Guild Wars 2

Most of us have played other games in which culling wasn’t an issue. That was in the past, when connections were generally less stable, slower, and more expensive. It was also when graphics were worse. Games 7 years ago at least could have large scale WvW.

I understand you weren’t prepared for this, and I don’t really mind that you weren’t prepared, but here’s what you should do in the mean time. While you work on your grand fix for all culling issues, give people who have high end systems the option now to load everything to a given range. Let them choose the range. Let them change it at will.

Let me choose culling settings. There is no way you can decide for me what is important in WvW. So don’t decide for me, give me the choice.

TSW implemented faction-based “uniforms” for their persistent PvP area. These uniforms were colored by faction and broken into armor type, so you generally knew if you were facing a heavily armored person, an offense-specced person, etc, as well as which side they were on. These uniforms covered all unique character features (masks to cover different faces) and as a result reduced the amount of models their servers had to track to a small number of preselected pieces.

If, at least in the interim, we have to give up having unique, multiracial, cool looking characters in WvW for human-sized “mist avatars” that simply show generic weapon/armor type and color by server, that is a sacrifice I’m pretty sure most of the community is willing to make.

If, at least in the interim, we have to give up having unique, multiracial, cool looking characters in WvW for human-sized “mist avatars” that simply show generic weapon/armor type and color by server, that is a sacrifice I’m pretty sure most of the community is willing to make.

For my opponents yes…but i would prefer to see my allies with their real armor/weapons/colors while raiding.

Not a sacrifice I would be willing to make. If I take the time to farm a legendary, you better be seeing those rainbows shooting into your heart.

I agree.

Make very very low texture or player model options, custom character sliders, load them at greater distance … nobody cares if WvWvW looks nice if it’s unplayable, better make it look ugly and playable.

The loading or rendering of textures is not the problem. Culling is done server side to figure out which data to send to each client. There is nothing in the client to change how this works. ANet need to do the changes and the changes will affect everyone.

Mipx.3519:

The loading or rendering of textures is not the problem. Culling is done server side to figure out which data to send to each client.

Yes, but the “data” is the aforementioned textures. Massively paring down the things needed to be loaded to 3~ sets of armor and basic weapons means the data sent to display 30 enemies is going to be vastly smaller than it is now, where culling is necessary due to 30 enemies having literally several hundred unique weapon/armor models, individual races, and every single permutation of racial selections (charr horns, sylvari ear textures, etc.)

It is the difference between “There is a red enemy with medium armor and two daggers at point X,Y,Z”, and “This is Jim, the norn thief, in his left hand he’s got incinerator, in his right hand he’s got a corrupted dagger, at character selection Jim took chose the biggest eyebrows because he’s cool like that, Jim is wearing the following armor pieces with the following colors…”, now multiply it by dozens.

Make name tags priority. At least have something to show where the target is.

Waking.6052:

Let me choose culling settings. There is no way you can decide for me what is important in WvW. So don’t decide for me, give me the choice.

This would mean that every person without an high-end Gaming PC has no chance in WvW because he cant render as fast as the one with highend.
I dont think this is any better then it is now, it would be far worse.

Besides the fact that the culling is caused by server and not on your client.

greetz

Tulisin.6945:

Mipx.3519:

The loading or rendering of textures is not the problem. Culling is done server side to figure out which data to send to each client.

Yes, but the “data” is the aforementioned textures. Massively paring down the things needed to be loaded to 3~ sets of armor and basic weapons means the data sent to display 30 enemies is going to be vastly smaller than it is now, where culling is necessary due to 30 enemies having literally several hundred unique weapon/armor models, individual races, and every single permutation of racial selections (charr horns, sylvari ear textures, etc.)

No no, the data is a list of IDs of the textures to load from the .dat-file in your installation directory as well as other attributes about your toon. I imagine something like { “ToonName”, 1, 4, 6, 5, 56, 567 } etc where the numbers each represent one attribute of the toon.

I agree, make it an option however… if people want high enemy detail they can select, or go for better performance with simplified generic models.

