Bug reports and suggestions - read the first post

[Heroes_Witch_King]

When I look at this blog, I can see PW in the future.

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,314140.0.html

Oh yeah, if only the normal village scene can be that big in Bannerlord, I wonder how big a PW scene could be...

 

[The Bowman]

When I look at this blog, I can see PW in the future.

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,314140.0.html

Oh yeah, if only the normal village scene can be that big in Bannerlord, I wonder how big a PW scene could be...

225 km2.

 

[Heroes_Witch_King]

225 km2.

You do realize that Skyrim has only 37.1 km2, right?
Wow, once Bannerlord is released, I won't play any other game anymore...

 

[hirovard]

I doubt most scenes will even reach a tenth of that size. It was more of a demonstration of the kind of sizes that can now be achieved than anything else

 

[Splintert]

It's Arma 3's Altis size. That takes over an hour to run from one side to the other at 23km/h.

Unless they have drasticaly changed the way their engine processes props, the game would not run at playable framerates on any system for the next 100 years on a scene with a sufficiently dense collection of locations.

 

[Raging Womble]

It's Arma 3's Altis size. That takes over an hour to run from one side to the other at 23km/h.

How dead would PW be with a map that size and only 200 or so people on it.

 

[hirovard]

Which is why its good for a demonstration piece but in reality is impractical.

 

[The Bowman]

Which is why its good for a demonstration piece but in reality is impractical.

Not really, you can have the main location concentrated reasonably in the middle[ish], while the rest is a zone free to explore [wilderness and stuff]. The ideal would be to keep playability and reasonable travel distance at the same time. Right now, you can have the enemy castle 100 meters in front of you, which is not really wise.

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

A suggestion about food. What about being able to serve consumable items like cooked meat, meat pie etc. in smaller pieces? For example, serve a wine jar into 4 wine cups, a meat pie -- into 4 (or even 8 ) meat pie pieces, beer -- into 4 beer mugs etc. They should give the same amount of "food units" totally.

Not a bad idea, but I don't have the spare time to mess around making meshes for that.

If I am not mistaken, the more "food units" are left in the hunger bar, the faster are things like mining. What about no limitations if there are more than, for example, 50% or 75% of "food units"?

I don't see the need for that: there are no "limitations" from one perspective, the food bar just giving an extra boost.

Well, if they would not DIAPPEAR when consumed, but rather return in an empty form, like with water buckets, it would look cool.

But also result in worthless litter dropped around the scene, lowering performance and triggering the pruning of other useful dropped items. Water buckets return to the empty form because they can be used directly to fill up again, at wells or when standing in water.

1) What if I make the models of these cups and pieces?
2) Well, I still ask that question again -- why not to give equal boost to those who have 75% or more food units?
3) The concept is, that you make the cup at first (from gold, silver, or anything else), and fill it with wine. Then you RP with it, use it, but it becomes an empty cup, it doesn't disappear.

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

It's Arma 3's Altis size. That takes over an hour to run from one side to the other at 23km/h.

How dead would PW be with a map that size and only 200 or so people on it.

At the best times of PW-Nexus, there were more than 200 people willing to play at the same time. So, why not to have more than 200 people? Yes, I doubt that servers will be able to handle it first day after release, but M&B Warband was at first made for 64 players, and not all servers could handl it. Now some servers handle 200 at the moment.

So, why do you consider that a limit?

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

It's Arma 3's Altis size. That takes over an hour to run from one side to the other at 23km/h.

Unless they have drasticaly changed the way their engine processes props, the game would not run at playable framerates on any system for the next 100 years on a scene with a sufficiently dense collection of locations.

Well, if it is a square with S=225 km2, the side is 15 km long. The diagonal is 21 km long then, so it would take a little bit less.

 

[Heroes_Witch_King]

So, why do you consider that a limit?

Actually, you misunderstood him. What he meant is that PW for Bannerlord will be able to have huge maps, I mean, really huge...
And if only 200 people play on that one server with the enormous map/scene, of course it would be kinda dead. Imagine playing Skyrim, and there are only 200 NPC's around the whole map, you would almost never see any of them...

