What prevents....my immersion...and worries me.

After months of testing and testing...and again testing...i found out what really makes me uhmmm not that enthusiast as i hoped icould be.

Its not Graphics, despite the fact that Graphics are important nowdays, i dont believe they are a gamechanger in a product like SOTA. if everything else it's ok they are secondary. Furthermore U5 will give Devs more chances and options.

It's not Musics and sound: quite the opposite infact, this part of the game is one of the best in my opinion (ok some effect needs an upgrade but i take it as placeholder). Some song its a real piece of music and could be very well sold reach a good position in charts...

It's not a problem of contents as well: they will come, for sure we won't have a AAA title per contents, but this game can count on a AAA community willng to help and invent new contents everyday...

Finally it's not a matter of atmosphere or feelings...not directly though...

What really annoys me and completely break my immersion with SOTA is something really stupid, sadly such stupid thing keeps on going and going...preventing me from a true 360° experience within this world...it reminds me every moment that this is all a fake world and this is honestly one of the worst thing possible for a MMO or SMO call it as you prefer....

There was something that every release pestered me...but i couldn't actually find exactly.....then today....*Poof* the magic happened...

.....and the problem is...Loading times: sorry guys in 2014 i cannot take that a persistent world has to load for seconds (and not a couple or 10...considering i have the best PC on market with SSD HD etc i take it as not my machine issue) every here and there....no this is an absolute game breaker. Those assets purchased and different biomes, which are beautiful per se, put together with this loading thing make them appear as artificial, not linked and actually very uhmmmm unreal. This is a problem that i voiced since day one and the decision of dual scaling the world. I know it's a matter of costs and economy...but i have to say what i feel guys. I feel that this issue will be shared among all those players which are not Hard core. And both me and you know the game succeed if not only hard core purchase it. I honestly don't know if these loading times are going to improve or no....but as for now this is something you guys definitely need to look into.

 

I have a great PC and it only takes about 10 to 30 seconds tops to load any scene for me.

Before I got this PC it took a little longer (maybe another 10 to 30 seconds?). I don't see that as being game breaking though. It seems to me that if I can't wait for a minute or two for a loading screen to come up then I have a problem with my attention span. I'm not saying you don't have a right to give your feedback, I'm glad you posted this. But I am saying that it sounds like a very picky thing to be upset about.

 

It's Alpha, they aren't optimizing the load times. Owl's Head always loads slow and yes it take a bit, but c'mon, we're still playing with proof of concept modules. It's way to early to worry about or get upset about or even expect them to fix load times.

 

I agree. But it's never too early to give feedback, and that's what this guy is doing. Let him give feedback. The devs are big boys and can use this when it comes time to optimize. What are the players expectations? What bothers them most? If he doesn't post this, how do they know?

Feedback is never early, it's only late.

 

It is great that your computer can pump those binary values Dracis, but Captain Jack's takes 50-75 seconds.

It is well known, you have 10 seconds of time before the end user's attention has been lost behind the screen.

The user needs to be kept busy. Get creative. Put quotes from books on the loading screen. Dev quotes. Screenshot slide shows. Literally anything to grab attention and you'll be fine. Captain Jack sees all you silly people going nuts over these steam trading cards... Well make some SotA trading cards and pump them into the loading screen seeded with rarity. Let the user take a screen shot of it, the sky is the limit! Make it diverse, not easily repeatable.

 

They were discussing this in the R12 post-mortem, they have optimizations they know they can make but haven't been able to put in yet. For example, they know about 50-70% of the content that's used in one scene is reused in the next. But what still happens is that 80% of the scene content is unloaded, and then that's reloaded in the next scene. While I believe they had it as a goal to get some optimizations done in R13, I think some of that was being deferred to R14.

I transcribed the post-mortem but never put it up, I guess late is better than never.

 

Answering to somebody up there....im not worried nor upset or else. I just pointed out some feelings which im sure in Portalarium will appreciate.


