IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited September 2013
You should use dx9 fullscreen, no vsync, no AO, raw input on.
(dual gpu setups aren't tested for input delay, so no promises, but i recommend sacrificing fps for responsiveness by using SFR if you are going to use dual gpu)
What IronHorse said. You should have everything but AF and AA off for max performance while still having things look good. High particles and textures are good too. If you get fps drop end game turn infestation to minimal.
Now we can really see the hit reg issues. First 5 mins I was merking all the filthy peasants. I noticed full shotgun rounds doing 0 damage. Blood goes everywhere, shotgun down skulks throat. Test your game please. AND FIX IT.
Like I've always said : if you can provide video evidence of actual hit registration issues you will win front page credits, a copy of the game, and some other goodies from me. (video must be 720p 30 fps minimum, h264 compression, and net_stats enabled)
Until then, my guess is you are either missing the tight hit boxes, or experiencing high latency /low tick rate.
Yeah... 26 ping. And I guess everyone else with high end gaming gear just makes this all up. Get a 120-144hz screen with 1ms input lag and you will see how fail hit reg is on all servers. I guess you would have to play the game though. QQ Does the hitbox not cover the models? almost like you stuck some boxes inside the model that are paper thin. That or hit reg fails sup[er hard and you need to code better.
Give me the right to use an aimbot for a day and you can have all the videos of hit reg fail you want. DEAL?
You all better start treating each other with a little more respect, and some of you need to start thinking about how you can be more constructive around here, because I for one am getting pretty tired of reading through this crap. I'm feeling like maybe some house cleaning around here is in order.
The hitbox issue is a hard one to properly measure and quantify so I won't try to do that. I'm an European player playing mostly on US servers due to better community and teamplay there (everyone speaks the same language, and people tend to be more chilled out). My avg ping is 130-140ms.
In build 254, my alien play was rather decent (actually, it was better than that, with skulk kdr often hitting 10+).
Now it's crap. The issue seems to heavily correlate with moving targets. That's why the marine strafe jumping made it so much worse. I do understand the strafe jumping, being a 'trick movement', is supposed to allow good marines to defend themselves. But there are many 'perfect' hits, where you see the enemy player model right where it should be, you bite, nothing happens, you missed. And to add insult to injury, often you can see blood being drawn, and the marine grunting being hurt. In previous builds, there were rarely situation when you died and was like 'WTF, those were three perfect bites!'. Now it happens all the times.
Based on my on my experience, (way back from NS1 tech demo :P, and NS2 betas), I would say, something is off.
But to be fair, there may be other factors here. Reinforced' issues with input might have thrown me off my play. The player base dropped a bit, and higher end players stayed in the game. Since the code says the hitboxes are ok, it might be a subjective issue.
Either way, I still love the game. And I'm incredibly happy I don't have to reboot to windows to play couple of rounds. I'm getting my shadow badge ASAP. The linux version is well worth it.
Blackscreen bug is starting to become mildly annoying. It happens randomly when you change maps. Some people play in DX9 mode and have it happening, others in DX 11 and it still happens. Also there seem to be two diffrent kind of blackscreen bugs. People who just have a completly black screen and others who have black shilouettes running around. Like there are still some atmospheric light cones visible, aswell as light coming from the skybox, but otherwise the whole geometry itself is being rendered as pitch black except infestation.
BTW bugs. On 64 bit Ubuntu 13.10, the game crashes when it goes over 2GB of mem usage. Steam, launched via terminal, shows OOM errors, certain visual effects get messed up (fade blink effects), then the game crashes.
Great patch guys. 256 broke the game for 40 minutes or so (non-native resolution bug) but a workaround was found really fast, and then it was promptly fixed which was good. I'm above all glad to have all the input lag fixed. Game finally feels as smooth as 251. I've been beyond frustrated with Reinforced, so it's just nice to have it all over with.
