Wow, 100.000 dudes running at the same time, 60FPS, Black Masses...

[Sundiata]

"Hundreds Of Thousands At Playable FPS - Making Of The Black Masses P.1"

 

Edited June 1, 2018 by Sundiata

[Lion.Kanzen]

Sounds like clickbait. lol.

[Rolf Dew]

I bet someone would have to have a super computer to run that lol

[Nescio]

9 minutes ago, Rolf Dew said:

I bet someone would have to have a super computer to run that lol

Well, I don't know. Cossacks could easily handle tens of thousands of units without noticeable lag on an ordinary pc in 2001.

[elexis]

In case this was about clickbait:

Wow, 19.333 entities in 0 A.D. rendered at the same time, 60FPS in 1080p...

This 1 minute scene on a giant Jebel Barkal map (set 1080p) was rendered for about 6 hours on my computer (until it crashed) and 1 hour on Imaroks computer:

It took between 10 and 30 seconds on my computer to advance one second in the match. But the video was rendered targetting 60 FPS and 1080p.

We can further increase the number of entities in trailers as long as the CPU or GPU don't melt (it did for bb when creating a trailer scene), maybe to 100k too sometime (but that were overadvertizing the game performance by a factor of 100).

[elexis]

1 hour ago, Nescio said:

Well, I don't know. Cossacks could easily handle tens of thousands of units without noticeable lag on an ordinary pc in 2001.

Like this one? It looks like the units don't have hitboxes, so tens of thousands of collisions less to test.

 

[Sundiata]

@elexis, so you're telling me:

[vladislavbelov]

1 hour ago, Nescio said:

Well, I don't know. Cossacks could easily handle tens of thousands of units without noticeable lag on an ordinary pc in 2001.

Units doesn't collide with themselves (can go through other units) AFAIK, that makes the problem much easier.

1 hour ago, elexis said:

We can further increase the number of entities in trailers as long as the CPU or GPU don't melt (it did for bb when creating a trailer scene), maybe to 100k too sometime (but that were overadvertizing the game performance by a factor of 100).

Challenge accepted

[Nescio]

25 minutes ago, elexis said:

Like this one? It looks like the units don't have hitboxes, so tens of thousands of collisions less to test.

1 minute ago, vladislavbelov said:

Units doesn't collide with themselves (can go through other units) AFAIK, that makes the problem much easier.

True and true, Cossacks was undeniably a much simpler game – but we've also advanced eighteen years.

 

[elexis]

I must say though that I don't have that much demand for increasing the population count by a lot. People often complain about too much micro needed and the game being too stressful. This problem is proportional to the population limit however. One doesn't have that much todo with 100pop, with 150 it's more comfortable to purchase economy upgrades. Beyond that one really has to pay a lot of attention to chose good battles. We still need a good amount of performance improvements though and we want to support more than 8 players (certainly 9 at least if there is a gaia player for instance, already doubling the total number of units).

[Sundiata]

2 hours ago, elexis said:

I must say though that I don't have that much demand for increasing the population count by a lot. People often complain about too much micro needed and the game being too stressful. This problem is proportional to the population limit however.

But that would change dramatically if battalions were eventually implemented for military units. I really wouldn't mind commanding several battalions of 100 units each 

I know this isn't Total War, but it would be really epic, to increase the scale of battles and simultaneously decrease unit-micro. If performance improvements allow it, of course. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

15 hours ago, elexis said:

Like this one? It looks like the units don't have hitboxes, so tens of thousands of collisions less to test.

Individual soldiers have hitboxes in Total War games, and you can easily have battles with an army of 2500 vs. another army of 2500. I wonder what TW games do to make this workable. And it's not just because their battle maps have fewer obstacles than a 0 A.D. map. You could have a completely blank 0 A.D. map and it would go to lag Hell with 5000 units moving around. It might have something to do with their soldiers all belonging to battalions. Perhaps there's a cheap way to just path the whole battalion as one entity and then "cheat" with the soldiers inside the battalion. dunno.

Edited June 2, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

13 hours ago, elexis said:

I must say though that I don't have that much demand for increasing the population count by a lot. People often complain about too much micro needed and the game being too stressful. This problem is proportional to the population limit however. One doesn't have that much todo with 100pop, with 150 it's more comfortable to purchase economy upgrades. Beyond that one really has to pay a lot of attention to chose good battles. We still need a good amount of performance improvements though and we want to support more than 8 players (certainly 9 at least if there is a gaia player for instance, already doubling the total number of units).

With battalions, one could "increase the pop cap" while actually reducing the number of controllable entities the player has to worry about. Let's say you can have up to 30 battalions under your command. Each with 20-30 soldiers in it would make 600-900 soldiers total, but you only have to worry about the disposition of the 30 entities, not 900.

 

11 hours ago, Sundiata said:

 But that would change dramatically if battalions were eventually implemented for military units. I really wouldn't mind commanding several battalions of 100 units each 

 

100 units per battalion in 0 A.D. seems a bit much.  I'm thinking more like 24-30 could be standard, but the code supporting much more for mods.

 

Edited June 2, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[elexis]

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Individual soldiers have hitboxes in Total War games, and you can easily have battles with an army of 2500 vs. another army of 2500

I didn't say that having hitboxes is the sole reason for 0AD being slow but being a reason why the originally cited game is quick and not comparable with 0AD.

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I wonder what TW games do to make this workable

I couldn't find anything on their pathfinder online. But likely by not computing a new path but most likely by pushing. This might have other downsides like units not finding a path (dumb zombie spam behavior).

