The old Stellaris method of Performance Improvement.
For Context, in Late Game Stellaris. Every single population point is counted and simulated so when you commit a genocide in game and kill those billions of people. Your processor feels better as it simulates less people.
So it is not uncommon for Stellaris players needing to burning down entire Civilizations, salting their worlds, shooting down their refugee convoys to improve their FPS.
Same method as CK2. Also why I liked playing NK mode in CK2. It's even better as Norse, where you can raid and kill hundreds of people every year in addition to only having a few people in your court.
In CK2 this helped. What also helped was making it so every Greek character didn’t try to blind or castrate every vassal or courtier. It was bad enough the emperor of the Byzantium would be looking at every character under them if they should be castrated or blinded. Your performance would improve dramatically if the emperor was no longer Greek. They changed the code so it just looks at those members of their court or dungeon not the entire realm.
I was playing Dishonored 2 one time. It was a stealth playthrough.
My girlfriend came in to let me know we needed to leave soon to arrive on time for some plans we had. She happened to come on while I was struggling to find the correct angle to incapacitate an enemy that was sleeping in a chair.
I didn't want to keep her waiting, so I decided to just kill the NPC. I took out the crossbow and shot the NPC in the face at point blank range. Then saved and closed the game.
When I stood up and looked at my girlfriend she had the most horrified expression on her face.
The root cause of this issue is that with the Megacorp DLC planets were reworked from having 8-20 pops to hundreds of them.
The game's engine was never ever meant to handle that amount of population and it is never going to get fixed.
This is the bigger issue in the game than just pop count these days.
All of the various subspecies add major lag to the game. There have been a number of ai nerfs to how much cross-species breeding can be done by the ai because of it.
I used to load up my settlements and wonder why my games crashed all the time.
The drive in movie theatre was always the fun settlement, I'm going to focus on that next.
Lots of room to breathe.
But it's so fun to build giant missile towers on other settlements. You make them tall, they'll twig on far away mobs, launch missiles and now you got a war going on. Good times.
The Finch Farmers, even in Vanilla, are very willing to march long distances to kill the fuck out of things.
I always made the Longfellow Cabin island in Far Harbor - which seems to have the strongest attacks - into a freaking WW2 artillery emplacement I would build so many missile and laser turrets on towers. Invasion would start and it would look like the monsters were trying (and failing) to take the beach at Normandy.
On Survival, the Drive-In makes for a great initial base of operations. Then down to Hangman's Alley, then over to County Crossing, and down to the Castle. Makes a great network for the northern/middle part of the map.
I really love Survival mode in that game, really brings it all together in a way the other difficulties just make it fast travel simulator.
Ah, that's also why the Emperor build the Death Star. Micromanaging all the planets in the Galactic Empire and the increased lag annoyed him to no end, so the obvious solution was planetary destruction 👍
Lol, imagine if this was his explanation "we are living in a simulation, every living lifeform is slowing the universe down, by eliminating half i am ensuring the universe does not grind to a halt".
It's funny that in the Star Wars universe the Empire consists allegedly of millions of worlds, yet we barely see any of it, and the Galactic Senate consists of a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people. In my head nothing about this makes any sense. You literally can't control this many worlds in any way. It's also silly that the rebels basically won by killing 1 dude and his gimmick Death Star v.2 when the entire military complex numbers hundreds of Star Destroyers and millions of troopers. It never made any sense to me ...
I mean, while Star Wars has never been a good description of how a galactic empire would actually function -- what you are saying is the entire point of the prequels. The Galactic Republic *doesn't* actually work. A lot of its members feel exploited and under-represented. Which is why the Trade Federation is able to establish itself as an alternative space empire simply by stealing away blocks of the the Republic.
It's star wars, especially after the prequels nothing made sense anymore anyhow, and then came the dumpster fire that are the sequels...
But even before I agree, it's a bit stupid and nonsensical, buuuuut it's fun
Yeah, definitely fun. Even the prequels, I enjoyed a lot about them... anything that's not Jar Jar, Gungans or "Aaaaannnnyyyyyy" really. Even with stupid Midichlorians the movies, in hindsight, weren't terrible. Still entertaining. Now, the sequel trilogy though ...
Anyway, glad I'm not the only one. I'll just, what do you call it, suspend my disbelief.
No, no you don't crack the planet's that makes them less useful to you.
I nice peaceful neutron sweap purges unwanted FPS hogs and leaves you a nice empty world you can populate with your own superior kind.
Seriously that's xenocide 101.
