System requirements

Cette traduction est peut-être obsolète

Test de performance de l'Alpha 1, 17 Mars 2021.

Histoire amusante, hier, alors que nous faisions des tests de stress/densité avec nos testeurs NDA, j'ai accidentellement invoqué 5 000 ours autour de quelques centaines de joueurs. Mais bon, ça n'a pas planté ! Pouvez-vous trouver Lt. Toast ici ? – Steven Sharif

Ce sont des PNJ pleinement opérationnels. Ils ont des arbres de comportement, ils ont des tableaux d'IA ; ils fonctionnent comme un PNJ le ferait ; à ma surprise et à la surprise de tout le monde en fait, le serveur a très bien géré cela : 5 000 entités, toutes dans une zone très étroite. – Steven Sharif

Configuration minimale requise pour l'Alpha-test de Ashes of Creation. Ces spécifications système n'ont pas été changées pour l'Unreal Engine 5.

• Système d'exploitation : Windows 10 64-Bit
• Processeur : Intel Core i3-2125 3.3GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 3.3GHz
• Carte graphique : Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 / AMD Radeon 6870 HD avec 1GB et DirectX 12
• Mémoire vive : 6 GB RAM
• Réseau : Connexion internet haut débit
• Stockage: 35 GB d'espace disque disponible
• Carte de son : Carte son compatible DirectX

Configuration recommandée.

• Système d'exploitation : Windows 10 64-Bit
• Processeur : Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz / AMD FX-9590 4.7GHz
• Carte graphique : Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon R9 Fury avec 4GB et DirectX 12
• Mémoire vive : 16 GB RAM
• Réseau : Connexion internet haut débit
• Stockage: 35 GB d'espace disque disponible
• Carte de son : Carte son compatible DirectX

Alpha-1 testing

Hail and well met glorious Ashes of Creation testers. My name is Sean Farrens. I am the manager of quality assurance on Ashes of Creation and on behalf of the Ashes QA team I would like to extend a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated in testing Ashes of Creation during the weekend of May 14 through May 16th for our Alpha 1 build. In spite of instability and uncertainty you have all proven to be invaluable in regards to your feedback and bug reports; and for that I cannot express my gratitude enough. As many of you know, developing an MMORPG is an epic endeavor that is filled with trials and tribulations that no other game will ever encounter; and your illustrated dedication has proven to our team that we are on a high road to the best MMORPG gaming experience to date. During this most recent testing period we received over 2,600 bug reports, which have been an absolute boon to our testing process. We review each report individually and I continue to be impressed with how detailed and helpful each of these reports has been. Like seriously you guys give repro steps and everything. Super duper handy. I greatly look forward to your feedback in the future and hope you enjoy our content so far, so thank you so much everybody. – Sean Farrens

While we will have specific spot tests for certain systems as we develop them post the Alpha one month, it should be expected and understood that after this Alpha one month there will be probably a significant amount of downtime where there won't be spot testing as we break apart a lot of systems, take what we learned from alpha one month and implement and iterate upon those learnings. So there's gonna be several months probably worth of significant downtime where there will not be access to spot testing, where we are going to go in and really rejigger a lot of systems – Steven Sharif

Phase	Release	Estimated/Actual date
Alpha-1	Alpha-1 early preview livestream.	March 27, 2020.
	Alpha-1 limited QA testing (NDA).	May 28, 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 1 (NDA).	Dec 18 - Dec 21 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 2 (NDA).	Feb 19 - Feb 22 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview intermittent spot testing (NDA).	Mar 19 - Jul 9 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview weekend (no NDA).	July 9 - July 11 2021.
	Alpha-1 (no NDA).	July 14 - August 15 2021.

Read more...

The term "alpha" is a tricky one, and it typically has 2 meanings in gaming. The development meaning for alpha is a point in the process where we are ready to test the fundamental systems in their core form, without polish and without much of the content. Then, there is the external or "marketing" term for alpha. This is typically applied to Eastern-ported MMORPGs, when in fact that is a completed game being localized for a region, and not really indicative of a true development alpha. As you may know by now, game development has many stages - from the initial tech demos to the pre-production and pre-alpha states, then on to the alphas and betas and eventually launch. – Steven Sharif

I want to make emphatically clear, our alphas and betas are true development alphas and betas, and some have said I am crazy to allow these phases to be seen without an NDA…maybe I am crazy? lol… But I am trusting the community of gamers out there to get a glimpse into the process, and understand the long road ahead for what will eventually be worth the wait. Given time and talent, amazing things can happen, so make sure you help us in communicating that we are in open development which means people get to see the bare bones before the meat. And look, I know people see our 4K footage and say, "This looks better than most released games!", but trust me when I say, you ain't seen nothin’ yet. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 servers

Alpha-1 servers were provisioned in the following regions.

