Well.. adding units is technical easy but gameplay wise one of the most difficult things to do . Every new unit added increases the complexity.
I think there's prolly 2 sides to this. Adding in individual units without considering general counters, I would agree. But if you keep a general balance between some general classes of units, and spec new units around those counters before hand, a lot less tweeking should be needed. So basically like econ crashes at this point: plan ahead!?
Question, how easy is it to add a unit in which the mechanics it uses do not exist? Also, how does one balance units against things that don't yet have mechanics?
Are uber aware this plays with unbearable lag and stutter at the moment? Is everyone not saying anything to spare their feelings or is it just me who is getting this? Just hosted a game on a custom planet and like the three or four previous games I tried this week it was unplayable. Better than the BSOD I got earlier but still really stuttery, with pauses and then fast forward catch up bits and combined with interface difficulties.... just saying I hope they are aware that is why people wont be playing it, not because we dont want to just its too painful to play right now. Sorry just felt I had to say something.
If you report performance issues please always include your DxDiag.txt. We (and developers too) can't know what hardware do you have, may be you want to run PA on 6-years old video card.
Yes agreed with boolybooly, not sure why other forum members haven't mentioned it. I and everyone in the Realm have nearly unplayable lag in small teamgames from quite early on in the game. Currently dealing with it by only playing tiny maps on the moon. Anything else isn't really playable.
Might be because developers know what performance issues game have and they mentioned it's each time? And actually if Uber will need some feedback on performance they'll probably give us some testing tools which will make additional profiling of engine. Currently we can only report average FPS and hardware info, it's not really useful for game optimization.
K thanks zaphod, looked through this thread and bug tasks list etc and couldnt see this so thought it made sense to check... and not make assumptions ... ! We can probably blame the mac users in a pinch !!
Not to rub it in or anything, but I've literally had excellent performance all the way except for when they changed the gfx method so it would work on macs. It doesn't even slow down as much with a ton of units all firing at once any more! Maybe someone should start a poll: ATI vs NVidia and who gets lag :geek:
Most of people have far slower GPU than your 660 Ti. It's really won't be useful without some in-game benchmark which will collect more statistics and proper hardware information. Performance actually depends on many parameters (screen resolution, drivers version and settings, etc) which make simple "good" or "bad" poll not useful.
It's something like £160 ($250) in UK, at least it's not cheap GPU. You also need to consider that many people use notebooks where you have 2 times less performance.
When was the last time you played a custom planet infuscoletum ? The mac change was a few versions ago but its been pretty bad ever since but custom planets are a lot worse . Currently zooming out is particularly troublesome as there is a huge hiccup when the view area expands so navigating around the map is a nightmare even against AI. But when you are networked to other people it gets even worse. On a standard map it seems a lot better. SXX I have a QX9650 with 8Gb and an HD 5870 with Win7x64 on SSD btw. You should test the custom planets see if it makes a difference for you too.
AFAIK, "standard" planets are just the same as custom, but are a lot smaller than custom ones can be. Just played a game vs. the ai, on a custom earth map of the largest allowed size. I wish I had the unit count mod installed, but 15 is about as low as it got, running ~30 almost all the time. It did dip to 3-4 a few times when zooming in/out on units, but that's prolly just an LOD (or lack thereof) issue. I did notice my ram spike quite a lot, then dip back down to a baseline, whenever I moused over a unit, or 100) (my mem use was at like 75% or something anyways :shock: ) Point is, I got lack of framerate stuttering, not the stop->catch up lag that you describe. My CPU did hit ~38 degrees tho. Which is pretty harsh on my setup, considering it's pretty cool here today. Not sure on my GPU temps, cus I left that monitor closed Here's my dxdiag after: EDIT: Just so no one gets the wrong idea, I view my setup as low-midrange for gaming, and most certainly NOT a powerhouse by a long shot!
The new graphics optimization guy starts August 12th hopefully he will find the leaks in the Video Ram thrashing, some guru from microsoft directx team. He will have to learn the openGL curve though but that shouldn't take too long. Probably see much more optimized opengl rendering code in September when the Beta comes out.