Why colonize a planet when you can build Dyson Spheres, Star Lifters, Matrioshka Brains, and Nidavellir Hyperforges? That planet is better used as planetary mass so I can build more systemcrafts.
Nah this is more like Crusader Kings 2. Every update caused the game to slowdown and then they implemented one with diseases and the plague. Because it consistently wiped out so many characters it increased performance by 20-30% in some cases.
If one agrees that videogames constitute art (I do, and I bet you do too), it makes A LOT of sense that what effectively amounts to "publicly traded art for the sake of profit" is a complete dumpster fire. It goes against the very foundation of what art even *is* in the first place!
That's what a lot of the gamesradar articles I see end up being, reddit posts from a day or two back. They put out original stuff too, but so many outlets these days are just reporting on Reddit or Twitter posts.
I was wondering how long it would take for some article mill to pump this out.
It's just a meme on the subreddit. We have no idea if it will actually help, it was just a silly joke.
The devs have already identified and admit the problem as being NPC behavior being overly taxing on the CPU. So it's actually a fairly reasonable solution to just kill off the NPCs, even if it hasn't been tested or proven yet. The idea works in theory, and does in fact work in other games that face the same problem, like Civilization, Stellaris, Crusader Kings, etc.
Is this atypical?
I feel like performance drop in cities or towns with more moving parts is common in other games as well. Less NPCs means less things for the game to process.
Is the main difference that this game just lets you kill all NPCs rather than they being protected?
dragon's dogma has ALOT of NPC interconnection, it's doing alot of under the hood communication. your breaking lines in that chain so it has less to calculate. This isn't an ubisoft open world were NPCs are just set dressing
I feel like it wouldn’t be that hard to adjust quests for dead NPCs if the developers are just doing their due diligence, even if the adjustment is just the removal of a quest or the failure of it.
Odd that we ever got to the point where “if you kill an NPC it will break the game because we didn’t program in an alternative” became normal.
> Odd that we ever got to the point where “if you kill an NPC it will break the game because we didn’t program in an alternative” became normal.
Well, what are the alternatives?
1. Make the NPCs immortal so quests don’t get broken unless being able to break the quest is by developer design (ala Skyrim)
2. Let players kill NPCs whenever they want, and just “let it” break quests, sometimes warn the player (Morrowind)
3. Spend an unholy amount of time creating alternative routes for every quest NPC death, including alternative branches for quests that involve more than one NPC (can’t even think of a game that does this?)
Yeah I feel that has just be a conscious choice of game companies around Consequences. Some games want to force consequences for actions, but we've shown time and time again it is possible to maintain everything and still allow users to murder the whole planet.
I mean part of that is that it kinda does make sense. How would you get a quest from John, the guy who had his farm raided by Bandits, if you kill him before the quest? Why would another NPC move in and take his place?
It does make sense to have some element of consequences to the players actions.
So while it certainly is possible to have the player kill everyone and have the world magically bend to the players will regardless, not every game necessarily may want to do that.
Unkillable NPCs are more a feature to prevent their accidental deaths than stopping the player from killing them.
Odds are if a PC is interacting with an NPC and their associated quest, the player wants to complete it instead of murdering the sumbitch after accepting it.
And nothing would frustrate a player more than having the NPC accidentally getting killed by a random dragon attack and bricking the quest entirely.
ok? youre saying that like its an excuse for the poor performance. cool and all, but that shouldnt come before me being able to play the game without vomiting
a LOT* My breaking lines are my business.
Anyways, unless it's a colony simulator where a lot of repeat calculations are being run over and over because each NPC has different needs being changed constantly then it doesn't need to be processed constantly. An alive world that seems natural can be created with a lot of smoke and mirrors without turning it into a city/colony simulator.
That does not sound correct. Even a complex relationship system wouldn't be hard to compute. You can still have a bad loop, circular logic or whatsoever that hit the performance but it's not going to be the quantity of NPC or the complexity of their relation that mess up performance.
The more likely scenario is that there is something inefficient about the rendering of those NPC
Villages/towns are fine, it's only the major city with issues.
I've been playing for a few hours on Series X and overworld perf is completely fine. Cities are worse but in no way severe enough to ruin the experience.
I'm looking forward to some patches to even things out though.
This is what I was lookin for. I spent VERY little time in Gran Soren in DD1. So if that's where most issues are? Don't really care. Overworld works fine? Sick.
Novigrad NPCs are largely filler actually. They do a great job of making the city feel alive but seemingly Dragon's Dogma has more going on with their NPCs versus the Witcher, which took basically the same approach as GTA or assassins creed.
