April 20th, 2021 Livestream

State of Dev: Hologram change

https://youtu.be/k_ma-Eg_4og

Topics

• Technology > User Interface > Holograms
• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 4

Transcript

currently another thing that I want to address that was added yesterday that I've seen some posts about today that, is that we've changed how the holograms work in satisfactory and I just want to start off by saying that this is something that we've been intending to do for a long time, a long time we just, it kind of like got prioritized up because we we noticed that the reason for why we did it are because of performance actually and it's quite significant so I'm going to talk a little bit about that now so so the holograms in satisfactory, I don't know how technical I should get into this but but essentially the way that rendering works for your factory in satisfactory is that a lot of buildables are like instanced in the world so you're not like seeing actual meshes in the world you're you're seeing like clever ways for us to be able to render a lot of things at the same time the problem with the hologram is that and the dismantle effects those two are are kind of linked up is because is that, when you're like trying to dismantle, buildables, switch their like material and that's kind of expensive and it also unfortunately also requires a lot of memory during load up specifically because when we load up all the meshes in the world need to exist instead of being instances so what happens is when you're loading into the game, it will allocate a bunch of memory for that instant for like the materials for all the factory buildings and that means the more factory buildings you have in your world the longer this will take which is why load times can be very long, during load up if you have a big save and that is very expensive and and really unnecessary and so what we've done is we've replaced the holograms and the dismantle effect with a on-screen stencil buffer instead which like draws on top of the the stuff which is much more performant but we lose out on the the that you have that hadn't occurred in their previous holograms, and we don't really know if we can solve that transparency thing yet but we are aware of that people really like the older system but it's kind of like one of those unfortunate things where we kind of have to sacrifice, some convenience to performance because we think that performance and satisfactory is more important to some, extent but we're going to see what happens we're going to keep working on the system for a while and and see if if if it's too much of a hassle gameplay-wise or something like that maybe we'll revert it but what we're seeing currently is that we really are whoops we really are, improving load times just with this change so we have some of the test cases we have so ben sent me a test case here with a save file that's like 24 megabytes which is a lot consider that we compress the save files, and in that build it took 10 minutes to load it before we changed the holograms and then the current build it now takes five minutes so we've halved half like the the low time, so it is a it is a really significant change, having this like introducing this type of hologram and this type of dismantle effect instead of of doing the old system where the holograms would like swap out the material on the buildables so so yes that's that's one reason, now also on top of this I know that some people are having issues with the hologram not just like them existing but also like they're harder to read and sometimes they'll like glitch out and stuff like that we're aware of that we're also aware of the issue where some of the directional arrows on the holograms are hard to read that's something we're also not there's that's something we're also aware of and we're working on that we're gonna fix that and in some cases some of the colors don't work with the hologram they like look strange and stuff like that and that's also something we're aware of that's something we've fixed internally and I think we're gonna push it today if I'm not mistaken, along with some other small bug fixes here and there so so that's the topic of holograms I'm probably gonna get a bunch of questions about this during the q a I'm gonna address that more later on I'm also going to address the state of dev again once we get to that section so yeah, so let's say holograms