Infantry Render

Yeah, but it could be coarse. Player position, updated every second. Their client detects the hit. If hit, then just dodgy the rendered projectile on the player's screen. Outgoing shots are directly calculated. It could work without direct simulation, because the distant infantry wouldn't be rendered. That gives you wiggle room to fudge the numbers

Make it 500,000 who cares if you cant see them?

I have noticed no problems in seeing the enemy; however, I cannot speak for others.

Ignorance is bliss. Seriously. During the last week of beta, and during release week, I thought it was just some network bug. Similiar to players warping around (which used to happen alot).

Once I realized what was really happening - that enemies can vanish into thin air while you are shooting at them (in large fights) because they were being culled, it started to drive me crazy. And it never stopped. I probably need professional help by now.

As a side note, it is less noticeable nowadays because the servers don't even get to high population anymore. But it's definately there, I see it happen almost every single time I play this game.

I think that SOE should do a preannounced day where for a limited time they bump up the render distance. Maybe you people would finally understand what the problem is when your CPU stutters up trying to simultaneously compute the positions, speeds, actions and trajectories of hundreds of players, vehicles, projectiles and every other piece of debris that does anything at all in this game.

The technology isn't there yet. Planetside 2 was just launched a couple of months ago and the optimization is still on the way. Find me another game that manages to do what this game does with good performance. No, planetside 1 doesn't qualify. It had a population limit of 120 people per faction per continent. Planetside 2 allows 2000 people per continent, that's 666 people per faction. In case someone doesn't notice, 666 is quite a lot larger number then 120 is. And that's just population limits. You only need to look at a screenshot of planetside 1 to see how much more there is to process in planetside 2 - all the nice graphics and shading and lightning aren't free.

If you're a world reknown mathematician/programmer and know some awsome secret that would allow the engine to magically do all the **** you're requesting while still giving you a decent fps, that's great, go to SOE and send them your patch. If not, chill the **** out and wait a bit with the rest of us mortals. It will get better in time. Not tomorrow, but in a few months. Just have some ******* patience.

Im no expert but I dont think it is that simple. And your idea is still relying on tracking more people. If it was that easy Im sure they would have done this already.
FF

No doubt dude, I'm no software engineer either. Tracking more people isn't a huge issue for the server (it's tracking everyone anyway) but it does constrain its bandwidth. I know for a fact that SOE are looking at putting the render distance for all actors up; it's the central drive of their optimisation team and it's on the roadmap. I'm not saying it is that simple, but god it'd be nice if a random SOE employee glanced over the post and was like "oh, but of course!"

In any event, I reckon we'll see something like that in future anyway. Use sprites and priority culling to simulate incredible DD while the engine is really just making up crap and hoping you don't notice lol

Yeah I think we can agree on that, I dont care if the fix involves the death of a 1000 hamsters running around in a wheel to power a good enough server so rendering is good then that is fine by me
FF

I do agree that there should be some sort of slider to increase the amount of infantry rendering. If people cry that it's an unfair advantage for those of us with gaming grade computers, then oh well. Either save up and build one or deal with it. Technology doesn't stop advancing.

Guys, DEV answer on rendering distance and what can be done about it. See link below.

CyclesMcHurtz, one of the optimization guys was the "guest dev interview target". I tweeted a question to them about how optimiztion relates to the render distance, and what can be done about it.

You should watch his answer to the question in the pre-recorded interview. But I'll summarize what he said: back during beta server and netcode optimizations needed to be done, and were. Client optimizations were also done.

And at this point, the bottom line is that older machines don't have the CPU horsepower to process all the players in large battles. And it wouldn't be fair to let newer computers render players from far away when older computers can't.

Here's the interview. Skip to 1:36:15.



So... it sounds to me like we're not going to see much more progress on this front, until years from now when SOE can just stop support ancient computers (if they even do that).

CyclesMcHurtz, thank you for your detailed answer to my question!

Ok guys see you all in 2015... unless a better mmofps comes out
Yesterday on Ceres it was like playing in a 50m. radius bubble, everything beyond that range wasnt rendered.
The map is huge, the battle is tiny, not the game for me at the moment.
Let me know if things get better because i loved the game and i would be happy to come back.

That is.. pretty sad, but at this point I already anticipated it to be the answer. It's an even greater problem for vehicles rendering infantry but maybe now the balance debate can shift from "fix the rendering first" to actually trying to work with what we have.
On the other hand, maybe if enough people complain SOE might revise their stance and increase the minimum requirements but I really don't see it happening at the moment.

Thing is, he quoted "it's not fair if someone you can't see is shooting you." Well.. This already happens. So yes indeed it isn't fair and their player model should render.

It sounded to me like he assumed that we don't have the issue where we can get shot at by people that we can't see or haven't yet rendered, when we very well in fact can and it happens all the time. It is not an issue of fairness because this already happens, I'm surprised they haven't noticed that yet and quite somewhat disappointed that they don't even acknowledge that.

Any true FPS player dropped this game the first time someone dissapeared in thier crosshair.

I mean really?......... If It's free and it sucks no one thinks twice

I was rather disheartened by that response to be fair. If it really is only low end machines that are the reason that this is in some game breaking phenomenon has occurred then SOE really need to improve rendering or admit that they overstepped with regards to what computers can run the game at an adequate level and adjust accordingly. If that means low end computers are getting shot at before they render units then so be it, it will encourage people to get bettert pc's.

However, it does seem to be getting slightly better (no where near where it needs to be) so perhaps SOE can find a way around it without penalising the low end guys. It seems we will just have to wait and see.
FF

This not rendering unit stuff is driving me crazy, its near impossible to play atm.

Like few hours ago I got my mag destroyed my invisible units who were launching tens of invisible rockets on to me and I just couldnt figure where they were and even after i hit I still got destroyed.

Its even worse with aircraft... Until i hover 50 meters above the ground for around 5 sec no units will render, its ********.

Another example units simply disappearing, NC were taking crossroad watchtower and we were defending it and I was shooting nc from third floor I literally saw people from 100-200 meters just vanish even if I hit them multiple times as they were running.

I wont play this game If freaking people with ****** pc's holds back proper unit render because its ****** impossible to play when you get shot from nowhere by invisible units. Not even talking about Annih spam...

What I find fascinating is that there are people tolerate (even defend SOE)on this issue and continue to spend actual money on this game.

People you are shooting at dissapear you say? ahhh no big deal...
Getting shot by invisible rockets? meh .. to be expected

Its an FPS for god sake, if i cant see and shoot people then it might as well be online checkers.

The only positives I can see about it so far is that its free... there is no way i would spend a penny on it.

If this is true, then SOE has basically gone ahead and signed the death certificate of PS2 and were only a bit over two months into release. Without proper rendering, large scale fights will continue to be determined by who can best exploit the invisible render bubbles, either intentionally or accidentally. SOE might as well forget the whole MLG and E-Sports thing because without rendering, the battles will be a disaster. The only way they could avoid this in MLG matches is by limiting the matches to something small, like 12v12 or something, but this would go against the primary selling point of the game: large scale battles.

I just don't see this game having much of a future if they can't fix this. It doesn't matter how much meta game they add or how many new continents they create, if you can't see who is shooting you and you are dying because of it, why bother playing? This only leads to frustration with no light at the end of the tunnel.

I would have thought they'd try to keep dodging the issue. Well, that's it for me then. They turned this into a farce of a game to support gameboys. This game could have been so epic, what a gigantic letdown.

If, as the interview suggests, this is just a client performance issue, why not launch a few servers for people with high enough performance PCs to support high infantry render distance, and allow free transfers?