Mouse delay on menus and throughout game

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david
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Version 1.6.3 - I play lots of games on my 16GB Ram computer and Overworld has the worst mouse delay I've ever seen, even on menus. I really wished you guys would have tested this more. I reduced the screen resolution but what does that have to do with menus? I adjusted mouse sensitivity and turned off all graphics and the delay still exists. I play AOE, Sins Of A Solar Empire and lots of RTS on this machine just fine, and those games don's have this problem. I think it's your UI that you're using as a third-party interface for Windows. That's what you get for trusting outside devs.

Game Version:
Steam Public
Platform:
Windows

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anonymous
  • Pending Customer

Hey david,


Could I please get you to post your system specs and output_log.txt, this guide How to: Submit a Bug Ticket


It's likely that there is not enough free time on the GPU to correctly render the UI, causing the UI to lag, I'll know more once I have the required log and specs.

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david
I play lots of RTS including AOE and many other games fine on this machine. I'm really tired of your company's excuses. When I'm on a black screen (fog of war) or a menu, the game and mouse lags. That's not a GPU issue. On a black FOG OF WAR the GPU is not active. Your response shows the high level of ignorance at your company about these type of issues.

FYI, I have 16 GB of RAM.

I went ahead and left a negative review on Steam with my concerns because I'm really tired of the excuses.



David Lieder

USA) +1.919.386.9871
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Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager

Hi David,


I'm sorry to hear about your issues with the game and we're always to happy to try to help and I can really appreciate your frustrations and understand that you'd want to leave a negative review for this. It's not something we're particularly happy with either and we've definitely had quite a number of customers frustrated with UI issues caused by this particular middleware. For what its worth we are currently investigating upgrading to a better version, 


As Cian has identified correctly an input lag on the UI is usually caused by the CoherentUI process being starved of resources, whether that be CPU or GPU, it's very unlikely that this would be helped in any way by more RAM. In order to investigate further we'd love to get a full list of system specs and output log from you.


WFTO is a particularly CPU and RAM heavy game it's true, there's a lot of unique scenarios happening that you just don't see in many RTS games like the vast amount of Unit AI that is running at any moment, the pathfinding calculations required to deal with a dynamically changing underworld terrain among a number of other aspects that just don't happen elsewhere. This need for CPU time can leave other processes starved and if the UI process is starved then the UI does not behave to our expectations.


There are also a few more options that you might want to try some workarounds here: Missing, Invisible or Laggy UI  which can help with a few compatibility issues some systems occasionally have with Coherent. you could also try setting the CoherentUI process in your task manager to higher priority. 


Look forward to hearing from you,


Lee

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david
There are some very intense AI RTS games out there. Stop making excuses, please. CPUs these days are quite powerful and Overworld is the only game that runs so poorly out of about 30 I've spent time on in four years. I don't agree that Overworld AI is just so far past everyone else and that's why normal CPUs can't handle it.

Good programming and optimizing your scripts solves this, as well as dumping the crap UI middleware Coherent UI.

I understand your frustration. I would recommend that you take the leap sooner, rather than later. Most of your fans are still patient, but that will change soon. Overworld will lose its support and be rejected if you don't act soon and replace your middleware, optimize scripts, prune down activities that are not on the main screen. For example, you can batch activities that are not on the main screen, instead of doing them as micro-routines. They could be put into an array and performed when the CPU is not as busy. Because right now everything lags. Everything!

Coherent UI abandoned its support for its Unity plugins and devs, and so it does not surprise me that it fails to work well. I just can't respect that you blame player's machines, when I, for one, play Mass Effect and almost all RTS games out there, at some point in the past. You think I can't compare, and you can? Have you played AOE for 400 hours and your own game in its current form on average machines, so you can compare?

Please just stop. I appreciate your response but I don't agree with it.


David Lieder

USA) +1.919.386.9871
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Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager

Hi David, 


Honestly I can only speak from the experience and working knowledge of the internal logic of our game and how it compares to others. God Games simply often have a higher CPU overhead than most other games and many other RTS games simply due to the sheer number of autonomous AI processes which is extremely uncommon for most games in god games every unit is autonomous while in RTS games units are only responsive (to orders, threats etc.). 


Though I do fundamentally agree there's always more optimization that can be done and we'll always continue to look for better approaches towards things. Ideally we would like to broaden the range of systems the game runs well on and I'm sorry that it does not appear to run well on your system.


