PC Curious things.

[Fenris]

Yup, too many trees cause lag for me also. On this play through I made a "tree farm" with a 100 trees (on single player). It seemed to me that while they were still in the sapling stage there was no lag. As full trees I noticed a decent amount of lag, the game was still playable but it was noticeable. Maybe someone with a better PC wouldnt have even noticed.  i7 4.00 GHZ, 16 ram, GTX 1070 here.

Farm plots dont cause any noticeable lag for me in any growth stage, even with the 336 plots I have now.

 

[theFlu]

I figured it was a workaround for the topsoil-texturing system, can't have tilled ground when the ground texture was forced from the map.

For trees, I think it's just the animations.. even when fully grown, tree farms give me massive frame drops.

 

[Smicer]

Is the respawn still like this? Does it respawn faster if you leave some trash in the lootbox? Is it adjustable?

The admin of my server said to please never leave any loot behind, rather throw it to the ground, because stuff wouldnt respawn otherwise......

And also... does it mean that you need to go near the lootbox to restart the counter or really open the lootbox (why would you open an empty lootbox?)

 

[Danidas]

Is the respawn still like this? Does it respawn faster if you leave some trash in the lootbox? Is it adjustable?

The admin of my server said to please never leave any loot behind, rather throw it to the ground, because stuff wouldnt respawn otherwise......

And also... does it mean that you need to go near the lootbox to restart the counter or really open the lootbox (why would you open an empty lootbox?)

If no loot is left in the container then getting with in 15 blocks of it is bad and should be avoided as the loot will never respawn. Since the respawn timer is reset each time that you do so and forces you to have to wait longer for the loot. Now if you leave something in the container that will break the proximity check and allow loot to repawn after the servers set loot respawn time has passed once you remove the item from the container. Since the proximity check only cares about empty containers and the loot respawn only cares about time since container was in Unknown Contents state for empty containers.

In other words leave something behind, figure out the loot respawn time, come back after, remove the item, look away from the container, look back at it, and enjoy the newly respawned loot.  Note if you remove the item before the loot respawn timer is up then it may reset it and create the illusion that this doesn't work.

Also a lot of players/server admins consider this to be cheating and actively try to keep people from doing or knowing about it.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

For trees, I think it's just the animations.. even when fully grown, tree farms give me massive frame drops.

Jep. Never had server issues with trees (but also not playing on public servers with lots of players), but rendering on the client suffers from huge tree farms. 

You could also easily notice that because fps only drop if the tree farm is visible. And the fpsdrops raise and fall depending how much trees are onscreen. Best noticable if they are fully grown.

It also depends of the type of trees, some are worse, others affect performance less.

 

[Smicer]

Thanks for the input.

I will consider this for bookshelves.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

If no loot is left in the container then getting with in 15 blocks of it is bad and should be avoided as the loot will never respawn. Since the respawn timer is reset each time that you do so and forces you to have to wait longer for the loot. Now if you leave something in the container that will break the proximity check and allow loot to repawn

But if there is an item in the chest, on respawn this item will be removed for the new spawn? That means if i use a POI as a second base and leave "emergency stuff" in a (poi-)container there and don't come back within <loot respawn time> my stuff will vanish?

Never tested but in earlier games we intentionally emptied the containers, because we thought they won't respawn if not empty.

And they are doing proximity checks for every! single! container, just to reset a respawn timer? Wow, now i know how to cause performance issues. *lol*

 

[katarynna]

If you take over a poi and leave emergency stuff in a poi container, it will be completely safe (unless you are on a multiplayer server and another player takes it).

If you wait til the respawn time is up, remove all your loot from the poi container, then look at the container again, it will be back to "untouched" lootable state, and you can get loot from it again. If you never remove all your loot from the poi container, it will never reset and never be lootable again, until it is emptied.

If there is a building close to your base that you will be passing close by often, put a single plant fiber or piece of wood or the like in any container you definitely want to loot again, like gun safes and book shelves. After the respawn timer has passed, remove your left-behind item, wait a sec, then the container should be filled with loot again.

 

[Solomon]

Trees generate lag

Really?

 

[Crater Creator]

Each player placed tree has a counter to determine when it will grow to the next stage. Which for a single tree is very minor but as you add more and more it gets exponentially worse for the server cpu that on top of that is keeping all the data synced between all the players. Now on top of keeping it synced and processing the growth timers it also has to handle the map data for it all as well. When combined with how inefficient everything else runs on a server for this game it can put a noticeable load on the server. Especially when you consider that most rentable servers are very weak in the cpu/memory department.

