The issue with realism in games

This is why PS2 has failed so hard. I admire that you think in a fun way but this is capitalism. You have to get people to buy your product. And people, for the most part, aren't interested in becoming highly invested in the game like its niche hardcore fanbase is.

Splash spam is bad, but people are also frustrated by inherent asymmetry, much more so in fact. I don't know about you, but i don't play the game to be farmed from 200m away.
Both sides throwing nades and c4 like candy is "fair", because two sides play that game (and let's not pretend the love for biolab farm among the peasants is universal, it's not). When HE fired from 200m away randomly can reach into every corner of the base because said base has sooo much square footage for the peasants to hide in then it's a big problem.
Map design is at fault, but given that rebuilding from the ground up is not going to happen then HE tanks should not exist for gameplay reasons, especially when 2 dozen tanks in 1 place are business as usual. HEAT gives enough leeway in case of near misses, demanding anything above that is just asking for a killstreak machine.

Mech is superfluous because there is no physical space for it.
500m long (tops) lattice links mean that AV set up in relative safety of bases create a mutual no-go zone with effective AV ranges overlapping. Imo the 4 existing continents are a lost cause. I'd rather see the devs churn continents with maybe a dozen honest to god BASES (so the infantry doesn't feel boxed in by farmers), each amp-station+satellites big (so setting up a 360 siege with an uncoordinated blob of tanks is not trivial) and maybe a dozen of secondary benefit-providing points of interest so the spatial control aspect is pronounced. I'd say 1km of space filled with interesting and somewhat realistic terrain allowing for leapfrogging without being pounded by AV from 500m away (not as busy and ridiculous as near vertical mountains we see on Hossin and Amerish) and the mech play becomes pure awesomeness.

It's not like the devs are idiots and just chose dog slow weapons and smurf-like distances for ***** and giggles. Its just impossible to do currently and for quite some time in the future because of technicalities.
2-way communication required goes with square of participants. At 6km we are talking pretty much a whole continent pop, because 6km is more or less effective width/height of current continents. Remember the lag the last time you participated in 200v200? Now imagine that, but amplified 10- if not 100-fold AND permanent. The hardware on both sides would melt.

I get 70FPS or higher in such fights. If I turn off shadows it will jump to over 150. And the hardware upgrades I made to my computer cost only a tad more than a console.

But lets use those numbers you provided. 10 fold, 2000vs2000. That's 4000 people. Which server are YOU playing on that it destroys the World Record?

World Record is 1100 players (an event staged to beat PS1's record of 900). That was less than 400 per side. Pretty sure my computer could handle it. The issue isn't the hardware on the player's side. But the hardware on the server side, or more like the software needs to be updated to handle such a thing.

They chose to appease the lowest common denominator. And I'm not convinced that cert farmers are paying customers. You see as an all access member, I have NEVER felt the need to cert farm. My bonuses, especially combined with my alpha squad boost (when I first started 3 years ago). Had me drowning in certs that I unlocked everything I needed by just playing objectively.

Further more. An EQ server opened up this summer capped out at 5000 (dev said the cap was 5000 before queues happened) players. They opened a sister server, it also capped out at 5000 (both servers had queues). That was 10,000 players on two Everquest Servers. So that tells me Everquest, a 16 year old game, during the summer months had more players playing on two vanilla servers (all were paying too, had to be all access to get on the servers) than all of PS2 and PS1 servers combined.

Cater to the paying members and your game will do well. Like EQ.

Cater to the self identifying casuals, and it fails. Like PS2.

Feel free to submit your evidence that proves that wrong. If it exists.

Nothing is perfectly linear in practice, because generally things are already pushed near the limits and you are hitting all kinds of nasty thresholds. So if the average computer is committing let's say 20% of one core to process I/O data, scaling up 10x = 200%? Now you have two cores mangling megabytes of data and fighting each other for access to it. What if hdd is slow enough that all the I/O work cripples texture loading at every goddamned corner? Hitches everywhere. More ram required to store all the information. What about the internet pipe? Suddenly we are talking hundreds of kb/s if not megabytes, which means much greater sensititivty to disruptions because any problem means so much more data missing.

