Progress with UE3.5 / Integration

[swft 356]

1 hour ago, Mitne said:

Does any of SCPTs own some shitty PC? Hopefully something near minimal APB requirements like Intel Dual Core or Quad, some weak GPU like 1GB of VRAM and 4GB of RAM set?

I would ask them to test it in manner of how much performance suffered or improved.

Of course I know there will be fix to optimization but right now I just want to know at what shitty-end PCs stand at.

 

APB is going to run as a 64bit executable, having 4GB ram probably won't even let you run the game.

[Healt 67]

2 hours ago, SkittyM said:

Vehicles have seemed to get a smidge more bouncy, normal Vegas now has suspension, can't do wheelies in any vehicle.  Otherwise the same as Live PC.  Can't say much about OTW2 however, it's just a port of console, if you played console you know that OTW2 is just a prettier version of that with M/KB.

Thanks for sharing. Glad to hear there are no drastic changes.

[Rebelliousness 85]

21 hours ago, owzzy said:

Wouldn't mind seeing some fog make its way back into the game. Gave the game quite a nice 'themed' atmosphere imo.

I wanna see snow and icy road conditions and huge car pile ups and new driving skills required.  Then I wanna see GMs come in game sometimes to make a tornado and blow all the dweebs around.  Yeah

[Mimee 2]

I'm temporarily coming back from my slumber just to say I am excited for the engine changes and I'll definitely give the game another try.
I view my years of playing APB:Reloaded as some of my most enjoyable gaming years ever.

Keep up good work, Little Orbit.

Edited February 2, 2019 by Mimee

[Rebelliousness 85]

14 hours ago, Darkzero3802 said:

@MattScott Sounds awesome the new engine is in testing however alot of these quality of life updates have been needed in the current engine for yrs. Collisions have always been wonky and tend to cause random suicides or other stuff to occur when they arent supposed to (see the links for some examples). Car hit boxes themselves tend to be abit wonky as well which causes hits to occur when they arent supposed to, or explosions not to kill when your within the explosion range or kill you when your clear of it. Threat and matchmaking are obv another big quality of life that needs immediate addressing as the current setup just doesn't work, period. Kiosks can cause suicides as well at random when hit by a car (when not supposed to) so while looking at those it would a good idea to look over how they cause these to occur.

Another quality of life is hitreg. I know it was attempted once before but its still broken and each day hitreg can be different where one day its fine the next ur shots dont reg for anything. I would think this to be the result of servers that cant handle APB in its current old engine so its abit concerning how they will handle a newer engine that will require more out of them.

 

https://plays.tv/s/M4JjJJ8CtK5q

https://plays.tv/s/M4JkjZ3yVIfG

https://plays.tv/video/5bef9df5daf61b2398/wtf-10-apb-apbreloaded-wtf-wtfmoments

https://plays.tv/video/5b988d5a1d77ef477f/what-is-logic-apb-apbreloaded-roadkill-suicide-wtf?from=user

https://plays.tv/video/5a55cdc3baa5a4018a/stairs-1-enemy-0-apb-apbreloaded?from=user

I hope they keep, but minimize the oddball physics.  Because watching a team mate get killed by a pedestrian car is hella funny.

[Cuve 244]

According that the 3.5 on PC will look exactly the same as on the console versions... I already hate it

[Lokislav 25]

1 hour ago, swft said:

 

APB is going to run as a 64bit executable, having 4GB ram probably won't even let you run the game.

tbf, it allows the app to utilize more than 4 GB of RAM but that doesn't automatically mean it's constantly going to use that much RAM/will want more than 4 GB, if the files are too large then the game itself can be optimized in such a way that it will load in only the necessities and other things will have to be loaded in from the HDD on the run (page file size) which will lead into stutters though

 

there are 64bit ue3.5+ games that run well on 4 GB RAM and I am pretty sure APB is not going to become a "IT'S 2019 SO NOW YOU NEED 16 GB OF DDR4 RAM, DOESN'T MATTER THAT THIS GAME'S ENGINE WAS MADE BACK WHEN HUGE MAJORITY OWNED ONLY 4 GB RAM" game

Edited February 2, 2019 by Lokislav

[Kewlin 692]

9 hours ago, _chain said:

I'm just hyped about having better textures. I want my tattoos and cars to stop being so pixelated

 

I don't think this was ever even hinted at as a feature. It would be nice, but I'm not sure where you're getting this from.

 

 

7 hours ago, NotZombieBiscuit said:

Everyone talking about the graphical and technical changes but no one talking about the negative gameplay and aesthetic changes.

 

Several people including Ghost and myself have already discussed the game looking worse. Similarly some negative gameplay changes have been discussed, such as wheelies being removed.

 

Gees.

[Uru! 50]

1 hour ago, Kewlin said:

I don't think this was ever even hinted at as a feature. It would be nice, but I'm not sure where you're getting this from.

i would hope "textures improved" meant across the board

 

i also agree with the skepticism that this would extend to player content aka the stuff that's more important though, albeit it would be really nice to say goodbye to the horribly jagged low res symbols.

Edited February 2, 2019 by Uru!

[_chain 176]

2 hours ago, Kewlin said:

I'm not sure where you're getting this from.

 

With the mentioned significant changes (improvements? But based on what you guys are saying about it, i doubt it) to the graphical aspect of the game you'd probably think about better quality of decals, maybe better texture res, instead of just sharper shadows or whatever you consider a graphical improvement. 

 

Dunno how it looks right now in 3.5 since they don't want to "hype" things, but new higher resolution textures could be considered after this year ends, not customization-wise,  but environment. 