That’s a plausible enough hypothesis, except if the timers really were the issue, then I’d expect reports of massive lag whenever people erect large concrete bases, for which each block takes time to dry.

 

[Maharin]

That’s a plausible enough hypothesis, except if the timers really were the issue, then I’d expect reports of massive lag whenever people erect large concrete bases, for which each block takes time to dry.

I sure hope they aren't using timers for that kind of stuff.  Horribly inefficient. 

 

[meganoth]

There are items in the game (for example the coffee machine) that have so many polygons that TFP does not want you to be able to craft them for performance reason. They fear that trolls or even unsuspecting players could just fill a small place on the server with such items and overload all clients.

Now trees are probably not as bad as coffee machines because they have a minimum distance for placement (the reason for this should be apparent now), whereas the coffee machine density is effectively 1 per block (except for the z axis because of SI).

Timers can be very efficiently handled by adding them to a list sorted by time. Then every tick you just need to look at the first bucket for timers that run out.

So my guess is trees lag because of polygon count on the clients and not because of timers on the server.

 

[Solomon]

There are items in the game (for example the coffee machine) that have so many polygons that TFP does not want you to be able to craft them for performance reason. They fear that trolls or even unsuspecting players could just fill a small place on the server with such items and overload all clients.

Just a question but how did that even happen?

I dont want to sound negative but the whole game is kind of ugly even for 2015 standards, so i dont understand how can something what looks like early 2010 graphics have that high poly count that it runs an active chance of lagging up a game especially considering that it doesnt even have any moving parts like a turret for example.

 

[meganoth]

Just a question but how did that even happen?

I dont want to sound negative but the whole game is kind of ugly even for 2015 standards, so i dont understand how can something what looks like early 2010 graphics have that high poly count that it runs an active chance of lagging up a game especially considering that it doesnt even have any moving parts like a turret for example.

This is mostly guess-work and conclusions from having heard a lot about the topic:

* In a normal static world game you have high- and low-poly count things as well, but there the designers simply can put only one of those items (like the coffee machine) into a room and carefully craft each szene to have a uniform poly count even if some items have more or less. In a dynamically changeable world like TFP this is done as well by the designers, but in game the player can change this dramatically. Someone can make a room full of coffee machines and it will tank FPS.

* TFP uses voxels and then transforms the voxel world into the normal triangle-based graphics. The transformation costs a lot of power as every other voxel game that ever was built proves. A lot of well-known and well-understood optimizations that you can use with a static prerendered world based on painted walls instead of blocks won't work. For example in a tradtional world you can make a wall out of one big texture or one small texture that endlessly repeats itself. A voxel world is broken up into blocks, so you need to render a texture for each and every block, which costs CPU and GPU time.

* Relative power of CPUs and GPUs, their data paths, their capabilities are all optimized for traditional games. This is a voxel game and it has different needs. It might make heavy use of routines that are seldom used in traditional games and have not been optimized. While it might not be able to efficiently use the routines that are heavily used by the majority of 3D games. Naturally the focus of graphics driver programmers and graphic engine programmers go mostly to those routines.

* Show me other games by small studios doing a game and I show you mostly graphics that is behind the times as well. I haven't seen Ark lately, but is that game better? Is "The Forest" a graphics highlight? Or are you simply comparing this game with cyberpunk 2070? Well, a graphics department with 100 programmers and 200 artists will do better than one with 2 programmers and 4 artists (the numbers are just guesses)

 

[Solomon]

* In a normal static world game you have high- and low-poly count things as well, but there the designers simply can put only one of those items (like the coffee machine) into a room and carefully craft each scene to have a uniform poly count even if some items have more or less. In a dynamically changeable world like TFP this is done as well by the designers, but in game the player can change this dramatically. Someone can make a room full of coffee machines and it will tank FPS.

I understand that but what is the reason for those to have high poly count at all?

Looking at how a coffee pot looks like ingame its nothing too fancy to justify having high poly count compared to for example a generator what player can actually make and may place more than 1.

* Show me other games by small studios doing a game and I show you mostly graphics that is behind the times as well. I haven't seen Ark lately, but is that game better? Is "The Forest" a graphics highlight? Or are you simply comparing this game with cyberpunk 2070? Well, a graphics department with 100 programmers and 200 artists will do better than one with 2 programmers and 4 artists (the numbers are just guesses)

Warframe looks pretty good thought they are no longer a small studio because they grow out from that stage around 2016-17 (im not sure the exact date). Deep rock galactic left early access this year, it looks pretty good.

