What Enfusion really means for DayZ.

[emuthreat 2837]

Beans to Pilgrim for beating a dead horse, but using a damn-fancy stick to do it.

My two cents:   ∞ ≤ grass render distance.  Problem solved.  :P

[pilgrim* 3514]

^ Emuthreat, you just said say that grass-render-distance is "greater or equal to" infinity, so do a reality check (or a virtual reality check?)
Well you aren't the first to <not-quite-understand> the concept.

DIFFERENT textures are used on the SAME object - depending on the object's distance from YOUR eyes.

Sorry - you'll just have to work this out for yourself,  It has zilch to do with how you mess with your settings at home.

xx
 

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by pilgrim*

[svisketyggeren 662]

On 1.4.2016 at 11:55 PM, lrishjake said:

 But its not really what we should be excited about when we think of .60 and Enfusion. What we should be focused on is that the introduction of Enfusion marks a rapid growth phase for the development of DayZ.

No, im more excited about dx11 and better fps. Game is already good...everything thats added in the future is just minor bonuses.

[Rags! 1966]

8 hours ago, themightylc said:

The question is why even long-time-EA-veterans have to be speculating about this. Why is this not common knowledge provided by the dev team?

It has been. Lots and lots of times. 

They've been talking for months and months about how important the Enfusion engine is and how much work it is to get it up and running and how once it's in the game, things will rapidly accelerate.

It's possible you didn't notice because half the time DayZ development is mentioned, it's a bunch of people who are asking why this game isn't releasing updates every eleven minutes and who don't understand vidya gamez err hurd ter mek.

[emuthreat 2837]

7 hours ago, pilgrim* said:

^ Emuthreat, you just said say that grass-render-distance is "greater or equal to" infinity, so do a reality check (or a virtual reality check?)
Well you aren't the first to <not-quite-understand> the concept.   While I don't claim to have any specialized training or credentials, I can firmly say that I understand what infinity is  (or rather could be). --> That thing that makes more sense to me than having infinity, and also this one guy, existing both inside and outside of it, that also made infinity, out of nothing.

DIFFERENT textures are used for the SAME object - depending on the object's distance from YOUR eyes.

Sorry - you'll just have to work this out for yourself,  It has zilch to do with how you mess with your settings at home.

xx
 

 

I'll chalk it up to the language barrier.  Sometimes I use idioms and hyperbole.  I thought the flippant nature of the last line would speak for itself.  I didn't go out of my way to use a somewhat esoteric and unnecessary symbol for no reason.  At least if the grass was set to render at greater than infinity, the program would just say no, instead of crashing from trying to do something equally as futile; like rendering millions of blades of grass beyond our physical capability to distinguish them.  Sometimes I wonder about you, Pilgrim...

Edited April 3, 2016 by emuthreat

[scriptfactory 620]

11 hours ago, emuthreat said:

Beans to Pilgrim for beating a dead horse, but using a damn-fancy stick to do it.

My two cents:   ∞ ≤ grass render distance.  Problem solved.  :P

I agree. Player render distance should be the same as grass/bush render distance. Can't see the grass? Can't see the player either...

Every player will need to have a DX11 compatible card to play the game after the new renderer is released. There is no longer a need to support players running the game on potatoes and allowing them to reduce grass rendering details to get an advantage in PvP. Want to snipe at long distances? Reduce your video resolution or upgrade your computer hardware... just like in every other FPS.

[pilgrim* 3514]

On 03/04/2016 at 8:59 AM, emuthreat said:

 Sometimes I wonder about you, Pilgrim...

DIFFERENT TEXTURES are used on the SAME object depending on the object's DISTANCE from the camera
this has nothing to do with "rendering"

ok - I've had enough tonight of explaining "simple ABC concepts" So as the good book says - "let the blind bury the deaf".
I guess the less the players know what's going on, the less they can tell if the game's playable or not. And that's as it should be.
[sorry]  

= = =

Back on topic, all you guys need to know about the engine is

- the game engine can only run the assets that are in the game
- if you want new functionality you have to create new assets for the game engine to use
- otherwise it runs legacy assets until they are replaced

xx p

Edited April 5, 2016 by pilgrim*

[St. Jimmy 1631]

1 hour ago, scriptfactory said:

I agree. Player render distance should be the same as grass/bush render distance. Can't see the grass? Can't see the player either...

Every player will need to have a DX11 compatible card to play the game after the new renderer is released. There is no longer a need to support players running the game on potatoes and allowing them to reduce grass rendering details to get an advantage in PvP. Want to snipe at long distances? Reduce your video resolution or upgrade your computer hardware... just like in every other FPS.

