Firing animation stuttering

[^1Romanov77]

It's since release that this game is plagued by severe stutter of firing animation on my friends machines.

The stutter only goes away when the animation has been loaded by the game for the first time, then it is smooth for the rest of the game. Anyway, that's really annoying considering that these animations are the only real eyecandy this game has to offer.

The issue still persist in 1.04.

Has anyone found a way to fix this?
Or even better, how about pre-loading these animations on startup?

I am not really inclined to spend money for a game that has this kind of bugs, so I will postpone purchase until this is sorted out.

[charliedrex]

Well, you hit the nail on the head already. The game is coded to pull the animation assets (graphics and sounds) on demand. While I don't have the game (only being in this forum to explore feedback on it before committing to getting it myself), in general game development terms I'll presume that this game has a relatively quick turn-around on startup, which is to say it loads rather quickly after starting it, yeah?

This has been a trade off in gaming for years, preload all your assets right away but slow down loading, or make it on-demand to get players in the game faster. Nothing other than a complete reworking of how the engine draws on assets in hard memory would 'fix' it, and it's no more a 'bug' than texture pop-in on Unreal Engine games. That's simply how it works.

[^1Romanov77]

Then that was a bad design decision...do not get me wrong, I still think the game is great and cannot wait to see it expanded further. I will probably buy it.

But a few seconds more of loading could have smoothed things.

One of the reasons I am interested in this game is the very low requirements.
Modern games have turned into resource hogs and stable 60 fps gaming is almost a chimerae unless you get top of the line hardware.


I could have come up with a fix:

Creating a custom map where all the effects are played (and therefore loaded)...is that possible?

[Sten]

Try to defrag the disk where the game is installed, this may help with stuttering.

[^1Romanov77]

I am no tech savant, but I can guarantee that my pc is fully defragged and junk free.

[charliedrex]

Originally posted by ^1Romanov77:

Then that was a bad design decision...do not get me wrong, I still think the game is great and cannot wait to see it expanded further. I will probably buy it.

But a few seconds more of loading could have smoothed things.

One of the reasons I am interested in this game is the very low requirements.
Modern games have turned into resource hogs and stable 60 fps gaming is almost a chimerae unless you get top of the line hardware.

This is a recursive argument, though. "Modern" (by which I'm sure you mean "high-detail 3D rendered, as Armageddon is technically modern by definition) games are such resource hogs BECAUSE they have so many assets to preload. They assume that the player will probably need this or that sound or graphic, and write it to the RAM... and even then, the game might not be fully preloaded. I've played plenty of 'modern' games that pre-cache assets, and then they'll "stutter" as they write the sound of a weapon I fire to RAM, because the game didn't already do so.

There's no way to predict every single thing that the player might need in terms of assets for display/sound, and even the most insanely highly-detailed AAA studio titles will suffer from this. I point again to Unreal Engine, which is absolutely notorious for its terrible LoD system, where textures might be blurry until you're right next to them and then suddenly pop out of nowhere into full resolution. IDTech 3 (or 4), whichever RAGE ran on, was even worse. Skyrim's Creation Engine does this. No matter how recent the game is, asset caching is a ballet that even the hardest-working dev teams can't fix.

Now, you keep going "hey patch and/or fix it!" But it's not... you can't just magically fix it. Whether the developers of this game want to chime in is their business, but in lieu of official input, I'm guessing that in order to minimize resource cost, they specifically chose an on-call asset loading manner of writing the engine, and if they pre-loaded every asset, it would probably be half a minute to load into the game and take several times the RAM it does now.

Whether this design decision is one you personally agree with is quite literally your own business. Considering how basic and primitive the UI and graphical featureset is for the game, I am surprised that such a relatively minor issue is really the make-or-break.

[^1Romanov77]

Animations are the only thing that makes this game look alive, they are very important to me.

First world problems, sure, I know.