BC Captor: Hot Buttered Girls

[Whizkid]

22 minutes ago, SkipWestcott said:

Yeah, agree. I was trying to find one speed for them all but the really long one is tough to time. IIRC, the anims have to go lower to be faster, if you want to test some numbers.

 

But, what do you think of the new anims?

the new anims are great u really picked the ones that reflect on the event great job!!!

[n0b0dy0]

On 1/25/2023 at 6:34 PM, n0b0dy0 said:

@SkipWestcott TBRandomEvents is done. I think I caught the one that you updated specifically Companion_Sexual_Devoted.

 

@asd000 Next, I'll be working on the 3 TBModularEvent and 4 TBOverrides.

TBRandomEvents.7z 32.45 kB · 12 downloads

@SkipWestcott Just an update, A lot has come up this week so I won't have this done until next week earliest. RL getting in the way of fun! 

[bicobus]

I've been trying to figure out a weird issue related to this specific module and how to game behave when it's enabled. I have been on the discord talking about this issue. I'm posting here for a more open exchange and, perhaps, greater reach.

 

I've been playing Bannerlord modded since I acquired it, didn't really care for vanilla. And the game always ran like shit on my system. That is until I disabled this mod (and its ancestor on earlier version of the game). Turns out that activating BC Captor makes the game bloat VRAM to unprecedented level. Doing so makes my poor little RX570 4GB struggle to draw frames, drops to 10 FPS during battles, and generally under 30FPS on the campaign map. Without this mod enabled, I'm rocking a solid 60 FPS everywhere. It becomes obvious that there is a memory bloat when using mangohud: under vanilla, VRAM doesn't get populated that much on game launch, where as with this mod it get fully utilized and then some more into my ram. That's right, when you video card do not have enough memory, your ram is being used. It's obviously slower, but faster than fetching from the disk every time.

 

So, what's the issue here? There aren't enough image in the packs to bloat beyond 4GB of VRAM... Is it the animation sequences? No clue. Though my question to this community is: does anybody see performance drop when this module is enabled?

 

Investigating Bannerlord modding scene on the surface, it seems to me that code is being generated from the various XML files. If so, that would be hard to troubleshoot.

 

Would it be possible to have a package, or even simply run the module, without image? Eliminating that variable should probably be the first thing to do. (Retrospectively, it was kind of dumb of me for trying to find a solution within the game/module logs).

Edited February 5, 2023 by bicobus

[Whizkid]

55 minutes ago, bicobus said:

I've been trying to figure out a weird issue related to this specific module and how to game behave when it's enabled. I have been on the discord talking about this issue. I'm posting here for a more open exchange and, perhaps, greater reach.

 

I've been playing Bannerlord modded since I acquired it, didn't really care for vanilla. And the game always ran like shit on my system. That is until I disabled this mod (and its ancestor on earlier version of the game). Turns out that activating BC Captor makes the game bloat VRAM to unprecedented level. Doing so makes my poor little RX570 4GB struggle to draw frames, drops to 10 FPS during battles, and generally under 30FPS on the campaign map. Without this mod enabled, I'm rocking a solid 60 FPS everywhere. It becomes obvious that there is a memory bloat when using mangohud: under vanilla, VRAM doesn't get populated that much on game launch, where as with this mod it get fully utilized and then some more into my ram. That's right, when you video card do not have enough memory, your ram is being used. It's obviously slower, but faster than fetching from the disk every time.

 

So, what's the issue here? There aren't enough image in the packs to bloat beyond 4GB of VRAM... Is it the animation sequences? No clue. Though my question to this community is: does anybody see performance drop when this module is enabled?

 

Investigating Bannerlord modding scene on the surface, it seems to me that code is being generated from the various XML files. If so, that would be hard to troubleshoot.

 

Would it be possible to have a package, or even simply run the module, without image? Eliminating that variable should probably be the first thing to do. (Retrospectively, it was kind of dumb of me for trying to find a solution within the game/module logs).

most likely its vram problem, which means system is swaping between vram and ssd textures causing fps problems, I have a gtx1080 and i never had any problems even when loading lots of animation png that animates as everything is buffed into vram..,, u should try with a gpu having 6-8 vram, also having lots of ram helps i hv around 16gb ram fyi...

