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Helas,
I mainly play UMS on US East. My favourite map is ww2 - allied final. On this map 7 players fight with rather big armies. Those armies consist of mainly marines, tanks, bcs, wraiths and scouts. When it comes to really big fights (like 300 marines, 50 tanks, 30 bcs, 40 scouts, 40 wraiths) lots of units stop actually shooting ergo it firelags. Every evolution player knows this thing.
I tried to understand the reason of firelag a bit better and googled around. I found this: www.staredit.net
Alright so 2 limits might affect firelag:
CHK load Sprite limit: 499
StarCraft can only process 499 sprites in-game (including unit attack and death animations).
StarCraft Weapon limit: 100
The weapon limit is rather easy to understand. If 100 units actually perform a working attack animation atm, from the 101th unit onwards units will perform effectless attackanimations. Units with a higherfirerate have higher chances of actually happening (ergo bcs get firelagged harder than rines)
Since the weapon limit is much lower than the sprite limit one might think, that it is the sole reason for firelag.
But i have my doubts. Here are the reasons why i consider the sprite limit itself to cause firelag:
- I read, that burning buildings need tons of sprites each.
- Every deathanimation takes a sprite
- I am not sure how many sprites the actual attacks take.
My question are:
- does anyone of you know wether a rine shot does take a single sprite (The bulletanimation at target)?
- Scouts and Wraiths have 2 Rockets - 1 Sprite each? What about the smoke and the explosions?
- How many sprites does a death animation which includes an explosion take (exploding tank)?
- How many sprites are used for burning buildings?
- I find it interesting, that there seems to be a ranking about which sprites have to disappear first. For example i never have seen a death animation not happening.
- Oh yeah also, some really good evo players told me, that fresh spawning units suffer less under firelag and from my observation that is actually true. Isnt that funny? (Second edit: I was thinking that fresh spawning units don't have a synchronised rythm with other fighting units, so that might be the reason)
I know i might should post this on Staredit.net, but it seems rather inactive and perhaps one of ya has an enlightening document.
In any ways thanks in advance,
Molo
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The 100 attack limit is almost always the problem.
Especially for units whose attack animations take up more than one sprite at a time.
1. simple "projectile appears on target" attacks (Marines, Goliath ground attack, Tanks in both modes, Scout ground attack, Sunken Colony, Corsair). These only display a short hit animation on the target, so that's one sprite (the firing animation with muzzle flash is actually part of the unit sprite, afaik). So these probably take only up one sprite for a short time.
2. simple "projectile home in on target/location" attacks (Dragoon/Arbiter, Photon Cannon, BC/Wraith lasers, Devourer). Projectile spawns, moves towards target, hit animation occurs. These are also just one sprite, but take up a sprite for rather longer due to the additional travel time.
3. simple projectile + firing animation: The little "dust cloud" that appears when a Vulture fires its grenade is a sprite of its own.
A Hydra's green spiny stuff is the same (but in this case the projectile is a simple "appear on target" hit animation, like for marines and the like)
4. I'll just call these "Missiles" because that's what these are. Here is where things get messy.
Missile turret/spore colony: 2 sprites per missile: 1 for the projectile, 1 for the exhaust/toxic cloud animation.
Wraith air attack: actually, both missiles are one sprite here. But the exhaust cloud is another one. So a Wraith air attack takes up two sprites
Scout, Goliath air attacks: Both missiles are separate attacks/sprites, each with their own exhaust animation, so that clocks in at 4 sprites per attack (and rather long travelling times for the projectiles as well).
Mutalisk: 2 sprites: 1 for the projectile, 1 for the trail. And that times 3 (or something), because of the bouncing attack (missile bounces on while the hit animation of the previous one isn't finished yet)...
Valkyrie: There's a reason why these have their own 80 sprite limit cut-off: Each missile use 2 sprites (projectile & vapour cloud, once again) and it fires 8 of them at once (or at least in quick enough succession that the first ones have often not yet disappeared when the last ones spawn). And each of them has probably the longest travelling time of any projectile in the game, due to their erratic behaviour (like circling target before hitting...) So that's 16 sprites per Valkyrie for a really long time...
