Just keep playing if you're interested in it, the cert system is a way to tailor the game to you and beyond the armor stuff there isn't much that's obviously essential. You'll figure out what you need as you play eg if you want longer range engagements you can get a scope for your weapon but if you're missing a lot you can get a lower damage, higher rof/ammo sidegrade weapon, etc.
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Planetside 2 |OT| 12 Man Squads, 2000 Players, So Free You'll Want to Pay!
- Thread starter MrBig
- Start date
Just keep playing if you're interested in it, the cert system is a way to tailor the game to you and beyond the armor stuff there isn't much that's obviously essential. You'll figure out what you need as you play eg if you want longer range engagements you can get a scope for your weapon but if you're missing a lot you can get a lower damage, higher rof/ammo sidegrade weapon, etc.
Cool, thanks. This thread is not very active. Has most of GAF moved on?
There's some playing, just no one gathers here. Tried to start up an Outfit, but it didn't stick. We're spread out over different factions and servers.
I've taken alot of this past month off, but I still log in occasionally. Will pick it back up by the time Hossin (new continent) gets released.
I've taken alot of this past month off, but I still log in occasionally. Will pick it back up by the time Hossin (new continent) gets released.
Yes, the updates are coming in too slowly & things keep getting pushed back when they're supposed to be the next update. It's disheartening. Then when updates do come along...they're usually broken up across multiple updates which can take weeks to get the full thing implemented.
I think most of us would rather just wait it out until they get their shit sorted out. You'll probably see an influx of us old players towards the end of the year or beginning of next, if SOE sticks to the roadmap schedule (LOL). That's when most of the cool stuff, that we've been wanting since the beta, should be available.
EDIT:
Holy shit, Nason's Defiance has an UNDERGROUND portion of the base? :O
I already thought it was a huge/intricate base but to find out there's a whole 'nother section under all of that....wow
Gen.Grievous
Member
I had a very frustrating gaming session yesterday. I like playing this game and having a small platoon (max 2 squads) to take important points in the lattice to cut the opposition off. Now on Esamir with every base walled in like Fort Knox you are constantly fighting against shotguns, shortguns and more shotguns. Barely any skill is required, just point and click and you win. Even when you are a heavy with over shield on, you get one shotted. Especially NC seems to only pull shotguns these days. It feels like there are entire squads equipped just with jackhammers and bruisers.
Either the rest of the NC weaponry is simply crap or shotguns are overpowered. To be honest I feel like the latter is the case. What is the point of a FPS where skill level is no longer important? Latency and a shotgun wins you the fight.
Either the rest of the NC weaponry is simply crap or shotguns are overpowered. To be honest I feel like the latter is the case. What is the point of a FPS where skill level is no longer important? Latency and a shotgun wins you the fight.
Depends on what class you want to play. You should just find a class you like and stick with it and build it up. I picked combat medic, so my first upgrades were for my med gun. Your stock rifle is usually pretty good. I would go for the armor upgrade next to get more health.
Nothings really Must Have, though I tend to get all the one point certs out of habit. My first upgrade was a scope as I recall. The 2x holographic one, it's still my preference. Use VR to get a feel for what you like, you can get to it from the world change terminals in the warp gates.
Anton668
Member
im sure there are a bunch that still play. its just not enough for a outfit on a single server and 1 faction. I know a few of us have moved on to join Azure Twilight(VS) on Mattherson
Those tweets this morning + the lack of PS4 footage + PS2 being a PS4 launch window title = me getting the impression that they're having trouble with the PS4 port and have started some serious crunch time in order to make sure it's out this year.
Gen.Grievous
Member
Quite certain that is the case. Let's be honest the PS4 has a fairly slow CPU at 1.6 Ghz but it does have 8 cores. Problem is that PlanetSide 2 at the moment favours a few very fast cores vs a whole bunch of slower ones.
Probably more about having difficulty splitting up the main gaming thread into multiple threads...which is pretty much NEEDED for the PS4 version. This is a good thing for everyone, especially AMD users.
I read the PTS notes and they had a section where they are trying to adjust tracer rendering and they mentioned it being a dangerous code area.
Leaves me feeling a bit insecure.
I think if DICE could figure out how to multithread the Frostbite engine for BF3 then Sony will get this thing working in time. Im just glad they finally got the wake up call.
Leaves me feeling a bit insecure.
I think if DICE could figure out how to multithread the Frostbite engine for BF3 then Sony will get this thing working in time. Im just glad they finally got the wake up call.
