Mines and lag

[DumbMarine]

Mines are in an okay spot balance-wise, but there's one major glaring issue with them: Lag. You drop enough mines, they lag the game. It's an issue I see often that involves the minelayer, someone will inevitably complain about the game being slow. I don't care about any particular solution to this problem, but some solutions:

- Mines expire after X minutes.
- Mines are consumed on use, you have to repurchase them. The minelayer would not come with free mines in this case.
- Minelayers don't deploy mines, they deploy mine spawners, which spawn mines when ships approach (and despawn when no ships are near). Minelayers would have fewer mine spawners on board.
- Mines have a max limit per team. Spawning a new mine blows up the oldest one.
- Optimize mines somehow (I'm not a mapmaker whiz so I have no clue what could be done to optimize)
- Some combination of the above.

Also, more of a personal suggestion, it would be cool if minelayers could actually disarm mines.

[Siretu]

Mine layers were always meant to be able to disarm mines, I just haven't got to it yet.

Most of what you're saying are good suggestions for solutions to the problem. I'm just confused that they still cause lag. I spent quite a lot of time on fixing them a couple of weeks ago and I optimized them to the point where I could have 400 mines on the map without causing more than a 5 fps drop.

I probably will implement some of the solutions you suggested, but first I would like some additional information. How many mines were there on the map (approximately) were there on the map when people start complaining? How much does the fps drop?

[DumbMarine]

The last time I used them was like 4 versions ago, and people started complaining about it at ~75 mines. If you've made optimizations since then then I need to retest-- I've had games lag recently but I don't know for certain it was mines. I tried it out just now singleplayer, and 100 mines drops my FPS from 115 to 105, which isn't what I saw in the past. I'll try it out in a couple of full games and see what happens.

[DumbMarine]

Had it lag today with me as the minelayer, at about 100 mines (and 3 distress beacons) the game started to lag extremely bad for everyone with 10 people in it. My FPS counter did not reflect the lag, it was showing 100 FPS, but I definitely had something like 5 FPS. It didn't look like network lag, the 3d portrait on the unit was lagging too. Game stopped lagging once the enemy BC found one of my mine caches.

(as an aside minelayer seems really weak now)