Guild Wars 2

I’d love to hear some feedback on what is being done to improve engine performance for HoT.

We all know GW2, beautiful as it is, chugs like a mule when it comes to performance, especially in CPU intensive scenarios such as blob-vs-blov in WvW. Great strides were made to improve the situation back in 2013 with the WvW and PvE player culling update (probably the single greatest engine improvement to date?)

I’d love to know if we can look forward to any significant improvements in this direction for HoT as we haven’t really seen even any hints drop as yet. But im hopeful. Im not looking for any new API support or any of that jazz, that would be a dream come true but unlikely. But surely we are going to move with the times even a little?

“Runs better than ever!” isn’t a tagline you can market to hook new players. But certainly puts a big smile on the faces of current players who have played the game in its current state for as long as they have.

Thanks!

Since we get bigger zones, or at least zones with different layers and so more stuff,
i would rather expect worse performance since there is more to be calculated and
rendered.
At least that happend in EQ2 when they doubled the zone size in Rise of Kunark.
Also the zones eat more memory, and the first people had OOM errors at that
time on 32-bit windows.

They will have to upgrade the engine someday, it’s inevitable. It will not happen at release, though. Pretty sure I read that somewhere.

Anyway, the competition does not sleep, the first MMO’s with Dx12 support are releasing this and next year.

Heh, they might as well have a look at Vulkan if they are interested in better graphics.

Kraljevo.2801:

Anyway, the competition does not sleep, the first MMO’s with Dx12 support are releasing this and next year.

Lineage 2 clone 4711 .. “Age of Geargrind” ? Yeah .. will switch to that as soon as
it is released because Engine > All ^^

Kimyrielle.3826:

Heh, they might as well have a look at Vulkan if they are interested in better graphics.

Chances are bad for that happening. No serious developer is going to use anything but directx at this point, with a possible opengl render path if they really, really want to do a Mac release, and a possible Linux release if they already are doing the work for Mac. If Steam OS does a whole lot better than I expect it to, that might change, but right now why would a developer waste their time with Vulkan when they can hit the vast majority of users using an API from a company that already works hand in hand with the major graphic card manufacturers? Vulkan’s success as an API hinges entirely on Valve’s success with their current Steam Box gamble, and won’t get major support from hardware manufacturers until Valve proves to them that it’s worth their time to worry about it. Directx is here, now, to stay, and will be regardless of how Vulkan pans out in the long run. I know which one I’d pick if I was a game developer. A year or two from now the answer might be totally different, but not right now.

this should answer your question

https://youtu.be/jZWOzwVlacQ?t=8m3s

TexZero.7910:

this should answer your question

https://youtu.be/jZWOzwVlacQ?t=8m3s

That makes me sad but also was pretty much what i expected.

Non-descript under the hood ‘engine improvements’. I really wanted some beefy “This is what we are doing and this is why it will make the game run better.” “Largescale battles in WvW will improve roughly %5 because of x.” 5% would be huge!

Many times have patch notes included something along the lines of “optimization improvements in the client” and stuff like that. But its all so imperceptible. Just what is improving?

Noobix.3958:

TexZero.7910:

this should answer your question

https://youtu.be/jZWOzwVlacQ?t=8m3s

That makes me sad but also was pretty much what i expected.

Non-descript under the hood ‘engine improvements’. I really wanted some beefy “This is what we are doing and this is why it will make the game run better.” “Largescale battles in WvW will improve roughly %5 because of x.” 5% would be huge!

Many times have patch notes included something along the lines of “optimization improvements in the client” and stuff like that. But its all so imperceptible. Just what is improving?

I think most people wouldn’t even understand it if they go into detail like maybe
they improved calculation algorithms for bleed damage or shifting functions in
another tread that has less CPU load than where it actual was .. or whatever.
And then a lot is maybe trial and error since what looks good on the paper
suddenly backfires on the live servers and leads to all kind of other problems.

Even if it is not a real problem .. just look at the bug with the candy corn nodes
that are sometimes visible for a short moment. That in my opinion is a result
from multi-threading when one tasks not waits until another is completed.