PC Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

khzmusik said:
I would 100% love to see the Laura Croft clothing on the male as well.

But my point stands.
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You mean the point I commented "Good post" on? Notice I was only saying your EDIT2 asks a senseless question because there is a very obvious answer.

khzmusik said:
TFP put more time and effort into making a player character look like the player character from a different game who they knew was controversial because it is considered sexist. (And if they didn't know this then they didn't know enough about the character to do an "homage" to it.)

They can do that. In fact I'm perfectly fine with them doing that, I like boobies. But what they can't do is put this "homage" in the game and then deny any controversy.
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Now this is another point where you now might be shooting for the wrong target. Who from TFP did deny any controversy? Or commented at all (yet)?

khzmusik said:
This is a completely ridiculous reply. Every single sentence in it is factually incorrect.

  • The original Tomb Raider character intentionally was "reduced" in the 2012+ video games (if you're talking about breast size, but also in terms of showing skin - Lara Croft no longer wears shorts or shows her midriff). Ironically the 2012+ version of Lara Croft looks more like the male version of the 7D2D character.
  • The movies followed suit. Alicia Vikander looks nothing like Angelina Jolie and the "sex appeal" was intentionally toned down. And it was controversial. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/bizarre-tomb-raider-review-slammed-a-lack-of-curves-and-not-an-ounce-of-sex-appeal/G5IY3CTGXVP5M3QA7SLLHOIHXI/
  • As I posted in a link, the gaming community has been nearly half women for a very long time. But even accepting your "skyrocketing increase" premise, the increase of women in gaming came at the same time as the "reduction" of Lara Croft. It didn't happen "somehow someway" - according to your own arguments, it happened because video game companies thought twice about producing sexist characters like her.
  • It is not a "small but loud minority" who believe her character is sexist. Her designers and marketing material described her as a "cyber sex symbol" back when she was released in the 90's. Literally everyone has acknowledged that she was intentionally designed to appeal to the "male gaze" (even her defenders). I've yet to see a single person say otherwise. Plus if you were right, then her character would never have been changed to be less cartoonish - video game companies (especially AAA game companies) don't do that unless there are good financial reasons for doing so, and a "small but loud minority" does not translate to a good financial reason.
Once again - TFP have every right to put a 1990's Lara Croft looking character in the game. I'm a dude and my gaze is male, so I don't have a problem with it. But they cannot do that and also deny the controversy that does now, and has always, surrounded that character.

They should just acknowledge that they don't care about being sexist. It would be a much more respectable and honest response than what you posted.

(EDIT: This whole topic should probably be moved to the "overflow" thread.)
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meganoth said:
Now this is another point where you now might be shooting for the wrong target. Who from TFP did deny any controversy? Or commented at all (yet)?
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Right here:

Roland said:
Like I said, Laura Croft has been in public view for about 20 years now. Both male and female gamers are familiar with her and nobody I've heard of is creeped out by her or feels she's a shot across the bow of female identity and self-worth. We would any discussion leading to the dev stream end in them thinking this model which is completely on par with Laura Croft would alienate anyone? I really don't think it does other than a very few that in my opinion could not be planned for.

[...]

Just because I think your expectations are off and your sense that a large portion of females have been creeped out by Laura Croft all these years is wrong doesn't mean I don't think you shouldn't post your opinions. I admit that there is a huge sex-factor discrepancy between the male desert costume and the female desert costume and that a woman would be a fool to wear something like that costume in the desert among virus-spreading zombies. Laura Crofts outfit is equally ridiculous for what she does. But I don't think that it alienates most women and girls.
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Do you think Roland is not a representative of TFP on these forums?

And those statements absolutely are denying that there was any significant controversy around the character, especially among women or girls. All it takes is a passing familiarity with Lara Croft to know that he's wrong, and that's what I wanted to point out.

But I won't say any more about this. I'm not a woman or girl, I'm not a feminist, and I don't really care about whether they have a character in the game that is obviously designed to be ogled by men like me.

I am upset mainly because it's a legitimate criticism, and if TFP respond to it by burying their heads in the sand, or gaslighting people into believing it isn't legitimate, then it's going to eventually become a game that I can't recommend to anyone I know. It's my favorite game - and since I'm also a modder, it's also a huge part of my creative outlet - and I don't want that to happen.

 
meganoth said:
Not anymore. You might have missed that Crator Creator now has that job and is the super moderator
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I absolutely did miss that. I knew Crator Creator was a mod but thought Roland was still the lead moderator on these forums.

