First of all, and I say this with all sincerity and humility, I thank each and every one of your feedback and efforts to help make Planetside 2 run better. It remains the challenge of any PC developer to deal with the nearly infinite number of hardware and software configurations out there. I recognize that, and have been dealing with it for over 35 years. I also believe that the reason people get so angry at the fact that everything doesn't work the way they want is that they REALLY want PS2 to be their game. That's a Good Thing(tm). I'll take anger over ambivalence any day. So don't worry that you're hurting our feelings. I do wish there was a bit less hyperbole, but this is the internet. *grin* Furthermore, the fact that even within this forum there are so many people contradicting each other (1000% improvement with a few configuration changes vs no improvement from any update ever) should accentuate the fact that PC optimization is just hard. The games that have few optimization problems are the games that just don't reach as far. In "Old School" vernacular, the best way to optimize is to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yeah, we didn't do that. Size, our boon and our bane, matters. Here are a couple of basic facts. (1) There is no magic formula for rendering a hundred guys around you, particularly at a high resolution with high detail, awesome sound, dense textures, etc. At some point, it's just a lot of work to do... that's why it isn't in every game you play. Regardless of opinion, you have some of the best coders in the biz on this team and for what they have accomplished I am proud. (2) Frame rates have gone up on average, and we HAVE added more features. For every speed increase, there is also a bit more that we add to the game that consumes some of it. Know this, we collect frame rate information every day as you're playing and we know the effect our optimizations have had. For some, the frame rate may go down...for others, it may go up... but for the average, it has gone up. Every single patch (and yes, even patches that literally change nothing to do with rendering) we hear that people's frame rates have gone up, AND down, and sideways and doubled and halved and caused their cat to start mooing. It's all part of the fun of PC development. Still, we gather our data, run our compatibility testing, and work to eek out another few milliseconds. I say all this in the hopes that I can focus some of your frustration in alignment with my own. Not as an excuse as to why things are slower than they should be, but a reason. In conclusion, I just wanted to let everyone know that we continue to fight hard to get the game faster, not only to give people a higher frame rate, but to also allow design to add more gameplay. We also continue to listen to your feedback, both positive and negative. We talk about you guys every single day, and what we can do to make the game better. Our spouses may not think very highly of you, since we promised to paint that room weeks ago... but we keep on, every day and night, trying to make PS2 better and better. Keep the Faith.
You make my cat moo codeforge :3 ..Also first. On a personal note with the game, I agree with everything said in the main post. My fps has gone down by about 2 moo's from last patch but I sympathise with how hard it is to get all this going considering no other game out there will render 100s of players in the same zone. While I'm at it, you guys wrecked what was already a broken platoon management window. I'm about to open up a college for platoon management cus half the codes we had before didn't work, now they are removed yet some still work. In sum, it needs a total revamp even after the changes. Colors are bad, except for delta, I like the black. We have a color blind officer in our outfit who would like white considered as a squad/faction color
Thank you codeForge for coming and writing this. Thank you to you and everyone on this team that is working on this. And just to ask the impertinent question, what is the average frame rate? What is the highest frame rate anyone gets? EDIT: And to throw my personal experience out there, I have always gotten good frame rates. ~30 in big fights pre GU2 and ~45 now.
Id like to make a request to SOE. When enabling physx, i would like if you could add the option of moving the entire physics rendering over to gpu (that for vehicles etc) together with physx... for us using a card purely for physx, that should greatly improve fps, as it would take a big load off the cpu, which is the bottleneck.
As a fellow coder I have only one thing to say: Thank you! I think you've already achieved something great here and every little thing you add and improvement you make just makes this game better. Back before beta, I had my doubts that a game of the scale PS2 was being touted as was even possible. I was sure that having that many people around shooting each other while keeping a good frame rate and not crashing a server, was simply not feasible (flashbacks to crashing WoW servers with not even 200 players gathered in one area, or EVE battles that turned into slideshows slower than the ones I present at work). But you guys made it happen. Big battles, hundreds of players each doing their own thing, explosions going off every which way. You proved it was possible. Are there still issues ? Certainly. Can things be even more epic, and more importantly, is the team behind PS2 capable of delivering the SCALE everyone has always dreamt of in a game ? I am convinced it is so. Please keep up the good work, and make us a truly legendary game I for one, trust that you can do it. PS: And please don't forget about cheaters. Performance is very important but so is making cheating as hard as possible (even at the expense of some performance perhaps).
