Q&A - Ask all your questions here

[Justice]

Hello good day
Any performance guides or similar?
Searching "FPS" on forums is not often a lucrative venture

Or maybe some quick tips on what things cause most impact



At new starter zone in area, I'm getting around 35 frames on 3440X1440 with 1080Ti and Ryzen 5 7600x
The CPU use % is low at around 25% and yet CPU is running at temperature that's comparative to program that's utilizing over 60%
Normally MMORPGs draw more from the CPU than GPU

Just wondered whether that's me or the game or ... because it's pretty painful


I have tried going through each setting and changing them around. About the only thing that stands out is the additional LOD distance sliders for Vegetation and Trees, or the native resolution scaler
Vegetation LOD management is more impacting than shadows, which seem to happily draw very far without any frame loss
( which is welcome because it looks way better [on that note, maybe developers consider making the current 125% the default)

Resolution scaler tool tip is not very clear
It's seemingly indicating that once you downscale it will auto upscale using FSR(presumably FSR1?)
Is that accurate?

If so, any plans for FSR2 as it's definitely going to make things look better when lowering this slider

 

[Deleted member 32699]

I would also be interested in a performance guide.

While I'm playing on Mac, the outcome should be similar.

I'm not surprised that Embers Adrift isn't super performant, because as far as I know it's based on the Unity engine - and Unity games are notorious for their "modest" performance.

In comparison Embers Adrift actually runs quite well - I've played much worse performing Unity games.

 

[Justice]

It feels like this has to do with culling - meaning the management of geometry render and draw that's 'behind' what you can actually see.
Normally things the user would not see (a tree behind a mountain) should be either not rendered, or have an extremely short draw distance
Also that when you move away from things, they disappear as well, rather than staying static.


An example at the start area is that it's pretty poor, then when you go north to the next set of guards - off to the left is your first elite, some type of treant
Head that direction the framerate almost doubles. The area seems to be a dead end into the side of a mountain
I would not be surprised that there's nothing rendered behind there
However if that was a mountain pass or an area that led to another open field of monsters that were being rendered, then the performance would be impacted (with how it's currently designed)

This is not Unity specific
Though you are correct Unity is pretty notorious for performance

From a fidelity point of view, it's pretty decent and I appreciate they went as far as having shadow occlusion on grass and foliage
Things that do detract from it though are
-That lighting/ shadow occlusion doesn't exist on trees - they look fake (color wise) which makes daytime seem overtly bright
-The shadows overall - the standard dynamic ones have low quality and flicker constantly. It really is noticeable and meanwhile there's no shadow quality adjuster to make it less obvious (higher shadow quality tends to mitigate some of the 'dancing' shapes on dynamic shadows)

Again pretty impressive for the small team and should anyone have suggestions and/or aware of any ini tweaks(?) do share as even ten frames makes a difference

 

[Undone]

At new starter zone in area, I'm getting around 35 frames on 3440X1440 with 1080Ti and Ryzen 5 7600x
The CPU use % is low at around 25% and yet CPU is running at temperature that's comparative to program that's utilizing over 60%
Normally MMORPGs draw more from the CPU than GPU

Just wondered whether that's me or the game or ... because it's pretty painful

Unity's high definition rendering pipeline (HDRP) is very GPU intensive. Not to mention we utilize a lot of screen space effects (fog, lighting, shadows etc) whose cost is proportional to pixels rendered. In other words, these effects are 4x more expensive to render at 4k than 1080p. This is not Unity specific however, which is why many games are pushing resolution scaling techniques such as FSR and DLSS. The biggest hits are going to be vegetation and shadows.

Resolution scaler tool tip is not very clear
It's seemingly indicating that once you downscale it will auto upscale using FSR(presumably FSR1?)
Is that accurate?

If so, any plans for FSR2 as it's definitely going to make things look better when lowering this slider

Unfortunately the 10xx series of nvidia cards do not support DLSS to my knowledge so that option is not available to you. The other "Resolution Scale" slider is indeed FSR1 as that is all Unity provides to us with native support. I would love it if they would add FSR2 support but it's not officially supported by the engine yet.

