Kotor Polygon Limit

[Jenko 53]

This is definitely a long shot.

 

The other day I was working with the dark side ending, trying to eliminate the cardboard cutouts used for the crowd. These are also used in the light side ending and the Taris Dueling Ring. I found out that they are just models with a "default" animation to simulate movement, if you can call it that.

 

Once I replaced the models and gave them a simple animation, the job was done. Or so I thought.

 

In discussions with JCarter426, I know there was an assumption that the game would lag with a lot of NPCs due to their scripts. Since these were not actual NPCs, there were no scripts for them. Regardless, my game lagged hard - down to 10 fps. And I've got a powerhouse of a computer, so we're obviously looking at some sort of engine limitation. While looking at the resource monitor, the game is barely using any of my system resources.

 

Again, pretty sure this is not possible, but does anyone know of a way to overcome this limit? Or is it hard-coded in the engine without any way of fixing it?

 

https://imgur.com/SDfyI0u

https://imgur.com/Jym2jxD

Either way, it works fine for what I was doing, but it would have been nice to release as a mod 

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Do we know for sure that the limit comes from overall polygons and not, let's say.... the sheer amount of characters on one area?

So for instance, suppose you made a new character model that was a row of, let's say 5 sith soldiers. Would that alleviate anything at all? That means 5 times less characters overall, so maybe worth giving it a shot?

[Jenko 53]

well, the crowd in this scene are not UTCs or creatures so there's no scripts or AI at work, they directly replace the Stunt_Crowd0x and StuntDroids models.

 

The silver sith troopers actually just that, there are about 15 lined up in one model to replace StuntDroids. I also tried replacing the models without animations, so the models T-posed, but the lag was just has bad. 

[Guest]

I really wish you all the best in this endeavor.

[DarthParametric 3,784]

Have you tried replacing them with simple shapes like cubes? Assuming that results in no performance loss, you could just start sub-dividing until you find the breaking point.

[DeadMan 103]

 

Again, pretty sure this is not possible, but does anyone know of a way to overcome this limit? Or is it hard-coded in the engine without any way of fixing it?

I believe this issue comes back from Aurora Engine (which Odyssey is based on) and can't be fixed. Even more recent games based on this engine (like The Witcher 1) suffer from this problem (that's why authors of scabbard mod for TW1 disabled option to give scabbards to all NPCs - it caused huge FPS drop on any PC and made game very unstable).

[134340Goat 116]

Hmm.... Uthar, Yuthura, custom Malak, HK, Saul and Varko incorporated into the dark side ending with completely robed Revan. Do I smell something for perhaps an upcoming movie here?

 

 

Anyways, I am no expert on things like these - but perhaps reducing dynamic lighting, sad a loss as that would be, might help with lag. I know M4-78 1.2 had issues with lag due to a large amount of objects' shadows rendering. It's definitely related to having so many complex character models on screen at once, and shadows may be related. If that alone doesn't do it, then editing in a very particular way might be the only option

[Kexikus 995]

DarthParametric's suggestion sounds like a good way of finding the cause of the issue.

 

Maybe you can just use low-poly versions of these characters instead of the standard character models. It'd still be far better than the low quality texture cut-outs.

[Jenko 53]

I'll look into using simple shapes like cubes to see where the issue is, as well as shadows. Thanks for the ideas, guys.

 

DarthParametric's suggestion sounds like a good way of finding the cause of the issue.

 

Maybe you can just use low-poly versions of these characters instead of the standard character models. It'd still be far better than the low quality texture cut-outs.

 

And yeah, I thought about using lower-poly versions as a mod release. Like you said, it'd be better than the cardboard cutouts. I get why BioWare did that, obviously, since I'm having severe lag issues replacing the cardboard cutouts with full character models. But still, they're uh... Fantastic.

 

 

Hmm.... Uthar, Yuthura, custom Malak, HK, Saul and Varko incorporated into the dark side ending with completely robed Revan. Do I smell something for perhaps an upcoming movie here?

 

 If that alone doesn't do it, then editing in a very particular way might be the only option

 

Heh, good eye. 

 

I've actually already got a good result for what I need by slowing the game down artificially and then speeding my footage up again. But I figured if this was an issue that could be worked around, why not release a mod to eliminate Bioware's crazy bad cutouts?