A note on "frame drops after installing mods"

Hello, commanders.

There has been a lot of discussion in the community lately about "mods causing performance issues." We'd like to use this post to explain, all in one place, what those three performance metrics in the garage actually mean, why mods affect frame rate, and how you can improve your experience without uninstalling any mods.

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1. Why does the game get laggy?

First, the most important point: all official vehicles go through a strict performance budget review. Our official vehicles are mostly kept between 10,000 and 30,000 triangles, with internal caps on material count and rigidbody count as well.

Mods are different. Mods are made and imported by community authors, and quality varies widely — some authors are experienced and know how to use normal maps in place of real geometry and how to merge materials; others prioritize visual fidelity, and a single vehicle with 300,000 triangles, a dozen+ materials, and 80+ rigidbodies is not uncommon.

The engine doesn't give mods any special treatment. It just faithfully renders whatever the asset gives it, submits the DrawCalls, and runs the physics. So when your frame rate drops noticeably after installing a few high-fidelity mods, this isn't an engine problem — it's that the combined rendering and physics cost on screen has exceeded what your machine can handle.

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2. Understanding the three performance metrics in the garage

Enter the garage and select any vehicle. The right-hand panel under Vehicle Performance displays three numbers. They are automatically color-coded based on value, as follows:

Metric	Meaning	Green	Yellow	Red
Triangle	Triangle count (affects GPU rendering)	< 50k	50k ~ 100k	≥ 100k
Material	Material count (affects DrawCalls)	< 5	5 ~ 10	≥ 10
Rigid	Rigidbody count = internal modules + hitboxes (affects physics)	< 25	25 ~ 50	≥ 50

Some reference points to help put this in context:

• Official vehicles are essentially all green across the board, with the vast majority of triangle counts falling between 10k and 30k
• A single vehicle exceeding 100k triangles has roughly the rendering cost of three official vehicles
• A vehicle with a red material count is especially unfriendly to mid- and low-end PCs and mobile devices — every additional material means another DrawCall submission
• For a vehicle with a red rigidbody count, when it gets hit the engine has to perform intersection tests against every hitbox one by one; CPU pressure rises significantly when multiple vehicles of this type are exchanging fire

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3. Why "AI Usage" is a performance killer

Simple multiplication:

You only drive 1 vehicle yourself.
AI vehicles are continuously spawned according to game rules — modes like Encounter, Bot Brawl, and Roguelike typically have 6~16 of them on screen at any given time.

If a high-quality mod with 300k triangles / 15 materials / 80 rigidbodies gets heavily used by AI, and 8 of them spawn on the field at once, then:

• Rendering: 2.4 million triangles
• DrawCalls: 120+
• Physics rigidbodies: 640

At this scale, even high-end PCs will see a noticeable frame rate drop. The problem isn't the individual vehicle — it's the multiplier from group usage.

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4. What to do: disable bot usage directly in the garage

The garage already has this feature built in.

How to do it: Select the target vehicle → find the "Bot Usage" toggle → turn it off.

Once disabled, this vehicle is added to your personal exclusion list. From then on, AI in any mode will no longer drive it, but you can still use it normally yourself.

Our suggested filtering criteria:

• All three green: Safe to hand off to AI — enable without hesitation
• One yellow, the rest green: Fine for AI use, minimal impact
• Two or more red: Recommend turning "Bot Usage" off — keep it for yourself

One-line rule: A single red vehicle isn't a problem; letting AI use red vehicles in groups is the real performance bottleneck.

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5. Optimization tips for mod authors

If you want your work to be enabled by more commanders in multiplayer/AI battles, these three metrics are the most direct gating criteria. We've provided some tools to help you optimize:

On triangle count

Try to keep it under 80k. Use normal maps in place of real geometry for details like tracks, rivets, and screws — players basically can't tell the difference at typical in-game viewing distance, but rendering cost can drop by an order of magnitude.

On materials

Merge them! A complete tank usually only needs 4~5 materials — body, turret, tracks, glass, interior. Giving each armor plate its own material is the most common and most easily overlooked performance trap.

On rigidbodies (key point)

Internal modules by default carry Rigidbody + MeshCollider — this is "Complex Physics" mode, and the cost is significant. The editor provides a one-click conversion button:

Select InternalModule → Inspector panel → "Switch to Simple Physics"

Click it, and the component will automatically remove the Rigidbody and MeshCollider, replacing them with a BoxCollider generated from the render bounding box. Multiple BoxColliders stacked together are sufficient to express the physical volume of most modules, which means each module no longer needs its own independent rigidbody, and the Rigid count drops dramatically.

If you later want to restore detailed physics, a "Switch to Complex Physics" button will appear in the same place, and you can revert with one click.

The same logic applies to hitboxes — dividing them by "front / side / rear / top / bottom + major modules" granularity is sufficient; you don't need to refine them down to the rivet level.

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Summary

1. It's not that engine optimization has gotten worse — it's that the on-screen resource cost has gotten larger.
2. The garage's three performance metrics = a cost dashboard for an individual vehicle; red = high consumption.
3. Before entering battle, take 30 seconds to turn off "Bot Usage" in the garage for any mod with two or more red metrics.
4. Mod authors, please make good use of the editor's "Switch to Simple Physics" button — it can significantly reduce Rigid count.

Hope this explanation is helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.