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RainXc

Red Alert: A Path Beyond Gamma Finally Launched

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After years of development, the latest version of Red Alert: A Path Beyond, also known as Gamma (2.0) has been released. At the delight of players around the world, it features many major improvements to the gameplay and graphics.

 

O0JB4.png

You can download it from their website. Download mirrors have been announced, among which is Desura.

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Guest Rabbit

Played it just now for a couple hours. It's pretty fun. There's a moon mission and some RA2 themes in different places.

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Didn't play it much, can't get to today, but from what I've tested it's X times better than Nuclear Winter. And 7 hours overdue.

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We've got this image too, if you want to replace the one in the news post. A little bit more informative.

 

post-14-1302424646.png

 

But it's fine if you don't. Thanks for the shoutout guys. CNCNZ is great.

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We've got this image too, if you want to replace the one in the news post. A little bit more informative.

Fixed.

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So after playing this APB Gamma thing. I'd have to say that the game is still boring (IMO) and even laggier than before. I get more frames per second in ArmA2 than this game... sorry, uninstalled...

Edited by godly-cheese

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Yeah, the devs still don't know what causes the lag. (APB is boring to you??? That's non-stop action!)

So, what are you guys called on APB? I'm TeslaWolf.

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Yeah, the devs still don't know what causes the lag. (APB is boring to you??? That's non-stop action!)

So, what are you guys called on APB? I'm TeslaWolf.

 

Allied129 and yes huge lag in there :(

 

Was worth it though since I got to play with ZeeHypo (spell check on that) with a few maps.

 

Ya it is quite fun though hope they figure the lag problem out but no rush :)

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Guest Rabbit

I'm ZeeHypno as of now.

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So after playing this APB Gamma thing. I'd have to say that the game is still boring (IMO) and even laggier than before. I get more frames per second in ArmA2 than this game... sorry, uninstalled...

This is ironic, since we're purposely thinking about dialing down player counts from 32 to 28 to maybe 24 because it gets too chaotic with far too much going on.

 

When you say laggy, are you referring to the network connection or can your computer not keep up? The network code is better than it's ever been, and it's playable even with a ping of around 400 during testing.

 

If you mean your computer's struggling, I think we've got that figured out now. We've identified several key points that can make a modern system unable to run it well. We are heavily CPU-bound and a 32-bit architecture; your triple-SLI top of the line video card, 12 gigs of RAM, and 8-core processor are simply underutilized. In fact, you might notice that the game never goes above a couple hundred megs of RAM at all, even at its worst. Your video card temperatures are probably perfectly fine, and could render the game a dozen times over (we suggest using this extra power to force antialiasing and anisotropic filtering).

 

The problem with your 8-core processor is that it's probably 8 tiny cores. You'd be much better off with a single fast 8GHz core. We're a single process, a single thread, and at this stage it's trivial to pump millions of polygons to your graphics card but a serious bottleneck to say "draw one beam of this hedgehog, draw the second beam, draw the third beam." That's where the slowdown seems to come from. We've got some optimizations we can make there for the meshes themselves for future patches, and some map rendering optimizations coming down the line. A lot of pre-computation that will take a while for us to churn through unfortunately, but fortunately, it will save the number of raw draw calls that need to be made for the client.

 

So if your problem is underutilizing your hardware, we've got some fixes coming. If your problem is that your computer is simply ****ty, I have some manual tweaks you could have tried right now to speed the game up substantially.

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Guest Rabbit

Chronojam, since I've started playing, EVERYBODY has been having lag issues. I have a top of the line computer and a reasonable network connection, and I hear everybody having connection issues during gameplay.

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Oh, well that changes things a lot. Perhaps it's a server configuration problem. I've been catching up on sleep lately, but throughout testing and for the first dozen rounds I played things looked alright. I'm seeing some reports of server bot issues though causing some lower server frames per second on the Mp-Gaming gameserver though.

 

While you guys are in game, open the console (~ or F8) and then enter the command FPS ... or use the launcher to enable showing FPS, if it's not already happening. Let me know if the SFPS in the upper right corner has been unusually low.

 

edit: That's not a typo either, the SFPS is the "Server FPS" and it will indicate if the actual host is having trouble. This can cause a number of odd symptoms, such as weapons not firing or reloading, player positions not updating, players not visibly entering vehicles, and good old warping.

Edited by Chronojam

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While you guys are in game, open the console (~ or F8) and then enter the command FPS ... or use the launcher to enable showing FPS, if it's not already happening. Let me know if the SFPS in the upper right corner has been unusually low.

 

Ahhhhh ok will try that pretty soon and report back here, the game itself though is great, tons of fun just the lag issues and then it's pretty much perfect :thumbsup:

 

Ok just quickly played a bit on the official Path & Beyond server and the SFPS always stayed at 60, never moved once while mine was moving from 40-60 depending on what was happening of course. Once again experienced server lag since doors would not open, couldn't use from PCTs and just kept "pushing" me back.

