Important: Please include the version number of the game in the title! (for example: [1.0.1.0] Broken Feature).
The latest version is [1.0.1.0]
Been debating whether or not to make this post since it has been a while since this engine update in Tower but just thought I would bring the issue to light again and how it has negatively impacted the larger Tower Unite condo communities which previously were playable and semi optimized before the Unreal Engine 4.22 upgrade [update 0.17.9.0.]
Steps to Reproduce
Played on any large scale or complex condo in Tower Unite with a lot of workshop items, lighting, sound fx, volumes, NPC’s, floating text, IO, etc prior to 4.22 engine upgrade.
What I expected to happen
Acceptable or adequate performance across most modern or mid range hardware with some micro stuttering generally only lower end hardware would have more significant fps or performance issues.
What happened
Nearly a ~50% drop in fps, (went from a solid 50-60ish fps over a year ago to around 30-40fps or less on average for even hardware like rtx 3070) 1-3+ second freezes when navigating around the condo even with only 1-2 players in the condo. Additionally, frequent drops to 10-12 fps while navigating or looking around more dense condo environments. This issue used to only be more prevalent when mega condos had around 10+ players at a time, now it is consistently bad no matter the player count or any attempts at optimization or reducing various levels of complexity in large scale condos.
As a side note, the most recent update which involved optimizations regarding shaders and permanent object pool garbage collection seemed to slightly help with the stuttering issues (used to feel like 3-4 seconds of freezing, now around 1-2 seconds of freezing) performance in our personal large scale condo (VGM) saw no noticeable improvement in performance.
Notes / Media
I do applaud the performance and quality improvements in every other aspect of the game such as in plaza and some networking updates as those have all resulted in significant performance increases in all other areas in Tower and do realize this is some what of a niche complaint that wont effect most condos. Unfortunately, for people who have dedicated hundreds of hours to larger scale condos these projects no longer feel viable to host or even maintain due to the huge hits to performance overall since the unreal engine update in Tower Unite. This has resulted in many larger scale condo creators either taking a break or leaving the game in hopes for future optimizations.
At this point it would be very beneficial to know the most resource intensive elements in condos which cause the largest fps drops to at least isolate the issue or what specifically in the engine move could be more performance taxing on mega condos in general.
1 Like
Does this condo have a lot of foliage?
1 Like
This condo has a lot of everything to be honest as its a combined 800 hours of work between 2 players over the course of a few years, probably 50-60+ foliage, 170+ placeable lights, 65+ NPC’s, 200+ volumes, ~700+ workshop furniture, 50ish+ workshop physics items, 900+ canvas cubes many of which don’t necessarily use custom images. I understand the scale is quite complex but even other mega condo owners who don’t utilize hardly any foliage or workshop items at all have noticed considerable degradations in performance starting from that engine update.
The reason I asked is because, we discovered after-the-fact that UE4.22 introduced an engine bug that breaks the engine’s ability to handle masked material depth sorting in the pre-pass, which makes any masked materials (which foliage is) significantly more expensive.
We have a fix ready, but we held it off from the Condo Rental Store update since there was already so much going on in the back-end to prep for dedicated condos; we didn’t want to risk adding in anything else engine-wise. In the next update, the dedicated condos update, we will be putting in this fix, which should give performance increases everywhere.
Additionally, I have been spending a lot of time optimizing the plaza. The plaza itself actually runs quite well now on its own; and remaining performance issues are mostly hitches from gameplay elements that we can hopefully resolve. Since that’s not my domain, I will be focusing on condo optimization in the future.
4 Likes
Ah okay that makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to address the potential issue, look forward to further optimizations in condos in the future.
The elephant in the room here imo is the ~750ish workshop items
This is going to bog down and cause stuttering anyone running a low-medium spec system by far the most, combined with the aforementioned masked material depth sorting bug means RIP framerate
If you have them, and unless you have a monster of a CPU, use Push and Gravity volumes sparingly, as these can be quite expensive
I’m guessing you took the necessary time to cull dynamic shadows on the 170 light sources
If you have anything placed out of bounds at exceptional distances from the world origin, eg. 100,000s or 1,000,000s map units away, investigate these too, because these will be affected by floating point precision loss, trigonometry calculations on such large numbers are CPU intensive to boot
2 Likes
I understand its a lot of workshop items and wont run well for most systems as it does have a dramatic impact on performance especially for the lower-medium end specs overall but even with reducing and optimizing many of these things over time, the main performance hit on the condo (with mid-high spec systems) in regards to FPS and freezes/stutters came after the engine change.
Even with all these workshop items in the condo if you had a decently beefy enough system my friend and I had well above 50-60 fps with way less freezing and stuttering as did most of our guests. As I stated in the original post many other mega condo creators will attest to the fact that even condos with little to no workshop items experienced extreme drops in performance with more complex condos with a lot of IO connections and decoration and many different areas. Will have to look into the push and gravity volumes we definitely use quite a few of those in mini game and game world areas.
Yes, we took the time to go through and turn off dynamic shadows on all the lighting. We also do have things spread out due to the sheer size of the condo and the number of experiences because initially keeping things too grouped up we were noticing more significant performance drops as opposed to spreading the builds out at least at the time.
Appreciate the input.
I make condos with 10k+ items, but I don’t use workshop items. I am considered on the lower end of pc specs by today’s standards.
My condos only drop heavily in frames when looking at the map all at once. Other than that I get 50+ fps. (I usually don’t get more than 70 in a condo unless it’s completely empty. I start dropping below 60 usually around 5k to 6k items, and even then it depends on if I’m looking at it or not. (Because I don’t have a great GPU) From what I know of Tower optimization, most lag is not caused by GPU, but by CPU related things.
I know a lot about condo optimization, and I can go into your condo to help diagnose any problems, if you’d like.
3 Likes