Colin hints at new WvW maps in the official forums

[Raye]

It’s worth noting, while they said we’re not working on new versions of the home maps currently, they didn’t say anything about new maps in general…..

Also I’ll throw out that the work our WvW guys are doing on culling and progression systems are extremely large, these are feature systems unto themselves. For example a lot of the culling work requires re-building almost entirely the way our game compiles, loads, and handles assets in general. For many companies, this task could literally years, we’re trying to pull it off in a matter of months, these guys are rock stars.

I know some of you got the impression there isn’t much development going on here, but I was to clarify you couldn’t be more wrong. There is a boat load of very serious WvW being done, much of it they discussed in this interview. Major features require many month long projects, our hope is you’ll start seeing the major fruits of those labors starting in our February update.

You’ll hear more details from our WvW team once stuff gets closer to finalized and tested, but we think you’re going to be thrilled with the stuff that’s coming. As an old DAoC fan, I’m freaking stoked about what these guys are doing.

Source

[Fluffball]

I guess by no new home maps he means BLs?

I'd love to see variations on EB. That map is very statemate-y.

[Alaris]

What do they mean by the culling work. I am not familiar with the term. Also, there's an interview?

[Fluffball]

Culling = invisible army that people talk about in WvW. Apparently it's worse if you don't have a good computer. I rarely have issues with it, but I think it's inherent to the way they built the game. The interview is the first post of the thread. I tried to watch it when it was first posted, but the beginning is unbearable and you can't fast forward.

[Alaris]

Ah right.

Yeah that's happened to me, rarely but still. And my computer is pretty recent.

I can imagine this would be bad for a lot of people.

[Raye]

Culling is one of the main reasons I don't enjoy WvW actually. When someone fights me and I die, I take it like a bauss. Someone bested me, good for them, I need to improve. When I get killed by thin air only to see 10 people appear as they're walking away from my corpse it is annoying as hell.

(I don't have a bad computer fyi. But I also get horrible loading times in LA whereas some folks get 10 second load times)

[kokabel]

I have issues with culling too, and my machine is pretty beastly. It has no trouble loading all the people when it does load them - suddenly what I thought was 2 people turns into 20 and it all goes horribly wrong.

[Alaris]

It's probably more related to lag now that I think about it. Loading time could be a factor, but lag is probably more at blame most of the time. Or server load.

Wow, I don't really know where the bottleneck is on this one.

[shawn]

They've already explained what causes it. Somewhere. Nice long dev post on the whole thing.


e: like so-

Hi all,
For a variety of performance reasons we limit the number of characters that are reported to any given game client. This report limiting (or culling, as it’s also been referred to) is generally distance based and limits both the amount of bandwidth and client side processing (rendering, etc.) required to play the game. Ideally this shouldn’t be something that you notice happening as characters will simply fade in when they’re “far” away from you. In the best case this happens far enough away that even if you’re looking right at them when it happens it isn’t too visually distracting. Unfortunately, there are some situations in the game in which this setup doesn’t work as well as we’d like and it seems that those situations come up in WvW rather more often than in other parts of the game. The higher player densities that we see in large battles are an obvious example of where this system goes awry. If only the nearest N characters are reported to you but there are N+100 characters within effective battle range then many of those characters will be invisible. There’s never a great time to be dealing with invisible characters, but I think that it’s fair to say that during a large battle is one of the worst times.

In WvW one of the things that we see exacerbating the issue is this: From the moment a character is first reported to your client to the first moment that your client is able to render it a non-zero amount of time passes. During this time your client is doing things like loading textures from disk, which can be (at least in computer terms) fairly slow what with all that accessing of spinning, physical storage media. So that means that a character who is moving towards you can potentially appear first at a much closer point even than the one at which they were reported because, of course, they were still moving during that load time.
MajorKong’s screenshot doesn’t immediately look like the situation I just described so it may be that there’s some kind of bug lurking in there as well. We will certainly be looking into that possibility.

That was a lot of detail but really I’m posting to let you know that we’re aware of the issues associated with invisible enemies and we’re working on finding both the root causes and effective solutions. I understand that these experiences can be quite frustrating but please rest assured that we do care and we are working on improving the experience.

Thank you for reporting your issues here on the forums and for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve them.
Also, MajorKong, that really was a great screenshot even if it does show a bug and bugs make me sad.

I’d like to take a moment to briefly address a few of the points of serious contention that have come up in this thread and hopefully clear up any confusion:

This is a multi-faceted issue that involves both reporting from the server to the client and client asset loading. Much like a super villain team-up these two parts of the issue are combining to make an unpleasant situation worse. We’re pursuing both parts of the issue and hope to see incremental improvements as we get fixes in and tested.

