25 réponses à ce sujet

[Blue-Wizard]

 Just how buggy are the standard nwn horses? Would it be a bad idea to include them in an online server without modification or adjustment? What kind of problems are generally associated with them?

[GhostOfGod]

We haven't had any problems implementing the NWN horses. There are a few settings/variables you made to tweak to your liking though.



We made ours work like WOW rides. You summon one and are automounted. Then you dismount and your ride vanishes. But that is just one of many ways of doing it.



Some problems you may encounter would be someone spamming horses in areas. And then there is the problem of another player coming up and jumping on someone else horse and stealing it.



Some people like to mess with the mounted speed increase. I think this is especially the case for monk characters.



Some don't like to use the saddlebags. Some do.



You many need/want to adjust where horses are allowed to be spawned. Etc..



Really most of these things are a matter of preference. I suppose you would just have to play around with it and figure out what works best for your server.



Hope that helps a little. Good luck.

[Shadooow]

Personally if player would ask for horse I would give him "Hobby Horse". Im against horses because:
- they are lagging client, their animations are too heavy and NWN wasnt build fot it, so each time you first see horse in any area you get graphic lag. Even on my GT 9800...
- their scripting is poor - heartbeats, and mess with all events seems not good implementation to me. For many pre 1.69 this wass main reason to not add them (cos they had custom scripts and must have sync in with new 1.69).
- you must set up variables on each area otherwise you will see horses in your tavern/dungeons
- they uses various skins, might conflict with your already present PC skin script.
Also Ride skill and feats around horses - Summon Mount, Mounted Combat/Archery seems very poor to me. They are almost unused by players, and Summon Mount is in 90% cases banned by builders.

+ there was some issues with summons/custom appearances etc. but since I never used them I don't know more about this.

Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 11 août 2010 - 03:45 .

[TSMDude]

Blue-Wizard wrote...

 Just how buggy are the standard nwn horses? Would it be a bad idea to include them in an online server without modification or adjustment? What kind of problems are generally associated with them?

Just a guess, but if your from Mistledale and you guys use the CEP Horses you would be better off. Less lag and make sure players know to dismiss them when not using them. Yes this makes immersion a bit of a knock but at one point we had 22 people at a Server Event and all of them tied thier horses up outside....

It sucked till we switched to the CEP Horses....

[Builder_Anthony]

I dont know i use them they seem fine to me.

[soignee]

I saw this topic come up on recent posts and was all disappointed when I clicked





PONIES OMG

[_six]

Just to clarify one point, there are two causes of the lag people frequently experience with the horses. Firstly, there's loading the extensive animation sets, which can potentially totally freeze the screen for about a second. This can be avoided to a large extent by being careful with the mounting scripts (eg by not destroying the horse model until after you've mounted the PC) and by keeping horses lying around close to area transitions. It may also help to keep an invisible mounted NPC and horse around in areas too, as I've found this removed mounting lag completely by keeping the animations in NWN's cache. It's really nothing more than an annoyance in any case, as it won't break anything ingame, and shouldn't persist for more than a second.

Secondly, due to how detailed the models and their animations are in general they may also slow framerates a little just by being around - particularly with mounted NPCs where two different and complex animation sets are being executed simultanously. So I guess it depends on players hardware - though I rarely get noticeable slowdown, on a pretty old system.

[Builder_Anthony]

I want a pony model for all those people that ask if theres horeses.

[Jenna WSI]

We had lots of bugs with horses and subrace scripts conflicting.

[Genisys]

1.69 Animations are horrible for horses
Horse Scripts mess with Using Custom Appearances for PCs (Fixable)
Horses will lag everyone's video performance due to POORLY Created Models & Animations for the 1.69 Horses, even CEP is this way too, unfortunately... (Fixable? Maybe...)

Custom Content is sometimes buggy or lame... (It's an unfortunately fact)

I just wish they would have done a nicer job on the 1.69 Models & animation for Horses..

Case / Point In Hand...
HOU Combat Animations never got fixed by it's original makers (*Ahem), though someone has created a fix for the HOU Combat Animations, since using them I've never had any problems with graphics since, but if you add horses though, you can just flat forget about quality video performance (For All Viewing Horses in the Area)

They don't cause lag server wide, they cause horrible video performance (including instant video pausing & bottlenecking) for all in the area viewing the poorly designed horses / animations..

Mounting is not the issue, as soon as the player with the horse enters the area, everyone in the areas screams LAGG!!!, it's their video card freezing over the bug in the animations &/or model.  I'm quite positive it's a model &/or animation issue..

My 2 Cents (Appreciated or Not)

Modifié par Genisys, 25 juillet 2010 - 10:44 .

