Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Seconded and +1!

Come on CCP, this can't be that hard! I will not be able to afford a new GPU until much later this year, and am stuck on a older Nvidia GEforce 9600 GT overclocked. In station and most anywhere in normal space I am getting 80-120 frames a second. In fleet battles consisting of 10-40 people I am getting 50-80 frames a second.

Then I warp into a level 4 mission. With a cloud. I'm now getting 10 frames a second. So i turn off effects - which gets me back up to a super nice FPS, but disables a bunch of other nice effects that have NO effect on my FPS whatsoever.

Come on guys, we've been asking for the ability to remove those darn clouds from being rendered for years, you finally give it to us, and this is the way you do it?

Please, for the sake of many of us who have this issue - just add a box under graphic settings for "Display nebula/cloud effects" or whatever you want to call it - and have that tick box turn JUST THAT off.

+1

This.
I hate those GPU-strangling clouds with a passion, and wish I didn't have to give up other pretty effects just to be rid of that crap. Not to mention the occasional full screen whiteout they seem to be the cause of...

+1 - SO ****ING ANNOYING
and I can't see for **** when they're front and centre in the screen, and I'm talking about my eyeballs here, not the screen being whited out

i am bill gates in rl and ty for the free bump

+1

and to be fair when you zoom out you can see how crap the clouds actually look and how much they look exactly the same as the other groups of clouds, whoever works on dungeon design clearly just goes for the "meh **** it, they dont pay me enough" approach

Why wasn't it done this way to start with I wonder?

I'd say "only from ccp," but my general opiniong of CCP is actually quite high and Arenanet have been doing some stunningly boneheaded things with their mmo for several months now and I'm feeling extremely bitter towards all non-CCP mmo companies. So, um...

yeah. Fix it.

+20 DOOOO IT

It would actually be pretty easy to fix clouds, at least from a base code standpoint. The current functionality might be a lot deeper within outdated coding than I realize, however.

The simple fix, from the standpoint of crafting the clouds from scratch, would be to build them as they are and add a function which causes their coloration to be treated as an opaque object rather than a viewer-oriented light source. Specifically, this means adding up the total brightness of the cloud and determining a net render color (which is already done) and applying it as a single layer color. This requires a graphics card to create a continually updating stream of cloud "dimming" on top of the continually updating cloud color render. Objects behind the cloud become further obscured with more layers, while translucent objects in front of it do not fade any further past the fade they would have from a single layer of plain white.

The net effect is that a dark object with 10% translucency will look like a silhouette against a bright cloud, not a ghost against it.

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Now as for the "GPU strangling" effect they have, you might need to think about getting a higher grade video card. But they also are using inefficient code to create their effect. If their code was rewritten using modern shading effects, they could retain the current functionality while being handled much more easily.

Nothing like happily missioning then suddenly my entire computer locks up for 40 seconds, my actions are quartered in speed (which is bad because the rats probably have me in armor by now) and I'm frantically trying to *not* spin the screen and make matters worse while trying to dig my way out of this evil ditch. Please give a "no clouds" option like stated.