If this is correct, perhaps some time should be spent on reducing the amount of scripts being run, and slowing down the overall framerate? I can run single-player games (and even some multiplayer games), at much higher settings with better framerate and better graphics. And yes, that includes most MMOs. On STO, I struggle to have a playable framerate at settings above Medium.
Reducing scripts means expanding exploits, generally.
That's part of what makes an MMO computationally costlier in certain ways.
Ideally as few processes as possible are hosted on the user's computer. Instead, events get determined by a server that Cryptic rents and fed back to players via scripts.
Now... An FPS can get by with handling more of the business of running the game client side. But an FPS doesn't ordinarily have to deal with issues like currency or item duping.
ANYTHING that gets done clientside is something I could figure out a way to exploit. And serverside validation scripts wouldn't stop me necessarily because then all I'd need to do is to trick those scripts into firing inappropriately.
For example:
Say an MMO has a server script that validates currency transactions. So it rejects increases sent by a modded client and resets the variable.
Okay, then maybe what I do if I'm Joe Hacker is actually send a corrupted data packet that LOWERS my total money. And maybe the server script says, "No. You can't change your total" and also says "You should have one more than that." And if the priority of those functions is wrong, attempting to hack my currency total lower actually increases it by using the failsafe against itself.
That's probably something most devs would think about. But the problem is that they can't just ban anyone whose client sends corrupted or garbled data and there is bound to be a place where a validation script would be highly exploitable. So it's better to have all aspects of gameplay happen serverside and make my client a big fancy representation of stuff that happens entirely on the server. So that all my client does is graphics... and a minimum amount of that lest you have an invasion of fifty foot monsters like you had when a few client hackers got loose in City of heroes and TRIBBLE their costume variables. So ideally, even costume only elements are something you want out of the client's control.
I'll add that I think the future of MMO gaming is going to be MMO via cloud. I think you could already handle a game light of twitch requirements that way.
Honestly, I think you could probably play STO entirely via cloud and do fairly well in everything but PvP. And if STO is designed for the cloud, they could just have it balance everyone's latency inside an instance (within a certain limit) to keep everyone fairly equal. Or build in a certain amount of fake latency into the game that goes away when real latency happens. (Of course, I'd imagine that could lead to speedhacking if you have a program which tricks their server about the amount of latency you're experiencing and then very rapidly adjusts the latency.)
I think cloud MMOs are the future of how you'll see these games on Mac and console and will resolve a lot of the systems spec issues, as you could get dramatically better graphics if all your system has to do is stream video of gameplay back to you and the 3D rendering happens on a server somewhere.
I realize there are certain requirements in place, to prevent exploiting. But then, prey tell... How do you explain the visuals of a game like EVE Online being FAR superior to STO, and the game itself running far smoother at high settings. Not gonna tell me that "UI scripts" does all the difference?
There are numerous other examples of modern MMOs that have equal or greater visual fidelity to STO, without being nearly as "hardware dependant". If I can run most other MMOs at High settings and have great visuals, and then struggle to get higher than Medium settings in STO, there's something wrong with STO, is there not?
How do you explain the visuals of a game like EVE Online being FAR superior to STO, and the game itself running far smoother at high settings. Not gonna tell me that "UI scripts" does all the difference?
1) EVE's graphics aren't superior to STO's - they just aren't. As for their graphics engine being optimized, ask anyone involved with the uproar or 'Captain's Quarters and the hit a client took on performance when they implemmented it. The outcry was so fierce CCP has shelved any further plans for "Walking in Stations" (Which IMO is a real shame.)
2) EVE doesn't a ctually run all that smoothly either, which is why they implememnted their "Time Dilation" feature - which basically lags ouit EVERYONE in combat to the response time of the slowest client connected and involved in the battle.
Could STO use optimizxatyion improvements? You bet. My point is, I would not hold up either EVE Online or CCP as a company that's "doing it right". Thehy update the game twice a year, and usually the upfdates are smaller than an STO Season update - yet it'll take them until the next kmajor update to get gtheir client stable again.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
You tell me, do those visuals look WORSE than STO? Not by a long shot... That being said, i'm no fan of EVE Online, but I do know that it's visuals look SPECTACULAR compared to the likes of STO. Anyone claiming EVE has worse graphics, is deluding themselves.
