Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets

@emperor_penguin said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

@jip said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

@valki said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

If those decals don't matter for gameplay, is it possible for one player to play without the decals while the other does?
In that case, make a normal and high res version of each map where the latter has no or small size decals.
Automatcher only ever downloads normal versions. With a button you can download all high res maps at once.

This was a potential solution I was thinking of too. I provide the maps in the vault with low-quality assets and you can manually replace them with high-quality assets. You could even go up to 16K per texture (that is 300mb / texture) and Supreme Commander would bite, looks brilliant.

I was wondering about this sort of thing as well. If this is viable, perhaps there might be a good way to automate this process either based on connection speed (which could be gauged by the download times for regular maps) or by an in-client option to download low or high data map versions for maps that have both available (low could be the default). Any thoughts on the viability of coding this approach?

I think automating it is too much effort for the niche case that we're talking about. Svenni and me are essentially the only two people that actively use custom assets in maps and then you can take Svenni off the list because he sticks to 4k instead of 8k.

To me this would be as simple as having a check in the map to see if a certain file in the map folder exists, if it doesn't then I can assume that they're using the default (low-res) textures. I could make a decal or a message somewhere that says you can download the high-res textures somewhere else.

That location in turn would be something similar to Google Drive that supports large files. I can automate the entire process so that both 4k, 8k and 16k files are available for you to choose from. Including instructions on how to replace them.

@Tagada I think it is important not to exclude people from the matchmaker in any form. If people have issues downloading assets then that is on us to fix. Or to leave the assets out. That is also why one of the questions is whether these maps are fit for ladder / tmm - as there you don't get to decide what to play.

@harzer99 I'm going to look into using Gimp for the task.

I'd like to note that this has been quite a productive discussion thus far, keep it coming.

@sheikah said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

The issue is that for some subset of players the download takes so long and also consistently fails

The solution is probably to download the files in chunks. I have no idea how difficult that would be to implement in java, e.g. if free pre-written code already exists for it. This is something that I like about Steam. The download can stop at any time and start up later, no problems.

Consider the following:
You get a match and the map download starts. You have no way of knowing that this map has map wide decals and an enormous file size. You might not even be aware that this concept exists at all. Now you notice that the map download takes much longer than expected. You may now miss your match, maybe you even close the client to "fix" the problem. This can leave you with a broken map, because the half loaded image leaves the map in a broken state. This has already happened and it will happen again in the future.

Because of this I would like to see the file sizes of maps in the matchmaker map pools to stay roughly in the same order of magnitude. The path to have the people manually "upgrade" the map visuals seems worthy to explore further.

Some random thoughts:
We could have a version with and without the decals in the vault. One that is in the matchmaker and one so people can easily install the "pretty" version for custom games and so they can have a look at what they are potentially missing. Not everyone is confident to manually swap files in their folders.

It has already been dicussed why forcing all map downloads is not feasible, I just want to add: It would not only happen once a month, but also everytime you unlock a bigger pool size, which can happen anytime.

Something to encourage people to download the map pool beforehand would indeed be cool. Maybe an element under the map pool button that notifies you that you are missing maps and gives you the option to download them all with a single click. Maybe I'll look into it once I finished the matchmaker and league projects.

Lastly: I really like the visuals of your maps and how you are pushing the boundaries. Keep them coming!

I skimmed through this so apologies if I missed some more conversation around this, but I like the suggestion @Valki proposed about having an option to toggle between low and high res versions of the maps. It sounds like it's not feasible to automate that for how few maps will be impacted, but what @Jip said about making a decal and giving the people the option to do it manually sounds like a nice compromise there.

I'm also still not seeing the issue with having people be forced to download the maps before queuing. It's the difference between making it annoying for the handful of people that might be impacted vs every single person they try to queue with and the queue fails, which I feel has been happening more recently. The maps have to be downloaded regardless, how do data cap issues come into play there? I suppose it's different if they're just playing a couple games there's a chance there's less of a total download size, but not for anyone playing a lot of ladder/tmm. If it fails for them to download before queueing, it'll also fail during queuing which is a worse experience for more people. Maps are reused a ton throughout the pools. Do that for two or three pools and they'd have most of the maps for ladder/tmm anyway, and this would be coupled with the lower res download set.

