High round lagging

[edd boy pee butthole poop head]

Are there any tips on reducing lag on high rounds, my highest is like 250+ still going. It would probably just get more laggier and laggier.

[Hiroko]

Originalmente postado por edd boy pee butthole poop head:

True, and also if you have small bloons, it makes bloons small so i guess could be less laggier.

This actually shouldn't matter, nor does big bloons. Its mainly a matter of effects/projectiles that exist and need to constantly calculate/update.
You can avoid lag (to a degree) by:
-Killing bloons faster to keep fewer on screen at once.
-Using higher damage attacks instead of higher attack speed.
-Not using spike factories, except maybe 520 (near front of track to keep them from stacking)
-Not using x5x druid
-Not using Perma Brew
-Not letting top path farms' bananas sit.
-Not using as many abilities
-Do use master alch. Hes secretly the most op tower and very lag friendly.
-x4x ships for similar to master alch
-not using T4 traps, but T5 is ok.
... and others im not thinking of atm

[edd boy pee butthole poop head]

Originalmente postado por Nikoman28:

I think ninja kiwi needs to optimize the game some more or add option to remove/reduce projectiles

yea

[Smokey]

Originalmente postado por Nikoman28:

I think ninja kiwi needs to optimize the game some more or add option to remove/reduce projectiles

Thanks for the necro post & this game has been optimized now and runs 10x times better than it used to when this topic was made.

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Smokey:

Originalmente postado por Nikoman28:

I think ninja kiwi needs to optimize the game some more or add option to remove/reduce projectiles

Thanks for the necro post & this game has been optimized now and runs 10x times better than it used to when this topic was made.

I have done optimized real time machine code programming...

This game is NOT optimized. It is probably not-optimized by a factor of over 1000-fold, as is essentually everything else on the PC, including almost-by-definition, anything using Microsoft anything.(*) Before getting overly technical, note the BTD5 is immensely more efficient than BTD6.

But now getting technical...

If they took the time to pre-render the animations and stored the 2D results, and then reprogrammed the game efficiently in C (not C++ or C# with OOP) and ran it without M$-Windows or Apple or whatever f-ing it up, the game would not lag out ever on a modern desktop machine. It could quite simple handle the maximum number of bloons, towers, and (if they didn't increase the number of projectiles per tower) all the projectiles from all the towers all the time without a lower frame rate.

Actually, proper animation should be done with the frame rate in mind as you write everything, (if you want to optimize that is) so that lagging really isn't an option.

Programming in optimized machine code gives even more efficiency, but I've rarely ever noticed anyone other than myself doing that for anything since the 1980's, although the best people working on GPU's might be doing that for part of the GPU code - but using the GPU to do true 3D graphical representations of 2D objects when we never even change the camera view during a game, the GPU won't be able to compensate for efficiency they'd gain if they kept the game as 2D in the first place.

Even some of simplest concepts such as when to use a hardware interrupt vs. when a function belongs in the kernal seems to be well beyond modern programmers, as is the concept that you shouldn't pointlessly add anything to the stack that you don't need to add to the stack, which means almost always using a "goto"/jump and registers and dedicated memory-locations rather than a call-by-value subroutines.

The common response from a modern programmer reading this would be how "inefficient" and difficult that would be for the programmers, but I'm not talking about the programmers, I'm talking about what the program itself could do if the programmers did take the time to write one that ran efficiently. (Yes, I admit that's not cost-effective and extremely unlikely to be a good business model given the power of modern CPU's, but again, I'm referring to the concept of "optimized programs", not what someone is likely to actually to do.)

And again, I can't stress this enough, "[Modern] Object Oriented Programming is right out"!

P.s. Smokey... sorry for the rant. I don't know if it runs 10x smoother as you say, but even if it did, 10x better than 1000-times slower than it needs to be still isn't "optimized." It's just the misuse of that word that I have a huge problem with. I just noticed some dictionaries have redefined "optimize" to mean "improve" when it comes to coding, but, of course, that is an abusive and confusing misuse of the word; modern "optimization" of code does not even approach "optimized" code which, by a proper definition, is code that is as effective as it possibly could be (which for the non-GPU non-game-engine parts of PC games today, would pretty much damn-near-always be more optimized than it should be.)

---

* - Actually, Microsoft Basic for the 6502 on the Apple II wasn't all that horrible, but every OS since Microsoft Windows 1.0 (inclusive) is. I don't remember where or why I saw a code fragment from MS-Basic, but the author (allegedly Bill Gates) actually took advantage of some of the less-intuitive side-effects of the CPU the way they should have. [That might have not been the 6502 version - again - I can't remember the specifics]

[Smokey]

Only know that in start this game lagged very much when builded the flying fortress and the sun god temple as it dosent do now on my system. So they have atleast done something, but they could probably do much more if they took the time as you said and only know about c++ coding self, and how building cube maps in fps games can improve the gameplay much

And its okay if you got a bit upset by my post since what do i know :)

edit: only sprites/particles i pretty much do for the time now and just focus on making visual improvements when i mod games

[Kiara]

Originalmente postado por Nikoman28:

I think ninja kiwi needs to optimize the game some more or add option to remove/reduce projectiles

https://youtu.be/E5KRDLabCVs?t=62

Unfortunately the majority of the lag late game comes from calculations, not projectiles as seen in this video. (1 minute in)

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Twilight Sparkle:

Unfortunately the majority of the lag late game comes from calculations, not projectiles as seen in this video. (1 minute in)

A modern PC can make roughly 10-20 BILLION floating point calculations per second. Yes, the video shows an instance of lag, but I'm guessing it's not "calculations" - my first guess is that Sauda is swinging a very large number of times per second and hitting multiple ZOMG's with each swing, and that for each hit, it's actually trying to redraw each ZOMG's hit. Worse yet, it may be entering into some recursive state where the redrawing the ZOMG causes it to get hit and re-redrawn again or something like that.

