Do the "Performance-Jam"!!!
dePARA
Join Date: 2011-04-29 Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
Join Date: 2011-04-29 Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
If you open the "Technical support" thread where people complaing about performance issues you see always see the same "solutions" from the same people like:
- Did you disable ambient occlusion?
- Diy you set everything to minimum?
- Did you do this?
- Did you do that?
That give people the feeling its an personal problem and everything runs fine with the right settings.
I know performance is on top prio since, hmm, around 1,5 years? Dont know.
But.
The game feels horrible from mid to endgame and its NOT a personal problem of some individuums.
EVRYBODY has this problems, no matter what CPU or GPU you have.
You can overclock your CPU to 5ghz and can use gtx titan and still cant hold constant >60 fps the whole game.
I think this is the Nr1 reason why Playercount going down constantly and not the missing of some "skillmovement" or whatever.
All i want is:
- Do something like the mod-jam to raise the performance ("perfomance-jam")
- Do this BEFORE you release the super fast skulks from Balance-test
- Stop telling the people they had an personal PC-issue
- Make the profiler user-friendly if you want help from the community
And Ironhorse, sorry for "trolling" you with that on the server, but its frustrating to have an nearly unplayble game from mid-endgame in crowded areas and reading always the same "solutions".
The game is released 7 month ago and still feels like beta performance wise.
Its time to solve this, DO it. Yes you can. I mean, you made 3 mods with new features and stuff within 1 week.
- Did you disable ambient occlusion?
- Diy you set everything to minimum?
- Did you do this?
- Did you do that?
That give people the feeling its an personal problem and everything runs fine with the right settings.
I know performance is on top prio since, hmm, around 1,5 years? Dont know.
But.
The game feels horrible from mid to endgame and its NOT a personal problem of some individuums.
EVRYBODY has this problems, no matter what CPU or GPU you have.
You can overclock your CPU to 5ghz and can use gtx titan and still cant hold constant >60 fps the whole game.
I think this is the Nr1 reason why Playercount going down constantly and not the missing of some "skillmovement" or whatever.
All i want is:
- Do something like the mod-jam to raise the performance ("perfomance-jam")
- Do this BEFORE you release the super fast skulks from Balance-test
- Stop telling the people they had an personal PC-issue
- Make the profiler user-friendly if you want help from the community
And Ironhorse, sorry for "trolling" you with that on the server, but its frustrating to have an nearly unplayble game from mid-endgame in crowded areas and reading always the same "solutions".
The game is released 7 month ago and still feels like beta performance wise.
Its time to solve this, DO it. Yes you can. I mean, you made 3 mods with new features and stuff within 1 week.
Comments
This isn't to say "Oh you have poor performance, that's gotta be your computer"... its to say whatever bug/glitch/tech support issue they have is generally something solve-able on their end.
Shaders, a mod, an overlay, drivers, settings, corrupt files, bad installs, incompatibility etc etc etc
When it comes to performance this is less likely the case (unless you want to include that argument of "your computer is too old")
But those things are suggested first because its like asking if you tried the on/off switch.. not everyone knows how many settings incur input delay, which can be misconstrued as something else sometimes.
Beyond that.. its about gathering info from that user, and if it looks to be anything outside of the norm (not always the case) like extremely low fps for their given hardware, then we continue diagnosing.
Otherwise... well, then they are getting the fps that is considered typical for NS2 and their hardware and there's really not much that can be offered in a "tech support" forum except suggestions of overclocking etc?
There is no "solution" currently..
And as far as that topic of 80 fps "feels like" X fps.. if any user has anything measurable to go on then we can report it/address it.. but so far that is the most description and information that's been given. Its not that i dont believe it - i do - its that if we don't know the culprit /we can't reproduce it, how can it be addressed? Its a ghost as long as the only thing to go on is "feels" Its all good man, but just remember whenever you feel frustrated.. how much more i am, given that i'm a play testing lead and i can't even figure out whats wrong. :-/
My theory is frame times, but we currently have no adequate method to measure that AFAIK..