Let's take something simpler: Ship models in EVE vs STO. Most of the Cryptic designs (non-canon), look like utter rubbish (too blocky, no sleek ships, added details in places that aren't needed etc). And the canon ships, most of which still to this day look sub-par, and in dire need of fixing. Problem is, they got rid of their good ship modeller (CapnLogan), and nobody is touching up the older models anymore. There's no profit in fixing the old ships, so they add brand new ships at sub-standard quality, via lockboxes (aka cash grabs).
I'm not asking for ships in the 15-20k polygon per ship range (look at some of the modded ships from Bridge Commander), but surely the game is CAPABLE of rendering ships a bit more accurately compared to the shows/movies? Intrepid Class says Hello, by the way.
I realize there are certain requirements in place, to prevent exploiting. But then, prey tell... How do you explain the visuals of a game like EVE Online being FAR superior to STO, and the game itself running far smoother at high settings. Not gonna tell me that "UI scripts" does all the difference?
There are numerous other examples of modern MMOs that have equal or greater visual fidelity to STO, without being nearly as "hardware dependant". If I can run most other MMOs at High settings and have great visuals, and then struggle to get higher than Medium settings in STO, there's something wrong with STO, is there not?
I'd argue about them being "superior."
Their ships are lower polycount. The difference is that the ships are designed to be low polycount whereas Trek ships were designed to be physical models without polygon limitations.
Beyond that, a much bigger chunk of their budget went into art because their game is largely social rather than scripted. In that regard, it's not that the graphics engine is better. It's that the ART is better. There's less focus on variety of art and things other than art, freeing up the art that is there to be more of a masterpiece.
So... Quality over quantity and a bigger percentage of the budget spent on art with an graphics engine that is less robust but also less stylized.
For example, characters could look a lot more "real" and detailed in STO if they had not decided to make custom aliens as exotic deformations of the basic humanoid skeleton.
A huge factor is that EvE ground avatars are not designed for social environments and a single avatar eats up most of the system resources for a lot of people. Whereas STO is designed around the idea of having dozens of them darting around eachother.
And in order to add ground play, they're basically creating a separate game engine.
STO could have cheated and done quite a bit if, for example, they'd limited instances to ten humanoid avatars and only had combat with a more zoomed out view of your avatar with a lower poly count.
So imagine, for example, that ship interiors could host 10-15 unique characters at once and used a higher quality version of your player avatar.
The UI renders using the GPU. The UI is slow due to some internal scripts that affect UI logic, but has nothing to do with the rendering. When sections of the UI are hidden or closed, the scripts for that section do not execute. The UI for the inventory is particularly expensive due to (I believe) some scripts that run per inventory cell each frame.
Maybe you should optimise this then? Or implement a way to let STO to use more than 2 CPU cores?
STO is one of the few games that is heavily CPU-limited. This makes playing some PVP games or fleet actions with lots of NPCs / pets highly problematic even on good hardware (i7 920, ATI 7850) because the framerate can drop below 20.
This is incorrect. The UI renders using the GPU. The UI is slow due to some internal scripts that affect UI logic, but has nothing to do with the rendering. When sections of the UI are hidden or closed, the scripts for that section do not execute. The UI for the inventory is particularly expensive due to (I believe) some scripts that run per inventory cell each frame.
So, technically, the UI *is* CPU bound due to the scripts :P
I'm guessing by your statement that the scripts are constantly refreshing the all of UI elements. Any chance of adding a sleep timer to the UI scripts?
I prefer "disillusioned and shellshocked veteran of the forums who hasn't come back since before the Cryptic/PW account switch". =P
But I suppose as long as there are still people who blame the UI performance issues on the graphics system, there is still a need for this grizzled old veteran.
As long as certain UI windows/elements can drop the FPS by almost 50% (in extreme cases), there will always be complaints about it.
