Can this game render hundreds against hundreds ??

[basti]

Originally Posted by Pella

I was at cross roads watch tower just now Pred. And you was flying about above. On the ground render distance was 15m tops.

And i fully agree this needs to be addressed. But i think the new render distance was part of the FPS stutter problem people where having. I dont think this engine can render 100s.

The engine can render a few thousand folks easy, your GPU may also manage that.

But letting your CPU track all the movment of those thousands? nope, no chance. Not to mention your melting network connection if you have a few thousand folks sending updates.


That isnt something that can be "fixed", all they can really do is try to find a way that the stuff doesnt affect you much.

Originally Posted by Mox

I would be already happy if they deliver 133+133+133. But they cant atm. Thats the tragedy....

Show me the game that actually allowed that. Hint: Planetside didnt. It did the exact same stuff as Planetside 2: not showing you folks due to Network/CPU limitations.




The render distance issue is something pretty simple, that is almost impossible to remove. Its the very limitation of CPU and network power that causes this. The only way to show you more folks would be by sending less updates, and then we are back at PS1s rubberbanding ADAD strafe spam.

So, what SOE can do here is simple: improve the mechanic that chooses what you see and what you dont see. It needs to automaticly figure out, in almost real time, what enemy is high priority and what enemy is low priority, based on a lot of different factors.

Folks, that shit is hard.

[Pella]

Originally Posted by basti

The engine can render a few thousand folks easy, your GPU may also manage that.

But letting your CPU track all the movment of those thousands? nope, no chance. Not to mention your melting network connection if you have a few thousand folks sending updates.


That isnt something that can be "fixed", all they can really do is try to find a way that the stuff doesnt affect you much.





Show me the game that actually allowed that. Hint: Planetside didnt. It did the exact same stuff as Planetside 2: not showing you folks due to Network/CPU limitations.




The render distance issue is something pretty simple, that is almost impossible to remove. Its the very limitation of CPU and network power that causes this. The only way to show you more folks would be by sending less updates, and then we are back at PS1s rubberbanding ADAD strafe spam.

So, what SOE can do here is simple: improve the mechanic that chooses what you see and what you dont see. It needs to automaticly figure out, in almost real time, what enemy is high priority and what enemy is low priority, based on a lot of different factors.

Folks, that shit is hard.

That my friend is biased nonsense.

PS1 Engine was optimized by zone's. And could manage 399 players on screen in a single zone.

Man vs. Machine. Back last year managed to increase that to 1000.

Render distance is worked out by the games engine. Not your CPU. If everyone had a decent Rig they could crank it up. But you have people playing on dual cores. And messing with it, Kills performance for many people.

[Ghoest9]

People it is impossible for anyone to make a game that renders(and by render I mean to intercat as in PS2) many 100s of players at once and still does stuff like computing trajectories and damage.

Its a not a software issue - its a server issue.

[Neutral Calypso]

Originally Posted by Pella

If everyone had a decent Rig they could crank it up. But you have people playing on dual cores.

I like how you implied people with dual cores don't have decent rigs.

[basti]

Originally Posted by Pella

That my friend is biased nonsense.

PS1 Engine was optimized by zone's. And could manage 399 players on screen in a single zone.

Man vs. Machine. Back last year managed to increase that to 1000.

Render distance is worked out by the games engine. Not your CPU. If everyone had a decent Rig they could crank it up. But you have people playing on dual cores. And messing with it, Kills performance for many people.

What are you talking about?

PS1 could not handle 400 players on screen. Remember Planetside day, we had all 3 factions in the warpgate, and half of the folks just dissapeared every now and then because the game couldnt handle it. Even folks who had proper FPS had this effect.

Man vs Machine has nothing to do with this at all. MvM was a example how to set up server architecture to handle the player count. Poly count, effects, everything was quite low quality to not stress the client, yet it still lagged like crap for a bunch of folks. Most important is that the amount of updates you got was far lower than what you have in PS2, and what you need for a proper FPS.


