Raising The Capacity Limit.

[Wowfunhappy]

Time has passed, computers have gotten faster and better, and the community has gotten smaller and thus somewhat smarter. Designers are more than capable of deciding for themselves where to draw the line between between how well their level performs, and how much stuff is in it.

I think we should raise the capacity limit. A lot. Like, 10x the current amount at minimum. Then designers can decide for themselves how important it is for their level to be playable on low-end PC's.

I don't know for sure this is possible—current server devs, please chime in—but since we're able to edit the game's code to some extent, I would imagine it's just as a matter of changing one value. It should be fairly simple.

What would you guys think about this? In an idea world, Minor Studios would have implemented level linking before they died, but that didn't happen. Atmosphir is the most accessible 3D creation tool I've ever used, so it's stupid for it to be held back by such arcane restriction.

Remember how before Stratosphir, when blocks took up zero capacity, and people were able to just build these insanely huge worlds? It would be great to see that again. Large levels wouldn't work on every computer, but they'd work on a lot. I'm running Atmosphir right now on an almost two-year-old 11-inch Macbook Air without a dedicated graphics card, and even large levels play just fine. If my lowly Macbook Air is able to run the largest levels now without difficulty, I'd imagine that an actual desktop designed for gaming could play levels that are much, much larger.

[Wazi]

I agree.

[Baufritz]

I didn't really have to worry about capacity limits in the past, as I never filled up my level to the point where I couldn't place any more blocks. I think it's a nice idea though.

I'm not a coding genius (I have some experience using Unity, C++, PHP etc.), but I'm guessing the capacity limit is handled client-side, since some levels that were edit-unlocked sometimes had more than the 100% capacity you'd get in design mode, preventing you from uploading them again.
If that's the case, we would need to recompile the client to make any changes. And correct me if I'm wrong, but recompiling without a Unity project does seem a little bit impossible to me.

[Phantomboy]

I certainly agree with turning down how much blocks appear the capacity bar, rather that be raising the limit or lowering their total. I can certainly see how in a user run version of a game, removing some of the limitations - even if that reduces the stability of the game for a small group, could be an alteration that a community, likely never a company, would make

[ElectroYoshi]

For me, capacity is really only a setback when bigger levels are involved. My laptop runs levels below 70% capacity pretty well, but levels bigger than that... I'm not gonna say they run HORRIBLY on my laptop, but they are a lot laggier and skip a lot of frames. The frames that don't get skipped are still in sync with what I'm actually doing, but the delay makes levels (especially platformers) a huge pain in the butt.

So to answer your question, yes, I'd like to see the capacity limit raised a bit.

[Gtarmetro]

It would be awesome if i could create a world that was 1000x1000 blocks big, huh? I fund this.

[Nin]

Yes, it's very possible to raise the limit and even remove it. However it's not as simple as just changing one value.

But still, the purpose of the capacity limit is to assert for better universal performance. If you raise the limit, it can't be avoided that different users will have different levels of play ability on different levels. It would be annoying to find that only half the levels you click on are playable. And it's not like you can tell which ones are playable or not for you.

There's also the potential for levels to grow to sizes of 5MB or more. That means you in part, Wowfunhappy, must be prepared for hosting larger files, and multitudes of it.

[Wowfunhappy]

Hosting space shouldn't be a huge issue as there just aren't enough people uploading levels for 5mb at a time to add up.

I definitely wouldn't want the capacity limit to be removed completely, just raised a lot. Maybe the amount I suggested last night was a bit ridiculous in hindsight.

I personally would like the capacity limit to be somewhere in the range of "if you have a good pc that's designed for playing video games, THEN you will be able to play every level at a respectful framerate." If you're using a standard laptop, that's where your mileage may vary. I don't know exactly where that is, maybe we'd have to experiment a bit with the capacity-limitless dev version to see what does and does not work for people.

I certainly agree with turning down how much blocks appear the capacity bar, rather that be raising the limit or lowering their total.

Is there any evidence that a level filled to 100% with blocks will perform better than a level filled to 100% with something else? I do remember that on the poor-ish computer I had at the time, I used a workaround in Stratosphir to play un-convertable old levels like Kingdoms 1 - 1 that never would have fit within Stratosphir's limit because of all the blocks, and the game ran perfectly fine. If someone with a not-so-good computer would like to experiment with this, it might be a good idea. As I said above, my Macbook Air is getting 60fps on everything, so I'm not in that kind of a position.

[Nin]

Hosting space shouldn't be a huge issue as there just aren't enough people uploading levels for 5mb at a time to add up.

