(edited to add findings) This is intended to be a work in progress type thread for anyone to post their findings about which pieces reduce framerate and to what degree. Someone mentioned in Warholic's Dynamic LIghting Guide that someone with a dev-kit could see the framerate on the screen. If anyone has that capability, obviously that would be the most scientific way to go about this. But I can't wait. I need to figure out which pieces are the most expensive for Framerate budget. Here's a method that with some tweaking, might work. Please alter this as you see fit and post your findings: Empty Map two players on splitscreen aim 2nd controller to view entire working area place multiples of same object until either player sees skipping/jumping of their framerate when moving past the objects or panning left/right/up/down. Count number of pieces required for the degredation to occur See if some pieces require fewer instances than others to produce framerate lag. The trouble with this is that no single object may produce framerate problems without a relatively large level already created in the background. So that's why I think people could try a few variations of this to see what works best. I searched the forum, but if someone knows of a better resource than this please post it here! EDIT (Findings as we... find them. So far things are in a good v bad category. If we can get more precise in the future, I can change the listing here.) Cover Glass - Bad
I feel like they are moving from selling xboxs to selling gold subscriptions half of Halo 4's functionality is taken away when you are offline, and entire feature suites are locked out entirely. you are essentially buying half a game, with the other half being physically one your hard drive, but you have to pay more money to use it. I really don't like this new direction :c
I think we need to keep bringing it (the frame rate issues) up in the Halo 4 Known Issues section of the Waypoint forums. They've been ignoring me everyday for over a week now, but maybe if more people keep bringing it up... Maybe they will try to fix the game we all paid so much money for.
I understand that part of the problem is that Halo 4 is more screen-laggy and certainly some of the developer maps are culprits, but this thread is about dealing with what we have... finding out which items cause the most frame-rate lag so that we can optimize our maps to compensate. I personally want to play most if not all maps using splitscreen when friends come over. if you design for 2 players, you are sure to have a good framerate when you take it online and play with 1 on each screen. (or is that not so?) You don't have to go to splitscreen to experience framerate lag anyways. you can design a level so laggy that one person sees it. Using the method above of having two players on the screen looking at the test area of your map just makes it that much easier to find the laggy spots. BTW, I'm all for going to repost this stuff over at waypoint and harping on this issue. I'ts a big enough issue to keep me from purchasing the next DLC pack. They should care about that, right?
Hey JK Addict, this is a great way about going about it since we don't have access to a dev kit. A better alternative approach would be to contact someone who can mod and spawn more than the object limit on some pieces. You would need to spawn about 200 of each object for consistency during cross comparisons. If you end up doing this without mod capabilities, results would be generalized. Not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you're running a controlled experiment. You could have object results labelled "Low", "Moderate", "high", "very high" depending on how perceivable the differences are. I'd recommend setting up a scene on the threshold of being frame heavy, try using a bunch of station corridors, wall coliseums or brace larges. I know those are pretty aggressive. Then spawn a consistent number of objects in a controlled experiment to see which one's cause more frame loss.