Obviously I should have directed my criticisms to Roland and not TFP.

 
Roland said:
I thought you did...repeatedly and even after my mea culpa. Just let me know how many times you're going to bring it up in the future so I can prepare myself now... ;)
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I do want to make something clear. What I was trying to criticize was your arguments. I was not trying to criticize you, personally. I do not think you're intentionally defending sexism.

Also - I was mainly replying because, for most of my time on these forums, you have functioned as the public face of TFP. If you are dismissive of valid criticism, it seems like it is TFP themselves who are being dismissive.

But if you are now just some dude, who neither represents TFP nor holds any sway with them, then arguing with you in public is not productive. (It probably wasn't productive anyway, but this puts the nail in the coffin).

 
Oh dear, the woman looks like Raquel Welch and people have "Woke"ed all over it.  I'm sure she would (if she could) disagree with the "Woked" as she had is the past. 

Looking at it tactically, the few second pause a woman could get in the wastelands looking stunning, could give her a life and death advantage.  

On that line, I'm hoping one of the Duke's main enforcers is a woman that looks like that.  The player would never see it until it was too late! (Maybe its TRADER JEN!!!)

Of course, I'm sure we will eventually see the whole spectrum of players and NPC's skins that don't look "stunning" just like we've seen in some of the male traders.  I recommend the update cost be around $0.99. 

 
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Aldranon said:
Oh dear, the woman looks like Raquel Welch and people have "Woke"ed all over it.  I'm sure she would (if she could) disagree with the "Woked" as she had is the past. 

Looking at it tactically, the few second pause a woman could get in the wastelands looking stunning, could give her a life and death advantage.  
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*cough cough Incel cough cough* 

 
Aldranon said:
Being Incel will soon be an ability trait for the player.  You heard it here first.
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As if one needs an other reason to shoot at anything that moves.  Seriously? I fail to see the humor. Then again you might just be serious. Good thing there's the internet between us...

 
Roland said:
Maybe the fact that she is covered from head to toe showing almost no skin made her so bland in the minds of the viewers that nobody remembers her. 
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Cripes, now you're making me feel bad.

I'd throw her a poke!

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

 
Obsessive Compulsive said:
Thanks for the details. That definitely makes more sense.

The 0.01 is the unity update tick rate? Unless I am mistaken. The tick rate of the update phase coming out of the engine is 0.01.

Oh you update physics at a different pace. Interesting. Maybe this changed for a21 or a later version? That is great to hear. Fixed update and update phase should definitely be utilized just as you mentioned. I must have misread the code. Currently I am updating it all at one time as that seemed to be how entities were handled. I do not run updates on entities every frame though, I do however run the gmUpdate method every frame and a faster rate.

I will have to take another look. It looked like the positions, physics, animations and stats were updating every tick for entities and triggered from the 0.01 unity update phase tick. This update tick triggers the gmUpdate method. Something else may have paced that down to 0.05 as you said. It was a little confusing how it was approached. Some sort of split list approach with entity in particular threw me off.

I took over gmUpdate using harmony and isolated the entity update section that triggers from it. I do not run the entity slice and split entity update the way you had it since I was able to utilize that 0.01 unity tick rate more efficiently and it looked like it was more or less to catch up on missed entities due to running too long during the update process. Since I am aiming to keep the tick runtime under 0.01, I can run multiple updates of the entire gmUpdate method within the same time frame of 0.05 that you are currently using. When I allowed the entity to update on every single tick at the 0.01 rate, things were moving around at super sonic speeds. The animations surprisingly keep up until it runs out of ai pathing, then gets stuck running in place. This might be one reason things are getting stuck in game at rare times. High lag and the server failing to keep the path up to date, might get them stuck in place as their animations out pace it. Something out paces the data available for sure, so they run in place at that point.

By using a combination of multi thread during certain phases for the player update, I can keep their runtime under 0.01 even with larger player counts.

As you stated, you are targeting a 0.05-0.06 time frame window. Since I am aiming for 0.01 as a max runtime per tick, I can split the work across that 0.05 time frame and update specific entities or do specific tasks within each tick, so long as I aim to keep them below that 0.01 runtime which, at least in testing seems to match the update tick from unity that triggers the gmUpdate.

