Can warframe's engine handle railjack?

[Joezone619]

Just want to get people's thoughts and opinions on this. From what I'm seeing, both in game, and on devstreams, it seems like warframe's engine just can't handle DE's ambitions for railjack. With every update to railjack, we get floods of bugs and issues. Which isn't new for warframe updates, but still, even with small updates like the tempestarii, to the point where they need to make separate forum sections to collect bugs and feedback specifically for the update.

When DE Scott was asked about all players needing to be present to enter the corpus ships, he was saying something along the lines of warframe not being able to handle enough AI's for the enemies, for the game to run both railjack in space, and enemies in the ships. Warframe is 8 years old now, and i don't remember ever hearing about any updates to the game engine, so it seems to me that its possible that railjack is pushing the limits of what the game engine can do.

But again, i'd like to hear other people's thoughts on this.

[DrivaMain]

The major problem is likely performance. I believe the engine can run Railjack to it's fullest potential, but it's being limited by the available hardware. Railjack is in fact pretty CPU demanding. Usually when I play normal Warframe missions my CPU's usage is usually hovering around 60-70%, but when I fired up Railjack grineer skirmish where the enemy density is higher than Corpus Railjack it jumps to 80% on intense scenes or when players are spread out across multiple tilesets. 

 

[PublikDomain]

It's their engine, they can make it handle whatever they want given enough time and effort. Issues like enemy caps can be resolved through further optimization or through design changes - 64 enemies max (or whatever the cap is) wouldn't be as much of a problem if those enemies actually meant something. Right now you could put 1,000 enemies in a room and they could all be killed in a nanosecond.

Though yes, Railjack is absolutely giving the engine a good workout. I think DE's done a good job on the technical side and that most of the issues are related to the design - not the engine.

4 minutes ago, Joezone619 said:

Which isn't new for warframe updates, but still, even with small updates like the tempestarii, to the point where they need to make separate forum sections to collect bugs and feedback specifically for the update.

I think the new bug reporting/feedback sections and Trello board are just something new the community team is trying, not some critical necessity because of this update in particular. I think they're just trying to be more engaged/transparent.

[MillbrookWest]

You'd be wrong to assume that other games don't have bugs, even the ones that ship in a 'polished' state. Games aside, you'd be surprised how much software in general actually ships bug free.

As for the engine, there's multiple parts to any engine, and in the EE's case some parts show their age more than others. In general, the renderer is probably the most new and shiny component, whereas the animation one of the least (for real, where's that IK tho?). 

Regarding the AI thing, not much progress has been made on AI in general industry wide, it's not just a DE thing. Specific implementation notwithstanding, it's not just a DE issue. In terms of AI effectiveness, they've long been able to outclass players, and are usually intentionally made dumb so you have a squishy thing to shoot and make dead.

 

[vanaukas]

Just now, Joezone619 said:

Warframe is 8 years old now, and i don't remember ever hearing about any updates to the game engine

Of course, we always had access to the new rendering tech and dinamic lighting since 2013, I don't know why they talked so much about that last year and when they launched thegame on ps5 and series X. 

Also, what do you think are "fixes" and "optimizations" on every single hotfix and update?

[Joezone619]

2 minutes ago, vanaukas said:

Also, what do you think are "fixes" and "optimizations" on every single hotfix and update?

i don't mean to say that these bugs and issues don't get patched, just that there are more of them in every railjack update, then a traditional one, even small updates to railjack.

[Mr.Fluffins]

I played RJ quite a bit before the last RJ update. It was rather stable and relatively bug free. However, instead of working on the, in my opinion, solid foundation, they decided to make a knee-jerk reaction to all the people whining about how "impossible" it is and how it is a "content island" (a popular meaningless buzzword thrown around here quite a lot). So they changed A LOT of things, which inevitably introduced a bunch more problems and bugs, as everyone expected and mentioned in their RJ update workshop (which was completely pointless, since the update rolled-out shortly after with zero changes).

