In one Alpha 3.1'ish Leak, is reported the new tech for walking showcased last citcon is going to be on the build, this mostly is the character animation adapting to obstacles, slopes and all sorts of terrain correctly.
In one Alpha 3.1'ish Leak, is reported the new tech for walking showcased last citcon is going to be on the build, this mostly is the character animation adapting to obstacles, slopes and all sorts of terrain correctly.
Well they discovered IK ... 2018 ... Sorry but this is not new tech, its 20 years old ...
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it. The cake is a lie.
In one Alpha 3.1'ish Leak, is reported the new tech for walking showcased last citcon is going to be on the build, this mostly is the character animation adapting to obstacles, slopes and all sorts of terrain correctly.
Well they discovered IK ... 2018 ... Sorry but this is not new tech, its 20 years old ...
Well they discovered IK ... 2018 ... Sorry but this is not new tech, its 20 years old ...
What is there to be sorry about? They develop their own solutions as they need them, they don't need to invent something.
And as we can see many games still do not have such a "20 years old tech" implemented, what kinda makes me cringe to still see games coming out where your character model "floats" in several types of geometry or is unable to cross small obstacles without jumping or clipping.
Doesn't matter whether a something is brand new or 100 years old; what matters is: is it in the game or not. All games at the end of the day can be considered a collection of features.
Dismissing a feature because its 20 years old is churlish. Especially as it still isn't in alpha!
The key point is that 3.1 has been released to Evocati. Which suggests that the alpha should get the 3.1 update at the end of the first quarter.
Doesn't matter whether a something is brand new or 100 years old; what matters is: is it in the game or not. All games at the end of the day can be considered a collection of features.
Dismissing a feature because its 20 years old is churlish. Especially as it still isn't in alpha!
The key point is that 3.1 has been released to Evocati. Which suggests that the alpha should get the 3.1 update at the end of the first quarter.
Sure we all need IK it is just not "new tech" as stated before. If someone would state that CIG is working on their own Inverse Kinematik system with extra fidelity everything would be ok. At least CIG didn't invent a new word for IK
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it. The cake is a lie.
Sure we all need IK it is just not "new tech" as stated before. If someone would state that CIG is working on their own Inverse Kinematik system with extra fidelity everything would be ok. At least CIG didn't invent a new word for IK
It is new tech on their game engine, they can call it whatever they want, Cryengine itself called all sorts of standard pieces of tech and tools "CryThis CryThat".
Sure we all need IK it is just not "new tech" as stated before. If someone would state that CIG is working on their own Inverse Kinematik system with extra fidelity everything would be ok. At least CIG didn't invent a new word for IK
It is new tech on their game engine, they can call it whatever they want, Cryengine itself called all sorts of standard pieces of tech and tools "CryThis CryThat".
It's not "their" game engine and please give some examples where Crytech is renaming standard tech stuff.
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it. The cake is a lie.
Turrican187 said: It's not "their" game engine and please give some examples where Crytech is renaming standard tech stuff.
What renaming?
Since when are you required to name your OWN code piece of technology that you developed to implement in YOUR game engine/codebase the same as the technical name of it?
Since when does the fact you name a tool or technology you develop, means that you somehow invented it and are taking credit for something that already exists elsewhere?
Arguing on the internal terminology they use for what they develop is really... meh. Aside of you if you watched the video you would see they are not stating they invented IK, it is actually stated it is a combination of different IK methods that provide the procedurally assisted locomotion.
UI has rewritten the visor vehicle status holograms to use RTT so it is a true reflection of the in-game entity. displayed on MFDs, mobiGlas or visor
Introducing the ability to set the camera angle (from predefined list) when viewing own or target vehicle
Added ability to connect auxiliary displays (visor, 3D radar, etc.) to vehicles dashboard to use as additional screens
Added new way to support multi-channels and improved colour blending/breakup to the Procedural Planet tech
Finalising last pieces of truckstop exterior and incorporating new common element hangars
ProceduralLayout tool is now automatically generating lots (1000+ and counting) of successful layouts
Anvil Terrapin, MISC Razor, Tumbril Cyclone, and Aegis Reclaimer approaching flight ready and getting VFX added
Focusing on impact reworks for Geminii R97, PRAR Distortion Scattergun, and Scourge Railgun
Migrating Star Marine customisation screen to common (Arena Commander, mobiGlass) codebase: will allow players to select individual armour pieces in SM
UI hard at work on implementing visual improvements and prototyping the new layout for the mobiGlas
TechArt working on Character Customiser: new looping idle, more/randomise facial animations, work-in-progress icons and so on
Working on Service Beacons for 3.1 to allow players to pay each other for services (personal transport, combat assistance, etc.)
