Combat Effect Changes

RinaldoGandolphi

Zaldan wrote: »

lol talk about grasping at straws to help server performance, I didn't realise persistent effects were there just to look pretty

They are not grasping at straws, if you understood the limitations of DirectX 11 and how its still serialized, and the multi-threaded function of it has never really worked( your CPU can fill a buffer of jobs for your GPU to render, but its still serialized) you would understand how much of a positive effect this will have on performance.

this is the right decision, there should be no toggle.

DirectX 11 simply can not handle or render so many particle effects on the screen at the same time due to it still being serialized. DirectX 11 was a big step up from DirectX 9 where only one thread could talk to the GPU, but DirectX 11 still has limitations. Why do you think ESO is so CPU bound? its not all because of client side calculations, a good bit of it is CPU Draw calls.

Even on a GTX 1070 and a i7-7700k you can see client side FPS fps drops from 60 to 30-35 just by a bunch of people in town spamming abilties....because your CPU has to draw call all that nonsense, and since DirectX 11 is still serialized and isn't exactly a great multi-threaded renderer this is what we got.

AMD designed Mantle for exactly the reasons I am talking about.(to make up for DirectX 11 shortcomings) Mantle allowed the CPU to send as many jobs as it wants to GPU and removed that serialization aspect allowing to process significantly more draw calls per second. This ended up forcing Microsoft to adopt much of it into DirectX 12 with AMD help, and AMD handed over the Mantle code to the Kronos Group to be the next version of OpenGL later named Vulcan.

If ESO has no plans to move to a modern API that can handle all the draw calls they want for all these effects, then they need to cull back on the unnecessary draw calls that impact peoples FPS, impact peoples ability to see enemy/bad things on the ground, etc...and you do that by telling the server, and making the client not process friendly graphical effects that are not important thus you reduce the amount of draw calls the client needs to process by a large margin, while also reducing what your server needs to send to tell the client to draw.

Since it seems ESO has no plans to move to DirectX 12 or OpenGL Vulcan, they need to move forward with this with no toggle. As someone who understands the limitations of DirectX 11, this has NEVER worked right in ESO, and its simply unfeasible....when you got 12-24 people all casting Wall of elements, Ash Cloud, Liquid Lighting, Healing, etc...its impossible for DirectX 11 to render all those draw calls in a reasonable time...its situations like this is exactly why AMD developed Mantle in this first place, and is exactly why Microsoft later developed DirectX 12 to handle these problems.

Good job Wrobel and company on taking the time to optimize this. I know sometimes folks have big plans, and you should never lose sight of your dreams, maybe one day you folks will implement DirectX 12 or Vulcan and can really push the limit on these sort of things.

Until then, thank you for recognizing how you can best improve performance while still keeping the game fun. I appreciate your work on this, and many players with middle of the road systems will be very pleased not seeing their FPS plummet in areas where players are just spamming stuff for no reason(like the wayshrines around Reapers March and Stormhaven for example)

My reasons for no toggle is because:

1. With a toggle the server is still going to have to send commands telling the clients to draw those effects(Even if they have the toggle off client side)
2. There is no real good way to tell who has the toggle on and who has it off and asking the server to differentiate between those who have it on or off and only send commands to draw to clients that have it on just adds another layer of complexity. Simply put it makes no sense to implement, and is something that has a very good chance of causing rendering issues down the road that will force you to spend times and money on fixing.
3. Having them universally off means the system is much simpler to troubleshoot in the case an effect here or there doesn't render they don't have this conglomerate of stuff going on in the background saying" well this client is unchecked so it can render" but this client is checked so it shouldn't render stuff.

continuing with the same stuff we have no just means performance keeps getting worse. this is a step in the right direction, and it needs to happen.

jkolb2030

It seems like the community is on the same page with this idea of hidden AoE effects...

If the goal is to simply fix and combat lag/frame drops, i think ZoS should be exploring other options first. My support to this idea can be found in all of the comments since the start of this thread.

Disabling the visuals on other players AoE abilities strips the game of a layer that doesnt need to be taken away. I don't want to go around the trials and zones seeing my teammates throwing out bottomless animations with no effects, or seeing mobs fall to their death around a sorc in an invisible hurricane. Nor do I want to be running around in PvP and walk into an invisible destro ulti because the only visual queue I have for such a strong skill is some half invisible "column" that is supposed to signify the center point of the skill.

Bottom line, this change seems more like a lazy bandaid fix for server/frame stability than it does intuitive towards fixing a real issue. A toggle option should be the only way something like this gets released.

aToken

I deafinelty feel like this should be an option in the video settings. I agree that in a pve raid 8 destro ults going off lags the game terribly. But at the same time players do need to be able to see what their team members are doing. If this were to be a setting in the video options i think we would all be happy.

