Meters and their myths: Introduction
Jun 28, 2024 16:25:13 GMT -5
coursedesignHQ, fergdawg, and 4 more like this
Post by metatropic on Jun 28, 2024 16:25:13 GMT -5
There are lots of questions on meters floating around forums (and facebook...). I am going to condense what I understand of each meter, and share with you all the results of some testing I have conducted to test out a number of popular beliefs about the different meters and what impacts them.
To begin, why do we have these bloody meters? They are the bane of of our lives as designers....
The meters are there to ensure that the courses we publish will play with acceptable performance across all the platforms; they reflect the limits of the lowest quality hardware that the game will run on. The meters also serve to prevent users publishing bloated courses that lock down servers etc.
The three meters, an overview:
File size: The course file saved when you design a course is 5-10Mb in size. Pretty tiny. Every time you place on object or press a sculpt button it generates a line of code in the course file; that line details the object selected, its size, (X,Y) position, elevation data (if raised or lowered above ground level) and rotation. Its about 100 bytes of data per object I guess. The impact of each entry in the course file is the same regardless of the item used; a massive skyscraper and a single grass object have the same impact. I suspect each sculpting brush stroke has a similar impact, but hard to quantify. File size only gets seriously impacted by small objects planted very many times, ie grasses and small plants. Anything larger planted in similar quantities will max out the object meter long before the file size becomes critical.
Object meter: In most cases the rate limiting meter for course designers. The object meter is essentially there to limit the load on the GPU of the system, by keeping the total polygon count to a manageable level. The object meter reflects the product of the number of an object and that object's complexity. Grasses mostly are simple with a low polygon count, a skyscraper has a huge number of polygons.
Memory meter: This meter is there to limit the impact of loading the course on system RAM. To render each object the system needs to hold the instructions for it in RAM. Each different object used (regardless of number of times used) takes up a bit of RAM. The different themes come with a number of trees, plants, grasses and rocks "pre-loaded" in RAM, which will minimise the impact of using those objects on this meter (doesn't appear to eliminate the impact though....see below). So memory meter is impacted only the first time you use a non-theme object. To keep memory meter under control you need to limit the variety of objects use. There is plenty of room though, you have to be really promiscuous with objects to max out, eg using lots of different city objects.
Stay tuned for chapter 1: Object meters and their myths....
To begin, why do we have these bloody meters? They are the bane of of our lives as designers....
The meters are there to ensure that the courses we publish will play with acceptable performance across all the platforms; they reflect the limits of the lowest quality hardware that the game will run on. The meters also serve to prevent users publishing bloated courses that lock down servers etc.
The three meters, an overview:
File size: The course file saved when you design a course is 5-10Mb in size. Pretty tiny. Every time you place on object or press a sculpt button it generates a line of code in the course file; that line details the object selected, its size, (X,Y) position, elevation data (if raised or lowered above ground level) and rotation. Its about 100 bytes of data per object I guess. The impact of each entry in the course file is the same regardless of the item used; a massive skyscraper and a single grass object have the same impact. I suspect each sculpting brush stroke has a similar impact, but hard to quantify. File size only gets seriously impacted by small objects planted very many times, ie grasses and small plants. Anything larger planted in similar quantities will max out the object meter long before the file size becomes critical.
Object meter: In most cases the rate limiting meter for course designers. The object meter is essentially there to limit the load on the GPU of the system, by keeping the total polygon count to a manageable level. The object meter reflects the product of the number of an object and that object's complexity. Grasses mostly are simple with a low polygon count, a skyscraper has a huge number of polygons.
Memory meter: This meter is there to limit the impact of loading the course on system RAM. To render each object the system needs to hold the instructions for it in RAM. Each different object used (regardless of number of times used) takes up a bit of RAM. The different themes come with a number of trees, plants, grasses and rocks "pre-loaded" in RAM, which will minimise the impact of using those objects on this meter (doesn't appear to eliminate the impact though....see below). So memory meter is impacted only the first time you use a non-theme object. To keep memory meter under control you need to limit the variety of objects use. There is plenty of room though, you have to be really promiscuous with objects to max out, eg using lots of different city objects.
Stay tuned for chapter 1: Object meters and their myths....