DE had, in my opinion, a solid gamemode that simply required more content that utilizies its own uniques features and strength. Instead they decided to run after the "content creators" and other people who didn't want to play anything else other than base Warframe gameplay loop in the first place, and ended up pissing off the old fanbase and not really getting the other crowd. But hey, at least you can watch the game literally play itself with 2 aimbot gunners and 1 bot engineer with infinite repair goo, that sure as hell made the people who didnt want to play RJ in RJ happy. The only thing left is to turn RJ into an extended cutscene in between regular missions, but when you finish watching it you automatically get extra RJ rewards. Now then the playerbase would be ecstatic, and we would have way less bugs and performance issues.

[ebrl]

24 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

It's their engine, they can make it handle whatever they want given enough time and effort. Issues like enemy caps can be resolved through further optimization or through design changes - 64 enemies max (or whatever the cap is) wouldn't be as much of a problem if those enemies actually meant something. Right now you could put 1,000 enemies in a room and they could all be killed in a nanosecond.

Your rig would probably be killed in a nanosecond by 1000 enemies, too. Higher enemy counts are a much more complicated problem than you think and there is a reason DE doesn't try to push it.

[TARINunit9]

I have to wonder if netcode is playing a part in the engine/performance problems. Or vice versa. Because while my experience is still relatively stable solo (I can still take an elevator in a Corpus Crewship and wind up on the roof of my Railjack, like I'm trying to skip A-presses in freaking Mario 64). But as soon as I go into public we suddenly have ping and glitches. A lot more ping than usual, we're talking triple the ping we have in non-Railjack missions, and glitches of vulpaphylas dieing permanently and players getting stuck in turrets, those kinda problems

15 minutes ago, ebrl said:

Your rig would probably be killed in a nanosecond by 1000 enemies, too. Higher enemy counts are a much more complicated problem than you think and there is a reason DE doesn't try to push it.

Even with this I don't think it's so cut-and-dry. I mean 20 years ago we were dealing with nuts.wad in Doom: it gave you 10,000 enemies, but they only lagged the game while enemies were moving. Serious Sam games have also toyed around with it: normal levels cap out with around 200 enemies on screen at once, but they also invented this thing called the legion system where the game CAN render 100,000 enemies (no exaggeration) at once on screen complete with actual (very basic) AI... but only if 99,500 of those enemies have no collision detection

[DrivaMain]

11 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

But as soon as I go into public we suddenly have ping and glitches. A lot more ping than usual, we're talking triple the ping we have in non-Railjack missions, and glitches of vulpaphylas dieing permanently and players getting stuck in turrets, those kinda problems

Let me guess, the host of that game was running on a potato with a DSL connection? Your client gameplay experience is at the mercy of the host’s setup.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

56 minutes ago, MillbrookWest said:

Regarding the AI thing, not much progress has been made on AI in general industry wide, it's not just a DE thing. Specific implementation notwithstanding, it's not just a DE issue. In terms of AI effectiveness, they've long been able to outclass players, and are usually intentionally made dumb so you have a squishy thing to shoot and make dead.

I saw this in action with the old Fortuna stage 4 alert. I watched vets quickly switch to Inaros after getting hammered by the enemy while complaining that the enemy kept them staggered and off balance. Those players cried for weeks about it until DE detuned those Corpus units. 

If DE desired, they could easily wipe the floor with us. Unfortunately, players asking for deeper AI have proven to DE that they can't handle that smoke.

[ebrl]

11 minutes ago, TARINunit9 said:

Even with this I don't think it's so cut-and-dry. I mean 20 years ago we were dealing with nuts.wad in Doom: it gave you 10,000 enemies, but they only lagged the game while enemies were moving. Serious Sam games have also toyed around with it: normal levels cap out with around 200 enemies on screen at once, but they also invented this thing called the legion system where the game CAN render 100,000 enemies (no exaggeration) at once on screen complete with actual (very basic) AI... but only if 99,500 of those enemies have no collision detection

Doom can do it because behind the scenes it is a 2D game with non-demanding assets that was also built by a freakin' tech genius (in fact, some of the more "modernized" source ports run into performance issues rather often on the more demanding maps), and from those Serious Sam 4 videos it looks like the game simply disables everything for enemies that aren't in your immediate vicinity and has them simply follow the most basic of scripts until you're within a certain distance (move forwards and "shoot", it's more of a simplistic cutscene in real time than an actual fight for the action far away from the player - and on top of that, Croteam built its entire reputation on throwing hordes of enemies at you, it has been something they have specialized in for 20 years now, that's the first priority in all of their engines).

