Infantry render distance has been severely reduced since beta.

Gonna bump this thing again until we can get an answer of some kind.

BUt that is NOT how it works. When fighting in large scale battles inside of Tawrich once, I was seeing enemies at abotu 30-40 meters away, but the ones right in front of me (and a threat) were going in and out of view.

That fact that when INSIDE of a base I was even getting characters not rendering, is an issue, but to have the game arbitrarily pick what guys to render and what ones not, even if the ones not rendering on the closes to you, then its ******.

The heavier the fight, the lesser is the render distance.
Until you can only see 10m and you can t see the 100 people standing 11m away.

Lets keep this thread up until its fixed ...

It's inherent in any game that allows an unbounded number of players in one spot. When that number starts to stress the server something has got to give, either server lag or dropping render distance. They'll increase efficiency over time, and that will help, but it will never go away.

well right now the render distance is giving to the point where the game is unplayable. one step to the right or left can literally put you in the line of fire from people you did not see because they were not drawn. that fact ALONE removes any semblance of tactics from this game. whoever has the fastest reflexes to react to the wack-a-mole wins.

what we are saying is they need to put a floor on this somehow, and get some more give from somewhere else.

I seem to remember MAG handling this fine

If this isn't fixed, I won't be playing PS2 very long at all.

There's absolutely no point to playing a sniper when the only thing your scoped view renders are vehicles.

As a pilot this is horrendous, but that's why I have my trusty allies waltzing forwards letting me know of the dangers ahead! Still, it's definitely a problem. I can see why it's like that atm and I hope they'll get to improving it once all this optimization thing gets sorted out.

not just infantry not rendering but has anyone had a problem when you are flying around and the ammo tower appears right infront of you and you crash into it?

Sorry I don't own a console, and wasn't even considering them. It's also much easier to create something for a single set of hardware than literally thousands of configurations. Invalid argument here I'm afraid

Yes, it seems to happen on low/med settings. Increasing overall quality thingy to high seems to help. I could be wrong though.

BUMP

If you can't increase the amount of people that render because of your server hardware, then increase your capacity or stop advertising the game as being anything other than a slightly bigger shooter.

Not entirely. I've been in many situations where I was getting locked on from ground, and there wasn't anyone. All I could see was a friendly lightning near the cap point, when I got a little bit closer, I saw 2 infantry on the roof (the roof, those heavies were closer to me). You won't notice this infantry draw distance while on the ground that much, but when you are flying, you'll definitely notice this thing...

Funny thing is, the dynamic render distance can be a little funky and render a guy off in the distance that you see as standing completely still (even though he's probably not and probably isn't there at all anymore), and you can actually shoot at and kill that guy as though he was still standing there. When my NC team was stuck in our Indar warpgate, I was able to snipe several guys outside of the outpost just to the west that appeared to just be standing there dumbly, all while staying just inside the shield. Had to be a bit quick about it, as they would usually only stay there for several seconds before disappearing. I'm imagining scenarios in which multiple of them probably had already run indoors only to be killed by a sniper out of nowhere they were probably sure was a hacker.

So yeah, they need to fix this. I know it's something of a necessity, but they need to find ways to ensure a reasonable minimum render distance. I'm sure there are a number of other things they could do to reduce the information that has to be sent - dynamically reduce terrain draw distance (I.E., geometry information), particle effect quality/rendering, prioritize enemies over friendlies, etc.

Then their network appears to be wimpy as all hell.

Forget the bugs, this is the biggest issue bar none that SOE needs to get straight. I am inches away from walking away from this game in its entirety because this render problem is completely game breaking. I see all kinds of complaints about balance and other things but none of that matters when you are getting enemies popping into existence mere inches from you and, even worse, untendered foes actually gunning you down. It has broken the game entirely.

And I will add to the others in announcing that distance is not always the factor. I was assaulting a tech plant today and when I scaled to the second floor in my LA I was quite surprised to find a bunch of friendlies (most shooting at 'nothing) and no enemies because the area had been hotly contested just seconds before. I strolled on up to the generator, overloaded it and then went to sit in the corner to defend my overload when suddenly over 20 enemies just materialized out of thin air. For the rest of the battle it was all rubber banding, popping in and out and generally a worthless battle. Not one death was avoidable and not a single kill felt like it was an actual kill because they were likely receiving the exact same problems with me. Further, I would have to empty 2 clips or more to kill some and then suddenly, I would pop a full health HA with one or two bullets.

This is NOT a 'massive' FPS if your engine is not capable of handling the massive part. If you can't render the populations as they are then you simply need to admit defeat and reduce them. Really, you're going to get reduced pops anyway. The difference is the lower pops are going to come from those that are disgusted in the game mechanics and quite only to never even look back.

Seriously SOE, the LEAST you can do is mention this and let us know you actually are working on it. As your current 'state of the game' post suggests, you have no plans on addressing this at the moment and that in simply not acceptable. Without this addressed, NONE of the strong points in your game matters at all as it completely negates all of it. What is going to keep me here and not chase me to BF or CoD when you can't even render something to shoot at?

QFT. Watching infantry pop in and out of view at a moderate distance is bothersome. Having 10 people suddenly pop into view within shotgun distance inside a base is just flat out game breaking.
I would play withh 8 bit graphics right now if it meant a static decent draw distance but in the current state... the only time I can use "massive" to describe the game is it followed by "PILE"

The render distance has not been touched. Render distance is actually a cap on the total number of people that can be drawn in a given area. If we increase that number too much it will mean a massive slowdown. If you want to test this for yourself simply go out to the boonies with a friend. You'll see what I mean.

What's changed since beta is there are consistently more people in a given area.

We will work on this issue once we come up for air on the bigger technical issues causing crashing and lag. We can make this better quickly once we're focused on it.

Smed