Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Agony_Aunt said:
Nope, i'm on SSD.
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It makes no difference if you use a RAMdrive :D

I remember one particularly "enthusiastic" backer who claimed there was no way on earth the 40Gb (at that time) client could fit the install in RAM and still have enough working set to execute itself. A few X99 screenies and I never heard from him again. Bear in mind that platform is now nearly half a decade old and long since discontinued.

Ahhh - those were the days.
 

LittleAnt

L
AlPilg said:
By low memory you mean 16GB? Fine for 99% of games but when it comes to whatever the hell goes on in that monstrosity CIG is working on, needs an SSD to help try and mask its ghastliness.
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SC need at least 8gb of free mem. I tried to run the alpha on 7gb with an HDD, it's unplayable (bug, 1fps, etc). Same system with an SDD, it's playable.

For the SSD vs HDD part, a good comparison is made here. The difference is HUGE.

SC has no loading screen for the whole system. It can't get all the assets at the 'start' of the map. So the assets are constantly loaded/unloaded when you walk/fly. I've read that the PS5 will use this system too.

That's also why Vulkan is needed. With DX11, the constant load process of assets in the GPU is heavily dependant on the CPU. So even if you have good memory and a good graphic card, if the CPU struggle you have bad framerate. I am not expert in graphic flow but I've understood that with Vulkan, they can lighten the work of the CPU by letting the graphic card directly load assets without the need of CPU.
 

LittleAnt

L
Agony_Aunt said:
Now, main memory is low but my graphics card is well within spec.
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Can you give me your spec, I can perhaps help you.
Agony_Aunt said:
Sure, there is loading and unloading, and that could be in issue if i was, for example, walking around.
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Loading and unloading is also for the ships/players around you. If a constellation is coming near you, your system will load the assets of this ship and the players in it, even if you don't move.
 
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Dooguk

D
LittleAnt said:
SC need at least 8gb of free mem. I tried to run the alpha on 7gb with an HDD, it's unplayable (bug, 1fps, etc). Same system with an SDD, it's playable.

For the SSD vs HDD part, a good comparison is made here. The difference is HUGE.

SC has no loading screen for the whole system. It can't get all the assets at the 'start' of the map. So the assets are constantly loaded/unloaded when you walk/fly. I've read that the PS5 will use this system too.

That's also why Vulkan is needed. With DX11, the constant load process of assets in the GPU is heavily dependant on the CPU. So even if you have good memory and a good graphic card, if the CPU struggle you have bad framerate. I am not expert in graphic flow but I've understood that with Vulkan, they can lighten the work of the CPU by letting the graphic card directly load assets without the need of CPU.
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Looking through some of the articles, it seems the "Vulkan vs DirectX 11, which is better?" doesn't have a clear winner. Is this just the backers clutching at straws again?
 

AlPilg

AlPilg
LittleAnt said:
SC need at least 8gb of free mem. I tried to run the alpha on 7gb with an HDD, it's unplayable (bug, 1fps, etc). Same system with an SDD, it's playable.
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My point was that you need more than 16GB and they recommend at least 32GB now for the game. If you're relying on an SSD to swap data in and out of memory the performance will be poor, will be better than using a mechanical HD for it but it's still not ideal.

The only other game I know at the moment that recommends 32GB is the upcoming FS 2020 but that maybe understandable. I wonder if it's the huge tiling assets they use for the planets that's really causing such high demands on memory in SC?
 

Tippis

Tippis
Dooguk said:
Looking through some of the articles, it seems the "Vulkan vs DirectX 11, which is better?" doesn't have a clear winner. Is this just the backers clutching at straws again?
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Always. It's simply the "wonder tech" that is next on the list of things that haven't happened yet but which will surely save SC forever, just like zoning and culling and being able to store values in a database. Vulkan is the jesus tech is also much more tangible and reachable than the ill-defined "server meshing" that is the next big thing that will solve all problems.

Fundamentally, the issue is that there isn't really anything in what ails SC that Vulkan is able to solve. Drawing things on screen isn't really the issue; figuring out what not to process, much less draw, is a far more pressing matter, and that happens long before the graphics API becomes involved.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
LittleAnt said:
Can you give me your spec, I can perhaps help you.