There's a reason why grass don't render hundreds of meters. No one can handle that and it isn't the best way to camouflage players in the distance. It's the worst way to do it performance wise. Also you can't reduce the grass render distance in DayZ. Everyone has the same forced grass distance setting. You can disable it with Terrain Detail or terrainGrid=x.xxx; in the menu and likely in the singleplayer when it comes but it is forced from the server or something. Terrain detail setting doesn't actually do anything when you're playing because it's forced.

[pilgrim* 3514]

On 02/04/2016 at 7:30 PM, lrishjake said:

Because common is never common any more unfortunately. :/

It is true that a lot of technical stuff inside the game software is difficult to describe and not interesting for non-technical players to be told about.
BUT from time to time something comes up that has an effect that can be seen by even the least technical player.

An obvious example is -  a player is in a house with a spotlight, he realizes that his spotlight shines out through the walls and makes weird lighting effects that other players can spot a mile away.
In that case it is useful to have a little non-technical explanation (as non-technical as possible) of why this is "a big problem" for the devs and why they can't just "seal up the cracks and repaint the walls so the light doesn't get out" 

Sure, it can be difficult - and programmers are USUALLY not good at non-specialist verbal communication (I've worked with them !!) but a couple of pointers are always useful, and shows good will, 
And there are other technical folk and scripters etc on the forum who can pick up on a couple of lines of explanation (just a pointer) and run with it.

Irishjake is an example of a player who has used the info and explanations he has found, and used his brain, and come out with a pretty decent run-down on what is going on.
Worth reading.
A little help from the devs, a little thought and some good questions from the forum folk, and we start to have a good idea of what is happening technically AND in the play you see in the game

instead of moans groans and ignorance 

it's kind of like in a democracy - you tend to get the Devs you deserve

xx

& "If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource."

Edited April 4, 2016 by pilgrim*

[scriptfactory 620]

34 minutes ago, St. Jimmy said:

There's a reason why grass don't render hundreds of meters. No one can handle that and it isn't the best way to camouflage players in the distance. It's the worst way to do it performance wise. Also you can't reduce the grass render distance in DayZ. Everyone has the same forced grass distance setting. You can disable it with Terrain Detail or terrainGrid=x.xxx; in the menu and likely in the singleplayer when it comes but it is forced from the server or something. Terrain detail setting doesn't actually do anything when you're playing because it's forced.

I just meant foliage (or some approximation of foliage) should render at the same distance as players. However the devs handle this is fine with me. Sick of looking at players sunken into the terrain at longer distances...

Edited April 3, 2016 by scriptfactory

[pilgrim* 3514]

2 hours ago, St. Jimmy said:

There's a reason why grass don't render hundreds of meters.

it isn't the best way to camouflage players in the distance. It's the worst way to do it performance wise. Also you can't reduce the grass render distance in DayZ. Everyone has the same forced grass distance setting. You can disable it with Terrain Detail or terrainGrid=x.xxx; in the menu and likely in the singleplayer when it comes but it is forced from the server or something. Terrain detail setting doesn't actually do anything when you're playing because it's forced.

grass (the green stuff) does render at all distances - the fact is that different textures are used to represent grass at different distances, from your feet right to the far horizon. Same for leaves, same for brick walls. etc..

I agree -totally- that the current system is not a good way to camouflage players at a distance, and in fact it does exactly the opposite.

It would be great to have a dynamic relation between the player you see at a distance and the environment you see at a distance, so that the middle-distance player in that middle-distance environment would be MORE difficult to see than a close player in a close environment. That would be realistic, and it would be great for gameplay, obviously - right?

I don't know any games that deal with this, and I don't know how to do it  -  but a player who is easier to see because he is further away.. is just Not Good - in a game that is supposed to include use of concealment in middle-distance combat. It makes open-country and woodland firefights Just Plain Silly.

Imagine the whole campaign across France after D-Day - played out on a lumpy golf-course with bare sticks to represent trees ?

xx

= Instead of altering the observed texture of the environment at a distance, how about altering the observed texture of the player at a distance depending on the environment he is located in =

 

Edited April 3, 2016 by pilgrim*

[emuthreat 2837]

11 hours ago, scriptfactory said:

I agree. Player render distance should be the same as grass/bush render distance. Can't see the grass? Can't see the player either...