Render distance has nothing to do with the topic at all. Its at what distance you render stuff, and its limit is the potency of your CPU / GPU, depending what bottlenecks you.

What you propably mean is the distance at what players appear out of thin air. And this limit simply exists because of Network and CPU limitations. Your CPU cannot track all that player data without melting (thats why PS2 is that CPU dependant btw), and the Network simply cant get you enough updates to let you even attempt to track all that players, because if they try, you get heavy loss.

[basti]

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

People it is impossible for anyone to make a game that renders(and by render I mean to intercat as in PS2) many 100s of players at once and still does stuff like computing trajectories and damage.

Its a not a software issue - its a server issue.

Its not a server issue. It was a server issue during beta / tech test, but they managed to imrpove the code quite a bit.

This is purpley a network and client CPU problem.

[VR Draco]

Originally Posted by Pella

That my friend is biased nonsense.

PS1 Engine was optimized by zone's. And could manage 399 players on screen in a single zone.

Man vs. Machine. Back last year managed to increase that to 1000.

Render distance is worked out by the games engine. Not your CPU. If everyone had a decent Rig they could crank it up. But you have people playing on dual cores. And messing with it, Kills performance for many people.

With client-side calculations....may be possible. But PS2 don't let your client calculate anything game relevant, so the server has to do this. This has some pros and some cons. One con is the quite heavy load for the server.

So you HAVE to make some people disappear, or the server would crash or at least lagging like hell.

So basti is right, maybe CPU might not be the bottleneck, but network is it definitely.
And he is also right, the ONLY thing SoE can do is to optimise WHAT disappears and this is no easy problem.

They CAN optimise packets and minimize the needed data, but this will not solve the problem, it just allows you to "render" a few more people.
They CAN experiment with the "refresh" rate, but this would probably lead to the so called "rubberbanding" and no one want this 2013...

At least some one understands the background of this problem...

[Ghoest9]

Originally Posted by basti

Its not a server issue. It was a server issue during beta / tech test, but they managed to imrpove the code quite a bit.

This is purpley a network and client CPU problem.

NO.

You are absolutely wrong.
As the number of players in an area increases linearly the amount of information the server must sort and send out(location, orientation, state, actions, speed, plus projectile information) increases exponentially. This is just basic math.





The game solves this by simply ignoring all interaction between some players. Basically if you cant see a player the game will not calculate an interaction with them for anything you do.
This is of course annoying on those occasions when person A is rendering person B but person B is not rendering person A. The game generally manages to not do this though.

EDIT: Its possible with some optimization you might increase the current rending - but the increaes wont be large because the base problem wont go away. The only real solution will be newr and more advanced server hardware

[VR Draco]

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

NO.

You are absolutely wrong.
As the number of players in an area increases linearly the amount of information the server must sort and send out(location, orientation, state, actions, speed, plus projectile information) increases exponentially. This is just basic math.

The game solves this by simply ignoring all interaction between some players. Basically if you cant see a player no information from you will be sent to them.
This is of course annoying on those occasions when person A is rendering person B but person B is not rendering person A. The game generally manages to not do this though.

I think he means that it is not an problem of pure server power.
The server might be able to calculate all the things, but the network limits the information flow to the clients.
And this comes from the exponential problem you mentioned.

[Ghoest9]

Originally Posted by VR Draco

I think he means that it is not an problem of pure server power.
The server might be able to calculate all the things, but the network limits the information flow to the clients.
And this comes from the exponential problem you mentioned.

Network is a broad term.

If you simply mean how much information can be sent through the internet to your computer - thats probably not the limit. If you are talking about SOEs network - I really have no idea.

[basti]

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

NO.

You are absolutely wrong.
As the number of players in an area increases linearly the amount of information the server must sort and send out(location, orientation, state, actions, speed, plus projectile information) increases exponentially. This is just basic math.