But I think Bannerlord will impress us, it will allow a lot more players on a server...

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

So, why do you consider that a limit?

Actually, you misunderstood him. What he meant is that PW for Bannerlord will be able to have huge maps, I mean, really huge...
And if only 200 people play on that one server with the enormous map/scene, of course it would be kinda dead. Imagine playing Skyrim, and there are only 200 NPC's around the whole map, you would almost never see any of them...

But I think Bannerlord will impress us, it will allow a lot more players on a server...

I am waiting for a 64-bit game about fencing with no actual engine-caused map size and amount of players online limit.

 

[Splintert]

There's always going to be a limit so long as computers don't move on from Turing machine design. Even for 64-bits, 128, 256.... you need infinitely many bits of memory to store infinite players.

 

[Яowan]

225km2... That is roughly the size of the ArmA 2 map, Chernarus - if not exactly the same size, ignoring the infinite terrain outside of the map itself. So really you shouldn't need or want anything bigger than that, considering small ArmA maps take weeks to months to create (though largely due to the map making process being difficult and tedious in that engine... Bannerlord looks considerably more streamlined for that matter, but still testing a map of that size would be... Time consuming).

Considering it appears they are using a new engine (or they have done massive overhauls of the current engine, not a clue), one can hope for greater player count limits (it appears that they've more or less confirmed this, iirc) and stable but large maps with large prop density combined. Though until the game is released or the devs go into details concerning large maps we won't know how well the game will run.

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

There's always going to be a limit so long as computers don't move on from Turing machine design. Even for 64-bits, 128, 256.... you need infinitely many bits of memory to store infinite players.

If I'm not mistaken, Warband engine can't handle more players because it's 32-bit. But I can be mistaken.

The point I tried to mention is that lots of games that last so long (like 6 years or more) start lacking ability to use all the resources that computers have, even though I still remember servers limited for like 16 or even less amount of men because they could not handle it when the game was just released.
To speak shorter, I don't want Bannerlord to be a game that can only use like 1/16 of what my computer can give it like Warband is.

By the way, Vornne has already said that he will not make PW for Bannerlord if it will not have Linux version.

 

[VVyrd]

There's always going to be a limit so long as computers don't move on from Turing machine design. Even for 64-bits, 128, 256.... you need infinitely many bits of memory to store infinite players.

If I'm not mistaken, Warband engine can't handle more players because it's 32-bit. But I can be mistaken.

The point I tried to mention is that lots of games that last so long (like 6 years or more) start lacking ability to use all the resources that computers have, even though I still remember servers limited for like 16 or even less amount of men because they could not handle it when the game was just released.
To speak shorter, I don't want Bannerlord to be a game that can only use like 1/16 of what my computer can give it like Warband is.

By the way, Vornne has already said that he will not make PW for Bannerlord if it will not have Linux version.

Warband was designed for 64 players. That's why when there are 80 or more players it starts lagging, and they can't change that without changing/heavily updating the whole engine, which is what they're doing in Bannerlord.

 

[Splintert]

There's a number of reasons for Warband's playercount limit but the main reason is network bandwidth. It gets exponentially harder to send updates to each player as there are more players online. There was a graph made by the FSE guys about this but I don't remember where to find it. The game client will also eventually be unable to keep up with the number of props/players/items moving about, lowering your framerate. That the game is 32-bit is almost completely irrelevant to the number of players that can be in a single environment, seeing as the largest integer (ie some kind of "player index", used to refer to that player in the code) is a staggering 2,147,483,647.

Games start failing to use all of the available resources because they quite simply don't need them. A game will never run faster than its main thread. The main thread will run as fast as it can. This is limited by your processor's single threaded performance, or the speed of one core. However, even if your processor is extremely fast, as soon as the game tries to read/write to memory, it will halt and another process will be allowed to do its thing while the game waits for the memory to change. This is why we rarely see 100% core utilization, your processor is waiting on other components in your computer to finish their tasks.

Unfortunately, its unavoidable. You might have the fastest processor and the fastest memory, but the speed that data travels between the different components is extremely slow. We're talking on the order of milliseconds or microseconds, but it makes a huge difference when your processor is running such that it can complete an instruction in nanoseconds.