 

hope this helps.

[bicobus]

6 minutes ago, Whizkid said:

most likely its vram problem, which means system is swaping between vram and ssd textures causing fps problems, I have a gtx1080 and i never had any problems even when loading lots of animation png that animates as everything is buffed into vram..,, u should try with a gpu having 6-8 vram, also having lots of ram helps i hv around 16gb ram fyi...

 

hope this helps.

You got the gist of it. I have more than enough RAM on my system, so that's not an issue.

 

The issue is that this module makes the game overuse my VRAM. I doubt that it is the module assets themselves though, as it doesn't make sense. I believe it's how the game generates and store events. I mean, we go from 2.5G of VRAM used to well over 4G (ram keeps swelling up by 3-4G).

[Whizkid]

19 minutes ago, bicobus said:

You got the gist of it. I have more than enough RAM on my system, so that's not an issue.

 

The issue is that this module makes the game overuse my VRAM. I doubt that it is the module assets themselves though, as it doesn't make sense. I believe it's how the game generates and store events. I mean, we go from 2.5G of VRAM used to well over 4G (ram keeps swelling up by 3-4G).

trying playing with CE only if there isnt any problems then its this mod which has alot of png images including animated ones which will cause your problem.

[bicobus]

10 hours ago, Whizkid said:

trying playing with CE only if there isnt any problems then its this mod which has alot of png images including animated ones which will cause your problem.

I appreciate what you're trying to do. But, unless I screwed up, you're basically repeating points I laid out in my initial message.

 

 

 

Anyhow, I enabled this module without applying any of the image packs, and I experience no performance issues. So it has to do with the images themselves. My little finger wants to believe that it is the animations. For example, the walk animation (vidlarawalk) weight in 13MiB for 90 files. That would be a file of less than 1MiB if it were a webm. I know that because I did the conversion myself, see for yourself in the attached files. It was made shoddily through ImageMagick without any investigation in how to make the animation smooth. Howto's in the spoiler at the bottom of this message.

 

So, to investigate: can the bannerlord engine natively handle formats such as webm? If actual C# code can be written, then can they be played in the background? I have no experience with Bannerlord modding scene, so these question are mostly for those who are actively building modules.

 

I'll try to add more assets to the modules, step by step. First by not adding any image related to the animations and see if I continue to have acceptable performances.
 

Spoiler

 

 

~$ mkdir walk
~$ mogrify -path walk -format gif *.png
~$ cd walk
~$ convert -delay 1 *.gif -loop 0 walk.gif
~$ convert walk.gif walk.webm

 

This gives a basic stream with these qualities:

 

Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'walk.webm':
  Metadata:
    ENCODER         : Lavf58.45.100
  Duration: 00:00:10.80, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 608 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: vp9 (Profile 1), gbrp(pc, gbr/unknown/unknown), 445x805, SAR 1:1 DAR 89:161, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      ENCODER         : Lavc58.91.100 libvpx-vp9
      DURATION        : 00:00:10.800000000

 

 

[Whizkid]

1 hour ago, bicobus said:

I appreciate what you're trying to do. But, unless I screwed up, you're basically repeating points I laid out in my initial message.

 

 

 

Anyhow, I enabled this module without applying any of the image packs, and I experience no performance issues. So it has to do with the images themselves. My little finger wants to believe that it is the animations. For example, the walk animation (vidlarawalk) weight in 13MiB for 90 files. That would be a file of less than 1MiB if it were a webm. I know that because I did the conversion myself, see for yourself in the attached files. It was made shoddily through ImageMagick without any investigation in how to make the animation smooth. Howto's in the spoiler at the bottom of this message.

 

So, to investigate: can the bannerlord engine natively handle formats such as webm? If actual C# code can be written, then can they be played in the background? I have no experience with Bannerlord modding scene, so these question are mostly for those who are actively building modules.