I would also be interested in a performance guide.

While I'm playing on Mac, the outcome should be similar.

I'm not surprised that Embers Adrift isn't super performant, because as far as I know it's based on the Unity engine - and Unity games are notorious for their "modest" performance.

In comparison Embers Adrift actually runs quite well - I've played much worse performing Unity games.

As I mentioned above HDRP uses a lot of new rendering tech which can be very GPU intensive. I've done my best to provide all of the appropriate knobs for players to tinker with to get performance to acceptable levels for their machine.

It feels like this has to do with culling - meaning the management of geometry render and draw that's 'behind' what you can actually see.
Normally things the user would not see (a tree behind a mountain) should be either not rendered, or have an extremely short draw distance
Also that when you move away from things, they disappear as well, rather than staying static.

There are multiple types of culling, but what you are describing sounds like occlusion culling. Unity's built in solution for occlusion culling is downright terrible for larger open world games. In fact, using Unity's occlusion culling can frequently lead to worse performance due to the additional cpu overhead. They recently failed to renew their license with their third party partner who develops their occlusion culling tech, so they have been working on their own solution which "promises" to be much better, but I'll believe it when I see it.

While occlusion culling is an important thing, Unity's HDRP rendering pipeline actually batches things very efficiently. Most of our performance overhead comes from rendering vegetation, drawing real time shadows, and screen space effects. However, this can vary drastically from one machine to the next for various reasons. Because of this resolution can play a large role in the resulting performance of our game; at anything greater than 1080p on lower end cards such as the 1060 or 1080 resolution scaling plays a huge role.

-That lighting/ shadow occlusion doesn't exist on trees - they look fake (color wise) which makes daytime seem overtly bright

The primary issue here is that real time shadow distance is limited. Given that we have a dynamic day/night cycle we cannot bake shadows, which means in order to keep performance anywhere near reasonable we have to limit the range in which we render real time shadows. This is done using shadow cascades where the shadows in your immediate area are higher resolution than those farther away. In an ideal world we would render shadows forever, but in order to do that reasonably you have to bake the lighting, which limits what you can do with a dynamic day/night system.

-The shadows overall - the standard dynamic ones have low quality and flicker constantly. It really is noticeable and meanwhile there's no shadow quality adjuster to make it less obvious (higher shadow quality tends to mitigate some of the 'dancing' shapes on dynamic shadows)

The flickering is mostly due to the lower resolution of the far off shadow map (which as I mentioned above is for performance). I've tinkered with making the shadow resolution higher but it has a huge impact on RAM and VRAM requirements.

 

[Justice]

Great response, much appreciated and obliged
I have found - and feel a little less critical of it as moving about some other parts of the landscape it's definitely not as bad as originally thought

It is unfortunate that FSR1 is all that is available in Unity, as running 75% resolution scale is kinda icky

Really what's left is the fidelity with the dancing shadows
I know you said about far off shadow map - this is more about dynamic shadows at near/medium distance
Some parts of the days - the sunlight of certain grading, has really noticeable dancing shadows from trees and on trees
Right now the quality of shadows seems to be at what you might often call Medium or possibly Low

Do you feel there may be scope to allow the user to at their discretion increase what I would normally call 'shadow quality' in most games via that resolution setting you referred to?


Though outside of that and when it's night time in particular, it's quite nice(could be darker, I would enjoy a real reason to use torches. If I can find copper ore without a torch, it's too bright!)

 

[Undone]

Really what's left is the fidelity with the dancing shadows
I know you said about far off shadow map - this is more about dynamic shadows at near/medium distance
Some parts of the days - the sunlight of certain grading, has really noticeable dancing shadows from trees and on trees

The dancing is due to a few factors. Mainly that the sun is moving faster than you think it is, coupled with vegetation moving in the wind. Both of these move in such a way that results in a decent amount of shadow flickering.

