Animation speeds

[Echelon117]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone knows of any plans to remove the set animation speeds the game currently has? Or is there a way to turn these off? The game is extremely choppy and doesn't run smooth like UFO Extender does.

Also perhaps a suggestion for a future feature, to be able to set the screen ratio?

[redv]

This is not animation issue.
This is because unoptimized calculation of the line of sight (LoS).

[SupSuper]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone knows of any plans to remove the set animation speeds the game currently has? Or is there a way to turn these off? The game is extremely choppy and doesn't run smooth like UFO Extender does.

Which animations are you talking about? The nightly builds have added lots of speed sliders, not sure what more do you need.

Also perhaps a suggestion for a future feature, to be able to set the screen ratio?

You can change the game to any resolution, do you mean have a fixed aspect ratio regardless of resolution? You can use letterboxing then...

[Warboy1982]

i doubt it's the LOS calc as redv suggests, make sure you're using the latest nightly and that your frameskip is set to 0.

[redv]

I guess, @Echelon117 spoke about animation in battlescape. In OpenXcom when soldier walks, animation looks choppy as compared with vanilla Xcom.

I know, this effect associated with the calculation of LoS. You can test it yourself by increasing MAX_VIEW_DISTANCE. Then the choppy effect increased also.

I faced with this effect when did one old PR: https://github.com/SupSuper/OpenXcom/pull/698

[Warboy1982]

i'll wait for clarification before jumping to conclusions

[Echelon117]

I'm talking about all animations. Battlescape, geoscape.. When soldiers walk its choppy as hell.. The screen scrolling is choppy, interceptions are choppy.

Sorry I'm not even aware of nightly builds what are they? I just downloaded the latest main build 0.9 and played it and its really laggy. I didn;t see any options in the settings that resembled any kind of slider. I'm just a newcomer to OpenXcom so forgive me

[Warboy1982]

https://openxcom.org/index.php/git-builds/

make sure your max frames skipped in advanced options is set to 0 (maybe 1-2 depending on your system)

[Echelon117]

Thanks for your help Warboy that has certainly improved the framerate. Its still not completely smooth and flawless like the way UFO extender feels but like SupSuper said, what more do I want?

If you are at all curious what I'm talking about, get your hands on a copy of the windows CE of Enemy Unknown and install UFO Extender and you will see what I mean about how smooth and flawless it runs.. Maybe there would be a way to mimic this performance for OpenXcom?

I appreciate the help thank you

[redv]

Now it's clear. Anyways optimization of LoS will be helpful.

[volutar]

UFO Extender is just a runner, it's not a game. And vanilla xcom is optimized to run on 20Mhz intel 486SX. Not surprising it runs so smooth on modern hardware.

About Battlescape:

In Vanilla the only calculation for each step they are making - is Unit-Unit spotting (which is quite fast). No need of such fancy things of OXC like each step light recalc, area discover, fullscreen rendering, which are quite CPU-heavy.

Vanilla rendering, by the way utilizing re-render of "invalidated" screen areas (not full rerender): did you notice, that all animation stops while your dude is walking? But after reaching destination point they are making all necessary area and unit revealing (in the hindsight), and lighting switch from old to new location. Quite frankly at this moment vanilla slightly hangs.

So this is simply side-effect of more modern fullscreen animation and dynamic area revealing.

Geoscape shouldn't run any "choppy". It might be caused by some OS overload with another tasks of higher priority.

[yrizoud]

OpenXCOM runs fine on my 10-year old Tablet PC, so I wonder what kind of hardware you're using. Are you SURE you don't have a hungry graphic filter acting as a bottleneck ? And what graphic mode are you using (Optimal should be fullscreen 640x4?0)

[winterheart]

I agree with Volutar, there need more optimizations on rendering algorithms if OXC planned to run on high resolutions.

[shinr]

With the max Geoscape clock speed it looks smooth except for the Interception Transitions (The UFO combat itself is also smooth).

The only thing missing for maximum Vanilla experience for me is the Loading-Times-Masking-Transitions; There is nothing like killing an alien, ending the turn and hearing change in music that says that, yes, you just killed the last alien.

[SupSuper]

I dunno guys I just don't see it.

https://youtu.be/UzOfHLDWa40

Here I'll even push it all the way to 1080p.

https://youtu.be/zGwk5ws21sU

Are you running a Debug build or do I just have a kickin' rad computer or something? Or are you interpreting "slow" to be the game's fixed tick speed without any tweening in-between segments? (which is a valid point but the original did the same thing and I doubt UFO Extender changed that, it just runs at absurd speeds because it's CPU-bound)