in the Discord channel (soon - after finishing dinner) if you're interested in seeing the approach.

KaletheQuick

@jip Sure. Ill take a look. I have the same name there.

Jip

After sitting down with Marlo, Kale, Kazbek and a few others we managed to get the hit of the sim speed at around 6 ms for 150 t3 engineers when building, instead of 10 - 11. If we go with the idea that higher tech engineers have bigger drones (and therefore less drones) we can even get faster than UEF / Seraphim drones, cutting it down to about 3 ms when they start building.

You can see in the previous post how it looks like with 150 engineers and each engineer having 3 drones.

This is how it looks like for 150 engineers, when they have 'bigger' drones:

What we did is:

Rewrite the Cybran build functions from scratch - ensuring that the best practices performance-wise are applied.
Dumb down the Cybran bot unit - originally it still called all the logic that any unit would call. As an example, all the table allocations done for a typical unit are done even though we don't use any of it.
Move a lot of the logic from the drone to the builder (engineer / commander / hive). This allowed us to cut down a lot on the logic performed on each drone.

In the long run the number of table allocations per drone is reduced drastically, the drones execute far less logic overall and the number of effects are reduced without impacting the overall aesthetics too much (in my / our opinion).

Tomorrow I'm going to try and finish it up.

An important disclaimer: the 6 vs 10/11 ms is the situation where the t3 engineer spawns the same number of drones as it did before. Meaning - we made them faster, and almost by a factor of 2. Let alone that the garbage collector is better off too causing less stutters.

CaptainKlutz

Aw man, do the logic reworks mean I can no longer block MMLs with drones? (Jk all these changes sound awesome)

Jip

150 hives:
Left side: 1 ms when off, 5.0 - 5.5 ms when turned on
Right side: 1ms when off, 22 - 23 ms when turned on

Note:

Drone count is divided by 2 (3 drones per hive instead of 6), otherwise the performance would be 11 - 13 ms.
Hives no longer have blinking lights.

150 t3 engineers:
Left side: 1.2ms when off, 5.5 ms when turned on
Right side: 1.2 ms when off, 14 - 15ms when turned on

Note:

Drone count is equal.

And when you have less engineers (3x t3). The beams of the engineer go to the same point, all drones go to the same point.

When you have t1 engineers - these look exactly the same as there is only one build arm and only one bot, each having their own unique build spot.

150 t1 engineers:
Left side: 1.2 ms when off, 4 ms when turned on
Right side: 1.2 ms when off, 5.5 - 6 ms when turned on

150 hives:
Left side: 1 ms when off, 4 - 4.5 ms when on
Right side: 1 ms when off, 15.5 - 15.5 ms when on.

Note:

Effects are not visible, what we see here is the impact of the drones on the sim.

Disclaimer:

Both instances have their own cores (2 + 2 hyperthreading each) but they do impact each other slightly regardless.

With some additional work from MadMax on the models this entire PR should be ready for review later this week

CheeseBerry

So hives are literally 4 times as fast with the new approach?
Amazing!

Jip

Give or take - yes.

Jip

And a more visual comparison: https://youtu.be/YZDU5mf1eOs

Copy of the description:

We have two instances of the game open - each having their own cores assigned. Made sure to assign the recorder on different cores ( 01:50)

10x t1 engineers: 01:00
40x t2 engineers: 02:00
50x t3 hives: 04:00
150x t1 engineers: 11:00

All numbers are in milliseconds.
1.8 - 2 vs 3.3 - 3.5 (40x tech 2 engineers, 02:45)
2 - 2.3 vs 7.0 - 8 (50x tech 3 hives, 04:25)
1.9 - 2.2 vs 5.0 (50x tech 3 hives, 05:45)
4.5 - 5.0 vs 5.0 - 5.5 (150x tech 1 engineers, zoomed in, 11:40)
2.8 - 3.0 vs 4.4 - 4.5 (150x tech 1 engineers, zoomed out, 12:20)

Performed on a Ryzen 5 3600 6-core processor with 64gb of dual-ram. Numbers may vary on different machines, but their relative impact should not.

Zooming out matters because it shows how much the emitters impact the sim in comparison to the bots of the units. Zooming out represents the performance hit on your opponents - they likely never get to see the emitters of buildings being built. They only see the emitters of engineers being blown up.

@arma473 I hope this provides the side-by-side comparison you were looking for.

~~edit: it is still processing the HD version~~

KaletheQuick

@captainklutz Not yet. We double checked and they do definitely have a collider, and thus tax performance by adding to that. We tried a few approaches to remove that but to no avail. Technically, removing their collider would be a gameplay change, and not strictly a cosmetic one (as Jip is attempting here). Though I am not actually sure if they block projectiles or missiles, have you had this happen?

Jip

@captainklutz said in Questions about performance: Cybran build drones:

Aw man, do the logic reworks mean I can no longer block MMLs with drones? (Jk all these changes sound awesome)

Didn't see this message.

Yes - that is what it means hahaha. As Kale mentioned, we tried to get rid of the collision box all together. But that made the game unstable and caused it to crash to Desktop (fast game though).

tatsu

Loud removed them completely didn't they? and they got tons of performance from it. worth it. IMO. the graphics are less important than performance.

Jip

That isn't true and we all know it. Graphics is as much part of a game as the gameplay is, especially for people that are just starting out. This PR will bring the costs of cybran engineers in the same range as any of the other engineers, without impacting the aesthetics too much. Imagine the speedup when you're playing with four cybrans in the game, all making hives at some point .

tatsu

yeah I understood that not suggesting the PR be changed. also I said "IMO"