I’ll try to be short (and copy my thoughts from discord).
I bought the game in 2019 and it ran well on ultra graphic settings.
Plaza, unfortunately, has been becoming heavier on my PC with each passing year. Right now I can barely play it on low settings on a server with ~10 players.
Now, I never had any gameworld lagging on my PC, ever. Until SDNL release. The snowy map has become the first gameworld to make my PC lag, and pretty greatly at that.
Lobby 2, which was told to be a ported source map and thus badly optimized, run way better on my PC than plaza at current days.
I’d like to hope going to older standards of cpu/ram/gpu consumption is still possible, like by playtesting the game on machines PixelTail had in 2016, when the game came out and since when its system requirements, I believe, haven’t changed - and I would hope they aren’t gonna.
Thanks for your attention
Addition:
I already know Pixeltail is doing optimization. It seems like that doesn’t help just because the game isn’t playtested on PCs from 2016 - game’s release - anymore.
Some people may say “boo buy new PC” but I believe that 1) Making the game more accessible is absolutely beneficial for everyone and 2) It doesn’t seem like Tower Unite has ever aimed to be a high-end PC game at the first place. I’m not sure if it should require as much computing power as it does now at the first place.
We’re working on a large optimization update right now behind the scenes.
Optimization is a constant with us, and new content is being optimized sooner than the older content was. Since we’re adding new content, it does make it a challenge to optimize the game.
Hardware from 2016 is certainly dated, though. We test on various hardware as much as we can.
The difference between the old Plaza and the new Plaza is a lot more than just the artwork. Lobby 2 Plaza did not have as many games or activities in it as the current one does.
Saving the game’s system requirements and thus testing it on 2016 hardware would make the key difference, I believe. So that’s the only thing I can hope for (and which can show y’all how heavy Frostbite map is).
Tower Unite was never supposed to be a high end game, so it would make sense for it to run fine on low settings on 2016 hardware, right?
Because right now it just doesn’t, and feels like soon it won’t at all
For what it’s worth, my personal/dev computer use a 1080 gtx and a i7 3770k, which are from 2016 and 2012 respectfully. Most parts of the game hit 60fps for me, though there are parts that are less stable and drop to around 45 fps at times. The worst parts of the game for me are condo (which will always have issues depending on how full people stuff their condos) and plaza which is something that I don’t think a month goes by where I don’t hear about something our art team is thinking of/doing to try and shore up performance as we approach the final feature set for the plaza. I will say that plaza is pretty rough for me as of the latest update, but I also know that I’m working on things on the cpu end and the art team is working on things on the gpu end, and if that doesn’t fix that we have more drastic backup plans to get things in check.
For something more concrete, I can say that at the moment I have some optimizations tied to CPU bottlenecks in the player character so that will help with crowded servers, especially the plaza. Essentially these things were running for every player, every frame, and not only was it bad on the player’s side, but even plaza servers would get bog down and become less responsive because of it. I have plans to attempt further engine upgrades (starting with ue4.22) once this current round of optimizations are out as they have improvements for draw calls which is another bottleneck for plaza from the GPU side.
any feedback on Frostbite (since it’s been such an example of optimization lately for me)?
My own gpu is gtx 1050ti, but even my friend with something-something gtx 30XX (i have to check ahain) says it’s noticeably laggy. They can play on it though, while I cannot at all
I just checked Frostbite before replying, and was getting anywhere from 60 to 45fps (in an empty server mind you). Most of the time it was 60, the only time I got serious drops was generally when I was looking towards the center of the map from the outskirts. Not perfect by any means but it should still be playable. That said the ‘50’ in the 1050 is a measure by NVidia of how well that card should perform against other cards in it’s generation (10). It doesn’t surprise me that your performance might be worse than mine. I don’t know of any specific optimizations targeting Frostbite at the moment, but if the performance is notably better for you in an empty server then my character optimizations may improve things for you in Frostbite for crowded servers. It’s hard to say for certain without testing.
crowding does make things worse, but unfortunately it’s pretty bad even when I’m the only one in there.
I hoped y’all could figure why it could be so perfomance-heavy if considering it’s the first and only gameworld map in the game to be like that.
I just can’t, as not one of the developers, say if it’s just because it’s so big, or heavy on textures, or effects or all at once.
Testing on old hardware and adhering to making it run on old hardware would imo become a bottleneck with new development/ideas/projects.