My point is that i cant shake it off why  a game where one of the biome floor looks like some poster laid down on the ground have trees lagging the players and other questionable elements. Im okay with the voxel system using up lots of power and how big holes can cause problems but im not okay with such sillyness.

 

[JCrook1028]

Looking at how a coffee pot looks like ingame its nothing too fancy to justify having high poly count compared to for example a generator what player can actually make and may place more than 1.

^^ This is exactly my thought on the "high poly count" coffee pot. If that look is the result of something than can break the game if overused then just don't high poly it. it still looks like just another basic clutter loot item.

 

[Solomon]

^^ This is exactly my thought on the "high poly count" coffee pot. If that look is the result of something than can break the game if overused then just don't high poly it. it still looks like just another basic clutter loot item.

It reminds me of that infamous skyrim mod what boosts fps by simply removing freacking thousands of meaningless clutter/decoration items. Seriously if something whats basically nothing but a container causes problems in the game it should be removed/remade. Seriously who is going to notice if TFP decreases the poly-count for it?

(hint this mod on the pics only removed rocks)

 

[meganoth]

I understand that but what is the reason for those to have high poly count at all?

Looking at how a coffee pot looks like ingame its nothing too fancy to justify having high poly count compared to for example a generator what player can actually make and may place more than 1.

I brought up coffee machines as an example. It might not even have a high poly count, I'm just guessing it could be one of those. A generator may or may not have a high poly count as well (it might also be just a texture on a rectangular thingy with a very low poly count). Even if it has, mass producing is mildly expensive and it could be a compromise because it just needs to be craftable. If you really want a good example of a high poly count item, ask madmole.

Trees need at minimum of polygons so they don't look blocky, because of their size and the shape that should look naturally grown. Probably they don't have the highest count by far, but even with a medium poly count their impact can be high because they can fill your whole viewpoint far into the distance.

Warframe looks pretty good thought they are no longer a small studio because they grow out from that stage around 2016-17 (im not sure the exact date). Deep rock galactic left early access this year, it looks pretty good.

My point is that i cant shake it off why  a game where one of the biome floor looks like some poster laid down on the ground have trees lagging the players and other questionable elements. Im okay with the voxel system using up lots of power and how big holes can cause problems but im not okay with such sillyness.

DRC uses a common trick, comic style looks much better than realistic style for the same poly count. Apart from that the dev seems comparable to TFP. Now I just looked at a random picture from DRC:

Notice the blocky nature of everything. Notice how the round tube has distinct edges and the vegetation is nothing more than a few polygons.

So you really want to tell me this looks much better than 7D2D ? Maybe you just didn't look closer because of all the action.

 

[Solomon]

DRC uses a common trick, comic style looks much better than realistic style for the same poly count. Apart from that the dev seems comparable to TFP. Now I just looked at a random picture from DRC:

Notice the blocky nature of everything. Notice how the round tube has distinct edges and the vegetation is nothing more than a few polygons.

So you really want to tell me this looks much better than 7D2D ? Maybe you just didn't look closer because of all the action.

Thats true but the whole game looks like that, everything has hard edges and few polygons.

7D2D on the other side as i said still has an entire biome floor looking like some stretched out flat image, sinks what does not seem to have real depth and some of the most horrid water i ever seen.

No back again, i didnt want to diss how the game looks because im okay with it but wanted to point out that items shouldnt ever be in a game if they are capatable of breaking it just be existing.

 

[meganoth]

Thats true but the whole game looks like that, everything has hard edges and few polygons.

7D2D on the other side as i said still has an entire biome floor looking like some stretched out flat image, sinks what does not seem to have real depth and some of the most horrid water i ever seen.

Work in progress.

No back again, i didnt want to diss how the game looks because im okay with it but wanted to point out that items shouldnt ever be in a game if they are capatable of breaking it just be existing.

Then they would need to remove options that increase zombie numbers and probably electricity completely. Two elements in the game that easily tank your FPS if you have a potato and use specific options. Just like someone playing Call of Duty has when he plays it on a potato in 4k with ultra settings.

While I think they want to keep all problematic stuff out of the hands of players you have to be aware that they may not be able to do it completely without seriously limiting the game. I don't need a fail-proof game if it means everyone has to be prevented from doing interesting stuff.

At the moment a feature to collect stuff in the world to put it into your home base was not implemented because of this. You want more of those limitations?