80 replies to this topic

[MechaBattler]

Russ mentioned during the Town Hall meeting that they would indeed be adding something to those monitors. But I can't remember what it was.

[generalazure]

I'd be happy with a cheap digital clock for those new dynamic time maps...

[LordNothing]

theres a game i used to mod that had these kinds of screens. the engine was a relic of the late 90s that was immortalized by a code release. but you could watch youtube (it wasnt youtube but i dont want to get banned) in your cockpit. too bad that is lostech.

Edited by LordNothing, 23 September 2015 - 12:59 AM.

[Vellron2005]

Well I think it's about right time to get something on those monitors..

My sugestions include:

1) Stock "mech info" pictures.. such as static readouts of various mech-related info.
2) Rear-view camera
3) Below the mech camera
4) Left / right of the mech torso camera
5) Cockpit item slots - MC only cool pictures
6) Dynamic Cockpit item slots - MC only animations
7) Match score tracking info
8) Voip-activated Pilot Avatar
9) In-game chat tracking info
10) Weather and time of day info

I'm sure I can come up with many more, and the Dev's can come up with really cool, iconic, and fun cockpit-screen MC only items..

[LordNothing]

yea, mech apps. lol. id hate to have to spend mc on things to unbreak the game. mech pong $30.

i do think the screens should serve some kind of function. maybe tie into modules or something. cockpit options would let you pick what you want displayed on each screen for each mech. cameras would be a great start. hell just do everything mw2 had on its hud. htal damage readouts for example, deltaheat maybe.

[ThisMachineKillsFascists]

i would love to have a rear camera. theres nothing more annoying than running into walls while backing up.


i wouldnt spend anything for it thou, just so you dont come to mc only ideas

Edited by ThisMachineKillsFascists, 23 September 2015 - 01:53 AM.

[stoogah]

I'd love to see personalization options. Warhorns and hula girls are not enough anymore... true screen customization - info screens where we want them for moderate mc price. I would buy mc's just for this.

[zagibu]

Vellron2005, on 23 September 2015 - 01:13 AM, said:

2) Rear-view camera
3) Below the mech camera
4) Left / right of the mech torso camera

Forget the cameras, the engine can't do picture in picture without a massive FPS hit.

[Kilroy95]

I started a thread about this In the feature suggestion fourm, but yes, getting these functional would be awesome, I mean, when I played the Tesla 2 BT pods, all the displays did something. Ammo/Weapons/Mech status could be duplicated, but hey, that's what Multi-function Displays do.

[IraqiWalker]

Kilroy95, on 23 September 2015 - 03:26 AM, said:

I started a thread about this In the feature suggestion fourm, but yes, getting these functional would be awesome, I mean, when I played the Tesla 2 BT pods, all the displays did something. Ammo/Weapons/Mech status could be duplicated, but hey, that's what Multi-function Displays do.

The problem is that in this game, with this engine, using these screens to do things will tank your framerate.

[Mordynak]

zagibu, on 23 September 2015 - 03:07 AM, said:

Forget the cameras, the engine can't do picture in picture without a massive FPS hit.

Yes it can.

[LordNothing]

zagibu, on 23 September 2015 - 03:07 AM, said:

Forget the cameras, the engine can't do picture in picture without a massive FPS hit.

its not as expensive as you think it. the first time i saw render to texture in a game was the quake 3 expansion pack, i was running a voodoo 2 back then. on modern hardware rendering is dirt cheap.

[zagibu]

IraqiWalker, on 23 September 2015 - 05:11 AM, said:

The problem is that in this game, with this engine, using these screens to do things will tank your framerate.

No, it wouldn't be a problem to draw textures on it that change based on mech information. The only thing that would lower your FPS is if you wanted to use them as camera screens, because you would have to add an additional viewport and render more stuff. Despite what the two posters before me claim, it WOULD decrease your frame rate.

[IraqiWalker]

Mordynak, on 23 September 2015 - 06:49 AM, said:

Yes it can.

No, it really can't. Because the camera will have to draw all the assets that your machine wasn't concerned about drawing. For every camera you have active, expect to slash your frame rate by a solid 20+ frames.

Some of us actually know what we're talking about.

LordNothing, on 23 September 2015 - 08:54 AM, said:

its not as expensive as you think it. the first time i saw render to texture in a game was the quake 3 expansion pack, i was running a voodoo 2 back then. on modern hardware rendering is dirt cheap.

Cool, you saw it being done a while ago. What does that have to do with right now? We're not using the Quake 3 engine, are we?

We're using the crytek engine, we're not running with 600 polygon assets, and models anymore. So even with modern hardware, rendering is actually a massive undertaking. Are you currently getting above 60 FPS on your machine? Because trust me when I say, that using PIP will slash that down to almost half. Meaning that anyone running a machine that barely cranks out 30 frames, can't play the game at all now. For every camera, you will drop your frames even more.

zagibu, on 23 September 2015 - 04:52 PM, said:

No, it wouldn't be a problem to draw textures on it that change based on mech information. The only thing that would lower your FPS is if you wanted to use them as camera screens, because you would have to add an additional viewport and render more stuff. Despite what the two posters before me claim, it WOULD decrease your frame rate.

Technically, draw textures will still task your GPU, and (more importantly in MWO's case) CPU. Thus, affecting your frame rate. Yeah, it won't be as massive a hit compared to running cameras, but it would still have an impact.

Don't get me wrong, I want those screens to have all kinds of assets on them. I'd love it. At the same time, I'm mainly stating the fact that using will impact performance. Which on a machine running at 60+ fps, isn't a big deal. However, someone running at 30 or less, is gonna be in for a rough ride.

