Author Topic: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!  (Read 5499 times)

Offline x4000

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Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« on: May 30, 2017, 09:24:13 pm »
https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Making_Alpha_Fun#Version_0.301_The_New_HDR_Visual_Stack

I still haven't actually done the main kickstarter update to tell people about the new version of the game now that we're into the "early access kickstarter backers have access now" period.  They all got emails, but still.

I want to do a proper video for that, along with really showing off the new graphics and having everything ready from a showstopper-bugs standpoint.  We're pretty much there now, I think, except that I have some work to do on the nebula backgrounds again.  Nothing so major this time, but some various tweaks tomorrow.  And then nice screenshots and video to show it off. :)

This HDR pipeline switch is a nice big item off my personal list, and it makes other future changes easier in the graphics domain, too.  So I'm really pleased to be where we are now.

Cheers!
Chris
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #1 on: May 30, 2017, 11:08:55 pm »
I spent a few minutes on .301 and it looks miles better  than .300 for stability! I didn't hit any significant problems.

Also, I just had a fight between 5K of my ships (plus turrets) and 100K AI ships and had better performance than I did prior to .300 with 6K total ships. It felt like it was laboring and a bit slow, but it never felt "clunky"; there were never giant hiccups in performance. You guys should be proud of yourselves for how much better it works!
« Last Edit: May 31, 2017, 09:50:59 am by x4000 »

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #2 on: May 31, 2017, 12:16:21 am »
Also, I just had a fight between 5K of my ships (plus turrets) and 100K AI ships and had better performance than I did prior to .300 with 6K total ships. It felt like it was laboring and a bit slow, but it never felt "clunky"; there were never giant hiccups in performance. You guys should be proud of yourselves for how much better it works!
A battle with ~105k ships ran acceptably? That's better than AIWC could manage, iirc, at least since the shift to Unity in 2010. It's not apples and apples due to squads, but that's kind of the point of squads.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #3 on: May 31, 2017, 09:46:29 am »
He meant 1K enemy ships.

Glad it was running pretty decently -- there are some things that are still slower than they should be that I just haven't gotten to yet, but I'm glad it's so much better.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #4 on: May 31, 2017, 09:49:49 am »
No, I actually meant 100K.

Offline x4000

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #5 on: May 31, 2017, 09:51:24 am »
No, I actually meant 100K.
:o :o :o :o

Ho-lee-cow.
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Offline x4000

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #6 on: May 31, 2017, 09:52:39 am »
No, I actually meant 100K.

Various savegames of intensive situations where things are laboring some are things I'd love to keep in my stockpile of savegames for profiling and whatnot.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #7 on: May 31, 2017, 10:39:49 am »
Here you go. This game is modded to make my Ark extra strong and give me all the bonus ships. It takes about 3 seconds of in-game time to be 1 second real time, which is imperfect, but the lack of any timing spikes makes it understandable.

Watching the serried ranks of AI ships flooding into a system is unnerving (perhaps the code should be tweaked to cause them to spawn a bit further apart?).

The game is gzipped because it's a bit large to upload otherwise.

Offline x4000

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #8 on: May 31, 2017, 02:58:31 pm »
Great googly moogly, that's quite a savegame. ;)  I named it "ComputerWeeps" on my machine, heh.

Pretty nifty seeing that the pain points are about the same, and continue more or less linearly.  Having 5k vs 45k ships was getitng me between 5fps and 10fps, and the bulk of that was spent on visual processing stuff.  Actual rendering is well under 25% of that on my machine.

Swapping to the galaxy map, I get about 200fps, but with hitches periodically because the underlying simulation isn't able to keep up under that strain at full speed.  The time slowdown is because of that, not because of latency on the visuals side.  If the simulation were keeping up, then we'd just have a jerky framerate but realtime results.  So that's a new place that can be optimized in the simulation, although obviously it's a really extreme case.  I didn't get to 105k units, though, just 50k.  On one planet.

There's plenty to update on the front-end visuals side as well, since I can make a variety of those things perform better still.  But frankly that insane situation performs better -- as you said -- than a 6k ship battle prior to 0.300.  Big progress! :)
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #9 on: May 31, 2017, 03:44:55 pm »
Yeah, this wasn't the initial case I hit which was a full 100K ships (that savegame wouldn't load and I opened a mantis bug for it), but I tried to recreate it quickly with a new game this morning.

Offline x4000

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Re: Now out: 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack!
« Reply #10 on: May 31, 2017, 03:49:38 pm »
Ah, gotcha.
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