Flying Circus AA clusters causing bad performance.

[BrianPeppers2]

Im having an issue with bad fps caused by the AA clusters in cities. I’ve got dserver set up on a separate pc running pwcgfc missions. The server experiences no slowdowns or overload reports, however our clients are experiencing very bad fps when the large AA clusters are generated in some cities.

It seems like reducing the AA setting doesn’t reduce their size, but just removes them entirely at low, or ultra low if running aircraft at high.
I would like the cities to retain some AA defense, but maybe half or 1/4 the number of guns. Is it possible to reduce the size of the clusters without removing them entirely?

Edited April 21 by BrianPeppers2
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[PatrickAWlson]

Use simple configs to reduce AA.  Unfortunately PWCG does not have the ability to let the user specify where they do or do not want AA.

Edited April 21 by PatrickAWlson

[BrianPeppers2]

Hey Patrick I appreciate the response and how awesome the campaign generator is! Excuse my ignorance because I really have no idea how all this works behind the scenes, but maybe hopefully this helps you in some way, at least as feedback if anything....

My issue is that the groups that do spawn are too big. At every setting besides ultra low, groups with over 60 units spawn. But at ultra low they disappear entirely.

In VR these large groups seem to tank my FPS and therefore I always have to run at ultra low, even if the server could handle more (we are running dserver on a separate machine). At this setting the AA might as well not exist they are so sparse. It is a shame since the groups of AA are very immersive and we love the flak effects and the challenge they create at higher settings.

I wonder if its possible to cap the max amount of units in AA groups that do spawn, as you decrease the AA, so that we can still have these groups to contend with?

[BrianPeppers2]

And just for what its worth as feedback/bug reporting.....here we ran AA high and spawned at Houplin...basically ground zero in between over 240 AA....and it crashed our games after taking off...even the guy running an rtx 5080/9900x with 64gb ram. Meanwhile the server didn't even overload. I know it wasn't meant for high settings and this is an extreme case, but it seems the large groups are problematic.

[AeroCrab]

The primary source of all this AA is around bridges and, more importantly, railroads. There are two bugs associated with all this. The first one is this (in buildAAAKeyPositionForMission):

 

       if (!currentGroundSetting.equals(ConfigSimple.CONFIG_LEVEL_ULTRA_LOW) || !currentGroundSetting.equals(ConfigSimple.CONFIG_LEVEL_LOW))
 

That logic is supposed to gate creation of bridge and railroad AA, but it is always true (instead, "||" should be "&&"). All that does, though,  is make the "low" setting not particularly usable (elsewhere in the code, there are checks for ultra_low, and bridge and railroad AA is skipped for that). The big-ticket item, and the one which I find kind of funny, is less of a "bug" and more "things are different for FC". Specifically, the code looks for certain substrings in the model name (like "railway") and if found calls that a railroad item for AA purposes, and builds AA units around them. The problem is that the FC map contains a lot of items like "railway_pillar" and "railway_sign", so Francois and his buddies in the 437th Railroad Sign Defense Corps are ready to give the Germans what-for if they come for any for the signage. 

 

So basically you get <config key> number of AA units for each one of those, and it is a comedically large amount. Unfortunately, there really isn't anything you can do about it without modifying the code. I've done that here to preprocess the railroad templates and declare the first "station" item for a group the "base" station, then only do AA for that. My average FC mission these days (I have other changes, so not really directly comparable) with a Low AA density is around the 40-60 range - and for me, Low includes bridge and railroad AA; I changed the initial logic to  if (!currentGroundSetting.equals(ConfigSimple.CONFIG_LEVEL_ULTRA_LOW)).

 

As a side note, the 5090 won't help any with this issue, it is a single-threaded CPU thing. I also run VR and that's what motivated me to deal with all this, as otherwise the time dilation was awful.

[Stonehouse]

Usually the AAA is set up as inactive with a trigger set to activate it when an aircraft enters within some range eg 10 or 15km and another trigger to despawn/deactivate the unit when the aircraft gets further away than some distance eg 11 or 16 km.  Unless the AAA unit is active then there is very little load. 

 

Possibly provide the mission for Pat in case there is a bug in creating the triggers?

[BrianPeppers2]

Oh I see now so ultra low really is the solution to the problem….oh well and it seems both sides are paranoid over the French railroad signage.

Honestly tho after playing with stonehouse AAA mod even ultra low provides good flak, but of course more is better! 

It is strange that the AA is so costly for the client. Like I said we run the dserver on a separate machine and that seemingly has no issue with them.

 

I don’t know coding too well but I do use the RRR Adder mod to put rearm trucks at some airfields…wonder if that could be recombobulated to add some baseline AA to cities? If it’s true they don’t effect performance outside of certain range than you could theoretically add a few baseline AA everywhere without issue? 

Edited April 22 by BrianPeppers2