[Khuzadrepa]

Genisys wrote...
Case / Point In Hand...
HOU Combat Animations never got fixed by it's original makers (*Ahem), though someone has created a fix for the HOU Combat Animations, since using them I've never had any problems with graphics since

What about them didn't get fixed?  I'm pretty sure they did something with this for 1.69.

Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 26 juillet 2010 - 02:24 .

[Shadooow]

Genisys wrote...

HOU Combat Animations never got fixed by it's original makers (*Ahem),

They actually were in last official patch.

Genisys wrote...

1.69 Animations are horrible for horses
Horses will lag everyone's video performance due to POORLY Created Models & Animations for the 1.69 Horses, even CEP is this way too, unfortunately... (Fixable? Maybe...)

Actually they are too good, thats why it lags. CEP horses are bit poor (which does lesser lags).

[SuperFly_2000]

The standard NWN horses are not not buggy at all....as far as I know. There is just this thing with the ride skill...but even that can be fixed.

You just need to read a little about how to set it all up to fit your need.

A tip is to use painted down or door transitions for all your transitions. This is to avoid players bringing horses to places where you decided there shouldn't be horses.

Personally I prefer the standard NWN horses over the CEP ones. They are lot better documented thanks to Proleric's Horse Guide (you can find it on the old forums), they are prettier, they are easier to handle...and probably more...

Edit: The only better thing about the CEP horses is that you have ponies also...that fit small stature PC's better...

Modifié par SuperFly_2000, 26 juillet 2010 - 08:46 .

[Khuzadrepa]

Since scripts were mentioned, if someone dislikes the standard horse scripts, you could check out this system done by The_Krit:
http://nwvault.ign.c....Detail&id=3524

And for ponies... I see in section 1.2 of Proleric's guide in the Lexicon that you can create properly pony scaled NPCs... we can't do the same for PCs?

Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 26 juillet 2010 - 12:09 .

[Khuzadrepa]

Genisys wrote...

I just wish they would have done a nicer job on the 1.69 Models & animation for Horses..

They don't cause lag server wide, they cause horrible video performance (including instant video pausing & bottlenecking) for all in the area viewing the poorly designed horses / animations..

Mounting is not the issue, as soon as the player with the horse enters the area, everyone in the areas screams LAGG!!!, it's their video card freezing over the bug in the animations &/or model.  I'm quite positive it's a model &/or animation issue..

This is a quote from Brian Chung on the old forum:
 
"It's client side loading of 13+mb of horse animations. Since the NWN client by default only caches like 16mb in resources, so whenever a horse appears, it causes a momentary stutter as the client has to clear out the resource cache, then load the animation data off the HD. The standard humanoid animations cause no hiccup because you're almost always guaranteed to have it in memory being a PC so it's always loaded. 

You can up the amount by changing the nwnplayer.ini setting under [Game Options] and adding "Max Memory Usage=32". Up to a max of 64mb, beyond that there wasn't much performance benefit according to some tests we did internally. So there might be a small initial pause on the first horse load, but afterwards it might not be as bad even if you transition areas."

Have your players applied the .ini setting described here?  If not, then yes, they will almost certainly experience client-side lag.  I've supplied this fix to everyone I know, and none of them have had any trouble with lag from horses since.  I personally use the 64MB setting, and I haven't experienced a problem like that.

I personally think the 1.69 horses and animations are incredible, and am glad they included them in the patch!

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Khuzadrepa

Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 26 juillet 2010 - 12:19 .

[_six]

Khuzadrepa wrote...

You can up the amount by changing the nwnplayer.ini setting under [Game Options] and adding "Max Memory Usage=32". Up to a max of 64mb, beyond that there wasn't much performance benefit according to some tests we did internally.

Most useful thing I've read all day

[Khuzadrepa]

_six wrote...
Most useful thing I've read all day

Glad I could help!
Also, Superfly, check out section 5.3 of the horse guide. That might help you with your pony problem! 

Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 26 juillet 2010 - 01:57 .

[B_Harrison]

I didn't know about that .ini setting either. Thanks!

[Calvinthesneak]

Khuzadrepa wrote...

 
"It's client side loading of 13+mb of horse animations. Since the NWN client by default only caches like 16mb in resources, so whenever a horse appears, it causes a momentary stutter as the client has to clear out the resource cache, then load the animation data off the HD. The standard humanoid animations cause no hiccup because you're almost always guaranteed to have it in memory being a PC so it's always loaded. 

You can up the amount by changing the nwnplayer.ini setting under [Game Options] and adding "Max Memory Usage=32". Up to a max of 64mb, beyond that there wasn't much performance benefit according to some tests we did internally. So there might be a small initial pause on the first horse load, but afterwards it might not be as bad even if you transition areas."

