lag after height map edit

[demostenes]

When editing heightmap, after releasing button there is cca 3 sec lag until I can continue. Decompress textures has no effect. It started with dx11 terrain, previous version is fast (same 4096 height map).

[sebastianbah]

Hi

Height map brush also updates normal map textures while editing, so this lag may depends on a normal map refined and coarse textures size, and may depends on a number of edited chunks. What normal map size and terrain size do you use?

Also, what SDK versions do you compare?

 

Thaks!

[demostenes]

Hi

 

Height map brush also updates normal map textures while editing, so this lag may depends on a normal map refined and coarse textures size, and may depends on a number of edited chunks. What normal map size and terrain size do you use?

 

Also, what SDK versions do you compare?

 

Thaks!

 

Hi,

 

both height map and nm are 4096. I am comparing latest 2.0 and latest pre-dx11. We are editing height map only. Chunks are 256, area of modification is very small (radius of brush 1-10), only on one chunk. Pre-dx11 wasnt updating NM? Maybe NM (and other maps) should be updated only after apply button, not after each usage of brush (release of mouse button)?

 

It seems like minor thing, but when you edit terrain for cities, villages, various places you need to manually do thousands of tiny modifications. And this is now quite unproductive.

 

edit: I tried on slower PC (and simple 4096 terrain, smaller mask, less textures, etc) and it takes even 10 seconds. Very low resolution terrain like 256*256 without any texture is OK. Settings are following:

 

http://www.dropmocks.com/mIiQsy

 

Editing of masks is OK.

[silent]

Hi,

 

Pre-dx11 wasnt updating NM?

Yep, there was a button to generate normal map after height editing. Right now it is updated automatically.

 

edit: I tried on slower PC (and simple terrain, smaller mask, less textures, etc) and it takes even 10 seconds. Settings are following:

 

This is really strange. What is the PC specs? I'm using a laptop with Intel core i3 processor from Lenovo with slow 5400rpm HDD and I can barely notice lag when editing 4k heightmaps in terrain editor. I can get 3 sec lag only after editing all the terrain chunks without LMB releasing.

 

Thanks!

[demostenes]

 

Hi,

 

Yep, there was a button to generate normal map after height editing. Right now it is updated automatically.

 

This is really strange. What is the PC specs? I'm using a laptop with Intel core i3 processor from Lenovo with slow 5400rpm HDD and I can barely notice lag when editing 4k heightmaps in terrain editor. I can get 3 sec lag only after editing all the terrain chunks without LMB releasing.

 

Thanks!

 

 

Update is automatical after each button release? So maybe thats it...

 

I ve tried on my notebook, core i5 5200U, 8GB of ram, SSD drive, geforce 840M, Windows 8.1, latest gpu drivers,  lag cca 10 seconds.  On my main computer core i7 with 16GB of memory, SSD drive and geforce 470, Windows 7, latest gpu drivers, lag cca 3 seconds. My collegue have same issue (Win7, i7, 8gb ram, GTX660, SSD), so it does not seem HW or OS related.

[silent]

 

 

Update is automatical after each button release? So maybe thats it...

Yes, I'm afraid so.

 

Can you give us your sample terrain to check? 

 

Thanks!

[demostenes]

Yes, I'm afraid so.

 

Can you give us your sample terrain to check? 

 

Thanks!

 

Well, I can but it does not make much sense, it is trivial to recreate (in our case). Just create new world, create new terrain (4096, no textures, masks, etc at all) and try to edit height map. I would only do this, export it, and send to you...

[silent]

OK, I understand.

 

I've created terrain (4k x 4k, 2.93 step, 4k heightmap, empty world) and still can't get any lags. Will try to reproduce it on more PCs. Right now I've tried on my Laptop and on a few test machines, but without any luck. 

 

Can you send us two screenshots with enabled profiler (show_profiler 2) - before lag and after?

 

Thanks!

[demostenes]

I ve tried to create something, but I dont know if it is usefull:

 

http://www.dropmocks.com/mIfZmR

 

Load during painting is so high on this machine (core i5 5200U), that lag makes no difference on profiler. Also during lag profiler does not update any values, engine is totally unresponsive.

[silent]

Thank you for the information.

 

We will investiagate this issue further, but what we are getting currently on all PCs with the latest beta (API: OpenGL, 4k terrain, 4k heightmap):

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qudjbw5zgawabzp/terrain_editor_i3_lenovo.avi?dl=0

 

Thanks!

[demostenes]

Thank you for the information.

 

We will investiagate this issue further, but what we are getting currently on all PCs with the latest beta (API: OpenGL, 4k terrain, 4k heightmap):

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qudjbw5zgawabzp/terrain_editor_i3_lenovo.avi?dl=0

 

Thanks!

Thanks,

 

I will prepare some video too. Btw, we are all under DX11.

[demostenes]

I ve uploaded to your ftp drive test.avi. New 4096 terrain, default settings, no textures, empty scene, dx11. Core i7, 16GB ram, SSD, gtx470.

[silent]

Hi,

 

I've tried your use case on DX11 too.

 

We can reproduce lag after mouse releasing button only if we editing a lot of terrain chunks simultaneosly (like you did in video). While editing single chunk or small amount (like 4 or 5) there is no noticeable lag. You can check how many textures are reloaded after you releasing mouse button in console (type clear before start painting). More likely when you get lags you get a lot of textures reload messages.

 

We will continue our investigations, but for common cases (like editing single chunk or small amout of chunks) there should be no lags (or very small).

 

Thanks!

[demostenes]

 but for common cases (like editing single chunk or small amout of chunks) there should be no lags (or very small).

 

 

 

This is wierd, I have lag of the same duration no matter how much chunks I edit. One or ten, it does not  look like there is difference. Even small brush with radius 2 and one click causes cca 3 seconds lag. I ve just did the test on the one chunk to be sure.

 

Generally lags when editing more chunks are no problem at all for us, because one chunk is 256 pixels, which means 768 meters in our game and such big edit will never ever happen during manual terrain tuning. Level designers are usually editing areas of several pixels, so in the worst case it will influence 4 chunks (pixels on the border), but this is very theoretical.