This is just nonsense.
Occlusion/Visibility
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PlanetSide 2 has a huge world. 64 km^2 filled with over a hundred thousand objects and thousands of players per continent! Each combination of mesh (the polygons that make up an object) and texture (the things we paint onto the mesh) has to be individually described in detail to your video card and then rendered. So how do we render hundreds of thousands of things per frame? By NOT doing it! Easy, eh?! Instead we first split the continent up in a whole bunch of ways and then use 10 man-years’ worth of code to determine what subset of those things you can actually see. This is Visibility. We also want to avoid rendering something that is behind something else, be it a “dynamic” object (like a person or bullet, something that changes) or “static” object (something that doesn’t change, like a building or Higby’s opinion). This is Occlusion.
We use a third-party code source called Umbra to do most of our Visibility/Occlusion. As part of OMFG, we are upgrading our Umbra to the latest version, which also requires a significant re-factor of how our visibility pathway works, changing several factors of our core client and tools. This is going to reduce the time spent per-frame on visibility by a sizeable amount, which means that the more complex your scene (like, for example, a base where there are thousands of objects) the more benefit you will get. We are also putting our visibility fully in another thread, so those of you with multicore systems (most of you) will see added benefit, and AMD users will see a pretty significant benefit from the parallelization of visibility operations.
Player Updates
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The more players you have around you, the more time your game client spends updating the information about those players. Be it sounds they’re playing, bullets they’re firing, stats that are changing, etc. Your client spends an amount of time per dynamic entity making sure the things that are dynamic get dynamic-ed. In an effort to make this more efficient, we are only going to update a number of them per frame and we are going to be smarter about whether or not they need a full update. In early testing, this has resulted in less than 10% of all dynamic entities actually NEEDING to be updated though right now 100% of them get their update. Needless to say, in large battles this will be nice to have.Physics
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This game has physics scenes that are unrivaled in their complexity. While a normal game may have upwards of a hundred different shapes bouncing around and solving for their collision, we sometimes have scenes with over a thousand shapes, or more! Those huge tank battles really do a number on the physics solver!
So OMFG will see us spending significant time restructuring the complexity of our physics solved in a way we call “Adaptive Level of Detail.” What this means is that we will be lowering the amount of work the simulator does, based on frame rate and distance to object. Basically, we give the physics simulation less to do by taking things that are a distance away from you and making them simulate less.
“But wait Ryan!”, you say to yourself, which is a funny thing to say to yourself, “Won’t lowering the simulation quality result in a crappy simulation!? I love PlanetSide 2’s awesome physics and would never want to see any harm done to it! PlanetSide 2’s physics are the best ever!” Well, now you’re getting a bit too…Okay…I’ll accept that compliment. To answer your question, though, we simply don’t know.
Some of the things we’re doing are experimental. We have great ideas from some of the best in the biz on how to solve our performance problems, however coding is 60% science and 60% art. Some of the tasks I’m talking to you about today are still in their early stages, and may not make it into the final game as described, or at all!
With Adaptive Level of Detail, we hope to emulate the frames we don’t simulate, “smoothing” out any simulation errors that may occur, but it is going to take a lot of work and caffeine to make it, then even more to determine if it is good enough. As far as effect on frame rate, it won’t have much of one unless you have 4 or less cores, but it will have a HUGE impact on physics “hitches” and anyone with 2-4 cores will see potentially massive increases in frame rate when in a big battle.many of these things aren't available in a flight sim simply because of the open air nature of it.
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TT We are going to remain 3 sides in the main arena.
What 3 sides does for arena play.
1. It balances out 1 side having more players than the other.
2. It Spreds the fights out accross the arena. If you only have 2 sides you would see a lot more of everyone fighting in 1 spot.
3. It provides everone with more enemys to fight. If all 3 sides are = numbers you always have 2 enemys to fight for your sides 1.
4. It creates a more dynamic enviorment because who each country is attacking changes . As opposed to 2 sides where you are always attacking the same side.
5. Countryies devlope a personality over time. With 3 countries we end up with a more diverse flavor.
HiTech
I played when the arenas were full and required new arenas to be opened, so i assumed that this was because of the number of players in one area to be too high. with the number of players in the arena (I think it was around 7-800) I thought that this was quite low, so i assumed it to be a "number of players in one spot" problem that other mmos have. ( I am connecting dots here). Then i look at other games that have limits of 32 players online, then at other mmo style games.
If I am hugely mistaken, then please educate me.
