BIG Problem with 1.5

#1 I've got the same problem. I merged 1.5 into my codebase and when I try to relight my mission it goes into an infinate loop of raycasts during lighting. I thought it might have been a bad merge, so I copied the demo exe file over and it feezes in the same spot (about 80% done mission lighting).

#2 Are you sure it's frozen and not just taking a long time? Relight times in 1.5 did increase a bit in release builds, but debug builds increased a lot. If you're not already, try running a release build and see if that improves the performance.

If this continues to lock up please send over any related difs for testing here.

#3 @John - It's not frozen, when I paused the executable in VS it would usually break on a castray that is called from the lighting system. I really hope its a bug and not to be expected that it itakes that long in a debug build. Nearly all development is done in a debug build and it would be very inconvient to have to recompile in release just to relight the scene. This was with a debug build without TORQUE_DEBUG defined. I let it run for about 20 minutes and it was still processing.

#4 I also thought it might have been a bad merge when i upgraded my version so i reinstalled and it still freezez when i hit the relight scene button. thiss a a major bummer = ( hope it gets fixed soon

#5 It appears now that it actually doesent freeze for me it just takes a while to relight the scene anywhere from 1-8 minits still im very happy it didnt freeze but im sad at the time it actually takes to relight.

by the way this is a great engine and an awsome addition to the helpfulness and realism! thx

#6 Can you guys post screen shots of the level complexity you're working with?

#7 In the old tge1.4 + tlk, my world took a second or two to light.
In 1.5 it takes 35 seconds. Too long. (this is with release build. 49 seconds with debug build)

#8
The missiongroup has 393 objects inside of it.

As it stands right now, I've switched back to 1.4 because of this issue. It would be really helpful if there was a #define that could be set to skip some of the new processing.

#9 Ya, it definitely shouldn't take that long.


Peter, can you send over a copy of that mission for performance testing and tuning? I did a similar pass on TLK 1.4 using the Warzone demo and it helped significantly boost the lighting performance.

The new lighting code is needed for smooth interior lighting (available around the same time as Constructor) and completely replaces the old code, so you can't really bypass it.

#10 It took forever to light the scene the very first time I ran starter.fps from 1.5 on my laptop. A little over 30 seconds. I was about to do ctrl alt delete but I decided to wait until finally it came up.

This laptop is only about a month old. AMD Turion solo core processor, 1 Gig RAM,
ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M , 64 MB VRAM

#11 Try it on a mac with only 256mb ram. :-/ 20 minutes.

#12 I have a Core Duo T2500 machine with 2 GB of RAM -- it still takes positively forever to start up the starter.fps scene, because of lighting. It really isn't very usable as it is. Even in draft mode.

I think it's all those high poly models which confuses the ray caster; it probably needs some TLC (from a very quick look at the code).

#13 Make sure you guys are comparing apples-to-apples, the TGE 1.5 demo takes a long time to load in comparison to the same demo in 1.4, because it contains 30+ point and spotlights, which aren't available in 1.4 (so the calculation is skipped, however the lighting is missing too).

Remove those lights and I think you'll find 1.5 and 1.4 are close in performance.


I'm interested in Peter's mission, because it's large, slow, and was ported from 1.4 to 1.5 (meaning it should be calculating the same amount of data), this is an apples-to-apples comparison of performance and should point out whats happening.

#14 @John:

"Are you sure it's frozen and not just taking a long time?"

It's both on my machine. When lighting the demo FPS I cannot do anything else on my PowerBook. It's being a resource hog :-(

#15 JW,

I just ran the demo mission here on an AMD Athlon 2800+, and a draft relight took 4.5 seconds with shadows. What times are you seeing the are too long?

#16 Mike and asmaloney,

I'll look into the Mac performance to see whats up. Mike are you on a G4/G5 too?

#17 Don't know if it helps, but here's a quick look using Shark:


I stopped shark after about 5 minutes of lighting. It took another 10 minutes or so to complete [debug version of TGE].

#18 I just ran the 1.5 demo in both release and debug on my PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz (OS X 10.4). Here are the results:

Full relight release: 46 sec
Full relight debug: 3 min

While I agree this isn't spectacular, the times are nowhere near 20 minutes. Are you guys running any other programs that might be affecting performance?

#19 I thought I'd add a few more datapoints to this thread...

The Arcane-FX demo is a slightly simplified variation of the starter.fps mission in TGE 1.4. Only four interiors (1 cottage, 3 small cottages). Since I've got nearly equivalent builds for TGE 1.5 and TGE 1.4+TLK, I can do a reasonable apples-to-apples comparison. However, I have an added twist in that I've rebuilt the cottage difs with much lower lighting and this has also had an effect on the lighting times.

First, compiled for debug under TGE 1.5, the lighting times on this relatively spare mission are for all practical purposes infinite. As a workaround, I always make sure the mission lighting file gets built under a release build before doing debugging.

Under release builds, the mission lighting is longer, but this mission is small so the increase is tolerable.

Mission Lighting TGE 1.4+TLK (original dif models): 1.360 seconds
Mission Lighting TGE 1.5 (original dif models): 4.000 seconds

(these timings are based on whats displayed in the console for just the lighting pack part of the computation.)

The interesting part is that new dif models also increase the timing.

Mission Lighting TGE 1.4+TLK (new dif models): 4.125 seconds
Mission Lighting TGE 1.5 (new dif models): 29.734 seconds

Perhaps what's going on here is also contributing to the lengthy lighting times.

Here's the story behind my rebuilt cottage difs... The cottage models come with .map files, but map2dif rebuilds them with errors and I've never been able to reproduce the original difs. Still I went ahead and made new variations of the cottages with very low and somewhat simplified lighting and for the most part the are just fine for a demo.

The odd thing is that these changes increase the lighting times. The three possible explanations I've come up with for this is as follows:
- The lighting calculation takes much longer for low lighting
- The lighting calculation is sensitive to models that are not totally well-behaved (built with some errors).
- There is another tool out there other than map2dif that builds interiors that can be lit more efficiently.

(FYI - The errors reported by map2dif are mostly "Orphaned Polygons".)

#20 @John:

"Are you guys running any other programs that might be affecting performance?"

Just Shark and Terminal. This is pretty wacky. I'm running a PowerBook 1.67 w/1G RAM - Mac OS X 10.4.8.

I'm talking about running Starter.FPS.command [w/substitution of debug version of app] from the SDK and then selecting the "A Stronghold" mission - are you talking about the same thing?