543 replies to this topic

[Xtrekker]

Ghogiel, on 11 September 2014 - 12:04 PM, said:

I was a MWLL dev. Yeah we saw similar problems in CE2. Crysis was the defacto benchmark game for high end PCs for a few years there.

We were working under an era of different hardware. So while it was CPU heavy, it was less of a bottleneck because at the time 9800GTs were basically the standard GPU and Phenom2s could just about keep up with those. The 1gb of vram was actually a top concern during my optimization passes along with lowering DP in LODs where possible. The HUD ***** fps in MWLL so bad too, which I presume the flash was all cpu run. turn off your HUD and get like 50% fps boost. :<

But I don't recall hit detection issues. I was gonna say, hey, call Toth. He's working over at CryTek now, right? Although my understanding was there was some involvement with those guys in the beginning. (I'm Stormin by the way, 2D HUD stuff.)

[Ghogiel]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:08 PM, said:

I think what you are referring to is the default setting for many settings was dropped to medium from high at one point to help ensure that the average user got decent performance which will have included texture settings. Texture quality has always remained the same in fact we increased it from 1k to 2k textures around the time prior to clans so many of the newer mechs use 2k sheets.

We appreciate the fact that we want the game to look great but also run on a wide variety of hardware two conflicting goals we do our best to balance where we can. To this end there were some reductions in quality for low/medium settings e.g. the missile trail effect was greatly reduced, but nothing high or very high has been removed.

Its a valid point that hardware progresses therefore performance will climb over time, my point wasn't that we are perfectly happy with performance or to be interpreted as excusing the current state of performance it was primarily to counter the notion that performance has declined over time or that we've made the engine perform worse as that simply isn't the case. Hopefully that answers your question?

Prior to the camo specs and different mech shader, in closed beta many of the mech textures were 2k. So there was a downsizing pass at some point. Also at that time all the mechs were baked to a smooth shaded model which caused shading errors. It annoyed me greatly at the time XD. Was so glad that got a reseeing.

Edited by Ghogiel, 11 September 2014 - 12:19 PM.

[Tombstoner]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:08 PM, said:

I think what you are referring to is the default setting for many settings was dropped to medium from high at one point to help ensure that the average user got decent performance which will have included texture settings. Texture quality has always remained the same in fact we increased it from 1k to 2k textures around the time prior to clans so many of the newer mechs use 2k sheets.

We appreciate the fact that we want the game to look great but also run on a wide variety of hardware two conflicting goals we do our best to balance where we can. To this end there were some reductions in quality for low/medium settings e.g. the missile trail effect was greatly reduced, but nothing high or very high has been removed.

Its a valid point that hardware progresses therefore performance will climb over time, my point wasn't that we are perfectly happy with performance or to be interpreted as excusing the current state of performance it was primarily to counter the notion that performance has declined over time or that we've made the engine perform worse as that simply isn't the case. Hopefully that answers your question?

Question – I understand why the game is server authoritative, but would client side hit detection be possible if the data stream was encrypted or is it not as simple a task to prevent hackers from packet sniffing/altering data to cheat.

[Xtrekker]

Bishop Steiner, on 11 September 2014 - 12:14 PM, said:

Answers mine! Though I must say the maps looking at videos seem crisper and more eye popping in Closed Beta, is that just an affect of all the particulates and smoke and such you have added over time? (as it seems many maps get little tweaks as I notice new things all the time)

Or is it the rose colored glasses of the "golden Age of Camelot" syndrome, where everything was better "back in the day"?

No, there was a definite point where you could see a great deal farther away. I think my biggest gripe has to do with whatever they're doing to limit visibility. According to MWO, I should not be able to make out any detail at the end of my street. Fix that, and I'm ok with all the borked netcode, discos, etc. etc. I'm tired of feeling like I need to clean my screen.

[Ghogiel]

Xtrekker, on 11 September 2014 - 12:17 PM, said:

But I don't recall hit detection issues. I was gonna say, hey, call Toth. He's working over at CryTek now, right? Although my understanding was there was some involvement with those guys in the beginning. (I'm Stormin by the way, 2D HUD stuff.)

Yo!
Ah the original HUD? I liked that HUD far greater than the current one.

There was Hit detect issues. When servers were rammed. PPCs wouldn't reg etc sometimes. But yeah it's not the same. I am guessing because hit detection was clientside and not server side. ie you could use hacks in MWLL. that's the trade off.

Edited by Ghogiel, 11 September 2014 - 12:24 PM.

