How will they handle so many concurrent players with this quality of graphics?

Briq · 2012-01-30, 10:13 PM

I have faith that the PS2 team will do a good job balancing all the weapons and vehicles in the game because of all the years of experience and data they have from the original planetside. I also believe that they'll do a good job adding new features to the game to make it fresh and keep it fresh. The main thing I'm worried about is how the game will run when hundreds of players are in a small area shooting their weapons, not to mention 30+ vehicles to go with them. This was one of the main issues the original planetside faced and the graphics in ps2 aren't even comparable. Has technology advanced enough to not only handle much better graphics, but more players with a smoother playing experience? Put my mind at ease!

VioletZero · 2012-01-30, 10:15 PM

Well, the graphics are like early Xbox 360 at best.

Sure, the art design is great but when paired up to recent titles it doesn't hold up as a PC title.

The graphics are also clearly designed with scaling down a lot in mind.

Which is good. I am not some graphics fanatic who has to have good graphics.

Roy Awesome · 2012-01-30, 10:30 PM

Concurrent Player Count and Graphic Rendering are fairly different from eachother. Take Eve Online for example. My computer can handle a very large battle (500+) just fine, but the servers die every time. This is because the server does all the game logic, and concurrent player count hurts them. For Graphics, you just have to deal with your polygon budget. You could theoretically have 10,000 players with 2 polygons per player and be just fine on even the worst modern graphics cards. It's all about optimizing draw distance and balancing draw calls vs polygon bandwidth, something you have to do regardless of the number of players in the environment. More players do lead to more draw calls though.

VioletZero · 2012-01-30, 10:32 PM

I'm more worried about processors to be honest.

super pretendo · 2012-01-30, 10:38 PM

Servers don't load every player's graphics, that's client side

Sifer2 · 2012-01-30, 10:42 PM

Well have you seen the quality of the models of units in RTS games now? Hundreds of little dudes running around, and each one looks really nice when you zoom in.

I'm thinking modern game engines just handle this stuff better. I'm guessing juicy details only load when your really close to the other person. But yeah I do hope they don't get too carried away. Since it did hurt the first game when people had a difficult time getting playable fps in large fights.

Death2All · 2012-01-30, 10:56 PM

What Roy said.

I'm guessing the game is going rely heavily on culling animations. I.E. highly detailed textures only load when you're at an optimal framerate or a smaller scale fight. Let's just hope they actually program the game correctly so enabling that feature actually works this time around. You actually had to go into the games files and manually change the numbers in a document to get them to work, even then it would still disable if you went into any menu with in the game.

The graphics really do look amazing (Xbox 360 graphics? C'mon, this game is gorgeous) but I still prefer performance over graphics. I really don't care about the individual stitches or hexes finely woven into your armor when I'm shooting you in the face.

Atheosim · 2012-01-30, 11:00 PM

I frankly would be fine with HL2 gen graphics as long as it runs smoothly. As DeeTwo said, such fine details are very superfluous in a game like this especially.