On September 13 2024 18:00 Cyro wrote: Yeah they made and managed that environment. It set off immediate red flags for me.
It was also generally hostile towards women and queer peeple, the mods did a horrible job with that stuff and FG appointed them and then never stepped in when it got bad. It bled into a lot of the feedback when somebody would submit feedback for devs, it had to be done in a public thread and then they would get flooded with hundreds of posts from trolls saying e.g. that they didn't want female units in the millitaries because of "woke" and so on. It was unmoderated and unavoidable.
One of the mods with the backing of the mod team and FG even gave out a warning to a victim because they protested against a troll intentionally , maliciously, repeatedly referring to them with the wrong pronouns, and this was apparently making a scene about "politics" in the chat.
The game launched with no block function.
If they don't want that whole segment of the population to touch the community because it's a waste dump, then fine - but they can't be shocked when the player counts and the game design suffer for it.
No way you are trying to blame SG failure on political crap, and the loss in audience would have gone both way. And if anything to go by this year, all of these games trying to bring in LGBTQ representative and realistic female beauty or whatever failed pretty hard. Why are we even having pronoun involved when we are all anonymous users submitting feedbacks. Meanwhile games that don't give a damn and focus on attractive characters and gameplay simply do well this year.
For the past few years a lot of multinational corp tried to promote DEI in order to get a better rating to cover ESG, and with the economy doing bad, DEI departments are the first to go because a lot has changed back to looking at numbers and focusing on MEI.
And I don't know why this is controversial, because no matter what government talk about inclusiveness, never have immigration policy with the goal to achieve diversity, but they have skilled migration which is merit based, and it is far less about identity but on merits.
Even if they never intend to listen to the feedback of one segment of the community, because implementing their suggestions would piss off a wider segment of their community, it doesn’t mean they have to let them be exposed to bullying or general toxic backlash.
Now I wasn’t present for those phases of the pre-beta, so to stress I didn’t observe this myself. I’ve no reason to doubt either, just can’t corroborate that.
For me ‘this stuff doesn’t matter, it’s about gameplay’ works both ways, and it’s kind of a cop-out. If that were the case, having LGBT characters or a female lead who wasn’t sexy wouldn’t matter right?
I think this does matter to many consumers, so I don’t blame FG for catering to it if they want to be successful. But don’t have people be insulted for the mere suggestion of such things.
I think it’s much more a case of ‘we don’t want unattractive female characters or LGBT ones in our game’ than ‘we shouldn’t worry about such things, it’s all about the gameplay’.
But it is what it is, me disliking a trend doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, otherwise Trump would never have become President
User was warned for this post
Appreciate the moderation away from what would undoubtedly be a shitshow, for the record I hadn’t seen your call as I spent a bit of time writing the reply so I hadn’t see your intervention
On September 13 2024 06:28 gTank wrote: Lol the new 1 on 1 map is literally fighting spirit.....
Well what is wrong with that? After all everyone can see this is a big copy paste of broodwar, sc2, Warcraft and also something else; fighting spirit was created in 2012 circa if I recall, so having it remade in 2024, after all, why not?
I love that map (they even named this very similar to it) dont get me wrong, but it runs against the whole idea of "future of rts" for me to get maps from 2012, at the same time getting told that "it is not starcraft, its very much its own kind of game".
Thing is, you can't not try something just because BW/sc2/WC3 did it. Stormgate has very much an "If it ain't broke" philosophy. And games that had decades to figure out what maps are good should be learned from.
As for maps specifically, you kinda have to use the tried and tested layouts at least for the initial game. Make the game good and balanced, then get interesting/creative with the maps. Not the other way around.
On September 13 2024 18:00 Cyro wrote: Yeah they made and managed that environment. It set off immediate red flags for me.
It was also generally hostile towards women and queer peeple, the mods did a horrible job with that stuff and FG appointed them and then never stepped in when it got bad. It bled into a lot of the feedback when somebody would submit feedback for devs, it had to be done in a public thread and then they would get flooded with hundreds of posts from trolls saying e.g. that they didn't want female units in the millitaries because of "woke" and so on. It was unmoderated and unavoidable.
One of the mods with the backing of the mod team and FG even gave out a warning to a victim because they protested against a troll intentionally , maliciously, repeatedly referring to them with the wrong pronouns, and this was apparently making a scene about "politics" in the chat.
The game launched with no block function.
If they don't want that whole segment of the population to touch the community because it's a waste dump, then fine - but they can't be shocked when the player counts and the game design suffer for it.
No way you are trying to blame SG failure on political crap, and the loss in audience would have gone both way. And if anything to go by this year, all of these games trying to bring in LGBTQ representative and realistic female beauty or whatever failed pretty hard. Why are we even having pronoun involved when we are all anonymous users submitting feedbacks. Meanwhile games that don't give a damn and focus on attractive characters and gameplay simply do well this year.
For the past few years a lot of multinational corp tried to promote DEI in order to get a better rating to cover ESG, and with the economy doing bad, DEI departments are the first to go because a lot has changed back to looking at numbers and focusing on MEI.