Also, how hard would it be to implement what @arma473 is suggesting to improve the downloads?

@emperor_penguin said in [Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets]

I was wondering about this sort of thing as well. If this is viable, perhaps there might be a good way to automate this process either based on connection speed (which could be gauged by the download times for regular maps) or by an in-client option to download low or high data map versions for maps that have both available (low could be the default). Any thoughts on the viability of coding this approach? @Sheikah @Askaholic

This would effectively require a pretty major overhaul of the versioning system we have currently have in the db, the api, and the client itself. It would also require testing to ensure there would be no desyncs. Also a would have to figure out how to handle the name conflicts between maps on the content server. All in all a lot of work for a very niche use case. So imo not likely to happen.

@arma473 said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

The solution is probably to download the files in chunks. I have no idea how difficult that would be to implement in java, e.g. if free pre-written code already exists for it. This is something that I like about Steam. The download can stop at any time and start up later, no problems.

This would require turning downloads into a true background task that would continue even if the client were closed. It also doesn't necessarily solve the issue as people still would not be able to join a queue or game until the download had finished fully.

@exselsior said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

I'm also still not seeing the issue with having people be forced to download the maps before queuing.

The issue boils down to the fact that the chance that you get one of these troublesome maps is rather low when you queue and so it would be bad to lock someone out of the queue just because one map in the queue has an issue for them when they may not even ever play it in the queue.

@sheikah said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

@exselsior said in Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets:

I'm also still not seeing the issue with having people be forced to download the maps before queuing.

The issue boils down to the fact that the chance that you get one of these troublesome maps is rather low when you queue and so it would be bad to lock someone out of the queue just because one map in the queue has an issue for them when they may not even ever play it in the queue.

That's where the low res version of the troublesome maps comes into play. Low res version should solve the issue of the larger downloads failing and bring them more inline with the size of the other maps. Now when they queue they don't have this awkward long wait for them to download any new maps before a match starts which helps mitigate one aspect of the issue of matches just not starting.

True but a solution probably should not be dependent on having a high and low res version as it would require a pretty extensive overhaul of how we do versioning for maps for very little benefit.

@Sheikah Completely agree, but I was thinking more along the lines of what @Jip was saying about a manual way to handle that. Sounds like it's only himself and one other person really doing this so far which makes a manual implementation on their end a lot easier to manage

Okay then I had just misunderstood what you meant.

First of all, I love the screenshots with all the detail, they look gorgeous

Now-could a dev weigh in on how feasible it is to have low-res maps/standard res be auto downloaded for everyone?

Is it possible to tweak the current system to download the higher res textures automatically only if the download can complete within a specified timeframe without glitches? ie without causing the black and red bar effect mentioned

That way higher res textures can be downloaded for any client that can handle them without any intervention by the user and the players with weaker internet connections are spared the complications brought up earlier? This would obviously benefit from the better compression methods mentioned above as well

I speak only as a user and no dev experience, does this sound viable?

@majortrouble It's technically possible to that, but far more work than it's worth. Like what @Sheikah and others who are more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to FAF development are saying it's a lot of work for a very small subset of maps and it isn't really feasible for that reason. I think the only way we'd see something like this is a manual process like Jip was talking about.

I've looked into the discussion and I agree in general that maps with a lot of custom assets (and therefore take up a lot of bandwidth) is more damaging than good for ladder. Solely because it can cause a match to appear to be stuck for the majority, where as a single person is still waiting for a download to finish. And since my aim is ladder, I need to change my approach.

Another issue that I want to mention from the mapper perspective is updating the map. E.g., if I want to make a minor change to Autumn (add the cliff build locations) I immediately add 200 Mbs to the server and everyone's personal storage. On top of that - all those people with a slow connection have to download essentially the same map all over again.

