Ship rendering with Masts down.

@duke-of-spire I hope they do deal with this at some point. They don’t need to match the sails exactly, but having a few different states for LODs would be great. Maybe, one for each: full down, 3/4 down, half, 1/4 down, up.

@m1sterpunch

Actually it would. Right now the game seems to set a distance cap on when it decides to load in a ship. When a ship is past that render distance the game will ignore any statistical value from the ship and just show you a sprite off in the distance.

The sprite is just there as a show of location and thats it. If they start having to implement different sprites then your hardware, not the server, would have to render farther out into the ocean which would increase the load on your hardware and the server.

I understand that everyone wants to be able to tell if the sails are up or down for stratigically reasons, but no strategy needs to be planned out THAT far in advance. If you see a ship with its masts down at max render distance and you are like "man that ship is defenseless lets go attack it" and by the time you get to it the masts are still down.

Trust me, you are going to sink it because you got the drop on them, you are going to sink it because they are bad.

Its fine the way it is, other way is unnecessary.

@duke-of-spire

Are you asking that they remove the sprite entirely?? The render distance is pretty far for this game.

I get you want to be able to hide your masts behind islands by destroying them but the sprite would have to be changed which means to gather data from a ship would require more resources.

If the game ends up slowing down because its trying to calculate and receive information from a ship at max render distance I would rather they not do it.

Just my 2 cents broski. If they can do it without it causing any hardware issues, sure I would enjoy to know what a ship is upto when I see it on the horizon but I'm pretty that wouldn't be the case as they would have to increase a players "playing field".

@duke-of-spire

Because that would be a little off putting. You are sailing and then out of nowhere a ship just appears out of nowhere.

The render distance is as far as it is because thats how far you can view.

Now what if they lowered the actual view distance? I mean they could do that but then you would have islands and stuff appearing mid horizon. Every play games back in the past while you see a mountain forming as you got closer to it. Not that you see the mountain and it renders in the foliage as you get closer, no as in the mountain itself render in slide by slide as you get closer.

Its a by product of having a world that is flat. If they created the world to be curved then it wouldnt be an issue and you could probably get what you wanted, but I don't think I know of a game that created a curved world.

@duke-of-spire This is very true. I am missing what you are saying.

Can you link me something to let me know what the "ship tucking" thing is??

@duke-of-spire said in Ship rendering with Masts down.:

and sure enough the sails rendered with no damage.

This is why the ships at a distance also render with the "lights on" regardless of the state of lights.

Sails are the same situation at a distance.

Why?

They are using 2 different models in the game client. One high definition reactive model that you see when you're up close enough to inspect details even with a spy glass..

And a second model for ships on the horizon that's low detail; the result is lower server loads..

PROBLEM is, they need to make both versions reactive to the owners commands.

Row boats also suffer this same fate, if you're out on the sea your light is on if you go out into distance 2 range.

This is a problem rare really needs to deal with because it's in reality a sloppy situation that just looks bad.. IMO it's not something that would cost them a ton in rendering nor should it load the server at all; you're only commanding the client to draw different ship in low res, all they would need to do is add a couple more models that need no animations.

Example if right now they have 8 different ship models; (may actually be 12) they would only need to add a few more to cover all the bases; these models could be pre-determined states..

Instead of using 3D models they could use sprites at that distance because honestly no one is going to get close enough to notice. A whole slew of ship state sprites could be utilized for long distance viewing of ships that would immitate a 3D state.. Only 8 different ship position sprites would be needed for each ship. The fixtures could be added also in sprite format as an overlay.

There are TONS of cheap ways to handle this, but I don't know if the UE4 engine does sprites............ should I mean it's not complicated stuff, and would save A TON of resources server side and client side.

This is the sort of application that sprites can be used in and not harm a 3d game.

Dear God if 20 year old me read this he would go freaking crazy thinking ZOMG BUDDY YOU'RE TALKING SPRITES, WE JUST ELIMINATED THOSE YOU TURKEY; GET ON THE 3D BANDWAGON MAN!

Be that as it may, I do feel this is the way to handle it effectively and cheaply both server and client side.

@d3adst1ck

Just saw your post and LOL I was talking about how they ought to use sprites to handle the problem and how a catalog of sprites could be actually added for different "states" of the ship.

It would cost next to zero server side because it's just calling the client to display a certain sprite.

The sprites take up so little space in memory and calling for them to be drawn is non-existent resource wise.. May as well just make a whole catalog of them for every ship condition / lighting situation.

There are only 4 boats in game, so it's not all that much work to develop a catalog for 4 different boats. (this includes the row boat)

Great idea OP. Shame it does not work. But kudos for being a sneaky pirate.

The rendering of ships at a distance leaves a lot to be desired. You can't be sure if sails are up or down or whether lanterns are on/off. (Although they might have fixed that second one?)

Now we have the state of the masts too.

It's not a huge issue but if it there's an easy fix Rare should definitely do it.

@d3adst1ck
Or... just have 'All sails up', 'All sails down', 'Masts down'

That's all you need to convey the information which is relevant to other players. I am not saying it can be done, it just doesn't need to be so convoluted.