Incorporate the best of the community into PA

A new update? Yay!

Yeah, it used to be png. But then Uber discovered that the DXT1 and DXT5 were way better for texturing purposes, since those formats are precompressed and GPUs just love 'em. And those were encoded in papa files. Uber even shared the header files for the papa format with us through Lennard, if I remember correctly.

But yeah, the earliest PA I have is build 50256. It was still PNGs then, but audio was fmod already.

That's the piece of information I was actually looking for.

Aggregated data from the various social networks and financial reports actually allows for a pretty good estimation of how many employees UberEnt currently has, so a vast majority of that sounds much better than all the recent estimations.

Sorry for the trolling, but you know the saying: The fastest way to get correct information on the Internet, is to spread false information.

Yes, and no. The game did use Fmod from the beginning. But it didn't embed the source files into the bank file, it used the file table feature of Fmod instead. Which means that the source files were in the file system, easily accessible and inter-exchangeable, while the sound effects and filter chains were still allready described in the .fev file.

Embedding all these files straight into the banks helped reducing the number of files in the file system. From almost one thousand individual audio sources, into 6 individual archives. That may or may not have saved *some* loading time on systems using antiquated harddrives which also suffered from too little RAM. But not much, since seeking in that archive isn't so much cheaper than accessing a regular file, and when fragmentation comes into play, archives of this size are suffering as well.

It also means that modding the sounds will now require the archives AND the source files to be shipped, as one can not open the project which contains the event definitions without access to the source files.

It's a format GPUs can decode quite easily on the fly, even though this is becoming a deprecated optimization.

Ever since R9 285 / GTX970, GPUs from both major vendors now have hard wired compression algorithms (Delta Color Compression) embedded into their memory controllers, so the GPUs will actually prefer UNCOMPRESSED data, with the intention of compressing it themselves whenever it gets stored in RAM and relieving the regular shaders from that task. Saving both on memory bandwidth and used VRAM, with the benefit of not only compressing the source textures, but also all intermediate buffers and alike.

So in the light of recent and upcoming GPU architectures, that optimization was in vain.

Oh, and the very same issue as with the audio files: If you want to work on the uncompressed source files (since the compression is lossy as hell, JPEG artifacts are a joke compared to DXT1!), you now need to waste twice the disk space. That is if the source files are ever being distributed again.


Seriously, a moding kit with all the UNCOMPRESSED audio and image files, including the Fmod project and the original .fbx files as a reference, would be greatly welcomed. No need to ship that by default with the game, but right now, reversing the tool-chain to get access to the "sources" is just painful.

Ah, I did not know that. Still, the GTX970 and R9 285 are only from last year, right? Considering people are playing PA with much older hardware than that, and it's especially that hardware that needs a boost, then I wouldn't go as far as saying that optimization was in vain really.

Maybe this could be a thing for "PA 2: Revenge of the Ant".

Yeah, those graphics cards are not old cards. They may not be cutting edge, but a simple look over the Steam Hardware Survey shows how many Steam users alone are running games on potato boxes. I myself have a 660 Ti that suffices for every single game I possess, including PA, ELITE: Dangerous and Company of Heroes 2. I have no need to upgrade at this time, and my card is in general at the top end of what most of my RL friends possess.

To claim that because the virtually-cutting-edge of graphics cards have changed compression techniques rendering optimisation work done a year ago or more invalid, PA shouldn't have bothered in the first place? A bit of a silly claim, really.

I get your frustration, as a modder and developer of stuff myself. But you're coming across as stupidly pedantic for very little end result here. Uber crunched optimisation to help the community, improve reviews and to prepare for the initial Steam release. You can't really criticise them for that.

The days of everyone having a 970 or better is . . . a while off yet.

EDIT: Gorbles has it covered.

I guess you're right then I'll scratch it from the list.

technically "revenge of the bolo..." but yeah.

So most devs are still working on this game. That is good news. I think the sense that this is not the case is mostly due to the lack of gameplay updates recently. I understand that this is probably due to the devs facing big technical challenges with the things that they are working on which means less regular updates. Hopefully once these things have been ironed out they can get back to focusing on more fun things and we will see things move a little quicker when they do.

We have a fairly large PTE coming out in next few days (currently in last stage of QA, so maybe even today). We'll follow that up with another within a week or so with some larger items such as GW improvements.

Overall though, you nailed it. Bigger items just taking longer. We should be back on more normal schedule soon

I am looking forward to this build and I am surprised that GW improvements will come so quickly afterwards!! Great work!!

The only thing to improve would be some kind of weekly update to show the forum you guys are still alive and working hard on our favorite game Something among the lines of this would be great: http://themeparkitect.tumblr.com/
I can never wait on sunday to read their update again since I really really want that game ^^