glad to recieve some proof that the devs actually care (even if though one could argue that you are not 100% sincere), whenever i think about how much you guys have to work with, how big this game is, it must be a complete nightmare. im glad you guys still work on this game, even though it must be a pain in the but. hopefully this game can last for a long time, and who knows? actually become more than just a grind for teh almighty cert points. but enough kudos WHY LOW FPS? GAME IS BAD! SOE SUK! WAH WAH WAH *insert more whining here*
Emphasis on key word. IE: Receiving data for guys that are behind walls/hills and then having to multiCore process 1000x more variables client-side that won't even be used until they step into Line of Sight. ....still waiting (patiently of course) for Cycle's explanation on why we're even being sent this data (while the guys who are in line of sight over 500m away continue to get server culled) EDIT: I appreciate the responses in any case, obviously everyone does.
Oh and just to make it clear, when I say hundreds of people in a battle, I don't mean hundreds of people in a continent... I mean hundreds of people in one small area, like The Crown. Your computer may see a hundred people around you, but the server is running thousands.
Iller, that's a great question, and one which people often ask. We send you people around you because you may turn around any second and you probably want them already loaded and ready to render. Also, you want to hear their footsteps, see their shadows, see their tracers, etc. The cost of a person behind you in pure CPU cost is a fraction of the guy in your view frustum.
It wouldn't have the effect you'd think it would. For the eye candy stuff like dustclouds, sure, but for actual game physics like that falling piece of wreckage? That needs to run in sequence, one object at a time, or you end up with objects falling through or into each other. GPGPU physics or the dedicated PhysX boards are brilliant for tasks that are highly parallel, but for serial problems they perform much worse than your CPU - trying to offload *everything* would hurt your performance more than it helps.
SO glad to see this. Proves me right aggain. My money is well invested here since there are devs who care. Still got nightmares from DICE and their way to "handle" their community *shivers*
thank you for the motivation and for echoing most rational users thoughts now that being said the roadmap has concerned me since it was introduced, surely you have some extremely talented and dedicated people but you have set so much for yourselves to do i often wonder if it is just to much... i suppose time will tell but remember, you have made a game to last (although obviously not in its current state) try not to kill youself getting it done!
Wait... Does this mean that you are optimizing for different hardware items and thus implying that your internal calculation-code (e.g. calculating player movements, projectiles, sound, game mechanics) performance is perfect already? I dont believe this... But it sounds like you are focusing only on implementing new features and improvin performance for single harware models... How about general optimiziations like getting rid of OOP and going back to plain old data structures for faster calculations blabla...
The problem your missing is that when you have multiple Hardware setups you cant just simply write a line of code that is perfect for everything. If they wanted to write the engine for One spacific setup alone then they could get a vasty greater performace then now, thats one of the reason the consoles have lasted as long as they have since you can write the engine and code to only one setup. Once you go into the multitude of Hardware and Software setups, including drivers, then How your code intereacts with each can be vastly diffrent.
Okay, well, why can't we have the option to lower the high detail, dense textures, awesome sound, etc if we want to render more people... I should be allowed to lower the detail, etc on models, textures or sounds, particle effects, etc so I can see more people.
Yup, this is why PS3 and Xbox360 still can running the game that need more performance in PC(windows).
Within two days this will be ignored and people will be back to whining, but at least maybe we'll get a minor respite.
Any thoughts on deep packet inspection breaking the data being sent to the game, thus breaking the game? I have a hefty thread about this with the information I have collected, but this jist is that on one of my internet connections the game flashes, freezes, and crashes until the ISP turns off their DPI throttling around 11pm, where as the game does not do this when connected to my other ISP that no longer uses DPI throttling. I'm talking literally toggling the problem on and off several times in the span of 10 minutes here, on the same computer, simply by logging out and changing connections, and logging back in.