Yeah, plus, it's not like designers are going to be uploading levels at maximum capacity every time. For some reason I just assumed that.

But anyway, before we raise the capacity limit, someone's going to have to figure out to what new maximum capacity would be viable. We wouldn't want to change it in the middle of development and inconvenience users in unforeseeable ways.

[ElectroYoshi]

This is just a rough estimate (and coming from someone with little programming experience at that), but I would say that 1.5x to 2x the limit we already have would be a decent increase. While that wouldn't solve EVERY problem with the current limit, it would still improve performance of bigger levels a lot, and for most people, that seems to be where the issue lies.

[Wowfunhappy]

Since the dev version of the game lets you bypass the capacity limit, people should use it to experiment and see what is/isn't able to maintain a stable framerate.

I'm able to get to around 600% capacity on my Macbook Air before performance starts to drop. Its specs are a 2 Ghz Core i7 Processor, 8GB of Ram, and an Intel HD 4000 graphics card.

Edit: Also, something to keep in mind is that Minor Studios actually lowered the capacity limit over the years. The reason I was never able to update In Vengeance of Love with teleporters and the like is because it now takes up more than 200% capacity.

And, for the sake of disclosure, since it's kind of self-centered, that level is a large part of my personal motivation for wanting to raise the limit. I've wanted to update that thing for years.

[Entity]

I have never had issues with the capacity limit. Ever.

Maybe I'm just a crappy designer, but... it's never been an issue for me

[Miniike]

The capacity always bugged me, though it is clearly necessary. I'm all for extending or modifying it.

From what I understand, blocks didn't take up capacity pre-statosphir. Am I right about this?

[Baufritz]

From what I understand, blocks didn't take up capacity pre-statosphir. Am I right about this?

That was the case, yes. However, Unity does deal with blocks differently, so they take up a tiny bit of capacity (Correct me if I'm wrong on this).

I have never had issues with the capacity limit. Ever.

Maybe I'm just a crappy designer, but... it's never been an issue for me

This.

[TheLastLink]

Honestly, the biggest problem I had with post-dave Atmosphir was the fact that the grid was so massive that you could lose an entire portion of your level because you forgot where it was.

[Phantomboy]

Yeah, in hindsight it would have probably been easier on the computers and level designers, to add teleports between levels, rather than a larger grid. If I understand things correctly, the game is still loading in the entire 1000-some grid at the start of the level. But for now, I think some sort of level teleport would be a very difficult feature to add

[bionicnacho]

Honestly, the biggest problem I had with post-dave Atmosphir was the fact that the grid was so massive that you could lose an entire portion of your level because you forgot where it was.

Yeah, in hindsight it would have probably been easier on the computers and level designers, to add teleports between levels, rather than a larger grid. If I understand things correctly, the game is still loading in the entire 1000-some grid at the start of the level. But for now, I think some sort of level teleport would be a very difficult feature to add

I had this idea back when I was making Aludra:
Design Snapshots. There would be a button that you would press and it would take the location of wherever you were looking at. These could be renamed and if you go away really far, all you'd have to do was open a little drop down and select whatever you named that snapshot. You would then be taken right to where you were.

Can't really add this in to Atmosphir though

Also, I don't know how level linking was supposedly so difficult for them. I got it done easily on Aludra.

[UC101]

I had this idea back when I was making Aludra:
Design Snapshots. There would be a button that you would press and it would take the location of wherever you were looking at. These could be renamed and if you go away really far, all you'd have to do was open a little drop down and select whatever you named that snapshot. You would then be taken right to where you were.

Can't really add this in to Atmosphir though

Also, I don't know how level linking was supposedly so difficult for them. I got it done easily on Aludra.

Unless we re-write the whole game! project anyone? Just kidding!

[Entity]

Honestly, the biggest problem I had with post-dave Atmosphir was the fact that the grid was so massive that you could lose an entire portion of your level because you forgot where it was.

^^this lol. I've never made a level bigger than 100x100x100 and I don't think I'll ever have the need to...

Yeah, in hindsight it would have probably been easier on the computers and level designers, to add teleports between levels, rather than a larger grid. If I understand things correctly, the game is still loading in the entire 1000-some grid at the start of the level. But for now, I think some sort of level teleport would be a very difficult feature to add

From working with the server there are a lot of supposedly unimplemented handles that were clearly for level linking. We could almost do it, but there'd just be no in game way to link levels. I really don't see why it wasn't ever done.

[ElectroYoshi]

I can see us somehow implementing the ability to link levels. It may take awhile though.