Feedback: WebGL Performance

This isn't a bug report per se, it is feedback on the webgl image pack.

My current Free Cities Pregmod game is nearly 8 years in with 300 slaves. My environment is Firefox browser (current version, 64-bit) playing over an intranet (ethernet) web server.

The impact on the game is two-fold.

Initial loading (before I can even load a save) is noticeably longer (a couple minutes)

Once loaded, if I open any facility page (even if there's only a dozen or so slaves), it sometimes takes long that the browser asks if I want to wait or terminate the page.

I'm on gigabit ethernet and on a fairly fast machine (RTX 2070 SUPER video card), I haven't tweaked Firefox at all other than to give me lots of local storage for games.

I am not terribly familiar with webgl, so any performance tips or profiling tests, etc I would be happy to do if given some instruction.

Pregmod Commit ID: 5b4541f4

changed the description

I myself use a gtx1070 with Chrome.

Initial loading time is quite long (a minute or more) since all assets are being stored in memory at start (so no streaming). At that point, the fact that you are on ethernet shouldn't matter.

Loading a facility page with 30 slaves takes 5 seconds of hang time or so. Perhaps you can check hardware acceleration is turned on in Firefox. Otherwise no clue here. You can also choose to not display slaves on facility pages.

!10843 (merged) This should help with the hanging.

Chrome is my usual browser too but the stupid 10MB limit for local storage is really annoying.

I double checked Firefox settings and should be using hardware. I tested at https://webglsamples.org/ (I was able to do (Aquarium with 15000 fish at 60 fps.)

I'll try the update to see if it helps with load at least.

Seems a bit better now, at least Firefox isn't thinking that the page is frozen.

The changes have improved performance for me although there are still some issues:

1. If a facility has a lot of slaves (> 50) and the sorting is changed, for some reason it tends to want to regenerate images so all the images are gray squares for awhile. This causes the game (obviously) to be laggy (at least when run via a web server).

2. Sometimes, and I'm not sure why, I get the gray boxes on the Penthouse view (which usually only has 3 slaves in it). It eventually loads them back up but while it's in that state I cannot end the turn.

3. Changing sorting seems to bring the 'gray squares' taking many minutes to resolve (total slave count is just under 500). But this even occurs in facilities with only a few slaves. (If this occurs, changing to another facility and back can clear it.)

I've found that one way to improve performance if you have a lot of slaves with large facilities is to lower the resolution/detail options in the WebGL pack.

The downside, obviously, is the slave images become pixelated but the game is much more responsive.

I'm not sure if the high slave count / performance problem can actually be fixed as if you go through a largely populated facility (100+) it's just going to be slow making 3D images for each slave.

A partial fix might be more simplified slave choosers, like the 'talk about relationships' could work more like the 'have another slave fuck her pussy/ass' selector. (The problem with those is sometimes there isn't enough detail in the list to make the choice you really want.)

The best solution might be to:

1. ... have more conservative default settings
2. ... on the image pack configuration screen have some 'preset' options like 'best performance' on one end leading to 'best quality' on the other with 'balanced' in the middle.
3. ... if possible, have a benchmark tool (like many games do) which then has recommended settings based on the results.

Probably the best solution would be to work with pages and limited the number of slaves that is shown at a time, kinda like slave tabs. Or only render a canvas that is in view or about to be in view (not sure how to do this one).