Foliage Lag

Foliage Lag

I have foliage working again. I have disabled deletion of foliage for the moment but I have a plan on how to efficiently manage rebuilding foliage indexing if it is needed. The basic framework is in place for it.

My bigger concern is trying to determine the most effective use of foliage.

I made all my props foliage and noticed that large foliage objects (walls) create lag where non-foliage actors do not. This means foliage works best for smaller objects. It may be that foliage comes into play for an actor when it is further away from the player. That would be painful to implement so I'm just going to stick with foliage for small objects like grass for now.

Foliage for grass did improve performance so it is working as expected.

Today's task is fading the camera in and out for teleportation when I know it require significant adjustments to the scene. Knowing unreal, this will be a herculean task. It looks simple but I'm sure it is going to suck for some unforeseen reason.

------------- UPDATE -------------

I got the teleport fade out implemented in about an hour. It works very well. I only need to do it when I know a lot of processing is about to occur.

After some experimentation, I have decided foliage is bad for performance. Frame rate starts out great and you think foliage is helping. But... I started getting low frame rates after teleporting around a while. I removed the foliage and voila, frame rate never went low again.

This is really unfortunate. I probably spent several weeks carefully incorporating foliage into my framework. Oh well.