What can we do to help? Frame-rates, rubber-banding lod effects

It was noted in the first livestream recapping of alpha 1, that two bugs which effectively nerfed the player experience.

The amalgamated outfitting which surpasses the taped on module storage for to the first incarnation of the outfitting screen, making into isolated branches.
The new UI seen in alpha 1 and update 5 amlmagmates both outfitting and
Storage, unfortunately it was removed due to a bug in the filtering, giving rise to the OMG why did you design such a horrible UI :D

the second bug was the occlusion system, and they shut it off for the alpha
Meaning everything that could be rendered was.

Now, as people have noted, frame rates aren’t the best, and driver optimisations is on the cards later towards the console release, but
I feel (this is a guess), optimisations isn’t the issue.
Regardless of low-graphics or high-graphics performance is the same,
We have stuttering and hitching because
1) the game engine loads in and loads out assets
2) the engine must know which assets
Are to be used and which level of detail version
3) the engine must know which assets are occluding what.
4) And which assets are too far away.


Competing renders values
Now we are seeing rubber banding in the HDR tone-mapping as the system fights between two values. Cmd rendering did a cool breakdown on the contrast of space being wrong.
His view was each team have their own render pipeline and when put together the cockpit/ui/space rendering are compiled together but also fight with each other’s values.
we see similar rubber banding over distance calculations giving a weird rubber banding effect to the dynamic tonemapping.

A bug in Distance calculations
Back in horizons on the approach to the planets surface the radar swaps out to mapp of the terrain.
But it could sometimes spaz out rendering/not rendering and rendering the wire mesh of the terrain again,
It was like Like the distance calculations and/or predicted distance calculations where off,
Or stuck in a loop.

now with odyssey’s terrain rendering we are seeing the same issue with the high-level detail objects like stone and vegetation fade into the renders of the surface only to disappear only to bounce back into o being visible again.

if faulty math gives the wrong distances asset streaming will be borked.

Occlusion of settlements assets.
Internal and external structures are Legoed together.
ive seen in the first alpha actual clipping planes where the assets
“Join” together.
I update 5 i am seeing “jumps” lighting walking through the now invisible clipping planes and then the tone mapping spazes out.


players are annoyed and vocal
As I’m sure the devs are :)
Everyone wants this stuff to be fixed,
the question is,
What can we players do to help out?
What data needs to be sampled are their any tools we can download, areas we can video capture?
 
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Sass won’t make the issues go away.

Sometimes bugs can be easy to spot, but hard to diagnose where the problem originates. With procedural generation frameworks they are build the settlements and planets.
 
Sass won’t make the issues go away.

Sometimes bugs can be easy to spot, but hard to diagnose where the problem originates. With procedural generation frameworks they are build the settlements and planets.
For the planet tech part exists a thread with links to the issues in the tracker and detailed analysis:
 
Yes, and it is totally the customers job to diagnose the product. Just like we did in the alph.. oh wait, that's right. They ignored EVERYTHING we said in the alpha about performance!
Who is this “we”
And what is your evidence they ignored
You??

Performance is multilayered issue.
Driver optimisations are the final pass and are in for the final dev phase for the consoles.
Shader / lighting revisions have been in almost every phase of the update 1-5.

The performance problem has NOTHING to do with your GPU or cpu, but more how the engine determines what is to be visibly rendered on screen.

They stated it was an issue with the occlusion system back in alpha 1 and have done everything they can to fix it since then.


The lack of a successful result it getting a little scary.
 
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Stop that stupidity for the good of the community they did not ignore you!!

Performance is multilayered issue.
Driver optimisations are the final pass and are in for the final dev phase for the consoles.
Shader / lighting revisions have been in almost every phase of the update 1-5.

The performance problem has NOTHING to do with your GPU or cpu, but more how the engine determines what is to be visibly rendered on screen.

They stated it was an issue with the occlusion system back in alpha 1 and have done everything they can to fix it since then.


The lack of a successful result it getting a little scary.
No, they told us we are imagining things, performance doesn't matter in the alpha, because there's this magical other build we'll be getting two weeks later that works totally fine. Which it didn't.