*does the mashed potato*
Another reason to be thankful for the PS4?
no. the answer is literally 6 posts above yours
I wouldn't expect them to admit to it
b&jy77VjiKn$#F
Member
Is this game worth getting into? I kinda want to play some f2p for some reason. Is the game similar to other fps titles?
Ya, if you play with an outfit or a great group of people it's fantastic fun. Hard to play on your own until you understand everything that's going on.
It's definitely its own beast but skills from other FPS certainly apply. Check the op for some info
Yup re-bought a headset recently just because of this game.
b&jy77VjiKn$#F
Member
Also, consider there are load of players in the game, what is the minimum internet speed for the game to be playable (I'm asking because the internet I have right now sucks ass).
ThreePiMatt
Member
Your actual download/upload speed isn't really super important for multiplayer games, ping times are the key factor. So long as you don't have problems with other multiplayer games and you pick a server in your region you'll probably be fine on that front. Your PC will struggle though. The game is super CPU dependent (some of the discussion on this page was about John Smedley making performance optimizations the primary concern for the near future). Large battles can easily cut your framerate 25-50%.
edit - I just realized my Alpha Squad boost finally expired.
edit - I just realized my Alpha Squad boost finally expired.
Came back to this game from a few months off. See it's relatively the same. That's unfortunate. Now I see they're stalling all production and release of direly needed fresh content for optimizations that iirc they were doing every GU while I was playing?
It just feels like this game is in trouble. And they just had some big lay offs again at SOE today it seems.
It just feels like this game is in trouble. And they just had some big lay offs again at SOE today it seems.
ThreePiMatt
Member
Smedley said on Twitter the layoffs won't effect PS2.
Excellent.
I'm hoping they can still release Hossin this month, I'm slowly but surely getting burned out on the game. Again.
Dont count on Hossin at all. Probably during the holidays or early next year would be my guess. These optimizations need to come before anything else is added. Doing that "optimizations + new content, without decent overhead/leverage" cycle every update is stupid. We never see any real gains, they're just gaining back enough performance to supplement the new content. So all the optimizations are just normalized
yggdrasill
Member
Has Physx been dumb down since its introduction? I see YouTube videos showing nice particle effects on elevators, but I don't see them when I enable the particle option in-game.
There's now a quality option that changes which effects are used.
You have to make sure in Nvidia control panel that you are assigning something to Phyx.
For what its worth the implementation is awful and it destroys any framerate you had.
RadioactiveLobster
Member
They removed them due to performance issues
Operation: Make Faster Game (OMFG)
Getting Our FPS Higher FPS
Hey folks,
It’s been a while since my last optimization post, so want to make sure you know that we’re going to be posting a lot more often than we have been.
WHY HAVEN’T YOU DONE ALL THIS ALREADY?
We’ve spent the better part of two years with PlanetSide 2 measuring and reviewing the elements of the game which are slow. When we’ve found things we could fix quickly, we did. When we found general optimizations that didn’t have much of a risk to them, we worked on them. But mostly, given that we were a live game since the opening of the PS2 Tech Test, we kept our optimizations as “safe” as possible. Optimizing often involves reorganizing code that has already been through rigorous testing, and that means as we move it around we can….Bust something…No matter how hard we try not to. Many optimizations that we found just required far too much “soak time” to be feasible at that stage of the project.
WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS NOW?
PlanetSide 2 has reached the point in its development where we think the core game is THERE. Designers have a vast array of options from here on out to create content, artists have at least a minimum set of tools for creating art, the UI works well and is understandable, we have an actual tutorial (no more “Welcome to the game! *POW*!”
We have reached an opportune time, and recognizing this, Smed stepped up and said, “Fix it, now.” We all have wanted to get the time necessary to do some of these bigger changes, and do them right. Smed also recognizes fully that no matter how much work the design department or art department puts into making the game shine, it simply isn’t as fun of an FPS experience at a low frame rate.
With this proclamation, all of our teams have been given the freedom to fix things that take significant time to fix. What you’re going to get at the end of this is a serious, noticeable increase in frame rate, PLUS some ancillary benefits that are capable as a result of some of these architectural advances. Every single member of the team, no joke, is actively looking for and implementing ways to make the game faster so we can deliver a better gameplay experience to you.
ALRIGHT ENOUGH APPETIZER, GIMME SOME MEAT!
I’m going to introduce you to some fairly technical terms. If you’re Vanu, you can skip this disclaimer and you probably know it all anyway. TR, if you don’t understand something ask your C.O. If you still don’t understand, you’re probably a Heavy…don’t worry about it… If you’re an NC, all this is probably just some plot by the man to keep you down. Just read it anyway.
