[POLL] Bigger Maps in Ranked Queue

Well, I'm a curios person, and by pure coincidence I got a HD graphics card.
So here are the specs: Core i5-3550 / 8GB / on board HD graphics unit (Intel isn't very talky about which unit this is, beside it's the HD family)

Windows alone with Chrome running for several days the machine shows usually that something between 1.8 and 2.2 GB of RAM is used.

After starting PA (the current PTE version) switching local server off (*) and loading a 1000r planet with tropical biome and one AI the resource manager shows PA without the Coherent processes is using 3.2 GB. Playing for 10 min against the AI will increase the memory usage up to 3.8 GB.
At the end, the total memory usage was 6.5 GB RAM, after closing PA it dropped down to 1.7 GB so I would assume that PA including Coherent was using around 4.8 GB.

(Edit: Loading a planet like Forge and playing on it for 8 minutes will result in a total memory usage of 4.5 GB and a drop to 2.0 GB when closing PA. So roughly 2.5 GB for PA and Coherent)

On my machine, which is an unusual setup for sure, PA is definitely GPU bound, since CPU utilization was between 15 and 20% all the time.
The fact that planets with less than 800r are acceptable within the performance, I would suspect that the additional requirements from the triangle geometry on large planets will eat up to much of the GPU bandwidth.

From the game experience, which was very sluggish, I would definitely not recommend to try to play a 1000r planet on a system that has a shared memory graphics unit with less then 8GB.

(*) Using a local server will bring the system to its full memory usage. The server process itself will use something between 1,2 GB to 1,5 GB on RAM. This will push the RAM utilization up to nearly 100% and page faults starting to happen, as Windows begins to swap out some of Chrome or its own processes.

Regardless, as the map pool widens to include a larger number of more diverse maps, it seems like a voting scheme will become very needed.

certainly, I am not talking against that. Heck if you remember correctly my own automatch implementation even supported that It's not that much work to add it.

You'd be surprised, the game can actually run quite well on integrated graphics.

integrated graphics solutions are cancer to gaming and nobody should expect them to work fine. theseeker2, if they work fine then that's nice, but I what game exactly ever was really limiting itself to work on integrated graphics solutiuons? xD And if you use an integrated graphics solution you should at least have enough memory to play "vram" for your integrated graphics thingy.
Also I think a big planet could be a moon. Tropical certainly is worst case, trees, SO MANY xD

I'm saying that the game is so well optimized, there's practically no issue with a 1200 radius planet unless the machine is really terrible.

While I agree in principle that larger maps would be a good addition to the 1v1 map pool, I think that we need to add an important caveat, as cola_colin seems to indicate: do we mean bigger in terms of buildable surface area, travel time between spawns (and for what sort of units?), number of different possible paths between spawns, overall path-area between spawns, or some metric that mixes all of these? It isn't just a question of planet radius - each of the above quantities changes how big a map 'feels' in some way.

To clarify: if you have just lots of buildable space, you could have two large spawns separated by only one or two narrow chokepoints, making the map feel smaller and less maneuverable than it might first seem; if you have long travel times between spawns you could just have maps like TA's The Pass. If you want to maximise the different number of paths (here read a single path as 'the class of paths continuously mappable onto one another'), you could have a maze-style map, or if you want to maximise path area you could have spawns that are almost entirely walled in but leave the rest of the map open.

My point here is that saying 'bigger maps' is broadly understandable but actually a rather weak statement. Big can mean many different things: for example, what makes Meso such a clever, clever map is that it is small in some ways and big in others, giving the player a rather sophisticated flow of options and strategies as the game progresses. I think what we actually need is maps that are big in different and interesting ways.

I guess an alternative to get "bigger" maps would be to scale down all units, vision ranges, weapon ranges/etc by 20% or so, increasing the size of maps without costing any additional memory.

Colin, I'm sorry but I can't agree with you on this. Whatever you say, the number of people playing on machines with 4gb of ram isn't small (based on the amount of questions I've answered on the support forum). @SXX and @DeathByDenim can back me up on this I'm sure.

The 1 v 1 ranked pool should work for anyone who meets the *minimum requirements as specified on game purchase* which is 4gb of ram and discreet graphics. To do otherwise would be a very bad idea imo. Machines with 4gb of ram as commonplace partly because *outside of PA* few games actually need more than about 2 or 3gb of system ram. Newer titles like Star Citizen and such are using more memory, however we aren't there yet so to limit the map pool on this basis isn't an option *yet*. Even with a hard limit of 4gb, based on the above 800 and 900 radius planets are quite possible and would give a very different play experience to the current crop of small planets.

I think we need to keep it realistic. r1200 would simply restrict too many players to be practical in the official pool.

With all that said, if you ever see me online feel free to challenge me to a game on a nice r1200 planet, like yourself I prefer bigger maps. Maybe we should start a 'large 1 v 1 maps club' and get a little in community tourney / ladder / something going for it?

