Comments on: Take Baby Steps

By: Tzing

Tzing — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:57:22 +0000

Good article. Totally corresponds to my vision of this subject. There’s no need to try to swallow an elephant. Maybe some mouse stake first.

By: Talyn

Talyn — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:48:20 +0000

Just from what I experience it mostly seems to be an issue of the engine not bothering to pre-cache textures, etc. but waiting until said texture, model, whatever is actually within visible rendering range and *then* loading everything. The server needs to tell the client what is slightly (guess someone needs to define “slightly” for this purpose) outside the client’s visible range and get things pre-loaded before they just *POP* on-screen and our pc’s are brought to their knees with hard-drive chugging, texture and post-processing effects applied, and so forth all at once.

DDO was horrible about it too until the last engine update, now everything flies.

By: Babs

Babs — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 21:39:01 +0000

Ack..hi Eric!! /sign

By: Sandra

Sandra — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:05:33 +0000

Last I heard it was called the Turbine Engine, but that was some time ago. One thing to keep in mind is that ‘engine’ for most single-player games is very heavily client-oriented, but for MMO games ‘engine’ also includes (and is sometimes primarily) the server side of things.

Babs: Thanks, but Eric wrote this one. :>

By: Babs

Babs — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:10:40 +0000

Yep, book 11 is a bust for me in LOTRO as well. Fully maxed everything down to absolute minimum, and I still can’t win the damned horse race in Bree. Ah, well.

I’ll sign wherever on the proclamation, Sandra. Please, all you smart people…be realistic, too.

By: Yeebo

Yeebo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:20:52 +0000

Actually, whatever they did to the engine in book 11 actually borked it for a lot of users, especially those with Geoforce FX series cards. I personally had to move some of my settings from near max to minimum to get my frame rates back to what I consider acceptable. I’m too damn addicted to quit over it, but if I was any where near the fence on LoTRO it definitely would have pushed me over it. This is my first Turbine game, but the only MMO I’ve played that I thought had a worse engine was Auto Assault (and for the record, building the AA engine with physics cards that practically no-one owns in mind….utterly insane).

By: Talyn

Talyn — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:17:39 +0000

I’ll keep the subject on MMO engines but not connections. Look at Turbine’s engine (does that thing have a name?) first seen (that I recall) in AC2 which you worked on. Now we’re how many years later with DDO and now LOTRO under their belt, and the engine still chugs massively when it has to load and render any new textures. DDO recently got an update that improved this tremendously and I was really hoping they’d put that tech into the LOTRO engine in Book 11 but nope. Surely the dev team has to see this on their machines too? I’ve read countless forum posts where *that technical issue alone* has caused people to unsubscribe. Constant hitching when new textures and models pop into rendering range should have been dealt with years ago, and now they have a AAA title on their hands with the same amateur problems.