Wasn't unexpected that someone would use the B word . But what you advertize for batallions is already the case for formations - only the formation entity computes the longpath and the units in the formation only compute the shortpath. So temple told me it were preferable to keep formations on Jebel Barkal as a performance improvement when I considered disabling them for being buggy sometimes.

The fundamental problem is that noone has reworked (or finished rework) pathfinding since alpha 19. It could be much faster independent of unit grouping by trying to achieve less perfect results at the gain of performance.

[Sundiata]

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

100 units per battalion in 0 A.D. seems a bit much.  I'm thinking more like 24-30 could be standard, but the code supporting much more for mods.

Of course. But you know me... I always like to dream big  

Me dreaming some more:

Another thing is that a lot of the micromanagement is tied up in the "economy". Tasking individual units to do this and that. Especially with regard to tree cutting and tasking and often re-tasking a specific number of women to specific fields, and even construction. I have a radical idea that I've always kind of wanted to see in 0AD that would focus the micro on battle, and economy would be more of a macro thing. I've suggested it before in some capacity, and will probably trie to work the idea out a little further in the future, to be able to explain it well enough (not that its so difficult to understand, I just need to find the right wording). Anyway here's an early draft:

The economy and civilian aspects of 0AD feel very stale. Mind you this is not unique to 0AD, but a problem of Classic RTS games in general. They never truly feel immersive, where other similar gaming genres have achieved an incredible feelings of immersion, especially city/town builders and economy or civilization management games, but those games always lack in combat. One of the problems in Classic RTS is that economy and civilian life feels very unrealistic, almost dead. For example having to tell individuals (civilians) what to do all the time. If not, they just stand there... 0AD is not a simulator, and probably never will be, and that's fine... But it doesn't mean we can't attempt to "simulate" certain aspects of the game, especially with regard to economy (and even construction). Basically what I'm getting at is higher level of automation for the sake of a more realistic economy and civilian life. 

In many building/strategy games, you simply have a (pop-up) panel with all your building options... Want to build something? Just click the the icon of what you want to build, place it, and done. Available workers will now autonomously go to the site and start construction. Building many things at once and can't wait for a particular structure to finish? Prioritize the building project(s) you deem most important (perhaps with levels of priority for maximum control). Or build more construction guilds to increase the amount of builders available. There is a civilian population (men, women, children), which could grow dynamically based on how many houses and necessary resources you have available (mainly food, but availability of other products could influence population growth/stratification as well), supplemented by immigration. This civilian population could be "simulated", controlled by an AI. You decide what to build, and where to build it, and the AI automatically assigns builders, and after its construction is complete, the AI assigns available workers, who become part of a running animation in the structure they work in (sometimes no more than entering and "turning on the light", or having some smoke coming from a chimney). The amount of available workers is determined by your civilian population minus employed people. Its from this same surplus of civilians that you recruit fighters (who would still be controlled manually, and could still be tasked to build fortifications/infrastructure or clear forests manually, like before, but not mine or farm, or build civilian structures).

With this kind of system, civilian and economic aspects of the game could be greatly expanded and diversified, while removing unnecessary/unpleasant micro. You could even have simple production chains, which are always awesome in games like this. Managing brainless individuals is replaced with managing a living economy, with automated individuals going about their daily tasks. Finite resources become "semi-infinate", and the output of economic structures is determined by the amount of workers, tech, radius, level... Not by how smoothly individuals may or may not pass obstruction boxes. You'd have an income and an expenditure, determined by a host of easy to understand/intuitive factors, easily managed and adjusted with an economic pop-up pannel, with all the info you need to know and the option to adjust/finetune things to your liking. Apart from the construction and economy pop-up panels, you'd have a third military pop-up panel as well, for everything relating to military (formations, battalion/army setup, recruitment, overview of all units/battalions/armies, military tech). 

Forests regenerate over time, wood being harvested through lumber camps (sustainable slow income). Tasking your army to clear a forest will clear it for good (unsustainable, rapid income). Metal(s) are typically mined from realistic looking mines, usually in a hill/mountain-side away from your original CC (continuous income). Smaller alluvial deposits could offer one time metal income, much like it is now, not too far from your original CC, but not too close either. Stone comes from realistic looking stone quarries (same story as metals). We could have things like brick makers, as bricks were the primary construction material for most civs in-game.

Various civilian and administrative structures specific per civ, could increase things like population growth, motivation for workers (increased outputs), or generate glory that makes your soldiers fight harder. I'm thinking about things like taverns, markets (with which civilians interact), shrines, statues, bath-houses, courthouses, and many other potential civ-specific structures. You wouldn't just be developing the economy and military of your chosen civilization, but also its culture.

Basically, what I'd love to see is 0AD in its current state, with a rich blend of civilization management games like the classic Caesar and Pharaoh, and the modern Anno series, Banished and Life is Feudal: Forest Village, mixed in with combat simulator elements similar to the Total War series. None of these simulation aspects should be as complex or difficult to understand as they are in dedicated management games, they should be more simple/arcade-like, so you can focus most attention on building, recruiting and fighting, with a semi-autonomous, living economy in the background. 

I know, I'm insane, but that's what a lot of people are really waiting for, and 0AD/pyrogenesis seems like a platform that has the potential to evolve in this direction. 

Economy wise, I'm thinking of something similar, but more simplified/arcady than than Banished and Life is Feudal: Forest Village:

 

 

Even a game called Ostriv is doing some interesting things with regard to production chains and economy managment: