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I know why this game is so buggy.
DKid
Member Posts: 76
Its a game there has to be zones your memory would have to be godly im talking higher then technology is at this point to and your card and processor would have to fly. And one more thing on this when and if there expansions god help technology is all im saying there is technology to fit this game at this early development but expand and see what happens you be upgrading your pc every expansion if there is such technology.
I am not no genius and I have never played this game but its common sense i use 1.4 gig to play everquest and i play it smooth with zones if there was no zones there im sure it would take over 20 gig memory to run that game easy.
At these early stages of the game it cant take over 4k memory to play it zoneless but then if it expands you in trouble how anyone upgrade every year or even afford that? In other words save memory make zones end of story everyone without 4k memory can play then, And think about it 4k just for this game then expansions what we need each expansion another 4k there is no such technology I think what happened is they made it with a top of line computer and didnt even think about the expansions.
Comments
So you use 1.4 gig to play everquest but if it was zoneless you would only need 20k - man that would run on my commodore 64 - they should do that.
And you are so wrong - needing a better processor, more memory and a better graphics card would mean the game was laggy (ie really slow) not buggy (lots of crashes , broken quests etc).
- a double negative - so you are in fact a genius. Riddle me this batman - which is bigger - a gig or a k?They made zone based loading to save memory.
Hooray for VG!
</sarcasm>
FYI --- RAM != performance, especially "4k memory"
You know, like, 30 years worth of hip hop and the best line you can think to use is that?
I wouldn't bash the OP to much. He's not articulating it very well, but he's on the right track. The amount of information that is loaded into your system for each zone is around a gig, and it's one of the reasons we get the hitching when we enter a new zone for the first time.
Guys, not everyone has a silver tongue, or is that gracefull with a keyboard.
Wish Darkfall would release.
But the message I got out of his post was, if we all had computers with 20 gigs of RAM, VG would run fine.
Clearly, this is not true. I was just suggesting that he go read up on performance cause/effect before attempting to explain the largest issue surrounding Vanguard itself, especially in that manor.
Maybe I am just a biased programmer who has too little patience for not so technical people.
Yeah I stopped there.
Unfortunately, the list of reasons of why VG is so buggy is far too long to rehash in a single post, but certainly it is a memory hog and that contributes to some of the performance issues..... but there are many more....
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Wish Darkfall would release.
I read the post, checked his profile and thought, dang, this guys is really gonna get it.
I'm just hoping people wont be to mean to him.
Wish Darkfall would release.
Yeah I stopped there.
Dang you stopped there? I stopped second sentence and skipped to the end of his statement. But yeah true if you havent play the game kinda of hard to be a critic.
and it earns my bewilderingly unclear award of the week.
My point was - poor performance makes the game unplayable - but its not a bug, its poor performance.
And yes having szones would make the game perform better - but it wont fix the bugs.
Bugs are things like - broken quests, falling through the world, crashing to desk top, skills /spells that dont work.
Both will put players off playing a game - but they are different things. Unfortunately VG is plagued with both.
Continous worlds are harder to implement than zoned worlds. Presumably Wwe have to load sections of the world in and out of memory whilst keeping a close eye on the CPU time needed to do this and also overall memory consumption. In VG this has added complexity by adjacent chunks showing as low detail models and popping into high details.
This isn't impossible to do though with zones we can take the liberty and say done with this area ... load this one. It seems a much more defined process. We really need a shit hot programmer on here to put us all into a trance and tell us about the diffculties.
Its also fariy safe to say that WoW implements this the best of any game I have seen so far (perhaps because of the simple world), LOTRO also has a good attempt at this. From what i saw of vanguard it isnt great. Walking vevr zones always gives sizeable stutter of some kind. This is evident on many youtube videos... which STILL dont have the bloomin FPS counter on !.... !
IF anyone wants to correct me fine.. just show some programming credentials, I'm only a novice.
Each of the continents in WoW are broken up into zones as well. It's not as noticable now, but for a while after release if you were a hunter you or a warlock your pet would dismiss when you crossed a chunk. WoWs engine doesn't have to accunt for the space beneath the world or above it, and only in TBC does it do anything above the world.
VG loads more portals on your system at a time then any other MMO at the moment. Intead of one or two it loads four. Most systems just aren't ready to process a gig worth of information in a couple seconds yet.
Wish Darkfall would release.
Making a loader that can handle a "seamless" world like this is in a way that really appears seamless to a player is an interesting technical challenge. Before I started playing, I had assumed that Sigil did a better job of this than they had. I have seen some gradual improvements to cross-chunk context management (for want of a better term ATM), but there is still a long way to go. Certainly, hardware technology improvements will help, but the key to creating the "seamless" illusion remains software that is sufficiently sophisticated and complex without the bugs that usually accompany "sophisticated and complex".
Using the example used above for ease, WoW loads an entire area. While this may technically be true it most certainly does not load the whole thing. Each client will be interacting with the server to retrive lots of information such as npc or player positions and constantly update them (although as any rogue will tell you, not always too well, "you need to be behind your target"). The map of the continent itself is a constant 3d model held on each client, then as the player walks about it will have a sort of big bubble around it anything within this bubble is effectivly loaded from the server.
Now it's no massive techonological step to move this onto seemless worlds. The main technological issues were not so much clientside as serverside. Whereas before for zoned games a zone is static you stuck more power for more poeple or effect until it was stable enough. With seemless you need to rely on newer technology (which costs about the same as the engines themselves) to manage you're server arrays (I make that sound so simple).
Don't get me wrong there will be increased load on clients but not to the degreee that a game should be as bad as VG is reported to be, if indeed it is, that is more likely to be poor codeing relating to the industry 'deadlines for cash' standards, than current technology.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Played it on an ATHLON 64 X2 5200+ /2Gb DDR2 / r1650pro and it run horrible.
I would have thought that VG would have used that kind of model right from the get-go. I think they didn't quite get around to making it really work well. IMO that should have been the main job of at least one person who really knew how to do it, and it should have been mostly worked out before the first beta phase.
What you said about server integration meshes up well with some other information people have posted, and from my own experiences in-game: VG does not have a good server setup. I'm not sure whether it's the basic server software design that sucks wads, or if its mainly a matter of tuning and capacity, but there are many more server-related issues than there should be. Maybe SOE has the capability to fix what Sigil did not do right, in that regard. The kind of server issues I'm talking about have almost nothing to do with details of gameplay or game design, but with the demands the gameplay places on the servers. These are all technical computer science & engineering issues for which SOE should have a dedicated professional staff, so I'm allowing myself some optimism.
Uhm, I presume the OP is trying to understand why VG is so bad.... The argument put forward regarding zones is utter rubbish the issue is the design and the code. A number of games run well without zones I think the starting point here should be the word 'Efficient' with respect to coding and resource management the game delivers neither.
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel