Friday Update, June 01, 2012

[Thee_oddball]

Originally Posted by Osprey

C++ is native, not non native. What makes you think there are perf problem between the layers anyway? If so the answer would be to optimise that, not convert.

the core game is written in .NET and the tress are a C++ DLL hence the interop, and What makes you think there are perf problem between the layers anyway? is the fact that you hear that people have high FPS but still have stutters which gets fixed by turning OFF the tree's should be your first indicator that interop is causing a performance hit.

optimization? the game was in dev for 5 years before release...it came out of the gate with no doc, no dedicated server soft and very little content...at the very least it should have been optimised at release.

[adonys]

have it ever crossed your mind that it might be because of a bad implementation of the speed tree library?!!

[Flanker35M]

S!

My guess is that Luthier's team is patching up something the previous programmers did or did not do at all. Taking over someone elses code can be hard..

[SiThSpAwN]

Originally Posted by Flanker35M

S!

My guess is that Luthier's team is patching up something the previous programmers did or did not do at all. Taking over someone elses code can be hard..

Was the entire team swapped out when Oleg left? I thought he was the only one that left?

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by SiThSpAwN

Was the entire team swapped out when Oleg left? I thought he was the only one that left?

At least sound designer, graphics engine, FM, AI and water programmers were fired or left IIRC and probably several others too. When people fail to deliver results in 3-5 years they have to be fired at last one day. But it may take even more time for new people to decipher old code.

It is good the idea of MMO saves the project from being shut down completely IMO.

[SiThSpAwN]

Originally Posted by Ataros

At least sound designer, graphics engine, FM, AI and water programmers were fired or left IIRC and probably several others too. When people fail to deliver results in 3-5 years they have to be fired at last one day. But it may take even more time for new people to decipher old code.

It is good the idea of MMO saves the project from being shut down completely IMO.

Ok, I never knew the fate of the original team, that makes it even easier for me to swallow the problems faced right now.

As for the MMO I agree, but only something more like Warbirds but with maybe different options to get people into the game.

[Buchon]

Originally Posted by Ataros

At least sound designer, graphics engine, FM, AI and water programmers were fired or left IIRC and probably several others too. When people fail to deliver results in 3-5 years they have to be fired at last one day. But it may take even more time for new people to decipher old code.

It is good the idea of MMO saves the project from being shut down completely IMO.

They already ditched completely the old sound engine code and written a new one, and same with the graphics engine (this took 6 months).

So there no old code to decipher in those areas at least.

I guess that the new AI and FM guys are the ones having hard times.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by adonys

have it ever crossed your mind that it might be because of a bad implementation of the speed tree library?!!

It sure can be, but there are tons of other games that use Speedtree out there with very good performance, like Battlefield 3 that hardly can be accused of stuttering But then of course, I hardly think there is another game that use so many trees on the same frame

Anyway - as the main logic in the game is written in .NET and the Speedtree dll:s are written in C++ there will be interop problems in this critical part that for sure will not help! Of course they can maybe do optimization so that they load stuff and don't do the marshalling every frame, but I really don't know how the Speedtree libraries work in runtime... As Speedtree does culling, lods etc I don't see how you could get around a lot of marshalling to get the C++ trees "into" your C# landscape manager? Just guessing here...

Another thing is that they seem to be using Speedtree 5.2 which is not the latest release so let's hope they work with Speedtree support to fix this and are not stuck on a license for 5.x only.

[SiThSpAwN]

Originally Posted by mazex

It sure can be, but there are tons of other games that use Speedtree out there with very good performance, like Battlefield 3 that hardly can be accused of stuttering But then of course, I hardly think there is another game that use so many trees on the same frame

Battlefield isnt trying to render the amount of area that COD is though....

[mazex]

Originally Posted by SiThSpAwN

Battlefield isnt trying to render the amount of area that COD is though....

Just as I said - there is hardly any other game (than CloD) that tries to render as many trees into one frame...