Aerithone

People, dont forget about customisable telegraphs for enemy AND friendly abilities.
You won`t see half of the particles and effects of abilities, but u WILL see HUGE GREEN OR RED CIRCLE.
Is it not enough?

maboleth

I like to see what others are doing (abilities, ultis, caltrops...) That's also part of the learning experience and visual/combat experience overall. Cutting anyone's experience should be minimal and optional.

I'm not totally against it, but it should be optional for everyone that has performance/clarity issues. I don't, so I wouldn't want to have it enabled by default, without being able to switch it off.

So +1 for toggle option. That's a must, as far as I'm concerned.

Anne_Firehawk

@Wrobel

Not gonna lie, as a longterm player, I've seen many different patches, of which none of being so promising like this one. If you guys make this a toggle option and find a solution for the Torugs Pact/Oblivion Damage-Madness you actually made the best *** patch this game ever had

jkolb2030

Aerithone wrote: »

People, dont forget about customisable telegraphs for enemy AND friendly abilities.
You won`t see half of the particles and effects of abilities, but u WILL see HUGE GREEN OR RED CIRCLE.
Is it not enough?

I'm not sure how this would be of any help? If they are hiding the abilities, I don't think they would still put a telegraph on said abilities.. That would defeat the purpose... Instead of having abilities show up that you could identify by their visuals, now you'd have a clump of colored circles on the ground?

What I'm really saying is... If the skill is one on the list provided above and is visually hidden, so would any circle telegraph associated with it. So no, it is not enough.

Docmandu

+1 on the toggle.. friendly effects are just as important as enemy ones imho.

If it provides an FPS boost for some, the toggle is the best option... but yet another item for Q&A to test against.

evedgebah

I would reiterate a comment I made (and agreed with others) about having a persistent color call-out in lieu of full visuals, and as a halfway point between full graphics and no persistent visual.

I'd also like to thank @Wrobel for chiming in and indicating he's reading feedback.

apostate9

MercTheMage wrote: »

I couldn't care less about how this affects pvp, but it NEEDS to happen for trials.

People not you (cuz not all about you)...do care.

Capt_Morgan

Aerithone wrote: »

People, dont forget about customisable telegraphs for enemy AND friendly abilities.
You won`t see half of the particles and effects of abilities, but u WILL see HUGE GREEN OR RED CIRCLE.
Is it not enough?

Tested it last night with my wife. It's literally invisible... No animation, nothing. Certain skills like the destro ultimate still show up. Only muted. Healing springs stoll shows, but offense ground dots and certain player buffs... Nada, in my opinion this should be a trial only implementation, or even cyrodil if it is really that necessary. Four man content, and bgs. This is really stupid. Made the game a whole lot less visually appealing running through a couple dungeons duo on the PTS. This is so not necessary for open world or smalls scale combat.

Anne_Firehawk

Capt_Morgan wrote: »

Aerithone wrote: »

People, dont forget about customisable telegraphs for enemy AND friendly abilities.
You won`t see half of the particles and effects of abilities, but u WILL see HUGE GREEN OR RED CIRCLE.
Is it not enough?

Tested it last night with my wife. It's literally invisible... No animation, nothing. Certain skills like the destro ultimate still show up. Only muted. Healing springs stoll shows, but offense ground dots and certain player buffs... Nada, in my opinion this should be a trial only implementation, or even cyrodil if it is really that necessary. Four man content, and bgs. This is really stupid. Made the game a whole lot less visually appealing running through a couple dungeons duo on the PTS. This is so not necessary for open world or smalls scale combat.

It should be a toggle option so everyone can decide themselves how they want to play the game

Ankael07

What's the point of having a game without server issues if its gonna look like Runescape at this point? Might as well remove the enemy effects too and replace everything with green/red telegraphs with ability names floating around

Sordidfairytale

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

1. With a toggle the server is still going to have to send commands telling the clients to draw those effects(Even if they have the toggle off client side)

While I understand and agree with everything you are saying, the game server still has to send that info to the client and allow the client to decide to draw it if it is:
A. An ally interaction (shards, ritual, etc.)
B. Enemy effect

And it still has to animate the launch animation, so it's very likely that the data that an AOE has been summoned by your client in a certain location is still being sent to my client by the server. So I don't think a toggle will be much of an additional tax on the server side, if at all.

rudimentxb14_ESO

I thoroughly do not like this idea.

I will be very unhappy if something like this goes live.

as others said, if you feel the need to add this terrible idea, make it a toggle.