 

Hope this info helps in someway :)

Edited by Allied129

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So if your problem is underutilizing your hardware, we've got some fixes coming. If your problem is that your computer is simply ****ty, I have some manual tweaks you could have tried right now to speed the game up substantially.

 

My computer is struggling with this engine. Does that mean the engine is poorly optimized/programmed? I don't have any problems with any games from 2010 and above...

 

CPU: AMD Athlon 250 X2 @ 3.0GHz

GPU: XFX Radeon HD 5670 1GB

RAM: 4GB

HDD: 1TB

Monitor: 1440x900 HP w1907

OS: Windows 7 Ult 32-bit

 

Also, my ping is around 150 or above.

 

I've never had such a poor experience with such a game. Being performance wise. What is up with that?

Edited by godly-cheese

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... err, yeah, that's sorta what I posted to explain. You could have one billion gigs of RAM and 30,000 video cards with 1TB GDDR64 and two petabytes of storage and a 64x2ghz processor, and it won't matter since it's an engine from ten years ago with a deisgn and architecture that never expected anything like that.

 

What we can do is force the engine, for you, to start dropping to the lowest Level Of Detail settings earlier. While this is counterintuitive because your graphics card clearly can push the millions of polygons and the engine can easily handle millions of polygons,

a. forcing your polygon budget down will

b. force the LOD settings down which will

c. invoke fewer drawn meshes which will

d. result in lower draw() calls which will

e. flood the bottleneck less.

 

I'll post some information on how to do this, and other adjustments, later tonight, on our web site.

 

Like I said, the best way to solve the problem after looking at metrice we've collected is to make some changes for our content that will effectively precompute a ton of information, free up draw calls, and send data in larger batches. That will take some time and come as part of an update. The good news is that, on the map North by Northwest, an updated set of precomputed information has allowed testers to see performance boosts anywhere from 20% to 200%. One tester reported going from 30FPS to 90FPS, tripling their framerate up from "acceptable" to "great."

 

A problem with updating the map content is that, until roughly a day ago, the decade old tools that are virtually required for the precalculation were actually broken for our purposes. The tools have now been hacked to perform properly, and we can begin updating the maps accordingly :) Until perhaps three months ago, those decade old tools (like the game engine itself) could not even handle more than 2 GB of RAM; if the tools were performing a lengthy pre-calculation, they could sometimes shoot over that 2 GB limit and crash because there were no safeties in place to ensure it wouldn't; 2GB of RAM was not really common in 2000, and 32 bit Windows could not address out that far. We've now got an operating limit of roughly 4 GB for the decade old tools, which is a nice improvement, but still won't let us take advantage of the 6, 8, or 12 GB of RAM that our developers may have.

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What interests me the most is this: was lag there when you tested Gamma, and if yes, why wasn't the problem solved? I can tell from your videos that you had a much busier server :P

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What interests me the most is this: was lag there when you tested Gamma, and if yes, why wasn't the problem solved? I can tell from your videos that you had a much busier server :P

 

Could have something to do with the location of the actual server; since they would be a lot closer to the server than us it would mean no lag and since now everyone can use it now and since we are all over the globe it means more lag for us.

 

That is just what I'm thinking why it was missed.

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What interests me the most is this: was lag there when you tested Gamma, and if yes, why wasn't the problem solved? I can tell from your videos that you had a much busier server :P

That's a good question, and jonwil's looking into it. Part of it is geographic of course, but we have testers from all over to purposely test latency issues.

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Then, if the Euro server is in Germany, I'm in Croatia with a ping of 50-60 (was 115 in NW), how do I lag so hard when the view shakes while I'm being fired upon?

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It's hard to know what you mean by "lag" because people keep using it interchangeably with "floaty mouse," "low framerate," and "warping."

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Guest Rabbit

I think there are just certain times where everybody experiences a strange, unexplainable slowdown, and they're unsure how to explain it because everybody's having it and it really just causes people to get stuck behind things or suddenly be in a different place.

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Alright, the problem with the US server seems to have been the hosting company; they were doing some weirdly worded burst bandwidth management scheme that would dynamically (read: inconsistently) adjust network traffic. I believe a new host has already been secured.

 

 

seems we're only on a 1mbps burstable to 100mbps port (What the ****)

 

looking at prices to get this updated..

 

Edited by Chronojam

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Alright, the problem with the US server seems to have been the hosting company; they were doing some weirdly worded burst bandwidth management scheme that would dynamically (read: inconsistently) adjust network traffic. I believe a new host has already been secured.

I don't know what's going on the US server, but the Euro server is really annoying to play on.

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Meh. Although this game looks better than C&C Renegade, the thing is, no SP skirmish or campaign in there, meaning no one in the dev team was using AI programming.

 

I wonder if this game will ever get to use the more recent SAGE kit from EALA, only to improve its graphics and gameplay.

 

 

Edited by zocom7

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