Quite simply, you can't just throw more processing power at a program to make it go faster.

 

[Baskakov_Dima]

There's a number of reasons for Warband's playercount limit but the main reason is network bandwidth. It gets exponentially harder to send updates to each player as there are more players online. There was a graph made by the FSE guys about this but I don't remember where to find it. The game client will also eventually be unable to keep up with the number of props/players/items moving about, lowering your framerate. That the game is 32-bit is almost completely irrelevant to the number of players that can be in a single environment, seeing as the largest integer (ie some kind of "player index", used to refer to that player in the code) is a staggering 2,147,483,647.

Games start failing to use all of the available resources because they quite simply don't need them. A game will never run faster than its main thread. The main thread will run as fast as it can. This is limited by your processor's single threaded performance, or the speed of one core. However, even if your processor is extremely fast, as soon as the game tries to read/write to memory, it will halt and another process will be allowed to do its thing while the game waits for the memory to change. This is why we rarely see 100% core utilization, your processor is waiting on other components in your computer to finish their tasks.

Unfortunately, its unavoidable. You might have the fastest processor and the fastest memory, but the speed that data travels between the different components is extremely slow. We're talking on the order of milliseconds or microseconds, but it makes a huge difference when your processor is running such that it can complete an instruction in nanoseconds.

Quite simply, you can't just throw more processing power at a program to make it go faster.

I completely dislike the way you speak when someone mentions words connected with computer's resources in any kind. You always misunderstand what people are actually trying to say.

I mean, that Warband can't use all 16 cores of processor and, therefore, handle officer buffs on NW with 200 players online. Server owner has to turn them off, because single core can't handle it.
I mean, that Warband can't use more than 4 GB of RAM. Just because it is 32-bit. Player's ID is not the only thing you have to store there.
I mean, that Warband can't handle maps bigger than some size.
Network bandwidth plays a role, but it's maximum also grows. I remember that 100 Mb/sec was considered great in 2010. Now it's just an ordinary thing. After 2-3 years GPON will be ordinary, maybe faster.

You can never say that you should not make your game able to consume more resources than computers normally have now just because you don't expect them to have much more.
You can never expect some technological jump that will break older limits and bring new.

Quiet simply -- you just can throw more resources to run things faster, but the point is, the program must be able to consume them.

 

[Splintert]

The reason Warband can't handle "officer buffs" is because their implementation requires too many resources. If your algorithm has a complexity of n^2, that means it takes the number of players squared resources to complete. It doesn't matter how fast of a processor you have, you're only gaining miniscule advantages in terms of runtime for an algorithm of high complexity. Not to mention that Module system scripts are going to run far slower than an engine feature. Vornne states all the time that checking distance from agents is an extremely intensive task, which is why he's refused to implement some features requiring that processing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation

Warband can't use more than 4GB of RAM because it is 32-bit, right. But that's completely irrelevant because it never uses more than 4GB of RAM under normal circumstances - that is, with the design player count limits, with nothing but Native scripts running, on extremely small maps with short rounds.

Warband can't handle large maps because the engine is not designed to do so. They most certainly could increase the limit just by changing some numbers around, but the game is not designed have even remotely close to PW sized maps, with so many scripts, and so many players.

If there's a technological jump, that is, we abandon the Turing machine design, or go to quantum computing (which has been demonstrated not to provide much of an advantage in runtimes for high complexity algorithms) Warband won't run!

The advantage you get by throwing a faster processor at a high complexity algorithm is negligible. Throwing more memory at the game doesn't help either, you'll still be limited by the computer's ability to change values in the memory. Throwing more network bandwidth doesn't help either, because eventually you'll start cutting out people who don't have several hundred KB/s stable connections. As I said before as well, the network bandwidth required grows exponentially with the number of players. It's simply not practical to wait for technology to catch up.

--

The only thing I'm refuting is your claim that the only reason Warband's limit is 200 players is because it's 32-bit. This isn't true at all. The vast majority of games that look way better than Warband and are possibly more complex are still 32-bit applications. 64 bit still hasn't really caught on.