And I don't know why this is controversial, because no matter what government talk about inclusiveness, never have immigration policy with the goal to achieve diversity, but they have skilled migration which is merit based, and it is far less about identity but on merits.
Even if they never intend to listen to the feedback of one segment of the community, because implementing their suggestions would piss off a wider segment of their community, it doesn’t mean they have to let them be exposed to bullying or general toxic backlash.
Now I wasn’t present for those phases of the pre-beta, so to stress I didn’t observe this myself. I’ve no reason to doubt either, just can’t corroborate that.
For me ‘this stuff doesn’t matter, it’s about gameplay’ works both ways, and it’s kind of a cop-out. If that were the case, having LGBT characters or a female lead who wasn’t sexy wouldn’t matter right?
I think this does matter to many consumers, so I don’t blame FG for catering to it if they want to be successful. But don’t have people be insulted for the mere suggestion of such things.
I think it’s much more a case of ‘we don’t want unattractive female characters or LGBT ones in our game’ than ‘we shouldn’t worry about such things, it’s all about the gameplay’.
But it is what it is, me disliking a trend doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, otherwise Trump would never have become President
well, this is by far the least bad mistake compared to not changing up the visual art style right from the alpha. Though I suspect there's an element of using cartoon graphics to make sure the game isn't too demanding to run.
I'd assumed that too, but the performance across the board is far worse than any modern RTS I've played.
On September 13 2024 18:00 Cyro wrote: Yeah they made and managed that environment. It set off immediate red flags for me.
It was also generally hostile towards women and queer peeple, the mods did a horrible job with that stuff and FG appointed them and then never stepped in when it got bad. It bled into a lot of the feedback when somebody would submit feedback for devs, it had to be done in a public thread and then they would get flooded with hundreds of posts from trolls saying e.g. that they didn't want female units in the millitaries because of "woke" and so on. It was unmoderated and unavoidable.
One of the mods with the backing of the mod team and FG even gave out a warning to a victim because they protested against a troll intentionally , maliciously, repeatedly referring to them with the wrong pronouns, and this was apparently making a scene about "politics" in the chat.
The game launched with no block function.
If they don't want that whole segment of the population to touch the community because it's a waste dump, then fine - but they can't be shocked when the player counts and the game design suffer for it.
No way you are trying to blame SG failure on political crap, and the loss in audience would have gone both way. And if anything to go by this year, all of these games trying to bring in LGBTQ representative and realistic female beauty or whatever failed pretty hard. Why are we even having pronoun involved when we are all anonymous users submitting feedbacks. Meanwhile games that don't give a damn and focus on attractive characters and gameplay simply do well this year.
For the past few years a lot of multinational corp tried to promote DEI in order to get a better rating to cover ESG, and with the economy doing bad, DEI departments are the first to go because a lot has changed back to looking at numbers and focusing on MEI.
And I don't know why this is controversial, because no matter what government talk about inclusiveness, never have immigration policy with the goal to achieve diversity, but they have skilled migration which is merit based, and it is far less about identity but on merits.
Even if they never intend to listen to the feedback of one segment of the community, because implementing their suggestions would piss off a wider segment of their community, it doesn’t mean they have to let them be exposed to bullying or general toxic backlash.
Now I wasn’t present for those phases of the pre-beta, so to stress I didn’t observe this myself. I’ve no reason to doubt either, just can’t corroborate that.
For me ‘this stuff doesn’t matter, it’s about gameplay’ works both ways, and it’s kind of a cop-out. If that were the case, having LGBT characters or a female lead who wasn’t sexy wouldn’t matter right?
I think this does matter to many consumers, so I don’t blame FG for catering to it if they want to be successful. But don’t have people be insulted for the mere suggestion of such things.
I think it’s much more a case of ‘we don’t want unattractive female characters or LGBT ones in our game’ than ‘we shouldn’t worry about such things, it’s all about the gameplay’.
But it is what it is, me disliking a trend doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, otherwise Trump would never have become President
well, this is by far the least bad mistake compared to not changing up the visual art style right from the alpha. Though I suspect there's an element of using cartoon graphics to make sure the game isn't too demanding to run.
I'd assumed that too, but the performance across the board is far worse than any modern RTS I've played.
The performance level with 3 players was worse than any game i've played before period. Much slower than cyberpunk with path tracing for some context here - and that's a graphical and technological showpiece which heavily loads CPU/RAM/GPU all at once.
edit: Actually Gemcraft (a tower defense based on Flash) was worse if you played endless modes after grinding loads of unlocks. Not something to aspire to, i just chose not to do that and so did pretty much everybody else.
I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
On September 14 2024 16:03 Cyro wrote: I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
do you happen to know if anyone has made a well performing RTS with UE5? It seems like modern RTS games avoid UE5.
On September 14 2024 16:03 Cyro wrote: I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
do you happen to know if anyone has made a well performing RTS with UE5? It seems like modern RTS games avoid UE5.
There doesn’t seem anything hugely obvious precluding it, maybe it needs a little more work than other engines. Although to my knowledge most recent RTS hits are kinda building components of their own engines
Stormgate’s performance issues seem to stem from them pushing (iirc) 64 tick, and their own rollback system. To the degree you’ll get feedback on performance issues on their Reddit to disable the latter.
