First off i cant say thank you enough to @RexXxuS and his team for giving us the chance to test the new changes on the Nova server. This gives us a great opportunity to play with the upcoming changes with out having to grind for days to get materials and deal with long blueprint times.
Would also like to thank the guys that came out last night night and helped with these test, We had more but the server seemed to have a few hiccups last night any way down to business,
The New Meta:
Lag Shots still exist (I did not get a chance to record the fight where this happened but i believe @Xanif has footage)
Class size changes, The old 20k block and 500 devices limit is now a class 6 ship. It does not matter if you use white spacing blocks or just all cube blocks placed against each other.
Block count in a class size is now an unknown number. The new formula for calculating class size has to many variables to say “X” amount of blocks and “X” devices is a class 3. (ex 1 core + 1 block + 148 lights = Class 3 ship)
Block Count now includes devices (ex 1 core + 1 Cockpit + 1 block = Block count of 3)
Here is a short video of the first round of testing on 5.1 last night. (BTW my editing skills are not very good) The over all goal is to see if we can pinpoint what is causing the massive FPS loss during fights and create a fun and balanced PVP experience.
Our first test last night starts the video we used 5 class 6 ships and 1 class 4 just flying around in space trying to set a baseline with turrets off. At about the 6:00 min mark we go turrets live in a 3v2 duel. The frame rate just becomes unplayable at this point. During this fight we did have two people disconnect around the 8:30 mark, everyone shut turrets down and waited for FPS to recover. (two and half minutes before FPS got better)
The next test was a 1v1 duel with a class 4 vs class 3 ship. (11:50 min Mark) While the game was playable at this point FPS still were not the greatest avg 15-25 fps and still getting some stuttering at about 17:50 i end up becoming desyned and have to relog
Tonight we plan to do some 3v3 battles with Class two ships to see if we can gain a better PVP experience and also want to do some testing with removing turrets such as cannon, mini gun, and flak to see if all those turrets trying to target are creating the FPS drops. Please feel free to jump in the test server and come out to do some testing its a great chance to help make the game better
That’s what I think the biggest take away should be. Before combat starts, ships are flying around and there is not that much lag. If the issue was blocks and simple polygon count - then ships being in proximity should be all that is needed to cause lag.
That is not the case.
The game only starts to freeze once turrets are turned on.
Whenever a large-poly ship warps into a playfield, you can sense it immediately through significant FPS drops (5-10 fps lost while the ship is on the playfield)
This is how I knew you guys were in Homeworld last week on Friday when you came to do your “Attack”
It’s exactly what sponsored the “I sense a disturbance in the force” comment.
I wasn’t even within render-distance of you guys.
In tomcat’s video he has 15-20fps before fighting starts. I’d say that isn’t very good. Not sure how good his computer is but 15fps is just barely playable.
In single player creative I have a file I spawn ships in and test them, tinker, etc. In this area I have like 20 giant CVs. No matter which way I looked I never dropped below 50fps and it was often locked at 60fps. If I join HWS and just fly around in space with nothing on my screen sometimes my fps dips to 30 or lower when I can’t see anything but blackness of space. There is massive performance loss associated with multiplayer. I run a 2600k/GTX 1060 so not top of the line but quite respectable.
Cool, thanks! Now it would be interesting that tomcat stop shooting instantly as you died and we see how your ships looked like? Theoretically there must be a hole or almost a hole straight to your cockpit, right?
I mean yes the netcode isn’t good but if one of you have some time I would like to see some of following usecases:
2 Class 5 ships flying around near each other:
without turrets at all. Also no guns (Pulse + Rockets)
without turrets but with guns shooting each other
without turrets and guns and no lights at all
without turrets and guns and no lights and just one sort of thrusters, not mixed (e.g. only L thrusters)
with max turrets but no gun and no lights and just one sort of thrusters
Just to have some of the regular “doubts” and use cases as comparison.
I have a theory: try testing with certain groups of turrets. We all know that lights cause lag, and the plasma and laser turrets basically fire lights. Maybe use just turrets that dont fire lights?
I notice a FPS drop when my team fires laser and plasma cannons, but no issues with sniper and bullets. Some fps with rocket launcher, but we dont fire very many of those. Maybe rocket turrets are adding to the mess?
EXACTLY… WTF were the devs thinking… make the effects “cool looking” AFTER they fix the damn lag first… dont add more FPS drain on an already drowning horse
I don’t think the devs are playing the same game we are. HWS is very much an outlier in the number of players and playstyle. I’m surprised by the level of attention HWS issues are able to get, but lets be frank, despite us being the most popular server we are still a minority when it comes to Empyrion player who are mostly solo PvE players.
The average daily Empyrion is 3000 players, in these HWS should answer for 300 to 500 players at various times, if it is 300 per day, it is 10% of all who are currently playing.
Hope they think about how they COULD grow the game though… make it so that Multiplayer and PVP are actually “playable” and thoses types will gravitate to the game as folks here the good word. Currently, its the oposite… and many just give up on the game cause they cant even do 1 vs 1 battles without playing a “Lag-Fest” type of game.
Poly counts a big issue sure, harder on graphics cards… but only reason people use 200-300 poly blocks in the first place is cause of the “Skip Shot’s” when lag causes the failed detection of outer edges, which forces the use of these blocks. I would love to just use 12 poly square blocks… IF they fixed that problem. its called RCA (Root Cause Analysis)… find the real reason and fix that first… there is no real advantage to use any other block type if they could fix that… so folks would build PVP ships with low poly counts to even optimize the FPS of the game…
That’s really what they should be focusing on - Space Engineers is a vastly superior "space ship building’ game. But is unplayable in multiplayer with lots of people.
Planet Nomads is shaping up to be a solid Space Engineers competitor - with maybe better mutli.
Interstellar Rift does ship multicrew better - but has a tiny dev team and lacks tons of content.
And if Dual Universe is able to match 1/4 of the hype it’ll blow it all out of the water…
yeap… serious lack of good SCI-FI ship to ship multiplayer on the market… if they got MP right and hammer this down… Empyrion could outshine the other clones as a clear winner… we can only hope…
