Boost fonline performance (reloaded/2238/other)

[fonliner]

Is there a way to boost performance on low tech machines? Some tips & tricks you know from client side and server which is hosted on localhost.

[Wire]

http://fonline-aop.net/forum/index.php?topic=3708.msg32563#msg32563 is one. I have no idea how that works

[loord]

Nah, it is bull***t.

[Koniko]

Well, caching more of the sprites and textures does actually help in performance but not in amount of FPS but smoothness and load time on machines with slow HDD. What I've always been doing is play the game with compability set to 98/ME or XP SP3 to ensure stability with custom graphical modifications and cap the FPS on 80 for smoothness (in D3D you've got VSync working but in OGL old revision based FOnlines that option was broken). What you may also try is to disable 3D Multisampling and all FPS setting related to 3D on 0.

In extreme situation you might set FPS cap on minus.. yes like -6 will give you stable ~20 to 30 frames but it's useful only on VERY low end machines with only one ancient core and GPU worser than GT240.

[fonliner]

How many sprites and textures can I set? Are there any limits?

[Yadanut]

I just want a way to add it.

[Engardo]

Client
Client/data/*.zip are compressed with a strong compression algorithm that should only be used for long-term archival.
If you unpack the archives and compress them with the algorithm "Deflate Level: Fastest" you should be able to access maps up to ~400% faster.

Server
In Server/FOnlineServer.cfg you can increase the cycle per seconds by reducing the GameSleep frequency.
GameSleep = 0, a processor core is fully utilized. Up to 500 cycles per second are possible with a 10 year old processor.
This is unnecessary and can negatively affect the game, try to reach 40 cycles per second.
If you are using server and client at the same time on an old single core processor you should not make these changes.

[testerDEV]

Client
Client/data/*.zip are compressed with a strong compression algorithm that should only be used for long-term archival.
If you unpack the archives

What if archives are not compressed?

[Engardo]

What if archives are not compressed?

With a slow hard disk it can take longer. Unless you have Windows Prefetch active with enough RAM.
Windows Prefetch must also recognize the files as frequently used. 

If the files on an SSD(250MB/s read) or RAM disk are uncompressed, there is a small speed advantage.
I'm not sure if it works well with SSD since the "Intel Meltdown" patch.   

The files are also partially compressed without an archive, mostly images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_compression
It would be possible to create a client that decodes everything at startup, then there would be no more load times.
The drawback is that it probably takes more than 4 gigabytes of ram.