Yes, they have been working on it, because the cat was out of the bag AFTER they took everyone's money, but let's not invent an alternate timeline, where FDev did nothing wrong.
 
Oh there is no doubt to them being a little coy, and fluid with the state of things.
Again. It’s a matter of what was said and how we interpret.

Again your interpretation of the alpha is in yet another miss understanding.
The “goal” and the “purpose” of the alpha was to test specific things and get “our” opinions on those things, not show off the whole “product”.
Integration with existing player data for example, had to be tested, so why should that have working planetary tech for that?

Going off the original announcement, they expected a period of fixes, refinements, balances.

The bug in occlusion / asset streaming - giving rise to the odd performance issues was already been worked on and perhaps was why “working”
Planetary tech was not in the alpha.

I was surprised the outfitting filter bug took so long to fix.

But there in lies another problem.

BUG fixing is not an exact science.
when developers know there is an issue, and believe they know what and where the problem is,
And believe they can fix it in a certain timeframe.

Is that a lie?
 
If sass is required to fix a problem,
Disappointing. I was kind of hoping that it would.

Ah well, back to the drawing board...
You will be first on my list of people to call :)

Im a Brit living in Sweden and people
Keep saying I’m so funny! Sigh, having sassy comebacks and quips are required survival skills in the UK. It’s not I’m am a great comedian at all, far from it; but apparently my basic UK sass is on par to professional Swedish comedians.
 
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Deleted member 182079

D
Yes, and it is totally the customers job to diagnose the product. Just like we did in the alph.. oh wait, that's right. They ignored EVERYTHING we said in the alpha about performance!
It was worse. They didn't ignore the performance related feedback, they instead brushed it off stating that the magical main trunk is in much better shape.

As in, they lied (and I'm not someone who uses the L word lightly).
 
If sass is required to fix a problem,

You will be first on my list of people to call :)

Im a Brit living in Sweden and people
Keep saying I’m so funny! Sigh, having sassy comebacks and quips are required survival skills in the UK. It’s not I’m am a great comedian at all, far from it; but apparently my basic UK sass is on par to professional Swedish comedians.
This reminds me of a Dane I used to work with. He was constantly taken aback by the sheer levels of sass in the UK workplace. He found it baffling - and endlessly amusing.

It also reminds me of an American I worked with. He very quickly learned not to ask Brits, "How are you?" Because, they would tell him.

Sass and complaining. Great British traditions.
 

Deleted member 38366

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Help them?

I think at first one would have to determine if they deserve help in the 1st place.

And as it stands, I personally don't feel like helping people that are lying into my face, cheaters and folks begging for my money without delivering something tangible in return.
They can beg their beloved Investors, Shareholders and Hedges for help for all I care. Then they can see if Goldman Sachs or Barclays or some HFT Algos buy 10.000.000.000 ARX to help them...
 

Deleted member 182079

D
But the standard British response to that question is simply "Not bad". Or maybe, "Not bad, you?".
Yep, it's certainly not limited to the Americans but an Angloshere thing in general. I learned after a while to simply respond "not too bad" when I'm ok, and say "Ok" when I'm not, instead of telling them how I really feel. Nobody wants to know, unless they're your friends perhaps (and tbh, vice versa).
 
It was worse. They didn't ignore the performance related feedback, they instead brushed it off stating that the magical main trunk is in much better shape.

As in, they lied (and I'm not someone who uses the L word lightly).
Which is not a lie if the devs fixed the bugs as planned in the the main trunk.
Because it’s just a few misplaced leaves…it’s easy to cut them off/rearrange them.

The problem with bug fixes is sometimes it doesn’t go as optimistically as one would like.

And of course you have to shut off the broken systems which are affected by a the core bug, so whilst you are back tracking the issue from the leaves inwards you are sabotaging huge swathes of the project so they don’t clutter the detective work, or the sometimes you have to really start Stripping off the leaves, fruit, cutting off the twigs, and then massive amount of branches and back to the main trunk, and into the root system in the adjoining tree.

And the bug fix can alter then alter everything that is built on top and functions after that point.
 
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