So we all know how the game slows to a craw when there are too many active units, but a majority of the bottleneck is in rendering and processing all of those animations; the server is doing just fine. I'm of the fan that when you zoom out to strategic view level, and the icons are overlaid, that you essentially don't render or animate any unit models (except for orbital due to the fact that you need to zoom out for them). They can be either not rendered or replaced with a 2d graphic (such as factory bases). Weapon gfx would still be there, but rendering every other shot with an exponential decrease for the number of shots fired. Nanolathe I believe can be reduced to a 2d gfx rather than a 3d one. I think it's worth an experiment, what do you all think?
I think there's an option right now that lets you display strategic icons all the time, regardless of view height. Perhaps an additional selection could be: Strategic icons replace unit graphics: Always Never FPS limited The last option would let the client choose to stop displaying unit graphics, replacing them with strategic icons, whenever frames-per-second dips too low.
Since we're talking about additional performance enhancing options, I would like an option to convert the 3D nanolathe particles to 2D. Even on big games, my game runs relatively smoothly until I zoom in to fabber-spam around factories or nukes. Zoom levels for unit renders also seems like a great idea for increasing performance.
My pc is pretty up there, but throw enough units and someone will start choking. I do agree this should be an option, perhaps for auto, it's enabled when performance really starts to suffer.
the problem i would have with this is that we are considering adding a culling effect to something that is "visible." which in itself is nothing new its just that it actually takes a lot more processing to get it back then it would to keep it. in fact if you have enough ram for it you could turn off culling processes and the game will run better.
I don't know it this proposition isn't already implemented. They probably already use a LOD "distance scaling" with the icon being the lowest LOD. This is a fairly standard modern 3D-engine feature. However, PA is relatively low-poly and seems to handle lighting quite well. Maybe it's a client-server communication glut rather than a rendering problem. The only way to solve those kind of problems is to optimize data serialization and only transfer differential updates (most of the time). Which maybe already done...
I have tons of ram, perhaps for the 'render bump' it can be a pop-corn effect for units in the center field of view rendering first, and as you move to new areas of interest, the priority for units under 'view' have their render priority first so the popcorn follows the camera. Even more so, perhaps it can be a 'cone' render where as you zoom out, peripheral units pop out of render/animation calculation first, and those in the center remain. As you zoom out more, the cone reaches it's 'peak' (cone intersect with the planet sphere) and fewer units are rendered till the cone no longer intersects and no units are rendered (surface/air units).
Excellent mind-juice. At the end of the day, if I can't actually see the difference (when zoomed out that far) between 2d and 3d I think it would be worth switching over, even if my PC could handle either, it just makes sense, perhaps a slider to adjust how readily this happens. The flip side is that it would look frickin ugly if you could actually see the change as you zoomed out. Everything in balance.
The point is when you zoom out, the strategic icons become so large you don't really see the units anymore, why even expend the resources to render and calculate their animations?
