Planetside 2’s been plagued with criticisms of its frame rate since launch. It’s to be expected that a game which sees hundreds of units blowing each other to smithereens on the same screen may be a little computer intensive but SOE are now making it their business to optimise the game wherever they can.
It’s all part of Operation: Make Faster Game. OMFG for short.
“Given that we were a live game since the opening of the PS2 Tech Test, we kept our optimizations as “safe” as possible,” writes Planetside’s tech director Ryan Elam. “Optimizing often involves reorganizing code that has already been through rigorous testing, and that means as we move it around we can….Bust something…No matter how hard we try not to. Many optimizations that we found just required far too much “soak time” to be feasible at that stage of the project.
“What you’re going to get at the end of this is a serious, noticeable increase in frame rate, plus some ancillary benefits that are capable as a result of some of these architectural advances. Every single member of the team, no joke, is actively looking for and implementing ways to make the game faster so we can deliver a better gameplay experience to you.”
Elam goes on to break down each area of the game they think can be optimised and goes into how much more efficient they can make it.
Some of it sounds a little worrying, simplification of the game’s physics system for one, but Elam reassures that the changes won’t be noticeable to player in any way other than a bump in your FPS.