you do not know what graphic physics engine is it all so how can you understand the impact on performance. this is the point I'm trying to make. using the physics engine of your graphics card is a huge strain. this is a fact. there are plenty of mistakes that have been made over the years that were not rolled back and we have been dealing with hot fixes that never 100% resolved the issue. either way since you clearly do not know what I'm referring to, I will stop wasting everyone's time.
Oh no please do expand on this, but not for me: for Eleon. If there is anything you know about this that can help them, then by all means explain it clearly so they (and all players) can benefit from it. I will not interfere. If you have anything grounded in the reality of the game that can help Eleon, just explain it here or in a suggestion thread and they will surely be interested. No point in trying to convince me in private : I have no power on the game development.
those that understand how graphics cards work need no explanation on how resource intensive the physics engine is. not sure why you feel the need to take your ignorance public but that's your choice. I tried to resolve this with a civil private conversation but you completely ignored every word I said and only looking for a fight so enjoy your sound room.
PhysX will not run on incompatible GPU and will fall back on CPU, provided that Eleon used it to run on PhysX-capable GPUs to start with, and I doubt it. But that, neither you or anyone except Eleon knows that. From seeing numerous reports of players with very capable graphics cards experiencing noticeable FPS drops, then seeing that the GPU usage was not in cause, this makes me think that your whole argument about PhysX threatening to fry GPUs is made out of thin air. If PhysX was required to run exclusively on GPU then some players would have to install some PhysX garbage to be able to run Empyrion with GPU accelerated physics. Obviously older hardware owners did not have to do that, and it's still not the case today. Seeing that The Witcher 3 uses CPU for PhysX I wonder why Eleon would go through the trouble of tackling harware conflicts and fallback mecanisms when they can just leave it to CPU.
Wheels would look amazing everywhere. For those who still wonder... https://answers.unity.com/questions/1558513/nowadays-does-unity-physx-use-the-actual-gpu-on-nv.html Then there are more technical links of course : https://hardforum.com/threads/current-state-of-physx-is-it-well-and-truly-dead.1959167/ It's quite well known ( not by me : I'm ignorant...) that PhysX is not run on GPU in Unity, and neither in Unreal. Developers have to take quite some steps to make it happen, and I would be surprised that Eleon went this way in the past for bullets and ships/BA blocks or any other physics-related thing in the game. If parts of the physics engine work was thrown at the GPU it would have been done to benefit from a performance boost, so this is actually the absolute contrary of what you affirmed up here, @Bob [OG] . But I'm still open and I'm sure Eleon is equally eager to learn whatever solution you have to propose to prevent PhysX from frying GPUs in Empyrion... ^^
Just to clarify this a bit, we've already put this question forward and this is not a water change, this will only impact the visual effect of the water and only to an extent, game mechanics regarding water will not be affected for the time being Maybe @Taelyn can chime in some more details....
please stop tagging me. i have no desire to waste my time trying to teach someone who refuses to learn. u didn't even read anything in those 3+yr old posts. just skimmed for a couple lines that agreed with ur misguided view. u know nothing of 3D liquid graphic strain. please educate urself with experience, not google.
That's odd. Do you have a screen capture showing that issue? Maybe it has to do with changing gamma/contrast on your display settings? The new post processing looks great here with my GTX1660 Super.
Could be that he refers to a 'Burnt Desert' Planet. Its covered in some kind of Mist that is also present when the Weather condition shows CLEAR.