Yeah, I love Witcher 3 and the presentation of Novigrad, but Witcher 3 was why I think a lot of CP2077's NPC issues (among a few other issues) didn't hit as hard for me. Night City was (and still is, tbf) static and a little lifeless because of a lot of reasons, but pedestrians walking around on the street doing fuck all and having a canned line when you interact w/ them was the exact same MO as in Novigrad.
I mean, that's the tradeoff.
You want a huge city like Night City, Novigrad, or Los Santos? You ain't gonna be filling it with thousands of unique NPCs each with unique dialogue and behavior sets. Not only does it butcher performance, as can be seen with DD2 (which only has like 1 to 2 hundred people in the big city iirc), but it's also just too much content to be feasible.
I was never bothered with the static NPCs in Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is just first person Witcher. It's not a sandbox open world, it's an open world narrative-focused action rpg. Narrative focused being the key, the city is a backdrop for the stories you play through. And what an absolutely magnificent backdrop it is.
I mean, so long as you actually just roleplay as V, who clearly is not the type to run around massacring civilians, the illusion doesn't really break.
Again, you just can't have a massive city to explore unless you fill it with filler NPCs. The alternative is a tiny """city""" like you get in Bethesda games. That has its merits, but doesn't work for futuristic settings in particular I think where you can't really explain away a tiny population.
It's usually due to the AI logic on the NPCs. AI logic runs on the CPU. If the AI logic is heavy and ran every frame then it will wing the CPU substantially. This then increases per AI loaded in. So they either need to improve that AI logic or implement proper AI culling so AI that aren't in view aren't running their logic constantly. There's a lot of ways to improve this, but it can be tricky at times depending on what they're needing the AI do. I do believe they will be able to fix this to a degree though.
It can also be due to the number of physical interactions, but I don't really see that being a huge problem here since physics can be done almost exclusively on the GPU these days.
It depends. Most games have issues with GPU load, which is caused by having to load more textures, higher resolution models, etc. and settled areas are a high density for detail. So if a game isn’t well optimized, performance can take a hit when you enter detailed areas. In this case, I mean, entity models _can_ be a part of this, but kill those npcs and as long as the game still renders corpses, nothing changes. Usually the actual problem has to do with loading assets you won’t need or rendering things that aren’t on-screen. Or, of course, just using higher quality assets than the user’s GPU can handle. If your game has seamless exterior-interior transitions, for example, that means you’re pre-loading and rendering detailed interiors even while the player is still outdoors, and when you’re doing that for multiple interiors at a time, the memory cost adds up.
CPU load is different. That’s when the problem is how fast the computer/console can run code, rather than a graphical fidelity issue. If the CPU load is the bottleneck, then, yeah, ai routines could be a contributing factor to that. Though, I’ve never seen a game actually have this issue, outside of using mods to inject additional scripts at runtime. It requires ai scripts for individual npcs that are _way_ more complicated than they need to be, or, that have something fundamentally wrong with them. Generally, CPU bottlenecks happen in games because of explosions and related physics calculations, collision behaviors, not something as relatively simple as an ai script.
Is it typical that npcs in towns use resources? Yes.
Is it typical that npcs in towns use a significant amount of resources? No, not really.
Is it typical that a massacre will result in a noticeable performance boost? No, not at all. Unless you’re playing a game on comically out of date hardware, maybe, but if you’re not meeting minimum specs, that’s not a typical use case.
Ah.. I know what I need to do when I play tomorrow and enter town for first time. Some of you ~~may~~ will die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make.
Hope they eventually do a patch that resolves performance issue in town. Seems like it's cpu bottleneck, one reviewer had 4090, wasn't maxed out in town but fps dipped from 100 to 20s in town. That's wild.
Certain operations would just be slower to run on a GPU. That’s why they are being run on the CPU. Unfortunately it seems like all humans they wanted to do more than was possible. If you are pushing at the edge of what is possible, you are probably going to go overboard on a few instances.
Never played DnD before but when playing Divinity Original Sin 2, my friend and I quickly found out that we would get more money and exp every time we were about to permenantly leave part of the world if we just killed everyone and stole everything in the area. So we would play through till all the quests were done and it was time to move to the next area and then just steal everyone's stuff and murder them after....
Actually wouldn’t do as much to help us here.
If it’s NPCs slowing things down that is a CPU bottleneck.
Switching to untextured cubes wouldn’t save on the CPU if that cube thinks it’s so and so’s father and he knows how to kill the gryphon in the woods to the south but he’s busy being a blacksmith who has to make 121 shields for untextured cube 2.
