Ben Lesnick posted:
Hey guys - long story short, we hear you. The VD store ended up coming across pretty much exactly the opposite way we wanted. We're working out a plan right now to make this right and I will have more for you as soon as possible.
Well, good to see that the 40+ shouting matches caught someone's attention.
I'm really not too surprised to see that. As I had said above, it was just low enough to be thought of as microtransactions, and high enough to be silly prices for microtransactions.
The thing is, DX9 is over a decade old at this point. And DX10 was, to be completely honest, dead out of the gate. Direct X 11 itself has been out around 4 years now. Both of those are eons in hardware terms. for You don't need even a moderatly expensive video card in order to use DX11 features at this point. A DX 11 card is maybe $100 if you're going for the older ones. As much as I hate to say it, it really is time to move on from DX9, and the only reason I think DX9 has stuck around so long was because Microsoft decided to only release 10 and 11 for Vista and 7.
Moving from D9 to D11 also makes multithreading a much simplier process, and most companies that use D9 simply port most of it to D11, meaning any advantages you would get from a multi core processor is lost. (Graphics wise at least. They still will get gummed up by AI and stuff, D11 or not) This is especially important as we really seem to have plateau'd in processor speeds lately, and instead insist on just jamming more cores into a chip instead.
First bit isn't true. 9 stuck around because:
10 had very little in the way of new features
9 was the version used by XBox360
widespread adoption of 11 only started about a year or so ago
10 and 11 are comparatively atrociously verbose for basic game creation [porting some 11 code to 9 cut the line count by over 50%] and still suffer a bunch of PITA things that aren't really fixed until 11.1; like simple text or sprite rendering, which you need to write a system for yourself (though any major engine will do this anyway for various reasons).
As for that second bit, not really... Turns out most of the major bottlenecks remain the same; draw calls in particular. Overhead related to draw calls is massive; and is one of the things we are setting up a system to circumvent. On PC, you can't get more than several thousand draw calls per frame and still get good framerate. Consoles can do somewhere on the order of 5 times more due to their hardware setup decreasing overhead. Which, even still, is only the tens of thousands range. A star citizen ship is built up of hundreds of parts [the larger ones will be thousands]. So if you naively draw those each with their own draw calls and material states and such, that's hundreds of draw calls per ship, plus hundreds more for shadow frustums. About a month and a half ago, we tried rendering a hangar with 17 hornets; with 40+ lights creating shadows and the hornets themselves without LODs, we were seeing on the order of 100k draw calls, and getting about 1.5FPS...
on a Titan. Doing a performance analysis, we were utilizing like 3% of the Titan's power; but were completely draw-call limited from the 100k draw calls. It's obviously improved since then, but it's still bad; and is one of the major things we're working on. DirectX11 doesn't really help with this; though we are using features of it in our Master Plan To Reduce Draw Calls.
And in general, game simulation aspects don't really bottleneck things. They can either be massively parallelized and put on the GPU [which can do on the order of trillions of ops/second], or just use some heuristic to cut down the complexity.
Though I do find it amusing that DirectX11 is the thing being complained about, not any specific other bit of the sys requirements. Even today, over a year and a half from release, you basically can't buy a card below DirectX11 anymore:
By the time the game releases, it will be nigh-impossible to have a GPU below DX11 unless your GPU is more than 5 years old, in which case not supporting DX11 is the least of your worries.
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Topic: Star Citizen: The Old Thread Was Dead (Read 64739 times)