Performance issues

[Chopkinsca]

I've been playing for a couple weeks and noticed bad performance at times. Usually the game would slow down on larger maps with lots of actors on it. Then I found a stone warden with stone vines added to the slowdown. The worst it has been was trying out a necromancer. The necrotic aura and minions made most maps take a while to auto-explore or just move manually.

What I'm wondering is if there is a specific setting I can change, or do something to help the slowdown. Otherwise, I'll have to just try changing settings at random (if changing a setting would even fix it), not playing a necromancer, or just living with it.

[Suslik]

you need to figure out first which part of the game is actually lagging. if you stand still, what's your fps? if it's not 30, it's graphics. do you have any addons? if one of them lags, the whole game lags. some locations have a lot of hidden triggers/actors and lag a little naturally.

[Chopkinsca]

I don't think it's the graphics that are giving me trouble. But to not rule out that possibility, how can I check the FPS? The bottleneck with my computer would be my processor, my graphics card is rather beefy (relatively), and I have enough RAM. Still, it probably is something to do with my computer.

One area that the slowdown is very evident in, is the sandworm lair. I understand the slowdown in that place though, lots of actors changing the terrain. I mostly notice the slowdown on characters with large area effect aura type spells.

[Suslik]

sandworm lair is one of the laggiest areas, i doubt that can be helped. i think you should just cope with it.

[Wolls]

From my own experience a good deal of that Lag is caused by the GUI, if you press Alt+W and disable it you should see a performance jump where movement and resting speed is less jerky. Turning it off is mostly useful for auto exploring and resting / waiting. Although if you use hot keys and have a good memory you could keep it off I guess. ( The tactical overlay remains so you can still see your health, but you won't be able to see sustains or effects so you need to mouse over and Tab eventually shows the map)

Another thing is the size of your talent bar, I see screen shots of ppl with a talent bar that stretches all the way along the bottom and on my comp it would be lag city. I had to shrink mine to make it mostly bearable but I still see a jump with the GUI off esp when lag was noticeable.

My current bar is something like 2 rows of 12, and yes I often forget I even have some talents cause I can't easily see them all so you have to train in PG UP and PG DOWN. If anyone ever read my log they'd prolly wonder just what in the heck I was looking for. lol

The "Classic" layout uses a rigid GUI, but I haven't checked to see if its any better. It might be though and with all honestly I keep meaning to.

Of course there are a number of ui / autoexplore and I think at least one quick rest mod and I always tell myself I'll ask one of them if its possible to include automatically Alt+W 'n when you rest or auto-explore. Maybe even an option to disable it entirely outside of combat.

[Suslik]

that's pretty strange because ui is(should be) a pretty lightweight draw call compared to the scene/effects. what's your gpu? hmm, need more reports on this.

[Elhazzared]

I don't notice this too often but it happens sometimes. For the most part it happens because of the server. Sometimes someone is going to use the vault to do a search and it lags the game a lot, the bigger the map is with more things moving at the same time, the worse the lag will be too.

The reason I noticed this is because innitially I played in the offline mode and I never had a performance issues, it only started happening after I went into online mode.