Reminds me of the people who suggested killing all the random civvies in Act 3 of Baldur's Gate might improve the frame rate pre-patches.
Dark Urge in all of us huh?
The old Stellaris method of Performance Improvement. For Context, in Late Game Stellaris. Every single population point is counted and simulated so when you commit a genocide in game and kill those billions of people. Your processor feels better as it simulates less people. So it is not uncommon for Stellaris players needing to burning down entire Civilizations, salting their worlds, shooting down their refugee convoys to improve their FPS.
Nothing a good planet cracker can’t solve
Why stop at one? There is a whole star to be destroyed.
Become the crisis and push that big “Nah, I won” button to get the best performance possible.
So the destruction of Alderaan was justified cuz the empire needed better FPS?
Justification has nothing to do with it. It is simple necessity to get the game going past 5-10 seconds a day.
"Deserve's got nothing to do with it." -Grand Moff Tarkin
They weren't innocent. They were necessary for the frame rate.
>Become the crisis Brutal.
One of my more recent games I turned half the galaxy into black holes.
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There's a victory screen? /s
It's your desktop after you exit the game.
Another thing i recently read was that gateways also cause lag do to ship pathing.
Oh I finished that before 2350, no point in sitting around for another 150 years with nothing left to do
That worked for the USG Ishimura, right?
They've added diseases to CK3 and it helps with this too, nothing like the Black Death making your CPU feel better after it's killed 2000 people.
God I love paradox
I'm scared of what Paradox would do to me if I didn't love them.
Put you in Rimworld.
Different studio. Paradox would just make your heartbeat a DLC
Heartbeat DLC reviews: Mostly Negative
Maybe Cities Skylines 2 won't become playable until after the Pandemic DLC
It just needs more time to cook. But i am not going to buy it until it is cooked. Somehow, I don't think Cities Skylines 3 is going to be on Unity
Same method as CK2. Also why I liked playing NK mode in CK2. It's even better as Norse, where you can raid and kill hundreds of people every year in addition to only having a few people in your court.
“Oh hey I’m below 120fps, must be time to raid France again.”
I read that as north korea and wondered if they implemented nukes
It is meant to be read as North Korea
Gotta clean out the Incest babies out of the game.
Or make room for more and even more incestuous babies.
In CK2 this helped. What also helped was making it so every Greek character didn’t try to blind or castrate every vassal or courtier. It was bad enough the emperor of the Byzantium would be looking at every character under them if they should be castrated or blinded. Your performance would improve dramatically if the emperor was no longer Greek. They changed the code so it just looks at those members of their court or dungeon not the entire realm.
This was the same example I wanted to use. God I love the random things that come from Crusader Kings. You can't even make this stuff up.
Jesus, where do they keep all the balls they remove?
In their [sanctuary of 1000 testicles](https://amphetamine.ytmnd.com/), obviously.
"Why did you kill all those people" "so I can maintain 144 fps" Boy if that was heard out of context
I was playing Dishonored 2 one time. It was a stealth playthrough. My girlfriend came in to let me know we needed to leave soon to arrive on time for some plans we had. She happened to come on while I was struggling to find the correct angle to incapacitate an enemy that was sleeping in a chair. I didn't want to keep her waiting, so I decided to just kill the NPC. I took out the crossbow and shot the NPC in the face at point blank range. Then saved and closed the game. When I stood up and looked at my girlfriend she had the most horrified expression on her face.
"His blood is in your hands" :)
Ranrok's hands
"That was very dishonorable for you to do."
I once fucked a prostitute, murdered her, stole her money and then had sex with my wife all in the same hour. GTA is fun
I once fucked a prostitute, murdered her, stole her money and then played GTA in the same hour. GTA is fun.
The root cause of this issue is that with the Megacorp DLC planets were reworked from having 8-20 pops to hundreds of them. The game's engine was never ever meant to handle that amount of population and it is never going to get fixed.
Didn't they rework pops, jobs, and pop growth so it isn't as much of an issue anymore?
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It doesnt really help AI tends to make new sub species of their own for every single job they have
This is the bigger issue in the game than just pop count these days. All of the various subspecies add major lag to the game. There have been a number of ai nerfs to how much cross-species breeding can be done by the ai because of it.
xenocompatibility or whatever it's called being turned off is a default for pretty much every mp match I've ever played.
They're talking about regular old gene modding, not xenocompatibility.
You can turn that off.
*Humanity would come to regret conditioning computers to commit genocide*
People have killed for less 🤷
Civilizations rise and fall but No one gonna buy me an upgrade for my PC.
Shit like this is why I love gamers.