In testing, I found I was able to run ten ticks at 0.01 and keep the animation flow to match your current game state, ai was more in tune to player movements and pathing around them, network is updated more frequent so you get less bottlenecking with packet dumps. You have multiple ticks to work with so you can focus on chunk sync to unity which is part of that gmUpdate method and gets a bit heavy with high player counts, but this keeps chunks loading really smooth around players.

When I say I run a tick, that means running the gmUpdate method fully, however I am isolating the entity update section of gmUpdate. I run ten ticks at 0.01, total equaling 0.1 time frame approx. Only players update on tick 1 and 6. They update completely, entire list both times. That utilizes multi threading as I phased certain sections like the physics which is mostly in the EntityAlive.OnUpdateLive sections of EntityAlive types. I do this with players to keep a better consistency of the movement that other players see. PvP is dramatically improved but so are the general hitbox responses due to keeping closer in sync. I hope the netcode improvements from a21 will really boost that for us. Exciting!

The physics for non alive types are mostly in the Entity.OnUpdate. I update non players single threaded but I divide the work across four ticks so tick 2 3 4 5 are for non players. If there were 100 entity to update, 25 are updated in each tick. Spreading the ai burden. This is why I am thrilled about your updates with AI since the combination with what I am trying out, equals a lot of zombies. I don't see why 400 zombies would not be possible with 100 updated across the four ticks. That should fit inside the runtimes. Tick 7 8 9 10 are for the chunk syncs to unity.

When I made it run 12 ticks, I was able to see a momentary stutter in the animation flow of the characters vs the network updates. This was very similar to when high lag and large entity counts will stutter the updates of entity normally. You also start to see a lag in the ai response while moving around the zombies. 10 ticks seems to be the limit which is 0.1 overall so long as I keep my runtimes below 0.01 for each tick. Currently the game runtime is often going well above 0.1 when large player counts or high entity numbers exist, which not only misses your 0.05 runtime rate but starts to bottleneck the netcode with multiple events getting updating at one time on the player side. It starts to look like warping.

One other trick I attempted was sector work. Splitting the map to five sectors. Update each sector with a different core handling all the entity of that sector single threaded but simultaneous to each other running their own sectors. Then run the last sector on the main which would be the middle grounds between the sectors. This would avoid physics collisions and overlaps while spreading the work. Only issue there is it does not address bottlenecking within a single sector. It would penalize all of them and so the advantages would be reduced, but typically one core was trying to update all of them, so it has to benefit in some manner.

There are two sections if isolated to avoid overlaps, they can be multi threaded. By that I mean running just the Entity.OnUpdate as its own phase and the OnUpdateLive sections as its own phase. It is tricky due to the overrides and how it is coded into the rest of the entity update process, but it can be done. It breaks the OOP pattern though so I know what you mean. You are not going to change the code now and I wouldn't dare suggest you need to. In general, this is not something I would expect you guys to ever do from the whims of some random forum post guy haha. This is your baby, I am just letting you know what I have found in testing so far.

If you multi thread these as phases you just need to be cautious of anything spawning, despawning, unloading chunks which in turn unload the entity. Of course double check for race conditions from static lists or anything you might modify while another thread is using the data. You do not want to be running your physics/collision checks and have something change position or despawn. It will crash the engine as I have experienced a lot of. To avoid this while I am updating multi threaded, I make sure the UnloadEntities method from the World class is run inside of the main thread task queue from your thread manager class. I am also running the main thread tasks twice inside of the gmUpdate method that I took over. Once in the original spot you have it placed but another right after the entity update section so that anything I toss at the main thread queue will stay inside the frame time.

You guys have a ton of awesome tools and systems that work really well together. A+. Would love to see the job system in action. I am still learning how it functions.

Sorry for the long post. I thought it would be best to give better explanations this time
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The newest version of the optimizer is running fantastic! I recommend holding off untill at least a21 before you release it to the public. With your optimizer and what the pimps have tweaked im hoping sometime a21 to have a 100 man server on a 10-12k map. Honestly, i never thought it would be possible that anyone would ever be able to figure out how to optimize multicore for this game but you sure have done it. The great thing is that your mod doesn't effect EAC so serverimage.pngs can still leave that on. I also think once the public gets their hands on it they are going feel the same way.. GREAT JOB!! CHEERS

 
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Just curious, in A21, if you ramp a 100% healthy motorcycle off of skyscraper_01, what state is the motorcycle and rider after they land?

In A20, the bike loses ~3% and the rider loses ~14 health.

Launch:

Launch.jpg

In Flight:

InFlight.jpg

Landing:

Final.jpg

 
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