Best posts made by Sprouto

I think the intent is to demonstrate that the user owns a legal copy - and that intent is to clear their obligations - not the legal obligations of someone seeking to get around that. Of course it can be circumvented. So, technically - that's correct - it doesn't make YOU legally compliant, but it unbinds FAF from you in the legal sense by discharging their responsibility.

Rather than blaming the factory for the issue - you might wish to simply consider the scaling of naval units. There is a LOT of room to decrease the size, especially of the largest units - and I can say, having done this years ago in LOUD, ships rarely have issues leaving the yard now.

@Deribus Not sure - we've had the d3d_windowscursor command in-line at LOUD for more than a week now, but a couple of days ago, we had some new users showing up that continued to have the problem - using the absolutely latest drivers. The task manager services did the trick, which was good for the users - but the services restart themselves, and not too many users are comfortable with altering core services.

I sincerely hope that this problem gets a proper NVidia resolution, sooner than later, as it's driving people off of FA entirely, especially new users that already have to deal with surround sound issues.

We addressed this issue several years ago in LOUD - it was a rather simple fix - and it hasn't made the HARMS, or other T3 torpedo defense units, awesome or unkillable. What it has done is properly framed the submarine, torpedo and anti-torpedo units in a way that makes them viable, and a meaningful portion of the naval game. If you don't properly compose your fleets with the appropriate units, you should expect to be defeated.

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

@vanifica said in Questions about performance:

I would be totally into this. I guess I assumed LOUD worked by graphical changes, but I never tested it extensively since it didn't have an online client as far as I could tell.

They claim 5000 units without any simspeed issues IIRC. That does imply there's some "magic bullet" somewhere in the code they figured out?

This has long been a myth - LOUD never gained any real performance boost from suppression of graphics. We did toy with this several years ago, and it stuck for some reason. There are certainly some graphical things we simplified or tied to the SIM speed, but over time, most of the pretty was returned to normal.

As Jip rightly points out - there was never a 'magic bullet' - just a lot of patient work going thru almost the entire code base, implementing the techniques that Jip is encouraging FAF to adopt now. The gains are real, but the work is extensive, but not difficult.

@deribus said in Stronger ASF:

This is the approach LOUD takes.

That's not true - ASF stats are essentially identical except in their relative cost/firepower relationship to other units.

Map size has little to do with it - the real issue draws in two aspects - unit count (which is directly responsible for the SIM slowing down) and traffic issues (unit collisions).

While a smaller map does reduce the memory requirement a bit, it has no impact beyond that. Unit count (and the complexity of those units) has long been recognized as the largest influence on performance, and memory consumption - and this 'unresponsiveness' that you're seeing is related to that.

It can impact players at different times, as it's really a measure of CPU 'saturation' - and if the problem is severe enough, it can impact multiplayer games for all players.

Unit collisions play a very big role in this - so anytime you have a situation with a large number of those (like clumps of engineers all crowding around a factory), or traffic jams caused by really tight and complex terrain, you're going to see a very big upswing in CPU activity - which manifests as 'unresponsiveness'.

Currently 62.

You can experiment with the FiringRandomness values directly - in game - via Shift F6. This will give you access to the units data - and if you expand the appropriate weapon, you can directly adjust the randomness values and see them take effect.

This tool is useful for many values (but not all) and FiringRandomness is one that allows active changes.

Over short ranges, it will be hard to discern randomness at work - so you may need some rather significant values to really see it - but for long range weapons, it's very clear.

I'd like to dispel some of the popular myths about LOUD - and then discuss some of what's been mentioned here.

Firstly, while we have indeed 'flattened' some starting areas on maps, to permit LOUD to use his preset base layouts, we have not, in general, done any flattening on maps as a whole. We have certainly upscaled some smaller maps to 20k and 40k, and that has certainly smoothed the inclines in some places, but it was not a goal to 'flatten' any maps - rather - knowing what we know about AI, and map markers, we've remarked those maps we distribute thru LOUD to take advantage of that knowledge, and as such, they perform better, and the AI comprehends them so.

With regards to graphics and sound - yes - we have indeed suppressed many very minor things, and, in the past, we had entirely turned off certain effects such as contrails, or excessive particle effects, but, over the years, as we've found other places to gain, we've brought almost all of them back. As for sounds, yes - a great many ambient sounds have been turned off, but this is not for performance, but it pays dividends in memory consumption - which indirectly aids in performance, but moreso in LOUD's ability to support games with higher unit counts. In fact, LOUD has built a dynamic system which leaves all the effects functions in play until the SIM drops below 0, at which point they begin turning down or off entirely if the speed drops too low.

