Guild Wars 2

WvW Invisibility and Why

Reason #1:
GW2 has a ‘culling’ system which does not load every single character at the same time as it comes into range. This stabilizes client-side performance. This specific method does not affect server performance.

Reason #2:
GW2 culling affects the client showing the enemy/friendly players. It only renders the full enemy player after it loads the armor and specific dye colors and weapon the enemy has. Compared to a game which sends location and armor/weapon type, GW2 sends a lot more information between clients; mainly armor, and the 3-4 colors on each piece of armor, a backpack maybe, and a guild emblem. You don’t see the player, but can target him easily, because the location is always sent and you can always target the player, but until you get info on his fancy armor, you do not render him. This specific method of sending data in small packets and only rendering characters who you have received full information on affects server performance as it does not have to flood you with data during large fights to give you information regarding the pink colored armor of the Elementalist who just died.

Reason #3:
The last patch increased the amount of culling to combat some of the lag. A lot of people on HoD/JQ/SBI last week ran into lots of lag. The whole culling thing is to reduce lag. For the few who don’t know, lag is the time between sending data to and from a server, i.e. getting information about what is going on around you, NOT frames per second, or FPS, which is how much money you make IRL which is converted into good computer components! As we had major lag spikes, which makes the game actually unplayable instead of playable but, eh I can’t see the zerg, not that it matters because I can only range-attack at this point, and I’m not useful in many other ways otherwise, they upped the culling to send in player armor dyes slower. This fixed the lag and this week has been smooth as butter. One thing no one can complain about is the lag. There is no lag 99% of the time now. You have 50 vs. 50 players and, although sometimes a lot of them don’t load their character graphic, you are not rubberbanding around the map, and anyone you are fighting, visible or invisible, is not rubberbanding. It’s smooth gameplay. Compare to any other MMO large scale battle where people warp all over the place and you will see this is a huge achievement which steps back to old games where position matters most not the armor color. Remember, you see all enemy positions, if not their fancy armor color. You can target them all just fine, you just don’t see the graphic, because the server is working some amazing networking code to make sure you at least get 100% of player position if not 100% of their armor color.

WvW Invisibility Fix
There are only a couple ways ArenaNet will be able to fix this:
1. Increase the rate at which players get updates to armor colors, so you can see that the enemy Charr Elementalist you are fighting has green and pink colored armor. This will increase the lag, as the server has to send out all that data more often to more players in the same area. Cool, now you see the dead Charr Elementalist with green and pink armor. But now you are rubberbanding, your skills take 3-4 seconds to cast, and the game becomes unplayable in many situations.

2. Remove enemy dye colors completely. Only send position, weapon, and race. Standardize all armor to the PvP set. Cool, now you see every player standardized in a way. The dyes have no meaning, and your guild emblem on your backpack is never seen by the enemy. Your choice of having no hat or shoulder armor visible? Not important anymore, as the enemy sees the fully armored you. In other words, it would work, but it would break the customization for WvW. Most people like knowing that their pink and green armor is seen by the enemy. But at least you would see all the enemies, because it wouldn’t matter their customization; that data would never need to be sent, and thus latency wouldn’t be affected.

3. Show nametags along with the location information. Saving the best for last. If people can at least see name tags, they can still play and be cautious of the incoming zerg. It does not require any major code overhaul, as the nametag can be defaulted in with the position code which is working perfect. Tie the nametag to the position, and you can at least see there’s 100 enemy out there, rather than seeing nothing except all the particle effects. The downside is that, well, it is not a fix, but a bandaid to the problem which is latency/lag, and rendering.

I love culling! Some games only have 32 people per map as a standard. Battlefield has 64 on some massive high end servers (and maybe more but, still mostly laggy). The whole idea is genius. It is the only way to keep the player customization meaningful while maintaining a lag-free play environment. It works flawlessly in all but the largest fights, where granted is where seeing the enemy can matter a lot, but where more than likely it also doesn’t matter at all. It does suck to get run over by an invisible zerg. I have fallen prey to this as well once, going to the center island and finding there were 50 enemy standing there. Insta-death. But I had no lag going to the island, had no frame-rate drop due to going to the island, and had no issues seeing all the particle effects exploding my character.

y u no visible? Because it makes the game smooth and always playable. Run a smaller group and enjoy it, or run in a zerg and sometimes get invisible enemy players. Either way, no one is complaining about lag, and that’s a step in the right direction for game design.

