this is what kittenes me off about arenanet.
bugs in skills that everybody knows about that have been in the game since release and 2 years later its still not fixed.
When casting muddy terrain as a charr ranger with a greatsword equipped no character animation is played and the sword just disappears
here is a youtube link with a video of the problem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZjbENlihw0
The bug can be easily reprocuded by making your character lose contact to the ground for a second during the running animation. After that the character will stop, wait for the rest of the running animation duration and jump afterwards.
Here is a youtube link showing the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrDFazpqAcc
Since the feature patch when using Rapid Fire on the Ranger sometimes the bow animations keeps repeating even when the skill duration is over.
The weird thing is that I can only reproduce this at certain times.
I can reproduce the bug for 5 minutes at a time and after that everything is back to normal for the rest of the game session.
I don’t really know what the conditions for triggering this bug are, aside from using Rapid Fire.
Here is a video that illustrates the bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyH7Zembi2o
The problem is that all AI agents in this game are handled at a very low tickrate for performance reasons. Thats why pet AI which is handled by the same systems is so bad. They are just as bad as AI mobs and can’t do anything AI mobs can’t do. Improved AI behaviour like finding alternative routes that involve jumping down cliffs can be a very demanding task for a computer, especially if you have to do it for hunders of pets at the same time. An elegant solution for this would be to push pet AI to the client and handle it in a seperate thread (since the games doesn’t seem to take advantage of multiple cores anyway there is alot of spare processing power to be harvested). Bandwidth from the server to the client wouldn’t really need to increase since pets are always close to the player anyway, so no addional data would be needed. But this probably involves a completely new system for client side AI so something like this will probably never see the light of day, since anets way of fixing hard problems is unsatisfying bandaid fixes.
That’s because you don’t understand how the CPU is being utilized for this game.
You increase the character limit, you increase the utilization on the CPU, and the GPU has to wait for the CPU to catch up. That is why the GPU’s utilization drops, and no other reason.
And the poster you quoted is 100% correct, the only way to increase performance in this game is to buy a K series Intel CPU and OC it to the teeth. Unless, of coarse, you want to reduce the visual quality in the game by dropping your games settings.
What I tried to get at is that I find it hard to believe that the amount of drawcalls are the culprit when it comes to the poor performance.
I’m speculating, but I guess something else is going on that needs to be done per character per frame that eats all the cpu cycles.
Maybe some network inter/extrapolation and physics stuff going on.
The only good and solid way to fix this issue isif you either get a faster cpu, overclock your cpu, or reduce the amount of draw calls through culling by lowering the character quantity on screen, anything that would require more polygons on screen impacts how much data the cpu has to send.
Thats is not exactly true.
Polycount is not directly related to drawcalls.
The game should probably have all the textures and mesh data residing in buffers on the gpu, meaning that the stuff only has to be uploaded once.
The cpu then only sends which which shader programm to run and which textures to use to render the mesh that resides in some buffer on the gpu.
I have done some “testing” and have noticed that gpu usage actually decreases on my machine when I increase the max player limit.
Something is really wrong with how player characters are rendered in this game.
Drawing a character on screen shouldn’t take more than maybe 20 drawcalls (assuming that each armor piece, the weapon, the body the face and the hair are 1 mesh each).
There seems to be something else going on that scales very very badly with each character that has to be drawn on screen.
So it’s too hard for the game to automatically move to a point on the ground. Care to explain how the AI seems to be able to do it? Or how a ranger can click to move the pet?
It is already in the game FFS!!!!
Of course it is in the game.
But it is way to limited to handle all the terrain, the game has.
Yes, A* is just a node traversal algorithm on a graph, but sombody has to model this graph. It’s trivial on a 2d surface and it works relativly well for npcs in gw2, but from a game design standpoint it is still WAY to limited. It may work in 90% of all cases, but that is not good enough. Having features that are broken by design in your game is not a good way to design your game. And that’s the whole point of all my posts. A simple solution is technically “trivial”, but it doesn’t nearly cover all of the gameplay usecases. A solution that would work for the whole game is really really hard, which is one of the reasons there is no click to walk in this game.
Of course there are other reasons, like this feature going completely against all other action oriented designchoices in this game.
tl;dr:
Click to movement isnt’t a feature that could be implemented to work good enough to meet all the usecases, so it shouldn’t be and wasn’t implemented.
Nope, many games do it, I have done it. It’s not even 3D unless you consider water movement but that is a problem with the UI not the maths. There are many well established algorithms, (start you googling with A*).
And I repeat, GW1 had no problem doing it all those years ago on much weaker machines so your argument is evidently falacious. Removing click to move in GW2 was a design decision not a technical optimisation.
Of course they have pathfinding working on “even” ground(how else would ai movement work), but unlike gw1 gw2 has alot platforming, which is a core part of the gameplay.
The way most games handle jumps is by using “jump points” that have been placed by the level designers, which isn’t really feasable in big worlds like mmos.
From a design standpoint having click to walk available would be a terrible decision, there are way to many problems with it:
1. You can’t jump over obstacles
2. Unreliable pathfinding in uneven terrain (big frustration for players)
3. Underwater doesn’t work since you cant click in 3d space
4. PvP players can easily abuse the terrain to have you walk around simple obstacles (have you ever played “kodo tag” in wc3?)
In conclusion:
Click to walk doesn’t fit with the rest of the games design and is unreliable, frustrating in uneven terrain and would have meant an unfeasible amount of work for level designers.
If you have implemented A* you should have known how hard it is to make it work nicely on arbitrary terrain.
