Telorn

well...that's a good thing to know. You can damage the core without having to be in the core! This will make defense harder and unable to just hang in the core and defend. They'll have to come out and weed out all the assault soldiers.

I don't find that unfair. I find that a nice tactic.

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Telorn

=Sarc=

I've actually used the rockets while defending too. They're just as effective to hit anybody hiding in the vents. I usually hide in the upper corridors behind the force field.

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Yoyi

I like titan alot. I play it from time to time, but not nearly as much as conquest.

The main problem with the lag and moving titans is that the titans are not considered a vehicle, they are a big chunk of moving terrain. Kind of like the carriers back in 1942.

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Shaznat

I like titan mode, but the server is not active enough. I seeded it the other day because conquest was full, and the total came up to about 10 people in 2 hours of waiting. I would love to play titan more often than I do, but the server just doesn't attract much attention apparently.

Shiner

I was reading in a mod (First Strike) forum that the titans each have over 80,000 polygons. They claims that is hugely ineffecient and a cause of the titan lag. Hopefully for those of us that are fine in titan without it moving will find the game fun again when the patch is introduced. For those that always lag in titan mode.. i don't think anything but lower gfx settings will help.

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Yoyi

With systems as they are now, that many polygons for such a huge structure is not a problem if they are stationary. But massive moving pieces of terrain are quite another story. Positioning that much information while still taking into consideration bullet trajectories, character positioning, and having the center of gravity of the characters moved from the stationary ground to the moving terrain is a nightmare.

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BHack

What Yoyi said is right. The "titan lag" is both player side and client side. The low frame rate on the titan is your computer chugging. I had this problem before I upgraded my computer, now it is completely smooth.

The broader issue is that many times on forums people confuse frame rate issues for "lag". Or just use lag as an umbrella term.

That being said, I do experience actual lag on the titan (not frame rate). This occurs because of what Yoyi said, the server simply chokes on the calculation and bandwidth requirements of processing that much information out to everyone.

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Maus

There are simple solutions though, such as keeping the titan interior as a static part of the map (out of sight of the main game -- underground perhaps) that players seamlessly teleport to when they get into the Titan. That way the Titan defenders/attackers are playing on a static platform wherever the Titan may be on the game map.

That'd work perfectly I'm sure - wonder if there's some engine-related reason that never seemed like a good idea.

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Acreo Aeneas

Most likely because people want to see the Titan in game, rather than have it "hidden" away. And besides, the guns would be useless :P

I think a volumetric fog that masks the Titans and that also blocks the drawn distance would help alleviate the fps drop when they do move. But not the ping spike.

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Acreo_Aeneas
Former 9th MID Member

Telorn

You misunderstand Maus, Acreo.

Maus brings up a good point, one I've thought of why they haven't implimented as well. The Titan is still visible to people outside of the Titan in the 'main' world, we'll call it. But the moment you walk through an entrance that takes you to the interior of the Titan, you 'teleport' to a static map that is unconnected to the 'main' world. This way, when the titan moves in the 'main' world, this does not effect the 'static' world of the titan. There is no reason anyone in the Titan needs to stay in contact with the 'main' world. Only people on the outside of the Titan (turrets/helicopter pad/landing bay) need to be connected to the 'main' world' and have to stay in tune with the movement of the Titan.

This change alone I think would end all lag inside the Titan. You may still encounter lag when on the outside of the Titan. The only reason I'd think DICE didn't do it this way is because they didn't have enough time to figure it out or they couldn't figure it out. Or they just thought it unnecessary, which was obviously wrong.

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Telorn

BHack

There are alot of issues that crop up with that solution. What about the players in the spawn area that hop on the guns and so forth... what world are they in?

Also... where would the teleport point be? because if I am in a hallway and suddenly enemies just appear in the middle of it out of nowhere that is lame. Also, whats to stop players from camping the teleport in points?

I think the idea here was seamless integration.

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Telorn

Apparently i didn't clarify. I said people on the outside of the Titan, turrets included, would be in the 'main' world.

Teleport points are easy. Wherever the outside is no longer visible, the teleport occurs. For instance, once you drop down the shaft or turn the last corner on the deck to enter the hangar.

You wouldn't be able to shoot someone looking down or up into the shaft, but that's a small price to pay.

And the teleport would be no different than the guy all of a sudden comign around the corner from outside and you sitting just inside to camp the corner.

And it could still feel seamless because you'd have no load time. It would be a transition you couldn't tell occurred because the devs would not place in any special effects to make it appear as if you teleported.

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Telorn

Maus

Hey, I didn't say it was the One Big Solution, it was just a wee idea I'd had.

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jepzilla

There's no real need for teleporting, or multiple reference frames, or anything. If you know everything that's inside the Titan, it's a simple matter to update their positions as the Titan moves seamlessly. The physics engine seems robust enough to deal with the marginal rounding error that might occur.

The real problem, so far as I can tell, is that it's not correctly updating the positions of things onboard. For example, dead bodies don't seem to move with the Titan. Furthermore, it seems to do this updating of positions quite late in its process, after other parts of the simulation engine have run (i.e. after the collision detection). So, instead of having things all moving together, the collision code is constantly finding little intersections and trying to bump objects around to figure out where they should be. This seriously impacts performance, and causes all the fun stuff like sentry-guns bouncing around the deck, clipping through walls, etc...

=Sarc=

I'm going to seed the titan server now. It's a shame to have one server so highly populated and the other fall off the game server ranking list. FMJ has two 64 player servers at the top of the list and they don't have to half pack the server with TG players. I think it's time to spread ourselves out a bit over the two servers. Maybe try some different configurations with the second server like titan/conquest mixing, pure conquest, or small maps.

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