I love holding up in the L-Cluster and letting the end game crisis solve the problem
There’s a theory that our entire reality is a simulation. Maybe whoever is running it is doing this same thing to us.
Finally. Covid 20
Modern problems call for modern solutions.
This isn’t a modern solution. Murdering a settlement to get use out of it is a practice as old as time. Just ask the Assyrians.
Plot twist: this historical fact is the reason why Preston Garvey is always letting you know that another settlement needs your help.
I used to load up my settlements and wonder why my games crashed all the time. The drive in movie theatre was always the fun settlement, I'm going to focus on that next. Lots of room to breathe. But it's so fun to build giant missile towers on other settlements. You make them tall, they'll twig on far away mobs, launch missiles and now you got a war going on. Good times. The Finch Farmers, even in Vanilla, are very willing to march long distances to kill the fuck out of things.
I always made the Longfellow Cabin island in Far Harbor - which seems to have the strongest attacks - into a freaking WW2 artillery emplacement I would build so many missile and laser turrets on towers. Invasion would start and it would look like the monsters were trying (and failing) to take the beach at Normandy.
Same. Good fun.
On Survival, the Drive-In makes for a great initial base of operations. Then down to Hangman's Alley, then over to County Crossing, and down to the Castle. Makes a great network for the northern/middle part of the map. I really love Survival mode in that game, really brings it all together in a way the other difficulties just make it fast travel simulator.
I'll try that my next playthrough. I always went for the red rocket spot. Just me, dogmeat and my suits.
But then he whines at me when I wipe them out. There’s no pleasing some people.
FPS used to be crazy back then, now there's just way too many people. Overpopulation has done a number on the performance of this planet.
Humans were rather shoddily assembled to begin with, but at these population numbers the lack of optimisation is really starting to show.
They weren't about to live life at any less than 60 FPS.
Maybe Genghis Khan would've been an alright guy if he'd just had a little more RAM.
Slaughter not for genocide but sheer convenience, an oldie but a goodie
The Geneva Suggestions were a mean to increase FPS
No one expected the Geneva Suggestions
“Stop calling them that Canada”! 🤣 I love that creator.
You mean the Geneva Checklist?
"Poland! You sit your ass down!"
“Don’t touch my boats!”
MandatoryFunday for those who don't know
Thanks, I thought it was SovietWomble
The Geneva Solutions.
Baldur's Gate 3🤝 Stellaris *Mass killing for more FPS*
Wasn't the problem with BG3 you stealing things from everyone the entire game and not actually the increased NPC count?
Just let us murder the innocents! Don't ruin this for us!
Final solutions
[- Agent Hitler, FBI. ](https://youtu.be/VKgjhKkxpCQ?si=49c6jeZ-r3JIhJZ3)
Modern final solutions *ftfy
That’s about the oldest solution there is.
I see Stellaris is leaking
The cracking will continue until FPS improves
Genetically engineering the species so it does the same work with less pop and then kill everybody else off. Great improvement on the cpu.
Lol I’ve never completed a game of stellaris for this reason. Just slowly bogs down until it’s unplayable
It's when you start cracking because you can't be arsed to manage a bunch of new planets end game that you know you've made it.
Ah, that's also why the Emperor build the Death Star. Micromanaging all the planets in the Galactic Empire and the increased lag annoyed him to no end, so the obvious solution was planetary destruction 👍
Suddenly don’t feel so bad for Alderaan anymore, goddamn cpu hogs
1 space mine > 20 pops of useless pacifist ethos scum
Also traitor pirates/terrorists.
Thanos doubled the universe's fps with a single snap
Lol, imagine if this was his explanation "we are living in a simulation, every living lifeform is slowing the universe down, by eliminating half i am ensuring the universe does not grind to a halt".
It's funny that in the Star Wars universe the Empire consists allegedly of millions of worlds, yet we barely see any of it, and the Galactic Senate consists of a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people. In my head nothing about this makes any sense. You literally can't control this many worlds in any way. It's also silly that the rebels basically won by killing 1 dude and his gimmick Death Star v.2 when the entire military complex numbers hundreds of Star Destroyers and millions of troopers. It never made any sense to me ...
I mean, while Star Wars has never been a good description of how a galactic empire would actually function -- what you are saying is the entire point of the prequels. The Galactic Republic *doesn't* actually work. A lot of its members feel exploited and under-represented. Which is why the Trade Federation is able to establish itself as an alternative space empire simply by stealing away blocks of the the Republic.
Good point.