A UI shouldn't need to be that CPU/GPU hungry as it consists of mostly static elements that in most cases changes with human interaction so most of the scripts shouldn't need to be running all the time and certainly not every frame (every 30-60 frames minimum) that is just eating away resources for no reason as all.
in EVE your a ship shooting Red Redicules. Thats your gameplay. When I first started playing STO I was happy to actually GRAPHICALLY "See" the enemy as I blasted at it instead of just a reticule.
Why is the Distance seem so far off in EVE? You have to be within like, 4Km away from an enemy to see their ship. I hated that. Not to mention your only control is to "Orbit" and watch compared to direct control of your vessel like in STO.
I;d fit into that Mid level PC user. I wish I could get a premium PC, but can't afford it. My PC actually just died, Motherboard went out. So Im using a back up old POS PC. But I'll be happy just to get a PC that can play the game again like I was.
I think cloud MMOs are the future of how you'll see these games on Mac and console and will resolve a lot of the systems spec issues, as you could get dramatically better graphics if all your system has to do is stream video of gameplay back to you and the 3D rendering happens on a server somewhere.
I think you're either European, or you aren't aware of internet and broadband penetration in the world. MMOs want vast audiences, especially F2P. Cloud gaming cuts out a massive section of the current and near-future market.
STO is one of the few games that is heavily CPU-limited. This makes playing some PVP games or fleet actions with lots of NPCs / pets highly problematic even on good hardware (i7 920, ATI 7850) because the framerate can drop below 20.
That's odd. Which Fleet Actions are you talking about?
Gorn Minefield has a fairly vast horde of ships. I've never had my framerates drop even below 45 with a weaker CPU (Q9450) and video card (GTX 460 SE 1GB), while using two monitors (1920x1080 and 1280x1024).
I think you're either European, or you aren't aware of internet and broadband penetration in the world. MMOs want vast audiences, especially F2P. Cloud gaming cuts out a massive section of the current and near-future market.
Ik we have rly good high speed broadband connections in Europe, but what does that have to do with him perceiving cloud gaming is the way to go?
I dn't think cloud gaming is rly the future and should take over. especially since u dn't get 1080 AA filtered quality(at least what i tested from OnLive wasn't).
but streaming STO for example on a tablet/smartphone anywhere anytime would be awesome. It's a very nice tool to have u'r fav game available all the time, the device u'r using not being an issue.
but something like that is even further into the mist the DX11. Guys ... and Galls space combat rly like in space is it. Space engine mechanics that allow u to move any way should be a lot higher on their then DX. alas that's not gonna happen.
Ik we have rly good high speed broadband connections in Europe, but what does that have to do with him perceiving cloud gaming is the way to go?
Cloud gaming requires fast, solid connections. When you switch from client/server to server only, your connection becomes important - your market loses everyone with a weaker connection.
A larger percentage of people in Europe have high speed broadband connections. This means the European market for cloud gaming is sizable. From an European-only perspective, MMOs going cloud makes sense.
This isn't true for the rest of the world.
MMOs are all about population and subscriber base. MMOs are the least likely to become primarily cloud gaming, because you'd be cutting off a chunk of the market who may be willing to pay you $20 bucks for a shiny starship.
Contrast this with people who are hardcore FPS players. They probably have a great connection anyway - otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete online. If those games switched over, you wouldn't lose much of your market.
I think you're either European, or you aren't aware of internet and broadband penetration in the world. MMOs want vast audiences, especially F2P. Cloud gaming cuts out a massive section of the current and near-future market.
That's odd. Which Fleet Actions are you talking about?
Gorn Minefield has a fairly vast horde of ships. I've never had my framerates drop even below 45 with a weaker CPU (Q9450) and video card (GTX 460 SE 1GB), while using two monitors (1920x1080 and 1280x1024).
Well, I think it's the FUTURE.
Right now, it would have to account for and assume high latency and artificially lag anyone who has less latency than is expected.
Over time, speeds will allow for near instantaneous play over cloud. Give it ten years or fifteen.
Ik we have rly good high speed broadband connections in Europe, but what does that have to do with him perceiving cloud gaming is the way to go?
