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Increase the Limit of Simultaneous Enemies

I think we can all agree that there ARE probably still a lot of tweaks and optimizations to be made to the specimens and to KF in general, but TWI can't find them all magically. we can help too.

Also, i don't really like the idea of tons of scrakes or tons of gorefasts. what i'd really just like to see is a slightly higher amount of clots. their strength is in numbers and their tactic is to surround you or grab you while a bigger zombie takes you out. why not make them not a harder threat, but a more numerous threat.
 
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I think we can all agree that there ARE probably still a lot of tweaks and optimizations to be made to the specimens and to KF in general, but TWI can't find them all magically. we can help too.

Also, i don't really like the idea of tons of scrakes or tons of gorefasts. what i'd really just like to see is a slightly higher amount of clots. their strength is in numbers and their tactic is to surround you or grab you while a bigger zombie takes you out. why not make them not a harder threat, but a more numerous threat.

Exactly.

Some cursory digging into the unrealscript with some profiling tools yeilds a lot of things that could be done (e.g. the HUD class).

I'd also make the general point that maybe the game shouldn't be relying on old ut2k4 invasion code anymore even if changing that is initially basically just a copy and paste job; in general removing levels of abstraction decreases complexity and increases efficiency.

Currently KF code runs upon KF code runs upon RO code runs upon ut2k4 code. Improving this situation would make possible optimizations far more obvious, for this job sometimes nothing beats looking at a linear code listing over trying to get a handle over the complex interactions of hundreds of different objects. Incidentally it would immediately yeild performance benefits if only because there is less context switching and type juggling for the engine itself to do!
 
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Optimizing is an important thing, of course.

But as I said before, my computer (3 years old) can run 130-150 zombies simultaneously without any lag. More than that causes lag.

Anyway, 130-150 in the same screen is quite enough at the moment. However, larger than six player games might need even more.

Based on this fact I don't see anything against raising the number of simultaneous enemies.

PS. And don't forget to lower the hp & speed scale when there are more of them. ;)
 
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Optimizing is an important thing, of course.

But as I said before, my computer (3 years old) can run 130-150 zombies simultaneously without any lag. More than that causes lag.

Anyway, 130-150 in the same screen is quite enough at the moment. However, larger than six player games might need even more.

Based on this fact I don't see anything against raising the number of simultaneous enemies.

PS. And don't forget to lower the hp & speed scale when there are more of them. ;)

they can't make killing floor just for people with above-average computers and up. they have to keep it playable on decent computers that can't handle 130-150 specimens at once. higher minimum specs means less players which equals less money for them to fund their developing.

i know for a fact that my computer would start sweating at 130-150 specimens on screen at once. are you saying that TWI should just ignore people who maybe can't afford better computers? no. KF was not made that way and shouldn't be amped up to that point.
 
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There is a big difference between what is going on locally on your computer with 150 zombies and on a 30 player server with each zed tracking every player and replicating state to and from each of the clients. As things stand with real world performance on top end server side hardware there is a huge scope for improvement software wise (from my experience running the most popular large server according to gametracker.com vs other games on the same level of hardware).

And furthermore, optimization would benefit even you on your superfast computer with pimped out gpus because the performance of the zeds client side are not gpu bound but cpu and network bound. You may have a higher framerate but would run at the same unsimulated tickrate as everyone else, and even the former is bound by the unrealscript execution and network transfer rates given the architecture of UE2.
 
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* bump *

It would be interesting to have some TWI input on this one.

As an admin of a large server I believe supporting more zombies at once would significantly help my end of the server spectrum. It currently seems universally bedevilled by zombie performance putting quite a low cap on what is possible and requires hardware above the standard game server offering (imo why the number of popular large servers in the browser is still in single digits despite them being full 24/7).

Despite large servers not being officially mandated, a general zombie performance improvement would tremendously help the success of this play experience that is increasing in popularity amongst the general player community

And investing development effort in improving KF's baseline performance vs zombie count would obviously benefit all KF servers and further reduce their hardware requirements and therefore cost, which can only serve to grow the number of servers out there and the KF player community as a whole.
 