 

I'll try to add more assets to the modules, step by step. First by not adding any image related to the animations and see if I continue to have acceptable performances.
 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

~$ mkdir walk
~$ mogrify -path walk -format gif *.png
~$ cd walk
~$ convert -delay 1 *.gif -loop 0 walk.gif
~$ convert walk.gif walk.webm

 

This gives a basic stream with these qualities:

 

Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'walk.webm':
  Metadata:
    ENCODER         : Lavf58.45.100
  Duration: 00:00:10.80, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 608 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: vp9 (Profile 1), gbrp(pc, gbr/unknown/unknown), 445x805, SAR 1:1 DAR 89:161, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      ENCODER         : Lavc58.91.100 libvpx-vp9
      DURATION        : 00:00:10.800000000

 

 

please most gpu has 6gb or more which is more than enough to play bannerlord, i tried having lots of animation and game engine works fine just the occasional pause but no fps lost, performance is fine, in my pervious modifief version i did alot of animation backgrounds and the perfomance is ok, i looked at your animation files and its so small it wouldnt cause any performance lost, please continue with these animated backgrounds it makes it so much better than static backgrounds..

[bicobus]

Yep. Explored various lead, one of them was file size. So I reduced the size of the PNG files by a 1/5 without noticeable drop in quality, but I still experienced issues.

 

The more I look into it, the more I believe the problem to be linked to the amount of images present in the folder. So not related to the size of the image itself. Bannerlord generates code (the GauntletUI thing has reference to code generation). So may just be hitting a quirk of the engine. However I won't know for sure until I understand how the images are being loaded.

 

I also agree, animated background are great. Here I'm mostly trying to figure out the root cause of the issue I'm experiencing.

[Whizkid]

2 hours ago, bicobus said:

Yep. Explored various lead, one of them was file size. So I reduced the size of the PNG files by a 1/5 without noticeable drop in quality, but I still experienced issues.

 

The more I look into it, the more I believe the problem to be linked to the amount of images present in the folder. So not related to the size of the image itself. Bannerlord generates code (the GauntletUI thing has reference to code generation). So may just be hitting a quirk of the engine. However I won't know for sure until I understand how the images are being loaded.

 

I also agree, animated background are great. Here I'm mostly trying to figure out the root cause of the issue I'm experiencing.

fyi, bannerlord has to load all textures into memory to provide for that sseamless experience, swaping should be minimal i.e. on screen load, i did experience fps when i tried to make almost all backgrounds animated with frame as much as 500+ png which i had to tone done to around 20-30 pngs frames fyi and thats why i concluded that your issues is somehow related to lack of vram, but i could be wrong..., try a gpu upgrade if possible.

[bicobus]

58 minutes ago, Whizkid said:

fyi, bannerlord has to load all textures into memory to provide for that sseamless experience, swaping should be minimal i.e. on screen load, i did experience fps when i tried to make almost all backgrounds animated with frame as much as 500+ png which i had to tone done to around 20-30 pngs frames fyi and thats why i concluded that your issues is somehow related to lack of vram, but i could be wrong..., try a gpu upgrade if possible.

Yeah, thanks. I already figured that before posting here (has I hinted). Beside, GPU aren't cheap these days and I'm not rolling on money.

 

I have figured that it is solely about the amount of images present in the folder, and nothing else. Reduced the file size of this module images from 1.1GiB to 361MiB, and that wouldn't help. Now, that's some weird shit to me, why would reducing the size of the texture not help at all?

 

So I removed all files that weren't referenced in the event files, and files that aren't relevant to my gameplay. Brought it down to 461 files (from a whopping 2251 initially) and wouldn't know it, games' running okay. There seem to be a lot of files that aren't referenced in the events xml at all. Coupled with how Captive Events loads images, I believe I found why it was behaving weirdly.

 

Anyhow, the amount of vram shouldn't matter in this case: I have a ssd and streaming those images directly from the disk when needed should be just fine. I simply don't get it.

[Revan1108]

where i put the image pack?

 

[bicobus]

1 hour ago, Revan1108 said:

where i put the image pack?

 

Each image pack are packaged with the proper folder structure. Merge all the zCEzBCCaptorGear folders if you have more than one.

[Revan1108]

thanks

 

[bicobus]

For those who care, I believe I found out the actual issue behind my own problem. Posted findings into an issue: https://github.com/BannerlordCE/CEEvents/issues/79

 

As to why nobody had an issue before, though doubtful, it may be linked to my platform (linux, playing through proton).