I have absolutely no issues with any of the animations we currently have.

newtinmpls

Erraln wrote: »

at the very least 'ultimate centered on this flag' would be a signal worth recreating. .

Quoted for being a really potentially workable middle ground.

newtinmpls

Meey wrote: »

Some group effects need to be seen to play effectively, please let us toggle the effects.

Or maybe SUPER simplify (see above)

maboleth

@Wrobel Thanks for your interest in this matter. The whole PTS patch is alright and progress in the right direction, but this particular issue is not.

This will visually impact the game for all. It's 2017, not 2005. I really don't see a point to cut the effects for everyone. For me this is the same as any other visual settings that control the amount/quality of graphics. I keep everything at max, but I understand some cannot run the game like that and need those effects turned off and sliders taken down.

So, please make Combat Effects as a toggle or a slider. Even if that means that is not enabled by default.

Elsterchen

Well, thank you... my rune focus goes off the PVP bar as well, if my allies don't see it how could they use it?

This is a good idea but at the moment not well thought through.

Zer0oo

How about reducing the effects of allies aoe skills to an absolute minimum just enough that you actual know where and what skill it is?

Doctordarkspawn

Enodoc wrote: »

If these changes are to increase server performance (i.e., latency), a toggle wouldn't help. When toggled off, the server would still have to perform the calculations for where everything is so that is can be shown in case anyone has it toggled on. If these changes are to improve client performance (i.e., FPS), then a toggle would be fine.

So essentially what your telling me is they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to forcibly update the games engine in Thieves guild and it's coming back to bite them.

I cant help but feel vindicated for stating that had no meaning at the time. Game should have remained direct x 9, maybe we wouldn''t have these issues.

TheHsN

Wrobel wrote: »

To give everyone a bit more detail, you will still see the animations and initial cast FX of the ability to help give some feedback as to where your allies are casting their abilities. For example, with Caltrops, you still see the ball of spikes fly to the correct location and explode. With Elemental Storm, you'll still see a column of fire/frost/shock at the specified location.

We removed the persistent effect because it could be difficult to parse what was happening when many players activated them at the same time. We also wanted to keep the spells looking and feeling awesome so the caster of an effect always sees its full glory.

More detailed feedback on global combat clarity and on an ability-by-ability basis would be much appreciated if you guys could check this out on the PTS, both in large and small groups.

Feedback on the toggle duly noted.

I started to like you:)...

CaffeinatedMayhem

JarlUlfric wrote: »

MercTheMage wrote: »

I couldn't care less about how this affects pvp, but it NEEDS to happen for trials.

It still needs to be seen for PVE. If a raid lead calls ultimates or for mitigation, how are teammates able to see where? They can't.

Um, S'rendarr? Raid Notifier? Yes, they can.

Meey

Any updates on this topic? @Wrobel can you give us more information why this is changed and give an an update on the toggle option?

Is disabling only a improvement on client side or also on server side?

Sandman929

@Wrobel
Maybe there should be a little less focus on the "feeling awesome" part of these massive AoE's. If the server can't handle stacked AoE effects (bravo on creating the Destro ulti BTW, great for performance), maybe the abilities need to be looked at to tone down the fireworks and perhaps make the game a little more about single target damage rather than ball groups of AoE spamming?
Just a thought.

0utLaw

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

Zaldan wrote: »

lol talk about grasping at straws to help server performance, I didn't realise persistent effects were there just to look pretty

They are not grasping at straws, if you understood the limitations of DirectX 11 and how its still serialized, and the multi-threaded function of it has never really worked( your CPU can fill a buffer of jobs for your GPU to render, but its still serialized) you would understand how much of a positive effect this will have on performance.

this is the right decision, there should be no toggle.

DirectX 11 simply can not handle or render so many particle effects on the screen at the same time due to it still being serialized. DirectX 11 was a big step up from DirectX 9 where only one thread could talk to the GPU, but DirectX 11 still has limitations. Why do you think ESO is so CPU bound? its not all because of client side calculations, a good bit of it is CPU Draw calls.

Even on a GTX 1070 and a i7-7700k you can see client side FPS fps drops from 60 to 30-35 just by a bunch of people in town spamming abilties....because your CPU has to draw call all that nonsense, and since DirectX 11 is still serialized and isn't exactly a great multi-threaded renderer this is what we got.

AMD designed Mantle for exactly the reasons I am talking about.(to make up for DirectX 11 shortcomings) Mantle allowed the CPU to send as many jobs as it wants to GPU and removed that serialization aspect allowing to process significantly more draw calls per second. This ended up forcing Microsoft to adopt much of it into DirectX 12 with AMD help, and AMD handed over the Mantle code to the Kronos Group to be the next version of OpenGL later named Vulcan.