• US East.
  • Resna.
  • Norlan.
  • Eradal.
  • Denaris.
  • Grenlaw.
  • Pelune.
• US West.
  • Lyneth.
  • Kal.
  • Shol.
  • Nimaneer.
  • Solunea.
  • Donale.
• EU East.
  • Tenok.
• EU West.
  • Kaelun.

Certaines des informations suivantes n'ont pas été récemment confirmées par les développeurs et peuvent ne pas figurer sur la feuille de route de développement actuelle.

Alpha-1 servers will support 1,500 concurrently connected users per server.

Alpha testing zone

Cette traduction est peut-être obsolète

Vous en verrez davantage à l'approche de l'Alpha 2, mais ceci vous donnera un aperçu de la capitale de l'empire Aelan avant l'Exode. C'est l'une des zones de départ dans laquelle les joueurs entrent. Ce sera l'une des zones de départ dans l'alpha 2. – Steven Sharif

• Le biome des Riverlands abrite le portail divin des Aelan dans l'Alpha-2.

Alpha-1 participation

Alpha-1 testing was available to the following participants:

• Anyone who won and claimed an Alpha-1 Key through a giveaway.
• Adventurer pre-order pack and Intrepid pre-order pack owners.
• Braver of worlds, Leader of men, Royalty, Hero of the people, and Avatar of the phoenix Kickstarter and summer campaign backers.
• Official content creators.

There were approximately 9,600 participants in Alpha-1 testing as of August, 2018.

• As of May 31, 2021, just under 5k additional participants have been added since Alpha-1 sales resumed. Less refunds and unclaimed codes, leaves a total of slightly over 13k testers.
• The weekend test of May 27, 2021 saw 5,300 unique logins over the 3 day period.

There were roughly 9600 if I recall A1 participants prior to my closing the preorder packs in 2018. Since opening them up again there have been just under 5k additional participants added. And prolly around 300 refunds give or take. Of the roughly 14,000 a1 testers, there are still about 1k unredeemed ks codes which leaves a little over 13k testers? The weekend test saw 5300 unique logins over the 3-day period. And I think discord flags stand around 4k roughly? – Steven Sharif

Performance

Performance optimization when rendering 1300 simulated actors utilizing merged materials and meshes in Unreal Engine 5 Nanite. This test was confirmed post-stream to be running on a RTX 3070.

What you're seeing here showcases the new modular appearance component which can combine any set of meshes and materials into a single mesh and single material at run-time. What you're looking at is over 1300 different entities, different actors. These are simulated players essentially. Previously you saw the example they were just standing still. There was no animation, there was no effects, there was no environment and it was a thousand. This is thirteen hundred playing animations, playing effects, plus the environment which is Nanite in this example. So what you're seeing is all of these players moving around and doing something and you're seeing the frame rate at about 30 on Clayton's rig. – Steven Sharif

Here you see that the FPS in the top right corner is like seven or eight on average, so not too good from a rendering perspective... So by merging now you can see that the same thousand players who are wearing the same armors as previously are actually having a 300 percent increase- 300 to 400 increase- in the performance of the of the FPS. So it went from 7 to about 21 on average and that is a significant optimization point that obviously this is just the beginning of the optimization efforts. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation was performing at 50-60 FPS on a 1080 Ti during early Alpha-1 testing.

• Game settings allow players to fine tune performance to suit their preferences and hardware capabilities.

• A "default player appearance" may be automatically applied during sieges or other large scale battles to improve client-side performance.

I think you guys will agree with me here that effects now are, as opposed to where they were in Alpha-1, we've taken into account what people's feedback were, although it was always the case we were going to address them; and we've implemented them in such a way where they're more conducive to large player battles. – Steven Sharif

Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 5 walkthrough.

Lumen has done a great job in really bringing to to life this area. As you can see, there's light bouncing off of the surfaces and casting into the rest of the cave... I love how you can also see the detail in the costume and the cloth that we have now. – Steven Sharif

Unreal Engine 5 is the graphical engine for Ashes of Creation. The game was originally developed in Unreal Engine 4. Migrating to UE5 early is expected to save time the long run compared to upgrading closer to release, or post-release.

