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If you've ever had a mass amount of bloons on screen (try it now: set up a regen farm in sandbox) you'll see that the game does indeed begin to lag, but the bloons still move. What's happening is delay lag. You can't select towers or click abilities despite clicking on them. This plagues late game BTD5 as it means you can't micro anything in the middle of a round.
In the later rounds, once the ZOMG's started to pop I was no longer able to use any abilities. Thus I used the only ability that has an effect for an indefinite time period: the 0/4 ice a few times at the start of every round to slow down every ZOMG. Once they crack to BFB's I'm incapable of doing anything and have to hope for the best :)
trust me.
Most impressive!
As a r300 player ranked XP98 in Flash BTD5, I ain't no slouch at BTD5, but this is a massive achievement all the same.
This is objective evidence of what we have known all along since the release of Steam BTD5 - it completely outclasses Flash in terms of lag reduction. Even though obviously at super, uber high rounds as in the video, Steam BTD5 will also lag. Inevitable.
Just a few basic questions please:
- how long did that game take, start to finish? Did you save at later rounds when CPU/RAM usage got very high, close and restart the game and then resume the saved round?
- what are your basic machine specs?
cheers and again, tremendous work there... :)
-les
~2 weeks in total. I did close the game regularly like any other program, before resuming progress the following day. In later rounds, RAM and CPU usage were hardly effected. Perhaps rounds with higher RBE had a touch more lag, but this didn't cause huge problems.
My specs are less than ideal, (but they were good enough for high flash rounds, so more than good enough for steam): 1.7GHz processor, dual core with 8GB RAM. I think my fan may be a bit faulty so most of the time I played with the laptop open to the air and not blocked off. This wasn't really necessary though as the machine rarely overheated (again compared to flash TD5).
This is a good point, though it does require a bit of technical knowledge to understand. :)
Indeed, the Steam BTD5 game engine is not necessarily ideal in terms of its ability to efficiently maximize our processing power. Clearly, some improvement can be achieved.
No question however, that, under the same map conditions and same machine, Steam BTD5 exhibits FAR LESS LAG than the same state in Flash BTD5. Which does go to show the superiority overall of lag mitigation under the Steam BTD5 port vs. the Flash BTD5 version.
Rounds above ~400 or so are simply not be possible under Flash BTD5, no matter one's hardware. Then factor in the ability of Steam BTD5 to save all games that are in progress [even solo player games above round 85, which Flash BTD5 cannot do] and rounds like what is shown in this thread now suddenly become possible.
However, to be fair, it should be noted that in your test where you deliberately setup some regen farming, you are actually creating the condition where a huge amount of lag will be generated regardless of the platform - you are deliberately stressing the game beyond the normal limits of play since most people will absolutely NOT deliberately create a regen farming scenario. Certainly they probably won't maintain that regen farming condition for very long since there really is no purpose to it in the course of normal BTD5 gameplay.
Unless you are XP farming. :)
The above does not negate your point, which is indeed valid in terms of how inefficiently the Steam BTD5 core may appear to utilize local machine capabilities. I just point out that deliberately creating a regen farming scenario is not really a normal thing most players will set out to do in BTD5. After all, you can easily end up with 1000s-10s of 1000s of bloons on screen simultaneously.
cheers and good observation...maybe the NK devs can do some tuning of the Steam BTD5 engine...
-les
Set up a quick regen farm in steam and attempt to activate some abilities (or even interact with the game). It will take a while to respond to what you have clicked. In flash, even at 1FPS the game will respond to your action within the next frame. I don't know why this isn't the case with steam but I feel it is more of a fundamental problem with the game engine, it makes abilities useless in deep freeplay.
Perhaps it is linked to the game not running at the maximum CPU it can.
Huh....Interesting...
TBH, I have not yet pursued any really high round games under Steam BTD5 - nothing beyond an Apop game up to round 260 or so...
Your observation of Ability Delay Lag under Steam BTD5 under certain conditions has actually been brought up before by a couple of strong, sharp BTD5 players on the classic NK Forums when Steam BTD5 first came out - so there appears to be some real merit to what you are saying. Which is what I said before anyway. :)
I personally have not yet experienced this kind of Ability Delay Lag under Steam BTD5, but I have done 1-2 games of overnight unattended Regen Farming.
So I cannot throw in my own experience on this exact matter, though I will be on the lookout for what you describe the next time I feel like doing some wacky stuff under Steam BTD5.
In any event, your comment and others like it are really invaluable I think to NK. Overall, despite its tiny size, NK is a really a very responsive company who historically does care about its games.
Perhaps conversations and posts like these will strike a chord at NK and they may hopefully be able to look into and possibly address this issue moving forward.
In the meantime, maybe do what I do every game I play in BTD5, regardless of platform: farm heavily and get to a "max" Temple as soon as possible and then flood the map with "max" Temples and a strong supporting cast of towers. Because this recipe certainly seems to mitigate Steam BTD5 lag, even up to round 1000+. As you have already done!
I mean honestly...round 1100+ on Steam BTD5? Absolutely INSANE MAN...An enormous accomplishment!
cheers man,
-les
Are you referring to the Heli/Temple stacking thing?
If you are, at this moment I am not sure where I stand on it.
TBH, I am kind of leaning towards leaving it alone in some ways.
The leaderboards for Steam BTD5 are significantly less granular compared to the boards for Flash BTD5, which has individual scores for each map with each difficulty.
This does not appear to be the case for Steam BTD5 boards.
Oddly, I think the Steam BTD5 boards are really not so relevant - NK appears to have less interest/less control over the Steam BTD5 boards for some reason and I am sorta OK with that.
Part of my reason for leaving the Heli/Temple thing alone [at least for now] is with it, perhaps we can really find out what the TRUE EXTREME UPPER LIMIT HIGH ROUND may be under Steam BTD5.
Which would really also be a test to see just how good the Steam BTD5 engine - sorta like car companies testing out the maximum top speed of cars.
It would be good to know I think, especially for those expert players who want to take the time and effort to really go sky high in Steam BTD5.
I contrast this with the very mature Flash BTD5 version of the game...we already know that pretty much the absolute maximum high round for solo play in Flash BTD5 is in the neighborhood of 400+ by the very best, most experienced and determined Flash BTD5 players.
Basically I think it would be very interesting in a similar manner to try and find out the Steam BTD5 maximum high round...and the only way to accomplish this is clearly by using the Heli/Temple stacking thing.
I am guessing that's what that jombombobobo-whatever his name used. Otherwise, I simply do not see any way at all to reach that kind of round.
So, for now, I am in favor of NOT patching the Heli/Temple stacking thing. Is it a bug? Is it an exploit? I dunno. Just not sure how to characterize it really - I could go either way.
Besides, I personally have not really had time yet to try my own crazy high round game with this technique. Guess part of my reason to leave it alone for now is to allow me a chance to see for myself how far I could push a solo game under Steam BTD5.
Just need the time and motivation to give it a whirl and also need to think about how best to plan out the attempt.
:P :)
cheers,
-les
EDIT:
Just looked at your vid again...Actually, I completely did not notice that in your game you DID NOT use the Heli/Temple thing. I am actually now super-surprised that Bloonchipper spamming along with just the average number of Temples on that map actually got you so far.
Very interesting...
https://youtu.be/xCPXGKeC_JY
So now temples have gone from taking up massive portions of the map in BTD5 Flash to virtually zero space in mobile/steam.
way over 100 in game hours iirc