[LordNothing]

in the voodoo 2 era all the video card did was rasterize. it didnt handle all of the transforms yet. they didnt have an army of cores go to work on every scrap of linear algebra you needed for rendering. most games in fact are under utilizing the video hardware. people who have framerate issues are either running 5 year old dinosaurs or are setting the effects far above their hardware capability. my low end scrub gtx750 ti barely drops down to 60 fps. render to texture wont cost no more than 10% of your fps (of course this is pgi were talking about here).

you are also forgetting a few things:

the texture will be much lower resolution than the screen, so less to draw. if you can draw 3 1080p screens, a little 512^2 render target is nothing.

it need not have the same fps as the screen. you can run the thing at 1/3 of the normal frame rate and if multiple screens are needed then interleave them so that they dont all need to be updated at the same time. i figure for practicality the game should limit you to no more than two of them, or one with low end specs.

when rendering to texture you can switch off or reduce some of the more expensive effects, such as shadows, particles, etc.

much of the setup work for the main draw can be re-used for calls from other perspectives. you really just have to reconfigure the camera, change the render target, switch off a few things for performance and render again. all the information is on the video card and the state machine is ready to go.

all this is handled by the video card. in fact very little additional data need be moved to the video card for this to happen. all the cpu needs to do is tell the video card what to do. render pipes usually accept world space data and transform it on the fly before rasterizing it. only real difference is where the data goes (texture instead of frame buffer) and the values associated with the world->screen space transforms, and a few effects you've switched off for speed.

Edited by LordNothing, 23 September 2015 - 07:57 PM.

[IraqiWalker]

LordNothing, on 23 September 2015 - 07:56 PM, said:

in the voodoo 2 era all the video card did was rasterize. it didnt handle all of the transforms yet. they didnt have an army of cores go to work on every scrap of linear algebra you needed for rendering. most games in fact are under utilizing the video hardware. people who have framerate issues are either running 5 year old dinosaurs or are setting the effects far above their hardware capability. my low end scrub gtx750 ti barely drops down to 60 fps. render to texture wont cost no more than 10% of your fps (of course this is pgi were talking about here).

you are also forgetting a few things:

the texture will be much lower resolution than the screen, so less to draw. if you can draw 3 1080p screens, a little 512^2 render target is nothing.

it need not have the same fps as the screen. you can run the thing at 1/3 of the normal frame rate and if multiple screens are needed then interleave them so that they dont all need to be updated at the same time. i figure for practicality the game should limit you to no more than two of them, or one with low end specs.

when rendering to texture you can switch off or reduce some of the more expensive effects, such as shadows, particles, etc.

much of the setup work for the main draw can be re-used for calls from other perspectives. you really just have to reconfigure the camera, change the render target, switch off a few things for performance and render again. all the information is on the video card and the state machine is ready to go.

all this is handled by the video card. in fact very little additional data need be moved to the video card for this to happen. all the cpu needs to do is tell the video card what to do. render pipes usually accept world space data and transform it on the fly before rasterizing it. only real difference is where the data goes (texture instead of frame buffer) and the values associated with the world->screen space transforms, and a few effects you've switched off for speed.

The problem is that the entire engine, and in fact the game, is CPU bound. Meaning the CPU will be handling almost all of the work, including draw calls.

Those cameras, even low res ones will still drop you by a good 15+ frames, easy.

[LordNothing]

whats the cpu got to do, physics? lol. this game has none.

[IraqiWalker]

LordNothing, on 23 September 2015 - 08:17 PM, said:

whats the cpu got to do, physics? lol. this game has none.

You can joke all you want, but our mechs have so many moving parts, that the CPU accounts for. CPU also actually handles the physical projectiles, so even if you want to say there are no physics, I'd wager that bullet drop is considered "physics".

Fact is, the game is CPU bound, and doing PIP in any shape or form, will negatively impact performance, in a big way.

[LordNothing]

IraqiWalker, on 23 September 2015 - 08:21 PM, said:

You can joke all you want, but our mechs have so many moving parts, that the CPU accounts for. CPU also actually handles the physical projectiles, so even if you want to say there are no physics, I'd wager that bullet drop is considered "physics".

Fact is, the game is CPU bound, and doing PIP in any shape or form, will negatively impact performance, in a big way.

they do have moving parts, but those parts dont interact with eachother physically. its not like ksp where evey scrap of metal has physics. weapons are effectively either simple ray or blob collision objects. mech collisions (and i suspect terrain as well) are all handled with hit boxes, a relic from the past (unless they are really convex hulls and not bounding boxes). there is seemingly no collision response aside from playing sound effects or applying damage when they happen. how many times have you seen a light mech run through your assault? on top of that the game is not very complex, 24 mechs, probibly fewer than a hundred active weapon objects and a terrain object. things like dropships have no collision data at all and you can actually damage mechs before they drop in cw. physics in this game are not a huge cpu load.


i very much doubt that minimally viable physics affect the cpu much.

Edited by LordNothing, 23 September 2015 - 08:30 PM.

[Ward Serpentine]

I'd settle for basic information on these monitors. Kill count, heat sink status, anything other than what looks like the mech tech forgot to connect the damned cable

When I asked this at the end of one of the town hall meetings, Russ's response was "yea, we really need to take another look at that."

Cameras, while it sounds great, would be a serious hit to performance. Maybe destructible terrain would be a better change. So that annoying boulder/pylon I keep backing into with my 100 ton mech traveling at 20kph might slow me down, but not stop me dead...