Just avoid major engine re-work patches for deadlines. Switching to SDL2.0, OpenGL, is a ton of work, and putting a deadline on such changes that inherently are liable to massive amounts of instability can be a bad idea. I'm assuming you guys won't need to make such changes again, but it's something to keep in mind. You could've released the Reinforced content without any engine changes and nobody would've had all the instability and gameplay issues.
Biodome plays quite well now. It's still not as fast as the other maps, but it's closer. I've finally gotten the chance to actually play it without the massive performance issues, and it's a fun map. I've only had a few decent games on it so not much room for judging, but I think it has a lot of potential, and I like the deviation from the standard map format by making it taller. Makes the game more fun over all with more variety. Whether having such a map is balanced or not is another story, but we won't find out unless we experiment with new designs right? I personally really like it as it actually feels like playing on a different map instead of just looking like it, especially with the lerk. Looks great too.
Often when I start calling BS on bites/bullets landing properly, I pull up net_stats and find that the server is unable to handle the game (tickrate drops down from 30 to 10-20).
This is very common on US servers (I'm on West Coast USA, and wont play above 100 ping), and I've actually taken to joining random populated servers, confirming tickrate drops, and then letting all (usually 24) players know that the lag, rubberbanding, and hitreg issues are caused by the server being bad, not the game.
This is why I mostly try to play on the KKG servers, i don't (for the most part) have any server related issues and gameplay is smooth and hitreg is good.
Most of these players are greens, who most likely would not stay if they thought the issue was the game and not the server.
In short, if (when?) server performance is improved, I believe that most complaints about hitreg will go away.
P.S. Hitboxes COULD be increased in size a bit to compenstate. The hit area being the model itself is tighter than most games I've played (bullets going through the skulks legs, for example
Often when I start calling BS on bites/bullets landing properly, I pull up net_stats and find that the server is unable to handle the game (tickrate drops down from 30 to 10-20).
This is very common on US servers (I'm on West Coast USA, and wont play above 100 ping), and I've actually taken to joining random populated servers, confirming tickrate drops, and then letting all (usually 24) players know that the lag, rubberbanding, and hitreg issues are caused by the server being bad, not the game.
This is why I mostly try to play on the KKG servers, i don't (for the most part) have any server related issues and gameplay is smooth and hitreg is good.
Most of these players are greens, who most likely would not stay if they thought the issue was the game and not the server.
In short, if (when?) server performance is improved, I believe that most complaints about hitreg will go away.
P.S. Hitboxes COULD be increased in size a bit to compenstate. The hit area being the model itself is tighter than most games I've played (bullets going through the skulks legs, for example
I really like your detailed post, but KKG has the same problems. It's something the dev needs to fix. When you put 40 rounds into a skulk not moving and he runs at you and kills you and goes on his merry way. That grinds my gears.
BTW bugs. On 64 bit Ubuntu 13.10, the game crashes when it goes over 2GB of mem usage. Steam, launched via terminal, shows OOM errors, certain visual effects get messed up (fade blink effects), then the game crashes.
I've already documented these in another post. And, they're certainly not limited to specific distributions or architectures. I suspect it may take some time to get development attention on this because we're the minority here. But, it's making for a difficult time getting friends to play considering they all use Linux. It's a shame everything can't be open source!
So yesterday I couldn't play because no servers where ready for 256 and today i can't play because no servers are ready for 257 ... And even thou it says the official server are rolled over to 257 I still cant join them.. (Versions do not match!!).. And by the way you say you have fixed the en_US black screen bug... But it's still fucking there!!!! just see the Steam forums.. So I still have to start Steam with LANG=en_us to make it work... Cmon guys.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
@b166erdk then there's a really good chance your game is not updated if you cannot join any servers (most were updated an hour after release) and that bug still exists for you.
I really like your detailed post, but KKG has the same problems. It's something the dev needs to fix. When you put 40 rounds into a skulk not moving and he runs at you and kills you and goes on his merry way. That grinds my gears.