What lag? I never saw much lag at all prior to the last patch and this is on HoD too.

Then again, since people are leaving HoD in droves…the lag is of course totally going away now.

No, they need to fix the mem leak and look into upgrading their servers instead of tryin to bandaid it with ‘culling’.

i dont think fix 2 can be donne, i mean, on this very casual game, looks is everything, if u loose that whats left to work for ?

Before the latest patch, we were having lag spikes, where you’d attempt to cast something, and it wouldn’t happen for 3-4 seconds. Or when you auto-attack it wouldn’t be instant, it would delay quite a bit. You couldn’t time anything during those times. It was happening when large battles were happening during US primetime. No lag now; even the recent ‘invisibility’ videos on YouTube; there are no rubberbanding players. You can’t see the graphic, but people are fighting, spells are being cast correctly, and everyone moves smoothly around the field.

And thanks for reading / commenting. I just want to spread awareness that although it is a problem and needs some kind of fix, it is also the reason for the smooth as butter gameplay we experience every night.

Although I agree with you that people complain too much about invisibility and stuff, there are several things I would like to remark:
1) There are no dye colors in WvW, it’s either, red, blue or green, except for your allies.
2) They should have dynamic culling, which takes place when there’s a huge number of players and not with a smaller skirmish which is also happening now.
3) Fix the kitten culling on the thief going in and out of invis!
4) there should be an option where you could just disable ALLY and ENEMY armour set and set it all to a specific one. and Also set your ally dye colours. Because it’s your allies who are creating the most culling lol.
5) In such a situation I prefer to not see my allies at all, except for maybe a round green circle below them so that I can know that they are there and give priority to the enemy loading.
6) Give an unloaded enemy that is CLOSE ENOUGH (<— very important part because an enemy could be trying to hide) a red circle below him too. That circle may be removed after the enemy has loaded enough.
7) What happens a lot is that right after I’m dead I can see a lot of the enemy. At that point I don’t even need to see them anymore. They should cut off sending culling data to me and give priority to the ones still living.

-1

Terrible post….forget trying to justify it and trying to speak on the issue as if you work for ArenaNet.

Having invisible enemies is terrible for running less than a large group…I never sure whether I’m about to engage 2 or 5 people and that really matters (life and death).

I’m glad you are getting better frame rate but the methodolgy employed here is TERRIBLE…I’d fire the person who let it get implemented on the live system.

Excuses. Excuses.

@Sinning
I only run small group. Unless that 2 or 5 enemy players is 40 feet in front of a zerg, they always show up correctly. I never have a problem with small numbers, and rarely does the zerg show problems in all but the biggest Garrison/Keep fights. Do you at least agree, that even if you see 2 out of 5, that you’re still in full control of your character, and can move around without any rubberbanding and without any incidents where you were far away but the server thought you were in the middle of that now 5 man group getting killed?

Sinning.7483:

-1

Terrible post….forget trying to justify it and trying to speak on the issue as if you work for ArenaNet.

Having invisible enemies is terrible for running less than a large group…I never sure whether I’m about to engage 2 or 5 people and that really matters (life and death).

I’m glad you are getting better frame rate but the methodolgy employed here is TERRIBLE…I’d fire the person who let it get implemented on the live system.

I run with a small team of 3-8 people.

We have never ever experienced bad culling until last night when we decided to join the zerg for a bit. Everyone became invisible, we went back to our small party stuff, hey presto, we could see everyone again.

If those 2-5 people are running in front of a zerg (which, in my experience, is the only time people disappear), chances are you’d die either way.

My system rarely has any FPS drop even in the biggest fights due to the culling, which is great. Just like you said, that’s the point of the culling. Since the latest patch, however, there have been times that things do not load anymore. NPCs stop loading, allies stop loading, and of course enemies stop loading. This is not a feature, this is an error. Even when I port back to some waypoint all of the vendor NPC do not appear until I logout and back in again.