We'll keep our eyes on the UI space, sadly at the time we were making the game the Unity UI was not suitable for our needs and there wasn't enough time to develop a full suite of our own code to cope with the needs we had, unfortunately when you're working on a project of this scale with one 2.5 programmers you have to choose your battles. Fortunately Unity's UI has come a long way and for future projects it's likely we'll either use that or start building our own frameworks on top of it rather than using third-party solutions. As for WFTO it's so far down the road that we won't be able to transition anywhere but to a version of Coherent which has wider support and we're working with them to try and get the new versions integrated but as I'm sure you recognize this is a uphill struggle. If we had known at the time what we know now things might have been different.


On the subject of comparisons we use a wide range of systems and have a number of test machines of varying degrees in the office, though most do meet our minimum specs. We also have a number of trusted volunteers who help us with testing and the range of their PCs is quite large and where possible we try to get information on people's machines so we can see at what point people are having issues with the game. Sadly I can't speak for the comparison of Age of Empires all I can say is that it's a product of a different time (at least a decade old) and the system requirements are vastly different.


However I would say that we'd happily support a refund claim if you're completely disheartened with the product, although it is not common Steam does occasionally permit refunds even after the two hour window and I would suggest contacting Steam Support to see if they will refund you for WFTO. Tell them that the developer would be happy for a refund to be issued if possible and link to this thread. We certainly don't want you to feel like your money was wasted and our only desire is to ensure as many players as possible enjoy our game.


Cheers,


Lee

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david
I understand that there are many AI routines going on, and that is respectable; however, if you don't start batching them and creating arrays that batch and batching draw calls, I believe your company will fail, because you've gotten by on the good graces of being an Early Access game now, for like a few years, and that will end.

In regards to minimum specs, if 1,500 is your minimum specs rating required on a machine for graphics, that is not an issue with AI, and graphics are not what is causing the lag when I'm looking at "fog of war" black on the screen. A black screen has no on-camera graphics.

Besides that, 1,500 is ridiculous and I just can't respect that your company sacrificed optimization and sane coding (which takes time) in the interest of the fun parts of creating beautiful graphics and amazing AI.


David Lieder

USA) +1.919.386.9871
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Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager

As I'm not a programmer myself beyond some basic self-teaching I've been doing, I can't pretend to know the ins and outs that well so I can't say how the AI is handled currently but I thank you for your feedback and I'll be sure to pass it on to the code team to get their thoughts on what you've said. We've definitely had a lot of good grace and we've done our best to foster that but we have much higher expectations for ourselves as we move towards the future. WFTO was the first game many of us ever worked on so we've learned a lot from it, sadly I do know that a lot of the codebase is now buried heavily under technical debt thanks to a lack of time, resources and experience but we'll improve what we can and take the lessons forwards to future games.


As for the minimum requirements we aimed for something we felt would at least run the game, in our case a low-mid end GTX 400 series card we only use the benchmark as a comparison to help users identify that in some cases for example a 530M might not be better than the 450GTS. Likewise for recommended we aimed a bit higher. In most cases 1500 is actually quite easily achievable nowadays with cards below $100 at retail easily tripling it. While for just a few dollars more you can get a last gen mid-range card that nearly doubles the recommended requirements and I'm sure these are even more affordable used. 


I do agree that the goal should always be to reduce requirements as much as possible to widen the range of users we can support, however we prefer to edge on the side of caution as we definitely don't want people to have a bad experience with our game, it's definitely the last thing we wish to happen and it's a great regret when we see that a customer has had a poor experience as you have. Funnily enough a lot of people don't feel our graphics are pretty enough and as for AI it's an important part of the experience though I hope we can find more optimisations to both of these!


Cheers,


Lee

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david
Lee,

You misunderstand the goal. It's not to "reduce requirements" needed by players. As I said, my machine plays the most complex games out there. The goal is to clean up your code and to use best practices when programming. I was not aware that this is your first game. I absolutely cannot respect bringing a game like this to market and selling it at a price like it is comparable to other games out there. I cannot respect your company's values, nor will I ever buy another product from Bright Rock or whatever the company calls itself in the future.


David Lieder

USA) +1.919.386.9871
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Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager
  • Cannot Replicate

Hi David,


As this ticket does not contain the troubleshooting information we require to appropriately support you I will have to close this ticket as "Unable to replicate".


I respect your decision to avoid our products in the future. as a company we believe in consumer agency and support strong feedback from our community, we value our customers and their feedback and will always do our best to help where we can. If you feel that we do not meet your exacting standards as a consumer you have every right to vote with your wallet. We'll continue to make games for our fans and we hope that our future titles may sway your opinion. I wish you all the best. 


Lee

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david

"My exacting standards"? This is one of the worst performing computer games I've ever played. The only reason I've sent information in is because I appreciate the effort artistically and with the AI. But you guys suck and until you really face the weaknesses of the code, the real weaknesses, you suck as game devs. It has nothing to do with my standards.


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