A modern, online game (important because server/client communication acts as a multiplier to some issues) has to worry about far too many things already impacting performance to be able to afford high enemy counts, especially if that means going over limits that were established earlier. Consider how the new Doom games only throw one or two dozen enemies at you at once at any point, and mask that with good enemy placement and room design that keeps the player constantly under pressure so the action looks a lot more hectic (though it also severely limits design space for what kind of encounters these games can throw at the player). Consider the attempt at recreating the 100,000 revenants map in newDoom, and consider that the original was already a reaction to the lack of hordes in newDoom.

[0_The_F00l]

You are confusing engine capability with client (PC / Console) optimization.

The engine is capable, the fact that the game runs is proof of that, DE owns the engine , so they can make the changes they need (within reason).

That it runs poorly/with hiccups is usually on the client performance,

The fact that it has bugs is on the coding ,

What you should be arguing is that the game is no longer "optimized"

[schilds]

1 hour ago, TARINunit9 said:

I have to wonder if netcode is playing a part in the engine/performance problems.

I'm pretty sure this is the main source of DE's bugs. Anything that demands somewhat more complicated synchronisation is prone to breaking the moment you have more than 1 person. More scripts running, more complicated scripts, more transitions, or more moving parts to a mission in general and multiplayer starts running into problems.

Raids had all those moving parts and kept breaking every update (even if it wasn't the raid being changed but something else in the game). All the boss fights with scripted sequences had real problems. Operators/archwings/mechs have all had issues. Railjack has all those transitions and state changes.

[Butterfly85]

Runs fine on my rig, now the hotfixes have caught most of the egregious bugs.

There will always be bugs. Coding games for pc is harder than for console because there's so many hardware and software permutations because we mostly have different set ups.

As others have said, most of the issues are more to do with the p2p system the game relies on for matchmaking

[Surbusken]

Yes, that's the question that should have been asked, before spending 4 years of work on it.

Is it even possible to make it "seamless"?

And the question prior to that, "what is the point of it?"

I mean, even if you could fly down to venus and pick someone up, as shown in the trailer, why would you?  Wouldn't people still just load orbiter then load map, to play something?

Who plays venus? The first disconnect was thinking people hang around on the planets 'for fun'.

Space combat is, hmm yeah, well, okay. Though you spend a lot of time building a frame, they have better and more ability options, parkour, pets etc. on top; if you are strictly looking for fun combat, what is the attraction supposed to be. Forge? Arty-gun?

I am not even sold on the ideal vision in a fantasy world with no limitations on it.

Lastly, I am also very surprised they didn't make the railjack your base, instead of the orbiter. If you want seamless, that seems the obvious place to start.

[MollAgdeduba]

2 hours ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

The issue is they went ahead and took people's words in a literal sense of LITERALLY copying 'old warframe' into railjack. 

Because since launch of empyrean, there never were any issues on my side if the host didn't live in a cave of course regarding enemies spawning a) on the ship, b) in space c) on even TWO side objectives in Grineer Skirmish missions at the same time and the ai didn't bug out and or 'failed'. 

So yeah, I was hoping they would build upon that and not just copy GOD DAMN DEFENSE missions from the WORST tileset into railjack.. 

I'll stick to Grineer Skirmish, and when they go ahead and copy another part into it, that's when I drop it. 

Also RIP Gian point and other exclusively space exterminate missions.. 

Also, I've yet to read 'I love corpus proxima defense/OV, I'll play that until update 50+!' from someone which is like half of the entire update. 