I dn't think cloud gaming is rly the future and should take over. especially since u dn't get 1080 AA filtered quality(at least what i tested from OnLive wasn't).
but streaming STO for example on a tablet/smartphone anywhere anytime would be awesome. It's a very nice tool to have u'r fav game available all the time, the device u'r using not being an issue.
but something like that is even further into the mist the DX11. Guys ... and Galls space combat rly like in space is it. Space engine mechanics that allow u to move any way should be a lot higher on their then DX. alas that's not gonna happen.
I have streamed and played STO on my iPad.
It works around the house just fine.
Now... Trying to use it on Starbucks Wifi across town is trickier but I think the issue there is partly my upstream data limitations from my PC over the internet and partly that free restaurant Wifi isn't that great.
Cloud gaming requires fast, solid connections. When you switch from client/server to server only, your connection becomes important - your market loses everyone with a weaker connection.
A larger percentage of people in Europe have high speed broadband connections. This means the European market for cloud gaming is sizable. From an European-only perspective, MMOs going cloud makes sense.
This isn't true for the rest of the world.
MMOs are all about population and subscriber base. MMOs are the least likely to become primarily cloud gaming, because you'd be cutting off a chunk of the market who may be willing to pay you $20 bucks for a shiny starship.
Contrast this with people who are hardcore FPS players. They probably have a great connection anyway - otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete online. If those games switched over, you wouldn't lose much of your market.
I will add, I think niche markets are worth pursuing in MMOs.
I've said before: I think WoW got big in large measure because of Mac support and lost some of its edge due to things like Bootcamp and Cedega working better.
Sure, Mac's are maybe 10% of the computer gaming market. And it's not that I think WoW is mostly Mac players (although more than 10% wouldn't surprise me).
It's that MMOs draw upon real social networks which are diverse. Failure to support one person (that Mac purist who won't or can't load bootcamp) costs you players their social network who you do support. Which costs you access to their social network. Or they play for awhile but quit to play Minecraft with their Mac buddy.
When offering support (hardware or OS), I think it's damaging to think that supporting Mac OS or European players is JUST supporting Mac OS or European players. It's penetrating their social network.
Not supporting Mac costs you PC users. Not supporting European gamers can cost you western gamers. And better supporting either group increases market penetration outside that group. (Probably less pronounced with Euro gamers than Mac users due to language barriers and geographical connections but I also tend to think Europeans have larger and more diverse social networks than the average American does.)
Comments
Reducing scripts means expanding exploits, generally.
That's part of what makes an MMO computationally costlier in certain ways.
Ideally as few processes as possible are hosted on the user's computer. Instead, events get determined by a server that Cryptic rents and fed back to players via scripts.
Now... An FPS can get by with handling more of the business of running the game client side. But an FPS doesn't ordinarily have to deal with issues like currency or item duping.
ANYTHING that gets done clientside is something I could figure out a way to exploit. And serverside validation scripts wouldn't stop me necessarily because then all I'd need to do is to trick those scripts into firing inappropriately.
For example:
Say an MMO has a server script that validates currency transactions. So it rejects increases sent by a modded client and resets the variable.
Okay, then maybe what I do if I'm Joe Hacker is actually send a corrupted data packet that LOWERS my total money. And maybe the server script says, "No. You can't change your total" and also says "You should have one more than that." And if the priority of those functions is wrong, attempting to hack my currency total lower actually increases it by using the failsafe against itself.
That's probably something most devs would think about. But the problem is that they can't just ban anyone whose client sends corrupted or garbled data and there is bound to be a place where a validation script would be highly exploitable. So it's better to have all aspects of gameplay happen serverside and make my client a big fancy representation of stuff that happens entirely on the server. So that all my client does is graphics... and a minimum amount of that lest you have an invasion of fifty foot monsters like you had when a few client hackers got loose in City of heroes and TRIBBLE their costume variables. So ideally, even costume only elements are something you want out of the client's control.
Whereas in a shooter? Eh. Less of an issue.
Honestly, I think you could probably play STO entirely via cloud and do fairly well in everything but PvP. And if STO is designed for the cloud, they could just have it balance everyone's latency inside an instance (within a certain limit) to keep everyone fairly equal. Or build in a certain amount of fake latency into the game that goes away when real latency happens. (Of course, I'd imagine that could lead to speedhacking if you have a program which tricks their server about the amount of latency you're experiencing and then very rapidly adjusts the latency.)