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That is another anecdote that illustrates zombie performance is script-bound, not graphically.

And given it is just making some automatons move around a small node path, that is appalling performance on today's hardware, given your average cpu can fold proteins at a rate isomorphic to doing millions of Dijkstras a second on graphs of that order.

Donald Knuth is displeased with your O(n^n) zombie algorithms lol
 
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I don't know about anyone else, but even in solo my computer seems to start having serious hiccups even with 30 specimens on-screen at once. And I am not using a very high detail level either. It is just dropping my framerate quite badly. And buying a new PC is not an option I am afraid.

I am sorry to tell this but if the most agree with the increased limit then you belong to the minority. This is an old game and the most players have computers able to run over than 100 specimens on-screen at once.

- "Democracy is about two wolves and a sheep deciding who will be eaten first."
 
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I am sorry to tell this but if the most agree with the increased limit then you belong to the minority. This is an old game and the most players have computers able to run over than 100 specimens on-screen at once.

- "Democracy is about two wolves and a sheep deciding who will be eaten first."

I am interested to know where you source your hardware because I run the most popular KF server according to gametracker (see sig) on a Quad Opteron and we notice both client and server side performance problems above 80 zombies on official maps.
 
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I am sorry to tell this but if the most agree with the increased limit then you belong to the minority. This is an old game and the most players have computers able to run over than 100 specimens on-screen at once.

Well, I am not sure what the problem is, but I see those occasional major framerate drops with lots of specimens lined up. And no, I am not talking the ZED-time style ones, I am talking about proper skips and jumps. :p

This seems to happen no matter what screen resolution I use.
I don't seem to have any problems with the other games I have though.

I guess it is partly to do with lighting issues with some maps or Specimen AI when there are a lot of them clumped up and the ones in the middle have nowhere to go and start bumping around, causing lots of collisions.
 
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For god sake, get your PCs checked for viruses and trojans and don't use Vista in older computers. Do you even try to optimize the CPU usage?

I have 3 years old computer and it can run smoothly 125 zombies on-screen at once. 150 and it is still playable.

I just can't believe people are running this game with ancient Pentiums or something. Even my friend who has 5 years old computer is able to play with 100 zombies on-screen and he said it is smooth. However, he has all settings as low as possible but that's how he plays this game anyway.
 
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Do you even try to optimize the CPU usage?

How do you do that? Do you pedal faster to make the fetch-execute cycle zip along, while the cpu light blinks out the opcodes in morse? ;)

Thanks for trying but please don't make sweeping generalisations directly contradicting people on specifics you clearly know little about, it's not getting this discussion anywhere.

This is essentially a very specific developer-oriented scripting issue that needs their attention, actually increasing MaxZombiesOnce is the very last step of a long development task.

Quoth my original bump this morning:
It would be interesting to have some _TWI_ input on this one.

Not some random blogosphere-esque hocus-pocus about trojans and Vista, this is not Yahoo answers.
 
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For god sake, get your PCs checked for viruses and trojans and don't use Vista in older computers. Do you even try to optimize the CPU usage?

I have 3 years old computer and it can run smoothly 125 zombies on-screen at once. 150 and it is still playable.

I just can't believe people are running this game with ancient Pentiums or something. Even my friend who has 5 years old computer is able to play with 100 zombies on-screen and he said it is smooth. However, he has all settings as low as possible but that's how he plays this game anyway.


Did it even occur to you that some people don't know how to do that? You can't tell somebody to just "get smarter" about something and have it actually work.
 
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Did it even occur to you that some people don't know how to do that? You can't tell somebody to just "get smarter" about something and have it actually work.

If people aren't lazy, they most certainly can learn about how to do things, including optimize their computers.

Too many people say "I don't know how to do that" like it's some incurable congenital disorder. Ignorance is easily curable if you're not lazy. Do you think I was born knowing how to build a computer from scratch and get the most performance out of it? No, I learned how from experience and lots of reading, which is exactly the same way I learned how to do everything else I know how to do.
 
