Animated objects killing the framerate
The framerate suffers terribly in the presence of animated objects in many cases (added by mods). Wondering if there's a way to detect and work around whatever the issue is.
Probably the most "test it to your heart's content" approach would be using the Kat's Kastle mod (http://mw.modhistory.com/download-21-5800). It has numerous wacky clothing shops all in one location, and a whole bunch of them suffer this problem, especially due to rotating mannequin platforms (verifiable by Disable
ing them in the Console, and seeing the framerate radically improve), though in many cases it's not clear why a particular room has a framerate so bad you can barely move. In another room, there's some kind of animated airship model, and nuking it also fixes the framerate, while in other rooms nothing seems to help. To use this mod for testing, look for a hovering sphere just south of Balmora on the way to Odai Plateau; this is a teleport door to the landmass (which collides with Tamriel Rebuilt Preview in the far north west), on which is a big castle full of shops. This mod has broken quests and other features, but the issue to use it for here is the anim framerate thing.
Another test is Bitter Coast Compilation (http://mw.modhistory.com/download-44-13810). In Seyda Neen, you'll find the framerate greatly suppressed. If you do AIWander,0,0,0
on everyone wandering around there (except maybe the guards, who are supposed to wander), then it gets a little better, but it still bad. The main culprit is an animated ship in nearby Haldenshore (integrated into this mod). It's a barque with a fake NPC on it (just a human-looking object, like the minstrels added in various mods). It is bobbing in the water. If you Disable
it (which you may have to do two or more times), then the framerate in the whole area vastly improves, though is still suppressed. I think the multi-Disable
is required because the animation effect is being done by rapidly swapping in multiple copies of the ship in different positions, though I'm not entirely sure.
A third such case is Reign of Fire 1.1 (http://mw.modhistory.com/download-55-12297) I recently noticed there's a "1.92 beta" version (http://mw.modhistory.com/download-55-6318) but this is someone else messing around with the original author's mod. In 1.1, when you track down the first dragon to its lair in MINOR SPOILER the grey, mountainous region east of Caldera (I forget the actual spot, but it's a mod room added into one of the Daedric shrines in that region), the combat sequence is super-slow-motion, unless you gradually move to put the animated giant braziers behind you – then it approaches normal (it's not the dragon's own movement and fire effects that are causing the issue). This mod also has some other problems (another dragon, found inside the Ghostfence, is sunk mostly into the floor, for example), but it's a good framerate-issues test, I would think.
My initial guess is that a script is firing off too many times per second to animate by moving/swapping something. There should probably be a way to detect and auto-limit that.
I was going to also mention that framerates get crushed by the presence of mirrors in mod shops (maybe it's computationally expensive light calculations?), but this problem seems to have gone away as of a late build of 0.42. I wouldn't be surprised if it's related, though. The mirrors never worked as actual mirrors, but were clearly doing something, perhaps raytracing of light paths without rendering actual objects; I dunno.
I'm listing this in Category: Animation, but that may not be right (for all I know that category might only be for body-part movement). Listing it as Reproducibility: Always, in the sense that the affected rooms are always affected; it is not the case that every animated thing causes this, of course, or combat, wandering guards, etc., would do it, too. I put it under MacOS, since that's what I use and have not directly confirmed it affects Linux or MS Windows. I'm on a 12-core MacPro (technically 2 x 6-core, 2.93 GHz) with 48 GB of RAM (20+ available almost always), so "your machine is too weak" definitely isn't it; I can run much newer games without such issues. There's a qualitative and radical difference between the affected rooms and unaffected rooms.
(RM-4339 from redmine: created on 2018-03-05 by Dark Locq, )