Vanguard May Beta Newsletter - Page 4

Itzena · 05-25-2006, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gieve

Grin, why wouldnt you? Ram is so cheap these days, I got a free Gig with my cheerios.

I'd link to that PA comic about Luclin here as it fits so well, but their site's buggered right now.

Oloh · 05-25-2006, 03:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Utnayan

Maybe someone can answer this for me, because I will admit I know nothing about programming. If Oblivion...runs fantastic on my setup, why does a game like EQ2 or Vanguard...run so shitty?

The way it has been explained to me (I am not a programmer either) is because of cacheing everything. When designers and artists make a single player game, they can control everything on the screen at one time. So, when you play a board or a scene, they know exactly what animations to keep in memory and which textures should be available. They know what spells you can cast at that point and what items you have gotten or are available.

If, during testing, something cuts FPS below X amount, they can redistribute art assets or lower texture resolution or remove an item or whatever from the game to get FPS back up.

In a MMOG, that level of control is not possible. A guy may run his high end horse through a newbie zone, or a guy may /dance in a raid zone. The best you can do is load all the stuff you *know* the player will see (terrain textures and mobs in the immediate vicinity), load as much of the stuff as you are *likely* to see (combat animations, armor/pet textures) as you can, and have a means to swap out the rest as fast as possible relative to the graphical fidelity you want to keep.

A game like WoW or Lineage 2 uses a lot of subtle tricks and cheats (not in a bad way) to make the game "overachieve" with less resources. And, this is one of the often overlooked benefits of instancing. If you have an instance, you can be guaranteed to load only stuff into the instance that is needed. So, technically, you can look at the player's inventories, load all of that stuff and all of the stuff available in the instance, and only those things, which can allow for good performance, etc.

EverQuest's "zones" were another example. Remember how hard it was to get SOE to change anything in the "global" texture file? That is because that stuff was loaded to memory across all zones. The other stuff was only loaded based on what was possilbe to have in the zone.

At least that is how I understand it. If you have more control over what will be seen (either in a single player game, or an instanced or zoned multiplayer game), you can better benchmark your graphics to ensure they are always at a targetted FPS.

Also, quite frankly, I think it is also a prioritization thing. Some gaming companies place a higher value on maintaining FPS rates than others. Even in a totally open MMOG, it is possible to keep a targetted FPS in most settings (WoW overland and popular areas come to mind) by picking a FPS range, allowing standard deviation from that range to cover up for "most" circumstances and hoping for the best. If you find an area that is not performing at your targeted FPS under certain circumstances, you revise the area until it is. Taking that approach generally requires that you sacrifice graphical fidelity for performance. Note, graphical fidelity is not the same as artistic style, and style can make a huge difference as to whether something looks "good."

I think that is the basic answer. There are a lot of tricks that you can do to help correct different issues, such as portals and level of detail (rendering the stuff immediately available at a greater fidelity than the stuff further away), but I really don't understand exactly how it all works.

Trebla · 05-25-2006, 03:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fuffalo

So to clarify, screenshots without character names don't violate the NDA?

I think their "i.e." was supposed to be "eg." I'm sure you could manage some NDA violating screenshots without character names.

Utnayan · 05-25-2006, 04:03 PM

Quote:

At least that is how I understand it. If you have more control over what will be seen (either in a single player game, or an instanced or zoned multiplayer game), you can better benchmark your graphics to ensure they are always at a targetted FPS.

Thanks for the in-depth explanation.

I guess that leaves the question then, why did developers move away from zones? This is going to be subjective as hell, but I didn't mind zoning, and I would gladly trade zoning for huge graphical performance - especially on raids.

Ayeshala · 05-25-2006, 04:10 PM

Quote:

I guess that leaves the question then, why did developers move away from zones? This is going to be subjective as hell, but I didn't mind zoning, and I would gladly trade zoning for huge graphical performance - especially on raids.

I think the answer from most developers would be because a zone-less world feels more "real". We're really delving into the psychology of the player here though because in most situations it does'nt make a big difference in the actual gameplay especially if certain mechanics like mob leashing are properly implemented.

Utnayan · 05-25-2006, 04:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ayeshala

I think the answer from most developers would be because a zone-less world feels more "real". We're really delving into the psychology of the player here though because in most situations it does'nt make a big difference in the actual gameplay especially if certain mechanics like mob leashing are properly implemented.