Nothing to say... this guys has told the truth on everything. Just quoting this for make people read this once again.

 

PS: worst for me is just that defence map (a giant, ugly skyscraper where enemies spawn 1000 meters away), not the tileset =)

[Aldain]

As a Switch player, I have to say I don't think the engine is the problem at all.

I've run into minimal glitches in my time playing post update 30 Railjack missions (aside from this one irritating one that has been around since the original launch where if you move too soon getting out of the pilot seat/turrets/FA it decides to drag you back into it) and if it is running even remotely properly on the Switch then something has to have been done right.

I think the problem is that they're trying to go about a 1-to-1 transition from Railjack content to traditional ground combat instead of creating analogous equivalents that are better optimized for simultaneous play. Take Defense for example, it loads the entire standard Defense tileset for Corpus Ships when pragmatically speaking it would only have needed half as much of that to work with and still functional.

[SneakyErvin]

4 hours ago, Joezone619 said:

i don't mean to say that these bugs and issues don't get patched, just that there are more of them in every railjack update, then a traditional one, even small updates to railjack.

I can only speak for myself and I've barely had any bugs with RJ, not even during the very first release. I've had maybe a handful of "gamebreaking" bugs since day 1 of Railjack, and they were all tied to multiplayer problems. And that is the main issue of the game, multiplayer and the way it is set up. Which isnt unique to WF since Outriders is riddled with the same exact issues due to going a very samey route with multiplayer. Heck, Outriders has more multiplayer bugs than WF, in that game it isnt just about losing connection, in that game the actions of the host can completely freeze up your game since the host-to-client communication is borked.

In all honesty, it is hard to find a game that is as well optimized and polished as WF. And focusing on what Scott said is really odd, since the density in WF is already quite high compared to pretty much any looter shooter out there. So if they need to individualize RJ objectives it is quite understandable.

Also, not hearing about any updates to the game engine? Wut? O.o

[Faylis_Altier]

2 hours ago, Surbusken said:

Lastly, I am also very surprised they didn't make the railjack your base, instead of the orbiter. If you want seamless, that seems the obvious place to start.

This ^^^

[Teridax68]

5 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

It's their engine, they can make it handle whatever they want given enough time and effort. Issues like enemy caps can be resolved through further optimization or through design changes - 64 enemies max (or whatever the cap is) wouldn't be as much of a problem if those enemies actually meant something. Right now you could put 1,000 enemies in a room and they could all be killed in a nanosecond.

I'm of the same opinion. The answer to the OP's question is that Railjack is almost certainly more technically demanding and less optimized than the rest of Warframe, which is why DE had to come up with compromises and workarounds, but I also agree that for all its optimizations over the years, Warframe's gameplay design imposes a lot of technical demands that I'd argue are flat-out unnecessary in many cases. Off the top of my head, examples include:

• Multishot as a stat forcing the game to handle multiple projectiles instead of just one, even though the stat in practice is just a damage+status increase.
• Enemies dying virtually instantly and needing to be constantly respawned.
• Maps getting littered with trash drops such as ammo restores, health and Energy orbs no-one needs, and fodder resources and mods. Often, these drops remain on the map even as players advance much further into the tileset and abandon prior tiles.
• Lockers and containers that eventually get completely ignored by most players.

Some of these aspects are more central to the game than others, but I'd argue there's plenty more room for optimization nonetheless. In addition to the above, the spawning algorithm in Warframe probably needs an update, because it's still imperfect and severely warps certain missions: enemies spawn super awkwardly on Lua, and Survival missions are pretty much a game of exploiting the spawning algorithm. Going even further, it would perhaps help if DE didn't design all of our enemies as a horde, and instead worked to make certain factions throw a smaller number of more powerful units at us (the Corpus would in fact be perfect candidates for this, in my opinion).

[vanaukas]

6 hours ago, ebrl said:

Your rig would probably be killed in a nanosecond by 1000 enemies, too. Higher enemy counts are a much more complicated problem than you think and there is a reason DE doesn't try to push it.