Either way tech support will not say "The game is horribly optimized CPU wise please get a decent quad core 4 GHz+ CPU to get playable performance." I remember it taking me a while to actually catch on that the game was CPU limited after finding about r_Stats and lowering all my graphical settings to find no performance increase. Lowering graphical settings is the only advice they can offer aside from a new CPU.
As for performance since the entire game is so heavily scripted in lua squeezing any extra gains at this point is difficult. I mean I heard something about LUAJIT but the fact that it is a side project at the moment does not give me a lot of hope.
It may simply (I use that word quite incorrectly) be a matter of optimizing the game code now. Maybe things are being asked of the engine which simply aren't reasonable. I think a big issue here is that, these kind of optimizations may be less about code efficiency and more about some gameplay changes (not removing infestation entirely, gtfo). Such changes require far more time to get right than code optimizations, which might be why UWE were reluctant to make those changes so late in development.
Blind already asked my exact question about this topic to Brian Cronin, Lead Programmer, interview here.
the game isn't efficient on the gpu side either
maybe the quality/performance ratio is better on high settings, but it's really bad on low
Combat runs better but still fairly slow. The smaller maps increase the player density which slows it down even though infestation and AI units are removed.
But I don't know much about how this stuff works, all I know is if the game used more of the cores we have compared to what it uses now, I think a majority of the userbase would see big performance increases because most of us are probably on 3 core processors or more
I'm pretty happy with 40-50 outside combat and 15-30 in combat.
/sarcasm
Nope you shouldn't. The problem is no one can get 60 constant all game. You get 4.5ghz computers getting 150-35 fps.
What performance increase could you expect if the lua-code would be written in c++ ?
It seems like:
The Spark Engine is pretty fast and looks great, but decision to be highly modable (to be one of the core-characteristics of the engine)
is the reason for the lua integration and the somehow bad performance (game logic/lua-code -> end game: cyst state polling etc.)
So, the questions i have:
if the whole engine would be c++ (and not lua), what performance increase could we probably expect ?
if the performance increase would be really high, would it be ok for yourself to "lose" all the modifications ?
is the modable feature (lua) a characteristic to keep playing ns2 ?
vs
would be a high performance increase (no lua, c++ only) keep you playing ns2 (without mods) ?
btw: mods doesnt mean maps, models (retextured etc.)
TLDR I hope they also monitor input lag and responsiveness along with framerates, and mouse input accuracy. My biggest complaint anymore is how it feels like my sensitivity is attached to a yo-yo and input lag.
Game is running bad. Answer: I can run the game on max settings, buy a new PC... Really helpful!
You get killed many times in a match. Answer: I am a competitive player, get some skill... Really helpful.
The teams are stacked, can we get balanced teams ?. Answer: I am on the winning team, stop whining... Really helpful.
Thank god, everybody has the money to buy new hardware everytime a game is running not smoothly on the recommended settings:
CPU: Core 2 Duo 3,0 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Isn't JIT compilation of the LUA code being tested? That's the next step before porting the game logic to c++ (if that is feasible effort wise, probably not).
Also my guess is that a lot of the issues (especially sudden lower fps when in a fight) are due to server performance combined with latency (it's not like other online games are problem free).
This is a surprisingly accurate summery of how these forums work. Also +1 Current1y rofl
I think when you get to this stage in the game's lifetime, most players are here for the gameplay and not the ooohh shiny things
why don't you crawl back in your hole.
We're all aware of the performance issues and are doing our best. In a sense, every week is a performance jam for us. We're always trying things and open to new ideas, and some things work out and some things don't. Believe me, we're not happy about the game's performance either.
--Steve
Your a genius! Thank you so much.
and...
sry, that not all people have the money to buy the newest hardware.
sry, that people talk about their problems on a forum about the game.
sry, for forcing you to read, think (you really thought well about it, because your a genius, aren´t you ?) and answer on this thread.
sry, that we cant talk to each other in a proper way, except you.
but, wait...
maybe i should create a new account to stay anonymous and troll a little bit around here.