Well I read the whole thread in the link provided by hexagonius (my 1st link) where Draemora explains why it is very unlikely that PhysX will ever run on GPU in Unity, and because this thread was quite old I provided another one to make it clear that things did not change since that time (my 2nd link). In that second thread, post #11 is very instructive and I recommend you read it. I stopped reading there. PhysX went "open source" since then of course, but this changes nothing regarding Unity. But I also read tons of Unity documentation regarding shaders and only slept 4 hours after that, because I'm always happy to learn something new and can't stop reading on these topics when I start. I asked you what PhysX had to do with shaders and you didn't answer, but don't bother : I checked for myself. So in the last 2 days, I learned a lot about you, shaders and PhysX. Now you switch focus from "PhysX" to "3D liquid graphic strain" . I congratulate you for the backpedaling once again, and I encourage you to help Eleon make a better game with the aid of your precious advice. So don't focus on me, just keep in mind there are other eyes reading the threads, and everyone can surely benefit from a brief lecture on "3D liquid graphic strain". -------------------------------- On a side note, there is nothing wrong with using google to learn something. If you rely only on your "experience" you are due to miss something here and there. Just try this with google : " water ripples with Unity " or similar keywords. Tell me how many results come up with " use PhysX " or " 3D liquid graphic strain " and how many results come up with "shader ". As a hint, "water" in Empyrion is not a real liquid, and the flat mesh surface defining its "top" is surely not deformed geometrically : it is most probably a shader which adjusts scale/ stretch of pixels following various shapes drawn as black and white gradients, maybe a bunch of sub-shaders scaling these shapes to get the "expanding ripple" effect, or the same "wave overlap" trick for waves breaking on the shoreline that we had previously but with the new pixel scaling/ stretching/ animated gradients shader thingy. All these pixel tweaks are applied to the image that has already been computed and that is held in a buffer, and this comes after the "physics" engine has done its job. So out goes the "PhysX simulation" theory. So this is surely not 3D liquid graphic strain of any kind like a huge particle system simulating forces on insane amounts of "water" particles, nor is it mesh deformation which would still require a few rendering passes on top of deforms to get the result which can be achieved much easier with shaders and a bit of imagination. I told you in private that it was very unlikely that Eleon made a real-time water simulation because even with the best PCs on the market they would have seen right away that it would make no sense. But you just ignored that, like you do here. Don't take my word for it : grab Blender, try a simple smoke simulation in a cube, then you will see how it makes no sense to think Eleon would have done that to a whole body of water in a game. The cool part about using shaders for post-processing effects (like antialiasing, you know that one for sure) is that they can be disabled from settings menus easily if they want to make it so (google: shaders, keywords). So if some players can't afford all the fancy reflections and ultra-shadows, then "water effects" will just be off like many other options. So this is all about creating illusions. Eleon creates an illusion of real water, and you (try to) create an illusion that you know something called "3D liquid graphic strain" and that " PhysX will fry GPUs".
apologies for my original message. apparently it was too insulting. again though, please stop tagging me. I have no desire to argue over the internet.
@byo13 and @ravien_ff: thanks for trying to help but the picture and the video of the first post in this thread already show what I'm complaining about:look at the top left corner of the "work in progress" picture, left to the trees and above the ground, you can hardly see anything else but a white foggy area. And in the video under that picture the fog starts so early that even the close isle to the right is covered in fog. Empyrion is the only game looking this way, I named Satisfactory as an example of a good looking game and I may add: with a realistic (= huge) view distance. I've set brightness und contrast to default in Empyrion. I see this ugly fog on three different monitors: a cheap LCD-Notebook sreen, an OLED Notebook sreen and on the hardware calibrated PC-Monitor I use for photo editing. This fog is much too prominent, too bright and it reduces the view distance to an unnatural low degree. This started with the new post processing in 1.6 when I had nearly 3000 hours of playtime, and it's on every planet and moon type.
They did change a few things but it's not all about "fog". First there's the "sun flare" that is quite exaggerated and intrusive, that overlays everything else in view. Even in space, where there is no "fog", we can see the extent (red arrows) of the sun flare's white overlay occupying all the view, as they also added some colored effect (top left side) to simulate "light refraction" from a camera lens or when looking through glass : When turning the camera to get the sun at the edge of the screen, the "haze" effect is less apparent, and it disappears completely when the sun is not visible on screen, even if it's just past the corner of the viewport : On a planet this adds up over the regular fog and distance clip trick they added to prevent us from seeing the terrain repeating itself when flying high above ground. On a planet, looking at a mountain not very far (see the marker) we can see on the map that there's already significant curvature of the ground, but since the playfield is flat this means we could see this same mountain repeating itself at the horizon. To prevent this they added a "distance fog" that starts at a fixed distance from the player and gets thicker with more distance: Since there is no atmosphere on moons, it was possible to see the terrain repeating itself a few times, so they also added "distance fog" on moons, but it's black instead of white otherwise it would look weird. They also added a "far distance clip" where there is simply no more image past that distance, and it cuts abruptly. We can still see a bit further if we look at the top corners and turn a bit, because as the view is a "rectangle" the top right and left corners represent a greater distance from the viewer and the max distance clip must be defined as a straight line in front of the camera : And here we can see the effect of the sun flare on a moon with no atmosphere : When the sun is out of view, no more white haze in view. So the problem has multiple components, not only related to fog. They could surely reduce the amplitude of sun flares, and that was asked by players a few times. With naked eyes we shouldn't see these effects. For distance clip, I can understand the usage, but on very large playfields this could be configurable in the yamls to allow greater distances. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- lol... and you keep sending me private messages to insult me ! You're such an hypocrit. .
