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[DE]Steve

Warframe Staff
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Posts posted by [DE]Steve

  1. Tenno,

    If you haven't heard, Sands of Inaros is coming soon! Check out the Hub here: https://warframe.com/18-5-hub

    In order to best prepare you for the Update, we wanted to give a quick heads up on it's approximate download size: 4+ GB.

    Why so big?

    The short answer: Warframe has received months of technical graphics improvements, putting an extra layer of detail on every single graphical element of the game. When released, players on all platforms should notice a substantial increase in detail across all of Warframe’s game modes, weapons, characters and tilesets.

    The long answer (that also makes up the past 2 months of my life):

    With Inaros, the sands of old have been swept away from U18 Warframe leaving behind a newer, more vibrant U18.5 Warframe. In many respects, 18.5 is a remastered, more HD version of Warframe with months of technical graphical improvements and artistic relighting of many parts of the game (and more to come in subsequent updates). These changes sweep across lighting, materials, collision, so the 18.5 update is expected to be a larger-than-usual download – again, we're talking 4+ GB. On top of these changes are across the board rendering performance improvements we hope you'll enjoy, keep in mind that your particular hardware may benefit more and benefit less depending on your GPU, resolution and preferred graphics settings. All of these upgrades in 18.5 are cross-platform - yes! PC, PS4, and Xbox One Tenno will see these improvements as they are released.  Here's some results you may notice as a result of these sweeping graphical changes:

     

    • Lighting textures have been reengineered to reduce square compression artifacts and ugly color banding. You may have seen me point this out on past Devstreams.
    • All PBR materials have been recompressed with a more accurate format, new and subtle details are visible on your PBR'd Warframes, gear and in the environment.
    • Reflection Probes have been built through many areas of the game, grounding PBR materials with more accurate lighting.
    • Character and weapon lighting includes more accurate 'dual specular' lighting which means metallic surfaces are more realistic and fancy looking.
    • HDR rendering has been switched to a compact 32bit format which has improved HDR rendering performance for a wide range of GPUs.
    • Tonemapping has been adjusted to use more of the range of lighting content in the game, images have more detail, particularly richer in the darks.
    • Motion Blur and Depth of Field have been re-engineered to run faster and look better, fast moving and defocused objects no longer appear 'cut out' on their silhouettes.
    • Draw order optimizations have been applied to every object in the game, which improves overall performance, particularly in worst-case scenarios.
    • Atmospheric fog effects are now rendering in a separate lighting pass, allowing richer particle effects at distance without being 'erased' by atmosphere.
    • Particle lighting has been improved to more accurately represent the local lighting environment.
    • Wind force modelling on many particle systems increase realism as various environmental particles now respond to explosive forces and Warframe powers – you've also probably seen us showcase this in our most recent Devstream.
    • Bloom system has been softened and made more seated in the scene. The burnt-out look is replaced with a more subtle and gentle sci-fi glow.
    • Physics collision, performance and stability have all been improved, as a long-awaited upgrade of Warframe PhysX libraries has been completed.

    PC Minimum spec remains unchanged. Combined with the optimizations mentioned, our tests are showing 18.5 as a better looking Warframe with 18.0 or better performance on an array of toasters and beastly GPUs!

    So there you have it, Tenno. 4+ GB of content explained, and now it's time for me to go back to the team and bring this Update across the finish line to come out on PC soon.

     

     

     

  2. Dearest Tenno,

     

    I'm taking a quick break from crunching my face off for Echoes of the Sentient Update to follow up on the announcement from 8 months ago regarding a proposed partnership for Digital Extremes.

    https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/324240-partnership-announcement/

     

    This morning news went out announcing the official partnership of DE with Multi Dynamic Games, a subsidiary of Leyou Technologies Holdings Limited. You can find the news here: http://www.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2015/0721/LTN20150721806.pdf

     

    Nothing new to report other than that. We have been and will continue to operate business and development as usual in our Dojo.