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If people aren't lazy, they most certainly can learn about how to do things, including optimize their computers.

Too many people say "I don't know how to do that" like it's some incurable congenital disorder. Ignorance is easily curable if you're not lazy. Do you think I was born knowing how to build a computer from scratch and get the most performance out of it? No, I learned how from experience and lots of reading, which is exactly the same way I learned how to do everything else I know how to do.

Do you think people are willing to spend hours learning how to do something so their computers can be up to par with the specs required to run KF? Do you think they want to learn how to defrag their hard drives and run virus scans and do sector error checks and run memory cleaners and defraggers and edit ini files and optimize graphics drivers settings just so they can run Killing floor?
No, many of them would just say fu** it and not bother buying the game.

Do you think TWI wants that? No. They need customers. You want to sacrifice money that is funding your game just so you can play with more zombies at once? Pretty weird logic there.

Just because you are able to do something and learn something doesn't mean other people can. They are not you.
 
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Finally some common sense! Please stay :eek:

Speaking of TWI will one of their number please comment here?

We've had 3 pages of establishing this is basically something they need to make possible.

I'm pretty sure they already commented on this a while back, I believe, saying something along the lines of "Adding too many specimens at once takes the impact out of each individual specimen in addition to causing performance issues on some machines". If I had some spare time, I'd look it up. It's either somewhere here or on the Steam forums.

BTW, asking for one of them to comment seldom seems to EVER get them to do so. They'll usually only comment if something in the discussion particularly catches or amuses them...
 
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I'm pretty sure they already commented on this a while back, I believe, saying something along the lines of "Adding too many specimens at once takes the impact out of each individual specimen in addition to causing performance issues on some machines". If I had some spare time, I'd look it up. It's either somewhere here or on the Steam forums.

BTW, asking for one of them to comment seldom seems to EVER get them to do so. They'll usually only comment if something in the discussion particularly catches or amuses them...

I'd be grateful if you can source this, if this is their official line it is very disillusioning.

As is the fact you say they won't comment in a very active discussion raised in their own venue by those who represent a large number of their paying customers (e.g. my server sees thousands of players and has hundreds of regulars)

"in addition to causing performance issues on some machines" <- this is what we're asking them to fix! (by improving the zombie code's atrocious current performance)

"Adding too many specimens at once takes the impact out of each individual specimen"
And this is deflecting pertinent criticism of the game's performance with a gameplay issue that is not necessarily related.
 
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Sorry, was away for a couple of days and I am back now. I take this reply was meant for me as it is after mine. Seems you completely missed my point and offered me the tired old "Your computer is ****! LOL"-solution to my problem.

For god sake, get your PCs checked for viruses and trojans

I do use viruscheckers and this PC is currently clean of trojans, spyware and viruses. I check it weekly and I haven't found anything for the last year or so.

and don't use Vista in older computers. Do you even try to optimize the CPU usage?

Who is using vista? I am certainly not using Vista (WinXP SP3). I do know how to use a computer and I can tell you that the overall performance of my PC is fine.

I have 3 years old computer and it can run smoothly 125 zombies on-screen at once. 150 and it is still playable.

Must be that 3D card you have got. Mine is a slighly poorer performance laptop display chip, but it is still not a slow one. How old is your graphics card? It is not like I can just upgrade mine so mine is still stock.

I just can't believe people are running this game with ancient Pentiums or something.

Who said anything about Pentiums? It is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600, which is quite adequate for games such as UT2004 and the like. I am able to run most games just fine, but KF seems to have some issues.

Even my friend who has 5 years old computer is able to play with 100 zombies on-screen and he said it is smooth. However, he has all settings as low as possible but that's how he plays this game anyway.

Good for him. I am using custom settings just slightly below medium. When I said "And I am not using a very high detail level either" I was not implying I am running on minimum resolution with nothing but wireframe view.

Bottom line of what I was saying is that the monster AI and scripting could use some improvement, as has been said in the thread a few times now.
 
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