Myrgard

Is it just me or is it much harder to pick up puss in 1.8???

Watch my latest 1v1 match vs PK... in the killing grounds game I had a shitty puss bomb dud... tried to pick it up about 5x with 3 different ghols... though perhaps each one was already carrying something, but they weren't. Just simply could not pick up the puss. Meanwhile... other units were dying because this was taking so long...

Happened again at the beginning of our demise game... once again fucking me over.

I've noticed it before, as well... PK also said he has had problems with it lately.

Worth looking in to.

Yea, it's true I told this to adren at the begginning of our match. I tried to pick up a puss on the ground but it was no way in hell i could pick it up. It also happend at start 1 game after healing.

It seems to me that You have to shift camera angel before it would allow you to pick it up. (And no, I am not talking about that you have to turn the camra to find the big pusses in the group of small pusses)

Check it out please its annoying as hell.

I thought it was just me, but apparently I'm not the only one having to change the camera angle to pick up pus sometimes

Right, so I believe this is a side-effect of the vertical sprites stuff - i.e. heads no longer get cut off by models when they stand near them and so on. The issue is that you're looking at the pus from an angle where it would normally be clipping into the ground, and while it is now rendered properly on top of the ground, the game logic doesn't know that you can click that part of it (since, for a variety of reasons, the picking logic effectively uses the software rasterizer).

i.e. in 1.7.2 the place where you're clicking on the pus would have actually been clipped into the terrain, so while the pus in 1.8 is now nicely rendered above the terrain, the picking logic still works the 1.7.2 way, so it thinks you're just clicking the terrain.

Usually clicking closer to the bottom of the pus (rather than the top) or orbiting a bit (to a point of view where you're looking more "uphill" than "downhill") will allow you to pick it from a point of view where it is visible for picking "internally" using the old logic. Knowing this, I've not found it to be a huge problem in practice, and worth the advantages that the vertical sprites stuff brings. Give it a try next time it happens and see if that works for you.

The proper fix is an overhaul of the picking logic, but that's not a trivial amount of work. If the above still doesn't work acceptably for you, there are workarounds that disable the vertical sprites, but they will also disable some other features like, unfortunately, extended zoom.

well it essentially cost me 1-2 games, so you can understand the frustration lol...

Yeah I can, it's a weird side-effect. I need to confirm it is indeed due to what I think it is (vertical sprites), but if it is, it raises the priority of implementing better picking in the next patch.

[Edit] Minor update - seems like it might actually be due to something else with minor precision differences in how the mesh triangles are ordered. If true, it'd imply clicking nearer the *top* of the pus would be better. Still investigating.

Professional Killer wrote:Yea, it's true I told this to adren at the begginning of our match. I tried to pick up a puss on the ground but it was no way in hell i could pick it up. It also happend at start 1 game after healing.

It seems to me that You have to shift camera angel before it would allow you to pick it up. (And no, I am not talking about that you have to turn the camra to find the big pusses in the group of small pusses)

Check it out please its annoying as hell.

Ok I've been trying to figure out when this happends. It seems more like you have to either zoom out or in a bit if it happends. The times when it happends now i tried rotating my camera without adjusting height and it would pick up. THe only way to be able to do so was to just simply zoom eiter in or out it seems and I have tried this with success two times now.

Hmm yeah, I normally just make a minor adjustment to the camera and it works. In any case this is something we'll try to track down and improve...

Knowing this, I've not found it to be a huge problem in practice, and worth the advantages that the vertical sprites stuff brings.

It's kind of a big issue to directly change how a game mechanic has been working for a very, very long time.

It wasn't directly.

Isolder wrote: It's kind of a big issue to directly change how a game mechanic has been working for a very, very long time.

Right, and we're no longer convinced that it is directly related to the vertical sprites stuff. Just any changes/improvements to rendering in the modern paths (GL/DX) can cause variance with how it works in the software rasterizer (which is effectively how clicks/picking is implemented). The software rasterizer uses a lot of approximations in the name of performance that aren't necessary (or reasonable to duplicate exactly) on modern GPUs, so stuff like this can happen.

Really we just need a better picking implementation that doesn't rely on the software rasterizer (or similar paths) at all, but in the meantime I think we'll try to pin down where the difference is occurring. My money is on the approximate sorting of polygons done in software vs. the more exact method that the GPU pipeline uses.

I also recently noticed this problem, but I thought it was because of my small laptop screen. Now I know that's not causing it

Did some work on this issue, and I believe I've figured it out as well as come up with a fix. We will release another fix build soon which will include this.
Interesting thing is it turns out this this bug actually started in 1.7.2, not 1.8. I'm not sure why it is just coming up now.

Here's an animated GIF that shows what is going on:
The frame where the puss looks normal is regular OpenGL in 1.7.2+
The frame where the puss gets cut in half is with depth testing off. This is what you would see with the software renderer, and also what the game "sees" in terms of mouse clicking.

Interesting. Thanks for putting in the work and figuring this out, guys. May seem like a small thing to some, but it can have a pretty big impact on high level games where every click and second count. Looking forward to the fix.

Thank you for looking into this.
Some people thought I was crazy when I brought it up.
Wastes valuable seconds that in certain situations, a player does not have.