Rendering distance of players is a BIG JOKE !

Recently had a rather large Battle, VS (me) versus NC on the Esamir Tech Plant in the middle.
As their attack got going, we couldn't see their planes anymore, they would dump their rockets on our positions and towers before we saw them.
Minor annoyance, but more funny than a problem.
Then the Infantry battle in the plant got going...

Infantry Drawing distance was literally less than 10 meters.
I was running down a corridor and suddenly gunned down by an enemy that sort of just appeared a few meters ahead of me.
I got kills with the lasher by shooting at what looked like plain, open space, a few seconds of sprint away from me.

I'd be fine with 20 frames at low texture and effect settings if that notably raised it, alas, to no avail.
I really can't fight against invisible enemies.
Luckily, the opposing side had the same issues.

I think a minimum draw distance of 25 meters should be somehow achievable, but here's hoping for the best.

Yes this needs to be fixed ASAP. There is another method which i do not know if SOE do or do not do with their engine...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_rendering
This would help out a lot, but its more engine work again.
There would have to be some interior redesign work if this was to be the case, some more choke points in bases would be needed to be built with low visibility into the next room etc. But i think it would work, and tbh i would rather have the tight corridors and that back.

Yeah, it's a problem. But from looking at your specs, that's the bottleneck in there since the 4GB RAM is the minimum requirement to even install the game IIRC.

What annoys the hell out of me is when I can't see the opposition, but they can see me.

I just played on Miller as NC, fighting uphill against an army of Vanu. They had tons of infantry (especially snipers) hiding behind rocks and trees, but I couldn't see them; all I could see was the particle effects coming off their weapons when they fired. Despite the fact I couldn't see them, they could see me...leading to a lot of frustrating deaths. -_-

Stuff like this makes me just want to stop playing.

I just hope they do something about this soon there's only so much i can tolerate before it starts to get to me.

As a competitive fps'er these type of problems really put me off the game and should have never been considered if you cant see your target whats the point of an fps?

and no walking in 5 yards towards your target just so you can see them aint the way to go about things.

i feel tweaks should be done in other area's and sacrifice other things but render distance should never be considered one of the things this is an fps we are ment to see our target we are not ment to walk 5 steps forward and have like 10+ people show up out of nowhere. it doesn't allow for tactical play at all just mindless go in shoot and hope you get 1 kill before they notice you and take you down.

Bump

it took me hours to complete but i made an HighDefinition-Pic to let people understand what's the problem is.






by the way...
i-5 2500k
msi 460gtx cyclone
8GB G.SKill Sniper 12800's
win 7 pro x64

I think the biggest problem is the people on these forums trying to talk about the game whilst knowing absolutely nothing about computers. (I'm referring to the people saying "Get more ram!")

The infantry render distance is an absolute joke, and personally I would like to be able to see enemy aircraft from farther away. Ground vehicles, on the other hand, have a decent enough draw distance.

Agreed I think that the number of players visiable before it starts culling them for render needs to be increased.

When it comes down to either a central base where all 3 fations main fronts will meet, or even when just 2 main fronts meet you start getting culling distances of less than 50m.

One tech plant we were fighting for was the TRs last base and so almost all of them were crammed in there. (33/33/33 cont pop lock) so that's at LEAST 300+ players in ther area, and just from general observation I've noticed that the cull start somewhere around 30-40 players. You couldn't get players rendering on the other side of the balcony overlooking the double doors in the heat of the fight.

With this issue snipers become useless because nothing is rendered past their own lines, tactics start boiling down to chuck grenade and run forward so it has some rendered targets to kill. Something definatly needs to be done even if it is a FoV cull or something where it culls objects behind and to the sides of you first instead of what seems like it just taking a count in a sphere around you and culling everything past that last object.

Also having it cull friendlies first (down to a point of say like 10 or so) then enemys would help as it would at least provide targets to fire at before 10 of them magicly appear out of thin air.

For supposidly being a large scale game you would think they would have focused on rendering as many players as possible for the Massive effect, I for one wouldn't mind sacrificing a little of the pretty and the rendered ground lighting effects for more targets to shoot at.

Glad the devs are working on this, only reason planetside 2 stands out is because of the scale, and this problem is really hurting that.

How you know are they working at it ? if they increase rendering distance of players you will get less and less FPS... so... i dont know if it will be fixed...

btw: if they make it i ll invest some money into this game

I wouldn't care if they used wire frame models. Graphics are nice, but gameplay matters.

You definitely need more ram...I haven't had only 4GB since win 7. it's a hog.

That being said, i FULLY agree with you. I get sniped a lot by snipers i can't see, and i'm sure i've done the same to others.

I did complete the graphics tweeking guide that has been floating around and it helped a LOT though. It still happens but it hasn't been as bad as it had been in the past. LINK

It's not the actual drawing of the players that slows you down.

I set max render distance in useroptions.ini to 20 meters, spawned at warpgate and walked away from all of those 60+ afk players standing around. I was still getting low FPS even though all I could see was skybox and blue doritos. It's not a graphics thing

Yep, it's more to do with how quickly the server can update and send info about players positions and what they are doing, then there's class and loadout data.

This is why we see CPU bound low fps yet no cores close to maxed.

We've seen what happens when things get really busy as the server starts to screw up and people start warping all over with flying tanks etc then your system grinds to a halt as it's starved for new info from the dieing server.

I'd say they grossly overestimated the capability of their engine and servers in terms of max playable capacity.

There's one thing people seem to be forgetting. They want people with low-end computers to be able to play this game. If 4GB isn't enough, that is stopping a TON of people from playing.

I assume the OP is a foreigner but i agree with all his points. Broken english but very good points.

I don't think warping effects frames per second

ok one last time. the amount of RAM has nothing to do with this issue.

its a SERVER side problem.

this is what think the problem is:

- the hit tregistration while shooting a gun is handled by the client (ie your PC) - this is done because it would be too much information for the server to register every bullet fired.
- the hit registration when threowing a grenade is handled by the server. because throwing grenades doesnt happen so often, so the server can handle it.
- the server always knows where everyone is on its designated part of map.(every servercluster handles a specific part of a map)
- your PC (the client) sends its info (your position) to the server and then requests info about players in your vicinity. the server then sends u the data of every player that is in "range" of your client (lets call this range the "pop-up-area"). your PC recieves that info and renders all the players (i.e. you can see them). lets say this "pop-up-area" is about 300m. so you can see enemy and infantry up to 300m.
- normally this is no problem. BUT if there are too many clients (i.e a zerg assault) requesting the whereabouts of other players in the same area of the map(ie the same servercluster) the server gets overwhelmed with requests from the clients. it can not handle every request in time.

- so whats the solution? cut the "pop-up-area" of each players so it will request less info from the server.

- whats the problem? the more players are in the same area of the map, the more the "pop-up-area" needs to be reduced to handle all the requests.


i dont know if its exactly like i said, but i can imagine that this is indeed the bottleneck. it also explains why grenades will hit an undrawn enemy and gunfire will not.

Love it how people complain about ESF, but never think - you need to face hug infantry to see them. Hate it with my armor as well and with infantry even more - Tech plant, OH GOD WHY?!!!?? Basically can drop infiltrator and go with shotgun, as enemy just pops out into your face (not exaggerating).