Happy New Year & Update 02 Info!

Yes! Finally! Thank you SOE!

Thank you for the update Higby / SOE

Happy New Years to you and yours as well!

******* amen to that\,sony blows when it comes to software developement!

because everyone is making an MMOFPS with 2000 players now-a-days.... dumb ***..

I think the problem is that increasing it would cause lagg and problems, so they need to change a lot of things before tweaking the render distance!

I wonder if they should work on performance, and hope that renderside encourages people to stop infantry-zerging like it's World War One.

Whats the point of having 2000 players on a map if you can't see them all at once?

As a technical writer who's worked in more than one enterprise software development project, and who's aware of how complex and slow-moving a beast it is.... and who's also leveled a fair amount of constructive (?) criticism at the game mechanics we've been stuck with.... I have to say:

Dude. Get a GRIP. This is -- warts and foibles and all -- the most responsive dev team I've ever seen in my life when it come to interacting with the user base, and I include the projects I've worked on. (They generally leave all that touchy-feely stuff up to the guy writing the user's guide: me.) Also, this thread was personally created by the development manager. And here you are cr*pping all over him in his thread. Go wash your mouth out with soap. Now. Right now.

/points at bathroom door
/levels minigun

I've been quietly wondering that myself. I'd settle for smaller continents -- maybe they could just call them 'islands', and crank them out faster -- with a lower population. PS1 gave us 166x3, and we had some king-h*ll slugfests. Half again that many in one place at one time, all shooting at each other and coming back fighting mad every thirty seconds to keep shooting, would be.... beautiful. Just beautiful.

Better optimization... YAY

The problem is, most customers have no clue about programming and the problems with 3D graphics rendering.

To be honest, no game out there is 'without flaws'. No game will be able to bolster what they are doing at the moment because of the sheer magnitude of what is being put into play. The current engines out there are limited by the processor and video cards currently out there. Back in the 80s, it literally took mainframe level computers to render the movie Tron and Last Starfighter back then. Nowadays, it still takes some pretty decent server level hardware working in parallel to do the movie such as Avatar or some of the cinematics in Halo 4 in almost real time.

Now mind you, the stuff they are doing there, is planned and specific. However, in our games, the only things planned are the staple objects and the terrain. The rest is not. The power it takes to do all that is maybe a tenth of your processor, but now, include the following that has to be taken into account:

• Objects moving in and out of your view, based on reported information sent from the master server
• Calculating estimated 'trajectories' of said objects, including ranging of items and 'guessing' at what is to be rendered to deal with 'landmarks' such as the static items that are within range.
• Readjusting models, on the fly, based on your distance and view point.
• Lighting physics
• Physics in general for the objects based on their reaction.
• Particle simulations (How they should go or inclusion based on range or situation)
• Transmitting positional and action data of the player, including health data.
• Receiving data with regards to other players including positional data based on the server guestimating from your information, their informational updates.

Remember, QuakeWorld was able to go up to 32 players with a single server back in the 90s... Do you understand why it has devolved down to 16 to 24 players and rarely pushed past 32 in a long while? Most of it is graphical overhead but also simply because of some of the above information above, plus other things involved. Even games like Worlds of Warcraft where you see a LOT of players than in FPS, has the draw back of how many players it can support in one area after a while because of the sheer data overload that can happen that will kill server processing and even computers trying to handle the number of users and NPCs at any given area.

Again, it is not limited to SOE, but also to other groups. Blizzard themselves had a hell of a time dealing with their little Opening of AQ event, where servers were literally thrashing as an event was happening, people on that server felt it all over the place, not just in the one area. You also see it a lot after a patch day on Everquest or on World of Warcraft where servers can't handle the load of a rush of people.

Been a month since I've even bothered to log into this game. These changes certainly have gotten my attention. Looking forward to re-firing up PS2 on the 30th.

Hoping the patch gives the game a rez'. But not more of a rez than the server can handle, since renderside all over again will make people quit for good if they haven't already.

Sounds very good!

Thank you for listening. This game should have a long good life in front of it, when players are listened to

i'm sure thats coming too later ... BUT I do not know a single game where its free... so it will cost you extra

If the game doesnt render 2000 people at a time, Sony can't go around bragging about their 2000 man FPS.

Get a grip Fanboys. People have the right to be annoyed by shoddy game design, even shoddier marketting, and lazy *** developers.

You can all pretend this game is something it isn't but I refuse to keep lying to myself.

And the dev's have every right to ignore the douchebags and interact with the civil members of the community .

I wont be playing this game until they add a metagame. I dont care about the trivial whos gun is more OP nonsense. What matters is the game is boring because it has no point. Its just a giant game of TDM. How much more boring could it be?

They need to make it where the conquest of territory leads to some kind of final assault on something like a faction main base.

Currently capturing zones means nothing.

Dynamic / player configurable colors for minimap & overhead indicators for enemies, friendlies, and squads within a platoon
Thank you soooooo much! This is going to save me and other colorblind players so much trouble. Honestly, I stopped playing because of the lack of this feature but now I am completely back on board. Thank you thank you thank you.

Apparently you never played Quake, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, BF1942, BF2, BF2142 (or even BF3 for that matter)? Those were all famously boring games without a point that people of course absolutely did not play for years and years on end, in the same maps (without unlocks/stats/progression) over and over again ... ...

He wasn't talking about unlocks/stats/progression, that's already in the game. Way to miss the point.

Though I do think that the basic team deathmatch+king of the hill in a persistent world gameplay(which is what this game is) is incomplete/rudimentary. Balance is still not good enough, maps are still not good enough etcetera. Thankfully they're working on it.

Metagame(I assume he means something like global domination like in PS1) is just another way to make this game good.