22 replies to this topic

[Gargel]

Firewuff, on 01 December 2012 - 07:57 PM, said:

data through put is one thing, yes its low, but latency is what I'm talking about. if my system can't start rendering the scene because it doent know where the mechs are because i'm on a 300ms ping that will be the issue. not so much about the total amount of data.

particles, depends on how they are implemented. if they are individual objects then the CPU does transforms. More commonly particles are things like smoke in the Volcano or sparks from explosions. In those cases the GPU shaders do all the work. THe CPU code sets up the parameters, x number of particles, these shading effects for them, this type of physics behaviour and the shader does ALL the transforms and rendering work, no CPU intervention at all other than to specify the camera postion. This is a bit of a simplification but generally correct.

I'm not sure, maybe we are talking past each other here, but latency has got nothing to do with the FPS in-game. The scene will still be rendered regardless of whether your computer knows the coordinates of the mechs in real-time or at a 300ms delay.

About the particles, I will admit I'm no expert in the field, but I've always been under the impression that particle effects are very CPU-dependent. However, there doesn't seem to be many particle effects in MWO (except when I hit my guass rifle and sparks come flying ), so the effect on performance shouldn't be that big.

And I got a question for you since you are in to software development. What about mech animations? There are several animations for each mech, with a total of 16 mechs. Are animations a cpu-dependant task? Is it reasonable to assume that it is the reason for the CPU-requirements? (It would explain why Planetside 2 would, as there were ALOT of character animations going around in that game)

[Firewuff]

Animations for mechs are relatively lights, each part of the mech is broken down into a "skeleton" or bones and the animation is litterally a list of positions relative to either the "world" coordinates for the object or relative to another part of the object. Because all the parts of the mech are fixed and there are no flexible skin or cloth then positional data is relatively easy to calculate as it is mostly a lookup table. Torso rotation and arm swing are done separately but these are and additional movement over the precanned one. there is a little collision data with the ground to take into account as well.

What is expensive is when you have a large number of objects and a larger number of collisions to check for + all the effects to set up the parameters for. Missiles are a prime offender when you have possibly hundreds of these all with their own tragectory and flight path to calculate. That would start to get expensive. I've noticed slowdown when there is an LRM rain incomming.... or is that just time as I panic ;-)