The ammount of nonsense I'm reading in  this thread makes me wonder if people really know what theya re talking about, apparently not, thank you for your attempts of sanity.

6 hours ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

Because since launch of empyrean, there never were any issues on my side if the host didn't live in a cave of course regarding enemies spawning a) on the ship, b) in space c) on even TWO side objectives in Grineer Skirmish missions at the same time and the ai didn't bug out and or 'failed'. 

Lmao, Grineer skirmish missions have one of the worst enemy density in the entire game, rooms are filled with 10 enemies at the same time at max and then they even stop respawning completetly when you didn't even finished the PoI yet, only to be greeted with 6 more in the final room (and in just 2 cases, in one of them gets empty before the first radiator poping outside).

This is the point: For exterminate, defense, orphix venom or volatile you can't have that low density, the compromise was "ok, we transition to something like regular missions, disable the AI outside and focus resources inside". The triggers to that system are the airlocks, wich acts like the elevator on fortuna or the rooms on cetus or deimos, but they did it so good and seamless that people doesn't even notice what's going on and end up comparing PoIs with the corpus system, wich makes absolute no sense at all.

The system needs polishing? Of course, this is brand new and needs to be iterated on the same fashion that the old railjack mission design was iterated to be stable before this major update. With the base game happened exactly the same, with Open worlds happened exactly the same. Iterations are key for the game design (and honestly, for every single game out there).

[vanaukas]

Just now, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

Density ≠ ai not responding

Why do you think it have low density then? Seriously, try to think about it, is not hard. Low density = AI working. Big density in multiple places at the same time = Your CPU being fried tried to handle all the AI at the same time or making compromises like having no collision shapes, being overly simplistic or being tossed in just one place, wich are currently problems even in the base game. Try this: Go to a spy mission as invisible frame, scan a few enemies and don't kill them, move various rooms and see the same enemies already scanned being spawned like new units. This is the kind of "magic" the engine does to avoid crashing due the enemy spawn.

[vanaukas]

33 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I was specifically talking about the way they went of just pushing 'old warframe' into railjack which obviously has even more going on in itself is not a great way to achieve neither what railjack turned out to be on launch, nor what the community wanted. 

Currently railjack became much more of an island EXCEPT the Dirac = endo change. Heck, the plexus is more alien because it's introducing 20+ capacity mods to the game. 

But as usual, the numbers after the collectors are done with the carmine penta will show how much everyone likes the new railjack. 

---

The first and second iteration despite not being flawless, something I'm not even asking for, were definitely better than this Taxijack. 

Nah, was widely asked in the same fashion as asking to move the orbiter or liset to the missions by our own hands, wich is probably something that's going to happen eventually, since it's also steve's vision since long ago.

The plexus change IDK, personally IDGAF about the drain but I can understand complaints about it, but's not a big deal, I needed 4 forma (3 regular, 1 for aura) to make a build good enough to solo everything and have space if they drop a new high drain mod just in case. This is even less than my regular frame builds.

Personally, I really like the new Railjack, while it needs more iterations for more polishing and stability, I wish I could play it more stable in PUG, but I still enjoy it a lot on solo. Liches on Railjack looks promising for me too.

If the compromise to have more complex missions (than "enter here with 10 enemies and kill a mob like The Sergeant" or "Go there with 10 enemies and pop 2 reactors outside") is needing to do the tranistion between scenes like in Corpus "on foot" missions, so be it, I'm all in. Orphix is amazing and Volatile it's one of the best missions in game imho.

I just wish Orphix wasn't that fast tho. About defense, I don't like any defense mission on starchart or railjack, I'm always avoidng it and I wish they could improve it somehow to make it faster without making it impossible for new players, wich is exactly what's happening in Orphix right now. I can handle perfeclty alone on Veil, but I understand the complains about it.

EDIT :

33 minutes ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

BTW with density ≠ ai failing I meant that the experience on Skirmish is way better (again, not flawless) than what corpus proxima brought. 