I get you disagree that people with 4GB should not just be forced to upgrade (upgrading ram from 4GB to 8GB is among the cheapest upgrades you can do to a computer. An additional 4GB RAM stick costs something in the ballpark of 40$. If you are pressed for money going for 4 to 6 costs less than 30$.) or live with a little laggy game (we still have no report at all from anyone with 4GB on how a 1200 moon actually plays, anyone can give that? I would hope it actually just loads for a some minutes and then *works*, just creates bad bad lags when you close PA, as windows basically has to fetch back everything not PA from virtual memory. I can remember back in the day I had that when I played bigger games of SupCom on my 1GB Ram system.) Sure 1200 is pushing it. I guess 1000 would be a start. Dunno the exact limits. Measure out the biggest that can barely work on 4GB and put it in. I am sure it is much more than we currently have.
The support forums is a bad measure for how many people may still try to play the game on toasters as well. Ofc such people will end up there, as they are trying to play the game on systems that are practically guaranteed to make issues. By that logic you could also look at the support forums and say "look the game is horribly buggy and crashes all the time", while that isn't true at all for most people. Only those with issues post in the support forums after all.

But why do you quote my post where I suggest just reducing all unit sizes/speeds instead of adding more planet geometry? That really should not be a big issue even for 4GB people.

It may work, but your 0.4 unit size & texture mod makes units borderline invisible on planet surfaces, we'd need to be able to zoom in a bit further to make that work.

First of, I'm not theseeker2.

Yes, my machine isn't exactly a gaming machine, I brought it mostly for compiling big sources like the Android Open Source Project, so I wouldn't expect it to run anything that involves graphics super smooth. But it runs PA in acceptable frame rates when you stay under 800r. So don't worry about my graphic thingy.

But since someone asked about memory requirements and low end machines, I thought I give some insights on a corner case, where the CPU isn't the bounding factor. I'm not sure why you acted so hyperbole to something that looks like a collection of facts.

I actually have a GTX 760, but I've tested the game on my laptop just to see if it does ok. It does.

Well, I actually was a 4gb user up until recently... And depending on your system getting an upgrade to 8 isn't that cheap. In the UK 8gb of ram currently goes for 60 to 70 pounds (100 dollars region) so it's not necessarily that cheap. also my old rig couldn't take more than 4gb due to ddr2 limits (4gb ddr2 modules are rare, poorly supported and very very expensive) and only having 2 slots (small form factor case and motherboard). In the end I spent 150 to get a new mobo with ddr3 support and 4 memory slots and a single 8gb module. The annoying thing is the rest of the machine was ok for pa.

What I do remember is the 10 minute loading times for pa when attempting to open a map too large to fit into ram. Whereas a smaller map would open instantly.

As for changing the scale, I don't disagree, however realistically I can't see that happening if I'm honest. My main point is that I think we can get sufficiently large systems that fit into a 4gb envelope, so we should do so. If bigger is really needed then uber need a memory check tool so players with insufficient ram never get placed on those maps... The loading times when out of ram in pa would cost you the match.

Also enough elitism on hardware. I'm adult, running my own successful design company and I don't have the disposable income to build a top spec machine... I wonder where people get the cash for these 2k rigS from...

You really don't need a 2k rig though. Just more than a 4 year old 400€ laptop.

lol most *new* £400 laptops won't run PA- seriously laptops have gotten *worse* recently- the laptop I use for work is 5 years old (first gen i5 with a GT 420m gpu and 8gb ram), and I'd have to spend £600+ to get something capable of outrunning it in games, yet they wonder why people are buying tablets instead lol. The number of 'laptops' featuring AMD E seriese or Intel Atom (or even worse the more recent Celeron / Pentium atom re-brands) chips is ludicrous. All of which featuring a terrible 5000 rpm mechanical hdd, 4gb of ram and a got awful 720p screen...

Anyway I digress, and yeah my current rig is ample for PA now (I've actually upgraded most of it though the memory increase was the biggest improvement). PA is very scalable which is nice, I just get frustrated by the 'upgrade your hardware' comments as it's not always that simple.

I was saying you need more than a 400€ laptop And if anyone expects a game like PA to run on cheap laptop with integerated graphics then seriously that's their own issue. Those computers don't run any recent games, why should PA be an exception?

And yeah sure it is not always so simple, but I've been in the situation of being a poor student for a very long time (actually I am again xD) and I know that it is not always that simple. But at least to me the reality was that I wanted my computer to be better to play the big games. Not the big games to be cut down to a tiny level so I can play with the toaster I had back then.

Could we also request more systems that promote orbital? Currently there is only one and really the first to go orbital is at a bid disadvantage to the one who stayed in terms of unit count due to the eco investment

-Just another suggestion to the OP