Halfgeek's Recent Forum Activity

  • Very few developers test with Intel iGPU in mind.

    Lets hope your report to Intel is looked into seriously and a driver update can resolve it.

  • Re: EA success.

    I only know of a few games that were a hit during EA in recent times: Neo Scavenger & Prison Architect. There's a bunch of others that were successful also but its true, its very rare these days given how much bad rep EA has got.

    I've purchased TNP to support you, but I don't have much free time to play games these days. It's definitely on my big list of games to catch up on (Divinity, Dragon Age Inq are the big ones coming up next!).

    I think TNP will do really well once its live-launched, so good luck and all the best!

  • DARTH Crusher

    Thanks, II is going to be lots better, luck willing.

    atomoso

    Thanks for the feedback.

    I haven't fully experimented with the parallax dust clouds yet, I'm re-using the ones I had for Star Nomad, which is just a grey/black cloud on 20-40% opacity to generate depth with parallax. Will throw in fancy colors or more refined patches later.

    The background is quite sharp (2048 x 2048) but once the layers are on top (in systems that are meant to be nebulas) it does get washed out.

    This is without the dust layers, its pretty sharp and loses the sense of depth with the additional parallax layers. I'll look to use colored dust patches for non nebula systems so that it gives the impression of depth when movement is occurring. Planets are place holder for code. Only final art are ships.

    [attachment=1:5s0ojjs9][/attachment:5s0ojjs9]

    And here's without the top parallax dust layer, ships are clearer & more vibrant but the background is toned down as well as retaining 2 deep parallax layer for depth. This would be most systems. Nebula systems have an additional layer on top of ships.

    [attachment=0:5s0ojjs9][/attachment:5s0ojjs9]

    I don't like having a stark naked BG its just too distracting. I prefer it to be very dark or faded so the focus is on ships.

  • Why do you need a lawyer?

    If its more than 5K in the bank (for you personally) then get business license. Pretty simple, no?

  • Just an idea. You could spread out the processor load further by doing something like this: instead of updating all the enemies every time interval just update half one interval and the other half the next. Or you could spread it further if needed. That would reduce the amount of stalling when looping over a large number of enemies.

    Thanks. I sorta have that currently, faster units (drones & fighters) are on a different timer branch that updates more frequently than slower ones. Its required to keep them fluid since the distance & angle checks to determine their movement has to be fired more frequently else they collide before evading.

    I enjoy the challenge to optimize so its fun working with the limitations of 1 logic thread.

  • TiAm

    Lunatrap

    I just went through the ship AI to optimize it, moving everything possible (without affecting the fluid nature of combat) under [every 0.1, 0.25 or 0.5 seconds] to calculate instead of prior where it would do it every frame.

    The results are amazing. Peaking around 50% thread usage, right at my goal.

    Ofc if it were multi-thread, one could scale up to enormous fleet battles, entirely Gratuitous! But for now, I am satisfied!

    ps. For the topic of NW 12, it start to stutter. I had to revert back to 10.5 for it to be smooth.

    pss. It was a messy install of NW over the old version (there's too many to test hehe). I've just uninstall it entirely and put back on the newly released NW 12, it's smooth, no problems.

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  • ~800 col checks per tic isn't that high. It's definitely due to all the other AI and events.

    And yes, there's limitations. One needs to be very careful to optimize it. If the game is too complex in scope, best to use another engine with multi-threading support.

  • i for one, am very dissapointed with tthis, we live are in 2015, and only single thread cpu usage?

    Whenver i see the community seying that c2 can make big games i guess they mean big games with ugly graphics and goombas for AI

    my game too has complex AI, and extremely good graphics, but now after learning abou the cpu thing, im very worried. i assumed that the runtime will use full use of the CPU....not so little.

    about the NW.js well im going to try it, but i dount is going to work :/

    You will just have to optimize and more optimize. Good luck with it.

  • TiAm I noticed there seems to be a cliff of sorts, more units than that and it quickly eats up CPU.

    I'll have to do an optimization run through a few times, currently I'm very generous with it, all the calculations are done per tick, see what I can move to every 0.1 or more seconds instead.

    It's a challenge though, getting efficient & effective AI for mass RTS style combat. Was hoping newer Chromium versions may improve this a bit but I saw no difference in performance between Node 10.5 to now.

  • BF4 is very well threaded, it will use up to 8 threads so fully using most CPUs.

    C2 is single threaded. 1/4 of your CPU is being used if you see 100% CPU usage.

  • I know this is a bit OTT, but in that stress test of yours, what is chewing up most of your resources? Cols? A.I.? Draw calls?

    Draw calls = ~5%.

    Using GPU-Z, my GPU usage is ~20%. Radeon 7950 (pretty mid-range these days).

    Col isn't much, peaks around 700/tic, well below stress test col levels.

    The bulk of the CPU use is for AI for target selection, priorities, movement for each ship (range, optimal firing solution, left/right shield facing against attackers, when to use missiles etc), drones & seeking weapons.

    I have to limit the fleet sizes in encounters due to it being single threaded, since my CPU is a desktop i5-3570K, using more than 50% of that thread means a lot of people on notebooks would lag as their CPUs are lower clocked.

    This definitely limits C2 to smaller scope games with fewer active AI &or simplistic combat.

    If I remove drones (~50 drones), that same fleet battle peaks at 50% single thread load and ~35-40% average, well within acceptable range for it to run well on a range of setups. The problem is it loses the sense of epic-ness without hordes of drones. Can't have carriers without drones either. :/

  • No stutters or jank, Chromium 41 is good. But I get no difference in CPU usage in my stress test.

    This is pure logic bottleneck, not GPU or fill-rate, my GPU is ~20% loaded. Draw calls are ~5% of the CPU usage. The rest are all used by the AI & combat simulation. Peak 97% CPU usage. It sucks to be single-threaded in 2015.

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Halfgeek

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