Edited February 3, 2019 by _chain

[Kewlin 692]

1 hour ago, _chain said:

~snip~

 

I will agree at the very least that higher texture resolution is one of the few things I really want graphics-wise, but it'd probably be a lot of work to redo all the textures.

[WitchQueen 316]

6 hours ago, Mimee said:

I'm temporarily coming back from my slumber just to say I am excited for the engine changes and I'll definitely give the game another try.
I view my years of playing APB:Reloaded as some of my most enjoyable gaming years ever.

Keep up good work, Little Orbit.

Welcome back dude!

[SkittyM 287]

5 hours ago, Uru! said:

i would hope "textures improved" meant across the board

 

i also agree with the skepticism that this would extend to player content aka the stuff that's more important though, albeit it would be really nice to say goodbye to the horribly jagged low res symbols.

Those are very unlikely to change in the near future as that would no doubt require a huge system change to how the character/vehicle editors work.  They never were changed back when RP was porting everything since they were focused on time.

 

[Fortune Runner 796]

8 hours ago, Rebelliousness said:

I wanna see snow and icy road conditions and huge car pile ups and new driving skills required.  Then I wanna see GMs come in game sometimes to make a tornado and blow all the dweebs around.  Yeah

vegas *shrugs*

[Nymphi--DoubleDee 83]

On 2/1/2019 at 3:19 PM, Kiida said:

APB was built as a complete mess from the beginning, it doesn't come as a surprise that you may hit obstacles here and there which can cause delays. The hard work is still greatly appreciated.

It seems so many forget that even the original developers didn't even know how half the stuff worked. 

[Gateron 267]

Very nice to hear that we got something working. How far are we off getting a public test build?

[CoDesigns 12]

Just Go to .../APB Reloaded/Engine/

look through some UE-Configs that Code Already gave me a headache xd.. 

[Nitronik 348]

20 hours ago, Cuve said:

According that the 3.5 on PC will look exactly the same as on the console versions... I already hate it

that's more of an art style description thing - APB on consoles runs at what would probably equate to medium settings on PC, so textures are muddier than they really are. Plus the game has horrible streaming issues so a lot of things will look like they're made out of clay regardless

[TehBlizzy 23]

Character texture resolution is limited to 1024x0124, which is why the more clothes you add to a character the lower-quality the whole thing becomes because it has to squish every part of your character into the same sized square. I think even bumping that up to 2048x2048 would make a big difference but that's also more 2x more bandwidth for every player on the server, and 2x more memory for the player, 4x if you include bumping up the normal maps with them. They're just textures though, so it's not actually that big of a deal with modern hardware and networking.

[Darkzero3802 606]

On 2/2/2019 at 3:40 PM, Rebelliousness said:

I hope they keep, but minimize the oddball physics.  Because watching a team mate get killed by a pedestrian car is hella funny.

Theres nothing wrong with oddball stuff like that but when things happen that arent supposed to like in my links and examples there then its something that needs some attention. Ive been run over by ped before yea its funny but thats diff then hitting something with an undamaged car and just exploding without warning.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

42 minutes ago, TehBlizzy said:

Character texture resolution is limited to 1024x0124, which is why the more clothes you add to a character the lower-quality the whole thing becomes because it has to squish every part of your character into the same sized square. I think even bumping that up to 2048x2048 would make a big difference but that's also more 2x more bandwidth for every player on the server, and 2x more memory for the player, 4x if you include bumping up the normal maps with them. They're just textures though, so it's not actually that big of a deal with modern hardware and networking.

Gotta correct you on two things. One, bandwidth usage would be the same, since the game doesn't send the textures directly, but instead sends instructions on how to recreate the character locally. Two, it would require 4x more memory per texture since you're working with squares, meaning 8x the memory per player in district (if we double normals too) for the clients which can become pretty daunting considering that textures are by far the largest part in memory usage in games.

[Nymphi--DoubleDee 83]

6 minutes ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

Gotta correct you on two things. One, bandwidth usage would be the same, since the game doesn't send the textures directly, but instead sends instructions on how to recreate the character locally. Two, it would require 4x more memory per texture since you're working with squares, meaning 8x the memory per player in district (if we double normals too) for the clients which can become pretty daunting considering that textures are by far the largest part in memory usage in games.

Plus you got to factor in that most of the APB players use computers with onboard graphic chips, and from 10 years ago.

[SkittyM 287]

5 hours ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

Gotta correct you on two things. One, bandwidth usage would be the same, since the game doesn't send the textures directly, but instead sends instructions on how to recreate the character locally. Two, it would require 4x more memory per texture since you're working with squares, meaning 8x the memory per player in district (if we double normals too) for the clients which can become pretty daunting considering that textures are by far the largest part in memory usage in games.

Mind you as time progresses, the "average" PC does too.  I know for some years 8GB of RAM and 2-4GB of VRAM was the norm and now 16GB of RAM and 6GB VRAM is more a norm, those numbers of course increasing as time goes on.  On top of that, the game already can load the player at max res and other characters/models at half res if you want it to.  So telling the game to render my character with 2048 and others at 1024 is hugely feasible.

 

2048 res and doubling the character poly count probably is somewhere near the bottom of LOs list of wants with 3.5 (or 4).  Though I'm sure that's a LONG ways away as well as requiring A LOT of work to do.  Least of our current problems though.

[Nitronik 348]

Not sure bumping character poly count is a good idea - you'd have to rebake most of the normal maps for instance*, potentially even reworking the geometry for each clothing asset (given how they're kind of "stitched on" to the human mesh)

[heysie 47]

so at this point we are back to Soon™ ?