Loading and unloading is also for the ships/players around you. If a constellation is coming near you, your system will load the assets of this ship and the players in it, even if you don't move.
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That's understandable if you are visible to those ships or very close, but i'm talking about being in the spawn room on microtech, not even close to the starport. Ok, again, even if it has to load those assets, once loaded, the stress on the system should pass, and framerate should go up.

It doesn't.

I was sitting in the room for minutes, doing nothing but turning around or standing still, FPS was constant sub 20, 15 pretty stably.

I'm still not buying how Vulkan (or DX12) will offer such amazing performance gains when i can run plenty of other high graphic games that run on DX11 without a problem. Sure, i can't go whacking all settings up to max, but normally at least medium settings.

This is what i don't get about all the defenders of the game. Its been shown time and again even with god level rigs, people having framerate issues, and while i do not expect to get great performance from SC with my 4-core, 8-Gb (yes, i know, 8 Gb free is minimum), SSD, 960GTX setup, i at least expect 60 FPS when standing still inside a cubicle.

Anything else screams bad optimization, whether it be DX9, 10, 11, 12, Vulkan.

Like i said, plenty of games which are on DX11 run just fine on my comp. Only SC runs like a pile of doo-doo. So, you want to try and tell me its a problem with my rig as opposed to the game? But somehow the saviour of framerates in SC is Vulkan? Get out of here!

And as we've seen before, CIG and backers have swore that (insert magical tech) will solve specific issues, only for them to frequently fail to deliver players to the promised land of improved performance.

Now we wait on Vulkan (eta: god knowns when) and server meshing (god knows when) that will suddenly make it all sunshine and roses.

Yeah, not getting my hopes up.
 

Tippis

Tippis
Dooguk said:
The differences between DirectX12 and Vulkan appear to be minimal. Wouldn't it be easier to move from DirectX11 to 12? Lumberyard doesn't support Vulkan or DirectX 12
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Yes, but that doesn't particularly matter. Remember, they're not actually using Lumberyard - they're using a very old version of CryEngine under a Lumberyard license, Daikatana-style. :p

CryEngine V has Vulkan support. But that's not the version CIG has licensed from Amazon.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Tippis said:
It can be all kinds of things. A lot of what they've actually shown in the realm of procedural generation just comes down to tile-laying, similar to how dungeons have been created in Diablo (and many of its ascii predecessors): the algorithm has rules for how to stich together a library of assets; how to include fixed parts in all of that (e.g. the Butcher on level 2); and how to create recognisable features such as rooms, corridors, rows of prison cells etc.

The way it is used in most other games these days (including ED) is almost the opposite: have those recognisable features and structures be pre-baked, and then generate a world around them that they are then placed into, possibly clamping the terrain around each asset to make them fit on what would otherwise be too steep or too noisy slopes. PG does the macro-level; hand-crafting does the micro-level; and various functions exist to blend the two together.

Minecraft is probably the most easily observable example: at the top level, it creates a patchwork of surface (and subsurface) biomes; one level down, each biome then determines what terrain can be generated and what features may show up; yet another layer down, placement of pre-built assets such as houses, temples, towers, and specialty rooms are cobbled together into towns, outposts, citadels etc.


You'd probably still want PG in your toolset, simply because of how much it can create very quickly. That's why there are such a huge abundance of middleware that does that job (just see the links I posted earlier for the first two I found for Lumberyard alone). The question is rather one of, what do you want to do with that base creation? Do you want to fine-tune every inch of it and have it all be stored as a pre-baked asset of some sort, or do you want to just have certain areas be hand-crafted and then grafted onto a larger world that is still being generated live at runtime?

Since the whole poing of procgen is that it isn't random (which is a common misunderstanding of how it works) but rather uses many of the the same algorithms for pseudo-randomisation to create a strictly deterministic and fixed result, you save a crapton of storage on just letting it build itself as needed rather than constantly loading in all that hand-crafted world data. Even with a lot of "uniqueness" and hand-crafting, letting a procgen algorithm take care of the broad strokes of the world will get rid of a crapton of storage requirements. The example used earlier in the thread (or maybe one of the previous versions) was that a hideously coarse 10m-resolution hand-crafted height map of something as tiny as the moon would require 1.4 terabytes of data, just for the terrain alone, never mind all the actual assets that would then decorate the terrain.

