Foundations worse than ceilings for lag?

[Oldkane]

Foundations worse than ceilings for lag?

I have noted that a quite a few unofficial servers limit the amount of foundations you can have in a base, reason seems to be that it creates lag. However I was unable to find anything in the forums when searching (and I may have missed it) that specifically says that using foundations is worse than using ceilings for the same floor area.  The question being if you use a checkerboard pattern of Foundations and ceilings for your base bottom level, is that better than just using foundations, or does it not make a difference lag wise? Thanks for your replies in advance.  

[invincibleqc]

6 minutes ago, Oldkane said:

Foundations worse than ceilings for lag?

I have noted that a quite a few unofficial servers limit the amount of foundations you can have in a base, reason seems to be that it creates lag. However I was unable to find anything in the forums when searching (and I may have missed it) that specifically says that using foundations is worse than using ceilings for the same floor area.  The question being if you use a checkerboard pattern of Foundations and ceilings for your base bottom level, is that better than just using foundations, or does it not make a difference lag wise? Thanks for your replies in advance.  

A foundation is acting as both; pillar + ceiling. Due to that, I would tend to believe foundations are best for server performance since it is halving the amount of structures required for the purpose of having a floor meaning less networking to clients for rendering, less snap points to lookup when a client is requesting the placement of a structures along with less ray tracing required for AOE source of damage (such as explosive, etc.) so if there was money on the line, I would put it on foundations being less heavy for the server than the pillar + ceiling alternative. Must be another youtube rumor spread by an impressionable fan base.

[Aikar]

13 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

A foundation is acting as both; pillar + ceiling. Due to that, I would tend to believe foundations are best for server performance since it is halving the amount of structures required for the purpose of having a floor meaning less networking to clients for rendering, less snap points to lookup when a client is requesting the placement of a structures along with less ray tracing required for AOE source of damage (such as explosive, etc.) so if there was money on the line, I would put it on foundations being less heavy for the server than the pillar + ceiling alternative. Must be another youtube rumor spread by an impressionable fan base.

Speaking as a developer, this is pretty spot on.

 

I just wish ark gave us better options to reduce structure counts.

Until Valguero, most locations are forced to use ceilings  and things get worse on official where you have structure clipping enabled.

[Fukushu]

But how does the lag on officials work? I have a 150-200+ping on our ragnarok server over the day but at nights when nearly no one is around the ping goes down to 20-30.

 

I once read that the ping is more affected by rendering and only shows effect if the person/tribe is online and in render range of those dinos/structures.

So with only 10 and less people online at night it's way less rendered dinos/structures the server has to struggle with than in top times where 30-45 people render everything.

 

So heavily reduced player numbers could help overall lag IMO?

[d1nk]

15 hours ago, Oldkane said:

Foundations worse than ceilings for lag?

I have noted that a quite a few unofficial servers limit the amount of foundations you can have in a base, reason seems to be that it creates lag. However I was unable to find anything in the forums when searching (and I may have missed it) that specifically says that using foundations is worse than using ceilings for the same floor area.  The question being if you use a checkerboard pattern of Foundations and ceilings for your base bottom level, is that better than just using foundations, or does it not make a difference lag wise? Thanks for your replies in advance.  

I believe its probably more to reduce overall base sizes - much like the 'no behe gate rule' some unofficials have. The gates themselves arent laggy.. but the 15? High structure needed to enclose the gates are.

[Oldkane]

The answer above about pillars and ceilings being worse than just foundations is not exactly what I was asking.  As you can clip ceilings to Foundations assuming a flat area, does making it 50/50 Ceilings/Foundations for the floor make it less laggy or the same as making it all foundations?  I would alternate the foundations with ceilings, so no pillars involved.  However thanks to those that have replied so far.

[invincibleqc]

12 hours ago, d1nk said:

I believe its probably more to reduce overall base sizes - much like the 'no behe gate rule' some unofficials have. The gates themselves arent laggy.. but the 15? High structure needed to enclose the gates are.

