Frame Drops During Enemy Combat

skritters

<div class="IPBDescription">Possibly due to sounds loading from disk?</div>I can't be sure, but I think I'm experiencing an issue where I get a big bunch of dropped frames when a sound plays for the first time.

This is most frustrating when I can get up to a full second of dropped frames during the first encounters with the enemy, but I think I've noticed framedrops on the first interaction with the armory as well.

Interestingly, the framedrops also give me a kind of 'sixth sense' where when I drop about a half second worth of frames, I can tell the enemy is nearby and alert my team! I think this may be because the sounds of aliens moving around which I might not normally hear are loading from disk.

Anyway --<b> I'd ask the devs to investigate the way sounds get loaded or cached and see if sound loading or playback is capable of blocking frames from rendering.</b> My system specs are pretty high, 8GB of RAM, 2GB of video RAM, and an SSD for my main drive, but the disk steam games lives on is an old spinner.

Kouji_San

What are your specs, because this is also related to texture loading on init. So when you see a skulk or marine for the first time it will load up their respective textures/materials and sounds. Along with all the map textures/props as well

The thing I have to do when I play is to go around the map before a round to load everything into memory I think.

2Gb DDR2 and 512Mb VRAM is forcing me to do this on each map start



[edit]Just curious what kind of CPU you're running

Hackepeter

<!--quoteo(post=1933621:date=May 5 2012, 06:17 AM:name=skritters)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (skritters @ May 5 2012, 06:17 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1933621"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->SSD for my main drive, but the disk steam games lives on is an old spinner.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I can't help you directly with the possible sound/texture loading lag but I also use a SSD as main drive and a HDD for Steam, and still I have NS2 on my SSD. I moved it there after installing it and than made a "junction" to that folder back in the steamapps/common folder. It's like a shortcut but works like the folder is really located there. So Steam and all other games are on the HDD while NS2 is on the SSD and still launching, updating and everything works just fine. If you are interested in that solution here is a nice windows tool for it: <a href="http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html" target="_blank">http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellex...nkshellext.html</a> maybe it also fixes your lag problems to have the game on the SSD but I wouldn't bet on it.