Physics
---------
This game has physics scenes that are unrivaled in their complexity. While a normal game may have upwards of a hundred different shapes bouncing around and solving for their collision, we sometimes have scenes with over a thousand shapes, or more! Those huge tank battles really do a number on the physics solver!
So OMFG will see us spending significant time restructuring the complexity of our physics solved in a way we call “Adaptive Level of Detail.” What this means is that we will be lowering the amount of work the simulator does, based on frame rate and distance to object. Basically, we give the physics simulation less to do by taking things that are a distance away from you and making them simulate less.
“But wait Ryan!”, you say to yourself, which is a funny thing to say to yourself, “Won’t lowering the simulation quality result in a crappy simulation!? I love PlanetSide 2’s awesome physics and would never want to see any harm done to it! PlanetSide 2’s physics are the best ever!” Well, now you’re getting a bit too…Okay…I’ll accept that compliment. To answer your question, though, we simply don’t know.
Some of the things we’re doing are experimental. We have great ideas from some of the best in the biz on how to solve our performance problems, however coding is 60% science and 60% art. Some of the tasks I’m talking to you about today are still in their early stages, and may not make it into the final game as described, or at all!
With Adaptive Level of Detail, we hope to emulate the frames we don’t simulate, “smoothing” out any simulation errors that may occur, but it is going to take a lot of work and caffeine to make it, then even more to determine if it is good enough. As far as effect on frame rate, it won’t have much of one unless you have 4 or less cores, but it will have a HUGE impact on physics “hitches” and anyone with 2-4 cores will see potentially massive increases in frame rate when in a big battle.
Overhead Manager
------------------------
Right now, when you’re in that Big Battle, we spend a lot of time drawing those little triangles (we call them Doritos, but get no product endorsement money…Can you believe that?) above people’s heads. They don’t look like much, but there is a complicated system under the hood to make sure we show them even though their owner may not be visible to you, and don’t show them when we shouldn’t and heck tons of other rules. We’ve seen real improvements from re-factoring that entire system to be more efficient and change only what’s necessary, when necessary. We’re also re-factoring its rendering code so it will be much faster as well.
Player Updates
-------------------
The more players you have around you, the more time your game client spends updating the information about those players. Be it sounds they’re playing, bullets they’re firing, stats that are changing, etc. Your client spends an amount of time per dynamic entity making sure the things that are dynamic get dynamic-ed. In an effort to make this more efficient, we are only going to update a number of them per frame and we are going to be smarter about whether or not they need a full update. In early testing, this has resulted in less than 10% of all dynamic entities actually NEEDING to be updated though right now 100% of them get their update. Needless to say, in large battles this will be nice to have.
Animation Updates
------------------------
PlanetSide 2 has a really robust animation system, with every tech animation buzz word you can think of (except for ragdoll…Yeah…Why isn’t ragdoll done yet? Seriously!?) We animate a lot more stuff than most games out there, through some very complex state networks. For our animation optimizations, we’re looking at ways to process fewer animations per frame and when they do process, have less complexity per process to iterate through while producing the same high quality result. This is tough work done through collaboration between the art and code teams, but we’re confident we will get a good result here.
User Interface
-----------------
Our user interface is incredibly complex. It may look simple (on purpose….It’s actually a heck of a lot MORE work to make something look simple!) but there are many tens of thousands of lines of code running all the time to keep that data fresh. However, now that we’ve had over a year to manage its functionality, we see areas where we can reduce the per-frame overhead and have it to give you the same data, but cost less to do so. We are actively optimizing the minimap and hud to reduce per-frame time to as little as 10% of what it currently is.
Furthermore, we are upgrading our UI middleware to its latest version, which includes optimizations that further decrease the time UI takes to draw.
Also, we are decoupling the part of the UI that manages the data, manages the on-screen movie, and renders the movie into three sections- each of which can run in a different thread. This decoupling also allows us to run each piece at a different rate, so they don’t all have to update every frame.
Occlusion/Visibility
-----------------------
PlanetSide 2 has a huge world. 64 km^2 filled with over a hundred thousand objects and thousands of players per continent! Each combination of mesh (the polygons that make up an object) and texture (the things we paint onto the mesh) has to be individually described in detail to your video card and then rendered. So how do we render hundreds of thousands of things per frame? By NOT doing it! Easy, eh?! Instead we first split the continent up in a whole bunch of ways and then use 10 man-years’ worth of code to determine what subset of those things you can actually see. This is Visibility. We also want to avoid rendering something that is behind something else, be it a “dynamic” object (like a person or bullet, something that changes) or “static” object (something that doesn’t change, like a building or Higby’s opinion). This is Occlusion.
