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Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 8:33 pm
by mAc Chaos
I've lived long enough.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2011 10:23 pm
by IskatuMesk
Well, I regularly speak with a gentleman who is involved in reverse engineering the game. Over the years he's informed me of a scary amount of spectacular fail in the game's code, especially LOD and 1.10 which worsened a huge amount of the existing issues.

Take, for example, the main menu. It's accessing your registry for every sample of the music, apparently. And no, I don't mean sample as in individual files. I mean many, many times a second. Supposedly this is why that animation seems to lag sometimes. This may or may not be rivaled by the Sins particle editor which, as HKS discovered, actually access ten billion fucking directx files it doesn't even use. lol .net 2.0

The DRLG (Dungeon Room Level Generator) calculates levels in an exceptionally retarded way. It doesn't check if rooms "fit" or not, it generates them, sees if they overlap, and then deletes them and tries again. Since this is PRNG, it can do this many times before finding a room that "fits". This also makes a mess of the game's memory, incidentally, especially on large levels.

Then, there's the sound-related hardcodes. Things being softcoded that are then hardcoded, all of the columns aren't even named properly (so when the interns made lod they fucked up literally every single sound-related thing in the expansion). Then there's the monster AI...

Oh, yeah. You know how bone spirit ect is always so desynced? That's because the server and client are always desynced for missiles. It's just more noticeable with bone spirit.

Here's a big one, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Their graphics engine and DCC files. The DCC files are fine, each frame only contains information different from the previous frame. But the game decodes the entire fucking super compressed thing each and every time there's a new frame, defeating the entire purpose and, in extreme cases (mass frozen orb ect) this causes some nice performance loss.

Does it surprise you that d3 gives me performance issues despite lacking simple things like normal maps? It shouldn't.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 10:33 am
by Lavarinth
I'm sure D3's issues with performance lag is based on the fact the game's engine was made a millennia ago and I'm sure the last thing on their mind is to optimize it sticking to the theory of Space Invader's first creation: The more on screen means the slower it is, this is just for effect, kills things to make it faster!

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2011 5:18 pm
by DrumsofWar
IskatuMesk wrote:Well, I regularly speak with a gentleman who is involved in reverse engineering the game. Over the years he's informed me of a scary amount of spectacular fail in the game's code, especially LOD and 1.10 which worsened a huge amount of the existing issues.

Take, for example, the main menu. It's accessing your registry for every sample of the music, apparently. And no, I don't mean sample as in individual files. I mean many, many times a second. Supposedly this is why that animation seems to lag sometimes. This may or may not be rivaled by the Sins particle editor which, as HKS discovered, actually access ten billion fucking directx files it doesn't even use. lol .net 2.0

The DRLG (Dungeon Room Level Generator) calculates levels in an exceptionally retarded way. It doesn't check if rooms "fit" or not, it generates them, sees if they overlap, and then deletes them and tries again. Since this is PRNG, it can do this many times before finding a room that "fits". This also makes a mess of the game's memory, incidentally, especially on large levels.

Then, there's the sound-related hardcodes. Things being softcoded that are then hardcoded, all of the columns aren't even named properly (so when the interns made lod they fucked up literally every single sound-related thing in the expansion). Then there's the monster AI...

Oh, yeah. You know how bone spirit ect is always so desynced? That's because the server and client are always desynced for missiles. It's just more noticeable with bone spirit.

Here's a big one, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Their graphics engine and DCC files. The DCC files are fine, each frame only contains information different from the previous frame. But the game decodes the entire fucking super compressed thing each and every time there's a new frame, defeating the entire purpose and, in extreme cases (mass frozen orb ect) this causes some nice performance loss.

Does it surprise you that d3 gives me performance issues despite lacking simple things like normal maps? It shouldn't.

Nice findings on the game. Heard from Q a long way back how bad the internal code was.

D2 was never a great engine although you have to admit BW was a good one for quite a while.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 6:52 am
by IskatuMesk
Really that's on the tip of the lardberg. It gets even worse the more you go into it. There are very few things in d2 that aren't bugged in some way. Also, they're still using diablo 1 code in wc3.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 10:49 am
by Alevice
like mpq reading mayhaps?

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2011 12:52 pm
by IskatuMesk
I can't recall the specifics, but I don't think it was mpq reading. I don't think wc3 was nearly as well researched as the previous games. I'm sure a venture into their AI code would yield a lot of brain damage, though! Zalamander had a few things to say about that when we spoke a time back.

Ah, the lard, it rolls uphill.

Oh, about Diablo 3 - I got bored and haven't done any more recordings yet. I'll try to wrap up the other classes once Black Sun is dealt with. I've been set back quite a lot by major encoding difficulties.

Something I'd like to do is a major review/overview, comparing Diablo 3 to Sacred 2, especially in graphics.

/edit

Scrap the D3/Sacred 2 video, Sacred 2 doesn't run anymore. I guess it doesn't support my new card.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 1:20 pm
by Lavarinth

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 2:27 pm
by IskatuMesk
Shouldn't need a filter to do what the game should be doing in the first place. Bleigh.

Also, I realize I haven't done my demon hunter video yet and that is because I am so bored of the game. The having absolutely no challenge in just lazily breezing my way through makes for poor gameplay.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 3:10 pm
by Falchion
IskatuMesk wrote:The having absolutely no challenge in just lazily breezing my way through makes for poor gameplay.
Yeah. I can still remember ya, out on those woods, doing absolutely fucking nothing while the monsters didn't do shit to hurt ya.

Man, EVEN the demonic minions in Darksiders did more than that!

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 3:30 pm
by Lavarinth
IskatuMesk wrote:Shouldn't need a filter to do what the game should be doing in the first place. Bleigh.

Also, I realize I haven't done my demon hunter video yet and that is because I am so bored of the game. The having absolutely no challenge in just lazily breezing my way through makes for poor gameplay.
If they're not going to do it, at least we can do it ourselves.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 11:50 pm
by RazorclawX
Egh... everything is dark enough on my monitor. I don't need D3D to help make it even darker.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 1:12 am
by RazorclawX
Battle.net Battle Tags.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4132437 ... _2011#blog


Currently required for the next part of Diablo III, but seems otherwise an alternative to Real ID where you don't have to give someone your e-mail. In fact the naming scheme seems similar to how Starcraft 2 names work.

I've already set my name up. One guess as to what it is.

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 2:31 am
by Falchion
RazorclawX wrote:Battle.net Battle Tags.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/4132437 ... _2011#blog


Currently required for the next part of Diablo III, but seems otherwise an alternative to Real ID where you don't have to give someone your e-mail. In fact the naming scheme seems similar to how Starcraft 2 names work.

I've already set my name up. One guess as to what it is.

Master Cinder?

Re: Diablo 3 beta

Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2011 2:32 am
by HelpMe
I really like the D3D filter. It improves the atmosphere by tenfold.