SC2 is pretty buttery smooth as it is, do you really gain much from a big tick rate increase if you’re getting these performance issues?
Cyro is more knowledgable than I on such matters, it doesn’t seem a fundamental UE5 issue but their own RTS logic layer and decisions they’ve made that really add to CPU strain.
They’re also not really gaining much of the visual sexiness that UE5 can deliver either, least in these builds. So it feels you’re taking an engine that can knock it out of the park in terms of visual quality, not taking advantage thus far, and your own Snowplay module and computational overhead you added as a pair of features is tanking performance in terms of CPU bound game logic
It may be that some optimisation will see some big improvements there but that remains to be seen.
On September 14 2024 16:03 Cyro wrote: I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
do you happen to know if anyone has made a well performing RTS with UE5? It seems like modern RTS games avoid UE5.
Not that i know of, UE5 in general has performance problems.
Generally agree with WombaT
3 player co-op is also a huge performance drain because simulation performance scaling is non linear with unit count; 50% more units will take something like twice as long to simulate. I would not personally make that trade for performance reasons alone unless there was a ton of headroom.
I recall in an interview with the ZeroSpace founder, they had to modify UE itself to get the engine to support the kind of unit counts they wanted in a performant way.
edit: found the spot in the interview:
Not sure why all of these new RTSs insist on using UE5 - I guess it helps get a product to market but I have to imagine it'll be a bit of a headache in the longer term as you run into various performance roadblocks like SG appears to be doing. Good luck diving into the UE source code at that point.
It is one of the "funny" lines units say when you click on them a lot. It is a hallmark of Blizzard RTSes. Doesn't look to me like writing of it is any better or worse than those lines in general. You can question how wise it was to use that line in such a video though.
On September 15 2024 02:12 _Spartak_ wrote: It is one of the "funny" lines units say when you click on them a lot. It is a hallmark of Blizzard RTSes. Doesn't look to me like writing of it is any better or worse than those lines in general. You can question how wise it was to use that line in such a video though.
Why would it be unwise to use such a line? It just seems like silly stupid fun. Am I missing something?
I don't know. To prevent these types of reactions maybe? 😄 It does feel a bit out of place in an otherwise "serious" video. There may also be people unaware of that Blizzard RTS tradition of having silly voicelines.
On September 15 2024 01:07 townhouse wrote: I recall in an interview with the ZeroSpace founder, they had to modify UE itself to get the engine to support the kind of unit counts they wanted in a performant way.
On September 14 2024 16:03 Cyro wrote: I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
do you happen to know if anyone has made a well performing RTS with UE5? It seems like modern RTS games avoid UE5.
Not that i know of, UE5 in general has performance problems.
Generally agree with WombaT
3 player co-op is also a huge performance drain because simulation performance scaling is non linear with unit count; 50% more units will take something like twice as long to simulate. I would not personally make that trade for performance reasons alone unless there was a ton of headroom.
I wonder how much is difficulty of optimisation and how much is UE5 itself. Not my area of expertise
Fortnite is Epic’s flagship game, so one assumes they really tweaked it when they transitioned from UE4 to 5. It performs remarkably well on my whole suite of hardware, even in custom lobbies with tons of players in an enclosed space. Crank the settings up on my main rig and it looks pretty nice as well.
Suffice to say I’ve seen very performant UE5 titles that look great, I’ve also played some that perform terribly and don’t look pretty either
There is so much experience with UE4. Sometimes its better to stick with old tech like how the Zerospace people are doing.
UE4 is so well understood that Borderlands3 runs solid on the Nintendo Switch. When Borderlands3 first came out it required a $1500 PC in 2019 running on UE4.
Guys can perform magic with UE4.
IMO, UE4 games have evolved from Atari 2600 Combat in 1977 to 1982 Pitfall. That is the difference in quality I've seen with UE4 games. This is how well understood UE4 is.
This is a way out there opinion... but I hope 2025's Borderlands4 is a UE4 game. The graphics do not need to improve from 3.
On September 14 2024 16:03 Cyro wrote: I still think that it could be life or death for them to improve it a lot, not like +20% but +200%. It's a very low layer on the pyramid, they could build the best RTS mechanics and art ever on top of it but if people can't run the game at playable and enjoyable performance levels with reasonable hardware in the game modes that they want to play then it wouldn't matter.
do you happen to know if anyone has made a well performing RTS with UE5? It seems like modern RTS games avoid UE5.
Stormgate’s performance issues seem to stem from them pushing (iirc) 64 tick, and their own rollback system. To the degree you’ll get feedback on performance issues on their Reddit to disable the latter.
I'm no expert so I don't want to comment too much, but disabling rollback doesn't make the game any more playable in my experience.
Maybe a 10% increase in fps. Going from 30 to 33 fps isn't noticeable. If it really makes matchmaking better and helps people on bad wifi or play with their friends on the other side of the world, then it's well worth it. Plus there's the option to turn it off if you want.
64 tick could well be a problem. When I play the input lag gets so high it's completely worthless.
EPT