We use a third-party code source called Umbra to do most of our Visibility/Occlusion. As part of OMFG, we are upgrading our Umbra to the latest version, which also requires a significant re-factor of how our visibility pathway works, changing several factors of our core client and tools. This is going to reduce the time spent per-frame on visibility by a sizeable amount, which means that the more complex your scene (like, for example, a base where there are thousands of objects) the more benefit you will get. We are also putting our visibility fully in another thread, so those of you with multicore systems (most of you) will see added benefit, and AMD users will see a pretty significant benefit from the parallelization of visibility operations.
Multithreaded Renderer
------------------------------
Many elements of PlanetSide 2 are already in separate threads, but each of those threads often have to be in lock-step with the main thread and the renderer. So we are taking the part of the renderer that actually talks to DirectX and we’re putting it into its own thread just like the UI renderer. This will give the main thread less to do per-frame, further increasing the frame rate for those with 4 or more cores.
More Instrumentation
---------------------------
We are working on adding even more tuning dials and nobs for ourselves, giving us even more power to see what’s happening in these big battles and where we should tune next.
I’m also excited about our ongoing efforts to create a Benchmark Level. Old-school “run through a rail and compute your frame rate” here. SOE believes in empowering its users like nobody else, and this is another example. We’re going to be giving you the ability to actually measure your frame rate in a static environment so you can, with every patch, have a one-button “How am I doing?” solver. You fly around a scene, while we compute all sorts of metrics on fill rates, object update times, UI times, and hundreds more…Then, at the end, you can see a score,discuss it and WE get that score as well, along with your hardware setup. Being able to have a static scene custom-purposed to find performance problems is HUGE. No more, “Well I got X frame rate at a bar in Indar on a Tuesday while it was raining.” Now you’ll be able to say, “Last week I got a score of 8300, but this week IT’S OVER 9000!!!!”
IN CLOSING
We’re going to keep talking about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. These optimizations DO improve everyone’s life, not just the low-end machines. They are significant increases in performance that will change your gameplay for the better.
You are a part of this. Questions welcome.
Ryan Elam - Tech Director PS2
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/operation-make-faster-game.150281/
tl;dr: they're recoding/updating/optimizing a lot of systems so they run faster by being more efficient and having the jobs being split into multiple threads for multicore systems. They'll be deploying discrete updates over the course of a few weeks. There will be a benchmark tool so SOE (and you) can collect practical performance data as they change things.
Mikey Jr.
Member
Man, still a few more weeks?
Not having game updates kinda sucks.
Really, this optimization stuff doesn't really affect me, so its kinda whatever. I get 60-40 fps (low 30's with a ton of shit happening) most of the time and I'm happy with that. I guess this is good for lower spec computers.
Not having game updates kinda sucks.
Really, this optimization stuff doesn't really affect me, so its kinda whatever. I get 60-40 fps (low 30's with a ton of shit happening) most of the time and I'm happy with that. I guess this is good for lower spec computers.
I get similar FPS performance but the experience really isn't smooth. There's hitching (even on an SSD), poor UI performance, poor player culling, etc, and of course it would be nice to actually be able to have a constant 60fps so that everything isn't always slowing down.
ThreePiMatt
Member
Always interested in seeing more optimizations. I'm in the same boat where I can keep at least 30FPS even in the largest battles, but even then, it doesn't really feel like a smooth 30FPS. Still always the concern that things might get a little more broken than before, anything relating to LOD and occlusion can have weird side-effects.
Hopefully the release of the optimizations will culminate in a 3x Smed Bucks deal or some Heroic Boost sales or something.
edit - Also, patch tomorrow. No optimizations, but Striker fix!
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...11-2013-6am-pdt-3pm-cest.150296/#post-2124293
Hopefully the release of the optimizations will culminate in a 3x Smed Bucks deal or some Heroic Boost sales or something.
edit - Also, patch tomorrow. No optimizations, but Striker fix!
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...11-2013-6am-pdt-3pm-cest.150296/#post-2124293
RadioactiveLobster
Member
They've released a video about Operation Make Faster Game
I didn't understand most of it but it was an interesting watch.
I didn't understand most of it but it was an interesting watch.