The reporting issue is really all about performance tradeoffs. Every decision that the server makes about what to report to which client consumes resources, as does the act of reporting itself. These resources (server CPU, network bandwidth, etc.) are finite and are the same ones that are used by every other aspect of WvW as well. How we make use of those resources determines the number of players we can support in a given map and how smooth the simulation feels. The system that we have in place now constitutes an attempt to strike a balance between a perfect simulation that handles all the details and makes them available to every client immediately and a simulation that supports a reasonably large number of players while maintaining smooth performance under most gameplay situations. This is a true dilemma because we really want to achieve both of those goals completely and simultaneously but that just isn’t possible at the moment.

Could we throw more hardware at the problem? Maybe, but the servers that we’re running on now are Serious Business™ and simply buying faster CPUs likely wouldn’t gain us even a linear increase in performance. With today’s hardware I believe that we’re likely to gain far more improvement from code changes than we would from slightly faster CPUs. As you might imagine the way that we manage client/server communication is pretty well core to the way our game works so making changes to that system is a tricky affair that must be undertaken with great care and much testing. Further, since we can’t really create any more resources (CPU, network) every substantial change involves making a hard decision about performance, scale, and completeness of the various aspects of Gw2. Some of the most robust, correct, and appealing solutions to this issue are also the ones that will take the longest to implement correctly, thus adding response time into the mix of factors we need to consider. In a situation like this, sadly, there are no easy answers. That said, we’re evaluating possible changes to reporting even now and are committed to making WvW into the best experience we can.

The client issue relates to the way that we load assets when preparing to display characters. WvW hits this more than most other parts of the game because players are pretty much the most complicated characters that we have and, especially at higher levels, they tend to be quite varied (so things like texture caching don’t help us as much as they might elsewhere in the game). WvW tends to have much higher player densities than the rest of the game so that’s why we see these issues coming up in WvW more than elsewhere. This asset loading issue will be influenced by client hardware (kind of like saying water is wet, I know) but we see this issue crop up on even high end systems so it’s clear that hardware is not the major determining factor. So, while better hardware may improve the situation a bit it won’t make the client issue go away completely. At this point we have a solid repro of the client issue and we’re aggressively pursuing fixes.

All of us who have worked on WvW (and many of those at ArenaNet who have not) are deeply invested in making WvW the best it can be. I personally have dedicated over a year of my life to developing this game type. Other have spent even longer. I know it can be terribly frustrating to deal with these issues (I’m a gamer too, I’ve been there!). I also know that frustration can make it tempting to believe that our silence on the forums means we’re ignoring issues with the game. Please believe me when I tell you that is simply not the case. We must always balance our time on the forums with our time spent working on the game. If we go silent for a while it’s generally because we’re busy working hard so that the next time we post we can have something substantial to tell you.

TL;DR: The issue is real, we’re aware of it, we’re working on fixes/improvements, the fixes/improvements are complicated and I can’t provide you an ETA.

Keep fighting the good fight and we’ll be back to let you know when we can share more details.

Hi mcl,

Thanks for pointing that out! It was my intention to be clearer on that point but that seems to have gotten lost in my attempt to acknowledge that better hardware is better.

So, let me be very clear: better hardware is better and will generally allow the game to look prettier but the issue with asset loading is not hardware dependent so buying an uber gaming rig won’t really help with the invisible player issue at this time.

[shawn]

more stuff on culling, which maybe could have used its own thread, but meh

Thank you, Grit, for posting that link. It points to a post in which I describe the culling issue in some detail and discuss a few of the issues involved with changing culling. An even more in depth explanation of what culling is can be found here https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...e/4#post356817 (be sure to read both that post and the next – my description exceeded the post size limit).

As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:
1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)
Until all three of those issues have been dealt with we can’t turn culling off because doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.

Ok, now let’s talk about what progress we’ve made!
Issue #1 was the easiest to deal with because we can basically just throw money at the problem. When we first started down the road toward removing culling from WvW I took a bunch of bandwidth measurements and then went to the executives and said, essentially, “Hey, if we disable culling our network traffic will increase by X%. Are we ok with that?”. The answer I got was a clear and unambiguous “yes!” So issue #1 isn’t a problem after all.

Issue #2 is a little harder. We need to ensure that folks with a min-spec network connection won’t be overwhelmed by the data we send them and we obviously can’t just buy a better connection for all of our players. So we put our heads together and came up with a plan to reduce the bandwidth required for WvW (and Gw2 in general) as much as possible. Those changes are in testing now and will be rolled out as soon as we’re convinced that they’re solid. Assuming we’re able to get everything working the way we’d like (and I’m fairly confident that we will) then this will address issue #2.

So that leaves us with issue #3: client performance. Some time ago the WvW team acquired an engine programmer who is focused 100% on this issue (and he is being assisted by another engine programmer who isn’t officially on the WvW team). They’re working on some really fantastic optimizations and engine modifications which we hope will allow even min-spec clients to render all the players on a WvW map. We’ll be talking in more detail about the specific changes they’re making when things get just a little more nailed down, but I can say right now that I’m very impressed with the work they’ve done already.

So that’s where we are. Engine programmers are working their magic even now and we’re testing the networking changes that will be required. I believe that our goal of removing culling from WvW is achievable and I’m looking forward to the day that I can announce to you all that we’ve pulled it off!