@Kassonnade, thanks alot for your detailed explanation! I tried messing with the yamls but could only increase this "distance fog" instead of making it vanish or decrease. I read a funny but sadly very true comment today on steam (https://steamcommunity.com/app/383120/eventcomments/3159832911121630910?ctp=2): "This looks like a 2005 title and plays like a 1999 title. Yet it somehow COOKS your GPU like it was a 2030 title." So Empyrion has already gained some reputation for its outdated looks, yet Eleon thinks it's good idea to degrade it even more with this ugly "distance fog"?
Maybe players get the illusion that because some models and textures are not top notch that they can crank their video settings to max without consequences. Minecraft is ugly without mods, but still puts quite a strain on PCs if players don't take some care in adjusting settings. The most obvious one, IIRC, is the number of chunks of terrain players can choose to see, where each increment of 1 adds exponential strain, because the number of chunks appearing gets bigger the further they appear. It looks something like this : If the player is in the middle of the "terrain" (looking south) he sees only the "middle chunk" outlined in yellow. If he moves in any direction then only the chunks facing him will be generated. Here the player is facing South, and at a "basic" video quality (ex. low view distance = low chunk numbers) he will only see terrain he sees from the center yellow square, so 1 chunk (2 triangular half chunks in this example). This is a simplified example, as usually whole chunks are loaded, but obviously they may not be completely visible at all times. If the player cranks the settings to medium quality, he will see all chunks in the first and second area (the +1 zone), which means 4 total chunks. If he goes up to high quality (sees the +2 zone also) the amount of chunks visible is now 9, and for the ultra setting it is now 16. Add all trees and deco items in these chunks and this makes lots more geometry to account for than just terrain, as compared to lower settings. Just Cause 3 has one of the biggest map among "open world" games at 400 sq. miles (+/- 1035 sq. km) and a good part of the surface is water, which cuts down a lot of geometry to render when looking far away. Also players can't see the whole map all at once. In Empyrion planets can be up to 2048 sq. km (class 5), Class 4 are 512 sq. km, and apart from "ocean" planets water is only a fraction of the surface, and players could go up 1km and see it all, if not for the fog/ haze preventing it. For an indie game running on Unity that is a very respectable feat. Empyrion is voxel-based for terrains and ships/ structures, it has lots of dynamic lighting stuff to update each frame, everything that can be destroyed has to be checked once in a while, etc. If we take the Witcher 3 example, or other similar games following the same build methods, there are tons of things that can be done to make these games run smoother yet they still impose quite a load on average PCs if video settings are cranked too much. These games are based on "scenes" or "worlds" that are highly optimized, with many parts pre-rendered, and the vast majority of assets (deco, trees, houses, rocks) can not be modified or destroyed. Trees and rocks and all the terrain don't have scripts attached to them (give wood, ore, resource, etc) and players can't run around carrying 128 torches on a 200m radius (lights on a ship). It's a bit unfair to compare Empyrion to other games because it's really a unique game in its kind. We can't make a proper assessment just based on the "looks" because lots of things happen under the hood that other games do not have. And as I compared Empyrion with minecraft, it's obvious that Minecraft's models are very simplistic with "boxy" NPCs and character models. Empyrion NPCs, critters, devices all have way more geometry and fancy effects than Minecraft. We can take for granted that all the logic that holds and manages voxel ships / bases / terrains is an additional layer that does not exist in games like The Witcher 3 or Doom etc. To see how Empyrion can run smoothly even on weak PCs, just make a scenario with very small amount of everything, to mimick an average game's level dimensions, with some NPCs and furniture, a bit of terrain with trees, etc. To compare scenes from different games we need to know how much geometry is shown at a particular moment, and how that geometry is set up (voxel vs classical, optimized 3d models), how lights are set up (and how many), dynamic or static with many of the visible shadows being simply "baked" in the environment's textures, or calculated "realtime" like Empyrion does, etc. Because Empyrion is quite an "experimental" type of game mixture, I can't blame the developers for not getting everything to work flawlessly, knowing there is no other game doing the same in any better way. Yes game X has better AI and game Y has nicer models and animations, but no game has the same mixture of features that Empyrion has, nor the same scale. .
About the sun flares: This is adjustable in the galaxyconfig file. I set most of the stars to a flare size of between 0.3-0.6 in my scenario, whereas the default game hasn't changed the values at all and are using the default (which is 1.0 I believe). Combined with the fact that the starting planets are generally closer to the star in vanilla, this means a much brighter sun flare.
Woo! New Water System! Have to ask - does this system have fluid dynamics? That is, if we dig a hole on the shoreline, will the water fill the hole? Or if we dig in the sea bed, will it fill with water, or will we still have air pockets under water?
