Guild Wars 2

I know the devs have said they are already fixing the problem, namely by throwing more money at the problem and making some extreme improvements to the game engine – but that is a very long term solution and by the time you’ve rebuilt the entire game engine to handle culling, it’s probably time for gw3. Here’s a more intermediate solution that will effectively remove all the issues of culling with very little change in resource consumption or requirement for game engine improvement:

Load the names of players first before loading their models. Floating text to indicate an enemy definitely takes less resources, and bandwidth and client limitations are not so much of an issue. No more invisible 50 men zergs popping out of no where – you’d be able to see a huge pile of names before culling decides the models should load. Same with thief stealth, if we see their name pop out as soon as they come out of stealth, it’s effective enough to give us a place to target. This is not a technically infeasible suggestion, and client hardware considerations are not such a big issue.

While I doubt it’s that easy, it DOES sound like an interesting stopgap on the way to fixing the culling issues…. IF the names aren’t tied to the images or anything.

It is -kind of- that easy. They haven’t built the engine to load the name plates separately from the player models and without expecting that to be an issue they might have an absolutely terrible structure in the engine for teasing the two apart.

That said it’s kind of terrible to not anticipate something like this issue and set it up so that you can definitely make a change like this with relatively minor development pain to go with it. If any of you folks in WvW ever find yourselves producing MMOs you should definitely think about having something like an independent nameplate that can load before the character model does. If you’ve got the time in testing also figure out what kind of server load starts causing strange behaviors like this and make sure everyone in charge knows how badly the engine fails if you up the values from what you actually tried in the stress tests.

A change in load-order priority and turning ‘model→nametag’ into ‘nametag→model’ should indeed be possible.

Aveneo.2068:

A change in load-order priority and turning ‘model->nametag’ into ‘nametag->model’ should indeed be possible.

Players, even those with enough programming background to know what they’re talking about (actually, especially those people) usually assume the game is put together much more elegantly than it actually is. Some times the smallest things that seem simple and obvious to change aren’t nearly as simple and obvious because MMOs get incredibly messy under the hood over time.

Tulisin.6945:

Aveneo.2068:

A change in load-order priority and turning ‘model->nametag’ into ‘nametag->model’ should indeed be possible.

Players, even those with enough programming background to know what they’re talking about (actually, especially those people) usually assume the game is put together much more elegantly than it actually is. Some times the smallest things that seem simple and obvious to change aren’t nearly as simple and obvious because MMOs get incredibly messy under the hood over time.

Oh I can assure you that I know what I’m talking about, and I know how much of a mess things can become. In fact, when I was creating Mannimarco Revisited for TES4:Oblivion you wouldn’t believe how many things had to be tweaked in order to get the multi-stage scripts to function properly for most users.

However, I didn’t say it was easy or anything; just that a change in load-order priority should be possible.

Greetz,

Aveneo (aka Miltiades)

Aveneo.2068:

Tulisin.6945:

Aveneo.2068:

A change in load-order priority and turning ‘model->nametag’ into ‘nametag->model’ should indeed be possible.

Players, even those with enough programming background to know what they’re talking about (actually, especially those people) usually assume the game is put together much more elegantly than it actually is. Some times the smallest things that seem simple and obvious to change aren’t nearly as simple and obvious because MMOs get incredibly messy under the hood over time.

Oh I can assure you that I know what I’m talking about, and I know how much of a mess things can become. In fact, when I was creating Mannimarco Revisited for TES4:Oblivion you wouldn’t believe how many things had to be tweaked in order to get the multi-stage scripts to function properly for most users.

However, I didn’t say it was easy or anything; just that a change in load-order priority should be possible.

Greetz,

Aveneo (aka Miltiades)

Fair enough. Having seen both sides of this fence more often than not perfectly reasonable player expectations and suggestions meet the cold hard reality of immalleable design. I’d hope that GW2 is a next-gen MMO in the sense that is was built to be a living product that can be changed and updated easily for >10 years, but other MMOs haven’t given me much confidence.

I was going to make the title “reasonably easy fix” but it was too long so I had to shorten it xD. I’m aware how even a little change like this could be monstrously difficult to achieve, especially if the game engine was never built with this idea in mind. But what this solution does, however, is provide a work around for this issue that is just as effective without requiring the effort to completely redevelop the game engine in order for min spec clients to be able to handle loading all those models efficiently – a feat that would be better suited for another future title release considering the amount of work that would be required.

I seem to remember another NCSoft based game that allowed you to disable player models and still show nameplates… Why can’t that be used here?

This has already been mentioned before and I still doubt it’ll happen. I think culling will be the black mark on WvW in gw2 because it wont be fixed till it’s to late.

Yeh I suggested this even before the launch of the game and a few times since then, but well…they do their own thing.
I’m hatin’ on culling more and more, specially when ppl get yelled at for not following…yeh, can’t see enemies, can’t see friendlies, 100 ppl around me and I’m all aloneeeeee hahah.