A great deal of LOUD's performance comes from an understanding of memory management, garbage collection, and methods to reduce both, and this has resulted in the rewriting of many core functions - and as noted above - 'declassing' which, as applied to what was noted above, means that Air units don't carry around baggage from other unit classes.

I'm not sure what the 'wrecks' comment is all about - LOUD has had naval wreckage for a long time, but again, similar to the effects, we decided on a dynamic system which will remove wrecks that are not reclaimed over time, resulting in dramatically improved entity count and significantly better memory management over the course of long games.

Now - all of this work in LOUD is pointed specifically at the long and very long games, on very large maps, with very high unit counts, and as such, the AI is not aimed at the FAF demographic. That it doesn't show well on 5k and 10k maps is intentional, and certain 'set piece' 20k maps, like Setons, offer limited tactical options that can make it rather easy to defeat a 1.0x LOUD, but that is why we continue to work on it - and having someone to converse with AI issues, after essentially working alone for most of the last decade is, at last, refreshing.

Uveso has advanced the AI for FAF a long way from it's crippled Sorian state, and along the way, crossed many of the same bridges as we had to cross in LOUD, especially in core areas like understanding the shortcomings of the default functions that support the AI, and taking advantage of some of the unused features available. I'm sure there will be more to come, and the opportunities to increase the performance (if it's even a concern in most FAF games) is there for the taking.

I do believe that the original reason for removing the ability for T1 transports to carry the ACU was to curb exactly the kind of behavior that's being suggested. While it may seem like it would be interesting, it really encouraged a death-wish behavior that brought a spectacular number of games to a rather early and abrupt end.

The thorough design, with solid OOP principles, and the simple fact that almost every feature of the game is exposed to modification, makes it the most extensible code I've ever personally had the pleasure to work with. It's almost 100% true - if you can dream it - you can do it. That's unique and that's what keeps me at it.

Black Ops Unleashed introduces teleport jammers.

The length of the pause is primarily determined by the number of units that have to be 'transferred' between players. This is a pretty costly process and can bring the SIM to a nearly total standstill. It might be worth considering inserting a global 'pause' - visible to all players - that doesn't unpause until all the work is complete.

This is a MUCH more visual application of the effect - very nice.

The key performance issue with Cybran build bots is rather simple - unit count. Every one of those drones is a unit - and they are being created, and destroyed, at a rather fantastic pace. This has two long term side effects - each drone creates a new entity (unit) which has to be initialized just like any other unit - and when it's finished a task - it is destroyed. This process, of itself, is not very hard on the CPU except for the intangible effects of garbage collection.

The garbage collection process of SCFA can, by the time a game is more than 30 minutes old, consume almost 20%, or more, of all the clock cycles available to the SIM. Why ? Because the creation of new units, and new tables and variables in the code are too intensive - and the memory used must be reclaimed - only to be used again - in very quick succession.

The largest of all memory allocations in SCFA is the creation of a new unit. Anyone who has ever examined a blueprint for any unit knows just how many variables are involved - and that is the problem in a nutshell. If you reduce the creation of drones down to a modest level, you minimize this problem quite a bit. Now - in the end - it becomes a simple matter of aesthetic versus performance.

Water depth is one of the factors that is involved here, but the effect is mostly related to AOE effects. A lot of weapons, strat bombs, battleship main guns, etc - all have great AOE range - and it's perfectly normal, above ground. However, the game mechanics don't know the difference, so these AOE effects reach down below the waves, to full effect.

For shallow waters, these are perfectly understandable, as many units are quite tall, and often, the water just isn't that deep - but - when we talk of submarines, the issue is one of their standard depth, which is specified in each submarines blueprint, and in most cases that depth is only 2 - which is insufficient to protect them from these surface-based AOE effects.

The correction, is a combination of things - first, make the submarine depth a bit greater, and second - introduce a reduction to AOE range when normal projectiles impact water.

Safety from surface guns is the entire reason for submarines. That's why torpedoes were developed. The idea that you can sink submarines, under the water, with any kind of surface gun is bizarre, and makes the entire class pointless. If you support that kind of thinking, simply removed the subs from the game - and just have 'water' units - and go the final yard towards simplicity.

Actually, map size has almost no impact on performance except when it comes to AI pathfinding, and that's mostly due to the number of pathing points a larger map will have, in general. Map size does consume more memory, up front, which can be a limiting factor for very large games due to the maximum memory available, but performance is pretty much all about TOTAL unit count - more than any other factor.