1. Hey Guest, is it this your first time on the forums?

    Visit the Beginner's Box

    Introduce yourself, read some of the ins and outs of the community, access to useful links and information.

    Dismiss Notice

Build 912 - Catapult Optimisations and Changes

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by DevBlogger, Oct 15, 2013.

  1. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    While I understand where this is coming from, in our eyes the steam release is very, very overdue. The game is in a pretty good place, and we're very anxious to move on to something else - constant tweaking quickly devolves into backwards progress, as seen in the later classic builds.
    That said, we're currently waiting on the steam integration stuff and are happy to put more polish in while we don't have other stuff to work on, but we're not going to hold the steam release for minor concerns.
     
  2. steve_jobs

    steve_jobs Bison Rider

    Messages:
    134
    tell me now :r_flex::skull::flex:
     
    Atheon likes this.
  3. Yagger

    Yagger Kouji's bitch 5eva Staff Alumni Tester
    1. SharSharShar - [SHARK]

    Messages:
    646
    kill 10 bison on an unmodified server without dying and you'll get the bison hat, which lets you tame bison
     
  4. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    This doesn't mean catapult rock doesn't hit stuff, it just means it doesn't use those scripts - probably should have been clearer but anyone who's been hit by cata ingame recently can attest to them still smashing actors, haha.
     
  5. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    A note, there'll probably be another build out today with a few more (minor) optimisations, some more health for the catapult, and additional coins for a lot of things.
     
    Joiken and Digger101 like this.
  6. yatar

    yatar Shipwright

    Messages:
    2
    I still get significant FPS drops when catapult rocks hit anything, even off-screen. At one point the game also crashed during one such event. Apart from that, the game runs fine performance-wise, but I think this is a huge issue.
     
  7. Contrary

    Contrary The Audacious Paramount of Explosive Flight Donator Tester

    Messages:
    2,196
    I don't know when these changes were made but I'm not liking the new collision stuff. Shields push bombs around now which makes shielding down on them awkward and is also leads to a lot of weird random bouncing of bombs. Also catapults bounce you when you just walk by them, which is also kinda annoying.

    edit: now all my bombs are falling through the floor. This happened in the past but not as much
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2013
    Joiken and Guitarman like this.
  8. eamono

    eamono Arsonist

    Messages:
    498

    Wait so KAG is essentially finished? After steam release we won't get any big updates? :(
     
  9. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    @eamono You might get a few, but we want to move on. Imagine working on a single game in a small team for going on 3 years - life's too short to only make a handful of games!
    That's a large part of why we made modding so flexible (to the point where 99% of the game is open source and in your hands) - we're sure people will want to keep seeing new stuff in KAG, but we don't want to be stuck doing that for the rest of our lives. Give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish, all that.
    We'll still be sure to patch when it needs it and will incorporate community sourced content that people want to see in vanilla - but yes, KAG is essentially "finished".

    We've actually got an internal rule before steam release - no new game stuff, only fixes.

    @Contrary: The shield blocking bombs happened ages ago, it shouldn't collide with teamies though. There's been some collision weirdness since we disabled continuous collisions, we'll definitely need to look into it.

    @yatar yup, we're optimising it even further at the moment, found an extra source of unnecessary particle spam :^)
     
    8x likes this.
  10. RogueCupcake

    RogueCupcake Haxor Official Server Admin

    Messages:
    248
    I like the idea. At least that would put the trap into it. Traps are meant to not be obvious!
     
  11. master-chief

    master-chief Arsonist

    Messages:
    55
    hey geti i still cant go on any of the servers. is there a reason to this?
     
  12. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    Nope, I can find them and join just fine: http://grab.by/rUE8 maybe you have some bad firewall setting going on? I'd need significantly more than "doesn't work" to help you out :^)
     
  13. Yagger

    Yagger Kouji's bitch 5eva Staff Alumni Tester
    1. SharSharShar - [SHARK]

    Messages:
    646
    update ; catapults were lagging us at the end of the game every time it hit a block for some reason. unsure why it started happening.
     
  14. LostPix

    LostPix Base Burner

    Messages:
    574
    I don't think it's even caused by catapults but there is some more concerning bug behind all of it and catapult might just be one of the things that trigger that bug, for example I had fps drop when holding right mouse button with more players on the server in pretty much the same way as catapults.
     
    Crabmaster likes this.
  15. Duplolas

    Duplolas So Sad

    Messages:
    917
    Just to be a nice guy ill tell you how.

    Get a burger, throw it at a bison. Get on the bison. Have fun.

    Make sure you don't try to jump because you will jump off of it and most likely will never get to ride it again. It jumps by itself, high, very high.
     
  16. Crabmaster

    Crabmaster Bison Rider
    1. Zen Laboratories

    Messages:
    322
    I've noticed these kinda lag spikes to, and with my low end PC it makes my game nearly unplayable. I could swear they happen whenever a fight starts because I tend to get a lot of frame skips during CQC and I SURE love it happening during that point.

    I think the game would benefit from a "particles on/off" button in the graphics menu, too...those start to become a lot near the end of a game where everyone is gibbing to bits!
     
    Digger101 likes this.
  17. LostPix

    LostPix Base Burner

    Messages:
    574
    I agree about it happening during fights too, but I don't think it's caused by particles but something to do with blobs loading, if you notice any massive performance drop from time to time it may occur when the command prompt console spews out a ton of blobs at the same time, but that's one occurrence.

    The game is mostly relying on CPU so graphics are not a problem in this case especially because game does not use any complex shaders and sprites are small, also the more players there are the more it causes your CPU to work even harder.

    I found that spamming doors also causes performance impact. My advice is simply to play on smaller servers because it seems to be the best option and everyone will tell you the same however the performance deteriorates after prolonged period of playing even with smaller number of people.
     
    Crabmaster likes this.
  18. Crabmaster

    Crabmaster Bison Rider
    1. Zen Laboratories

    Messages:
    322
    True, I never have issues with smaller servers or at the start of games, kinda too bad really, because 32 player servers are so much more fun.

    I noticed during earlier builds that things such as arrows would lag the game to bits, so I know a lot of those can cause serious drops, maybe corpses too? I am actually curious how much code things like gib particles have, because they do render as if they are colliding with things...then again that would still hardly be much code going on.

    I feel like something must have some loose end of unoptimized code, whether that be the code for a player slashing or the code of how arrows work(getting rid of the RNG on them might kill two birds with one stone) or something. It feels weird to me how a game like Minecraft can play more stable than KAG sometimes...which is saying something.