I remember back in the EQ days, I think the least of people's worries was zoning. I see your point in that some people may think psychologically a seamless world adds to realism, but when you end up having to sacrifice 60% of your graphical settings as a result, I would rather take the loading screen for 10 seconds before a raid than see half the world clip away, armors lose their textures, names vanish, lighting and shadows go poof, and take a 40% frame rate hit even after all that happens to boot.

Anyen · 05-25-2006, 04:17 PM

But dont zones still exist? In WoW it was "seamless" but there were still clearly zones.

Ayeshala · 05-25-2006, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anyen

But dont zones still exist? In WoW it was "seamless" but there were still clearly zones.

From what I saw at E3, the Vanguard world design is much more open than even WoW's design. I spent a while running around and I did'nt see obvious zone transitions like you have in WoW in many places.

Ayeshala · 05-25-2006, 04:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Utnayan

I remember back in the EQ days, I think the least of people's worries was zoning. I see your point in that some people may think psychologically a seamless world adds to realism, but when you end up having to sacrifice 60% of your graphical settings as a result, I would rather take the loading screen for 10 seconds before a raid than see half the world clip away, armors lose their textures, names vanish, lighting and shadows go poof, and take a 40% frame rate hit even after all that happens to boot.

Horizon was the worst example of this. You would come into town and it would take several minutes before everything would load.

Oloh · 05-25-2006, 06:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Utnayan

I guess that leaves the question then, why did developers move away from zones? This is going to be subjective as hell, but I didn't mind zoning, and I would gladly trade zoning for huge graphical performance - especially on raids.

I think it all depends on what direction a developer wants to go. WoW, for instance, is very much a "world," but it is a "gamey world." It has zones that allow for interesting landscapes and sudden contrasts that are very fun. EverQuest was the same way. Zelda worlds are also very similar in that regard. They are very cool in a "gamey" way.

Some companies (Sigil and Bethesda being two that do a realistic looking non-gamey world, and NC Soft in Lineage 2 being a sylistic version of a non-gamey world) seem to want to translate the real world into a game. They are willing to suffer through the increased inconvenience (both technical and gameplay) of seemlessness in an effort to make the world as close to realistic as it can get.

Just as an aside, folks interested in this stuff should take a look at this article. It is a white paper on some of the technical and design hurdles that Gas Powered Games ran into when trying to make Dungeon Siege. Its a good read.

I think there will always be places for both. Final Fantasy isn't going realism all of a sudden, neither is Super Mario Brothers. Zelda switches each release, with Windwalker being about as stylistic and compartmentalized as you can get, but the Twilight Princess looks like it has jumped back to full scale realism. /shrug. It's all good and change is nice.

forge · 05-25-2006, 06:31 PM

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that seemless worlds arn't all their cracked up to be. I always found it much easier to get a group while doing areas which had zone lines. This was because groups of players would solo around the zone line. Be it that the zone was far over their single level, or that they were simply unable to break multiple spawns. Never the less when you had a collection of players all in the same area it made finding/forming groups far far easier than places without. Not to say that a "overworld" isn't just fine seemless. But I think there are plenty of good bonuses to having a zone line for dungeon.

Kreugen · 05-26-2006, 01:59 AM

Zoning doesn't help EQ2 much.

In fact, once you zone, your performance lowers. When I first load up the game, I'm getting 40-60 fps without a hitch in less detailed zones (dungeons.) But if I step outside to a more memory intensive area, then zone back in, it plays noticably slower. Zone enough times and all of a sudden, I'm getting 10 second pauses in combat. I've been frozen for entire battles this way before - until I quit and restart, and then I'm back to first person shooter quality.

This is with settings on high performance, which I use simply to delay this effect. I'm not sure if it works, to be honest. I can play in much higher settings, and get the same decent performance - for a while.

Two factors cause this: A piece of shit game engine, and having "only" 1GB of RAM.