Optimization
The biggest problem with optimization in a game like Star Citizen is the sheer number of entities.
Game simulation is dependent upon inputs, the state of the game's world and the rendering of scenes within that world in simple looping steps.
GPUs and CPUs can work together in either lockstep or in parallel forming a pattern called pipelining.
The management of pipelining is a main way to improve resource efficiency and thereby reduce lag and latency.
Because a system will always be bound by the slowest component, multithreading CPUs add to the complexity.
More pipelining can actually increase perceived latency though better frame rate might be achieved.
Again, because of the latency issues in dealing with a game like Star Citizen, especially considering the internet use, lockstep is not being used
Often multiple approaches are used in unison to increase and optimize performance through good resource management.
Tech art and tech content tend to focus on the GPU budget of 2500 draw calls, and try to use LODs, detail meshes, and skinning to reduce the number of draw calls.
Damage tech is being reworked to have less debris, and therefore less extra geometry. This reduces the number of draw calls required.
Another trick to limit draw calls is vis areas and portal culling - this essentially is only having the game render what you can see. They are currently fighting some significant bugs with this as seen on the Caterpillar where you can frequently see through the walls.
Another improvement is moving from using voxels to using signed distance fields for local physics grids. This is much more precisely and the actual shape can be described in much higher resolution. This will allow for much more ship-hugging shield tech.
Signed distance fields are also the first step in allowing ship wrecks to be fully accessible and therefore salvageable and explorable.
Network code on the server has been a big performance bottleneck. The main thread will get delayed because the network thread is too busy trying to send updates to all of the players in the game, causing everything to slow down or stall.
3.0 included a lot of optimizations for network code including conversion to serialized variables and remote methods.
The overload of network instructions on a single thread has now been parallelized onto multiple threads.
Network code has never really been a performance issue on the client side - the issue has always been on the server side.
Bind culling is intended to address this mismatch.
Essentially bind culling will mean the client will not load entities for which the player is not in range and therefore will not spend any CPU processing time on them and will not get updates from the server about them.
The issue, and why bind culling has taken so long to implement, is what to do when a player does go in range of an entity which the server has not been updating. How do you create the entities without causing the game to slow down massively?
Object container streaming is the answer to the bind culling issue - needed entities will be predicted and loaded on a background thread so the main thread is not halted while trying to do so itself.
Full implementation of bind culling won’t be coming to the player until object container streaming is in the game but bind culling is needed beforehand for the developers so that they can work to eliminate all the problems it can cause - such as how do you point a player to a destination for a mission when that destination does not currently exist in the game (due to being culled out).
A lot of the performance gains that were anticipated with bind culling have been able to be achieved with serialized variable culling which essentially just tells the server to stop sending updates to the client about entities which are not within a certain distance of the player.
When designing a game like Star Citizen, it becomes more difficult over time to optimize and improve performance as it’s being built due to the complexity and ambitions the game is trying to achieve.
When it comes to new features coming online, there usually is a performance drop, but with the new tools they should be able to quickly get performance back to the level players found acceptable and improve upon it.
More recent bit of the Reclaimer, shall be interesting exploring that in-game, the scale of the ship is quite on the tier of a capital ship, bigger than the Polaris.
Comments
(Dopamine Edit)
Patch notes : https://pastebin.com/vXmzmWs0
Reclaimer is now the New Biggest Ship in Town:
Reverse The Verse aka Q&A about Performance & Optimization (Q's start @ 7m)
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it.
The cake is a lie.
Have fun
15 years ago.
Have fun
And as we can see many games still do not have such a "20 years old tech" implemented, what kinda makes me cringe to still see games coming out where your character model "floats" in several types of geometry or is unable to cross small obstacles without jumping or clipping.
Dismissing a feature because its 20 years old is churlish. Especially as it still isn't in alpha!
The key point is that 3.1 has been released to Evocati. Which suggests that the alpha should get the 3.1 update at the end of the first quarter.
If someone would state that CIG is working on their own Inverse Kinematik system with extra fidelity everything would be ok.
At least CIG didn't invent a new word for IK
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it.
The cake is a lie.
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it.
The cake is a lie.
Since when are you required to name your OWN code piece of technology that you developed to implement in YOUR game engine/codebase the same as the technical name of it?
Since when does the fact you name a tool or technology you develop, means that you somehow invented it and are taking credit for something that already exists elsewhere?
Arguing on the internal terminology they use for what they develop is really... meh. Aside of you if you watched the video you would see they are not stating they invented IK, it is actually stated it is a combination of different IK methods that provide the procedurally assisted locomotion.