Can you create a video of that? that clearly sounds like a bug and a video would help a lot to recreate it.
BTW bugs. On 64 bit Ubuntu 13.10, the game crashes when it goes over 2GB of mem usage. Steam, launched via terminal, shows OOM errors, certain visual effects get messed up (fade blink effects), then the game crashes.
I just tried and i could reproduce, but it crashed at 2.8 GB for me. Can you try to lower your texture settings and other settings too? i try to figure out why this happens, but i know that the game works fine for me on lower settings and i could only crash it when maxing everything out (or mostly everything)
It improved a lot, many report that before they crashed when loading now only crash after one or two games. It is an ongoing effort and should improve over the next patches
Got a lot better for me, I usually can play 2-3 matches (even very long ones) without crashing while I was crashing as soon as I entered the ready room in the previous build. Using DX11 and Texture Streaming here, since DX9 still crashed more on me last time I checked.
Didn't crash at all since I increased the addressable space to 3 GB with the workaround mentioned in a previous blog post.
So, what I've heard from before is that there is a bug that looks like the game is loading shaders on every mapchange, even though I've played every map a lot of times.
Only the Prechache part was required before. Is it a bug or a feature?
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
It's using the word "compiling" instead of "loading" when it loads the shaders. They're only actually compiled once. They still have to get loaded into memory if they're going to be used.
I just tried and i could reproduce, but it crashed at 2.8 GB for me. Can you try to lower your texture settings and other settings too? i try to figure out why this happens, but i know that the game works fine for me on lower settings and i could only crash it when maxing everything out (or mostly everything)
Actually, I have tried it on most settings. It seems to happen less often on low settings. I just keep textures on medium, and I also use texture streaming (tried both, seems to be better with streamed textures).
upgrade for gorgetunnel is free now? why? really......why? aliens are winning like more than 60% of all games (again). and i dont understand why people want to remove the new marine jump. its the only chance for rines to win battles against good aliens
upgrade for gorgetunnel is free now? why? really......why? aliens are winning like more than 60% of all games (again). and i dont understand why people want to remove the new marine jump. its the only chance for rines to win battles against good aliens
jeez calm down, some of the devs already said alien win rate is actually 54% ish if i remember correctly. Also time will tell... update is still fresh.
Servers seem pretty dead by the way, like 30 players max.
Comments
"Rightclick ns2.exe and go to properties - go to compatibility tab, check disable visual themes and disable desktop composition, apply, ok"
specs: win7 64 bits, amd phenom 955 Be, nvidia 660 gtx ti, 8 gb ram,
(dual gpu setups aren't tested for input delay, so no promises, but i recommend sacrificing fps for responsiveness by using SFR if you are going to use dual gpu)
And yes disable that work around.
What IronHorse said. You should have everything but AF and AA off for max performance while still having things look good. High particles and textures are good too. If you get fps drop end game turn infestation to minimal.
Yeah... 26 ping. And I guess everyone else with high end gaming gear just makes this all up. Get a 120-144hz screen with 1ms input lag and you will see how fail hit reg is on all servers. I guess you would have to play the game though. QQ Does the hitbox not cover the models? almost like you stuck some boxes inside the model that are paper thin. That or hit reg fails sup[er hard and you need to code better.
Give me the right to use an aimbot for a day and you can have all the videos of hit reg fail you want. DEAL?
In build 254, my alien play was rather decent (actually, it was better than that, with skulk kdr often hitting 10+).
Now it's crap. The issue seems to heavily correlate with moving targets. That's why the marine strafe jumping made it so much worse. I do understand the strafe jumping, being a 'trick movement', is supposed to allow good marines to defend themselves. But there are many 'perfect' hits, where you see the enemy player model right where it should be, you bite, nothing happens, you missed. And to add insult to injury, often you can see blood being drawn, and the marine grunting being hurt. In previous builds, there were rarely situation when you died and was like 'WTF, those were three perfect bites!'. Now it happens all the times.