I think cloud MMOs are the future of how you'll see these games on Mac and console and will resolve a lot of the systems spec issues, as you could get dramatically better graphics if all your system has to do is stream video of gameplay back to you and the 3D rendering happens on a server somewhere.
There are numerous other examples of modern MMOs that have equal or greater visual fidelity to STO, without being nearly as "hardware dependant". If I can run most other MMOs at High settings and have great visuals, and then struggle to get higher than Medium settings in STO, there's something wrong with STO, is there not?
1) EVE's graphics aren't superior to STO's - they just aren't. As for their graphics engine being optimized, ask anyone involved with the uproar or 'Captain's Quarters and the hit a client took on performance when they implemmented it. The outcry was so fierce CCP has shelved any further plans for "Walking in Stations" (Which IMO is a real shame.)
2) EVE doesn't a ctually run all that smoothly either, which is why they implememnted their "Time Dilation" feature - which basically lags ouit EVERYONE in combat to the response time of the slowest client connected and involved in the battle.
Could STO use optimizxatyion improvements? You bet. My point is, I would not hold up either EVE Online or CCP as a company that's "doing it right". Thehy update the game twice a year, and usually the upfdates are smaller than an STO Season update - yet it'll take them until the next kmajor update to get gtheir client stable again.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kED11aGobUk&hd=1
You tell me, do those visuals look WORSE than STO? Not by a long shot... That being said, i'm no fan of EVE Online, but I do know that it's visuals look SPECTACULAR compared to the likes of STO. Anyone claiming EVE has worse graphics, is deluding themselves.
Let's take something simpler: Ship models in EVE vs STO. Most of the Cryptic designs (non-canon), look like utter rubbish (too blocky, no sleek ships, added details in places that aren't needed etc). And the canon ships, most of which still to this day look sub-par, and in dire need of fixing. Problem is, they got rid of their good ship modeller (CapnLogan), and nobody is touching up the older models anymore. There's no profit in fixing the old ships, so they add brand new ships at sub-standard quality, via lockboxes (aka cash grabs).
I'm not asking for ships in the 15-20k polygon per ship range (look at some of the modded ships from Bridge Commander), but surely the game is CAPABLE of rendering ships a bit more accurately compared to the shows/movies? Intrepid Class says Hello, by the way.
I'd argue about them being "superior."
Their ships are lower polycount. The difference is that the ships are designed to be low polycount whereas Trek ships were designed to be physical models without polygon limitations.
Beyond that, a much bigger chunk of their budget went into art because their game is largely social rather than scripted. In that regard, it's not that the graphics engine is better. It's that the ART is better. There's less focus on variety of art and things other than art, freeing up the art that is there to be more of a masterpiece.
So... Quality over quantity and a bigger percentage of the budget spent on art with an graphics engine that is less robust but also less stylized.
For example, characters could look a lot more "real" and detailed in STO if they had not decided to make custom aliens as exotic deformations of the basic humanoid skeleton.
A huge factor is that EvE ground avatars are not designed for social environments and a single avatar eats up most of the system resources for a lot of people. Whereas STO is designed around the idea of having dozens of them darting around eachother.
And in order to add ground play, they're basically creating a separate game engine.
STO could have cheated and done quite a bit if, for example, they'd limited instances to ten humanoid avatars and only had combat with a more zoomed out view of your avatar with a lower poly count.
So imagine, for example, that ship interiors could host 10-15 unique characters at once and used a higher quality version of your player avatar.
STO is one of the few games that is heavily CPU-limited. This makes playing some PVP games or fleet actions with lots of NPCs / pets highly problematic even on good hardware (i7 920, ATI 7850) because the framerate can drop below 20.
So, technically, the UI *is* CPU bound due to the scripts :P
I'm guessing by your statement that the scripts are constantly refreshing the all of UI elements. Any chance of adding a sleep timer to the UI scripts?
As long as certain UI windows/elements can drop the FPS by almost 50% (in extreme cases), there will always be complaints about it.