Last patch was a big step forward. Still has lotsa errors. Wrote a lot of reports ;-)
Have fun
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Project Update
UI has rewritten the visor vehicle status holograms to use RTT so it is a true reflection of the in-game entity. displayed on MFDs, mobiGlas or visor
Introducing the ability to set the camera angle (from predefined list) when viewing own or target vehicle
Added ability to connect auxiliary displays (visor, 3D radar, etc.) to vehicles dashboard to use as additional screens
Added new way to support multi-channels and improved colour blending/breakup to the Procedural Planet tech
Finalising last pieces of truckstop exterior and incorporating new common element hangars
ProceduralLayout tool is now automatically generating lots (1000+ and counting) of successful layouts
Anvil Terrapin, MISC Razor, Tumbril Cyclone, and Aegis Reclaimer approaching flight ready and getting VFX added
Focusing on impact reworks for Geminii R97, PRAR Distortion Scattergun, and Scourge Railgun
Migrating Star Marine customisation screen to common (Arena Commander, mobiGlass) codebase: will allow players to select individual armour pieces in SM
UI hard at work on implementing visual improvements and prototyping the new layout for the mobiGlas
TechArt working on Character Customiser: new looping idle, more/randomise facial animations, work-in-progress icons and so on
Working on Service Beacons for 3.1 to allow players to pay each other for services (personal transport, combat assistance, etc.)
Optimization
The biggest problem with optimization in a game like Star Citizen is the sheer number of entities.
Game simulation is dependent upon inputs, the state of the game's world and the rendering of scenes within that world in simple looping steps.
GPUs and CPUs can work together in either lockstep or in parallel forming a pattern called pipelining.
The management of pipelining is a main way to improve resource efficiency and thereby reduce lag and latency.
Because a system will always be bound by the slowest component, multithreading CPUs add to the complexity.
More pipelining can actually increase perceived latency though better frame rate might be achieved.
Again, because of the latency issues in dealing with a game like Star Citizen, especially considering the internet use, lockstep is not being used
Often multiple approaches are used in unison to increase and optimize performance through good resource management.
Tech art and tech content tend to focus on the GPU budget of 2500 draw calls, and try to use LODs, detail meshes, and skinning to reduce the number of draw calls.
Damage tech is being reworked to have less debris, and therefore less extra geometry. This reduces the number of draw calls required.
Another trick to limit draw calls is vis areas and portal culling - this essentially is only having the game render what you can see. They are currently fighting some significant bugs with this as seen on the Caterpillar where you can frequently see through the walls.
Another improvement is moving from using voxels to using signed distance fields for local physics grids. This is much more precisely and the actual shape can be described in much higher resolution. This will allow for much more ship-hugging shield tech.
Signed distance fields are also the first step in allowing ship wrecks to be fully accessible and therefore salvageable and explorable.
Network code on the server has been a big performance bottleneck. The main thread will get delayed because the network thread is too busy trying to send updates to all of the players in the game, causing everything to slow down or stall.
3.0 included a lot of optimizations for network code including conversion to serialized variables and remote methods.
The overload of network instructions on a single thread has now been parallelized onto multiple threads.
Network code has never really been a performance issue on the client side - the issue has always been on the server side.
Bind culling is intended to address this mismatch.
Essentially bind culling will mean the client will not load entities for which the player is not in range and therefore will not spend any CPU processing time on them and will not get updates from the server about them.
The issue, and why bind culling has taken so long to implement, is what to do when a player does go in range of an entity which the server has not been updating. How do you create the entities without causing the game to slow down massively?
Object container streaming is the answer to the bind culling issue - needed entities will be predicted and loaded on a background thread so the main thread is not halted while trying to do so itself.
Full implementation of bind culling won’t be coming to the player until object container streaming is in the game but bind culling is needed beforehand for the developers so that they can work to eliminate all the problems it can cause - such as how do you point a player to a destination for a mission when that destination does not currently exist in the game (due to being culled out).
A lot of the performance gains that were anticipated with bind culling have been able to be achieved with serialized variable culling which essentially just tells the server to stop sending updates to the client about entities which are not within a certain distance of the player.
When designing a game like Star Citizen, it becomes more difficult over time to optimize and improve performance as it’s being built due to the complexity and ambitions the game is trying to achieve.
When it comes to new features coming online, there usually is a performance drop, but with the new tools they should be able to quickly get performance back to the level players found acceptable and improve upon it.
The damage states of the Reclaimer ship, part of the 3.1 update.
Bugsmashers! - Sticking the Landing Gear
More recent bit of the Reclaimer, shall be interesting exploring that in-game, the scale of the ship is quite on the tier of a capital ship, bigger than the Polaris.