... and 99.9% of the time it doesn't matter what the vast majority of them does so you waste a lot computing power on I/O and stealing from the framerate for no good reason. Last time i checked framerate is king. Also do you happen to remember PS2 at the release where 48v48 was enough to destroy performance? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why the rendering range was set up to a distance very similar to distances between bases. They hoped for players splitting themselves into a skirmish sized groups but once the zerg proved dominant "strategy" all non-top-of-the-line-intel players were experiencing framerates of 10. Months of o.m.f.g. effort were required to bring the game to a playable state in scenarios in which it is often played.

Last time i heard it was not exactly playable, far from that.
There is no low hanging fruit to be had here. OMFG was months of laborious optimization and at the top end of hardware you pay orders of magnitude more for a modest increase of performance, a case of diminishing returns. Unless you are google or amazon and have infinite money to throw at the problem, you can't afford it.

Yes, because the lowest common denominator makes money. And there are not that many hardcore players blowing 3k on top of the line intel and black razor xtreme leet XXX999 gfx adapter to build a sound business around.

Different genre is different.
Wouldn't EQ happen to be a game in which you can click once and have the 1 minute long combat simulated for you and that runs on cooldowns to reduce the number of actions just like every goddamned MMORPG out there? Guess what the cooldowns are for - to limit the amount of inbound/outbound data among other things. Here we are spamming projectiles 10 times per second. It's a hard problem and that's why AAA FPS games boast about having 64 players at a time. What an achievement!
Are there instances in EQ? These can be farmed out to a separate machine. Capacity of 5k is a nice advertising gimmick but i really doubt you will ever see 5k in 1 place or that all 5k people need to know what remaining 4999 are doing at all times. Your idea means exactly that
And funnily enough, EQ can be ran on a toaster today so there is no barrier to entry in the form of a 2k computer.

EVE that actually sees thousands of players in one place works on cooldowns of everything AND it has to slow time to 1% when things go south.

You're making alot of speculation. For one, you're assuming the game is suddenly going to become uber popular. I've seen what 'everyone' on the continent within render range will do. Its not doom and gloom. You will see this happen during some three way fights on alerts. In such fights you will have the entire playerbase in one area. I didn't see lag. I didn't see FPS drops. And I didn't see any server anomalies.

The great thing is, PS2 is no longer limited to 4GB of ram now that its a 64 bit only program. As far as uber machine costing 3000 bucks.. I don't know where you got that figure, but mine was less than $800. i7 4790k and GTX 970 powers through anything PS2 can throw at it.

MMOs evolve and sometimes your hardware has to evolve with it you can't play EQ or EQ2 on the same machine you did ten years ago, or even 5 years ago. Why should PS2 be different? Because its a shooter? A game is a game. A MMO is a MMO.

As for who is spending money, its easy to tell. Login and look around. The cert farmers are wearing default camos. Default voice packs. And lacking the up arrows when they join random squads. I'm not worried about losing them. In fact I believe if we lose them we'll gain more paying customers. In fact I know of several that would come back if the average player didn't cert farm. These several are defined as whales in these F2P games. Capable of spending 1000s of dollars on a single game. But they want a quality experience. Zerglings kind of ruin it for them.

My "speculation" is actually grounded in some amount of knowledge about how computing works. And no, i am not assuming anything, I am saying that current pops + 6km render range = unmitigated disaster for a vast majority of players. Your vision is nothing but a pipedream.
Btw, show me any evidence that the world record in PS2 was done without any culling, then we'll talk.

Everybody in the industry is in the race to make the epic-est game of them all to make a massive buck, obvious component of that being a massive number of players and action, so how do you explain there being ZERO massive FPS games except for Planetside and the smooth experience for 64 players is considered something to be proud of in the genre?

Cool. Now consider this - in the simplest terms assuming there are no tricks employed, 10 fold increase is not 8, 12 or 16GB, more like 30GB. Ok, let's assume that 1GB is core game, data is 2GB, still 21GB. Unless you breathe PS2, why would you need such an overkill of a computer? Which other game requires anywhere near that much RAM?

And yet WoW never required cutting edge hardware, which is not something that can be said about PS2. WoW also is playable with 300ms ping because accuracy of the position is pretty much irrelevant, acquired targets are acquired and attacks and spells go through obstacles and are on long cooldowns. Not entirely trivial to scale up, but compared to fps games its walk in the park. Shooters require much more information to be sent continuously for smooth experience.
PS2 ran like an *** at the release, continues to do so to a degree if you don't have intel cpu, and despite the large amount of effort cannot even be made to run decently on PS4.

You say this... but then go on to state this:

Do a little research on Methods, Objects, and Instances and then come back.