The data used to draw the toons is not sent by the server. The server simply tells your computer what to render from the data already stored on your computer like mipx said. The problem is that they have the server set to tell your computer how much to render.

Mipx.3519:

Tulisin.6945:

Mipx.3519:

The loading or rendering of textures is not the problem. Culling is done server side to figure out which data to send to each client.

Yes, but the “data” is the aforementioned textures. Massively paring down the things needed to be loaded to 3~ sets of armor and basic weapons means the data sent to display 30 enemies is going to be vastly smaller than it is now, where culling is necessary due to 30 enemies having literally several hundred unique weapon/armor models, individual races, and every single permutation of racial selections (charr horns, sylvari ear textures, etc.)

No no, the data is a list of IDs of the textures to load from the .dat-file in your installation directory as well as other attributes about your toon. I imagine something like { “ToonName”, 1, 4, 6, 5, 56, 567 } etc where the numbers each represent one attribute of the toon.

The fact that textures are locally stored doesn’t change the fact that the server has to rattle off a massive list of different things to load. Even something as simple as keeping gear the same but making race completely generic would massively cut down on the number of fields that need to be filled to tell a client what it needs to know about each character. I get that the vision for WvW is to have all sorts of unique folks running around doing combat in their hard-earned gear from every part of the game, but I don’t need to know the eye colors for each of them.

Basically we have culling because ANet is unwilling to implement ugly character placeholders. It’s aesthetics vs gameplay issue.

Waking.6052:

Most of us have played other games in which culling wasn’t an issue. That was in the past, when connections were generally less stable, slower, and more expensive. It was also when graphics were worse. Games 7 years ago at least could have large scale WvW.

I call it Slamz’ Law of Density

Moore’s law states that computer power will double every two years (basically).

Slamz’ law states that the player density on physical server hardware will double every two years while game mechanics will stay just as weak as ever.

That is,

10 years ago: 1000 people per server array with weak game mechanics
8 years ago: 2000 people per server array with the array running two servers with weak game mechanics
6 years ago: 4000 people per server array with the array running four servers with weak game mechanics
4 years ago: 8000 people per server array with the array running eight servers with weak game mechanics

The servers running Aion are vastly more powerful than the ones running EQ, but the game mechanics are identical and the number of people per “server” (i.e., “Triniel”, “Vallon Zek”, etc) is roughly the same.

All of the improvements in hardware are being eaten up behind the scenes to lower the cost-per-user to run the game.

GW2 has serious culling issues.

Planetside 1, launched in 2003, did not.

“Slamz’ Law of Density”! Hardware dramatically improved but it all went into reducing the cost-per-user. We got no improvements in actual game mechanics and in fact, they may be getting weaker.

Even Ragnarok Online had culling problems when 5k+ people were trying to get Prontera main castles… KRo is from 2k2/2k3

I’ve never seen more than 75 players at once in this game, and I have played games from 10 years ago that made it possible.

When 75 players are on their screen you are not looking at their eyebrows, or the texture of their armor. At most you’ll see color.

It’s not about how awesome (or crappy) your hardware is. It’s partially about how all customizations of character height/body/face/gear need to be sent to your hardware from the server.

It’s mostly about positional data, which is perhaps more important in this game than any other game to date, due to the way combat is designed. When there are 10 players fighting each other in one area, the server must report ~100 position changes per movement. When there are 100 players fighting, that’s 10,000 reports in the time a fight between 10 would require 100. Older games, without active combat and dodging, could get away with reporting a lot less information. This end of things leaves little room for improvement.

The area where there is room to improve is in the character model reporting, but it is unlikely to see much change, as it would limit the visibility of sweet looking gear that people grinded (or charged) a lot to get.

I’ll still take culling over the 5+ second ability lag that happened in large fights in beta before culling was introduced. Better fighting invisible enemies than watching 100 idle animations for several seconds while mashing buttons followed by a rapid burst of numbers from everywhere and models teleporting all over.

I’ve played other games in which EVERY aspect of position was important because there were so many position based abilities, and it was made close to a decade ago. It also handled open world pvp in a good looking 3d environment.