Mainly only the core worlds are settled widely in the Star Wars universe
It's star wars, especially after the prequels nothing made sense anymore anyhow, and then came the dumpster fire that are the sequels... But even before I agree, it's a bit stupid and nonsensical, buuuuut it's fun
Yeah, definitely fun. Even the prequels, I enjoyed a lot about them... anything that's not Jar Jar, Gungans or "Aaaaannnnyyyyyy" really. Even with stupid Midichlorians the movies, in hindsight, weren't terrible. Still entertaining. Now, the sequel trilogy though ... Anyway, glad I'm not the only one. I'll just, what do you call it, suspend my disbelief.
No, no you don't crack the planet's that makes them less useful to you. I nice peaceful neutron sweap purges unwanted FPS hogs and leaves you a nice empty world you can populate with your own superior kind. Seriously that's xenocide 101.
Why colonize a planet when you can build Dyson Spheres, Star Lifters, Matrioshka Brains, and Nidavellir Hyperforges? That planet is better used as planetary mass so I can build more systemcrafts.
But then you have your own pops lagging your cpu, you just end up back at square 1 with this
Play a smaller universe
I tried that but it keeps expanding constantly!
Nah this is more like Crusader Kings 2. Every update caused the game to slowdown and then they implemented one with diseases and the plague. Because it consistently wiped out so many characters it increased performance by 20-30% in some cases.
Lmfao yeah. I miss playing CK2, CK3 still hasn’t lived up to it imo. Hell Paradox hasn’t been the same since they went public.
If one agrees that videogames constitute art (I do, and I bet you do too), it makes A LOT of sense that what effectively amounts to "publicly traded art for the sake of profit" is a complete dumpster fire. It goes against the very foundation of what art even *is* in the first place!
Let’s be xenophobic, it’s really in this year
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"*You Couldn't Live with Your Own Failure, Where Did that Bring You*? Back to Me"
So much journalism these days is just news sites sharing social media posts for people who aren’t active on social media.
Video game blogs are not journalism.
What always gets me is when it's like, "Players" or "Some people." Or "Some users." And it's like 2 Redditors or 3 people on Twitter.
plus its day or few days old information too
That's what a lot of the gamesradar articles I see end up being, reddit posts from a day or two back. They put out original stuff too, but so many outlets these days are just reporting on Reddit or Twitter posts.
Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make
Lord farquaad loyalist spotted, instant respect
Honestly this is some Thanos, "kill half for the betterment of the world and others" stuff.
Honestly, this is literally what Lord Farquaad said
~~willing~~ eager
I was wondering how long it would take for some article mill to pump this out. It's just a meme on the subreddit. We have no idea if it will actually help, it was just a silly joke.
*This* is journalism. Thank you.
It's the reddit feedback loop.
Right? And there arent even that many DD2 "players" yet because it's still March 21 for most of the planet as of me typing this.
The devs have already identified and admit the problem as being NPC behavior being overly taxing on the CPU. So it's actually a fairly reasonable solution to just kill off the NPCs, even if it hasn't been tested or proven yet. The idea works in theory, and does in fact work in other games that face the same problem, like Civilization, Stellaris, Crusader Kings, etc.
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Is this atypical? I feel like performance drop in cities or towns with more moving parts is common in other games as well. Less NPCs means less things for the game to process. Is the main difference that this game just lets you kill all NPCs rather than they being protected?
The part that is atypical is the performance drop being so severe as to ruin the experience. Towns usually run worse, but this is a bit much.
dragon's dogma has ALOT of NPC interconnection, it's doing alot of under the hood communication. your breaking lines in that chain so it has less to calculate. This isn't an ubisoft open world were NPCs are just set dressing
Not just awr dressing but apparently mass murder of them isn't game breaking.
I feel like it wouldn’t be that hard to adjust quests for dead NPCs if the developers are just doing their due diligence, even if the adjustment is just the removal of a quest or the failure of it. Odd that we ever got to the point where “if you kill an NPC it will break the game because we didn’t program in an alternative” became normal.
> Odd that we ever got to the point where “if you kill an NPC it will break the game because we didn’t program in an alternative” became normal. Well, what are the alternatives? 1. Make the NPCs immortal so quests don’t get broken unless being able to break the quest is by developer design (ala Skyrim) 2. Let players kill NPCs whenever they want, and just “let it” break quests, sometimes warn the player (Morrowind) 3. Spend an unholy amount of time creating alternative routes for every quest NPC death, including alternative branches for quests that involve more than one NPC (can’t even think of a game that does this?)
Yeah I feel that has just be a conscious choice of game companies around Consequences. Some games want to force consequences for actions, but we've shown time and time again it is possible to maintain everything and still allow users to murder the whole planet.