If you actually had some knowledge in computing, specifically programming (I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you mean you know how to put a computer together), you would know that increasing render distance would not increase RAM load.

Everything comes down to the server.

As for PS2 running like crap, it ran fine when my computer was a Phenom II and a HD 5870. Not blazing like it is now. But good enough to squeeze out 40fps on a large fight at ultra setting (no shadows). All 989, Verant, SOE, and Daybreak games have always been processor heavy. That included PS1. And includes H1Z1, Landmark and Everquest Next.

First off, during intense battles, the game reduces the render distance so that you can have a framerate. Second, in reply to your previous post, 150 FPS/400 is .375 FPS. If you can play like that, have fun. Nobody else can. I know that computing probably doesn't work like this(I'm no expert on this at all), but it's probably a good approxamation.

Also, as to your talk about cert farmers and such- it's off topic. Please stop. This is about velocities and render distances, not how PS2 is not your ideal game.

EDIT: Same for you, Vaphell. This isn't a discussion about how you dislike PS2's base design. It's about velocities and whether they should conform to real life or not.

Vehicles should (and DO god damnit) have advantage in open field fights

The only PROBLEM is lack of game design to encourage more and constant field fights, and instead the game is directly designed to get people to skip directly from 1 cluster frack base fight to the next.

That is, quite frankly, the only REAL problem with armor in this game.

That and tanks really should have Coax...

but tanks are EASILY more powerful in the open than infantry are and if you think otherwise you're goddamn terrible in a tank.

They're not ungodly powerful that leaves infantry with NO HOPE of fighting back, and MASSES of infantry will easily overwhelm a lonely tank, but don't play stupid then.

PEOPLE. PLEASE STOP TAKING THIS THREAD OFF TOPIC. This thread is about velocities and maybe render distances. Ronin, if you can't read the post directly above you, then you're probably beyond hope.

Render distance isn't reduced for framerate purposes. Its done to reduce loads on the server. And unless they're skimping on the specs of their servers (which is likely) then its a software issue in logically giving us what's going on. The amount of data pushed by PS2 and just about every other MMO over the internet is negligible. The only people that may suffer on the network side are dial up users. And doubt there is any.

If you don't like what we have to say, do us both a favor and ignore us and move on. You're not required to respond, and I'm not going to cater to your limited since of morality when it comes to what is on topic and what isn't. I believe it is relevant and that is all that matter. I could give two craps what your opinion is on that.

If you've read the opening post at all, then you'd see that this thread is, indeed, about realism, especially velocities. If you want to talk about your proposed changes to Planetside, have fun. Nobody's stopping you, but please do it on an appropriate thread, or make your own.

Also, while I'm not an expert on computers by any means, your explanation of render distance doesn't make sense. The server still has to process everyone and everything. It's not like it everything that isn't rendered stops existing, but it stops being shown to you in particular. The reason why they would reduce render distance would have nothing to do with bandwidth- it's purely clientside. Rather, rendering thousands of people and even more projectiles is really computationally intensive.

You don't need my explanation. It was a dev that said it was set server side. We can set render distance of the world to 6000 ingame. But the server hard caps infantry at 300 (about 350ish actually) and 500m for vehicles (goes up to about 650 for air). But if you don't wish to believe me, do whatever, I don't give a damn if you want to live in a little box. Its common knowledge.

Using basic math, 6000^2/300^2 is 400. You're asking our computers to render 400 times more stuff. My computer, and probably that of most others would explode, catch on fire, and scream in terror in that order if it had to render that much more. Even if you set the render distance to 6000, that's just terrain, which isn't nearly so bad as people and projectiles.

Also, do you have a quote on the whole serverside vs clientside thing? It's not that I don't believe you, but quotes are always nice.

You know, I've been thinking about that last night.

Let's ignore dynamic Infantry rendering right now and assume a player sees all other players within his "applicable engagement." To start with, if a server has N players on it, it will, at least, always receive N updates. Let's say there's 20 players in an area. The server receives 20 updates and sends out 380 updates, wherein each client receives information about the other nineteen clients. In a 96x96 fight that's 192 updates incoming and 36672 updates outgoing, and that's only for that region. Let's use the maximum PlanetSide 2 pipe dream and say all continents are full - 7992 players on four continents with 666 players per faction per continent, excluding VR and Koltyr. These players are not all in the same place at once so, for simplicity, let's divide them into groups of disconnected 96x96 battles, which is 42 rounded up. (That doesn't seem spatially reasonable given what we know about the maps and the lattice; but, let's just run with this for now.) The number of updates would be 7992 incoming to 1540224 (36672 x 42) outgoing.