If ESO has no plans to move to a modern API that can handle all the draw calls they want for all these effects, then they need to cull back on the unnecessary draw calls that impact peoples FPS, impact peoples ability to see enemy/bad things on the ground, etc...and you do that by telling the server, and making the client not process friendly graphical effects that are not important thus you reduce the amount of draw calls the client needs to process by a large margin, while also reducing what your server needs to send to tell the client to draw.

Since it seems ESO has no plans to move to DirectX 12 or OpenGL Vulcan, they need to move forward with this with no toggle. As someone who understands the limitations of DirectX 11, this has NEVER worked right in ESO, and its simply unfeasible....when you got 12-24 people all casting Wall of elements, Ash Cloud, Liquid Lighting, Healing, etc...its impossible for DirectX 11 to render all those draw calls in a reasonable time...its situations like this is exactly why AMD developed Mantle in this first place, and is exactly why Microsoft later developed DirectX 12 to handle these problems.

Good job Wrobel and company on taking the time to optimize this. I know sometimes folks have big plans, and you should never lose sight of your dreams, maybe one day you folks will implement DirectX 12 or Vulcan and can really push the limit on these sort of things.

Until then, thank you for recognizing how you can best improve performance while still keeping the game fun. I appreciate your work on this, and many players with middle of the road systems will be very pleased not seeing their FPS plummet in areas where players are just spamming stuff for no reason(like the wayshrines around Reapers March and Stormhaven for example)

My reasons for no toggle is because:

1. With a toggle the server is still going to have to send commands telling the clients to draw those effects(Even if they have the toggle off client side)
2. There is no real good way to tell who has the toggle on and who has it off and asking the server to differentiate between those who have it on or off and only send commands to draw to clients that have it on just adds another layer of complexity. Simply put it makes no sense to implement, and is something that has a very good chance of causing rendering issues down the road that will force you to spend times and money on fixing.
3. Having them universally off means the system is much simpler to troubleshoot in the case an effect here or there doesn't render they don't have this conglomerate of stuff going on in the background saying" well this client is unchecked so it can render" but this client is checked so it shouldn't render stuff.

continuing with the same stuff we have no just means performance keeps getting worse. this is a step in the right direction, and it needs to happen.

/\

THIS!

RainfeatherUK

Gutting the games animations volume is sure going to make it look loads of fun. Performance may improve, the playerbase of people drawn to shiny effects and 'cool' factor not so much. Better hike up those cash shop prices in prep for the exodus.

And yeah. The toggle is pointless considering the method being intended for this fix.

JarlUlfric

Now that Horns of the Reach has been out for a few days, how do you feel about this change? Do you think it's worth it? Do you think there are problems that still need to be hashed out? Personally in pvp and in pve I would love to have these back. There have been a few times where I haven't been able to identify friendly ground AoEs and it's affected our ability to do content.

IAVITNI

There are plenty of solid suggestions to make this work in pve.

As a PvP main I really don't like this change and I spend most of my time solo. Knowing is half the battle and this change takes away a significant amount of combat info.

Cyrodil in ps4 is an absolute zergs fest, and you've made it impossible to play solo. I have literally fought people who will chase me across half the map, snare/cc me and avoid actual combat until the zergs catches up even if I run away from objectives. The only way to win a fight is basically to out zerg or pray you catch potatoes.

Zergs tactics are fairly simple amongst the average group so it all comes down to numbers. In 1T You'd have 2 zergs fighting, now it's 3-4 24 man groups going at it and that's a minimum number. Incentivize these zergs to split up. I'm all for group play but when you have 2-3 24 man zergs from the same alliance seiging it requires 2-3 zergs from the opposing alliance to defend. You have lag because half an alliance are all dropping skills in one area. You've incentivized group play to the point where it's more effective to drop as many aoe s at once then learn to actually outplay your opponent. This is leading to the best tactic to having as many zergs running side by side as possible. Sol i almost never lagg. If im in a group i spam executes because idk whats happening from all the lagg.

Tl;Dr
Give zergs a reason to run separately. Having +4 24 man groups all dropping AoEs on front door of Ash is what is causing lag, not skill animations themselves.

Enough bandaids. Fix the real problem.

Maole1989

IAVITNI wrote: »

Tl;Dr
Give zergs a reason to run separately. Having +4 24 man groups all dropping AoEs on front door of Ash is what is causing lag, not skill animations themselves.

Enough bandaids. Fix the real problem.

This is how I see it too. I used to play in Vivec and you could always tell by the lag when a zerg was about to ride over the hill. Since switching to Shor, I hardly lag now. I play on PS4 so it will be interesting to see how the new skill effect changes will go.