Either way, it's likely to be graphics-related, and even less likely to be any sort of mathamatical "calculations" including position, damage, hits, and whatnot. Quick estimate from the her damage counter is about 100,000 Red-Bloon-Equivalents (RBE's) per second - divide that by even 10 or 20 RBE's worth of damage/pierce per hit, and that's around 5000-10,000 damage hits per second. 10,000 is much much less than 10,000,000,000...

Then again, with really poor Object Oriented Programming, anything is possible with respect to ineffeciiency, and the same thing is true for the OS and we don't know even know what's in that PC's background, including Spyware and whatnot.

Notwithstanding the above, regardless of what is causing Sauda and those Zomg's to lag, it doesn't mean that projectiles don't cause lag for their own separate and independent reasons.

I really wish they had expanded the BTD5 2D engine rather than "pointlessly" going to this hardware-intensive 3D engine, but 3D is what most game designers are being taught in college and what-not, so it's probably very "hard to get good 2D help these days."

If you have some utility that could check the CPU load vs. the GPU load that would help give more infomation. Also, the CPU "talks to" the GPU via (hopefully DMA and) the PCI bus, might want to keep a watch on both that, and interupts as well.

Personally, I really hate Microsoft so I don't want to mess with it "more than I have to." In the very hypothetical situation that BTD6 could run natively on Unix, I might actually run a kernal trace, or even a CPU debug-mode trace and try to figure out what's happening.

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Twilight Sparkle:

Originalmente postado por Nikoman28:

I think ninja kiwi needs to optimize the game some more or add option to remove/reduce projectiles

https://youtu.be/E5KRDLabCVs?t=62

Actually, the streamer seems to agree with me at around 9:57... "Just code better, it's as simple as that guys."

[Crux]

One of the best GPU stress tests there is. Don't fix what isn't broken, is what I would say.

EDIT: removed an emoticon. I won't need a tone indicator here.

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Alpha Crucis:

One of the best GPU stress tests there is. Don't fix what isn't broken, is what I would say.

Personally, I prefer the wording "Don't fix it if it ain't broke." What I like about that wording is that it is obviously grammatically incorrect, but nonetheless no more or less confusing or ambiguous than Alpha's statement of "Don't fix what isn't broken."

In other words, Alpha, by saying "Don't fix what isn't broken", you're fixing the saying "Don't fix it if it ain't broken", even though that classic saying and rule of thumb effectively isn't broken.

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Alpha Crucis:

One of the best GPU stress tests there is. Don't fix what isn't broken, is what I would say.

Not sure what you mean, but I suspect, at a minimum, you're removing the cost of hardware and power-consumption from the definition of "broken".

The rule of thumb of "Don't fix what isn't broken" is often useful. But it's hard to argue it's not broken, or at least, the statement is really all the useful unless, at a bare minimum, you first try to explain what it is you actually care about.

Clearly to the extent that people want to play high round levels without lags, the most on-topic relation to this thread, clearly things are broken as most experienced users, as well as people with machine with relatively low-performance, will lose interest and/or become frustrated due to lag, perhaps even lockups or crashes, rather than the difficulty of the game.

Expanding the thought further, both hardware and electrical consumption have real-world implications, spending money of hardware limits was we can spend on everything else, including games, food, shelter, medical care, For etcetera. For people who are on that he whole "save the earth by using less resource" thing, hardware consumes those sort of things and scales upward with the number of people who use them. But for things that are used by large numbers of people, such as very popular games, the software cost divided by the consumers theoretically approaches zero.

[Killerman1997]

im coming into a dead post a year late but this aint stressing my GPU OR CPU... both sit around 15% when lagging to 10fps

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Killerman1997:

im coming into a dead post a year late but this aint stressing my GPU OR CPU... both sit around 15% when lagging to 10fps

My phone very noticably heats up on BTD6 and nothing else I play. The battery dies littterally about 20 times faster to when I hit moderately high rounds.

Or at least it used to, an update made the game unusable on it about 6-8 months ago.

(Given that I haven't spent as much as 30 miinutes on the phone in that time, I'm not going to upgrade it. The CIA GPS trackre works fine as is.)

[Ninja Zyborg]

Originalmente postado por battlezoby:

Originalmente postado por Killerman1997:

im coming into a dead post a year late but this aint stressing my GPU OR CPU... both sit around 15% when lagging to 10fps

My phone very noticably heats up on BTD6 and nothing else I play. The battery dies littterally about 20 times faster to when I hit moderately high rounds.

A- get a better phone
B- it's a pc game ported to mobile, what did you expect

[battlezoby]

Originalmente postado por Ninja Zyborg:

A- get a better phone
B- it's a pc game ported to mobile, what did you expect

I excepted you to slowly get smarter, or at least not get any dumber.
It's Totally a Mobile phone game port to the PC?
WTF?
Why do you think all the maps are all the same size and don't scroll?
Why do think think it has so many microtransactions?
And even better proof... did you ever think about why Right Click and Mouse Wheel never do anything ever!?!?!?
It's because phone only have "touch" and not "left" "right" and "wheel."
That's why.
It is sooooooo a mobile game portd to the PC!

I'm not arguing with what you wrote. I'm just telling you that you're wrong!