It's middleware; totally unrelated to the game engine (or any particular game engine). For those who don't know, Umbra is a technology which facilitates frustrum and occlusion culling. Essentially, what this does is tell the engine only to render the things the user can see on screen at any time, so as to increase performance.
Frustrum culling is the exclusion of anything not in the camera field of view the player is viewing. Occlusion culling (a bit more revolutionary) is the exclusion of anything in the camera field of view that is being blocked (occluded) by geometry in front of it. Thus if you're looking at a building which has a tree behind it that you can't see, the tree is actually not being rendered at all (until you go around the building and can look at it). When this works right it provides a huge boost in performance and absolutely no visual sacrifice.
When it doesn't work it makes the entire world disappear for no reason in Metrica Province.
That's actually very interesting, more so since it's such an intuitive idea. I even remember thinking about that when I took computer graphics subjects in college, and that was back in the mid-nineties! For context on how much things have changed since then, Z-buffering (a cornerstone of current graphic representation, eliminating polygon flickering) was being taught as a rendering method only used in Silicon Graphics workstations and stuff; it was me who told the teacher that a then-upcoming console (the N64) was going to use it.
I've never done any graphics stuff after college, but if I'm not wrong, frustrum culling is quite common; indeed, it's occlusion culling, intuitive as it seems, what seems to be new (since it involves much more complex calculations).
You know, how the game suddenly can only show a maximum amount of player models in your area and just refuses to render everyone else. That wasn't there in BWE 1 and 2.
That actually didn't happen to me, perhaps it's video-card based? Or perhaps I simply never saw that many players on-screen.
I don't remember the dead sister thing being that interesting. I hardly remember it, though.
The "biggest regret" question determines the personal story after the "I was raised" part ends, about level 15. So if you never finished the first part, you probably didn't see anything related to that question.
AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW why'd you saaaaaaaaaaaaay that????
(you just read it in that guy's voice)
Was going to post just that. >_> Seriously, accuracy be damned, it's that one guy's voice why I hate them so much.
So I spent the latest stress test trying out a couple of different controller configs including one of yours I found via GafGuild.com , just to see if any of them feel more fluid than my current setup.
Maybe I'm too comfortable with my current config but I just can not use anything but a right bumper for left mouse-clicking. Something about it just feels natural, and scrolling through the mini map was such a pain when assigned to sticks.
I'm very much considering changing my mouse button setup, actually; I'm not entirely satisfied with it yet as well. I'll keep you all informed.
As result, gonna stick with my current setup. Also tried adding another shift button, to keep all skills to the face buttons. That didn't end well
Yes, it ends up being confusing, and XPadder doesn't like it at all when you hold both.
O.O It was smooth as hell for me. That sucks.
If you didn't play the latest two stress event, or you didn't play in Metrica province, then you probably didn't have a chance to see it. Otherwise, it was all around the place in Metrica, although it did happen on occasion outside it (but much less often).
Its a good thing they let players start playing Asura/Sylvari in BWE 3. Would have sucked (will suck?) if they don't fix it asap. It frustrated the hell out of me the past couple stress tests.
Remember they have their own, separate ongoing closed beta; there's next to no chance of them not noticing even without the stress tests. This is pretty much obviously a result of the huge optimization done before the stress tests; as occlusion was precisely the bottleneck, they probably messed around with it, and managed to improve performance substantially but break Metrica. I'd hate for the game to launch like that, but I'm sure they can fix it within days.
