Your dynamic infantry rendering solution hit critical mass last night.

I know they announced a patch for this next week/this week coming up: But an idea in case whatever they try doesn't work..

Render everything in a very large distance, but mix two solutions together for objects at greater distance:

For all I care use 2d models, fine. As well, use prediction or network smoothing, making the server have to send packets downstream about distant targets less often.

This way you have less memory usage for the lower end rigs you're trying to accommodate, and you have lower packet counts for targets over a certain range.

Although.. If someone is a pilot or an infiltrator.. Perhaps just make every infantry a 2d model, but don't send them less-frequent packets with prediction in between.. Because these two groups of players more than anyone specialize in fighting from a range and should illegitimately be able to see from said range.

-I'm assuming here that the server can handle the load, but this has been adjusted to work with lower-end clientside PCs and poor bandwidth users. And honestly, if this is the case just give us a slider allowing us to choose ranges/distant model quality that suits our rig's performance.

I don't think 2d models would work that much, sniping or hitting long ranged target 2d models, together with its hitbox would I think make things harder.

I just cant fathom, how a you can make a game, that has main selling points of 2000x2000x2000 battles that not only no rig in this world can run ( despite them saying the game should run awesome on low spec rigs ) but there is no point going to the battle cause you cant SEE the battles............. how can you use a engine that cant manage it? I just LOVE to know the thoughts of the devs on that. ' Hey lets make a sequel to PS1, use a engine that doesn't support high end rigs, doesnt support our main selling point, lets do it!'

Then don't snipe at the crown.

If render distance weren't dynamic than your frame rate would plummet to 5 FPS and then you guys would complain about 5 FPS.

Technology has limitations. The correct thing to do in that situation is leave the tech plant and go to another area.

How about I snipe wherever the **** I want and they fix the game so it's capable of what it's advertised for?

6,000 players per server and half of them at the crown. Even an overclocked I7 can't render that many players.

I'm sure they can optimize even more for the 4-core I5's and above, so instead of rendering 200 players at 10 meters, they will render 400 players at 20 meters, still well above sniping range.

They didn't just use an engine, they built it themselves. But I do think it's funny, Planetside's problem was that it was so ambitious that at the time you needed a supercomputer to run it. So they come back 10 years later and say "Now! Now we have the computers to do it properly!"... and then quadruple the number of people on a continent so we end up right back where we were with Planetside, needing a supercomputer to run it properly. I'd have settled for half that many players if it meant everyone could play at a decent framerate with good render distance.

Not in this engine no, but why make such a game, use such a engine, if you cannot do it!? I rather have far less eyecandy and a working selling point of PS2, then this crap.

And if they really made this engine on there own, they failed miserable.

eye candy is what the GPU does
Rendering players is what the CPU does

You can set render distance to 10 meters so you only see skybox and still have low FPS, I tried it with my old CPU before upgrading.

Doesn't anything about how the game looks conflict with rendering players if its CPU? Because if it is CPU, that would mean that 'Planetside 2, 6000 players per continent, will never see it, not today, but! In 5 years from now, you can play PlanetSide 2 as it was suppose to!' Thats terrible marketing xD Cause in reality, it is doing this =s

I don't even know where to begin. You really think that it's totally ok that in a game marketed for and based around massive warfare, a player's only recourse is to leave the fighting?

That depends. They should support massive battles as much as possible, using graceful degradation of effects and models.

There is of course a point where you have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to the lowest supported system requirements (LSSR) and internet bandwidths.

If your LSSR has a limitation on a certain amount of player models (which I agree should be higher than what it is currently) then you should apply the same degradation of drawing player models within a radius to all players not just the ones with the LSSR. Doing so would give a tactical advantage to better PCs, allowing for a high-end PC zerg.

Similarly with bandwidth and the lowest quality cable modem of 256k or whatever it is. They need to find a way to squeeze through massive amounts of player information through a small pipe. Gracefully degrading when bandwidth is the bottleneck is much more complex.
They have to find a way to trim the fat in massive battles, removing the nice-to-haves from the netcode and only sending over the most basic important information:

12 bits for a unique playerId for each character currently on the continent, probably less than 4096. Obviously you want to pre-load all of the character information to the client, but a lot of times network programmers still choose to send over a 64bit accountId + 64bit characterId with each update packet, which is wasteful and you could easily save 116 bits if this were the case with PS2.

send 64bit x/y/z coordinates (192 bits!!) ONLY upon loading/syncing a character's location, and after synced try to maintain locations only by direction vector and distance from previous point. This way of updating a client is prone to syncing bugs that needs sophisticated periodic desync detection between a client and server, but if they can figure it out, can be used to squeeze out better performance in huge battles.

Some of this may seem obvious but I've seen a lot of inefficient netcode that doesn't scale well.

But still the fact remains if you don't want a degraded fight, leave the zerg and go elsewhere.

Yes I finally found this thread! I would love to see an administrator comment on this issue. I cried last night when I ran into this problem

well tech plants were broken by the "fix" you can cap them in like 3min now zerg or no zerg so no problems there lol

this....you said it all.

Quoted for truth. Even with 133x3 we still had some absolutely Godawful battles. 266x3 would be twice as epic.

Saw each continent in half, connect them via rotating warp gates, halve the pop. Make it an epic in-game mega-earthquake event. Why not?

Tired of this crap. Bump.

if your render distance is 10m, uninstall now

I think the server can handle it. I remember some pretty big fights happening on West 01. Can anyone confirm they were bigger than now?

bump