Because clicking is an inferior movement method in an action game and requires the implementation and maintaining of smart pathing which is actually more work than most people are aware of.
Not it’s not, it’s really easy and cheap. GW1 managed very well with the click to move system.
Scrap the overcharge, scrap the detonate, make the turrets have a built in “bleed” to limit their active time, make their attacks perform as if overcharged from the word go, and make the skill recharge start at use.
Their current incarnation belongs more in TF2 than in GW2, especially when one consider that the tool kit autoattack is supposed to repair them…
Couldn’t agree more.
They should last for maybe 10 seconds and automatically detonate after that.
Proposal Overview
Instead of pets dying when losing all hp they should enter aggroless mode. Enemies will ignore the pet and transfer aggro to the ranger.
Goal of Proposal
Allows pets to not die from aoe spam, or instant kill abilities from boss mobs without being able to tank unlimited amount of dmg.
Proposal Functionality
This allows rangers to keep their full dmg potential even during boss and zerg battles.
Associated Risks
Possibly very annoying because it allows the ranger to attack a player with a pet without the player being able to do anything about it.
I REALLY want this and I’m surprised it hasn’t been added yet. I’ve been playing smite for a few months and it works flawlessly in that game, but I can imagine it would be a bit more tricky in non planar space.
You really start to wonder what went wrong with ArenaNet, that core mechanics of classes do not work after 15 months of ongoing development.
The incompetence is just baffling. WHY would you make deployable turrets different entities from normal turrets.
Every sensible programmer would have them be the same class or entity, but for some reason they are not related to each other at all.
Skill tooltips in this game are incredibly stupid, too.
They should be automatically generated from the code that specifies the skills behaviour.
Some parts of the game are very well made, while other parts just scream utter incompetence.
AEDs toolbelt skill says “You can’t use that skill without a target” when trying to use it without a target.
This is the first time I encountered that message in all of gw2.
Why did they do this?
AEDs toolbelt skill says “You can’t use that skill without a target” when trying to use it without a target.
This is the first time I encountered that message in all of gw2.
Why did they do this?
When you have a list of 10,000 things that aren’t that hard, it still takes time to do them. Some of the landscape designers are working on longer term projects, like new areas. They’re not prioritizing an old jumping puzzles. Why? Because anyone can take a cheap tonic and do the puzzle. It’s not a priority.
Sorry, but that is in no way or shape an excuse for something as essential as the camera in a game. The image you see on your monitor is THE most important output the game has and it’s really aweful in this game. I can’t count how often I got turned around in a cave, because the camera started spazzing out. I know doing it right and still giving the player the feeling that he has control over what the camera does is not easy, but the game is doing an aweful job with it and I can’t imagine it cannot be improved.
We don’t have many gap closers, but we do have an absurd amount of control. Traited Wrench cripple, Net shot, net turret, magnet, freeze grenade, glue shot/bomb, throw mine, etc are all fantastic at keeping an enemy from getting away.
The rifle jumpshot is probably the kittentiest gapcloser in the game, since you are rooted in the air before landing, which pretty much negates the movement boost you got from the skill in the first place.
And all those nifty cripples, pulls and immobilizeses dont help you if your enemy isnt in attack range to begin with.
That’s why fighting eles and thieves is so frustrating. If you don’t manage to constantly impair their movement abilities they are gone.
Also what do you mean lack of mobility?
I almost always have swiftness up and have 2 self knockbacks+ 1 more knockback for my target, and the net to root them from rifle.
Also I like your idea but I’m gonna take the 5 points out of inventions for it haha.
Mobility was referring to his lack of stun breakers and no perma-swiftness in his base build. In addition, you do need to be careful if you fight more than 1 target, as both of your knockbacks are single target. Good luck to you.
How can an engineer have perma swifftness?
multiple ways.
medkit + speedy kits (true permaswiftness)
medkit + 6 runes of the centaur (true permaswiftness)
medkit + elixir b (a few seconds downtime)
elixir h + elixir b (a few seconds downtime)
It’s been like this since forever.
I also like how the backpack is attached to your shield when you pull it out before suddenly teleporting back to your back.
thanks for the insight.
thought is saw a pattern with you using elixir s twice on guardians that already used their knockback. but the way you describe it sounds logical
great video.
though i did notice him using elixir s, when trying to stomp even though the guardian alrady blew his knockback, which made me scratch my head.
I actually like to think that 1 on 1 my engineer is pretty dangerous. I’m playing with rifle, flamethrower and Toolkit and the control I have over my enemy is pretty dangerous. I can always bring the fight into the range that is most suitable for me.
The class I can never handle though is the Mesmer since all their kitten illusions block many of my projectile based CC like the rifle2 and rifle4, while their illusions crash into my face and they keeps stacking confusion.
I would love to see the hook let us choose between pulling the enemy to us or pulling us to the enemy. This could allow us to move away from stompers insteadof pulling them to us.
It drops when opening presents.
I think I opened a giant one, but i am not sure.
I really am happy I got, but sadly I cant play anything.
Gotta learn some songs.
I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to have dmg hack. I all the code for dmg and health and so on is running server side. Unless they managed to hack anet servers don’t see it happening.
Ever used a shield and a visible backpack on the engineer? I when pulling out the shield the backpack is attached to it and will later teleport back to your back. This looks really stupid and has been like this since beta.
its more of a workaround than an actual fix.
especially if you used to transmute your items before and never heard of the fix.
i was really confused when suddenly i couldn’t transmute my items anymore and i didn’t get an error message or anything. it simply didnt do anything.