     

    Back to building Warframe…

     

    -DE_Steve

  3. Sorry about that - we'll get this fixed up on those items! In defense of my crappy new shaders, this isn't a PBR problem, it's a problem in the tint mask texture! Both old (blinn phong) and new (PBR/GGX) shaders added specular reflections on black tinted materials for sure but the problem with these items is the tint mask that applies your black color choice wasn't fully opaque... artist missed a setting to include the alpha (4th color slot) to the tint mask.

     

    We'll get it fixed up for ya!

  4. For these items, or a wider reaching fix?  Been seeing an issue with the game not using anisotropic filtering on an increasing number of things (presumably anything touched by PBR) as time goes on.

     

    Most of the PBR tint masks should be much sharper in next hotfix - noticing it even on the Liset skins as well. Sorry for the blur!

  5. I'm finally able to play more than a couple of missions without a crash.  In initial testing, the most current patch is actually making the game better.

     

    Finally. 

     

    Good to my word, the next three patches will be free from my commenting.  I'm glad the game finally works.

    (Good to hear!) Guessing: AMD hardware, not using windowed mode?

  6. Warframe freezes up at start up, cant even get into login screen. Task manager registers warframe as non responsive. Similar incident happened on update 16.1. 

    Ouch - are you on AMD/Fullscreen? Working on this still but one workaround we saw was disable fullscreen from Launcher settings.

  7. You can definitely turn off all the new GPU stuff in display options - Ambient Occlusion and Adaptive Exposure

     

    But I would encourage you to turn on VSync if you're concerned about GPU temperature (your screenshot has ~300fps!!!). You're literally running the GPU flat out when VSync is off which means anytime we make CPU improvements your GPU utilization will increase.

  8. Hey guys I may need to tune a few more levels for adaptive exposure.

     

    You can definitely turn off all the new GPU stuff in display options - Ambient Occlusion and Adaptive Exposure

  9. I would note, as I mentioned, I'm having the problem as well(but don't use a laptop, so I don't have those options), and just mere persistence makes it work when it has stopped--it may, in fact, still be broken, but you got it to work *this time*.

    Definitely bugs in our crap - any chance this http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1980891/setting-nvidia-graphics-card-default.html could make it more reliable for you? (Until it gets fixed for real)

  10. If you have a EE.log you could send after repro'ing - a support ticket number would be rad, thanks for your patience!

     

    Edit: We do have a hotfix for some Dx11/Dx10 weirdness that isn't the launcher (but coincides timing with its release). Hang in there.

  11. still getting black screen when connecting to hub, tried 5 times, solo setting, black screen had to force a shutdown each time, only thing visable is the frame rate indicator in the bottom left, showing about 5500 fps and changing 0.2 draw time

    Make sure youre not in a squad and set to solo. And to be super sure, switch to solo and restart the game.

    Super goofy and will be fixed ASAP.

  12. PC Tenno Today… Console Tenno in a few weeks: The Mesa Update is a whopper, roughly 1 GB at the time of this writing.

     

    Typically when you’re faced with 1 GB download size you can expect a lot of that data to be new content – but today it’s different. Roughly 1/3rd of this new update is focused on optimization.

     

    The type of optimizations coming today focus on a sweeping change of mesh formats. This change will reduce load times and video memory consumption.

     

    All the graphics you see in game are made up of meshes – and meshes are quite large. We’ve compacted the vertex format we use by 25%, meaning in the future we are able to fit more meshes in our work, and you’ll have faster load and render times. This download pain now will continue to pay dividends in the future!

     

    For those technically inclined: Vertex positions are using ‘half float’ and our tangent basis has it’s bitangent calculated instead of stored.

     

    Thanks for bearing with us for this change, and if you need something to watch while your download chugs away, we suggest the following:

     

    QErkoMg.gif

     

    (credit: http://theloobster.deviantart.com/art/Warframe-Moa-Racing-379612727)

     

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