Based on my on my experience, (way back from NS1 tech demo :P, and NS2 betas), I would say, something is off.
But to be fair, there may be other factors here. Reinforced' issues with input might have thrown me off my play. The player base dropped a bit, and higher end players stayed in the game. Since the code says the hitboxes are ok, it might be a subjective issue.
Either way, I still love the game. And I'm incredibly happy I don't have to reboot to windows to play couple of rounds. I'm getting my shadow badge ASAP. The linux version is well worth it.
Just avoid major engine re-work patches for deadlines. Switching to SDL2.0, OpenGL, is a ton of work, and putting a deadline on such changes that inherently are liable to massive amounts of instability can be a bad idea. I'm assuming you guys won't need to make such changes again, but it's something to keep in mind. You could've released the Reinforced content without any engine changes and nobody would've had all the instability and gameplay issues.
Biodome plays quite well now. It's still not as fast as the other maps, but it's closer. I've finally gotten the chance to actually play it without the massive performance issues, and it's a fun map. I've only had a few decent games on it so not much room for judging, but I think it has a lot of potential, and I like the deviation from the standard map format by making it taller. Makes the game more fun over all with more variety. Whether having such a map is balanced or not is another story, but we won't find out unless we experiment with new designs right? I personally really like it as it actually feels like playing on a different map instead of just looking like it, especially with the lerk. Looks great too.
Often when I start calling BS on bites/bullets landing properly, I pull up net_stats and find that the server is unable to handle the game (tickrate drops down from 30 to 10-20).
This is very common on US servers (I'm on West Coast USA, and wont play above 100 ping), and I've actually taken to joining random populated servers, confirming tickrate drops, and then letting all (usually 24) players know that the lag, rubberbanding, and hitreg issues are caused by the server being bad, not the game.
This is why I mostly try to play on the KKG servers, i don't (for the most part) have any server related issues and gameplay is smooth and hitreg is good.
Most of these players are greens, who most likely would not stay if they thought the issue was the game and not the server.
In short, if (when?) server performance is improved, I believe that most complaints about hitreg will go away.
P.S. Hitboxes COULD be increased in size a bit to compenstate. The hit area being the model itself is tighter than most games I've played (bullets going through the skulks legs, for example
I really like your detailed post, but KKG has the same problems. It's something the dev needs to fix. When you put 40 rounds into a skulk not moving and he runs at you and kills you and goes on his merry way. That grinds my gears.
I've already documented these in another post. And, they're certainly not limited to specific distributions or architectures. I suspect it may take some time to get development attention on this because we're the minority here. But, it's making for a difficult time getting friends to play considering they all use Linux. It's a shame everything can't be open source!
Can you create a video of that? that clearly sounds like a bug and a video would help a lot to recreate it.
I just tried and i could reproduce, but it crashed at 2.8 GB for me. Can you try to lower your texture settings and other settings too? i try to figure out why this happens, but i know that the game works fine for me on lower settings and i could only crash it when maxing everything out (or mostly everything)
Got a lot better for me, I usually can play 2-3 matches (even very long ones) without crashing while I was crashing as soon as I entered the ready room in the previous build. Using DX11 and Texture Streaming here, since DX9 still crashed more on me last time I checked.
Didn't crash at all since I increased the addressable space to 3 GB with the workaround mentioned in a previous blog post.
Only the Prechache part was required before. Is it a bug or a feature?
Actually, I have tried it on most settings. It seems to happen less often on low settings. I just keep textures on medium, and I also use texture streaming (tried both, seems to be better with streamed textures).
jeez calm down, some of the devs already said alien win rate is actually 54% ish if i remember correctly. Also time will tell... update is still fresh.
Servers seem pretty dead by the way, like 30 players max.