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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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Who knows because Unity's doc are often vague, which means you end up guessing and doing time wasting trial and error:

 

"The total amount of memory to be used by streaming and non-streaming textures.

 

Non-streaming textures will always be loaded at the largest mipmap level (even if that exceeds the budget). Streaming textures will pick the smallest mipmap level possible to try to hit the memory budget."

 

Generally you never want to use system RAM for textures, since it is slow to access.

 

Oh, damn, and here I thought they'd provide a ton more detail than that for those who use their engine, which is a ton of people/games. Surprised they leave such critical info vague like that. See, even more reason to make a TFP voxel engine, one day, when you're ready and up to the task, if ever.

 

Again I think the motivation would be so you could license it and make bank that way to justify that level of development cost and time. UnReal sure did with their engine, ha I remember how stupid expensive UE3 was when it first came out, like 2 mil or something.

 

So system RAM is not up to task for textures, interesting and not surprising. Working in robotics I see very very similar struggles, always going to be there with a "von-nuemann" style serial architecture. Luckily graphics cards have been pushing that limit really well for a solid 10-15 years now, hence why nVidia makes autonomous car brains now. Between that and SSDs becoming cheaper and more practical gaming has had a huge boost from the old days. But still, the bottleneck issues are real, and heavy, due to the nature of the system method adopted decades ago.

 

Thanks for the explanation, appreciate it.

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One of the experienced modders (I think dust2death) mentioned that texture streaming would consume CPU time. I conducted some tests and as far as I remember he was right (not absolutely sure though).

 

yeah but we've added so many new textures to the game a person would have to cut it down to the lowest texture settings for everything to possibly fit into memory. All modern games stream textures. Unity probably has to improve it some more its fairly new.

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This is totally off-topic, but if the pics with the accounts are the people talking.. you all look so young! And I am so green with envy! lol

 

Well I'll be 44 soon. Gingers don't grey, we go straight to white, eventually, and I do have some already. But thanks, sure wish I still felt younger lol. All of Madmoles fitness talk makes me realize I should probably eat better and exercise more. Sure seems to help.

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Oh, damn, and here I thought they'd provide a ton more detail than that for those who use their engine, which is a ton of people/games. Surprised they leave such critical info vague like that. See, even more reason to make a TFP voxel engine, one day, when you're ready and up to the task, if ever.

 

Again I think the motivation would be so you could license it and make bank that way to justify that level of development cost and time. UnReal sure did with their engine, ha I remember how stupid expensive UE3 was when it first came out, like 2 mil or something.

 

So system RAM is not up to task for textures, interesting and not surprising. Working in robotics I see very very similar struggles, always going to be there with a "von-nuemann" style serial architecture. Luckily graphics cards have been pushing that limit really well for a solid 10-15 years now, hence why nVidia makes autonomous car brains now. Between that and SSDs becoming cheaper and more practical gaming has had a huge boost from the old days. But still, the bottleneck issues are real, and heavy, due to the nature of the system method adopted decades ago.

 

Thanks for the explanation, appreciate it.

 

You cant pool the RAM together like that....yet.

 

DX12 has implementations that could/would allows devs to pool vram between gpu's of same or diff branding into a unified pool.

 

Faatal is stuck between and rock and hardware unfortunately..

 

Up the rec specs.

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Which is probably a Unity issue with texture streaming, but possibly we could do something different with textures. Our testers have had the stuck in low res issue many times, but we have not found a fix when it starts doing that other than restarting the game. It currently puts us in the position of which bug would you like?

 

I'm making a build to test/profile the effects of texture settings, but this is becoming a can of worms.

 

I brought this up before and you mentioned the same, which is why I never officially bug reported it since turning it off didnt harm me in any way even with me hosting dedi. So play with it carefully, wouldnt want you messin nothin up LOL ^5'z

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@fataal

 

A issue with low FPS the testers were able to reproduce last night, is people turning off texture streaming (why???)

 

Turning it off for me stopped a blur effect when in a mine that the person next to me had no issue with.

Lead, iron, etc. would be completely blurry for one or the other ore,

we both had the same high settings, except texture streaming was off on his end.

when turned off on my end the blurry texture immediately came into focus and never happened again but when turned on, started happening again. Some things would never come into focus with texture streaming.

 

so I keep it off now.

 

please leave this as an option I don't have to use console for.

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yeah but we've added so many new textures to the game a person would have to cut it down to the lowest texture settings for everything to possibly fit into memory.

 

Well, thats entirely relative, to how much VRAM you have...

 

You arent exactly topping out 8GB VRAM with Full textures. I dont think I ever managed to get A17 to hit the upper limit. I know I could in A16..

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This is the first alpha release that I didn't mind waiting a little while to get. I was sitting in a bar when a guy pulled a knife and stabbed it through my left hand, after beating him and 3 of his friends senseless I had to go to the hospital and get it stitched up. It was unusable for a while, but it's okay now so I will be ready to play tomorrow.

 

At least that's the story I'm gonna tell people when they see the scar, not the truth that I fell face first while walking across my bedroom floor while holding a plate, the plate broke and sliced my hand up.

 

I have the day off tomorrow, so I'm ready for some Z smashing.

 

That is what you get for not eating at the table!!! Hope your hand is ready for some serious button mashing.