Right now the quality of shadows seems to be at what you might often call Medium or possibly Low

As mentioned above we utilize shadow cascades, which breaks the shadows up into different resolution bands where the nearest is highest and the farther you get the lower the shadow resolution. The quality setting does tap into this: potato & performant uses 2 shadow cascades, balanced uses 3, and high fidelity uses 4. The number of cascades equates to the number of different resolution regions there are in the shadow map. The more regions you have the "smoother" the transition between them and the less noticeable by the player at the cost of additional performance overhead. However, to maintain decent performance at all of these settings the lowest resolution band starts at 290m, 280m, 260m, and 240m respectively (potato, performant, balanced, high fidelity). By increasing the shadow slider we are simply extending how far out the lowest resolution band draws. There are other ways to handle this (where the bands represent a fraction of the total draw distance) but I have found that those other methods can severely eat into performance with not a huge amount of visual benefit. I can't stress enough how expensive real time shadows are in HDRP, especially on some of the older hardware.

Do you feel there may be scope to allow the user to at their discretion increase what I would normally call 'shadow quality' in most games via that resolution setting you referred to?

This is a bit tricky in HDRP because there isn't one shadow "resolution", it's actually an independent setting for each light. I could look into increasing the shadow resolution of the primary sun light if the client so chooses at the cost an additional performance overhead.

 

[Deleted member 32699]

[...] night time in particular [...] could be darker, I would enjoy a real reason to use torches.

Night time for me is almost pitch black - and without torches I'm screwed.

Heck, even *with* them I'm screwed. *chuckle*

Are you sure you haven't changed anything in the "Exposure Adjustment" slider in the graphics options - or is your monitor set to very bright?

If not, you could use this slider to make the nights darker.

 

[Justice]

The dancing is due to a few factors. Mainly that the sun is moving faster than you think it is, coupled with vegetation moving in the wind. Both of these move in such a way that results in a decent amount of shadow flickering.


As mentioned above we utilize shadow cascades, which breaks the shadows up into different resolution bands where the nearest is highest and the farther you get the lower the shadow resolution. The quality setting does tap into this: potato & performant uses 2 shadow cascades, balanced uses 3, and high fidelity uses 4. The number of cascades equates to the number of different resolution regions there are in the shadow map. The more regions you have the "smoother" the transition between them and the less noticeable by the player at the cost of additional performance overhead. However, to maintain decent performance at all of these settings the lowest resolution band starts at 290m, 280m, 260m, and 240m respectively (potato, performant, balanced, high fidelity). By increasing the shadow slider we are simply extending how far out the lowest resolution band draws. There are other ways to handle this (where the bands represent a fraction of the total draw distance) but I have found that those other methods can severely eat into performance with not a huge amount of visual benefit. I can't stress enough how expensive real time shadows are in HDRP, especially on some of the older hardware.


This is a bit tricky in HDRP because there isn't one shadow "resolution", it's actually an independent setting for each light. I could look into increasing the shadow resolution of the primary sun light if the client so chooses at the cost an additional performance overhead.

I am fully deferring to your knowledge on this which is clear- and I appreciate I might be approaching the shadow in a somewhat simplistic way.
From a player perspective though quality of shadow does seem to transition clearly. Rather what wee see happens is the further ones are lower quality - which actually mitigates the dancing, as they are more of a static blob

Image below you can see near side is low quality and 'dancing' where as the shadow up the path is fine. It's not super quality, though at my distance it functions fine as a tree shadow, and it's not invasive because it doesn't dance.

Somewhat ironic in a way ?
But yes, if there was anything that could be done about how they sparkle and dance, I really think it would help a lot to settle the scene and much like at night, you can get kinda lost in the great scenery

Spoiler: image

You also mentioned about the speed of the sun. Would even slightly slowing it down help not cause such flicker? Is there a reason that the days have to cycle (not in relation to night, rather overall) a day as quickly as it dos?