The whole SET being active is much better than fly to x, shoot y and enter ship for defense. 

Oh yeah, it's so exciting to kill a few waves of ships that are less than what spawns on corpus veil, it's so exciting entering a barely populated mission to hack this, go outside, shoot the radiator while the railjack is parked outside waiting for you and repeat until the mission is done. It's not like a "taxi" to enter to those pales at all, the railjack making you closer to the objectives while you have to enter to them it's something entirely new.

It never happened while you go to kill Pyr, Lektro, Glacik or Blite, you even killed them on your Railajck!

Imagine asking for just killing enemies on 2 mins (RIP giant point 😭😭 ) and then complaining about "Taxijack" because you do the same on Rialjack and then enter to a mroe compelx mission.

[vanaukas]

1 minute ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I'm all for removing the liset and making the railjack our new home xD after so many years playing, it'd definitely be something refreshing. (I don't know if that would make sense lore wise though lol) 

So Liset "taxi" good but Railjack "taxi" bad? Ok...

1 minute ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I don't like the plexus mainly because it consists of the same issue as our warframes/weapons. The grid was much more friendly towards future changes, when something new releases/gets changed etc. we were and could've been able to just reassign avionics. Now it's dependant on polarity if we're able to slot it in immediately, or have to forma the plexus. Take this by a couple times and it can get rather annoying.. (not all avionics fitting could've been addressed via stronger equipment/reactors) 

What? The grid was so bad that I couldn't fill it properly and had to leave slots empty if I had the high tier avionics, what are you talking about? And I had everything maxed out with Vidar reactor at max too. I can finally fit everything I want on the ship without compromising eHP. The only pro I could think of the old grid is in more freedom on choices about tactical avionics, but I can live with the change.

1 minute ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

I don't know.. I played railjack before and after the update, and found myself enjoying 'old railjack' more, and the removal of raw ship exterminate instead of addressing the issue it brought (XP fountain) was definitely something I disliked.

At least you are honest about it, because it was the only "pro" on those missions, specifically Gian Point, a literal snooze mision we could rush for XP and profit. But of course, I forgot that fun = fast completion, silly me.

1 minute ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

Obviously in 6 to 12 years especially with next Gen (and already new developed hardware ongoing) railjack will be ENTIRELY different, but damn that's a lot of time xD i know DE is different, and can't really do stuff like that 'on the side' as other devs, and push it in later. But to me corpus proxima feels just.. Like a step back, despite them trying to ship what they showed in trailers. 

It feels like they really tried to make up for their trailers people called them out on as fast as possible, maybe that's it, not sure. 

It doesn't need 6 years, you even said that Railjack was good but not flawless before this major change. At the end of this year will be in the same spot if they keep working on it as they've been doing, maybe the additions on Liches or Corpus breakes some stuff again, but I'm 100% sure stability is going to be reached this year. Stability as old RJ, not like the main game. 

I also fail to see the ASAP mindset for what they've shown on too early trailers, the only thing I can think about is the literal launch, after that they've taken quite long time of development to make a cool and stable game mode. They haven't rushed this since that big mistake imho.

1 minute ago, (XBOX)TyeGoo said:

Volatile is.. Definitely something different. My first run was literal hell because I didn't read up on it but I did it :D

Regarding defense, they need to stop making maps that large.. It's neither fun for players either rushing km's to the enemy, or the enemy taking forever to arrive at the destination. Hydron/Helene are popular because the map is appropriately in size. Not too small, corridors and definitely not bloated in size. I think the new corpus maps are just BAD in that regard. 

I can partially agree about the map size on defense, I think the main problem there is the complexity of the map rather the size. Also Helene and Hydron aren't just popular because the size (wich is a factor, I can't deny it), but mainly because grineer as faction gives more exp than corpus and infested on the same enemy level. In fact, that map is the only "good map" for defense, every other has the same problems of mission speed and enemies having pathing issues. Maybe they need to reduce complexity and size to help to speed the defense process, but that's another topic.