[Matthew Craig]

Ghogiel, on 11 September 2014 - 12:04 PM, said:

I was a MWLL dev. Yeah we saw similar problems in CE2. Crysis was the defacto benchmark game for high end PCs for a few years there. We were working under an era of different hardware. So while it was CPU heavy, it was less of a bottleneck because at the time 9800GTs were basically the standard GPU and Phenom2s could just about keep up with those. The 1gb of vram was actually a top concern during my optimization passes along with lowering DP in LODs where possible. The HUD ***** fps in MWLL so bad too, which I presume the flash was all cpu run. turn off your HUD and get like 50% fps boost. :<

Yeah as you know we've had similar issues with the HUD it still eats more of the performance budget than I'd like, and this one is primarily a CE3 issue as they created their own interface to Scaleform that makes it very hard to integrate any newer version of Scaleform, Scaleform made large strides in performance starting with Scaleform 4 so this is a painful limitation to live with, we've looked periodically at the work involved to just update it ourselves and even with UI 2.0 written with that eventuality in mind its still a lot of work to undertake and again harder to get buy in for as its a lot of work to just get the same visuals with more performance.

The increasing gap between CPU/GPU power is definitely a key issue within gaming currently and an interesting one to watch unfold. I'm not sure if we start to merge CPU/GPU closer together e.g. AMD APU approach, moving increasingly more work to the GPU or ensuring that more work can be done in parallel on the CPU I'd say all approaches are valid and increasingly games/engines that are able to do this effectively will likely see better reception by their users.

Another way of looking at this as I've often stated on these forums, is if there is a surplus of GPU resources available why not put them to use, run in a higher resolution, turn on additional anti aliasing etc. As I follow the emergence of VR closely perhaps this gap can also be seen as a blessing not a curse as for VR 4k is looking to almost be minimum requirement and with the current DK2 you need to maintain a solid 75fps to ensure low persistence so VR increasingly looks like it could consume this performance gap quite happily.

[Sprouticus]

Ghogiel, on 11 September 2014 - 12:23 PM, said:

Yo!
Ah the original HUD? I liked that HUD far greater than the current one.

There was Hit detect issues. When servers were rammed. PPCs wouldn't reg etc sometimes. But yeah it's not the same. I am guessing because hit detection was clientside and not server side. ie you could use hacks in MWLL. that's the trade off.

I actually like the new HUD. And I like the imersion of the effects.

The only thing I really want back is the cool terminator pulse lasers. I hate the wub wub.

[Matthew Craig]

Bishop Steiner, on 11 September 2014 - 12:14 PM, said:

Answers mine! Though I must say the maps looking at videos seem crisper and more eye popping in Closed Beta, is that just an affect of all the particulates and smoke and such you have added over time? (as it seems many maps get little tweaks as I notice new things all the time) Or is it the rose colored glasses of the "golden Age of Camelot" syndrome, where everything was better "back in the day"?

The lighting did shift when we did that one engine update I talked about, in an engine update many things change too many sadly to isolate exactly what changed but if you could provide some good comparison reference images/videos I'd be happy to take a look.

[Xtrekker]

Ghogiel, on 11 September 2014 - 12:23 PM, said:

Yo!
Ah the original HUD? I liked that HUD far greater than the current one.

There was Hit detect issues. When servers were rammed. PPCs wouldn't reg etc sometimes. But yeah it's not the same. I am guessing because hit detection was clientside and not server side. ie you could use hacks in MWLL. that's the trade off.

This one was mine. It was probably the one you didn't like, lol. I seem to recall you taking issue with the dual scopes.

[Matthew Craig]

Xtrekker, on 11 September 2014 - 12:22 PM, said:

No, there was a definite point where you could see a great deal farther away. I think my biggest gripe has to do with whatever they're doing to limit visibility. According to MWO, I should not be able to make out any detail at the end of my street. Fix that, and I'm ok with all the borked netcode, discos, etc. etc. I'm tired of feeling like I need to clean my screen.

Interesting I know there were changes made to depth of field and that many users weren't big fans of it which is why we eventually got options to disable DoF and Film Grain available to users but draw distance should have remained similar again if you have some reference images I'd be happy to take a look.

[Kazvall]

Thank you for replying, Matthew. This is exactly what the community is looking for. Honestly, I think you should be promoted to community manager as you have a great tone while not gas-lighting us at the same time!

[Bishop Steiner]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:32 PM, said:

The lighting did shift when we did that one engine update I talked about, in an engine update many things change too many sadly to isolate exactly what changed but if you could provide some good comparison reference images/videos I'd be happy to take a look.

Will see if I can track them down. Though offhand ,it just seem like more smoke, rain, smog, etc keeps getting added, as one could clearly see across forest colony 2 years ago to poke an Atlas in it's glowing red eye (miss those..... pun intended!) and now, it all is lost in a haze. (though it seems many people are stripping those things in their Config files as people are nailing me that I can't even frikking see on some maps)

Will see if I can pull up some HD CB youtubes though (all my recordings are stuck on a busted hard drive on a defunct computer, sadly)

Kazvall, on 11 September 2014 - 12:35 PM, said:

Thank you for replying, Matthew. This is exactly what the community is looking for. Honestly, I think you should be promoted to community manager as you have a great tone while not gas-lighting us at the same time!

I would rather he stays working on the Dev side, personally. Seems to be where we would get max benefits from his talents.