Could I also query two more things maybe graphics related (though not to shadows)?
1. I posted about it in the Feedback/Bug forums around camera behavior
Is this due to a technical limitation or reason, I really hope not and it's just an oversight - maybe that's not your department ?

2. Does the mouse have a type of 'smoothing' or acceleration? there's something somewhat off about the input and input response, resulting in a drunk mouse
It behaves very much like a smoothing where the mouse accelerates as you continue to apply input(or movement).
Should that be the case, is there a way to turn this off and have raw mouse input only?

Night time for me is almost pitch black - and without torches I'm screwed.

Heck, even *with* them I'm screwed. *chuckle*

Are you sure you haven't changed anything in the "Exposure Adjustment" slider in the graphics options - or is your monitor set to very bright?

If not, you could use this slider to make the nights darker.

My exposure is on 0.00. That said when I adjust it, nothing happens in day time, only at night as the tooltip indicates
Here is at the darkest setting

Spoiler

I appreciate mileage may vary as your monitor gamma may be different though clearly this is not remotely pitch black
Though ya it's a little better now


General question : does the game have a bit of a cycle on it when it has a sale? similar to Steam - where you can expect one at Christmas, Summer, etcetc?

 

[Deleted member 32699]

I have the problem that sometimes when I move the camera slightly back and forth - while standing still and gathering resources - the shadows completely disappear and pop up again.

That said when I adjust it, nothing happens!

I have no experience with it myself as I left the slider on the default setting.

I've only heard that you can use it to change the brightness of nights, as some people have complained that the nights are too dark.

 

[Justice]

I have the problem that sometimes when I move the camera slightly back and forth - while standing still and gathering resources - the shadows completely disappear and pop up again.



I have no experience with it myself as I left the slider on the default setting.

I've only heard that you can use it to change the brightness of nights, as some people have complained that the nights are too dark.

aye, and I notice the tooltip specifically mentions "..at night" strange to lock out the feature during 'day' times
I'd actually quite like to tone down (or well technically up) the gamma during the day times as well, maybe reduce some of the washed out look

 

[Undone]

I am fully deferring to your knowledge on this which is clear- and I appreciate I might be approaching the shadow in a somewhat simplistic way.
From a player perspective though quality of shadow does seem to transition though what happens is the further ones are lower quality which actually mitigates the dancing, as they are more of a static blob

Image below you can see near side is low quality and 'dancing' where as the shadow up the path is fine. It's not super quality, though at my distance it functions fine as a tree shadow, and it's not invasive because it doesn't dance.

Somewhat ironic in a way ?
But yes, if there was anything that could be done about how they sparkle and dance, I really think it would help a lot to settle the scene and much like at night, you can get kinda lost in the great scenery

The dancing here is due to the vegetation movement + sun movement. Adding higher resolution sun shadows may help slightly here but nothing I can do short of stopping the sun from moving makes it look any better. This is in fact something I have tried in the past, but it led to shadows "jumping" when the position of the sun changed rather than smoothly interpolating. Real time shadows in large open worlds such as ours with a real time day/night cycle suck from both a performance and aesthetic perspective. It's something I would love to fix but any actual fixes result in performance taking a nose dive and performance is a huge concern for us at all times.

Could I also query two more things maybe related?
1. I posted about it in the Feedback/Bug forums around camera behavior
Is this due to a technical limitation or reason, I really hope not and it's just an oversight - maybe that's not your department ?

I would say that our first person camera is not fully featured. It was sort of snuck in at some point for those who wanted to toy with it and has not been expanded upon too heavily. The camera rotation being locked to the player rotation was mainly EQ inspired and it was the least complex way to get it in the game. I just tried WoW's 1st person camera as you suggested in your post and find that interesting, but beyond the scope of what we are currently offering. It's certainly something to consider in the future but not high on the priority list right now.

2. Does the mouse have a type of 'smoothing' or acceleration? there's something somewhat off about the input and input response, resulting in a drunk mouse
It behaves very much like a smoothing where the mouse accelerates as you continue to apply input(or movement).
Should that be the case, is there a way to turn this off and have raw mouse input only?

