Questions: Scene Optimizer Adventure

[Crowsinger]

Hello. I have a couple of questions about Scene Optimizer, because things aren't going very well so far.

Background: My zone was originally made with MapMagic2 and spawned using Vegetation Studio Pro. For various reasons, I wanted to convert the zone to Gaia and other Procedural Worlds tools.

Current setup:

• Unity 2021.3.5f1 (built-in pipeline)
• Atavism X.6
• Gaia Pro (latest)
• GeNa (latest)
• R.A.M. 2019 (latest) and other NatureManufacture assets
• Enviro (latest)

I'm still using R.A.M. 2019 because every time I try to make a lake with GeNa, it goes horribly wrong.

So I dragged a lot of things into the Original object and followed along with the documentation.

In my old zone (MM2 and VS Pro), I was getting something like 80-110 FPS depending. In my new Gaia zone, I have been getting 20-40 or so, which I why I'm trying the Scene Optimizer.

I hit play, and it tells me that my FPS is 38. I press the Optimize button, and now I'm getting 75, which is still less than I would like.

On page 9 of the documentation, it says that with Gaia Pro, "create your Gaia Environment using the Terrain Streaming system as you normally would." But my terrains don't look like the picture. They're not in the root of the hierarchy like in the image. Instead, my terrains look like this:

And the button that is supposed to appear in the Scene Optimizer window, the one that says "Optimize Scene: Gaia Loaded Terrains", is not there. 

Does this mean that the Optimizer isn't helping with the trees and details? (I tried moving those terrains into Original, and the terrains disappeared altogether from the world.)

Next I built the client and played. The good part: ~100 FPS. That was nice to see.

First bad part: Lampposts are messed up and flicker when I move:

All of the white that you see on the lamppost is messed up and flickering. Also the lights no longer work, so I guess the spot lights died inside Original.

Then there was the Lakeless Lake:

I realize this could be a R.A.M. 2019 problem that I could solve by figuring out how to make a GeNa lake look like something other than one of M.C. Escher's works, but more importantly, the village on the lake is more messed up than the lamppost. That whole scene flickers like mad.

So I guess my questions are these:

1. How can I fix the lampposts and lake village? Should all of that be outside of Original and not optimized? Is there a shader fix? I have no idea where to begin.
2. How do I make sure the four Gaia terrains and all of their spawns are being optimized?

I guess that was a lot of text to just ask two questions, but I wanted to put a lot of information in this post in guess you can see that I did something obviously wrong.

Thanks!

Edit: I should add that there is grass in the scene in editor (though not much, which is another issue). But even though the grass appears in the editor, you can see that it doesn't appear in the game at all. I guess that would be question 3.

[Crowsinger]

Anybody?

[Crowsinger]

I tried replacing the R.A.M. lake with a GeNa lake. The lake was still invisible in game.

 

[Crowsinger]

I found that in the Optimizer window, I can deselect a layer from each of the OptimizeCommands. So I deselected the Water layer from all four, hoping that this would tell the Scene Optimizer to stop messing up the water.

It didn't work. I ran the Optimizer again, and the lake and river water is missing.

I really wish someone from Procedural Worlds would answer this question for me, because if this product makes water disappear, then I kinda wasted my money on it.

[Bryan]

On 7/27/2022 at 5:18 PM, Crowsinger said:

On page 9 of the documentation, it says that with Gaia Pro, "create your Gaia Environment using the Terrain Streaming system as you normally would." But my terrains don't look like the picture. They're not in the root of the hierarchy like in the image. Instead, my terrains look like this:

As it looks you are just using the multi-terrain setup (not world streaming). 
Which is fine if thats what you want. 
The Gaia Manager has options like: 
Create Terrain Scenes 
Unload Terrain Scenes

These options are for the world streaming, which will take your multi-terrain setup and enable world streaming by turning the multiple terrains into multiple scenes. 

Unload Terrain scenes is good for very large worlds. Depending on your world size you could have them all loaded at one time but really that depends on your machine. 

As far as the rest of this is concerned I am bringing someone else in to take a look. 
Certain systems like the water, terrains, etc. you would not want in the scene optimizer. 

I would say because they are all different materials could be your problem here. 
As they all shouldnt be combined into one. 
You may need to separate more, and create more parents. 

In the meantime I recommend taking a look into this video: 

 

[Crowsinger]

23 hours ago, Bryan said:

The Gaia Manager has options like: 
Create Terrain Scenes 
Unload Terrain Scenes

I tried doing that, and it created four new scenes, one for each terrain (this zone is 2048x2048 with four terrains).

When I then tried to log in, my characters kept falling through the terrain and looking up at the village

I verified the spawn coordinates with a cube, and I should have been spawning above the ground. I don't know if there's a problem with those terrain scenes working with Atavism, which wants to load scenes itself.

Anyway I went back a changeset and played with only trees and no terrain details to see how I'm doing. The FPS was between 85-118 while I was running through the forest.

So I tried going through the steps again. This time Original contains ruins and villages (a lot of prefabs in both). I deselected the Water layer from the Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large Objects commands. I also removed the UI layer to keep the Atavism Canvas out of it.

Then I clicked Optimize Scene, make a build, and played.

Running through the starter village I was getting a little over 100 FPS, which I've never seen. Through the forest it varied between 80-140. (There's no grass because I'm still not happy with how it's spawning, so just pines from a NatureManufacture asset).

And the water is all visible, which is awesome.

Here's what the Medieval Lake Village looks like, the flickering I was talking about. Maybe I should just leave this one out of Optimization:

At this point I think this are looking good FPS wise. I'm going to try this process again without the lake village and see how it goes.

I did go through the video you mentioned, but I think the documentation helped me more.

[Crowsinger]

Quote

You may need to separate more, and create more parents. 

I forgot to ask about this. Most of what I put into Origin was stone ruins and wooden villages. Would you recommend dividing the assets along those lines?

btw, I made another build with the lake village left out, and now it looks fine.

[Bryan]

I would simplify it as much as possible yes. 
One it would be easier to track if you needed to fix something vs going through one massive list. 
That's just me personally, but see if you get any different results depends on how much you divide before you dont notice performance gain. 

Optimization can just be funny like that sometimes. 
glad you got it working though! 

Also, make sure that you have the region loader or neighbor loader attached to the player as well.