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New technologies and the future of Planeshift
moteyalpha
Member Posts: 32
I am interested in what developers think about the future directions of Planeshift and what effect graphics quality and animation complexity can do for it. I work with various levels of OpenGL development in lot's of capacities, and I have tended to be purely technical in interests until recently. Since I discovered Planeshift it has opened my eyes to what all this means in terms of "from the iron to the eye" or how the process of graphics proceeds from the GPU to driver to OpenGL to Engine to Application. I never really appreciated what the end result was because I just saw it as how many frames of such and such content can be displayed. Now that I have seen the process of virtual world creation and animation and npc's and pc's it really makes me appreciate what is being built. I know from my personal work with other projects that new technologies are coming soon and with them a rather significant increase in performance. At the point when real time movie quality animation becomes as common as television, what happens? I don't even watch TV anymore, it is too slow, too limited, too predictable. When I can play a game with 100's of other players and every second of every game is new that second, TV seems about as interesting and enlightening as a light bulb. I can have streaming news , email, IRC, visual encyclopedias and almost any content imaginable available with a click, along with it.
It seems that anything that can be dreamed can be made.
Comments
Talad promotes uncivil behavior.
In all honesty, I think Planeshift needs to do what it's already doing while using far less memory. I'm not sure what the solution is but it takes up far too much CPU for the quality of graphics you get. The best things about Planeshift are social, not technological in nature.
As far as technology goes:
CPU usage balanced with GPU usage and enhanced method speed combined with new functions is simply a way of increasing the quality of a player's experience. Multiple CPU technology seems to be the new doubling factor and I expect that to continue to the point where we might see GPU's and CPU's with 1000's of paralell threads in the near future.
In addition lowering cost of ram/Gb and availability of more memory space enhances performance. That coupled with new OpenGL 3.0 will make a quantum leap in what players might experience. I don't see that it is out of the question to have npc's that are so complex in behavior that most could not distinguish them from a real character.
Planeshift is not a single minded venture and it is open source so changes can be made by anyone. I see the implementation as a tool like a desktop environment. What people do with it or how they interact at any time/space/forum is not a technology issue.
My intent here was to share what I know and listen to what other's say so that we could be better at implementing a complex technology with fewer inconveniences to players.
There are technologies being applied in other areas that can solve some of the technical issues that exist with many multi-player games. I am certainly looking at distributed server nets as one possible solution to some aspects. In addition there are interfaces for facial expression/body language/real time language translation/text to voice/video/custom character face/ that are known to me and might give a player more interaction within the game environment.
My real interest is in the method and not the use. No matter what interface is provide to people they will still be the same people, there are no upgrades or bug fixes planned for -my- consciousness .
It's more than that though. I see Planeshift as a platform for roleplaying. Things like combat and quests are just icing on the cake. Sometimes I even see them as distractions.
Re the speed of the game... I have a fast machine, and Planeshift is slow. Planeshift's visuals are antiquidated in a lot of ways, and yet it runs slower than modern commercial games. I don't know the reason for it, and sure yeah computers will become more powerful as time goes on, but something just ain't right.
pstruth:
You may have a point in some other area but this is "technology", If you can explain to me why a L2 cache crossover increases performance in a multiple cpu chip die please do. I though I said that politely the last post. This is not about emotion or touchy pouty feeling, it is about -iron- that makes machines work.
Also explain the advantages of a n-way cache, the technical limits of FSB, and how compilers can be written to take care of advances in branch prediction. Also explain how memory bandwidth between the mother board and card slots effects graphic performance in typical applications.
Also tell me is "a forward and reverse sparsely allocated and sorted linked list", more effective in managing complex sets of AI characteristics than simple hash tables?
What advances in the API elements of Crystal Space are coming?
Also explain what microcode changes can be made to enhance graphics speed without disturbing overall system stability or compatibility.
Also explain how Xen can be used to trouble shoot games.
If you can do that, post again.