None that I am aware of. The camera movement is tied to the raw input of the mouse and will move faster if you move your mouse faster. Adjustments to the mouse sensitivity sliders might be in order here? I do not encounter any "drunk mouse" behavior, although it could be due to low frame rates?

My exposure is on 0.00. That said when I adjust it, nothing happens in day time, only at night

aye, and I notice the tooltip specifically mentions "..at night" strange to lock out the feature during 'day' times
I'd actually quite like to tone down (or well technically up) the gamma during the day times as well, maybe reduce some of the washed out look

Cameras in Unity's HDRP operate similar to real cameras in that they adjust the brightness of a scene via exposure settings. The Exposure Adjustment slider in the options allows the camera to use lower exposure values to expose the scene which essentially over exposes things giving you a brighter result (hence the lower value = brighter scene). On the other end however (during the day), there is no maximum exposure, we let the camera automatically adjust for the brightness of the scene. If we were to set a maximum exposure level that would actually make things brighter.

I'm still not clear on what some mean by "washed out look"? To me the only time things look "washed out" is when the fog rolls in every morning, but that dissipates closer to noon and beyond.

General question : does the game have a bit of a cycle on it when it has a sale? similar to Steam - where you can expect one at Christmas, Summer, etcetc?

None at the moment.

 

[Justice]

Ya, the camera 'delay' might be in part lower frames. I'll play with it some more in dungeons where things perform better.


Concerning the camera controls for panning, I do appreciate you jumping on Warcraft and testing. You see what I mean right? You can appreciate how it's weird that one moment in one view (third person) we're provided two separate viewing functions (panning versus turning) and then we go into first person and suddenly we're reduced to one (turning) despite using a different mouse key.

I guess from what you're saying it is in fact a technical limitation as the first person is a bit of a hack, is that a fair assessment? And that you cannot see it being in the scope of things to be implemented.
Though you kindly commented elsewhere about the first person camera view height and said there maybe something that can be done in future.
Is this not the same 'first person' system then, meaning if you can fix the height and such for proper viewing, then you may be able to fix the the camera panning?



I get what you're saying about the exposure, I misunderstood the mechanic and the setting, and don't believe that's the cause of the washed out look
That's likely more to do with lighting itself
To your question, the washed out look is when colors are not vibrant, saturation is somewhat lost and there's a kind of white haze over the image. Turn up the brightness setting on a scene and you start to see it white things out
Bethesda games are notorious for it and one of the first mods that usually appears on Nexus for their games, is a type of lighting fix to remove the haze

 

[Undone]

Concerning the camera controls for panning, I do appreciate you jumping on Warcraft and testing. You see what I mean right? You can appreciate how it's weird that one moment in one view (third person) we're provided two separate viewing functions (panning versus turning) and then we go into first person and suddenly we're reduced to one (turning) despite using a different mouse key.

I guess from what you're saying it is in fact a technical limitation as the first person is a bit of a hack, is that a fair assessment? And that you cannot see it being in the scope of things to be implemented.
Though you kindly commented elsewhere about the first person camera view height and said there maybe something that can be done in future.
Is this not the same 'first person' system then, meaning if you can fix the height and such for proper viewing, then you may be able to fix the the camera panning?

I wouldn't call it so much a hack, but more of an afterthought when compared to the third person camera. But with the way the camera is setup it follows the rotation of the character, so to break with that would require a reworking of the entire system which is just something we don't have the time to tackle right now.

And yes, I will see about getting the camera heights more reasonable. This still has its challenges as the height range between male/female is not the same.