I don’t think buying 2016 hardware is the norm anymore unless you are specifically looking for old hardware or for financial reasons but there are plenty of newer lower end products that far exceed 2016 hardware.
It should be a bottleneck. What’s the point in implementing new ideas if they become a laggy mess (point exaggerated but not too far from current reality)?
2016 hardware would be a bottleneck in a good way, reminding of optimization importance and enforcing developers to both come up with clever coding ideas to lift off computing weight and, in cases when that’s not possible, rethink things in more resource consumption friendly ways.
Keep in mind I think it’s important for game to run well on 2016 hardware on low settings. It’s obviously ok for it not to support older machines on high settings
I find it strange you feel inclined to push for the devs to stay in 2016 when its almost 2024 just because you do not want to upgrade your PC.
And no it should not be harder for the devs to do their work by forcing a bottleneck from using outdated hardware as any sort of baseline, especially suggesting they use “clever coding ideas” as a workaround.
If I can’t run this john on an Atari Lynx I’m gonna have to request a refund
Also, the “bottleneck” they’re going based off of the Steam Deck, according to Caboose [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Which, CPU-wise I’d hope handles the game better seeing as even low-end Ryzen should be pretty good against older low to mid-tier Intel products? I hope??? GPU-wise idk you can only expect so much out of 8 computer units, not sure those’ll be going toe-to-toe with even a low-tier 10-series GPU. I think by default the GPU gets 1 GB out of the 16 it has–which can be increased–but default it’s got a quarter of the 1050 Ti. 1 GB of VRAM in 2023 is a pretty darn low bar considering I paid like $100 USD for a 4 GB RX 460 back in 2016. But given the fact the game does run on a 15-watt handheld you could get* for $279.99 USD refurbished (albeit heavily subsidized by Steam), I would say that’s a much more preferable performance target to hit than that of Ivy Bridge CPUs and Pascal GPUs.
* Is now out of stock due to the Steam Deck OLED coming out. I assume they’ll continue the program for the 256 GB LCD and OLED models a bit after those release.
tower unite’s system requirements in steam haven’t changed since 2016, let’s hope it can stay that way.
Not being able to upgrade a pc is a pretty valid thing considering they cost money, so it’s not something you would do just out of spite or something.
And my main point was that since Tower Unite isn’t a game that strives to be ultra realistic or such, it would be normal for it to be optimized enough to run ok on low settings on old hardware
I am not sure how or when system requirements ever get updated, as i have never released a game on steam before.
They very well might be outdated (if truely not updated since 2016) which does not give them the “defacto” gotta meet these standards you are trying to give them.
Again im not sure why you insist on things from 2016 “staying that way” to suit your specific PC build issues. Literally hopeing the devs wont adapt to newer tech/engines etc…
You need to figure out the problem & bottleneck with your PC and work on that as a solution for this game and any other games. That will solve your problem. Much easier then trying to direct a dev team to stay in the past with regards to tech.
dude did you literally read anything I said?
one - not “specific pc build issues”, it’s called “money issue” and it’s real for a lot of people (and it’s normal, not something to shame people for).
two - i wrote twice i meant ensuring game can work on lowest settings on old hardware, not be built specifically for it
You ok? I have never shamed or implied shame on anyone for any reason, especially for money reasons, infact if you read my posts i address the reason why someone might stick to 2016 hardware. There was no shaming.
I only suggested a solution you can do yourself so it does not lag anymore which has been your main concern shown in several of your posts so far.
You have since your first post requested everything to be adhearing to 2016 standards, you also claim tower unite “was never supposed to be a high end game” dunno where you got that idea from unless it became a thing once your PC started showing its age. The fact is we are not in 2016 anymore.
If the game is still underperforming at the lowest settings for you that should be an even bigger wakeup call to upgrade whatever hardware you have that’s causing your bottleneck.
Kay bro just made sure you got my point, we both seemed to repeat ourselves above
It’s worth of noting that the performance doesn’t differ a lot between highest and lowest graphics settings. Which is what goes for game’s optimization topic
I wish you luck on finding out/replacing whatever it is that’s causing the slowdown for you. Run some gpu/cpu/ram monitoring software and see what exactly is causing the bottleneck so you can narrow down what needs to be replaced.
You could also relay the relevant information to the devs with more clarity so they can target specific issues better but without knowing what exactly is causing the issue for you it’s anyones guess as to what they are even supposed to be looking at.
