Best Of

Ludullu wrote: »

I do feel like it might be more of a laptop issue though. Cause considering that my almost-10-y.o. pc can handle Ashes, streaming and recording - I'd say it's somewhat optimized (for an alpha of course). Though maybe I'm just super lucky with my hardware, cause I've had previous experiences where people complained about huge lag in certain games, while I had barely any.

Among my group the only issues with Ashes are for my laptop, yes. Everyone else is fine, even on their weaker Desktops. Is it really data? Probably not, but I'd definitely EXPECT for weaker Desktops to outperform even gaming laptops, at least 'Gaming Laptops bought around the time of Alpha-1.

But this is one of the reasons I am still a Console MMO gamer.

Ludullu wrote: »

Chicago wrote: »

The other thing I just watched the jundark jungle preview " the art team worked really hard on this " but I mean it looks dreadful.. it does not look like a jungle, it looks like you slapped a few trees in the desert, places some random mobs with next to no thought on placement positioning and just called it a day, even games made in 2003 did jungle biomes better

Again though, making games in 2003 was easier (relatively speaking) and even then optimization was horrible in the mmos of those days. Afaik WoW could barely handle a gathering of over 40 people, while L2 could handle it server-side, but client side you'd be barely reaching 5fps

The "work" the team did in Ashes is "making it testable". It's in the game and players can interact with it - job well done.

What I'm trying to make both of you see is that you're giving counter arguments to your own complaints. You give examples of previous showcases (i.e. vertical slices of what the devs are capable of), but then you say that Intrepid aren't capable of that

I doubt that anyone at Intrepid wants the game to look like shit. But they still have to release something for people to test, so we've got what we've got. But we've also seen what they CAN do, so I find it kind of illogical to say that the current state of the game will never become better, when we literally know that it can.

except i didnt say that those showcases were what i wanted , i said they were a lot better than what we had now , they somewhat fixed some of the problems we got rn but overall still keep a lot of them and if that is what we had with bad optimization i would of believed we would only get better yet we got like 10 time worse than that and the game is literally frying people PCs and laptops, at least let my PC explode looking at something nice that i could see becoming great but nah

Ludullu wrote: »

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

god , looking at this just makes me extremely sad

But look at those beautiful choppable treeees! All ten of them

Ludullu wrote: »

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

god , looking at this just makes me extremely sad

But look at those beautiful choppable treeees! All ten of them

what trees , those are weed , aint no trees those are small tree branches

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

god , looking at this just makes me extremely sad

But look at those beautiful choppable treeees! All ten of them

Ludullu wrote: »

@Azherae now that I compare the two again, I'm fairly sure it is exactly the same entrance.

16:14
https://youtu.be/YyKHuX8GE8o?t=974
vs 3:15
https://youtu.be/Lzlhdy3Hr2s?t=195

Now, mind you, I'm running at 1080 resolution and on minimal settings, and I was also there at night. But the core visual difference is still present.

god , looking at this just makes me extremely sad

Maybe. I haven´t had problems with STALKER 2 or Baldur´s gate 3.

Chicago wrote: »

Basically a year into alpha 2 there should be at least some things that are not place holder, given even if in an unpolished state

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

life is a placeholder ..at this point the game will launch as a placeholder , if we are so far in yet everything is a place holder , no system is what it supposed to be instead of being there without being a placeholder and just have it be improved upon then nothing will ever be completed

We're around 3-4 years into the proper development of this client. Considering how massive the game is, I'm surprised we have anything at all.

And if absolute majority of things doesn't change before release - Intrepid will have failed to a fairly great extent, because, yes, a lot of stuff right now is in a bad place. So releasing bad things would be bad.

I haven't played Alpha two for about 3 months or something now, so I'm not fully up to date on what everything currently looks like. But when I played, I did find the riverlands to be kinda boring to look at. And that biome type is usually my jam, green plains, rolling green hills etc.