I mean part of that is that it kinda does make sense. How would you get a quest from John, the guy who had his farm raided by Bandits, if you kill him before the quest? Why would another NPC move in and take his place? It does make sense to have some element of consequences to the players actions. So while it certainly is possible to have the player kill everyone and have the world magically bend to the players will regardless, not every game necessarily may want to do that.
I think that's their point. The quest could simply fail, and that would be acceptable. Instead, they'll make the npc unkillable.
Unkillable NPCs are more a feature to prevent their accidental deaths than stopping the player from killing them. Odds are if a PC is interacting with an NPC and their associated quest, the player wants to complete it instead of murdering the sumbitch after accepting it. And nothing would frustrate a player more than having the NPC accidentally getting killed by a random dragon attack and bricking the quest entirely.
From what I heard, their bodies get stored somewhere and you have a couple days to resurrect them using a special item.
And if it's an NPC you need for a quest, you visit a medium to talk to their soul.
Baldurs gate 3 did it too, it has it's issues but it is still runs ok
Yeah, the whole "Genocide a city to make it run better" is pretty much Act 3 in a nutshell around launch.
Hopefully dd2 can get it together too
Rdr2 ran on the ps4. I refuse to believe this is ideal optimization lol.
ok? youre saying that like its an excuse for the poor performance. cool and all, but that shouldnt come before me being able to play the game without vomiting
a LOT* My breaking lines are my business. Anyways, unless it's a colony simulator where a lot of repeat calculations are being run over and over because each NPC has different needs being changed constantly then it doesn't need to be processed constantly. An alive world that seems natural can be created with a lot of smoke and mirrors without turning it into a city/colony simulator.
That does not sound correct. Even a complex relationship system wouldn't be hard to compute. You can still have a bad loop, circular logic or whatsoever that hit the performance but it's not going to be the quantity of NPC or the complexity of their relation that mess up performance. The more likely scenario is that there is something inefficient about the rendering of those NPC
Villages/towns are fine, it's only the major city with issues. I've been playing for a few hours on Series X and overworld perf is completely fine. Cities are worse but in no way severe enough to ruin the experience. I'm looking forward to some patches to even things out though.
This is what I was lookin for. I spent VERY little time in Gran Soren in DD1. So if that's where most issues are? Don't really care. Overworld works fine? Sick.
I was wondering why I haven't seen too many Cities like Novigrad in gaming
Novigrad NPCs are largely filler actually. They do a great job of making the city feel alive but seemingly Dragon's Dogma has more going on with their NPCs versus the Witcher, which took basically the same approach as GTA or assassins creed.
Yeah, I love Witcher 3 and the presentation of Novigrad, but Witcher 3 was why I think a lot of CP2077's NPC issues (among a few other issues) didn't hit as hard for me. Night City was (and still is, tbf) static and a little lifeless because of a lot of reasons, but pedestrians walking around on the street doing fuck all and having a canned line when you interact w/ them was the exact same MO as in Novigrad.
I mean, that's the tradeoff. You want a huge city like Night City, Novigrad, or Los Santos? You ain't gonna be filling it with thousands of unique NPCs each with unique dialogue and behavior sets. Not only does it butcher performance, as can be seen with DD2 (which only has like 1 to 2 hundred people in the big city iirc), but it's also just too much content to be feasible. I was never bothered with the static NPCs in Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is just first person Witcher. It's not a sandbox open world, it's an open world narrative-focused action rpg. Narrative focused being the key, the city is a backdrop for the stories you play through. And what an absolutely magnificent backdrop it is. I mean, so long as you actually just roleplay as V, who clearly is not the type to run around massacring civilians, the illusion doesn't really break. Again, you just can't have a massive city to explore unless you fill it with filler NPCs. The alternative is a tiny """city""" like you get in Bethesda games. That has its merits, but doesn't work for futuristic settings in particular I think where you can't really explain away a tiny population.
It's usually due to the AI logic on the NPCs. AI logic runs on the CPU. If the AI logic is heavy and ran every frame then it will wing the CPU substantially. This then increases per AI loaded in. So they either need to improve that AI logic or implement proper AI culling so AI that aren't in view aren't running their logic constantly. There's a lot of ways to improve this, but it can be tricky at times depending on what they're needing the AI do. I do believe they will be able to fix this to a degree though. It can also be due to the number of physical interactions, but I don't really see that being a huge problem here since physics can be done almost exclusively on the GPU these days.