I was playing with my client/server arrangement for Planeshift and I thought of a couple things that might be future areas of research for me anyway. I ran a npc-client and I was thinking that they could serve as in game monitors in the same way as a "honeypot" serves to deter invasion by placing an obvious target to identify cheating, botting, scripting , and other unwanted actions.
I am an end-user decribing to you my experience using your product. I do not need to be versed in technobabble in order to point out a problem.
Oh, and it would be nice if you were more polite next time.
It's more than that though. I see Planeshift as a platform for roleplaying. Things like combat and quests are just icing on the cake. Sometimes I even see them as distractions.
Re the speed of the game... I have a fast machine, and Planeshift is slow. Planeshift's visuals are antiquidated in a lot of ways, and yet it runs slower than modern commercial games. I don't know the reason for it, and sure yeah computers will become more powerful as time goes on, but something just ain't right.
I -also- have a fast machine, and PS runs fast for me.....It also seems to me that moteyalpha was asking for input, suggestions, ideas, solutions (I refer you to Tuxide's post to see how this is done).
Anyways moteyalpha, all that fancy stuff you talked about sounds nice (XD i know im computer retarded). Would many of these things take a lot of work to implement (they sounds fancy to me)?
Sincerely Yours,
Anumesa
As much as I like to play PlaneShift,
I must say that pstruth has a point. (actualy two)
When playing with maps withouth grass, the game is very CPU intensive (needing at least a 2Ghz cpu to run smoothly) while on the other hand using a downclocked GPU (rendering at Geforce 1 (or 2mx) comparible speed) is enough to render the 3D world. With the grass enabled the game might use a tad more of your graphics card power, but the overall game is not realy that GPU intensive. (I'm actualy quiet happy with that, so I dont need to buy a new graphics card evry two months)
To me the graphics of the game are comparible to Half-Life/CS
Dispite that I loved the senery when I first started play PS and I still do, people have put amazing creativity in some of the stuff build in Yliakum, wich is realy worth seeing.
Second point, I think MMORPG.com is ment to give players of mmorpg games a chance to get to know PS and PS a chance to get new players. I know that there are a lot of tech heavy people on freenode.net and working on PS. But I think this is not the place too get to technical.
This thread becomes totaly unreadable after the second post, and your head goes ''wooooozzz'' And then you stop reading because normal people can't follow what was said. I know I did.
Keep up the good work
And a Happy 2008 to evrybody
War does not determine who is Right just who is Left.
Some of the performance issues are due to issues between Crystal Space and PlaneShift and both teams work to address them as such. On the one I am in agreement, the game should (and will in time) do more with less.
The man stated a simple fact: the games visuals are so far down the ladder of "technology" that there is no reason other than borked programming to make it run slow on an even moderately modern computer.
Since you understand "technology" so well, how about you address the mans' (pstruths') statement/question?
If you can do that, post again.
Edit: seems QueenofFools explained it in one sentence, and I quote: "Some of the performance issues are due to issues between Crystal Space and PlaneShift and both teams work to address them as such."
<modedit>
Talad promotes uncivil behavior.
Perhaps experimentation with such plugins could be limited to the test server if there are known problems with them?
Talad promotes uncivil behavior.
The average player doesn't give a crap about that stuff. The devs want to have stuff to brag about. The players just want to have fun.
Ofcause PlaneShift is still in alpha/beta whatever modus.
So I actualy would expect the development team of PlaneShift to try out and use new features of the "CrystalSpace 3D engine" as they come available. Hopefully benefitting the final release of PlaneShift.
When you have a big project like this, I imagine you can't always iron out all the possible bugs on a test server. I know a lot of commercial software that is realesed with bugs (Vista?). Also on the main PS-server there will be more people playing and doing things that the dev-team didn't think of doing. In so doing (by sheer bigger number of actions) finding more bugs.
Some stuff/bugs enoy me some times in PlaneShift, but I know I'm playing a game that is in development. At least I know people are working on it, and I can always ask about any issue on the PS-forums or on IRC ( irc.freenode.net #planeshift )
War does not determine who is Right just who is Left.