Vexus.5423:

Before the latest patch, we were having lag spikes, where you’d attempt to cast something, and it wouldn’t happen for 3-4 seconds. Or when you auto-attack it wouldn’t be instant, it would delay quite a bit. You couldn’t time anything during those times. It was happening when large battles were happening during US primetime. No lag now; even the recent ‘invisibility’ videos on YouTube; there are no rubberbanding players. You can’t see the graphic, but people are fighting, spells are being cast correctly, and everyone moves smoothly around the field.

And thanks for reading / commenting. I just want to spread awareness that although it is a problem and needs some kind of fix, it is also the reason for the smooth as butter gameplay we experience every night.

Er, no. Before this patch, YOU may have been having lag spikes, but the generic, all-encompassing “we” weren’t. Clearly, this was neither the cause nor the cure.

WvW was supposed to let us “clash with other players in truly massive battles,” so only running around in small groups isn’t a fair solution. I’m fine with option #2. I remember being blown away by Sega Genesis graphics, so make everyone else look like something from Minecraft for all I care – I would just like to know they’re there.

@sinning i agree with u bra, bad post trying to justify a serious game breaking problem using incorrect information about the game. Sinning’s counter points are spot on the money. Also if you only want small group combat we might as well be playing on the PvP servers instead of World vs World vs World and all the huge fights that imply’s.

Seems like i have at least 30 min lag because today when i was playing i didn’t see anything else than my party members and commander icon.

I turn my monitor off.
If I can’t see you then you can’t see me.

I thought i would help.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/features/gg/557-writing-a-good-video-game-press-release

The solution is to render low-poly proxy models with no dye info and no custom armor until the server can get around to loading the custom info. I would rather see some ugly 2002-era models than nothing at all.

Player culling and background loading of character model assets are both necessary evils, but the current implementation of it is so horrendously bad that it’s probably just buggy. Give them time to work it out, it will get fixed. I believe they can probably get it to a much better place without having to make some drastically user-experience altering changes, but time will tell. Hopefully not too much time, though. I don’t believe that any of what we are seeing currently is “a step in the right direction” though … lol

The invisible players is a bug plain and simple. People are confusing that with culling so this thread is a mess.

Standardizing dye probably wouldn’t have that big of a performance benefit anyway. At least for this issue, it would probably have some slight effect on latency (Dropping the need to retrieve the dye colors from the server).

Culling is just dandy, there’s not a game out there that doesn’t do some form of distance or occlusion culling. But the poster above is correct, there’s obviously a fairly serious bug involved instead of just culling being set too aggressive.

Here’s a screenshot I took all of 10 minutes ago in Eternal, it’s even “funner” when even friendlies start dissapearing: http://i.imgur.com/uPahQ.jpg

I have no doubt they’ll fix it, I just hope it’s soon.

Look, people complain about “The Zerg” etc and how WvW is based around the large roaming group etc….I like to run with big group sometimes but like that I can run with one or two mates and achieve objectives as we like to help the cause…prefer to do this. My machine isn’t awesome at all…runs 60 Frames PVE…30-35 WvW BUT in those terrible moments drops to < 5 Frames and yup it sucks….however rather have that than not being able to see enemies as I NEED to know whether its 2 or 5 people….I think from talking to people that it seems to affect different systems/setups more than others…I have a mate who although gets slightly less FPS than me usually seems to get better visiblity with this Invisibility problem and so I get him to confirm numbers all the time when I run with him. We both live bottom of the planet so also have high latency to deal with..all in all the Invisibility is just the straw that breaks the camels back.

I don’t like this Invisibility…Do Not think its a solution..personally would rather have the terrible <5 FPS….but of course would rather have more sensible solutions put in place.

I would be happy if I could just see enemy nameplates. Then I’d at least know where they are. The odd thing about this is I don’t get the rendering problem all the time. I can play wvw for hours and see all the enemies and then suddenly stop seeing anyone at all. It’s really strange how it works or rather, doesn’t work.