A UI shouldn't need to be that CPU/GPU hungry as it consists of mostly static elements that in most cases changes with human interaction so most of the scripts shouldn't need to be running all the time and certainly not every frame (every 30-60 frames minimum) that is just eating away resources for no reason as all.
Fleet Admiral Enterprise-D
THANKS STO community!
in EVE your a ship shooting Red Redicules. Thats your gameplay. When I first started playing STO I was happy to actually GRAPHICALLY "See" the enemy as I blasted at it instead of just a reticule.
Why is the Distance seem so far off in EVE? You have to be within like, 4Km away from an enemy to see their ship. I hated that. Not to mention your only control is to "Orbit" and watch compared to direct control of your vessel like in STO.
I;d fit into that Mid level PC user. I wish I could get a premium PC, but can't afford it. My PC actually just died, Motherboard went out. So Im using a back up old POS PC. But I'll be happy just to get a PC that can play the game again like I was.
I think you're either European, or you aren't aware of internet and broadband penetration in the world. MMOs want vast audiences, especially F2P. Cloud gaming cuts out a massive section of the current and near-future market.
That's odd. Which Fleet Actions are you talking about?
Gorn Minefield has a fairly vast horde of ships. I've never had my framerates drop even below 45 with a weaker CPU (Q9450) and video card (GTX 460 SE 1GB), while using two monitors (1920x1080 and 1280x1024).
Ik we have rly good high speed broadband connections in Europe, but what does that have to do with him perceiving cloud gaming is the way to go?
I dn't think cloud gaming is rly the future and should take over. especially since u dn't get 1080 AA filtered quality(at least what i tested from OnLive wasn't).
but streaming STO for example on a tablet/smartphone anywhere anytime would be awesome. It's a very nice tool to have u'r fav game available all the time, the device u'r using not being an issue.
but something like that is even further into the mist the DX11. Guys ... and Galls space combat rly like in space is it. Space engine mechanics that allow u to move any way should be a lot higher on their then DX. alas that's not gonna happen.
A larger percentage of people in Europe have high speed broadband connections. This means the European market for cloud gaming is sizable. From an European-only perspective, MMOs going cloud makes sense.
This isn't true for the rest of the world.
MMOs are all about population and subscriber base. MMOs are the least likely to become primarily cloud gaming, because you'd be cutting off a chunk of the market who may be willing to pay you $20 bucks for a shiny starship.
Contrast this with people who are hardcore FPS players. They probably have a great connection anyway - otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete online. If those games switched over, you wouldn't lose much of your market.
Well, I think it's the FUTURE.
Right now, it would have to account for and assume high latency and artificially lag anyone who has less latency than is expected.
Over time, speeds will allow for near instantaneous play over cloud. Give it ten years or fifteen.
I have streamed and played STO on my iPad.
It works around the house just fine.
Now... Trying to use it on Starbucks Wifi across town is trickier but I think the issue there is partly my upstream data limitations from my PC over the internet and partly that free restaurant Wifi isn't that great.
I will add, I think niche markets are worth pursuing in MMOs.
I've said before: I think WoW got big in large measure because of Mac support and lost some of its edge due to things like Bootcamp and Cedega working better.
Sure, Mac's are maybe 10% of the computer gaming market. And it's not that I think WoW is mostly Mac players (although more than 10% wouldn't surprise me).
It's that MMOs draw upon real social networks which are diverse. Failure to support one person (that Mac purist who won't or can't load bootcamp) costs you players their social network who you do support. Which costs you access to their social network. Or they play for awhile but quit to play Minecraft with their Mac buddy.
When offering support (hardware or OS), I think it's damaging to think that supporting Mac OS or European players is JUST supporting Mac OS or European players. It's penetrating their social network.
Not supporting Mac costs you PC users. Not supporting European gamers can cost you western gamers. And better supporting either group increases market penetration outside that group. (Probably less pronounced with Euro gamers than Mac users due to language barriers and geographical connections but I also tend to think Europeans have larger and more diverse social networks than the average American does.)
How does "cloud gaming would exclude a large market" turn into "they should exclude Europe"?