Have your players applied the .ini setting described here?  If not, then yes, they will almost certainly experience client-side lag.  I've supplied this fix to everyone I know, and none of them have had any trouble with lag from horses since.  I personally use the 64MB setting, and I haven't experienced a problem like that.

I personally think the 1.69 horses and animations are incredible, and am glad they included them in the patch!

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Khuzadrepa

This is something I always sticky on forums for players.  It doesn't help particularly old machines with poor graphic performance.  They still get a stutter, usually about less than 1 second.  I don't think there is anything else that can eliminate it entirely.  On my 3.33ghz dual core, it's usually unnoticable unless I have several horses popping onto the screen at once.  Something that builders should try to avoid.  Well that and creating many mounted NPCs

Horses lag some people, quite badly.  Pretty much entirely to do with the fact that when a horse is seen in visual range it has to try and precache 16 MB of mount/dismount animations.
Unfortunately there isn't much you can do to get rid of it, though there is something that will help.  Changing the amount of memory allocated to the NWN engine can improve the performance and keep the animations cached longer.

What to do
 

• Go to your Neverwinter/NWN directory, find a file called nwnplayer.ini
  
• Open the ini file with notepad or wordpad
  
• Navigate to the section in the file that is [Game Options] (it should be at the top)
  
• Add the following line to the file: Max Memory Usage=64.
  
• Save the file, restart your game.  Depending on the age and speed of your machine, your milage may vary, but it certainly can help a great deal with horses and graphical lag in general.

see my bad I quoted them as being 16mb instead of 13.

Modifié par Calvinthesneak, 26 juillet 2010 - 02:12 .

[Shadooow]

Khuzadrepa wrote...

Have your players applied the .ini setting described here?  If not, then yes, they will almost certainly experience client-side lag.  I've supplied this fix to everyone I know, and none of them have had any trouble with lag from horses since.  I personally use the 64MB setting, and I haven't experienced a problem like that.

Didn't helped for me. I had it always 64 since I installed 1.69 and still lagged.

[TSMDude]

While we have horses and such and went to the CEP ones for a reason. The CEP ones do not use as much resources as they have 5mb compared to 13mb. That is a lot. Many of these suggetsions are great for SP Mods or MP Mods but in a PW I still would suggest going to the CEP ones as when a person first enters the area and spots a normal 1.69 horse it will stutter. Compund that by 10 when you have some numbers on your PW and say two groups meet all on different horses and BAM! Lots of lag and some spikes.



Same group and sitituation with CEP Horses it clocked a moment blip on the logs. We tested it ad nauseum to make sure we found what was best for us as a Persistent World.

[Khuzadrepa]

B_Harrison wrote...

I didn't know about that .ini setting either. Thanks!

You're quite welcome! 

A few other tips I've heard that can help with stutters and lags (including PWs):
If you aren't using tails on your PCs, you can add an invisible horse tail to them when they log into the module. This means the horse anims will always be loaded, much the same way that Brian described earlier with PC anims always being loaded. Of course, you would definitely want to stress to your players that they should make that .ini modification (the way Calvinthesneak did.)

Another option is to place invisible horses near transitions in some areas in your mod, as _six suggested earlier in this thread. That way, the anims get frequently refreshed into the cache. It would also help keep the gameplay smoother where it is most important to do so, by maybe adding at worst a second of time or slight pause after entering an area (when you already have a pause) rather than having it happen while walking around.

Of course, no solution will be absolutely perfect, and stutters may still exist (since hardware configurations vary widely.) I think that any and all of these can help keep it from being laggier than that, though.
And everyone should do whatever works best for them, I just want to present a few more options. 
Happy Gaming!
Cheers,
Khuzadrepa

Modifié par Khuzadrepa, 26 juillet 2010 - 04:53 .

[KooKoo88]

You can't cheat in most PWs, but . . . .
If you're playing a single player mod . . .

~DebugMode 1
~dm_mylittlepony
~DebugMode 0

That will give you a nice little hobby horse to ride that goes really fast.

Good Gaming

[TSMDude]

Khuzadrepa wrote...


Another option is to place invisible horses near transitions in some areas in your mod. That way, the anims get frequently refreshed into the cache. It would also help keep the gameplay smoother where it is most important to do so, by maybe adding at worst a second of time or slight pause after entering an area (when you already have a pause) rather than having it happen while walking around.

That is a cool idear...I might have to test that out. Thanks for the idea.

KooKoo88 wrote...

You can't cheat in most PWs, but . . . .
If you're playing a single player mod . . .

~DebugMode 1
~dm_mylittlepony
~DebugMode 0

That will give you a nice little hobby horse to ride that goes really fast.

Good Gaming

Really? *heads off to go try that out*

Modifié par TSMDude, 26 juillet 2010 - 03:53 .

[locksly]

Well lots of horse hating yep.