Pathing should be low hanging fruit here. Most NPCs don’t need accurate pathing, and can use a much faster algorithm to calculate. Hopefully the devs do a round of optimizations for late game content since that seems to be where most of the issues are.
We don’t know how their NPCs are built though. The pathing seems to be the same for every NPC that moves, so I bet its baked in somewhere up the inheritance tree. They already use ocular occlusion to take down some of the clutter out of view. The fact is the city probably pushes the limits of the engine in its current state.
Oh it’s certainly pushing it to the limits, which is why they need to change things. If it’s pathing, they have a ton of options to make it smoother, since most NPCs don’t need fancy pathing logic.
That’s optimal if you want to find the best path to a destination, but NPCs milling about a town don’t need the best path, they just need to move toward their goal more or less. And most go on a mostly fixed route, so you can just store the ideal path in memory and let the NPC evade up to some distance from that path.
This makes it a lot more friendly to do a multi-threaded implementation since you don’t need to figure out collision avoidance until it’s about to happen, just look a few steps ahead and course correct as needed.
Enemies should use proper pathing, but NPCs don’t need to be anywhere near that sophisticated.
But I have no idea what they’re actually doing under the hood, it’s just concerning that it gets slow when the player moves without interacting with any NPCs.
Yeah but with how optimal the game is are they really not using waypoints for jobber npcs already? This game runs extremely well. That seems like a hell of an oversight. Thats why i figured the pathfinding was baked in somewhere higher up or something.
Edit: I really don’t think it is pathing. These models have insane LoD. I’m thinking they tuned it since D:OS2 but its the same engine. I bet its just compounding factors of high polygons, environmental effects (the earthquakes) and NPCs just existing in high number on top of that. There is more than double the amount of NPCs inside the city than anywhere else in the game.
In the Digital Foundry review, they saw huge performance dips when just running in small circles, when standing still had no impact. As in, on a high end system, performance dropped from ~90FPS to mid-60s, just by moving in a tight circle (i.e. not enough to actually move the camera).
That sounds a lot like pathing to me, though other things could certainly be causing it.
It just seems like something there is poorly optimized and it shows when there are a lot of NPCs around.
And the game essentially uses last gen tech (DX11, no RTX, performance drop on Vulkan, etc), so it’s not pushing the boundaries all that much, so it’s probably not fully optimized. It should be feasible to optimize it to at least not get FPS dips when moving vs standing still in towns, if not get a bit better performance on older CPUs (e.g. Zen 2 CPUs like 3600 and whatever is in the Steam Deck). It runs pretty well, it they could probably get a bit more.
Pushing the boundaries of the engine is different than pushing the boundaries of the industry. Maybe it could be the pathfinding. But movement doesn’t necessarily mean its pathfinding. I’m sure transforming all those polygons costs more computationally than pathfinding.
But why only when the player is moving? Surely the NPCs are also moving all the time, so just moving the player and maybe nudging the party members (so like 4 new characters moving?) shouldn’t drop frames by ~30%. Something seems off there.
I hope they figure it out and patch it, because it would really impact the experience on lower end hardware, like the Steam Deck (i.e. stable 30 FPS vs stutters in the late game).
The high seas for a PlayStation 6 exclusive release? First, might be a while before piracy on a new console is a viable option, second, an emulator won’t be able to run it for years.
You won’t be able to pirate the PS6. Not unless technology gets really fucking gnarly by the time it releases so you can download hardware. You’d have to rely on real theft.
There’s a massive difference between a Switch and a Playstation. We’re nowhere near emulation of a PS5, and knowing Sony they would have FromSoftware make a launch title for the PS6.
I had fun with Go when it launched, but haven’t played in years. What I love about it though is how many"non- traditional" gamers play it. I’ve had more than one 50+ coworker I’ve known tell me they play it often, and do no other gaming besides it. Two of my sisters also play, and they don’t play any other games. I think that’s awesome.
And while it’s a good thing that this asshat is gone, I’m sure he’ll be running another company soon enough and spreading his cancer and bad practices elsewhere very soon as a CEO at some other company.
Plus you know that he’s not the only cause of this at the company and his underlings that are just as cancerous with their bullshit are still there.
I cannot trust any publication that “reviews” a product like this without taking at least a little time to go over the legitimately harmful business practices against the customer.
The real threat is Godot. It’s getting better and better. Why pay for a commercial game engine, when you can use one that comes with a literally no strings attached FOSS license? And you have full access to the source code, so you can fiddle with any line of code, if need be.
I looked through the announcement post and all I can say is that this is beyond absurd. Can they even legally apply these changes retroactively? All these relatively large indie games used Unity. They can’t exactly tear everything down and use another engine. They didn’t even accept such terms at the time, so how can they suddenly be expected to pay for every download they get?
And I was so excited to finally start learning Unity too… damn. I probably should have seen something like this coming way back when they announced their IPO. I was going to learn Unreal at some point as well but I guess I’ll just uninstall Unity and skip right to UE5.
There’s definitely going to be huge action taken from every studio that used Unity in their games. I have a hard time believing that they’ll get away with the retroactive part at least.
It isn’t going into effect until January 2024, and it isn’t retroactive. And I don’t think you need to worry too much about breaking 200k paid installs if you haven’t even learned the language yet, but I admire your drive if you do.
It isn’t retroactive in the sense that it applies to installs before that date, but rather in the sense that it applies to games made with Unity before the announcement.
American test audiences literally said that for I Am Legend which combined with studios unopinionated cowardice caused them to ruin the ending, amongst many, many, many other times that test audiences have given bad artistic feedback.
His anger should probably be focused at the showrunner / studio, but I’m guessing he’s not risking burning those bridges so is instead blaming the only other party in the decision making process, the test audiences.
You do have a 20% illiteracy rate, and the response is that American test audiences have ruined very obviously good plots with their stupidity many times before.
Dark Souls is kind of a lonely game, I wonder if they'll recruit some ally npc characters like the Solaire, Siegmeyer and that funny little guy named Patches. Or will they go the Samurai Jack style and revel in the loneliness of the journey.
My LG OLED autoupdated through the internet last year and now VRR is broken (flickers no matter what or how stable the FPS is), only way to „fix“ it is to set the refresh rate to whatever my FPS is gonna be (most of the time) and then lock my FPS to that and hope it doesn’t dip below that too much (or it‘ll flicker). Support is as helpful as you might imagine.
So yeah, don‘t connect your TV to the internet or you‘re at the mercy of the manufacturer. Lesson learned.
This would vary based on what router you use, but this is the way I handled it on my Ubiquity EdgeRouter.
I added a DHCP reservation for my TV so it’s IP address on my local network doesn’t change.
I added a new firewall policy (with the highest priority) that accepts all traffic by default between my internal LAN network and the WAN interface of my router.
Then I added a rule to that policy to drop traffic from the IP address I assigned to my TV.
Now the TV can no longer phone home to send obnoxious notifications or issue surprise firmware updates but I can still turn on the TV and adjust the volume over the local network. I use Home Assistant for this, but I think the LG remote android app would still work as well.
I was going to buy braid, but the original was delisted and the anniversary edition is 10x the price on sale. Will have to wait a few years for it to fall into 80% territory again.
I didn’t know that about the creator. I’m fairly anti piracy when it comes to indie games, even if I don’t agree with the devs views. I still hope he gets it and has a bad time with COVID if that is the case though.
This was about a week ago, since then it was unblocked, then reblocked. Note, this is only the store itself (and the store within Steam), you can still play your existing games, so it seems they have blocked the store front to hamstring or reduce sales so that Valve will then pay whatever tax amount is going to be asked for.
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