I think the texture of Behemoth Gates is heavier to render and might cause FPS drops client-side for players that play on  which may explain why some came to that conclusion but a single Behemoth Gate compared to 77 walls should technically be lighter for the server itself.

10 hours ago, Oldkane said:

The answer above about pillars and ceilings being worse than just foundations is not exactly what I was asking.  As you can clip ceilings to Foundations assuming a flat area, does making it 50/50 Ceilings/Foundations for the floor make it less laggy or the same as making it all foundations?  I would alternate the foundations with ceilings, so no pillars involved.  However thanks to those that have replied so far.

I don't believe a single foundation to be more expensive than a single ceiling. Both are basically idled structures (that do not think nor replicate every frame) and are just node in the snap point chain of a build in the end. When I build, I personally leave rows without any foundations/ceilings and it really helps to make the base render faster. Also prevent babies from growing in the foundations/under the ceilings so that's a plus. For example:

Spoiler

 

[Oldkane]

I sort of did this also, only put foundations where required for walls ceiling support etc and left rest out.  Definitely helps with breeding as babies dont glitch on them, not as good cosmetically as seeing a nice floor but helps with render.

[Sphere]

I found the better answer to the problem is to have better Internet, and configure it correctly to perform (Server Owner). Now people can build as much as they like on Unofficial. ?

[Oldkane]

Thanks for your informative answer Sphere, which I am sure solved your problems.  However everybody has different PC's etc, so where some people dont get lag, others playing the same game on same server do.  So working out ways of building that can reduce it can be helpful for those that struggle. Also I was told by other players that ceilings create less lag than foundations, but that seems to be a myth from answers so far posted.

[Pipinghot]

19 hours ago, Oldkane said:

I sort of did this also, only put foundations where required for walls ceiling support etc and left rest out.  Definitely helps with breeding as babies dont glitch on them, not as good cosmetically as seeing a nice floor but helps with render.

Yeah, and in the end that's pretty much the best answer. The fewer objects & structures there are in your base, the faster it will res in, this is true both in terms of the server load and the load on your PC's graphics card.

Even if there is a difference between 1,000 foundations vs. 1,000 ceilings that difference is insignificant compared to reducing the number of objects from 1,000 down to some lower number.

Some of what I'm about to say will seem obvious, but bear with me on this. What I'm about to describe to you is based on personal experience, I've actually done this on a couple of very large builds on a private Ragnarok server that I play on. I didn't start out with the intent of creating the following scenario, but it's the sequence of events I ended up following when I was trying to build a couple of very large buildings on my base, and then those buildings started causing problems with the base rendering too slowly. You'll need to use the S+ Mod in order to do this test.

1) Build

Build one very large box shaped building with standard foundations, walls, etc. and then a fair distance away build a second identical big box using the large S+ walls that are 12-tiles high. Make your building, let's say, 24 walls in height with a footprint of 20x20.

* Standard building components:

      400 Foundations, 400 Ceiling tiles, 1,920 wall tiles

* S+ Building components

      400 Foundations, 400 Ceiling tiles, 160 wall tiles

2) Test

Then, for each building, fly into render range and then fly away, repeat that about 12-15 times and count how long it takes to render in the full building. Compare the times for the two buildings. You will see (and I'm sure you already suspect) that the building with the large wall will consistently render in faster).

3) Modify and re-test

Here's the not-so-obvious part.

In the S+ building, replace nearly all of the foundations with ceiling tiles. You'll just have a single ring of foundations around the outside of the building holding up the walls, with the entire 18x18 center of the floor being composed of 324 ceiling tiles.

Do the flying test again, say another 10 times. I'd be surprised if you see any difference at all in the render time (I can tell you that it didn't make any difference for me when I did it), or if you do see a difference it will be awfully small and only noticeable if you're carefully tracking the render time.