[Ghogiel]

OT

Sprouticus, on 11 September 2014 - 12:29 PM, said:

I actually like the new HUD. And I like the imersion of the effects.

The only thing I really want back is the cool terminator pulse lasers. I hate the wub wub.

Well I don't dislike the new HUD per say. I found it hard to read and it used more resources than the old HUD. It's rough around the edges imo and was rushed into the final build. Like a lot of things were..

Xtrekker, on 11 September 2014 - 12:33 PM, said:

This one was mine. It was probably the one you didn't like, lol. I seem to recall you taking issue with the dual scopes.

Nope. That's the one I liked .
dem radar boobs

Edited by Ghogiel, 11 September 2014 - 12:38 PM.

[Matthew Craig]

Tombstoner, on 11 September 2014 - 12:21 PM, said:

Question – I understand why the game is server authoritative, but would client side hit detection be possible if the data stream was encrypted or is it not as simple a task to prevent hackers from packet sniffing/altering data to cheat.

The rule of thumb is never trust the client just google Warface and hack and you'll see why client authority would have been exceptionally bad and doesn't scale well. Sure you can try to encrypt your packet stream but now you're entering into a game of cat and mouse with all the hackers out there, and believe me they have more time and expertise on their hands than you would like them to have and it's probably only a matter of time until you lose that game.

[Xtrekker]

Ghogiel, on 11 September 2014 - 12:37 PM, said:

Nope. That's the one I liked .
dem radar boobs

Haha, well cool. I gotta say, I love how recognizable the screenshots are for MWLL because of those boobs. The new one did look a little arcade-y. Also, I'm sad to say that our flash friends could never get the opacities right, so it never looked as it should have.

[Matthew Craig]

Cimarb, on 11 September 2014 - 12:16 PM, said:

Anyone that does not think this game is amazingly beautiful has never saw http://youtu.be/cZP1J1jTdfE

Well to be fair he is injecting his own post processing which changes the look, though I have seen plenty of shots that capture great looking moments in our game check out Lordreds screen shot thread for examples. I think for many users it becomes a choice between great looking visuals or performance and as discussed I'd love to help make that less of a choice. As I've stated before the best way to do that currently is to run on very high and just lower shadows/environment and object detail to low or medium.

The reason for this is exactly as discussed above those sliders cut out the most draw calls and therefore have the greatest impact on performance the other sliders don't have as drastic an impact.

[CHH Badkarma]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:48 PM, said:

Well to be fair he is injecting his own post processing which changes the look, though I have seen plenty of shots that capture great looking moments in our game check out Lordreds screen shot thread for examples. I think for many users it becomes a choice between great looking visuals or performance and as discussed I'd love to help make that less of a choice. As I've stated before the best way to do that currently is to run on very high and just lower shadows/environment and object detail to low or medium.

The reason for this is exactly as discussed above those sliders cut out the most draw calls and therefore have the greatest impact on performance the other sliders don't have as drastic an impact.

I just wish that over time this game had not been cut down for lower end machines. Was so Ooooo ahhhhh, and now, meh

[Dark DeLaurel]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:48 PM, said:

Well to be fair he is injecting his own post processing which changes the look, though I have seen plenty of shots that capture great looking moments in our game check out Lordreds screen shot thread for examples. I think for many users it becomes a choice between great looking visuals or performance and as discussed I'd love to help make that less of a choice. As I've stated before the best way to do that currently is to run on very high and just lower shadows/environment and object detail to low or medium.

The reason for this is exactly as discussed above those sliders cut out the most draw calls and therefore have the greatest impact on performance the other sliders don't have as drastic an impact.

I do have a question if you dont mind Matthew. Why does it seem as we use more powerful machines our performance drops? I built a new X79 machine and get almost the same performance of my old one. That does not compute

[Stinkeye]

I love the fact that most of the angriest people are ex-white Knights. You would think PGIs biggest supporters becoming these angry out of touch weirdos would mean something. But I guess the OP is right and you should cut out most of your previous player base. I mean they really had nothing to be upset about really.....I stopped playing a long time ago due mostly to no new modes, CW, etc and of the hundred founders or so on my friends list did the same thing.
Why expect what you are promised or give feed back, that won't be listened to. Never have I seen a community turn from so much hope to so much hate and really it is all deserved. The quislings who are happy with the way things are are as shocking as well quislings. This last reddit scandal is just the capper on this hole sad epoch in MW history. Get some nails and dig a hole just put it down for good.

Edited by Stinkeye, 11 September 2014 - 12:53 PM.

[Dark DeLaurel]

Matthew Craig, on 11 September 2014 - 12:34 PM, said:

Interesting I know there were changes made to depth of field and that many users weren't big fans of it which is why we eventually got options to disable DoF and Film Grain available to users but draw distance should have remained similar again if you have some reference images I'd be happy to take a look.

I should be able to dig out some images (I have some dating back to the closed beta).

@Tombstoner do you remember when that was? I can't remember and it would help me search through things.