Since that's clearly insane (and was also an early red flag for CIG's level of competence, since they so explicitly eschewed any use of PG at an early stage while also talking about this vast world they wanted to create), you instead limit the hand-crafting to picking parameters for the PG that gives a good base result on the macro level, and then fine-tune a small handful of unique locations and include functionality to let PG-placed prefab locations blend with PG-created terrain. You get the micro-level detail of purpose-built locations with the macro-level vastness of PG. And on top of that, you also let the PG do detail-decoration placement (which is another thing PG is ostensibly being used for in SC). It's still hand-crafted and unique, just not for every single hill, tree, pebble, or even village. Only a few "hero locations" get the full treatment, and even there, you can let good old Diablo-style tile placement to do the brunt work. Uniqueness isn't a matter of making every pixel blue, but of picking and choosing good "tableaus" on top of which each location can be built, and playing with and picking the parameters to achieve those outcomes. The PG still does what it does, but in a very directed manner.
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There is quite a bit of randomness in the way the algos generate the detail. Yes, it's seeded and the data compression is a major point, but if you have a good algorithm it can assist in generating believable terrain, too - compared to hand-crafting. And should make the whole thing faster, too.
Even I converted plasma fractals with a tool into landscapes some 25 years ago. That was trial and error twiddling with the parameters until it looked believable. And I'm no expert. I assume the tools have gone quite a way since.
Give me some contemporary tool and I'll make you a planet. Now imagine what a talented person in my stead could achieve even.
That leaves me wondering wth they have problems with generating more planets? 500 monkeys picking seed parameters for eight years surely could have come up with a couple of believable height maps for a planetary wrap?
Are they trying to figure out how to coat a sphere with a 2D map?
 

Dooguk

D
Tippis said:
Yes, but that doesn't particularly matter. Remember, they're not actually using Lumberyard - they're using a very old version of CryEngine under a Lumberyard license, Daikatana-style. :p

CryEngine V has Vulkan support. But that's not the version CIG has licensed from Amazon.
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Found a page that compares Cryengine to Lumberyard if you are interested. Not the CI version but...

https://www.slant.co/versus/5125/5164/~cryengine_vs_lumberyard
 

Tippis

Tippis
Navigare Necesse Est said:
That leaves me wondering wth they have problems with generating more planets? 500 monkeys picking seed parameters for eight years surely could have come up with a couple of believable height maps for a planetary wrap?
Are they trying to figure out how to coat a sphere with a 2D map?
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The simple and most readily acceptable and consistent answer is also the most [ scary | laughable | mind-boggling ] one: they don't actually have any PG tech worth the name. It's all just tile-laying of hand-made maps, and those maps take time to create (to say nothing of locking them down) to CRobber's ever-changing standards. If nothing else, that explains some of the ugly maps generated and shown off a while back, where there was obvious repetition of large terrain features such as mountains and rivers. A 2.0 verion has ostensibly been implemented since then, but it's not like that eliminates the possibility that it's still just tile-laying, only with a larger set of tiles and possibly some less obvious stitching and blending.
 

LittleAnt

L
AlPilg said:
My point was that you need more than 16GB and they recommend at least 32GB now for the game. If you're relying on an SSD to swap data in and out of memory the performance will be poor, will be better than using a mechanical HD for it but it's still not ideal.
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The game run well on 12GB of free ram with a SSD. You will notice stutters from time to time but absolutely nothing to the scale of the stutters you will have with a HDD. CIG should have put the SSD requirement in the minimal specs, not the recommended one, replacing HDD by SSD in any computer is night and day.

AlPilg said:
I wonder if it's the huge tiling assets they use for the planets that's really causing such high demands on memory in SC?
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Yes, it's only the assets (planets, ships, players, etc). SC have an insane amount of detailed assets.
Digital foundry have a really good serie of video about micro/macro aspect of it. A must see to understand what's behind the render engine of SC.


You can also see the excellent Digital foundry video about why the SSD is a gamechanger in the gameindustry. A lot of people think that SSD is just about shorter loading time but it's more than this.
 
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Dooguk

D
Are those two SC videos paid for? They seem awfully like promotion pieces.

Reality...
eMISt7N.jpg

Edited as spoiler
 
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LittleAnt

L
The last videos I've posted where long ones but if you want to see a detailed explanation about the excellent damage model of SC, just look at 13:30 to 16:10
 
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