That means, assuming all load from traffic happens near-simultaneously, a PlanetSide 2's server's original specifications was hopefully going to pace 1.548 million player updates within a certain latency. With nanites.

Note that up to this point I've been using the term "player updates" and not "packets." Not only have I excluded other things being updated but I've also not given consideration to how big each update may be. I don't know what kind of encoding PlanetSide 2 uses for different kinds of updates and how big its typical UDP packet is. Each packet might be a clown car of players for all I know.

It's a big number. That's all.

I am not talking about static **** though i'd argue loading props for rendering purposes does strain the computer a bit, it's still irrelevant polygons that are pushed to the card and shown for no good reason.
Render distance means more people "exist" in your world, more bullets flying, more damage being dealt, more consumables being consumed, more deployables being deployed. You have to slurp that data from the server and store it somewhere and refresh it in realtime which is probably going to be of linear nature at the very least, even if 99.9% is completely irrelevant to your situation. Keeping tabs on 200peeps in the meatgrinder, maybe, especially when they are filtered out by culling techniques, is not the same as actually keeping tabs on the whole continent pop without any filters.
Another thing is that I/O is generally a CPU intensive process and scales badly. More communication stuff on the bus, less geometry data/texture data being sent to gfx on demand etc, reducing fluidity. Computers tend to have major bottlenecks.

You disagreed that culling is only for servers and there is no effect on framerate but given how massive meatgrinders bring any computer that is not a beefy intel to its knees i don't think it's true. Culling is done also to reduce strain on clients but yeah, it's the server that needs it the most.

what the hell? I meraly base design it in passing, and even if i did it's still relevant to the puzzle as a whole.
The velocities are a function of in game distances. In game distance is intimately related to performance. Base design is related to performance too otherwise we would have huge imposing facilities instead of a couple of smurf shacks slapped on top of each other, only to be steamrolled by a 100+ blob. Then, when the vast majority of encounters are compressed to 100m, maybe, then in order to make shotguns, smgs, scout rifles, battle rifles, carbines, assault rifles, lmgs and sniper rifles unique you have to cripple the general velocity levels to make any difference between the classes and to make weapon choice remotely relevant.

Unless the game somehow provides massive render range, massive continents much bigger than the current 8x8 and massive everything else there is no point discussing realistic anything.

Packets are obviously going to stuff alot of those in at one time. Now we also have to take into account that at 6000m, not EVERYONE will be included in there that's on a continent. In addition I would use some sort of method to ignore things outside of Line of Sight. I mean there is no reason to render something you cannot see nor interact with. At least past a certain distance.

So someone 6km out in the middle of a field would render. But someone 6km out inside a tower or biolab wouldn't. And I'm debating on the 6000m number simply because you wouldn't see infantry that far out and barely able to see vehicles. I'd have to test to see what the sweet spot is. I chose it originally because its the halfway point from a warpgate to warpgate on average.

Realistically (no pun intended) it might have to be something like 1000-1500m for infantry and 2000-3000m for vehicles... which is something I'm pretty damn sure the server could handle. And the only reason I'm conceding it down to these numbers is because we're just not going to be able to physically see infantry past that.. not without a large screen running in 4k resolution. At least I think.

Next time I'm flying around, I'll throw down a market and see how small the marked area gets and compare its size to a normal vehicle.

Not rendering anything that can't be realistically interacted with would help clients immensely. As will their personal sliders. Most already reduce it and thus wouldn't be affected other than a random tank shell fired from a few clicks away. But for the servers.. they usually run more than one CPU. I know Minecraft DS's run dual processors.

It would depend on how they utilize those assets. Like I said.. its a software overhaul more than likely that would need to be done.

... but even if there was 1500m render distance, it would still be 25 times more computationally intensive. 1.2 times more intensive is a lot- 25 times would still make everyone's computer die.

Why is the server dealing with something as complex as occlusion culling when deciding which things to tell individual clients to update in your scenario? That's just going to slow the whole ordeal down without preserving some sort of impressive spatial partitioning model. The naive approach where we just maintain players in base-region buckets and then repackage the contents of that region-bucket and some adjacent ones into an update after running a distance test to be sent out seems to be most expedient on the server's end.