• The recommended system specs for the game have not changed for Unreal Engine 5.

• Unreal Engine 5 enables improved forms of locomotion/animation (motion warping), such as crouching, tilting and mantling.

What it provides in my opinion as person who enjoys PvP is it adds additional dynamics to what is possible from your opponent or from yourself. You know, if there is a ledge and jumping off that ledge is going to deal a lot of damage to me when I hit the ground and that puts me at a significant disadvantage, maybe I have an option to jump off the ledge at a point where I can mantle onto the side of a cliff or something. Now the give and take there is I won't be able to use my skills while I'm mantled. I won't be able to react easily, but I didn't have to take the fall damage per-se. Or if there's an obstruction and I'm going to take a significant reduction in speed so that I can crouch and make it past that, and now I have a effective line of sight has been obstructed as a result of that decision. I think it adds interesting elements to the battlefield and the key here is going to be making sure that it's not cumbersome- that it doesn't feel opposite of the flow of combat. – Steven Sharif

• Unreal Engine 5 Lumen provides enhanced global illumination

Lumen is going to greatly improve the visual fidelity and performance of the game with the reduced work and effort that's required by the art team, making Ashes of Creation much more beautiful than in UE4. – Steven Sharif

• Nanite enables increased graphical fidelity in the game (without excessive overhead).

Nanite brings us really an entirely new approach to rendering and art workflows. Now we can render more actors with extremely high detail while eliminating the need to bake out normal map textures. For artists essentially what this means is that they can import high quality sculpted meshes directly into Unreal 5 without really having to reduce the poly count, making the workflow more efficient while simultaneously improving the quality of the art. – Steven Sharif

• Features (such as World partitions and One file per actor) make it much easier for multiple developers to work together.
  • World partitions also enable Unreal Engine 5 maps to exceed the map size constraints of UE4 (~20 kilometers squared).

Q: How does this upgrade to UE5 affect the Ashes of Creation release timeline?

A: While UE4 is a great engine, there are certain focuses and technological endeavors that Epic is doing on UE5 that won't necessarily be supported by UE4; and we want to make sure given the lifespan of Ashes and how long we intend this MMO to last, that when we made this decision early on during the development process that we weren't going to exacerbate the amount of effort it would take to move over later in the lifespan or after launch. – Steven Sharif

• Ashes of Creation features a custom network back-end with proprietary Unreal Engine networking code to enable mass combat in the open world: such as JcJ, Sièges de Nœuds, Siège de Château, Donjons and Bosses d'extérieur.
  • The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 was primarily a change to the front-end side of the game. The custom back-end networking code remains largely unaffected.

• As of January 24, 2022 all teams have moved over to Unreal Engine 5.
  • The developers were able to transition to Unreal Engine 5.1.1 in February 2023 as part of milestone 4.
  • The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.2 was completed. The developers expect to start upgrading to 5.3 around the end of 2023.
  • At some point the developers intend to stop updating Unreal Engine until post-launch. This decision will be based on careful consideration of potential delays and other risks.

Q: What is your stance in regards to focusing on delivering an MVP versus continuously upgrading your tools and engine to deliver a better product with new tech, even if that results in delays or additional years of development like UE 5.2, maybe 5.3 etc?

A: Our technical teams, especially our network team, our ICS teams, our gameplay engineering teams, they convene and weigh when our next update should be on the engine side: What new technologies might bring benefit overall. My perspective on how we balance the need for integration of new technology versus the responsibility we have in a timely manner to provide testing sessions that get us closer to the launch date; that's a delicate balance. I would say generally our disposition is not to incorporate new technologies that yield some significant amount of delay on the development side. We very much take the perspective that we're capable of adjusting and/or integrating those new technologies post-milestone, post-launch if necessary. At some point we'll stop updating the Unreal Engine in development until launch. That point hasn't come yet, but of course the larger the project grows and on the more custom we make the engine for our back-end needs; and for whatever else merge conflicts can occur- those mergers can become big and painful; and the update process gets more painful. So to answer your question shortly, we have a team that evaluates what direction we need to take there; and at the top of my mind is always, let's not incorporate delays as a result of leveraging new technologies. – Steven Sharif

Voir également

• Alpha-1
• Alpha-1 testing
• Calendrier de publication