And then there are:
Lurker: Each spine is a single sprite, so each Lurker attack takes up a few of them at a time
Carrier: multiple interceptors, which attack with 1 or two projectiles fired at a time, so in sum, there's quite some sprite usage going on here.
Reaver/Scarab: The Scarab itsel is a unit, but it also uses the same trail sprite as the Scout missile
bunker overlay: muzzle flash from a bunker is its own sprite, it seems.
mining/attack animations for Probes and SCVs, attack animation for Drones: these also use 1 sprite each
building lift animations (Terran): the dust clouds
animations/projectiles for spells: use at least one sprite. The animation for maelstrom uses 2, the animation for recall uses twice as many as units are recalled, Yamato gun also uses at least 2 (projectile + trail)
debuff effect overlays: Plague, Ensnare, Stasis, Lockdown, Maelstrom, Irradiate... These need one sprite per affected unit.
not (pure) sprites: Scanner sweep, Dark Swarm and Dweb and Scarabs are actually non-targetable units.
Death animations are 1 sprite each (not sure whether building rubble/whatever rotting remains your unit leaves behind is considered part of the death animation or is still handled as a unit, though).
Vespene Geyser smoke clouds: These are sprites, too.
So overall, there are quite a few things that use sprites, but the problem is almost always the weapon-sprite limt being saturated by units with sprite heavy and/or very long lasting attacks (mops prominently by far: Valkyries).
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Sorry for it being such a mess, I have no time to actually compose carefully edited posts atm...
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Are there progames which got influenced by this?
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ww2 allied final? Are people still playing that custom game??
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@ Freakling
wow such a great answer! For me as a treehugger its a huge relief, that i don't have to remove the few trees the ww2-map still has just to free up sprites. Scouts taking 4 sprites really sucks pretty hardcore.. Modding would be only workaround right? Anyways thank you a bunch!!!
@ dudeman
Yeah what is dead can never die! and so we still meet multiple times per week and play some ww2 @ US East. If you were in clan 001 you may like to hear that Turkish, Exo and FTH are still playing. If your nostalgic here's my stream with fpvods: www.twitch.tv
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holy shit I had no idea. That's awesome! Could you remind me what chat channels people use? 
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Its op stc @ Us East. Your best chances of actually getting to play a ww2 is around afternoon Us time on weekends mainly sunday. www.facebook.com In this group there are 70 members of the community.
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Is there actually a guide on how to use mods/mpqdraft here on TL.net?
I don't tthink so, and it's such a shame.
The amount of hellishly sophisticated stuff that's still going on with UMS mapping nowadays, over at Staredit.net, is crazy.
So, xboi (or some one else), if you are knowledgeable in that regard, please make an article !
(unfortunately, it's bee like forever that I actually tinkered around with any of that kind of stuff myself...)
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It would be awesome, if that could become an unofficial patch as that would make it possible to have more than 6 valkyries without them being useless. Reading the topic, the possibility to run out of memory in a 1v1 should be impossible right?
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Can this limit removing feature be implemented into iccup and mca launchers anyhow?
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On August 26 2015 20:03 Cryoc wrote:It would be awesome, if that could become an unofficial patch as that would make it possible to have more than 6 valkyries without them being useless. Reading the topic, the possibility to run out of memory in a 1v1 should be impossible right?
Answer to your question is absolutely possible. Altough it happened to me like 2-3 times, what I can surely recall.
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This means we can use it ChaosLauncher? But what does this mean? Only working when everybody has this plugin just like Lanlatency?
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On August 28 2015 19:22 chrisolo wrote:
This means we can use it ChaosLauncher? But what does this mean? Only working when everybody has this plugin just like Lanlatency?
Yes you can use it in Chaoslauncher. Everybody in the game must have it enabled like LanLatency.
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On August 28 2015 19:43 xboi209 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 28 2015 19:22 chrisolo wrote:
This means we can use it ChaosLauncher? But what does this mean? Only working when everybody has this plugin just like Lanlatency? Yes you can use it in Chaoslauncher. Everybody in the game must have it enabled like LanLatency.
This should be implemented with latency change plugin or antihack so it would be on as default while playing iccup I still remember this one ladder game I had with like 12 reavers and none of them shooting.
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This is incredible xboi!
Going to test this asap
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EPT
