Thanks in advance!

Did anyone notice server is constantly empty lately?

Is APB... dying?

Honestly, APB was and still is one of the best game I ever had a pleasure to play. But apparently, latest changes are not what me and as I assume - other players - would like to see (with all respect to Pushwall and all other Admins&Mods for their hard work over making the game better). Still tho, server is empty, no games played and noone honestly like playing the game with bots in a long term. I didn't even downloaded current update - because there is no point in it.

So I am asking you guys - what is happening? You also don't like changes made in the latest updates? Or is it other reason for you not to play the game? I would like to enocurage everyone to share their thoughts. And, damn, I miss those evenings spent on playing APB. I hope I'm not alone, and APB will be back alive.

Additionally, APB has lately caused my CPU to hit 100% when it never has before.

We suspect that one thing that may the cause is the Yak landing gear animation or maybe just the Yak in general. When Guard55 deployed his landing gear, my FPS tanked below 10. When entering the Yak, his FPS slowed and when exiting, it rose back up.

There may be other causes or this could be the only one, but whatever it is it is making APB unplayable when everything just freezes whether I'm engaged in combat or just strolling through my base.

I played APB online this morning and suffered horrible frame-stutter issues across the few maps I was there for.  These are the first proper (player-filled) APB matches I've ever played, so I'm not sure if this is a new problem (due to scripts 5 overhauling the renderer) or not.

I'm running my games on Linux using Wine, so I'd like to see if any Windows players are suffering similar issues.  Please comment if you think you are seeing the same thing in the new RA:APB or if you have a better/perfect experience instead.

Overview

Even when the game is reporting 90FPS and higher my game "feels" like it is around 30FPS.  Stuttered camera movement and frames, input delay when typing, etc.

Settings played with

All of the W3D quality sliders at minimum, vsync on or off (my graphics drivers triple-buffer regardless), fullscreen vs borderless, extra shader toggle boxes (do these do anything?) and shadow toggle boxes turned off, MSAA at 0x.

Background information: the difference between frames per second (FPS) and frametimes (FT)

I'm going to assume you know what frames are and how they are used to fake motion on your computer screen.  It's the same concept as frames in videos/film, so have a read about  animation if you are not familiar.

I'll simplify things down into two types of frame:

1. Rendered frames.  These are the frames your game makes.
2. Displayed frames.  These are the frames that display on your monitor every time it refreshes.

They are not the same thing.

Most monitors refresh exactly 60 frames per second (this timing is typically accurate and reliable to better than 0.01%).  This means that once every 16.667 milliseconds they can 'refresh' to display a new frame, or keep displaying the old frame for longer, but that's all they can do.

Your game and computer render frames.  Each frame takes a different amount of time to render, depending on the complexity of what is being drawn and the algorithms (games & graphics drivers) being used.  If you are facing a wall then a frame might only take 0.53 ms to render, but if you are looking at a battlefield full of 100 players and tanks then a frame may take 80ms or more to render.

For good quality "motion" to be perceived by players on their screens, each refreshed frame must be:

1. Unique. ie no frame lasts more than one refresh cycle.
2. Equally spaced in the game-world's timing.  Ie each frame should show the same amount of time elapsing in the game, not one frame where things move further/faster than in the others.

Bad quality motion makes players feel uncomfortable (headaches are common, motion sickness less so), makes it harder to aim and generally makes it much more difficult to enjoy the experience.

There are two common ways of measuring motion quality in games: Frames Per Second (FPS) and Frame Time (FT).

FPS counts how many frames are rendered every second.  Typically you want 60FPS or higher, so that (ideally) your monitor has a nice new unique frame to display every refresh cycle.  Higher than 60FPS "feels" better most of the time  (due to better physics & input timesteps -- outside the scope of this intro), but can sometimes lead to a 'worse feel'.  Many setups cap your framerate to a maximum of 60FPS due to a feature called vsync (again outside the scope of this into).

FPS measurements are fundamentally flawed in a lot of situations, because the frames being refreshed on a monitor are not always the same frames being rendered AND FPS only informs of an average result, which is not what humans experience. 

Take for example:

• One frame is rendered and then displayed for 0.1 seconds.
• In the remaining 0.9 seconds 80 frames are rendered (and some of them are displayed).

