Is this why CoV is so laggy compared to CoH?!

A little extra memory used doesn't cause a 50% FPS drop when turning the camera toward a certain area on a C2D proc at 2.7 with 2GB DDR2 and a g92 8800gts with XP on a rig that has nothing but OS, drivers and games.

This reminds me of a bug I experienced using Mission Teleport in Mercy. In one of the warehouse missions, I'd end up appearing in between the normal wall as seen from outside, and an inner building wall. I could run back and forth but not get out; fortunately the mission door was clickable.

Absolutely, but the problem isn't the way the buildings are put together. Emphasizing the building thing is like making a big deal out of a spec of dirt on the white tablecloth you just murdered your husband on. There's a problem with complex things you can't even see getting rendered anyway, or sometimes there's a serious problem with the algo that is supposed to decide what gets rendered and what doesn't and you end up with almost everything on the map getting rendered.

And Faultline is?

Laggy, very laggy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GrinningSpade And Faultline is? Laggy, very laggy.

...I really need to start playing Faultline arcs. I've rarely been to that zone.

And Razoras, yah, I agree with you. But I still do think in this case, having multiple instance of this design inefficiency does have an impact on performance; it's minor, but it's not negligible, in my opinion.

Does anyone know how I could get a developer response on this? I'm really curious as to why they've designed the map like this.

You're kidding, right? We have no prerogative that they respond to this question. And anyways, isn't it obvious? So much in the game from SG bases to instance maps is comprised of modular components and repurposed and reskinned assets. Heck, take a good look at how boulders and rocky outcroppings inside cave maps are placed. Compare this to how often even now with a larger staff that we actually get original art for any release, from costume pieces to power animations to tile sets.

Original art elements require many more hours to produce and require much more experienced/skilled/talented labor. This has always been the case and is not isolated to just digital media. All this translates into $$$, budgets and deadlines. Arranging and essentially "decorating" maps with pre-made, pre-approved elements from a set of items can be done much more quickly by a larger number of workers from interns to folks crossing boundaries from other departments. i.e. (and this is only a hypothetical pulled out of my hat) even though War Witch MOSTLY does copy and zone spawn stuff (IIRC), I could see her quickly getting up to speed on a proprietary map editing/decorating tool set and filling in in a pinch. But could she transition even half as quickly into a full fledged digital sculptor creating entirely original maps readily and efficiently while staying within the boundaries of already established art direction? Unlikely. (And that is no jab at her or any other developer. Just trying to underscore the reality that it takes time to become fully adept in the basic skills of a profession and even longer to gain the myriad experiences that makes one a highly flexible and efficient expert. She, like much of the dev team, have spent their years doing things OTHER THAN 3d modeling or directly related trades.)

I dunno about your work experiences, but every sort of production team workflow I've ever worked in has to cut corners somewhere to meet deadlines and budgets. In so many production settings, volume, time and consistency sit at odds with excellence. Compromises get made. It's pretty much a no brainer as to why these maps are the way they are. Without huge, massive, expensive production teams (which only HUGE developers seem to be able to afford--such as Blizzard or Rockstar--how 'bout that Red Dead Redemption title, hey?), the only way we'll see totally original artwork in large vast virtual worlds is with further advancements in procedural generation tools (either on the fly in game or more likely as proprietary development software) that saves time, limits the need for corrections (including removing redundant architecture) and then allows the limited number of artists on the production to focus on refinement, exceptions and hand touches.

It's not a huge load (or even a noticeable one) if the game's rendering is even something remotely approaching intelligent. I'd like to give the devs the benefit of the doubt on that, and say that they're using a reasonable hidden surfaces algorithm for their rendering process.

Unless there are extraneous vertices being hidden (which we wouldn't be able to determine without opening the building model up in a 3D editor), what you've shown here is actually design EFFICIENCY, not inefficiency. And even if there are extra verts there, the inefficiency produced is approximately 4 bytes of data per extra vertex, give or take depending on what sort of data structure is used for the verts. And even then, it's only inefficient if there are more hidden verts than there are visible corners along the seam between the two joined buildings.

Send pohsyb a PM.

Chimney Ftaghn!

Hahahah, awesome.

Pic of the FF chimney:

That is not hid which can full rendered be,
And with strange Issues even devs may see.

Awesome. Busted a gut.

This has two impacts on performance:

1) By re-using design elements, they only need to upload those elements to the graphics card once -- the second time an element shows up on a map, CoH just needs to tell the card "oh yes, and put another copy here". This reduces both GPU memory consumption and AGP/PCIe bus bandwidth usage, speeding up rendering (with an enormous speedup if the reduced usage means the entire scene fits in GPU RAM).

2) By using overlapping design elements, they slightly increase the time needed to render the scene. Fully-hidden polygons are removed very early in the rendering process, and contribute effectively no GPU load. Hidden parts of partially-visible polygons are removed later, but still before the really slow parts of rendering: antialiasing, texturing, and lighting.

Which impact is more significant depends on many things. I'd guess the effect is generally to speed things up, and the older or less powerful the card is, the more significant the increase.

I'm guessing 'Chimney Ftaghn!' has something to do with Cthulu?

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

What part of "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," do you not understand?

Begone from the geek-o-shpere

Wait, I see two arms and two wings in that shot. How come we only get to fight the 8 tentacles and the head? You tellin' me there's more to the critter under the water? Bad design!

...there are entire buildings buried under the ground in monkey island...

It depends; that image clearly shows a 'stock' box of building unioned with another 'stock' box of building. There are still some places in Founder's Falls (the tunnels near the Natural contact store) where you can see that the buildings actually extend down through the 'ground', to prevent gaps in the terrain (not always successfully; there used to be spots in FF where there were gaps that the NPC mobs could use to get under the geometry (and the pathing algorithm would cause them to run away and jump down one of them, then run to another to jump back up to come after you). But in that example, I expect that the window, the wall above and below it, and the top and bottom of the recess all extend polygons back into the 'hidden' area, making the clipping algorithm go into subdivision to render the scene, causing some additional rendering load.

CoV graphics lag comes from models with higher polygon counts than CoH, and overlapping surfaces where the near surface does not completely obscure the far surface (ex: grates on the floor in Grandville, or the webbing in the Tangle)[/QUOTE]
There are also supposed to be a significant number of the Arachnos buildings in Grandville that have buildings like the ones in the center of Cap inside them, as if the devs built the zone using 'stock' buildings, then went back and put the Arachnos buildings over them like shells, then neglected to remove the now-hidden buildings -- so the renderer has to process each polygon of the inner building, then do the subdivision loop to clip them against the Arachnos shell, before rendering the scene, which causes slowdowns, over and above the grate-masking load.

No, but holes in geometry and less than complete occlusion of them can.

Years ago, nVidia put out a Quake demo to "show off the power" of their new cards.

Turns out that the map used for this had massive un-occluded geometry holes in the map itself. So in certain areas, you'd wind of having your system trying to render the geometry of the entire map, textures and all.

Accordingly, framerates dropped into the toilet going through these areas.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Probably the remains of a civilization that rose and fell ages before humans existed.

Fixed, for the general tone of the thread

You are reading from false doctrines, sir. Everyone knows that the unbelievers will be eaten first!