You DO realize dyes don’t show up for enemy players, right? Also, not being able to see enemy numbers, or getting a rough idea of classes, is just as bad as lag. My ranger has 1500 range and I still hate the rendering issue. I would hate to be a melee class and have to put up with this.

And for the record, I wouldn’t mind at all if they turned enemy customization off and made every enemy class look the same. Make the gear that’s rendered reflect the enemies gear level.

I did not have much lag prior to last patch; except in large lord room fights where I occasionally ended up with 2-3 sec ability lag. For example SM fights.
I did have very little ‘culling’ issues again -except above.

Something last patch – possible to ‘fix’ lage – made everything much much worse for me, essentially making the game unplayable in WvW.

Also, as mentioned above – enemy dyes don’t show – they’re either red, green or blue. Not pink, purple, yellow etc. You see your sides colors, not the enemies.
The issue seems to be much more about the number of effects they want to show on the screen which takes too much, leaving less for the player/NPC models.
But I’ve tried numerous graphics settings after last patch -and none of it made any difference.

Or or or oooooor….hear me out on this one:
OR they could just prioritize sending other packets first. Namely: What sort of armor and weapon the enemy wears. Nothing else.
Then, after every enemy is loaded, load dyes and emblems. Yeah, everyone would wear a gray armor until loaded, but at least you could see them. And once the battle is going on, their armor would become colored.

This plus the nameplates thing ought to fix the issue. Not seeing players is BAD and it feels bad.

Well – it’s not like sending the few bytes which tells the client to render things green, red or blue take up much more space then telling it to render things gray.

But according to latest notes, they’ve fixed something – guess I’ll see tonight if it is true.

Do you realize that custom colors are not seen by the enemies both in WvW and PvP?

@Vexus.5423;

No the issue can’t be “dye” or “data” related, since u have a max. of 65,507 bytes per UDP packet. U actually only need very few bytes to encode a full MMO character, since u use lookup values and can highly compress those data. I can encode all dye and armor informations in the same size than the position/velocity value.

As example:
512 color values = 9 bit
64 armor prefix = 6 bit
512 armor types = 9 bit
256 rune types = 8 bit

So we need 32bit for each armor slot, if we assume 12 slots we need 48 bytes to fully describe the “dynamic” part of the player. We may need a additional 48 bytes for the “static” part, aka hair + face + size + race.

The static part can actually be cached and saved, removing the need to send those more than once per map. Thats actually what EvE online does, they store/cache all static data on your local hard-drive and simply recheck from time to time.

So we have 48bytes for armor + dye and we also need at least 24bytes to send position and velocity.
Now how can it be that GW2 can update 24bytes (pos+velocity) in a very high frequency, but we cant update an extra 48bytes with a much much lower update frequency?

In comparison all this physics information at very high frequency for every effect and projectile, is much more problematic than the actual player + armor data, since those are low frequency or even only “once” updates.

Also the often noted “streaming” of those armor parts and textures, is a false assumption for this problem, since at 1-2GB PC GPU Ram u can probably hold all mesh and texture data in the GPU ram, without the need to stream anything. WvW is using a fixed mesh and texture set, there is nothing changing here. We also don’t talk about ultra high quality mesh characters or textures. So the actual GPU ram amount is more than enough to hold all this data.

There must be something else Anet has problems with, that we cant simply find by “reasoning” or speculating. My guess is its some low level technical problem in there client-server and database code.

I hope they can fix/optimize this somehow, since its really annoying.

AndyPandy.3471:

@Vexus.5423;

No the issue can’t be “dye” or “data” related, since u have a max. of 65,507 bytes per UDP packet. <snip>

And when they only show custom colors on friends, and not enemies – you don’t even need to send the entire color code for enemies. Just whether they’re the green, blue or red armor.

It may have been a coincidence but a couple days ago I unchecked the ‘High-Res Character Textures’ box and since then I’ve had much fewer invisibility issues. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a major issue but better! The two nights prior to that was unbearable, I often didn’t see my own teammates even in quieter wvw situations.

See if it helps you…