This is actually a topic that is a big deal to me. It's frustrating to see so many new games trying to push the envelope graphically. Conan rivals Oblivion even. Why? It's going to run like dogshit. Do they test every scene with dozens of players wearing a huge variety of equipment, fighting several different creature types with spells flying? Not likely. One of the greatest strengths of WoW is that it runs great nearly all the time. However, I think you can still have this without looking like cartoon land. It just won't look like a photograph. So what? You know what is NOT immersive? Chopping up every time you walk towards a new area, and dozens of objects suddenly appear ten feet away because in order to keep the game playable, they have to have an in-your-face clipping plane. Freezing completely when combat begins. Having to fiddle with graphic options whenever you are in an area with a lot of players. Fuck all that. Pretty effects it's a massive handicap for EQ2, not a help. Lineage is a good benchmark - most people agree that is has a great look, and it sure as hell doesn't tank with ten people on the screen.

Why doesn't zoning properly clear up EQ2 performance? Definately a huge fucking issue with the game.

Another good way to think of it is look at Quake3 vs Quake4. Granted, framerate is a hell of a lot more crucial in an online game - dying and losing a close match because your game just hitched is fucking infuriating - but death is a lot less of a big deal than in a MMO, and I've died many times in those games for the same reason. Yes, quake4 looks a lot better than quake3.. but it does it look THAT much better? Do those shadows, bump mapping, and other bells and whistles really add -anything- to a deathmatch game? Nope. Quake3 looks good, even now. Adding a million polygons might sharpen up those models when you are three feet away, but much of the rest of the time you don't even notice.

Granted, in a MMO, you do take in the sights. But as Vanguard shows, the better your graphic engine, the more critical people are of it. It looks nice with settings jacked up, but how many years until you can run it with AA on? 3D games generally look like shit without it, no matter how good you art and how many effects you layer over it. I ran WoW with 4xAA at all times. Unfortunately it was still wow, and some areas like AQ looked like blurry vomit, while others like stranglethorn, ferelas, and Azshara looked goddamn gorgeous, and nothing at all like a saturday morning cartoon.

In short, please prioritize performance in whatever game you are playing. Please. It's really, really fucking frustrating to fuck up somewhere crucial because your hard drive was churning.

The Hiram Key · 05-26-2006, 03:21 AM

I think in the year 2006, we may finally be able to say "if you are playing a MMOG with 1 gig of ram or less, you have no business playing a MMOG". Not saying that the way things are, or are going is right, just pointing out the reality.

I played EQ1 on 512mb, then on 1gb of ram. Currently I run more ram then windows can even recognize. Does it impact performance ? Fuck yeah it does. People have no business complaining about performance given we understand *why MMOG's require more ram, and *why performance suffers when you dont have enough.

This was not in direct reference to the last poster, so save it.

Lenaldo · 05-26-2006, 06:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Hiram Key

It would have been far better, given the lack of interest across the board in this beta, to have just said "send us what you have and we will publish the best". Being so nit-picky, with so many requirements means they will barely get a trickle of SS's submitted.

Can you imagine what the SS forums on FOH would look like if that was the requirements for posting them was ?

When you ask people to help, you don't ask them to bend over backwards and set their heads on fire to help you.

I am pretty sure most of the PGT shots are in high resolution, so the ss thread would still serve a very important purpose.

forge · 05-26-2006, 06:21 AM

I might be majorly wrong here... BUT. I think people need to come up with a better way to code these games. I think the engine is at fault because they use fps engines which are designed well, for FPS games. Where you always have a certain amount of textures. They make those games and do pay attention to these issues so when you're playing with a decent machine you're not caching all over the place. Me and a friend were recently talking about VG, and how he was reading the boards and saw people with sli 7900s are getting like 30 fps. Sure that might improve, this isn't to hark on VG. However you'd fucken think that laying down 2x $650+? for some gpus that this shit should run 60+fps no problem. I mean if theres 30+ people on the screen like in a raid its understandable to drop. But to be in generic town03 and having a system which can hardly keep up and its top of the line. But its sorta the same for EQ2 and other games. I'm really with Kreugen on this. For me its what made Q1 such a hit for Id. Any smuck could install and play the game and have decent frames. It didn't take dropping 3k+ on a computer to even have a chance at enjoyment.