Now more in detail: it's not the loading itself that bothers me, or well, it does but that's not my point. In a persistent world to me it's crucial to feel like i'm living in a different reality. This mean that if i want to wake up in the morning in Kingsport and roam around the world till the morning after stopping by for a sunset or a sunrise WHERE i decide, i actually cant. I m given the chance to live a complete day cycle ONLY in given SCENES, this is how Devs call them and infact this is what they are, just unlinked scenes: call them cities, dungeons etc. A persistent world, though, its different: there i should have the chance to live the "24h day" cycle WHERE i decide to live it.

Thing that it's completely missing "on a macro side". Of course if you live your day in town you will benefit of the Whole cycle, but still this is something "standalone". Each city, town, biome, etc live it's own reality within a given space and time. We are missing the "glue" that put together all these scenes because as soon as i exit the scene itself i get a 40 to 60 seconds loading (im not sure what will happen laters).

In few words: i feel like we are not living into a one world but we are living X scenes put together by a scaled map....which is something different from what a persistent world should offer.

Of course this is just my opinion !

Lordy aka Lord Marshall Vulcano

 

The 10 seconds only starts when the rum is gone.

 

Everytime they say that the Overland Map kills immersion, I think this is what they really mean. They want a seamless world with no load screens.

But even games like Skyrim aren't truly seamless. You have a load screen any time you click on a door.

The "seamless" outdoor cell loading is SUPER buggy and loves to corrupt save games. They've been trying to fix this since Morrowind and still can't do it without causing tons of bugs.

Unfortunately, a seamless model doesn't work with instances and how this game is designed.

Even when I play SWTOR with its $200 million dollar budget, I'm constantly waiting for long load screens. It is hard to avoid.

I think I heard Chris say there is some room for optimizations. Currently they unload everything and then load a new screen. In the future they might be more intelligent and not unload an asset if they need the same asset in the next scene they are loading. Less unloading and less loading means less wait time.

With SWTOR, I put the cache files from the game on a RAM drive and it helped significantly. I might try the same with SotA.

 

Hm, is this not the same topic as this one

 

I came from pen and paper and the overland map brings back those times for me...

LEAVE IT BE!!

 

sorry guys probably the title is Tricky....my second post i hope explains better the point ov view....it's not the loading itself the problem...it's the XXX Scenes glued together by a scaled map....

 

Definitely loading times need to get to being near instant honestly to make up for the fact that everything will be instanced....which is fine, but make it loading superfast!

 

I have several different PC from Intel 4th generation I7 CPU with two GTX Titan in SLI configuration to first generation I3 cpu with some old nVidia GPU. Thing is that I gar the about same loading times on all computers. And it's hardly my internet that is the problem mither, fiber connection with 1000/1000 Mbit/s. (luckily my work pays for everything )

Thing is that loading times vary a lot for me depending on time. As an EU player I tested around 06:00 GMT and got some loading over a minute in Owls, When I tested again about 12:00 GMT I got times around 30 sec, never got close to 10 sec tough.

 

Wait, how do you do that? 0.0

 

When I originally said 10 to 30 seconds I meant it as just an average. For Owl's Head it's probably more like an average of 30 to 50 seconds. The smaller scenes, random encounters, that's probably where I was thinking 10 seconds.

I'm in the US. That's where the only SOTA server is located. That's what's going on.

 

I think it's more a matter of the distance between the server and the calling client and more importantly how many 'decorations' must be loaded than of a decent PC

 

But what surprises me is the amount of data that are transferred over the internet every time you load a scene. I think they need to save more data locally.

 

Yes, I agree. But you can only hold fixed data local. Player houses and decorations could have changed every time you reenter a town for example.

 

No no no... It's no problem at all to even store things like house decorations. Only think you need is a delta patcher routine, that means that only the difference in data between server and client are needed to be transferred.