Not an expert or even an amateur at biome design. But if I was in charge of "fixing" it, the first thing I'd want a sample of is the riverlands shaded to a somewhat darker, more vivid green. It could only go so dark and vivid before it starts encroaching on the tropics/joondark color palette though.

But yeah that's my input. I found it kinda boring. It's not an issue I overly care about though. It's very pretty as is...just somehow boring to me at the same time.

Azherae wrote: »

Isn't that clip a preview of Highwayman Hills, a spot that is live in the Alpha right now?

I don't know if that spot looks different or has been removed since I never travel to that part of the map (so technically, I'm asking if that spot in Highwayman Hills has been changed, for example if the trees are smaller).

It has been, massively. Once my vod is done loading I'll post my entrance to the spot. Mobs are different, barely any trees around.

Chicago wrote: »

I think you are right that they may be moving to fast but let's not forget, there are different teams doing different parts of the project, whoever is designing quests and the leveling experience is almost guaranteed to not be designing the art style and biomes so these don't really go hand in hand and can very well be done in tandem

My response to this relates to both of these

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

look at this , while this could still suffer from the same look at the very least it had a nice vibe going and most importantly , the trees (actually big), the characters the atmosphere it all looked to be on scale , it looked right unlike how it is now , if we had that then i would of believed that the biomes would of became a lot better since the base of them is already pretty decent

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxq0JM51UzTV7VdU1zvCP9jrLDHzeAFNpb?si=TbRYlVq6YDUo3MNF

Chicago wrote: »

100% agree, many of the showcases look like a completely different game, a good example is this https://youtu.be/V9F_AJl9ozY?si=_PhvL582R4P-E-Zm

Skip to 49:30 it actually looks to scale and somewhat of fantasy world, but in reality it's nothing like this

And if you ever bring this up on the forums it's just " it's an alpha bro " comments

If you look at the minimap in both of those videos, you'll see that the areas are not properly laid out there. In the Cleric video anything outside their little entrance to HH is barren as hell and in the Artisan showcase the corrupted area is pretty much blank.

To me, this says that what we're shown there is just a possible vision of things. A vision that works on a super limited playspace, with barely any people in it and, most likely, no other features implemented. This allows them to boost all the visual effects, the fog, the leaves in the wind - all of that shit.

The current A2 client must survive literal thousands of players, all while being optimized enough to run on some encient hardware (i.e. my gtx1080 and i7-6700K). And to achieve that kind of performance you gotta cut down on the prettiness and on the client load from models, etc.

Also, both of these showcases have uncuttable trees. Hell, I'd even assume that the Cleric showcase has its tree cutting turned off completely, though maybe I missed a white dot somewhere. And in the Artisanship you can go to 48:36 and see that the tree to the left of Steven doesn't give him a "cut" prompt (and it's not even that big of a tree tbh).

And all of this just screams to me that implementing the things both of you are asking for simply requires a later stage of production, where it would not crash the game over and over, cause even the current basic-ass visuals/models still crash servers and people's clients on the regular. And when it comes to trees - blame aaaalll the people that begged on their knees to have "all trees are cuttable" kind of design back in 2021.

I was in the HH today and ran through almost the exact spot from that Cleric showcase. There were just a few trees there, but they suuuuure were cuttable

And this then also relates to the economy and model interaction side of things. If forests are so dense that the ground is dark - you have to account for that amount of trees when you design your crafting material costs and you need to account for fallen tree interactions between each tree. And if you look at a few recent threads you'll see the exact kind of feedback that happens when the econ side of the game increases the requirements by almost x10.

And when the entire game's design is built on "scarcity of resources and pvp for them" - you don't really want to plop insane amounts of resources everywhere. So the current tree situation is most likely a compromise between "you can cut all trees" and "crafting costs are not as high as they probably should be".

Though even then, I remember that in P1 node surroundings had very dense forests of Ash trees. But that's probably because Ash is the most useless damn tree in the game, so of course we can have forests of them

In other words, no, 3d modelers can't just easily plop their cool-looking massive trees into the game willy-nilly. So the answer, still, ultimately distills down to "it's alpha".