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Turning it off for me stopped a blur effect when in a mine that the person next to me had no issue with.

Lead, iron, etc. would be completely blurry for one or the other ore,

we both had the same high settings, except texture streaming was off on his end.

when turned off on my end the blurry texture immediately came into focus and never happened again but when turned on, started happening again. Some things would never come into focus with texture streaming.

 

so I keep it off now.

 

please leave this as an option I don't have to use console for.

 

Yep. I even felt bad turning it off because TFP was so excited for it during A17 development. But the struggle is real, just wish you the best of luck getting all the worms back into the can on this one Faatal, or whoever's task that is(I assume it's you, but not 100% sure, just sounds like it.)

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

That is what you get for not eating at the table!!! Hope your hand is ready for some serious button mashing.

 

My body is ready! *

 

* albeit because I don't have to actually move much...

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Well, thats entirely relative, to how much VRAM you have...

 

You arent exactly topping out 8GB VRAM with Full textures. I dont think I ever managed to get A17 to hit the upper limit. I know I could in A16..

 

There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

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There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

 

Half a terabyte you say?! (I detect tech sarcasm)

 

I just reinstalled R6:Seige and that mofo was, I ♥♥♥♥ you not, a 110 Gig download. I'll need yet another SSD soon at this rate.

 

I am really looking forward to all the new art, stuff in the streams looked awesome.

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I saw, which is why this is getting ugly. I don't know that I want to remove the tex streaming video option anymore. Might be better to force half res textures as the max in that case, but that could be jumping the gun.

 

Sorry, I missed your reply earlier. Maybe just remove the option to turn it off in the menu, and add it as a console command as you mentioned, but add a streamer note in the change log? You could also send a message to your affiliate streamers.

 

The point of the game is playing, and limiting it because streamers are using single underpowered systems instead of dual systems can't be later at TFP feet.

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There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

 

Sure, but we (the end user) arent getting the RAW files. We're getting the compressed bundled versions. 2K up from 1K isnt a huge increased in terms of data, certainly not 4K levels. (in terms of terrain)

 

You mentioned earlier they are PBR now, so certainly an increase in the number of maps used (compared to 17), will also increase the VRAM requirements overall.

 

limitations going to limit.

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Half a terabyte you say?! (I detect tech sarcasm)

 

I just reinstalled R6:Seige and that mofo was, I ♥♥♥♥ you not, a 110 Gig download. I'll need yet another SSD soon at this rate.

 

I am really looking forward to all the new art, stuff in the streams looked awesome.

 

I doubt its sarcasm.

RAW art files are generally huge, especially if assuming most of the RAW files would be 4K or higher.

 

For example, a car Im working on for something.

 

My RAW working PSD's come in a total of 705MB.

The exported material maps for unity are 160MB

the car bundle itself after compression etc, 5MB.

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We are considering buying new 1660 ti cards with 6 gb video ram for our two gaming systems, partially because they are several years old, but also partially because newer games are wanting more v ram.

 

I figured we'd see how bad things were tomorrow with out 1060 3gb cards first.

 

(We actually bought both these systems originally partially so we could both play 7 days co op locally, btw.)

 

Another observation I saw in a stream today (forgot their name) in a mp game, one player saw saplings, and the other player saw full grown trees.

 

The sapling player was standing inside the trees while the other player was laughing chopping them down while he was inside them.

 

The only remarkable observation I noticed other than other streamers, was a ton of spikes around thier base (a few hundred) and these looked like planted trees that had grown up.

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We are considering buying new 1660 ti cards with 4 gb video ram for our two gaming systems, partially because they are several years old, but also partially because newer games are wanting more v ram.

 

I figured we'd see how bad things were tomorrow with out 1060 3gb cards first.

 

 

And here I was about to ask if anybody was running A17 with a .5 gb graphics card instead of at least 1gb, if it was doable with min settings.

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I doubt its sarcasm.

RAW art files are generally huge, especially if assuming most of the RAW files would be 4K or higher.

 

For example, a car Im working on for something.

 

My RAW working PSD's come in a total of 705MB.

The exported material maps for unity are 160MB

the car bundle itself after compression etc, 5MB.

 

Oh, duh, I should've known/guessed that, honestly, pardon my brain fart. Especially since I also do a ton of PS work, used to anyway, is less frequent these days, but I am very familiar with huge PSD files in general. I encounter similar things with 3D files, although I mostly use a NURBS program(Rhino) that has very small files compared to both polygon program files(Max, Maya, etc) and even most CAD packages like Solidworks, etc. Thanks for correcting me.

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We are considering buying new 1660 ti cards with 4 gb video ram for our two gaming systems, partially because they are several years old, but also partially because newer games are wanting more v ram.

 

I figured we'd see how bad things were tomorrow with out 1060 3gb cards first.

 

 

That seems like a bad buy IMO.

 

Better off jumping to a 2060 SUPER with 8GB. (yes cost, but in relation to what you plan to spend and what you were planning to get in terms of increase - the 2060 would be a better buy)

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Take a look at the top of this thread and tell me what day it says. We are still on track. There is a morning meeting planned tomorrow and if there is going to be a delay it will be announced then but so far everything looks pretty good.

 

Are the streamers getting the results of the meeting first? Asking for a friend.

 

Coughs * RELEASE the KRAKEN* Coughs

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