So ive been wanting to make this thread for a while now. What does everyone think on how well the game is going to perform at release? Perhaps running giant planets or multiple reasonable sized planets with maybe even asteroid belts? My issues are server related late game when it catches and freeze and bigger systems own my GPU when others are fine with theirs. I have a GTX 550 Ti and they had some radeons. They were running smoothly but thats always expected. So my question is how much optimization is left in PA? 90%? 70% 40%? 10%? I hope this game can at least run decently on a lower end computer. Anyway, just my thoughts, of course the game is still in development and still has some ways to go. It would be pretty cool to have a phase after gamma dedicated to optimization and overall polish. Of course its easy for me to speak than for it to actually get done but of course I am extremely happy with uber and usually other indie developers that I am not gonna name either stop and/or have extremely terrible service and you end up throwing away money. I can clearly see uber has a vision and dedication.
"It would be pretty cool to have a phase after gamma dedicated to optimization and overall polish." I think I read somewhere from one of the devs that they are basically in this phase now. Though there are some big features missing like gas planets and the unit cannon these are now going to be done post-release. I do believe and hope there will be a fair number of new units though (though again this may be post-release). As for optimizations, I doubt they themselves could say for sure how much more can be done in terms of % (and it would vary per computer system anyway) but from reading Varrak's posts I think they can still do a fair amount. My brothers have a 460 OC and a 6870, both with 1 gig of RAM and they do struggle with a biggish planet or two. I think the 6870 is faster than the 460 but it does not perform as well in PA at the moment (though not sure since last patch). We just make sure the system uses less than one gig of video memory and that helps a lot for them I think. Use low textures.
With support for Windows, Linux and iOS, some optimization can massively improve performance on one system and do nothing at all on other systems. I would expect a performance similar to SupCom, with ~1000 units on the field yet still running fairly smooth.
I will try and summarize what still can be done for client side optimizations based off of what bgolus and varrak have said in the past. Note that these are off the top of my head so they might not be entirely accurate and might already be implemented. 1. Convert unit icons, selection boxes, and other per unit ui stuff to the particle system. This will give a major jump in performance to those with lower end CPUs as preparation will be much simpler. Also a slight jump in perf on GPUs due to instancing. 2. Unit instancing. This could give a perf increase for both CPUs and GPUs. Unit instancing means fewer draw calls and vertices handled in a more efficient manner. 3. Unit Level Of Detail. All units are rendered at full resolution at all times at the moment. LOD could give significant perf increase on GPUs. 4. Shader Optimizations. Shaders define the material of an object and some of them take up a lot of time to render and are a bit messy. The sun in particular is a problem. All of these together should give a good perf increase but a percentage is hard to come up with as it will be different on different systems. If I had to guess I would say that perf would increase between 10% and 40%. Keep in mind that the only thing on that list that I have implemented in one of my own programs is LOD so I could be way off.
Are these accurate to the current state of development ? If so, we could expect some major performance improvements especially lategame because of Unit Instancing and LOD. I thought I read somewhere that LOD was already in (but I didn't notice it ingame so you are probably right).
I'm pretty sure their accurate to the current build. LOD is in for foliage but not units. Also, I listed these in order of the performance hit. Right now unit icons take longer to render than units, even without unit LOD and instancing. But once again, I'm not a dev and haven't done any graphics coding beyond a simple openGL test.
Icons take longer to render than Units ? That's.....interesting. An icon should consist of no more than 2 polygons. A unit contains a whole lot more and a more complex shader XD Well...there will be lots of performance improvements then PS: I am a true pro when it comes to graphics programming. I have done a FEW simple OpenGL tests
Dont know much about this stuff ,but it seems to me at the moment the Uber servers are the limiting factor?
I have the same understanding on this. Nonetheless, all possible optimizations are obviously welcome.
Uber servers are the problem if your units (= the simulation) starts to lag. But fps are often a problem, as well. And for that to improve, client side optimizations are needed.
It seems that Uber did a lot of stuff really fast and dirty to get the game out to the alpha backers, especially in the rendering department. Icons are currently rendered by combining them all into a single mesh on the CPU and then sending that mesh to the GPU. I think they were going to replace this method by turning icons into particles which are instanced textured planes with positioning handled on the CPU and geometry on the GPU. You are mostly correct but we don't have any specific information about how they are optimizing server side stuff and network traffic so I didn't mention it. It should also be noted that Ubers servers are throttled so when we get the server side stuff at release we should be able to run it with ease. Client side optimizations are very important so that we can turn up the graphics. Although there isn't a whole lot of stuff to make the game look prettier at the moment, the latest graphics update teased some awesome things that I would like to be able to activate.
As long as the game is playable on the Intel HD4400 of the laptop I'm getting, preferably at 1080p and at least 30fps, I'll be thrilled. I have noticed the lack of unit LODs though, and actually have had the idea to make a 'Uber Low' graphics mod which uses as few polygons as possible while keeping the units readable.
