Guild Wars 2

Quick question here. I’m not really the best english speaker and I see the term “Culling” used alot in the game and on the forums. Is there anybody who cared to take their time and explain this word to me?

FYI:

What LithePanther.5027 described is not what culling IS ,,its what culling CAUSES.

Culling is what a GPU does to reduce load. It is controled by the game in question and helps keep up performance. Anything outside a ingame range distance and line of sight (i.e behind you) can be culled.
Examples:
For range distance in front of you, you can see this when you see someone pops up infornt of you X yards away out of nowhere. A more obviose and drastic effect happens with large groups of people hoarding together like in the halloween event. As you run around you will notce that there is effectivly a invisible circle around your character where anyone outside of it is not rendered.
Culling behind you, you can feel the effect of the fps stuttering as you turn the camera ..this is the gpu reloading stuff that was ‘culled’.

The ‘BUG’ people talk about is the ‘conditions’ currently set inplace for culling to occure. It is currently set to close to the player, meaning people can pop up all of a sudden very close to you becouse culling is happening to close. In additon to this culling is also happen to clsoe and to soon when moving around cuasing stuttering when a player turns the camera to somwhere he hasnt been to in a while. preferably culling should be set with a greater distance in mind however this would cause performance hits on lower end GPU and CPU’s as there will then always be more to render and compute. it would however help performance(less stuttering) and visusal quality(see more people) for those with high end rigs.

EDIT; the reason for people being slow to ‘pop up’ when within the culling distance is down t oa slow CPU. For GW2 to that ‘pritty much’ means anything that is not an up to date OC’d cpu.

It means to ‘thin out’, to kill some of the enemies off quickly.

Wikipedia will give you the long asnwer. In particular, check out the section on the origin of the term.

The main difference between using the word ‘thinning’ and ‘culling’, is that ‘culling’ is supposed to be more selective and, usually as a result, careful and complicated.

but…

Warcraft 3 had a mission called ‘The Culling’ wherein you had to massacre lots of peasants (the name was presumably chosen to emphasize the cold, pitiless attitude the protagonist had at the time, as if he were sorting through sheep), and as a result it’s entered the gaming vocabulary with new meaning, which is to massacre trash mobs. For example, you’ll cull the smaller adds before you start on the boss to reduce incoming damage faster.

However, if you ever work at an English-speaking farm, and the chief tells you he plans to cull a herd, you’ll get fired if you decide to take the initiative and kill the entire herd with a chainsaw. Unless he’s also a gamer.

I’m sorry, but while the above posters are right, in regards to YOUR question they are wrong.

In GW2, culling is another way to talk about the rendering bug. (i.e. rendering bug and culling bug are equal).

Culling is when there are a large amount of people/enemies in one area and it takes a few seconds for people to start popping into your screen. It’s a big problem in WvW and large DE’s because it takes a long time to see everyone at once so you can charge a group of 5 and it turns out there’s 20 there.

thanks Lithe(and Mun and Gara as well). That was what I thought it would be, just needed to have a confirmation.

Is n’t the culling also a deliberate server mechanic thats designed to make sure the gameplay stays smooth when events become huge.. Unfortunately it tends to cull the wrong things at times.

Yes, it was supposed to be good but ended up being a big problem. They’re working on fixing it.

Was supposed to be fixed in the last big patch but no. Still waiting.