Huge lag spikes when NPC pops up

[Wraga]

Hello ladies and gents,

Any suggestions how to fix huge lag drops when NPC pops up? Game is running with basic setup, there is no mod or anything else installed and my pc should be able to handle the game req easily.

Thanks in advance

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[Kazinsal]

That's just something Freelancer does. Quirks of a 20-year-old game engine.

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Retired, permanently.

[Wraga]

That's just something Freelancer does. Quirks of a 20-year-old game engine.

Thanks for the swift reply. According to my memories it was not bad like now in the past but maybe just my memory tricks me.

So its quite normal.

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[Skorak]

Once I moved the game to an ssd it was less bad for me.

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[Arcana]

Got this freeze/lag too when the game is loading new objects and sometimes for no reason it just freezes for 2-3 secs. It is very strange cause on the 9 years old Toshiba it is running smoothly and on a new laptop it freezes . Was wondering is the graphic card making some huge cloak spikes.. But as Kaz said, freelancer is 20 years old, we must be happy it still runs ^^

[sindroms]

It loads the whole asset when it does that.
The reason why you don't remember it being this bad was that the poly count for new ships is drastically higher than the originals.

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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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[Czechmate]

It loads the whole asset when it does that.
The reason why you don't remember it being this bad was that the poly count for new ships is drastically higher than the originals.

[Wraga]

It loads the whole asset when it does that.
The reason why you don't remember it being this bad was that the poly count for new ships is drastically higher than the originals.

That makes sense.

Alright guys, thanks for the replies, so its something what everyone experiences.

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[Kazinsal]

Yeah, Freelancer is *really* bad at loading stuff. Blocks everything while it loads, loads as slow as humanly possible (it has is own virtual filesystem layer and I/O code! y'know, instead of just asking the OS to do it, which is what every other program under the sun does)... Plus, it's written by Digital Anvil, a horribly mismanaged company that missed its release targets for pretty much everything they ever did and still had issues after a proper software development company bought them out.

Significant portions of this engine date back to 1997. It wasn't great when it was released in 2003. It's even worse now, for a lot of reasons. We do what we can to keep Discovery working almost two decades after Freelancer came out, but there are concessions that we just have to make.

e: Loading and parsing a handful of 5000-vertex models in real time is *super* easy. Freelancer just does it in some really complex ways with "optimized" code that was written with 10 GB 3600 rpm hard drives and Windows 98 in mind. Doesn't really work in 2020.

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Retired, permanently.

[Wraga]

Yeah, Freelancer is *really* bad at loading stuff. Blocks everything while it loads, loads as slow as humanly possible (it has is own virtual filesystem layer and I/O code! y'know, instead of just asking the OS to do it, which is what every other program under the sun does)... Plus, it's written by Digital Anvil, a horribly mismanaged company that missed its release targets for pretty much everything they ever did and still had issues after a proper software development company bought them out.

Significant portions of this engine date back to 1997. It wasn't great when it was released in 2003. It's even worse now, for a lot of reasons. We do what we can to keep Discovery working almost two decades after Freelancer came out, but there are concessions that we just have to make.

e: Loading and parsing a handful of 5000-vertex models in real time is *super* easy. Freelancer just does it in some really complex ways with "optimized" code that was written with 10 GB 3600 rpm hard drives and Windows 98 in mind. Doesn't really work in 2020.

I do appreciate all the effort you have been doing to keep this game running and evolving so dont take it wrong. Simply thought it might be an issue from my side, since it was different in my memories, and quite surprising experience about a 15+ years old game.

Thank you for the explanation, its clear now.

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