It's time for a feature freeze
kabab
Join Date: 2003-12-15 Member: 24384Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-12-15 Member: 24384Members, Constellation
With the latest patch the game has really fleshed out there is a stack of content which is awesome!
Although many of the performance issues from day one are still around, I don't think I'm alone here but stop adding features the most important thing now is to get the game running faster.
Now I understand not everone are programmers but those who are should solely focus on making it faster.
Perhaps adopting a tick tock strategy where one build focuses on speed and one on features.
Although many of the performance issues from day one are still around, I don't think I'm alone here but stop adding features the most important thing now is to get the game running faster.
Now I understand not everone are programmers but those who are should solely focus on making it faster.
Perhaps adopting a tick tock strategy where one build focuses on speed and one on features.
Comments
Only bit I'd agree with is that coding for multi-core use from the ground up tends to save time in the long run, too; you write functions that are designed to resist race conditions, and can redesign bottlenecks more easily with less code to take into account.
But again. It's a beta. It'll be done when it's ready, as usual. :)
I have said it before and I shall say it again, Rome was not built in a day! Some of these issues do not take a day to solve or a week or a month they take much design and architecting to do it right. I am sure we could just throw in cheap hacks to fix some of these issues but thats not just how we roll. Furthermore there is a lot of work to be done on many fronts and taking all of the engineering resources and placing them on one or two issues would be a colossal waste of time and resources. But then again, you have made games so you already know this :D
I have said it before and I shall say it again, Rome was not built in a day! Some of these issues do not take a day to solve or a week or a month they take much design and architecting to do it right. I am sure we could just throw in cheap hacks to fix some of these issues but thats not just how we roll. Furthermore there is a lot of work to be done on many fronts and taking all of the engineering resources and placing them on one or two issues would be a colossal waste of time and resources. But then again, you have made games so you already know this :D<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->I understand and appreciate the hard work :D
There are 2 things that bug me more then anything...
Pathing and server performance..
Don't you think both these things are relatively independent area's from any future new features and that getting these 2 things running well now is not going to be a waste since all the new stuff should benefit from it..
The game is awesome but when I try and play I want to cry because either things are lagging across my screen like mad or I spend half my time fighting with mac's, drifters' and arc's getting them to locations...
The new features in this patch definitely are nice the bloom, new fade, arc, phases gates but i'd trade all these things to fix the 2 issues I listed...
Also with the occlusion culling isn't that more of a GPU optimisation? why do that before other CPU optimisations? (unless of course this new method moving the culling from the cpu to the gpu I'm to sure how the old one worked)
Oh there is another massive performance hit which is pretty obvious is with the particles that problem has been around for a while and it really hurts your frame rate at the worst time when your fighting... Surely optimising that is more important them some bloom filter?
I guess what I'm getting at it seems like some of the priorities of things seems out of wack to me...
If i'm talking ###### feel free to tell me to STFU and sit in the corner :D
Here again I am shocked... well not really that you would expect 100% performance out of a game still in development. I mean there are games that shipped that are far worse then what you have here and to be honest as I said I have worked on several AAA titles and going into beta for those titles the game had major issues. I mean we are not killing video cards like Starcraft 2 was in beta!
But when there a number of very obvious problems which get left for a long time in favour of more "bling" I think it hurts the game...
Here again I am shocked... well not really that you would expect 100% performance out of a game still in development. I mean there are games that shipped that are far worse then what you have here and to be honest as I said I have worked on several AAA titles and going into beta for those titles the game had major issues. I mean we are not killing video cards like Starcraft 2 was in beta!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dude I like your attitude LOL
<i>It performs worse than Crysis by quite a wide margin</i>. If your target is an action-packed, fast-paced shooter this is not acceptable.
While a feature like Bloom is not high priority, it was a relatively quick and easy thing for Max to add on the side, while continuing to work on the other optimization tasks. Max is often working on multiple tasks at once, so its not like he drops everything to just focus on Bloom, for example. Not to mention, the optimization tasks tend to be complicated and time consuming, and involve a lot of dependencies, and integrating them into the game can cause large issues, so I'm sure, both for the sake of his sanity and to be able to see some short term progress, he likes to bang out a few of these smaller tasks on the side.
--Cory
Here again I am shocked... well not really that you would expect 100% performance out of a game still in development. I mean there are games that shipped that are far worse then what you have here and to be honest as I said I have worked on several AAA titles and going into beta for those titles the game had major issues. I mean we are not killing video cards like Starcraft 2 was in beta!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You're killing CPUs instead. Of course this is a beta (well it's not, but lets not get into that again), but I'm not as confident the issues will be sufficiently solved by release, as we're looking at a real snag with Lua right now. Other AAA-titles with issues cannot be compared to NS2, as they are not fundamentally broken. The Lua-scripting isn't working out for you at all, and the occlusion-culling is downright non-functional, mappers are expected to hack around it via visibility-hints (hello 90s where have you been).
Battlefield 3 and plenty of other new games use occlusion culling meshes. You might want to go let those guys know that they are stuck in the 90s as well.
-cory
-cory<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
LOL nice one :D Get them Cory !
There's a lot of speculation and guessing-work on my side, as what goes on inside the engine, and what plans there are to fix things, I haven't an idea.
