It's not about the total content, it's about the content that is or needs to be immediately accessible.

All the little bits of information about each players potential look and state and that of their deployables.
The number and quality of the meshes and textures of static objects.
All the things you can access at the press of a button like chat channels and fittings lists.

Not to mention bad programing

Thing is though man, we've reached the absolute limit when it comes to optimization. Like, there's nothing more we can do. Graphically, mechanically, we've optimized everything possible. Anything else and the game would.... Well, it wouldn't be Dust 514, that's for sure xD

I don't really agree with that because one of the most important core game design philosophies should be 'Dust is a competitive shooter', which we know can't happen at 15fps. But that is the stance and is why we're still sitting at such poor framerates.

Maps that are 100s of thousands of square meters with at least 4 - 5 different building models.

Unique models for every suit and color variation. (Being solved currently)

Unique models for every weapon and color variation.

Unique models for every vehicle and color variation. This also includes unique models for every vehicle weapon.

3 different unique large turret models.

2 unique MCC models.




For the life of me I just can not figure out why we would be running out of memory. Doesn't every well optimized game have this much waste?

Agreed. I'm of the opinion that they should be making whatever cuts are necessary to stabilize performance. I don't think that doing so would detract from DUST's identity. Make DUST a little less pretty. Limit chat channels. Fix sockets. Trim the fat, drop the bells and whistles, etc.

A shooter doesn't have to be beautiful to be a good shooter.

Wait are you saying they use a unique mesh for each texture variation on suits/weapons/vehicles?

If so I retract my 'no bad programming' comment.

That is the real reason for skins coming out if you go back through the old discussions on it.

Hopefully power cores will even further unify these assets finally giving us workable space on the PS3. Only time will tell.

How has CCP maxed out the ps3 memory without any content??

I mean FFXIV has more content than Dust does and its also on ps3??

Oh my god it all makes sense now. You ever seem to get an fps drop at the most inappropriate time? Like just as an enemy is coming into weapon range? I'm sure we've all experienced it. What if that was because the enemy was wearing one of the mesh/texture combinations that weren't loaded into memory during the loading screen? Because lets face it, there's no way you could have all the combinations pre-loaded. If this is correct, and I hope to god it isn't, it has some pretty serious implication. Again I have to stress if this is correct, because this is going to get kinda nasty.

- CCP more than likely know about the performance impact of loading a mesh/texture combo in during gameplay.
- With that knowledge they've repeatedly and consistently added even more mesh/texture combinations into the game.
- The way that these new items are obtained kinda puts CCPs commitment to the game into perspective.

One more time, if this is correct, I'd just like to say that I doubt these decisions are coming from Rattati.

Not to mention bad programing

Rattati is exactly the one who pushed skins through as fast as possible to correct this terrible setup which he was handed.

I will search through the dev archives for the exact info to give you a better idea what is going on there.

Yep which is why I said I doubt it's Rattati's fault, he's trying to fix it.

I'd very much like to see the appropriate archive. I tried searching for SKIN and filtering by Dev but there was a lot of noise in the results.

Everything outside of those ranges gives a very basic rendering and is only fully loaded once render range is reached.

This is exactly what I'm talking about, it's called Network Relevancy in UE. Outside of a certain distance your client doesn't care what the enemy looks like so it doesn't have anything special to render. The reason I think it's a particular problem in Dust is that the client not only has to go to the RAM to see what it needs to render, it first has to ask the hard drive to put what it needs to render in the RAM first.

You are absolutely correct but it also seems that somewhere along the way the RAM may not flush properly which is why the problems are worse after you have been playing the game for a couple of hours.

At a guess I'd say that once a new character model enters the RAM it stays there. It'd be easy to flag map data for removal from RAM but not so much anything that enters during gameplay.

Since you said please :)

So, I am jumping the gun a little, it's theoretically working but the idea is to create skin modules, that dynamically alter the skins, much like damage modifiers, treating colors like actual attributes. Currently, the dropsuits just reference a material instance that tells it what it should look like.

That means every dropsuit is unique, not a copy of a parent, which means when 32 dropsuits are fighting, there may be 32 unique dropsuits on the field, taking up memory.

The idea is to replace all colored variants with skin modules that look the same. That will allow us to "remove" dropsuit types from player inventories, and refund with modules and normal bpo's of the same type. No loss of utility or worth.

Thereby improving memory, decreasing clutter in dropsuit fittings, and allowing players to use the skin module on adv and proto suits as well.

I am just so excited about this, that I had to share with others than CPM. No promises though!

Yes, what this means is that CCP hired a bunch of doofuses to make their game. One guy GÇô Rattati, managed to get more done with this game out of development than a whole team of who the eff ever in China got done in two years while in production.


I say sell the company to Blizzard and do a game that sells. "Sells" means it will actually go somewhere despite not being what swamp*ssers want. "What some people want it to be" means it will effectively linger in dev h*ll.


If CCP weren't busy pleasing Mittani and his like, they'd be making bounty hunting, smuggling and station walking content a skill based thing to sic one's teeth into instead of a loose notion.