Texture Streaming in Echoes of the Atlas

Your problem is loading things on-the-fly. That is just terrible for HDD users. In a game where damage is so spiky that a milissecond can waste days of gameplay it's outrageous to have the game freeze, even for a brief moment, to load textures.

Remember: it's better to wait one minute to load a full map with everything than having to regrind 10h.

Take away what you thought was gonna help it was fine the way it was now its trash. revert to 3.12 if its not broke dont try to fix it. Simple. Beta days werent even this trash and I was on a potatoe pc.

Guys, is there any way to add a bit more graphic options? We have mostly only "low-high" chose, that really doesn't help much. Before DX11 we could lower graphics using config file, game looked like potato, but was fully playable with stable 50-60fps even on worse computers. I think it would be helpful to allow players lower details more than it is possible already, so we could have better performance with worse quality. Turning off all these mists/fogs, lower water quality, less bloom (even with all low options my char with one of golden weapon enchants looks like a ball of light), less grass details, worse lights coming from fire, reflects etc. We love your game, I'm coming back every league since beta, but not everyone got enough money to upgrade computer every 3-4 years and I think we would love to play bad looking game with same gameplay and without dying and rage quitting just because fps drop/freeze.

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scherii wrote:

Guys, is there any way to add a bit more graphic options? We have mostly only "low-high" chose, that really doesn't help much. Before DX9 we could lower graphics using config file, game looked like potato, but was fully playable with stable 50-60fps even on worse computers. I think it would be helpful to allow players lower details more than it is possible already, so we could have better performance with worse quality. Turning off all these mists/fogs, lower water quality, less bloom (even with all low options my char with one of golden weapon enchants looks like a ball of light), less grass details, worse lights coming from fire, reflects etc. We love your game, I'm coming back every league since beta, but not everyone got enough money to upgrade computer every 3-4 years and I think we would love to play bad looking game with same gameplay and without dying and rage quitting just because fps drop/freeze.

Few years ago this mightve resonated well with GGG but they dont need to improve there product anymore they got it sold off to Tencent the hard work is done.

I am not going to pretend to know the details of the technical aspects of all of this, but here is my two cents.

I have been playing a LONG time and yes from time to time there were some technical issues that were usually resolved in relatively short order in the past and I have been running POE for years with almost ZERO problems since the whole lock-step thing. Vulcan made it even better. I know people who were still having some issues but for me personally I had very little problems with the way the game played and looked. I run the game on a machine only a couple years old on an SSD.

Let me start by saying this league could have been HUGE for GGG. It is a great league that introduced a ton of new fun things to do and made a lot of content more accessible to people who don't play 24/7 which is great!

Unfortunately this is ALL being overshadowed by glaring technical issues. I crashed while leveling my character more times then I have combined in the past 10 leagues. Once I got to my hideout / maps the crashing seemed a lot less (although still not non-existent). What I got in exchange was an initial mapping experience of seeing SOME weird texture issues where it would just look like a potato for a little now and then - wasn't too bad.

As soon as I started doing more juiced maps though....this has become borderline unplayable. I load in, and see absolutely nothing for a good 10 seconds. Things are invisible and the ground/walls are a giant textureless blob. If I wait until it all load its looks ok for about a screen or two - then it all goes back to giant blob of mess where it is impossible to see what the hell is going on. I pay good money for a decent PC so I can play the games I love without the immersion / game breaking problems like this.

Another example...I ran a four way and five way legion boss event last night and i literally could not see what was happening the ENTIRE TIME - not just at the beginning. Literally the only way I knew I was attacking bosses was from their icon on the minimap because I couldn't see them let alone anything else that was happening.

This is problematic for so many reasons. But mostly GGG, you are a company delivering a product, and right now your product is completely broken. This is creating a VERY unpleasant experience for a large portion of your player base and I can't imagine anyone new starting to play will continue to play in the form the game is in right now. This is going to take this league from a very lucrative prospect for you where everyone would have loved to support you guys financially, but instead it is now having the opposite affect as NOBODY is ok supporting something financially that so obviously is completely faulty and unplayable.

I am all for advancing technology to make the game a better experience for everyone, but this clearly was not ready for a live launch. You need to seriously consider swallowing your pride on this one and undoing this addition until it is 100% ready before you turn what could have been your best league in history into one your worst leagues in history. MOST people it seems would be ok with a slightly longer loading screen then the mess this is right now.

It is making your game LOOK VERY BAD as well as having a serious affect on the playability off the game - especially for hardcore players. This is an issue of how the public / players PERCIEVE your game and it is important enough that I hope you would WANT to address it immediately not slowly work at it.

PLEASE do something quickly! People are not ok with waiting weeks for you to work out this new system that isn't ready. I love this game and this company and and how much content you put out and how well it is done (mostly) in the past - please don't sully it with this monstrosity.

/end walloftext

Clearly not acceptable whatever spin you want to put on it. Never used to have any issues with loading until you decided there was a problem and 'fixed' it for me into this mess

https://youtu.be/StibAFSJWJs

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garantivil wrote:

I think a problem could be that poe uses a loooot of textures for everything so the game has to load a ton of things. League of Legends used to has this problem some years ago and what they did was to rework the maps in order to for example 10 objets (trees, rocks, etc) were integrated in only 1.

I dont know anything about this subjet and probably i'm wrong but it is an idea that i had for a long time.

Nice constructive thinking!

League of Legends have certain constraints that make such improvements possible which unfortunately makes it harder for PoE to do:

They have fixed game levels without variations, everything is pre-placed and can be grouped offline into larger meshes to make individual draws more efficient.

The champions in the match are known and their resources can also be pre-loaded at load time.

Their client is somewhat short-lived as few games run longer than an hour and is restarted fresh after each match which means that they don't have to care much about memory fragmentation and leaking, and their client sure leaks memory like a sieve :)


As a contrast, PoE has several aspects due to being the kind of game it is:

The client runs until you're done playing and is often kept running in the background while not playing to catch trades, so it never gets to restart to sort out the fragmentation you inevitably get over time.

Areas are procedurally generated so very few things are fixed in the world. Even if there's rooms of tiles that tend to be next to each other, they're of a granularity that merging them won't help.

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distort3d wrote:

Is there any news of the performance issues potentially related to these texture streaming modifications?

My game completely freezes for 2-3 seconds whenever I open a harvest or start a delirium or legion pops, and so far I have not been able to find a solution.

Honestly, I'm more okay with the low res textures; but the game freezing for a few seconds is a pretty big issue because oftentimes my character is dead by the time the game unfreezes

Agreed, had to go standard instead of my usual SSF due to these three content events. It's even worse with Bestiary.

Why we have this flash/movment skill blink/flicerking ground when use skill form almost every time (mostly on Vulcan) its not fixed to this day with texture streming its get even worse i notice some players with even better pc then mine have no ground textures when they move with skills even on dx
We cant just get all the stuff cached on hdd instead of unpacking them from that big 30 gb file it be faster..
And make loadings slower but more accurate , i can wait bit more , the game is not loading long as other titles so minute or two dont make much diffrence.

Give us an option to turn this garbage "feature" off?