Currently I have no idea since I don't play EQ2. However I imagine its quite a big install. I'm not sure ram is going to scale fast enough with the texture content of games. Someones going to have to slow down for someone dealing with this. Currently the VG install is like 18gigs? This isn't first hand so I'm not sure but I don't think that even all the 3? continents are taken into account in that size. Even if they are, lets say 2 years from now VG Ruins of Kunark comes out. Stack another 12 gigs on to that. If you had 4gigs of ram thats a 1/7+ ratio of ram to content. However the average gamer is more likely to have 1gig of ram. You know the people who play WoW.. not the people paying $3k just to play VG/EQ2. Their going to still be at a 1/30th of Ram to content. Basically what I'm really saying here is that it seems games are growing far faster than the comp industry can even keep up at this point. It seems that were getting to the point where there will be infinitly more textures and models to load than ram. At some point we'll always be caching something because there are just to many resources to handle.

I've noticed this for a while and its odd. I don't know if its a oddity currently and its going to subside.. or its going to continue on a curve at the current state. However mostly FPS guys push the GPU industry say people like Carmack and Sweeny(engine guy for epic?). Hell, Carmack basically tells Nvidia I need this much GPU power for my game. Now we can see that sli 7900gtx's run most fps games with tons of frames to spare, even new ones. However if we look at games like Oblivion and VG they choke to death dealing with all the extras that get thrown in the mix. Be it grass, shader work, enormous clip planes, whatever the case. There's so much more overhead added to a engine which was supposed to run ok with graphics card xyz. MMO's are shaping up to always take far more requirements than their FPS friends. It should be the MMO's saying my games going to be 30gigs and I'm going to have 4gigs of character textures. Its these people who in the future need to be sitting down and saying you need your cards to be able to handle this amount of data and processing. Because MMO's are a completely different beast than FPS games.

05-25-2006, 04:17 PM	#52 (permalink)
Anyen Registered User Join Date: May 2002 Location: California Posts: 313 -1 Internets	But dont zones still exist? In WoW it was "seamless" but there were still clearly zones. __________________ Freedom is not free; free men are not equal; equal men are not free; individual rights are inextricably linked with government control.

05-26-2006, 01:59 AM	#57 (permalink)
Kreugen Fires of Heaven Ancient Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 2,524 +23 Internets	Zoning doesn't help EQ2 much. In fact, once you zone, your performance lowers. When I first load up the game, I'm getting 40-60 fps without a hitch in less detailed zones (dungeons.) But if I step outside to a more memory intensive area, then zone back in, it plays noticably slower. Zone enough times and all of a sudden, I'm getting 10 second pauses in combat. I've been frozen for entire battles this way before - until I quit and restart, and then I'm back to first person shooter quality. This is with settings on high performance, which I use simply to delay this effect. I'm not sure if it works, to be honest. I can play in much higher settings, and get the same decent performance - for a while. Two factors cause this: A piece of shit game engine, and having "only" 1GB of RAM. This is actually a topic that is a big deal to me. It's frustrating to see so many new games trying to push the envelope graphically. Conan rivals Oblivion even. Why? It's going to run like dogshit. Do they test every scene with dozens of players wearing a huge variety of equipment, fighting several different creature types with spells flying? Not likely. One of the greatest strengths of WoW is that it runs great nearly all the time. However, I think you can still have this without looking like cartoon land. It just won't look like a photograph. So what? You know what is NOT immersive? Chopping up every time you walk towards a new area, and dozens of objects suddenly appear ten feet away because in order to keep the game playable, they have to have an in-your-face clipping plane. Freezing completely when combat begins. Having to fiddle with graphic options whenever you are in an area with a lot of players. Fuck all that. Pretty effects it's a massive handicap for EQ2, not a help. Lineage is a good benchmark - most people agree that is has a great look, and it sure as hell doesn't tank with ten people on the screen. Why doesn't zoning properly clear up EQ2 performance? Definately a huge fucking issue with the game. Another good way to think of it is look at Quake3 vs Quake4. Granted, framerate is a hell of a lot more crucial in an online game - dying and losing a close match because your game just hitched is fucking infuriating - but death is a lot less of a big deal than in a MMO, and I've died many times in those games for the same reason. Yes, quake4 looks a lot better than quake3.. but it does it look THAT much better? Do those shadows, bump mapping, and other bells and whistles really add -anything- to a deathmatch game? Nope. Quake3 looks good, even now. Adding a million polygons might sharpen up those models when you are three feet away, but much of the rest of the time you don't even notice. Granted, in a MMO, you do take in the sights. But as Vanguard shows, the better your graphic engine, the more critical people are of it. It looks nice with settings jacked up, but how many years until you can run it with AA on? 3D games generally look like shit without it, no matter how good you art and how many effects you layer over it. I ran WoW with 4xAA at all times. Unfortunately it was still wow, and some areas like AQ looked like blurry vomit, while others like stranglethorn, ferelas, and Azshara looked goddamn gorgeous, and nothing at all like a saturday morning cartoon. In short, please prioritize performance in whatever game you are playing. Please. It's really, really fucking frustrating to fuck up somewhere crucial because your hard drive was churning. Last edited by Kreugen : 05-26-2006 at 02:04 AM.