@harzer99 thank you for your suggestion, I was not aware of the size difference. It is quite large in practice. I've been able to reproduce them with Gimp. Sadly though, I can not reproduce it with my automation pipeline and therefore it would involve a lot of manual labor near the end of an iteration. Therefore I can not make use of it. In practice, when a typical 10x10 map is 5 Mbs, reducing from 80 to 50 Mbs per texture is still not sufficient anyhow.

I've decided on doing the 'you can download the HD files yourself' approach as that is the only reasonable solution to the problem. Any other solution is essentially asking someone to solve the problem for me. I'm not entirely sure how this will take shape. Do people have suggestions for services that can store and make available relative large amounts of information (think in terms of 10 - 100gb)? I was for example thinking of making it part of my website to cut costs through my company - but that is less community friendly especially when other people join in on the journey.

@FtXCommando I think you need to add in a map-size limit to the ladder selection. I'd personally not allow any map that uses more than 50 Mbs, as that can already take more than a minute to load for someone with a slow connection. I noticed this during the testing for tmm when a map of 38 Mbs was chosen and people were already wondering if things were broken. In practice without having BlackYps telling you that it has nothing to do with the matchmaker it may cause the entire match to dissolve before it starts. I don't know if it would be difficult to add in, but maybe a similar message in the client when uploading a map stating that anything above 50 Mbs is not appreciated in general.

Imo, I would rather see the maps being forced to download once a month than cut down on the quality of the delivered work to the client. As in you have to download all the maps in pool before you actually get to join the Q.
I know that coding is gonna be the hardest part here but I really do think that making it possible would bring FAF one step closer to other games on the market which clearly don't let you play unless you have the most up to date version of it. Even more when it comes to one of the more important components of said game modes.

Also I don't think that downloading the map pool once a month is gonna be such a hassle, even for an older game like this one. Like if folks are fully capable of downloading 100s of GB a month to play stupid CoD then worst case scenario of 1gb per month for FAF shouldn't be such a big deal even for those with slower connections.

Though maybe I'm just to accustomed to waiting at times a day or two to play games after updates, from when I still had pos internet. And don't see it as much of a problem as long as it's done before you are allowed to join the Q under the guise of game update.

You are forgetting that some map downloads fail consistently for some people. As long as this is happening, forcing people to download the whole pool beforehand is off the table.
Sadly we didn't find a way to reproduce that issue yet. So I don't think it will change anytime soon.

If I may put my two cents in:
If we do “Gimmick” Matchmakers. The restrictions here described would also limit doing some Gimmick Mods as Gimmick Ladders (SCTA bias warning). And by extension, while I understand the issue a quick pedantic question:

How did these people install FAF downloads orginally? These largers map downloads I imagine are not larger than the original FA install or the FAF code bank installs. I do believe the issue Jip talking about is Genuine (and Jip may correct me here, but wasn’t I one who brought this concern up?).

But I feel the core issue should be noted, and converstation broaden. Espacially if core issue is that download package too large. Which if and when gimmick ladders happen, the gimmick chosen mods or otherwise might have same core problem

@dragun101 I have no idea who brought up the issue originally.

If you want this to be looked into a broader fashion then we need to find someone where the anti virus was the reason the download failed.

I think it was me who was complaining about it along with someone else in the VC during testing of three versus three and four versus four match making. I am still will stand by the original statements that i have made.

While your maps are pretty and your work deeply appreciated if it comes at the cost of player enjoyment due to unable to load into a game or preformace issue then it might be the time to tone down the amount that it goes into making a single map for the sake of players... If no other viable solution can be found that is.

I was on mobile (tho still good and viable) connection that day i still feel that map should not take over 5 min to download since i "almost" never expect it to. We should maybe more go gradually about increasing the map size to see where the viable limit is where map makers are gonna be happy and players gonna be less annoyed.

One side question that i have, does increasing the amount of decals increase the loading time for the map?
I am starting to feel that some newer map have "bit" longer load times.

@hinthunter

If done right then the loading time is not affected. An example of when it is done wrong: if the dds file is not a power of two size-wise then the game has to resize it and that takes time . Make sure they are always a power of two and things are good.