Fixing culling inWvW

ANET Dev talks about fixing culling in WvW, very interesting read,this is how i imagined as a solution for the rendering problems in WvW, but this appears to be just a temporary fix and that they intend to get rid of culling altogether in the future. looking forward to this anet!

Habib:

Hi all, I think a little more explanation is in order.

First, let’s call the culling system that we’re switching to “affinity culling” just to make it easier to talk about. Under affinity culling the system handles enemies and allies independently. This means that the maximum number of allies that you can see under affinity culling is 1/2 the maximum number of characters (combined enemy & ally) that you could see under the original culling. Ditto for enemies. In exchange for that cost he benefit that we get is that running with (or through, or past) a large group of allies (e.g. a guild) won’t prevent you from seeing the enemies who are closest to you.

During the initial trial of affinity culling we found that a number of players reported asset loading issues that were highlighted by culling. Any time that your client is aware of another character at all (dot on the map, targetable in world, nameplate is visible, etc.) then culling is no longer a factor because that character has already been reported to your client. In that case if you can’t see the character the issue is one of asset load time. The fallback model feature which is shipping this month directly addresses those issues by providing a cached model to show immediately when the character is reported to the client.

The order of operations looks like this:
1) Character X enters player’s visibility
2) <delay due to the mechanics of culling>
3) Server reports character X to client
4) <delay due to asset load time>
5) Character X full model is visible on-screen to the player

Using fallback models we end up with this instead
1) Character X enters player’s visibility
2) <delay due to the mechanics of culling>
3) Server reports character X to client
4a) Character X fallback model is visible on-screen to the player
4b) <delay due to asset load time>
5) Character X full model is visible on-screen to the player

As you can see we’ve made the asset load delay unimportant (or at least less important) and allowed the player to be aware of character X sooner (in some cases quite a bit sooner).

The combination of affinity culling and fallback models provides a better experience than affinity culling alone. Even so, the affinity culling is not intended to be our last change to the system, but rather to hold players over until we can make more extensive updates to the system (which take time to implement and test). In future updates we’ll be making changes in an effort to eliminate the delay due to culling (step 2 above) and to tell each client about character X as soon as the server decides they have become visible again. We hope to do this by removing culling completely and preserving client performance though a mix of network and engine optimizations, the more extensive use of fallback models, and sundry wizardry.

As I’ve said in the past our ultimate goal is to remove culling and we’re pushing hard to make that happen. This update represents the first steps in that direction and much of what it accomplishes is to lay the groundwork for our upcoming updates. The next few months are an exciting time for us on the WvW team and we’re very excited about the changes are coming.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/January-WvW-culling-loading-changes/page/2#post1275878