The game solves this by simply ignoring all interaction between some players. Basically if you cant see a player the game will not calculate an interaction with them for anything you do.
This is of course annoying on those occasions when person A is rendering person B but person B is not rendering person A. The game generally manages to not do this though.

EDIT: Its possible with some optimization you might increase the current rending - but the increaes wont be large because the base problem wont go away. The only real solution will be newr and more advanced server hardware

Dude, the nonsense you talk is indeed utter nonsense.

The server cant ignore interactions between you and someone else, because there is nothing to ignore.

Listen to me, and get it already: This is NOT a Server power issue, this is purpley a Network capacity of both server/client and a Client CPU limitations.

The server cant send out updates of all 400 players to all 400 players within a big battle, its simply to much. It would cause massive package loss if you try.

He had this bloddy topic several times already, and several times devs came along and cleared it up.

[VaderShake]

Originally Posted by Tatwi

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...o-256-players/



I am such a terrible person for incorrectly remembering a number I read months ago, in an article about a game I have never played. Wow, you really showed me who's boss there.

So Tatwi since Coke says they are the best I suppose you believe they are correct....but then what do you do when Pepsi says they are the best?

DICE can say whatever they want but the customers decide what product is right. What's DICE going to say 400 players is optimal but we don't have and engine that can do it and we don't want to support it (they can barely support BF3 as it is) so I guess other games will pass us by. DICE has lost touch and marketed the heck out of BF3 lying all the way.

And if you believe everything a developer tells you about their game then every game is a 10 and you have no right to complain about PS2.

Also I have a cousin who lives in Africa who recently inherited a large fortune but needs $10,000 wired to an account before he can recieve the payment. If you would wire him the money he will pay you $100,000 as a reward for helping him.

FYI: I preferr Dr. Pepper....

[VaderShake]

Originally Posted by basti

Dude, the nonsense you talk is indeed utter nonsense.

The server cant ignore interactions between you and someone else, because there is nothing to ignore.

Listen to me, and get it already: This is NOT a Server power issue, this is purpley a Network capacity of both server/client and a Client CPU limitations.

The server cant send out updates of all 400 players to all 400 players within a big battle, its simply to much. It would cause massive package loss if you try.

He had this bloddy topic several times already, and several times devs came along and cleared it up.

These are the limitations now....maybe in a couple of years technology will help improve it.

[QuantumMechanic]

This is what I don't understand: SOE didn't add the current dynamic rendering system until just a week before beta ended. Before that, were our network cards melting? Our CPUs exploding? I had no such problems, and the fights were much bigger than now.

I built my new gaming rig right before beta started, and having a new maching I really haven't had performance issues at all. I thought that beta was supposed to have testers with low-end machines as well.

BTW, Higby did say in an interview with Azure Twilight's Nobel around the Empire Smackdown that the culling issue was mainly because the client's CPU attempting to process so many players in the area was the bottleneck. I'm sure there's more to it, but that's the main thing.

After game update 2 I've been noticing some strange behavior regarding the render distance. Last night I started noticing pop-in of ALLIES at close range. That along with the usual groups of enemies popping in all at once when I get close enough to them.

The current dynamic render distance seems like a "solution" thrown together at the last minute of beta. I'd be embarrassed to go live with a product flaw like this.

[Rolfski]

In this video Higby explains that tracking is the issue, NOT graphics rendering:
twitch.tv/azuretwilight/c/1869271

It's the biggest reason why we will never see a lattice system, this game just can't handle more focused battles.

Originally Posted by VR Draco

Total differnt system, this won't be possible.
If you port this to PS2, you would have a bullet time if there are too many ppl.

But a question on the Eve system. How is this time synced with other systems?
If those heavy load systems where slowed down you could bring reinforcements quite easy trough "normal" systems and you would have 10 times the time for this.

If you read the linked article that is exactly what happened. One of the reasons that fight went completely out of hand was that everybody outside the local time warp zone had all the time to be warned and join the brawl.