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05-25-2006, 06:31 PM	#56 (permalink)
forge CTW! Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: at work Posts: 436 -1 Internets	I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that seemless worlds arn't all their cracked up to be. I always found it much easier to get a group while doing areas which had zone lines. This was because groups of players would solo around the zone line. Be it that the zone was far over their single level, or that they were simply unable to break multiple spawns. Never the less when you had a collection of players all in the same area it made finding/forming groups far far easier than places without. Not to say that a "overworld" isn't just fine seemless. But I think there are plenty of good bonuses to having a zone line for dungeon.

05-26-2006, 06:21 AM	#60 (permalink)
forge CTW! Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: at work Posts: 436 -1 Internets	I might be majorly wrong here... BUT. I think people need to come up with a better way to code these games. I think the engine is at fault because they use fps engines which are designed well, for FPS games. Where you always have a certain amount of textures. They make those games and do pay attention to these issues so when you're playing with a decent machine you're not caching all over the place. Me and a friend were recently talking about VG, and how he was reading the boards and saw people with sli 7900s are getting like 30 fps. Sure that might improve, this isn't to hark on VG. However you'd fucken think that laying down 2x $650+? for some gpus that this shit should run 60+fps no problem. I mean if theres 30+ people on the screen like in a raid its understandable to drop. But to be in generic town03 and having a system which can hardly keep up and its top of the line. But its sorta the same for EQ2 and other games. I'm really with Kreugen on this. For me its what made Q1 such a hit for Id. Any smuck could install and play the game and have decent frames. It didn't take dropping 3k+ on a computer to even have a chance at enjoyment. Currently I have no idea since I don't play EQ2. However I imagine its quite a big install. I'm not sure ram is going to scale fast enough with the texture content of games. Someones going to have to slow down for someone dealing with this. Currently the VG install is like 18gigs? This isn't first hand so I'm not sure but I don't think that even all the 3? continents are taken into account in that size. Even if they are, lets say 2 years from now VG Ruins of Kunark comes out. Stack another 12 gigs on to that. If you had 4gigs of ram thats a 1/7+ ratio of ram to content. However the average gamer is more likely to have 1gig of ram. You know the people who play WoW.. not the people paying $3k just to play VG/EQ2. Their going to still be at a 1/30th of Ram to content. Basically what I'm really saying here is that it seems games are growing far faster than the comp industry can even keep up at this point. It seems that were getting to the point where there will be infinitly more textures and models to load than ram. At some point we'll always be caching something because there are just to many resources to handle. I've noticed this for a while and its odd. I don't know if its a oddity currently and its going to subside.. or its going to continue on a curve at the current state. However mostly FPS guys push the GPU industry say people like Carmack and Sweeny(engine guy for epic?). Hell, Carmack basically tells Nvidia I need this much GPU power for my game. Now we can see that sli 7900gtx's run most fps games with tons of frames to spare, even new ones. However if we look at games like Oblivion and VG they choke to death dealing with all the extras that get thrown in the mix. Be it grass, shader work, enormous clip planes, whatever the case. There's so much more overhead added to a engine which was supposed to run ok with graphics card xyz. MMO's are shaping up to always take far more requirements than their FPS friends. It should be the MMO's saying my games going to be 30gigs and I'm going to have 4gigs of character textures. Its these people who in the future need to be sitting down and saying you need your cards to be able to handle this amount of data and processing. Because MMO's are a completely different beast than FPS games.