Devlog KAG Build 2509 - "60FPS Build" - Unlimited Render Framerate, Optimisations, New Maps and More

Hey folks - it's been a bit of a wait on this one, I know, but hopefully the payload makes up for it!



60FPS!

It's finally here! Asu has gotten serious work done on this feature and after ironing out some issues in testing, it should be ready for public consumption. There might still be issues with it, so it's not on by default - yet. If all goes smoothly in production, we will enable this by default - so if you haven't already, now is the time to give it a look and report any issues.

If you enable Uncapped Framerate (in the video settings), the game will now render "in-between" frames. The game logic still runs at 30 ticks per second, but the rendering is now decoupled from that limit. This makes the game's motion a lot smoother in the eyes of most people, without increasing the game's processing cost proportionally. You can keep the framerate capped if you prefer 30fps for whatever reason.

We recommend you keep vsync on (as it is by default) to prevent wasted processing on frames that aren't displayed. For most players, this leads to a smooth rendered framerate of 60fps, though those with higher frequency monitors or graphics cards the support "special" vsync modes (freesync, gsync etc) will of see higher framerates.

This feature works with most mods out of the box (including TC, pictured above), but if they do any tricky custom rendering, camera updating or similar, then they will need to use a few new functions to smooth out their motion. It's probably best to ask about it on a case-by-case basis in #modding on Discord, but we'll look at doing a forum writeup to help you understand the changes as well.

New Maps

The maps team have continued to review and integrate new community map content, to help keep the mapcycles fresh. We hope you enjoy what they've come up with this time around.

Both CTF and TDM have new maps in the rotation this build.

Code:

CTF changes:
    Added/Modified: highlands, princesscity, gloryhill2, lech_walesa
    Removed: kaggen, antqueen, snitchmerk, passfest, paradox

TDM changes:
    Added: watery, reaver, neringa, cursedwell, virgo
    Removed: peanut

More Translations

The translation contributors have continued to provide, with the Russian translation being extended to support the server browser and the Polish translation being upgraded from a placeholder to parity with the Russian team. Please let us know if you have any feedback, and you can always contribute modifications or corrections on github! French will catch up soon, Asu has had enough on his plate with this release!

Community News

The Official Discord has continued to flourish since the giveaway around new years, to celebrate hitting a thousand members - we hope this continues through 2018! Congrats and thanks to Mazey, Galen, and the rest of the discord crew.

Github has slowed down a little over the New Year, but we'll be updating the repository with contributor guidelines soon - watch that space if you're looking to get your feet wet with KAG dev! A chinese translation may also be in the works, and the Russian, French and Polish translators are waiting on some further extensions to the translation system. Terracraft also contributed optimised image files to the space taken by the game on disk.

Eluded released his KAGLadder site for ranked 1v1. I believe discussion should be directed here.

The official servers have experimentally had the chat filter enabled serverside. We don't expect that this will have much of an effect on gameplay or on the majority of chat, but it will hopefully send a message that we want to encourage a more friendly atmosphere on the official servers. You can discuss this in more detail here - we're open to feedback, including suggestions for different filtering criteria or behaviour.

There was also a disruption to several THD web servers as a result of issues with some planned maintenance - the game was unable to be played online for a few hours as a result. Joe, our main sysadmin, is looking into options for redundency or failover to prevent a single point of failure from taking out the API, which is used for the server list and logins. More news on that as things develop.

We hope you enjoy the build!

Max

Code:

Full Changelog:

60FPS Related

[added] uncapped framerate interpolates frames, allowing >30fps (thanks and congrats Asu)
[modified] graphics flash updated on render, changed logic and new time param
[added] interpolation support to many rendered objects
[fixed] various script issues with >30fps
[added] fps diagnostic graph for inspecting render deltatimes /v_deltatime_diag

Modding Related

[added] getInterpolationFactor, getRenderDeltaTime, getRenderSmoothDeltaTime, getRenderExactDeltaTime, getRenderApproximateCorrectionFactor functions for enhanced >30fps support in scripts.
[added] CCamera::getInterpolationOffset() bind (for fixing edge-case flickery world->screenspace conversions)
[added] anim_timer to CParticle (thanks Vamist and Mazey for being insistent)
[added] console print with color (thanks Asu and Eluded)
[removed] tile noise variable (watch out tilemap modders)

Hosting Related

[added] config variable for customising ban length if a player leaves while frozen (default 30, no ban if set to 0)
[added] disable file sending logs by default, can be changed with g_verbosefilesending
[added] nolauncher option to the dedicatedserver.bat for windows
[modified] some hosting-related properties (port, slots, etc) are now constant at runtime and must be set in the config or command line arguments, to prevent abuse/price tier escalation at shared hosting.

Localisation related

[added] changes required for server browser translation

Optimisation

[modified] significantly improved client performance with a lot of blobs
[modified] <cmap:update> subtasks are more accurate
[modified] optimized lighting code
[modified] inlined cmap stuff for performance
[modified] optimised flood layers (fire, water)
[modified] optimised image files (thanks Terracraft)

Other

[fixed] soft-crash when disabling smooth shader
[fixed] tcpr calling hooks before connection authentication
[removed] many of the Engine namespace functions (thanks for the reminder TFlippy)
[fixed] gramatically incorrect noswears correction (thanks for the reminder Paralogia)
[fixed] irc button goes to thd channel (discord is majority now though)
[modified] bombs in inventory don't kill non-player objects (eg war boats, storages)
[modified] updated TDM, CTF mapcycle.cfg (thanks Panky, Ni, Map Team, Map Authors)
[removed] longboat challenge that caused crashes

 

I'm not a fan of the slow zoom in when you die. Idk if that was a thing in 30fps but was barely visible.

Just noticed that seeds aren't centred when held.

 

A few people have asked this - basically because it was a fair bit of work, and back in the day MM and I honestly didn't "believe" in increased framerate being a benefit :) I've changed camps there in the almost 7 years the game has been out, but it was mostly Asu's work and push to make this a reality and find a solution that wouldn't involve huge, sweeping changes or an extra 100% CPU hit.

The current implementation lays good foundations but there's a few issues like slightly increased visual latency in some cases and it's possible to cause transitions that interpolate badly - we'll look at improving that as we look at rendering optimisation too.

A lot of people seem to be noticing the zoom for some reason, but I don't think it's actually changed? Might be something to revisit but seems like a pretty minor thing!

Yeah i've been thinking about this, for people in your circumstances. Might be worth looking into, though I imagine it'll still have issues with dropped frames if it's not vsynced, or if it's not an exact multiple of your vsync frequency. Its less trivial than it sounds to add, funnily enough :)

we aren't miracle workers, though check back in a couple of months ;)

 

I don't dare to enable v-sync again. For the longest time it was lagging my cursor until I realised the cause.

 

v-sync causes cursor lag even in osu! so i think its a common issue.

 

Well done guys, I don't play all that much anymore, but this progress is amazing, big congrats.

That's a shame, it's attitudes like this that do damage to the community but I guess the concern could be with retaining server player base?