Your game will report this as 81FPS, but it will look and feel awful to play. Every second the game will stutter noticeably, which is severely uncomfortable if you are rotating your camera with the mouse (ie aiming a gun).

Now imagine a second scenario:

• During monitor refresh 1/60: (ODD) two game frames are rendered, the second one gets chosen to display because it's newest.
• During monitor refresh 2/60: (EVEN) no frames are rendered, the old frame still displays.
• During monitor refresh 3/60: (ODD) two game frames are rendered, the second one gets chosen to display because it's newest.
• During monitor refresh 4/60: (EVEN) no frames are rendered, the old frame still displays.
• During monitor refresh 5/60: (ODD) ...
• During monitor refresh 6/60: (EVEN) ...
• ...

Here the game will report 60FPS, but you will be seeing 30FPS of frames in real life.  Half of the frames the game creates are thrown away, the other half display for two monitor refresh cycles each.  I've had some games (eg NFS:MW 2005) that do this almost like clockwork on my system.

A better measure of animation is frame timing (FT), or "how long did each frame take to make?".   Ideally you want all of your frames to take 16.667 milliseconds (1/60) to render so that every monitor refresh cycle shows a nice, new evenly spaced frame.  If the frames take too long then your monitor will display the old frame for another refresh cycle (bad).  If the frames take a very variable amount of time to create then the physics (eg player/tank movement) on your screen will appear to "jitter".  A mixture of both of these problems occurs for every game you play in different amounts.

Shorter frame times than 16.667ms will increase jitter, but this tends to be one of the smallest source of jitter (or stutter) in games and is mostly not noticeable.  Have a read of my analysis of stutter problems in "The Crew" here (inline pictures have been moved to the bottom of the post) to get an idea of how bad other sources of the problem can get.

Vsync (outside the scope of this intro) can help enforce strict and even frame timings, but under certain situations it makes the play experience worse.  I believe Rene defaults to triple-buffering by default, which fixes tearing but doesn't clamp timings as strictly as vsync does.  Some(?) W3Dhub launcher games appear to have vsync turned on by default.

Footage of the problem

Note the FPS and FT graphs at the top-left:

There is a lot of FT variation -- you can see even the 30FPS video has notable stutters. 

Note the 'odd frame even frame" up down up down timing patterns that appear occasionally, similar to the second bad example of frame timings I describe in the section above.  This (edit) typically means that perfectly good rendered frames are being thrown out and the remaining frames are being displayed for multiple refresh cycles.

Also note that the variations in timings appear to settle down in the last few seconds of the video when I face away from the bases.  This makes me think that view-based culling is taking over and that VIS might not be working.

(N.B. I have full-match videos showing similar graphs, but they're at half-resolution and too big to upload here.  Toggling my video recording on/off did not noticeably affect the patterns in the graphs.)

For a comparison: here is a video of me playing Interim Apex (scripts 4.x) on a map that I don't think has any VIS.  Overall the FT stability is better, but you can see it gets worse when I look toward the enemy base (past the airstrip and into the fog):

Misc: system specs

• Processor: i5-4460
• Graphics: Radeon HD 6850
• Graphics driver: in-kernel radeon (default option for Linux users)
• OS: Linux  4.19.30_1 SMP PREEMPT  + wine-4.6

Other games like IA get an FPS from 50 to 300, depending on the map and what is going on.  99% of the time it's above 60 and comfortable, dramatically more so than RA:APB was this morning.

Questions

1. VIS issue in scripts 5?
2. Problem faced by Windows users too, or just my Linux/wine setup + the new d3d11 scripts 5 renderer?

Welcome to the APB Honourable Mentions thread! You have voted for the top three players who have participated in the Games Night. Without further ado, let's give a shout-out to:

@Pushwall! Thanks to your team skills, piloting skills and ability to adapt to the situation, you collected 4 votes. Congratulations!

@Dghelneshi! Your being a great teamplayer and consistent hard work has not only earned you a $5 Steam Card for a runner's up prize, but also an honourable mention at 4 votes. Reach round with your arm and pat yourself on the back!

@Silverlight! Although people don't talk a lot about your game skillz, a lot of emphasis was placed on your tactics and planning helping to win the day multiple times, enough for you to sit with 3 votes. A job well done in my opinion!

