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Particle Effects VS Server Load Balancing

I have a question regarding the discussion title.

For, discussion sake, let us say there are  5 levels of paticle effects with 1 being the easiest and smallest particle effect and easy for a graphics card to quickly render and 5 being the biggest paticle effects, awe inspring but the most difficult for the graphics card to render.

Equally 1 allows the largest goup of players to play in a small confined area without overwhelming the average user system and server configuration  and 5 for the same size of group to tax the high end user system but can be handled prior to the standard server crash prevention (time dilation for example) and load balancing kicks in if the user volume  exceed this # in the rendered region.

Has the game devs determined the aporoach to handle the peaky lage data volumes a guild of 300 vs 300 and subsequent ability of user systems to render without the average user system freezing up as a result (too many rank 5 effects all at once)?

This questtion is the question that
 is the hardest to solve, if at all, but the best balance decided by the devs  for the game server load balance vs what the average user system can adequately handle.

It would be nice to hear from the developers, the horror stories this caused in the past for you folks, as I hope no 4am panic calls from the server admins will happen (ugh!)

Comments

  • I cant speak for Intrepid, but as an Unreal Engine 4 developer there are inbuilt systems available to manage the graphics workload on a client machine. The most powerful of these systems is Automatic Level of Detail (LOD) generation, which allows the game to dynamically adapt the level of detail to cater for the distance objects are away from the camera.

    Auto LOD can also be used to reduce detail in high load situations, such as those you mention, with a large group of players in a small area. This gives the devs the ability to trade off graphics detail for performance in demanding situations with very little coding effort.

    In terms of server load balancing, I hear that Ashes will be hosted on Google Cloud Platform. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'd guess that the physics engine and other backend components would benefit from the load balancing and other advanced features available there.

    We have two years of alpha and beta testing and tuning ahead, so hopefully there won't need to be too many late night calls come release :)
  • It be nice to have a dedicated particle effect selector to change the visual intensity of and maybe even turn it off, in the graphics settings.

    Reasons:
    1. Lag issues.
    2. Visual obscurity in smaller spaces with a lot of people. 

    While they are nice and stunning there are times where you wish you could turn them off or lessen its visual presence.  Part of it sometimes being it is hard to see what is going on cause so many particle effects overlap each other.

    @lexmax Nice info on the Auto LOD system, maybe if it works very well we won't have to worry about manual selectors when it comes to Lag.  They would be great to have, non the less, for visual obscurity reasons which would effect each person differently.


  • lexmax, thank you for helping enlightening me on the LOD.  Sad to say back in college for Computer Science... no books or knowledge of such was available for reading, let alone game design, closest we got was design of the motorola processor
  • Mindseye said:
    I have a question regarding the discussion title.

    For, discussion sake, let us say there are  5 levels of paticle effects with 1 being the easiest and smallest particle effect and easy for a graphics card to quickly render and 5 being the biggest paticle effects, awe inspring but the most difficult for the graphics card to render.

    Equally 1 allows the largest goup of players to play in a small confined area without overwhelming the average user system and server configuration  and 5 for the same size of group to tax the high end user system but can be handled prior to the standard server crash prevention (time dilation for example) and load balancing kicks in if the user volume  exceed this # in the rendered region.

    Has the game devs determined the aporoach to handle the peaky lage data volumes a guild of 300 vs 300 and subsequent ability of user systems to render without the average user system freezing up as a result (too many rank 5 effects all at once)?

    This questtion is the question that
     is the hardest to solve, if at all, but the best balance decided by the devs  for the game server load balance vs what the average user system can adequately handle.

    It would be nice to hear from the developers, the horror stories this caused in the past for you folks, as I hope no 4am panic calls from the server admins will happen (ugh!)
    more to the point: can we have a toggle that turns off those particle effects that aren't necessary for game mechanics? something that could be keybound would be awesome: for those massive battles that happen when you least expect them.
    Anyone know if the client will minimize spell effects produced by other players? otherwise, just judging on the gameplay clips it looks like melée are going to have a hard time seeing if a mage is about. Just from a visual clutter perspective the gameplay does not seem ideal: and all those flashy effects will certainly be laggy.
  • Aiveleen said:
    Mindseye said:
    I have a question regarding the discussion title.

    For, discussion sake, let us say there are  5 levels of paticle effects with 1 being the easiest and smallest particle effect and easy for a graphics card to quickly render and 5 being the biggest paticle effects, awe inspring but the most difficult for the graphics card to render.

    Equally 1 allows the largest goup of players to play in a small confined area without overwhelming the average user system and server configuration  and 5 for the same size of group to tax the high end user system but can be handled prior to the standard server crash prevention (time dilation for example) and load balancing kicks in if the user volume  exceed this # in the rendered region.

    Has the game devs determined the aporoach to handle the peaky lage data volumes a guild of 300 vs 300 and subsequent ability of user systems to render without the average user system freezing up as a result (too many rank 5 effects all at once)?

    This questtion is the question that
     is the hardest to solve, if at all, but the best balance decided by the devs  for the game server load balance vs what the average user system can adequately handle.

    It would be nice to hear from the developers, the horror stories this caused in the past for you folks, as I hope no 4am panic calls from the server admins will happen (ugh!)
    more to the point: can we have a toggle that turns off those particle effects that aren't necessary for game mechanics? something that could be keybound would be awesome: for those massive battles that happen when you least expect them.
    Anyone know if the client will minimize spell effects produced by other players? otherwise, just judging on the gameplay clips it looks like melée are going to have a hard time seeing if a mage is about. Just from a visual clutter perspective the gameplay does not seem ideal: and all those flashy effects will certainly be laggy.
    Yup this is why I also suggest they add a selector to be able to remove particle effects for people with weaker systems or slower internet.  Would be a nice function when we have to sacrifice appearance for function during large scale events like siege.

     
  • I think most particle effects are client side, so they would not impact on the ping from the client to server.
    But I do remember that some games had to get physically stronger servers to cope with raids. That was down to the number of people and actions in one area though.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited January 2018
    Aren't particle effects usually calculated by the client and the user's GPU/CPU ? I'm pretty sure most systems nowadays work in a token-like system : the server sends the client a "token" (e.g. : "fireball sent by user X to Y location") and then the client converts this token into graphics ? So for the server, whether everyone uses 5th level of effects or 1st level does not induce any different behaviour ?

    This sure makes 300x300 raids pretty hard to handle by a non high-end computer, but it has the advantage to not overload no matter the user's configuration.

    At least that's how I've always thought it worked, otherwise you'd need a pretty huge internet bandwith to get all the effects and interactions information correctly without lagging.
    Edit : nowadays most games use neglectable bandwidth, for example on average an online game is about 20-50 kB/s, so that's what I'm basing my answer on.
  • As others already said, level of details is not a vs with server load balancing. As all graphics effects are calculated at the client side. So the server will have the same load for the lowest graphics settings as the highest.  

    In 300 vs 300 situations, the level of detail will have to be scaled down because else your pc won't be able to render it all. The server will also have a hard time but this mostly because it needs to check that what the clients are saying is 'realistic' to prevent hacking. But again level of detail doesn't have any effect on the server.
  • EQ2 has a particle effect slider, which is great, you can go from none to as much as you think your machine can handle.  So I'm hoping for sliders.
  • T-Elf said:
    EQ2 has a particle effect slider, which is great, you can go from none to as much as you think your machine can handle.  So I'm hoping for sliders.

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