Field no. limit

[antler22]

Hi all,

I am doing well with proress on a 16km map. DEM, roads, etc are all working perfectly, and I am upping the resolution on my weight files so curves look nice on texture and field transitions. All of this, and my system can hold 60FPS constant. However, I added fields as my next step, and now ingame I get what I would call a "micro-stutter" every 2-3 seconds. My FPS will start at 60, then "stutter" down to about 20 or less and then back up to 60. This repeats and I left the game running for an hour to see if it was a cache thing and it did not help.

I have 765 fields defined in the map, some have many corners. In removing/testing for individual errors I could not find any individual field issues. I am finding that any combination of about 200 fields or more gives this stutter. Is there any solution, or is this just a game limitation I wont get around?

[Snake Man]

How many corner pieces are we talking about, per field on average and possibly max, few dozens or hundreds?

[antler22]

Quite a few. I painted these in and generated corners with the bitmap script. From the xml, counting the number of <TransformGroup name="corner... gives me 232,754 results which is about 300 per field. So I believe that's 100 of those square shapes per field.

Maybe I found a limit here? I saw that Whapeton in FS19 had 500 some fields but maybe those were simpler shapes

[Snake Man]

It was PMC Undefined Farms 20km that had... 1880 fields I believe, but at the moment of last screenshot those were SINGLE shapes, performance was rock solid 60FPS. Even after I added simple shapes to about 25% of them, cant remember how many got done, performance was still good.

Number of fields is not the issue, its the excessive number of corner pieces.

[antler22]

Makes sense. Well, so the first 200 or so fields I did by hand, so average corners is closer to that 20-30 per field. With that in mind, I also deleted all other fields except 200 and still that same issue. My .i3d shows about 22k corner pieces, far lower than the original. I am still getting the spike. I guess there's no other way around this than further reducing the corners, but with that lack of detail the map may not be worth continuing.

[Snake Man]

Field definitions are used only for AI planting crops, this enables contracts, so field definitions are really important for game-play, assuming players want to do contracts. Other than that, field definitions have no function, its just cosmetics as single shape field definitions make planted crops look odd if not ugly as so much field on the edges is bare cultivator_density material. Also good to remember that in multiplayer environments field definitions have no use, once player buys a farmland with field(s) on it, field definitions have no meaning anymore.

Game-play is the key here, there is no need to stress over ultimate detail into corner pieces, "good enough" do just fine. You can do amazingly working field definitions game-play wise with very few corner pieces. How many is "very few"? Hum umm good question, I would have to look it up but lets say 20-30 still sounds like a lot to me when end result is hundreds of fields. Main goal is to use as few as possible.

Decent quality can be achieved using as few corner pieces as possible, its like a building a puzzle, how clever can you get with those blue rectangle things to save corner pieces space

Please don't cancel your upcoming terrain, it would be a loss to the community.

[antler22]

Great points made there. So, I restarted fields to make sure this would work I deleted all field dimensions except for the first 10 on the map. Then, I went through and manually defined so I would only use 1 square per field. So with a total of 10 squares (30 corners?) I loaded the map and the issue came back. Is there something else I should be checking?

I also tested with all fields removed, and the issue went away. So I am confident it is the fields, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing something else wrong..?

[Snake Man]

Hmm could it be multi terrain angle combined with many field definitions, have you configured "MTA" on the terrain project?

Multi terrain angle is for cultivator_density and field definitions are on top of cultivator_density, so perhaps that could somehow max out FS22 engine when there are thousands of corner pieces used. Dunno, just guessing here, my terrains have no multi terrain angle yet and they work fine even with thousand+ fields, so MTA thing could be a cause.

[antler22]

I did put MTA in with max angles. I took it out completely and reverted back to base game angles. However, the problem remains. Any other ideas?

[Snake Man]

Nothing comes to mind. Of course the assumption is that everything else in the terrain project is in order. If you want me to take a look at the files I'd be happy to help. Who knows maybe extra pair of eyes catches something.

[antler22]

Just for others who may look at this... the problem originated in my weight files for the map. I used very large weight files to increase the resolution of foliage, paint, etc hoping to get rid of the "blockiness" you can see in larger maps. However, the strain this put on the game was too much, and it finally was over the top when I added MTA and fields in on top of that. Those three features alone were too much for FS to handle, regardless of the computer specs.

[Snake Man]

Glad to hear you found the performance issue cause, thanks for letting us know