Solid state hard drive question

[Lethaltyrant]

You can use process monitor if you wanna see what an app is doing
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896645.aspx

I will have to try this tool plus i didnt know about this and it will help in my work as well thanks for this

[worldofneil]

If they don't have it already, they'll probably write it in the future

I mean you no disrespect, but I seriously doubt they will. They never did for FFXI and we had all the same things for that (different character styles and augmented gear - gear with different stats from the base gear) and that was designed for computers 10 years older.

With current day processors assembling a character into an engine built for generating characters really isn't that complicated, even with 50+ on the screen at a time. I honestly can't see it being the cause of much network lag either, since again each person is just component parts which are assembled on the client. The persons "name" is probably one of the biggest parts about the character data and assuming they're using a compression algorithm the whole random character as you go by is going to really tiny.

But if they cache the character then when the person ran by instead of saying "Here's X and his gear" you'd be querying the server and saying "I've got version 8 of Scott Pilgrim, what's the current version?" "Current version is number 10 here's the data for him" (sending it anyway). It's just messier and people change their gear so often, you can't cache that which is dynamic.

The graphic issues you speak of aren't anything to do with the character generation, that's literally down to graphics settings on the clients. It doesn't matter if I have 50 points in mind, or 300, my cure animation will look exactly the same regardless. Same for audio issues , I'm not exactly sure of what you're referring, but if you're saying the computer is having issues rendering graphics AND audio when there's only 20 people on the screen, might be worth turning down the graphics options and/or investing in a better CPU/graphics card (which I know no one ever wants to hear, but there isn't much else you can really do there).

[Slynk]

Possibly, but it's not that complicated to put a character together. They've got the basic engine already built for "assembling" characters so it's really just "character 1, head 5, skin 32, weapon 18,..." etc. And with the amount of gear changes in this game, how often are you likely to run into the same person with exactly the same gear?

Just a quick rundown of rendering. Assuming you have your fps capped at 60fps, that means there are 60 render iterations every second. Rendering a character without caching goes something like this:

1. Compile head mesh based on any mesh changes (chin, and nose are probably the only options)
2. Apply height transform.
3. Apply rotation + translation based on current animation
3. Render with appropriate textures for eyes, face paint, etc.
4. Load appropriate hair mesh.
5. Apply transforms
6. Render with appropriate color texture.
7. Load appropriate armor meshes.
6. Apply transforms based on size, stature, position, rotation, and animation offset.
7. Render with appropriate textures.

With caching you apply size and stature transforms once, and cache it in vram (graphics card memory.) And then just apply animation transforms to the cached mesh. It cuts out 2-3 operations per mesh (there's a mesh for the head, the hair, and every armor slot other than rings and soul crystal.) That's what, 10~ meshes to render? That saves any where from 20-30 operations per character rendered per render tick. Or roughly 1200 - 1800 operations per second per character. XD

Rendering pipelines are all about optimizations. That's why it would be surprising if they don't already cache these things.

[Astralen]

If i get a SSD as a secondary drive and install ffxiv arr to it it wont have OS on it would i still be able to run it and also increase my loading time?

I'm amazed at how long the loading times are. In Beta I used to have my game on an external USB 3.0 drive and now I got it on a SATA3 SSD. It feels like the loading times are longer now than in beta and I think it's connected to the servers rather than the storage drive.

[Lethaltyrant]

I'm amazed at how long the loading times are. In Beta I used to have my game on an external USB 3.0 drive and now I got it on a SATA3 SSD. It feels like the loading times are longer now than in beta and I think it's connected to the servers rather than the storage drive.

Well at least i know its not only me with these long loading times when ever i go into a loading screen it feels like i could go to the kitchen make some food get a drink come back and then i can keep going (may be a little exaggerated but still lol)

[Slynk]

I mean you no disrespect, but I seriously doubt they will. They never did for FFXI and we had all the same things for that (different character styles and augmented gear - gear with different stats from the base gear) and that was designed for computers 10 years older.

With current day processors assembling a character into an engine built for generating characters really isn't that complicated, even with 50+ on the screen at a time. I honestly can't see it being the cause of much network lag either, since again each person is just component parts which are assembled on the client. The persons "name" is probably one of the biggest parts about the character data and assuming they're using a compression algorithm the whole random character as you go by is going to really tiny.

But if they cache the character then when the person ran by instead of saying "Here's X and his gear" you'd be querying the server and saying "I've got version 8 of Scott Pilgrim, what's the current version?" "Current version is number 10 here's the data for him" (sending it anyway). It's just messier and people change their gear so often, you can't cache that which is dynamic.

The graphic issues you speak of aren't anything to do with the character generation, that's literally down to graphics settings on the clients. It doesn't matter if I have 50 points in mind, or 300, my cure animation will look exactly the same regardless. Same for audio issues , I'm not exactly sure of what you're referring, but if you're saying the computer is having issues rendering graphics AND audio when there's only 20 people on the screen, might be worth turning down the graphics options and/or investing in a better CPU/graphics card (which I know no one ever wants to hear, but there isn't much else you can really do there).

(Bottom up response because I'm too lazy to individually quote things to respond to XD)

You have a finite amount of "oomph" to get everything done in the game before the next render tick, or you'll see an fps drop. 20 characters spawning 20 audio effects to play on top on all the audio effects the mobs are spawning on top of the bgm, *does* have an impact on the CPU which is doing the audio processing. You gotta think about this from a big picture perspective. There are so many subsystems working together and they are all using the same hardware to get their stuff done in time.

On the topic of caching characters, I'm going to assume you don't know what a hash map is, so I apologize if this comes off as condescending. But the rendering pipeline doesn't ask the server what to draw. The network updates the game state, and the redering happens on its own. The renderer says for each entity in the state, draw it. When it draws it, it first would look for a cached model to work (most likely using a hashmap to lookup which model to use), and then if it doesn't have one (called a cache miss), it makes one.

Network lag: Every player on the screen has to update the other players on the screen of what they are doing. Movement, moves they are executing, items they are using. They also have to all tell the server what they are doing so that it knows who should get aggro, who's hit by that AOE, are their attacks hitting? When 20 characters are affecting the state of a battle in the same area it *will* create lag.

[worldofneil]

Thank you for the very detailed breakdown of how character rendering in the game probably works. To be honest I don't really know what to reply to that as none of us know for sure exactly how SE is doing it, I can neither agree nor refute what you've said. Given that the character models are very similar to FFXIs though (just better quality), I think they know what they're doing though.

The original thread however was about would an SSD speed up the game and we went off on a tangent about disk caching, which (for whatever reason) they don't use, so the only disk activity intentionally created by the game is reading data (and saving of character hotbars/gear sets).