Bug Report Solved increased Dragon texture quality

[THARGOR]

Hey,
while the increased Dragon texture quality really looks nice and is an improvement for almost every dragon, it still seems to cause annoying lags, especially in dragon arena.
guess some ppl will have problems in the upcoming tournaments

 

[Exceddius]

Can't you lower the texture quality in option?

 

[THARGOR]

idk tbh - but if that would mean to lower overall texture quality in dp, that would be sad

 

[Exceddius]

You don't have to set the texture quality to the minimum...

 

[THARGOR]

well, i did, just to test it.
even when i set overall textures to low, game crashes by just opening the arena window - what never happened before.
it doesnt always crash, but i had it 2 times already today, and never had that before.
so i assume loading 3 pics of dragons with the new texture could cause a problem ?

 

[Seiichi]

What GPU, CPU and how much RAM does your computer have?

The upscaled textures are only slightly larger in file size than the previous textures (the full 34 patches with 1700+ textures is only ~2.6GB total), so to load ~3 textures in one window is at most 6-9MB more than it would have been previously which is a negligible amount to process.

Basically all that was done was taking 512x512/1024x1024/2048x2048 and scaling them up and defining details a bit more. The files are then compressed, so the actual size loaded is not significant.

EDIT: I will talk to Dragon, as we could potentially increase compression, and possibly re-add Crunch. The issue is that it significantly slows down the patch process, which was something we did not want to do.

 

[THARGOR]

well, its a laptop, but one that allowed me decent gameplay for the past 3 years:
16,0 GB RAM
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

 

[Seiichi]

well, its a laptop, but one that allowed me decent gameplay for the past 3 years:
16,0 GB RAM
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

You shouldn't really have any issues with those specs, so it is odd that you would be crashing.

We're going to make some adjustments by re-adding Crunch to the patch building process but a patch will likely not be available for several weeks as it will need to compress every file and that will likely take several days to say the least, and there will need some time to test and address any issues if one comes up.

Chances are the textures are not the culprit as I said, as they're negligible to performance. In actuality, any ancient, or better looking Dragon already had higher quality textures and there is not much of a difference. The same goes for our exclusives, which were already higher quality.

 

[Eggshell]

well sorry but have to say that that though my hardware has about the same standards than Thargors in arena fights I get attacked from opponents dragons before I even see them. Thats quite annoying to be honest. So I will have to blind play at the beginning of a fight not knowing unfortunately which kind of dragon the opponent is using.

 

[Seiichi]

well sorry but have to say that that though my hardware has about the same standards than Thargors in arena fights I get attacked from opponents dragons before I even see them. Thats quite annoying to be honest. So I will have to blind play at the beginning of a fight not knowing unfortunately which kind of dragon the opponent is using.

Is the Dragon not rendering for you, or is it delayed?

 

[THARGOR]

both dragons are delayed, that happens for several ppl i talked to yesterday.

that means an oriental with a good cyclone assault and some 2nd attack could kill you already before you see anything - but also there seem to be some delays within the fight, which means you see the dragons on different places then they are and your attacks miss then.

we had that before when there was lags or ping spikes, but now it seems to happen always and at least for several players

 

[Draconia]

I have the same RAM, maybe a bit better graphic card and have the same issues anyway. The higher textures needed at least a second longer to load before we´re able to see the dragons. In common dragon arena not such a big problem, but in tournament it could be pretty unfortunate

 

[THARGOR]

Update from my side:
i just had another game crash by opening the arena window, and it seems to happen when i scroll down the top 9 dragons before the dragons are fully loaded - again btw with low texture setting.
idk if the textures cause the problem, or the fact it takes longer now to load the dragons, both is new since maintenance

 

[Seiichi]

We're going to be looking at re-adding Crunch (method of DDS compression) to see if this resolves the issue, and look in the source code to see if there are any other issues.

Also having Dragon look into how models are loaded, and seeing if there are improvements that can be added.

I think I have an idea of what the issue is, and why it normally does not come up, but it is due to how Dragon's Prophet handles it's pack data, and is something we have made some adjustment to with the source code. It is also something we have been debating from re-doing from the ground up, as a lot of the performance is directly caused by the way data is used.

There also may be a role that latency is playing in things (which has caused most issues in the past with Dragon Tournament).

Crunch is something we can add "quickly" (may be several weeks for testing and then also compressing everything).

 

[Seiichi]

Okay, I just checked using a VPN with Saudi Arabia as the endpoint, and the issue seems to be a mixture of latency and also reading of data (at least from a cursory look).

Same VPN endpoint on the source client has a slight delay to populate the Dragons, but it is noticeably shorter than on the live client.

Crunch compression may help as I said, but the source client will resolve other issues, especially if we can find any direct issues in Dragon Tournament/Arena.

The new test server is up, so I will have players do a run down and see if there is anything that we need to be fixed immediately.

 

[Seiichi]

Doing some initial tests with Crunch added, and seeing if I can just re-build existing patch commits as new patches.

 

[THARGOR]

ty very much for your effort, much appreciated.
i was offline during yesterdays tournament, but still won it - i guess that means my opponents had some trouble too...

 

[Seiichi]

So initial test worked, I just need to rebuild each of the 34 patches... Chances are this will not be done before Monday, but we will see.

Our patch making time has now gone from ~2-4 minutes up to about 2-4 hours... Which is still better than the 15+ days previously.

 

[Seiichi]

To make my life easier we added batch processing, so may be able to finish patches by today or tomorrow.

 

[Seiichi]

The new patches have been pushed now, and are generally 1/3rd of the size that they were originally.