here is a planet.

right okay... Just didn't think it would be much difference. Would like to know how big we could actually go before its unplayable might have to experiment a bit

It's a downgrade. I have a 2500 and a NVIDIA NVS4200M right now in this laptop. I was wondering if the integrated would be enough.

For some reason, my GPU isn't letting me get optimal FPS all the time (usually it's at 30 rather than 60), but I get ~20FPS on a 2000r Earth planet. So, you can imagine that it would be a bit painful to play on.

That would be (regular double buffered) VSYNC limiting your framerate to a whole number divisor (60, 30, 20, 15) of your monitor refresh rate when it dips below 60 fps. Enabling triple buffering in your graphics settings should fix this at the expense of around 100mb of additional vram (on 1080p at 32bit color anyway, less if you are running at a lower resolution). If you cant manage that, disable VSYNC and deal with the inevitable tearing. Or, if you have a recent enough NVIDIA card, use Dynamic VSYNC.

For general interest, here is a plot of the relationship between the radius and surface area of a sphere:

I've always ran 60FPS and then it slowly dips down... I usually have vsync on since my PC can handle it, and it randomly plays games on 60 or 30 now, even though the system sizes don't matter. It's odd, but not important.

As I said before, this is caused by double-buffered VSYNC, it happens to everyone who uses it, as it's an inherent flaw in the design. Triple buffering was developed expressly to address and fix it. So check that out before giving up on my suggestion.

Dunno, I'm running hella fine on 8GB. Or am I not being ambitious enough with my planet sizes?

this goes into the planet scale contest, and I had a multiplayer match on a planet roughly this size already: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/3000-radius-planet-multiplayer-gameplay.58831/

this does speak volumes for how planet generation has been optimized.

You know, I dont think there is any data compression for planets in ram at this point, I think we will be able to have significantly larger planets once Uber figures that out. I know that the engine uses CSG operations to make planets, and I believe that that particular format/method has several highly efficient compression algorithims for use in CAD/CAM packages currently existing. It shouldn't be terribly difficult to adapt one to the PA engine.

I saw so many planet size discussions, I finally made a surface area mod for the system designer.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-surface-area.62643/

What, were you born in a barn?
Label those axes.

Radius 4500 Earth, 65 Height Range, 50 Water Level, At the very edge of the grid. I thought that it looked sweet. This used less than my 16GB of memory.

(Note: This is not recent. It should be almost 8 months old now.)

Edit: I can't wait to play with the 64GB hexacore OP server I'm building for my school. Water cooled, I get to play with it until we decide to migrate. PA FTW!

Oh man, back when water in PA was pretty..

Edit: Whoops, wrong thread.

Hmm actually I think HD4000+ is probably faster than the 4200M. That's only a 48 shader card. My old laptop with its ancient GT 420m has 96 shaders of the same generation, which I've found sufficient for PA and games like Tomb Raider 2013 and Star Conflict at reasonable settings. The main thing you need though is more ram before anything else, if you could simply increase the memory in your current laptop you might find it will improve (or more importantly *maintain*) performance quite a bit.

I have a old, low end, terrible, 8g ram computer. Still, haven't had trouble playing anything I wanted to play in PA. I don't get most other's issues.

The only 2 things ever, was a black texture on everything bug that everyone had for the entire existance of just a single PTE, and a restart between every new match bug which is inconvinent but stops nothing itself.

I actually like to play both on multi planet systems with low radius, and single high-radius planets. However, there is a difference between "high" and "unplayable".

That difference, is pretty much the difference between a 64x64 map and a 2400x2400 map in games of old. One is playable. The other isnt. Within the realm of sanity. Now, I know it COULD be playable, but there is no reason I would ever need to play on a single planet above 1800. 1800 is MASSIVE and I would probably play with no more than a 5v5. Most sensible people should find this self evident and inarguable... Pretty much anyone who has ever attempted to play a huge SupCom map can note the reasons they would never intentionally do one.

Sometime I wish I weren't so poor, so I could afford more than my current 4GB RAM.

8gb of RAM is a terribly low end PC now?

Oh my bad.
Here is a updated version with axes labels: