Regarding the recent community investigations about relation between framerate, ping, lagshot and pyramid blocks (especially here: http://empyriononline.com/threads/number-of-triangles.12440/) and the recent benchmark done by our beloved admin, i’d like to suggest a change in rules about the use of pyramid blocks in building for performance reasons.
It is now impossible to deny that Both servers and players computers are loosing framerate and perf because of the huge use of pyramid blocks in ships builds.
For the tournament last sunday, Fulgrim asked players to avoid the use of “too much pyramid blocks” for same reasons.
The fact is that many pvp players don’t want to stop building their ship that way…They don’t care about performance issues as the only interesting thing to them is to win their dogfights.
I’d suggest with 6.0 coming to completely prohibit the use of any pyramid blocks as internal layers on SV/HV/CV. Players would be allowed to use some, only as external shapes or decoration. (so no massive use of external pyramid blocks neither).
Illegal ships would be immediatly seized.
That would improve performances a lot for everyone during the fights and that would force everyone to make new blueprints, maybe allowing the new players to have a lot more chances in dogfight as we would all have to start thinking again about “how to build efficient ships”.
I’m pretty sure many will argue about this, but this would be for the better until Eleon finds a way to improve performance and size class calculation.
The dev’s already changed the way that the ship size is calculated, players will gravitate to most cost effective, hence eventually all will be building full solid blocks to add as much white space to their ships as possible to reduce class size and lag.
While it is true it has an impact, in the form of more rendered area, it is not nearly as significant as that cause by terrain rendering, Spotlights, muzzle flash, Impact calculations, or a host of other issues. Pyramids are not evil here guys. They are not ideal, yes, but they are not causing pvp issues. They are used BECAUSE PVP HAS ISSUES. When we get frame rate drops from all the other far more impactful sources dropped down to an impossibly low factor, so that extra triangles rendered is our biggest issue, then maybe think about banning a particular shape of block. But know that the gain from this course would be minimal at best.
If you want to see and/or abuse real lag… try making a ship with a ton of signals.
The games poor optimization, poor sever latency combo’d with amount of action going on.
I dont get lag with pyramids, I dont have shadows on. Once there is a ton of players and turrets firing and/or not firing because the server cannot handle that many thats when I lag. Then it eventually catches up and everyones floating around not firing weapons, and runs part of the game smooth. I dont know I am not a programmer… just a gamer.
Ultimately its alpha, its probably a steam alpha that will never get out of alpha. But its clunky fun. If players are complaining about pyramids because they dont build with them and think everyone should use cubes, then get rid of every block type except for cubes for quote on quote “Performance” … the best builders will keep building better ships plain and simple… you can change the game but you cant change the player. lol
Sucks anytime I want to speak my mind about things I have to delete it because people will get upset. I really need to work on my people skills or something. Blaming pyramids for your lag is wrong. "If population comes back, I will build a ship made out of nothing but solid blocks. I will have lots of bases and HV’s… You will lag… I will shoot you down just like I would if I had pyramids, and everything will be the same.
Blaming pyramids for your lag is wrong. "If population comes back, I will build a ship made out of nothing but solid blocks. I will have lots of bases and HV’s… You will lag… I will shoot you down just like I would if I had pyramids, and everything will be the same.