Every player will need to have a DX11 compatible card to play the game after the new renderer is released. There is no longer a need to support players running the game on potatoes and allowing them to reduce grass rendering details to get an advantage in PvP. Want to snipe at long distances? Reduce your video resolution or upgrade your computer hardware... just like in every other FPS.

I was definitely not serious about that rendering jab.  Pilgrim gave me a long spiel about how the 3 different textures based on observer distance were *not* rendering distance; even though it decides what to render, based on the distance it is from the player.

There is a reason that foliage cannot be rendered out past a certain distance in a high-detailed texture.  And that reason is resource cost.  I tried to hyperbolically illustrate that point by using infinity as an unrealistic milestone to work back from.

As the distance in which things are rendered at high detail increases, so do the resource costs.  Lets just understand resource cost to be a function of the distance at which grass is rendered in high enough detail to provide adequate cover on flat ground.  The resource availability considerations will make anything beyond a certain distance impractical to render in a high-detail texture.  There is a point, much closer to zero than infinity, at which the law of diminishing returns will take effect.  I assume the game is already there.

So the idea of "increasing the rendering distance of high-detail grassland textures" is really not a solution.  Even doing so for a distance of 500 meters is prohibitively expensive, or I assume that the devs would have done so already.

[emuthreat 2837]

6 hours ago, pilgrim* said:

...

= Instead of altering the observed texture of the environment at a distance, how about altering the observed texture of the player at a distance depending on the environment he is located in =

 

This is about the best solution that I have been able to imagine, but it would have to be implemented so that the observing player's client does the reduction in detail on the observed player.  We wouldn't want to have players watching their own textures get crappy, and use it like a spidey-sense that they were being watched.

There are, of course, problems with this idea too.  Firstly, each player would have to be equipped with another *expensive* sensor, one much like the zombie AI have, that assesses the content of the visual cone.  This cone would have to be as long as the render distance, and extend a few degrees beyond the player's FOV, to provide time for the program to decide if and how to hide an observed player.  It would have to be decided if zombies and animals in cover will have to be adjusted as well for the viewer; and this is where resource cost becomes an issue again.  And that is just the "what" phase.  There will be a second line of resource expense to determine "how" each observable situation of players, in every possible combination of clothing and character skins, should be adjusted to appear for an observer.  If you have a player sitting at dusk, on a hill just at the treeline, observed from two different players that are separated by 150 degrees, would the player rendering be consistent for both observers? 

How would this work?  Should the opacity of the observed player simply be scaled down, based on the ambient vegetation and light conditions.  Would a single beam of sunlight shining down through the canopy be enough to blaze off a players shoulder, negating their use of cover in a shrub?

If this weren't an enormously difficult problem, #commonsense dictates that it would have been resolved by now.

[St. Jimmy 1631]

This solution combined that it's checked from the map mask image what clutter the player is on would be a very good solution and likely without much of a performance cost:

Elcoo made a very good post about this in BIS forums

www.forums.bistudio.com/topic/140105-rendering-grass-at-long-distances-my-thoughts-about-it/

This is what mask image is:

It defines what material and clutter there is in each color.

Make it so for example that all the light green areas would camouflage like in the topic I linked. Invisible grass could be rendered 5m radius around a player that is further away than 50m. That shouldn't cost too much performance especially if it's made on players only.

In the end this is how it would look like:

 

The sinking in the ground actually already works this way I believe. So in the green (grassy area) you're inside a ground and in blue (rocky or something like that) you're not sinking in the ground. That ground sinking could be replaced with this. Then combine this with a much better resolution satellite image so everything blends even more because everything stands out very well from lower resolution image. It's a lot of effort but they're improving and old map so making something like this would really bring v2.0 feeling for Chernarus and the engine.

 

 

The biggest problem is really the texture vs object quality. High quality object is easily seen from low quality (plain) texture. When the texture has variation the object can't be seen as easily. These kind of grass rendering solutions come as second best option in my opinion but if it can be made without real performance cost, it would be very good.

Edited April 3, 2016 by St. Jimmy

[pilgrim* 3514]

OK ^ this is an INTERESTING post St. Jimmy. Thanks for the pointers and the ideas.. No one said it was going to be easy, for sure, but there is a direction here. You are exactly right about the base problem being the environment texture qualities opposed to the player object quality. They work against each other incredibly - and the combination does not always predictably produce one standard unnatural high-visibility effect that can be countered by one technique.
  But I like your thinking. Multi BeanZ already. You show that something can be done that really improves the game in an important way without wiping out the FPS.

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by pilgrim*