Just a heads up to the developer of this (amazing) plugin, it seems to be a (large) resource hog.


I normally run at 75 FPS (without Decal), when I enable Minimap and Radar Add-On, I drop to 35, just with those two plugins. I tested with using all my plugins (10 total), without MiniMap and Radar Add-on, and still sit at 75 FPS.


So, just a heads up. I believe it's in Beta (Right, it's real new, anyways?), so this is a heads up to you.


My system, in case it helps.


-: Microsoft® Windows Vistaâ„¢ Home Premium

-: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4400 @ 2.00GHz, 1995 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

-: 256MB ATI Radeon X1300PRO

-: 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs

Which dungeons? I had to do some serious tweaking to it before releasing it, as it slowed my machine to a crawl in the Underground City just because of the sheer volume of walls it had to draw. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the larger dungeons still slow it down a bit.


Secondly, is it still slowing down if you turn minimap off and just have radar addon running?

I've noticed little or no slow down on my system since running it. I run it constantly. I'll have to make a trip to the underground city to see how that affects it. I'm running a P4 3.2GHz, 2GB ram, 512MB Radeon vid card and Windows XP.


by chance, is any of your tweaking going to include the drawing/savings of maps? It'd be super cool if you could export them to 3dxml

 

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First I got to say that both the minimap and the AC+ are EXCELLENT tools for the game play in AC. I've enjoyed them much since you release them!!


Concerning the perforance hit tho .. I'm seeing the same. Like Yaroz, I also have a pair of high performing computers to play on .. but I can measure the lost via the frame rate at about a 40% lost. Enough that it is bumpy in places for me. BTW .. This is taken outside of the dungeons over on the monkey island (AL).


When I tested this last night, I tried it both with just the minimap/radar and AC+/radar .. and both separately experiance framerate drop. Out of curiousity, I ran AC+ without the radar addon. And still experiance the drop. Leading me to believe that the on screen graphics would be the cause.


BUT ... with all that said, I prefer the performance hit and have the tools. If I find I go into a location where there is too much lag, I just log out and turn off the Decal utility (or Decal itself) and continue on.


Thanks again for the great work.

It only happens with MiniMap, and Radar Add-On, together. With one or the other, I don't lose the framerate.


It happens outdoors as well as indoors, sticks to 35 FPS no matter what when the 2 plugins are running.

Even when you're standing still? I just had a look through Minimap's code, if you're outdoors, it quite literally does absolutely nothing except whenever the Radar tell is that you've changed landcell, it just checks that it's still outdoors and does nothing. If you're standing completely still, no code in Minimap is being called at all. At that point the only thing it's done is create a couple of objects within the radar plugin and not used them yet. I can't see how there's any way it could be causing any kind of slowdown.


Roogon, are you using Vista as well?

Yes, when I'm just standing still, it still sticks at 35.


It must be a conflict between MiniMap and Radar Add-on then, because there's never a problem with just one of them running. Always with a combo.


Additional finding:

-: When I'm running around in a dense outdoor location (Aphus Lassel, for example), it will drop to 25 FPS. When I run with no decal through said area, I stay at (normal) 75 FPS. The drop of 10 FPS is linked, as well, to one of those two plugins.

Have you tried using the radar with either AC+ or Corpse Tracker? Both of them use it as well, I'd be curious to know if they're having the same effect, although to be honest without the radar actually drawing anything, it's hard to see what could be causing it. If you're standing outdoors, and have never been indoors until that point, the radar simply has nothing to draw, in which case it quite literally just clears the radar every frame, and then because it didn't actually draw anything on it, it doesn't even use it.


The only thing I can think of is if there's a bug in Vista that doesn't handle some aspect of the graphics properly. I just tried it myself on my XP machine, and having MiniMap running or not made absolutely no difference to my framerate outdoors. On that basis, even if there was something wrong with Minimap or Radar Add-on, there's no way I could fix it, because I'd have no way to tell if what I'm doing is making a difference.


Bottom line is, it's not MiniMap that's the resource hog, it's more than likely Vista. But then, we knew that anyway. That doesn't mean I'm going to ignore it though- if AC+ & Corpse Tracker don't slow you down, I might see what they do differently from MiniMap.

I lost about 5 FPS with both Corpse Tracker and AC+, but still about 20-25 FPS loss with MiniMap.

There is some great feedback going on here. Nice job everyone on helping trouble shoot.


One request to help further the process. When you list results you are getting, please list your Windows version and basic system specs. From reading through this thread, it looks like the issue is having more to do with Vista interacting with the plugin's than the plugin's themselves. Vista hadles graphics totally differently, so it may be the root of the problem. Memeory calls to graphic memory in Vista are different than an previous version of windows.


Thanks