Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

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mikeprichard
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by mikeprichard »

KOW - I'm getting massive wandering NPC pop-in/pop-out glitches on Win 7 64-bit running DFU build #116, only when your Remaster v2.0 textures are loaded. I don't remember this problem with Remaster v1.0 and/or earlier DFU builds. Thanks!

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King of Worms
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by King of Worms »

Hi, thanks for report Mike. This issue appeared after build 107 and happens only when the city NPCs are replaced with higher resolution variants. In v1.0 there were just a basic low res NPCs so no problem. Its a known issue which is now being worked on.

In the meantime, you can delete (or move elswhere for later use) those NPCs from the pack and it will be solved, until a permanent solution is implemented that it...

Deleting them is easy - sort the textures in the "...streaming assets/textures" by a name and than
find and delete archives:

381_0-0 till 399_19-0 (451 files) - they are ALL sorted one after each other with no other textures in the middle

and

451_0-0 till 456_5-1 (132 files) - again, same sorting, one after each other with no other textures in the middle

Thanks for understanding ;)

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mikeprichard
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by mikeprichard »

Thank you! One more question - with all of your textures installed and not surprisingly, whenever I load a new area I get a significant load delay of about 20 seconds even on my above-average hardware setup (i7-5820k processor/GTX 1070 graphics card/Samsung SSD). Do you expect that future mod versions and/or future Unity/DFU versions will speed up this loading process?

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King of Worms
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by King of Worms »

My mod is as optimized as it can be atm. Maybe theres some 5-10% room for further fine tunning if I REALLY dive into it. Further optimalization would result in a decrease of visual fidelity and thus the idea of a mod would be lost.

But Im quite sure further down the road, the modded content loading times will get better. I have been waiting to raise this topic as I feel there are more important things to work on atm. But I wonder... what takes so long? :D I noticed that the textures compression adds cca 10% of loading time. I doubt that can be sped up a lot. But I wonder, if the texture/sprite injection is multithreaded? The loading looks a bit strange to me. My Afterburner monitoring SW just freezes until the game is loaded, so I have no idea what is happening during that time. Maybe if we had some log with timestamps we could see what is going on. Maybe The Lacus or Interkarma knows ...

I know that the cache systems will be worked on. That might help as well, maybe a lot...

My guess is, theres quite some room for improvement there, and that during the time, this will get much better.

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TheLacus
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by TheLacus »

Loading high resolution textures from disk will always take a lot, but SSDs should be helpful. For textures pack this big is a good idea to ship with dfmods since assets are bundled in a friendly format for Unity rather than being created in real time from disk data. Hard to give numbers without trying, but i believe the difference should be quite noticeable, and it's also a more convenient way to manage mods for the end user ;)
Last edited by TheLacus on Sun Jun 03, 2018 5:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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mikeprichard
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by mikeprichard »

Thank you both! A single .dfmod file format as already used by many other mods - optionally with configuration options in the DFU mod management menus that allow e.g. enabling/disabling of the redrawn NPC sprites, etc. - would definitely be more convenient for users, and if there would be a performance improvement as well, even better! (Maybe for the Remaster v3.0? :D ) But I hope further DFU/Unity updates in the next year or two will also contribute to faster load times across the board.

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Interkarma
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by Interkarma »

One of the reasons this is slower is down to how disk filesystems work. Each texture requires a check: "is a replacement available for this texture?" followed by actually loading that texture, then importing into engine and building a material at runtime. Compression adds another step to the time required. It's a great solution for testing textures or small mods, but doesn't scale well to huge replacements like this one.

The big advantage of using asset bundles and packaging everything into a single .dfmod file is the bundle is optimised for the engine. All of the textures are pre-converted to an engine-ready format and the bundle itself abstracts the file system to create more efficient lookups and loading. By packaging to a .dfmod, you should be able to bypass significant time otherwise wasted in file system and conversion.

TheLacus has done absolutely phenomenal work creating the back-end for all of this stuff. I can't speak highly enough of his work.

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mikeprichard
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by mikeprichard »

Interkarma, thanks for the explanation. KOW, given this, I hope you consider converting your Remaster to a .dfmod format in future. The work you've done on the textures is amazing, but I've removed the mod from my game for now given the slowdown it currently causes.

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AXO
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by AXO »

just to give some numbers ... I have created a dfmod with all the texture of KOW just for this problem ,
and I can say that on an SDD the times are half more or less then a loose file !
A noticeable improvement in loading times i advise everyone who wants to use large amounts of textures to really do this

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Interkarma
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Re: Daggerfall Remaster w/future builds

Post by Interkarma »

Thank you for the feedback AXO. It's great to know someone has tried it and it's a measurable improvement. :)

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