One of the largest issues for WvW players currently is the problematic culling effect that happens more often than not when large groups of players collide. Culling essentially throttles the amount of players that a person can see on the screen (no matter their hardware, connection, etc.), yet it doesn’t stop attacks from firing off, which can understandably create quite a bit of frustration during a hectic battle. If you haven’t experienced much WvW, this screenshot represents the issue well.
ArenaNet has been hard at work on a solution to this issue, but it’s not one that comes easily. Yesterday, Habib Loew, Gameplay Programmer, took the time to tell players exactly where the team stands on fixing the culling issues. He also went into some details about what the fix requires, exactly. Quite an interesting read.
Here’s a snippet:
Originally posted by Habib Loew (Source)
As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)Until all three of those issues have been dealt with we can’t turn culling off because doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.
Ok, now let’s talk about what progress we’ve made!
Keep reading to see that progress.
Originally posted by Habib Loew (Source)
Issue #1 was the easiest to deal with because we can basically just throw money at the problem. When we first started down the road toward removing culling from WvW I took a bunch of bandwidth measurements and then went to the executives and said, essentially, “Hey, if we disable culling our network traffic will increase by X%. Are we ok with that?”. The answer I got was a clear and unambiguous “yes!” So issue #1 isn’t a problem after all.Issue #2 is a little harder. We need to ensure that folks with a min-spec network connection won’t be overwhelmed by the data we send them and we obviously can’t just buy a better connection for all of our players. So we put our heads together and came up with a plan to reduce the bandwidth required for WvW (and Gw2 in general) as much as possible. Those changes are in testing now and will be rolled out as soon as we’re convinced that they’re solid. Assuming we’re able to get everything working the way we’d like (and I’m fairly confident that we will) then this will address issue #2.
So that leaves us with issue #3: client performance. Some time ago the WvW team acquired an engine programmer who is focused 100% on this issue (and he is being assisted by another engine programmer who isn’t officially on the WvW team). They’re working on some really fantastic optimizations and engine modifications which we hope will allow even min-spec clients to render all the players on a WvW map. We’ll be talking in more detail about the specific changes they’re making when things get just a little more nailed down, but I can say right now that I’m very impressed with the work they’ve done already.
So that’s where we are. Engine programmers are working their magic even now and we’re testing the networking changes that will be required. I believe that our goal of removing culling from WvW is achievable and I’m looking forward to the day that I can announce to you all that we’ve pulled it off!