Though we may not have much to award you with, know that your efforts have not gone unnoticed. Great job to you three!

With luck, I hope to implement this more often, so while you may not win any gifts you will get recognition for being fantastic players.
I'd also like to thank everyone who participated in the Games Night; you are helping breathe life into this community!

A lake in the middle, with naval combat. Run around the edges of said lake to reach the enemy base with tanks.

Original RA map:

Rough concept:

There are all sorts of screenshots and memories floating around that I don't have the time to scrounge around and find, but I'm sure you guys get the idea.

Vote now!!

Edit: seems to be resolved now.

Friday 29/06

Saturday 30/06

Installing and playing some games on APB May 6

 

[Team] Pyrodaimon: inc another demo

[Team] moonsense715test: side

[Team] Pyrodaimon: dunno

[Team] TiberCHSL: demo

[Team] moonsense715test: D:

[Team] Pyrodaimon: just left their base

[Team] Pyrodaimon: left

[Team] Pyrodaimon: nvm is not demo

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie destroyed a Anti-Personnel Mine (Rifle Infantry/Demolition Truck)

Jie didn't last too long in the Tiberium field.

[Team] moonsense715test: its in our base

[Team] Pyrodaimon: oh wait, it was

Death_Kitty: you were saying?

 

There are a list of all achievements and how are they unlocked?

Thank you

The Server has a bot that sends messages to IRC about how the game is going and you also can see who is in-game.

The channel for this is #W3D Hub-apb on the rencorner irc server (irc.rencorner.com).

If you want, you can join the W3D Hub TeamSpeak3 server at ts.w3dhub.com and talk with your fellow APB players.

Rules

These are the server rules for the APB server. If there are any questions please contact a moderator. If you are in-game, try !m to see if there is a moderator online, in-game, or getting highlighted on IRC.

• Always follow the instructions of moderators
• English is the main language on this server so please speak English when playing with other people. (if you are just with 2 people then it's fine just as long as you speak English when there are more people of whom you are unsure if they speak English). If you want to speak in a different language to someone please use the PM system. Open a chat window press '/' and start typing the name of the recipient. Press space and then type your message.
• No cheating
• No impersonation of any form, be it either clans, players, or both. This includes wearing clantags of a clan you are not part of, or making a tag to make it look like you are part of a clan that you are not part of. Examples an [sG] member wearing the |-TA tag or a -|TA member wearing a [sG]- tag.
• No Team-hampering
• No blocking the AI Ore Trucks
• No unfair bug abuse
• No Killwhoring or any other kind of whoring (these issues will only result in a ban or kick if it is done on a daily basis and is bad for the community)
• No abusive language of any sort.
• No ban or kick evading.

Breaking any of these rules may result in a timed ban, kick(24 hr ban) or a qkick(warning kick, aka quick kick).

The only place to appeal your ban, kick, warning or qkick is on these forums in the complaints section so don't go into discussion in-game or by PM'ing a moderator through back-door politics.

If you are having any problems with a moderator in-game, either contact me or post in the appropriate forum section (Bans & Complaints).

So here's how my end of things go since I started playing more frequently again: For the past couple of weeks, my modem would spontaneously reset itself multiple times during a given 24-hour period, regardless of the time of day. These spontaneous resets cause me to go offline anywhere between 1 minute and half an hour at worst. In between these resets, my connection while playing APB would still be stable enough to stay online, but not unstable enough to get completely disconnected from the game. The end result, is that whatever gameplay I see gets sent in "bursts" of data, where every moving object appears to be moonwalking, then disappears/reappears in a totally different area, as if my connection is (literally) using chrono technology on everything.

I am actively trying to figure out what's causing my modem to reset at random, and the closest possibility I can come up with right now is that the power signal to my modem is sub-optimal. I'm also getting my ISP's technician to check on my line signal outside my house soon, provided I have ample days off from work to properly schedule an appointment.

Below is a video of one of my "bad lag" days. It's business as usual between Voe, FRAYDO, and myself playing APB, and Totd also makes an appearance (even on teamspeak):

Call me what you will, but this is the stuff I have to deal with while playing APB. I do apologize in advance to anybody and everybody who thinks that I'm some dirty player of the game as a result of this problem I'm having. Except Voe. He sux 

Regards,

Tiny.