[SkipWestcott]

On 2/7/2023 at 7:57 AM, bicobus said:

For those who care, I believe I found out the actual issue behind my own problem. Posted findings into an issue: https://github.com/BannerlordCE/CEEvents/issues/79

 

As to why nobody had an issue before, though doubtful, it may be linked to my platform (linux, playing through proton).

Ahhhh, yeah, it's gotta be some weird Linux-GPU-Bannerlord issue.

 

I am going to (have to split to <250MB and then) upload your Crushed file today, along with a few fixes (scn_bc_whip_out) and the latest Translation files from @n0b0dy0

 

This will provide 350MB of images, rather than the 1.2GB currently. (if you have no RAM issues, you can keep the old images).

[煤球猫]

Got the optimized  images! 

[bicobus]

41 minutes ago, SkipWestcott said:

Ahhhh, yeah, it's gotta be some weird Linux-GPU-Bannerlord issue.

I'm not so sure though. My GPU has 4GiB of video ram, and other with limited amount like me could face the same problem. We just need to find people with the proper hardware. (Anybody?)

[Whizkid]

2 hours ago, SkipWestcott said:

Ahhhh, yeah, it's gotta be some weird Linux-GPU-Bannerlord issue.

 

I am going to (have to split to <250MB and then) upload your Crushed file today, along with a few fixes (scn_bc_whip_out) and the latest Translation files from @n0b0dy0

 

This will provide 350MB of images, rather than the 1.2GB currently. (if you have no RAM issues, you can keep the old images).

from my testing, the png files that bannerlord are just standard not 256 colors, and having too many will cause fps problems in my case its e.g. 100 - 500 png for animation files, i tried to animate most of the backgrounds and hit this problem, so i trimmed the background to around 10-30 pngs per animation and it helps i could have more animated backgrounds, but there seems to be a limit on the number of png files where game engine starts to slow down having fps problems..., what u have is just a tiny amount of what i did fyi, unfortunately i got rid of all when i moved on to your mod.

 

gpu makes a difference as i hv a gtx 1080 with 10gb of ram which helps and i think 6gb of ram is enough, idk but most new games are also vram hungry fyi and 6gb is the baseline.... 4gb is pretty much useless unless u turn down all graphics settings....

[SkipWestcott]

21 hours ago, Whizkid said:

unfortunately i got rid of all

 

Aww!

[spore123]

Appreciate everything you are doing with the mods! Just wondering has anyone gotten this and hot butter worknig with the beta 1.1.1?

[Whizkid]

9 minutes ago, spore123 said:

Appreciate everything you are doing with the mods! Just wondering has anyone gotten this and hot butter worknig with the beta 1.1.1?

main mod CE doesnt support beta 1.1.1 and hot butter u dont need just grap the CE hot butter instead at the hot butter mod page.

[spore123]

3 hours ago, Whizkid said:

main mod CE doesnt support beta 1.1.1 and hot butter u dont need just grap the CE hot butter instead at the hot butter mod page.

Thanks for the quick response - I may have to downgrade back to 1.0.3 then since the stock game is rather shallow without mods and most of the good onesa rent updated to the beta yet.

[n0b0dy0]

On 1/31/2023 at 5:02 PM, n0b0dy0 said:

@SkipWestcott Just an update, A lot has come up this week so I won't have this done until next week earliest. RL getting in the way of fun! 

@SkipWestcott TBModular and TBOverrides are done.

 

Next to work on is TBCaptorCommon_Slavery -> TBCaptorMaleThief.

Aiming for next Saturday or thereabouts

TBModularOverride.7z

Edited February 11, 2023 by n0b0dy0

[SkipWestcott]

8 hours ago, n0b0dy0 said:

@SkipWestcott TBModular and TBOverrides are done

I cannot thank you enough -- I would go into panic attacks thinking about the problem, but your files are invaluable. Once we get decent coverage, I will put this all up on Github for us to work new stuff as a community.

 

(FYI, I found a couple 'issues' in the last pack but I fixed them; commented lines, missing text)