I get what you're saying about the exposure, I misunderstood the mechanic and the setting, and don't believe that's the cause of the washed out look
That's likely more to do with lighting itself
To your question, the washed out look is when colors are not vibrant, saturation is somewhat lost and there's a kind of white haze over the image. Turn up the brightness setting on a scene and you start to see it white things out
Bethesda games are notorious for it and one of the first mods that usually appears on Nexus for their games, is a type of lighting fix to remove the haze

That's why I ask if this washed out look is present later in the afternoon as opposed to the mornings. Every zone has a ground fog which permeates the zone starting early morning and persisting through about noon where it mostly dissipates. It's what gives the light it's volumetric properties and allows for things like god-rays etc over the mountains, through the trees, etc. This volumetric fog is typically white in color, which could lead to the perception that things are washed out when it's actually the volumetric lighting doing it's thing.

 

[Justice]

Alright, I am still not sure I follow (no pun)about the camera, but that's very unfortunate :/


The fog - although the use of that word might be different for you and I; I think of fog as in literal fog..atmospheric, as you might get in lovely England very often early in a morning and which may or may not appear on some days (just as in life)

That's not what or how this looks in-game. Maybe I can swing some photos this week of when the washed out look appears

=-==-




Circling back to sales - maybe not a question for you specifically though
1. is the game meant to be 39.99? I kept getting told by persons and see it being advertised as such when watching videos from the likes of RedbeardFlynn and others.
They state it was once 39.99 when launched and had subscription. Then it went to buy to play at 29.99 with optional subscription

2. The fact the 'tax' is not included is a bit meh as well, kinda ruins that .99 ring to it
Also Youtube and reviewers conveniently leave this out

All respect the game should be 29.99 on the nose

 

[Undone]

Alright, I am still not sure I follow (no pun)about the camera, but that's very unfortunate :/

Again, I am not saying that is something we won't consider in the future. But you have to understand that we have to be very careful with the budgeting of our development time. Our dev team working on game systems or content is literally 2 coders, 1.5 artists, 1 designer, and 1.5 writers.

The fog - although the use of that word might be different for you and I; I think of fog as in literal fog..atmospheric, as you might get in lovely England very often early in a morning and which may or may not appear on some days (just as in life)

That's not what or how this looks in-game. Maybe I can swing some photos this week of when the washed out look appears

Here is a comparison shot of early morning with the volumetric lighting & fog ON, the same scene with the fog at noon (I kept the sun in the same spot for reference), and finally with volumetrics OFF. This is not a setting available to players because we feel the volumetric lighting brings a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

Circling back to sales - maybe not a question for you specifically though
1. is the game meant to be 39.99? I kept getting told by persons and see it being advertised as such when watching videos from the likes of RedbeardFlynn and others.
They state it was once 39.99 when launched and had subscription. Then it went to buy to play at 29.99 with optional subscription

I'll refer you to a statement from our producer he made in Discord a few weeks ago:

2. The fact the 'tax' is not included is a bit meh as well, kinda ruins that .99 ring to it

We use a third party to handle payment for various reasons hence have no control over what taxes you are charged. And the last time I checked any time I purchase a game on steam, an app on the app store, or renew a streaming service I get charged a tax that is not included in the price. So I'm not sure how we are all that different here? (this is at least true in the US. In other countries the price can be listed with VAT but we don't control the currency conversion rates which is why it's not included on our website).

All respect the game should be 29.99 on the nose

You are more than welcome to have that opinion but we respectfully disagree. None of us are getting rich at Stormhaven Studios. To put it simply: we have bills to pay. Running a live service includes a number of costs including website hosting fees, game client download fees, Unity licensing fees, and server hardware hosting fees (electricity + ISP). None of which include the money required to allow people to continue working on this game.

 

[Jmitch]

I've been following embers adrift off and on with interest because of the old school principles it seems to foster, mainly the ones bringing the social aspect of MMO's. I'm sure this has been answered before, but why hasn't the game been brought to Steam? A smaller more indie dev company making a game that needs a healthy player base to flourish seems tailor-made for the Steam platform. I appreciate the candid responses from developers I've seen, transparency and honesty in gaming companies is hard to find these days.

 

[Elloa]

Heyhey @Jmitch - Porting the game to Steam would requiere a lot of tech work, legal work and more that we do not have the time to invest for now. Our priority is to continue to develop the game. Maybe one day. But not in the immediate future