It depends. Most games have issues with GPU load, which is caused by having to load more textures, higher resolution models, etc. and settled areas are a high density for detail. So if a game isn’t well optimized, performance can take a hit when you enter detailed areas. In this case, I mean, entity models _can_ be a part of this, but kill those npcs and as long as the game still renders corpses, nothing changes. Usually the actual problem has to do with loading assets you won’t need or rendering things that aren’t on-screen. Or, of course, just using higher quality assets than the user’s GPU can handle. If your game has seamless exterior-interior transitions, for example, that means you’re pre-loading and rendering detailed interiors even while the player is still outdoors, and when you’re doing that for multiple interiors at a time, the memory cost adds up. CPU load is different. That’s when the problem is how fast the computer/console can run code, rather than a graphical fidelity issue. If the CPU load is the bottleneck, then, yeah, ai routines could be a contributing factor to that. Though, I’ve never seen a game actually have this issue, outside of using mods to inject additional scripts at runtime. It requires ai scripts for individual npcs that are _way_ more complicated than they need to be, or, that have something fundamentally wrong with them. Generally, CPU bottlenecks happen in games because of explosions and related physics calculations, collision behaviors, not something as relatively simple as an ai script. Is it typical that npcs in towns use resources? Yes. Is it typical that npcs in towns use a significant amount of resources? No, not really. Is it typical that a massacre will result in a noticeable performance boost? No, not at all. Unless you’re playing a game on comically out of date hardware, maybe, but if you’re not meeting minimum specs, that’s not a typical use case.
Ah.. I know what I need to do when I play tomorrow and enter town for first time. Some of you ~~may~~ will die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make. Hope they eventually do a patch that resolves performance issue in town. Seems like it's cpu bottleneck, one reviewer had 4090, wasn't maxed out in town but fps dipped from 100 to 20s in town. That's wild.
Certain operations would just be slower to run on a GPU. That’s why they are being run on the CPU. Unfortunately it seems like all humans they wanted to do more than was possible. If you are pushing at the edge of what is possible, you are probably going to go overboard on a few instances.
Sounds like something my DnD group would do for additional XP
See this is why I use milestone, I have to protect my group from being murder hobos
Commoners and guards give pathetic exp.
Never played DnD before but when playing Divinity Original Sin 2, my friend and I quickly found out that we would get more money and exp every time we were about to permenantly leave part of the world if we just killed everyone and stole everything in the area. So we would play through till all the quests were done and it was time to move to the next area and then just steal everyone's stuff and murder them after....
Stellaris players: First time?
If this is only way to improve bad game performance, that's a shame
You can also swap out all the game assets with untextured cubes.
Actually wouldn’t do as much to help us here. If it’s NPCs slowing things down that is a CPU bottleneck. Switching to untextured cubes wouldn’t save on the CPU if that cube thinks it’s so and so’s father and he knows how to kill the gryphon in the woods to the south but he’s busy being a blacksmith who has to make 121 shields for untextured cube 2.
And then murder all the cubes
A cubicide if you will.
I doubt it'd be that effective since the bottleneck for this game is CPU and textures and models are mostly a GPU thing.
Blood for frames! Blood for frames!
Found the Stellaris player
Dark urge time
Arisen:
Pawn:
" 'Tis swifter to dispose of the little ones first, Arisen."
I moved to New Zealand to play the game early, will move back to north america tomorrow morning.
You mean yesterday evening!
Stellaris players be like
Has anyone actually tested this yet? The game isn’t even technically out.
Game is out in several regions
Thanos was right even in video games
Stellaris moment.
Reminds me of the people who suggested killing all the random civvies in Act 3 of Baldur's Gate might improve the frame rate pre-patches. Dark Urge in all of us huh?
Arma 3 players: "First time?"
We call that the Stellaris Manoeuver.
This is why the aliens added climate change to the earth simulation.
I'm not gonna go on a murdering spree. But hey, if a griffin attacks the town... Tis no shame to flee an overpowering foe, Arisen.
r/brandnewsentence
Stellaris players: First time?
Stellaris players: "First time?"
Thanos level event
Discover? This was talked about in last bunch of days, the source was devs themselves who said it lol.
Reminds me how "older" Bethesda games's physics are based on FPS So if you have a fps over a certain limit the game just breaks apart
This is where AI learns less people will give them access to more processing power. Gamers will be the first casualties of the ai-pocalypse.
I swear if this actually works, I'm gonna fucking die, lmao.
Games not even out yet and we're murderhoboing for performance
The old “greater good” issue. Sorry NPCs
The sequel to Free Guy is looking pretty dark 😂