minimum system requirements

[hbarudi]

This new game has an issue, it might need a powerful computer to be able to play it:

If there are thousands millions to billions of particles and each one has a large amount of attributes and vectors of different things acting on it like forces, fields, and so on, the game would slow down a lot and become unplayable on most but the most expensive of laptops and desktops.

[Epic4242]

then its a good thing we probably wont have millions of particles

right?

wait were going to have millions to billions of particles virlilw?

[J]

Just take a look at the video's, I don't think there ever were more than 3000 particles at the same time (however I think 1000 is a better guess). Comparing it to CW3, CW3 has about 2*mapwidth*mapheight calculations going on each frame, on a 256x256 map that is 131072 calculations just for the creeper. That leaves enough room for 43 calculations per particle per frame (assuming we have 3000 particles) to reach the same performance result, again not including player actions, targetting and drawing everything on the screen.

[Vanguard]

then its a good thing we probably wont have millions of particles

right?

wait were going to have millions to billions of particles virlilw?

Trillions at least. Billions were only in early development stages, when the V was still learning the ropes. Now, since he mastered the arts of "throwin particles in your face like there is no tomorrow"-Wars, most of the time, he calculates in exponents of exponents, to visualize the numbers better.

"SIR! We have 3x10²²x10³² Particles incoming! What do we do!"
"No Problem. Launch the 1.1x10²X10³x10³ Missile launchers! THat should do the trick."

[PMouser]

o rats i cant get an expensive computer for this

[Michionlion]

I'm pretty sure V has tried to keep the hardware requirements down.  It should be playable with anything that can run CW3 decently.

[Karsten75]

The major difference between CW3 and the new game is that many functions are now transferred to the graphics processor. So expect to see a small increase of the load on your graphics subsystem and  also a pre-requisite of DirectX9 (which is fairly old).  As for particle simulation, it's a vetex simulation (Google that) and is remarkably efficient in simulation CPU requirements.

[warren]

Will this new game need a graphics card? Unity games tend to work well on my card free device.

Also, it should be possible to get over two million particles if they are aggressively optimized without slowdown or graphics card on any 1080p 60hz video playback capable computer. I believe some of those particles, the square ones in particular, are necessarily more expensive.

[dudecon]

Will this new game need a graphics card? Unity games tend to work well on my card free device.

Also, it should be possible to get over two million particles if they are aggressively optimized without slowdown or graphics card on any 1080p 60hz video playback capable computer. I believe some of those particles, the square ones in particular, are necessarily more expensive.

I don't have any inside information, but I'd be surprised if the calculations involved will bother even an integrated graphics processor. Honestly I'd be surprised if the creeper flow in CW wasn't crunched on the graphics card. It's perfect for that application.

As for square particles, I suspect they are handled like round ones, with a vertex shader to make them look different. An extra channel for the rotation is all you need, and that's not a big deal.As you say, I'd expect anything capable of playing multimedia will be able to handle Particle Fleet.

[warren]

From what I know, the flow calculations are not done in graphics card in CW3. The CW3 probably only uses the graphics card for rendering affine transformed flat images.

[Vanguard]

It´s defintiely not on the graphics card in CW3 otherwise we wouldn´t have so many complaints about the grind-maps where the game slows down to a crawl.