This also goes for Lua, any quib remarks for that too? Maybe some games you could reference...
No, Starcraft 2 was literally killing GPUs. Like they would burn out and no longer work. Period.
Props to the devs, I am absolutely loving what I see here.
With this new patch the game has become playable enough, for me atleast. I had some really fun games last night. The ARCs add the much needed team play element as they are escorted to their destinations. The phase gates look and work awsome. Spreading infestation as alien comm was extremely easy and fun. The game is finally starting to feel like a real game. Of course it had its usual spikes and bugs here and there but nothing so bad that i couldnt continue playing.
I WANT TO SEE THE BIG GUNS!!!
With this new patch the game has become playable enough, for me atleast. I had some really fun games last night. The ARCs add the much needed team play element as they are escorted to their destinations. The phase gates look and work awsome. Spreading infestation as alien comm was extremely easy and fun. The game is finally starting to feel like a real game. Of course it had its usual spikes and bugs here and there but nothing so bad that i couldnt continue playing.
I WANT TO SEE THE BIG GUNS!!!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I have to agree that when playing last night the game ran quite well for me with no real lag issues. Still a few bugs here and there of course plus some balance issues but they will get ironed out in due time.
Keep up the good work dev team!!
I have a q6600(the graphics card is not important, but if you really care, it's a HD6870). My framerate swings wildly between 10 and 100 FPS(if I spectate from outside the map, my frame rate is ~10 FPS, so what that's telling you is that the occlusion culling is broken).
It seems to be random.
Yeah, there clearly is. I don't know why you feel in a position to be so heavy-handed given you have just admitted you don't really know what you're talking about. When it comes down to it, you just seem to be disgusted that an unfinished game is unfinished.
You are manufacturing a non-existent controversy over occlusion meshes. They are a common part of occlusion culling in modern games, and treating the issue like level designers are having to be brought in to clean up after sloppy code is... just silly.
Perfectly playable? Come on, it's not that good behave of fans. It's completely not playable. Gap between amount of buyers of NS2 and players of NS2 shows that it's completely serious problem. Computers which can easily run Crysis are still hard to run NS2. This is biggest problem, why should lots of man spent 34+ dollars cannot play this? Liar :( :( :( It's playable for people who have super computer as NS2HD. So till when would this game be played by maximum 100 players? If it runs as it says on official website, i sware that this will be one of the most popular game ever, cos' it's innovate, and fun! But would this fun game survive unless they have players??
There're not that many people who upgrade their own computer just to play a game. Devs, i love your hard-working and gret achievements, but the most important thing is still still with questions. I know you're working on it, but it's not that simple to solve IMO, the biggest task!! Most of people are still using computer of 2006~7's. Because they can run most of games, but no NS2!
p.s. I'm now far away from home and having just a notebook without graphic cards so that barely runs CS. Just for working.. therefore I've never waited for playing by this notebook NS2 here. So I'm not complaining, but representating the all-time requests of 90% of fans of NS2!!
<!--QuoteBegin-Donald Knuth+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Donald Knuth)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Premature optimization is the root of all evil.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course, since this is public beta, the issue is a bit more complicated (PR etc.).
Max is the only one working on the Engine, They are looking for another engine programmer but they are few & far between.
Game Programmers & Engine Programmers is like the differance between a Brain Surgen and a local GP. The GP does not have the years of specialist knowlage to be able to jump in and help a brain surgen.
I thought Players knowlage on programming and his level of understanding was better than that.
The current occlusion system seems to be somewhat clumbsy. That is being addressed with a new system Max is working on where the mapper builds a simple shell version of the level.
Just so happens that when they attended the GDC they picked up on the fact that Battlefield 3 has already taken that same approach.
Look at page 45, for scene on page 46 of this:
<a href="http://publications.dice.se/attachments/CullingTheBattlefield.pdf" target="_blank">http://publications.dice.se/attachments/Cu...Battlefield.pdf</a>
Flick through from page 39 onwards.
Sure in typical game development you do optimisation at the end..
NS2 is not being developed in a typical manner its completely open people are paying/playing a game which the <b>general public would never see</b>..
Its obvious to everyone the biggest barrier between more sales and active players now is performance... You can see when ever there is media about NS2 the comments are always about performance which is very damaging to the game...
I would say up to this point in time the game definitely needed more features but this patch 178 has more then delivered on that front the game it finally feels like NS!!!
What you guys need to do now is change public perception of the game at the moment it has a bad stigma about performance which is very dangerous if this isn't handled soon particularly given all the press NS2 is getting now and the influx of new players the last thing you want are people bad mouthing the product because of performance...
If the next patch has as much performance related improvements as 178 had features then I think things will look very very good! I urge you guys to drop everything and do this! Sure it might not be the most efficient long term development strategy but I can assure you it will generate more sales which of course give you more money to keep expanding the game...
If you do your optimisation before features are added, then every time a big new thing is included there's a good chance it will break some of the work you've done before. So instead of seeing a sudden, PR-tastic leap in performance, you'd get repeated fluctuations in performance, which I wouldn't say is better for PR than slow, steady improvement.
I don't think doing what you're suggesting will be as beneficial, over and above steady improvements, as you seem to think.