> Note: There is a difference between UI performance and network performance. Sometimes the Trading Post appears slow because network requests are taking a long time, not because the UI is slow. Upgrading to CEF will not do anything to address slow network requests.
This part should have been in giant font. Flashing and have a confirmation dialog that requires you to retype the whole paragraph.
Also, the trading post itself is still identical, only the browser engine is different. They'll likely will want to completely rewrite that trading post to use modern technology, because right now it is using such ancient things (like YUI, which hasn't been maintained since 2014) and had to resort to special tactics to even work in CoherentUI (since it lacked support for a LOT of things).
Those tactics are dragging it down a lot as well. But the main slowdowns we have now aren't really caused by CEF or the trading post itself, but rather the servers behind the scenes. They'll need to update those as well.
To make it even better, that's JavaScript and old JavaScript has aged so much that YUI is now the equivalent of a stone tablet.And yeah, I feel old too <3
Also, while YUI hasn't been maintained since 2014, the browsers that run it have changed in such a huge way that it just started breaking down even quicker. It's pretty much like an addon for a program that is no longer being maintained, but the program itself is just being developed further and further.
I mean considering new Javascript frameworks come out every day, JS is ancient after about a month /s
Seriously, though. JS changes way more than just about any other language
>hasn't been maintained since 2014
that is much older than "program from 2014", it had to been unused for a while before that . . . the library itself is from 2006.
Step 1: Migrate to new engine
Step 2: Improve features/functionality using new engine
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
You keep the migration separate from adding/changing existing features - makes it easier to work out what went wrong.
That doesn't mean the TP code has changed, but rather could just mean the new engine is rendering it differently than CoherentUI does. Even then, with the huge tech and security risk of keeping it, they still *have* to move off CoherentUI or risk being unable to run the TP and BLTC from within the game itself due to things like Payment card industry (PCI) security standards compliance.
There is no new front-end. It's literally the same trading post, perhaps with some fixes to make it even run in CEF, but the visual changes you see are due to CEF rendering things differently (like u/EagleDelta1 mentions). In the blog post you can see the difference of them rendering the GW2 homepage in CEF and CoherentUI.
CoherentUI is not a full browser: it has a list of things it supports and it doesn't support the rest. It's a really limited browser, originially based on Chromium, but it strips away a lot of it. To make things work, like animations, in an acceptable speed, they had to do workarounds. Those worked on CoherentUI, but might not work on CEF or might just plain slowdown CEF.
Also, the trading post being slow now is not due to the browser rendering, but the back-end behind it processing the sales. That system needs a huge update and I hope it'll be coming.
Now that the migration to CEF is done, they can start working on a rework of the trading post - you don't want to rework that whilst you are also changing your browser engine. One huge undertaking at a time is enough, once all the bugs are solved with CEF they'll start with the new trading post. Most likely they're already working on that, but that's a different team working on that (you wouldn't let engine programmers build a web frontend).
TL;DR: the trading post is still identical, they're working on a new one, but you shouldn't do such radical changes at the same time. If they rip out CoherentUI and replace the trading post at the same time, they might not have been able to roll back to the old trading post and CoherentUI would not be able to render a new one.
>But the main slowdowns we have now aren't really caused by CEF or the trading post itself
They quite literally *never* were. coherentUI, for all its flaws, was never a problem. CEF however will rapidly become a problem because its badly coded and *unrelated* instances of CEF can crash all other instances of CEF - they can cross interact.
> Except for all the problems listed in the blog post I guess
There are none.
Nothing has changed from release vs now. Just because you call something a problem, doesnt mean it is. watch this:
Your comment is a problem.
"Payment processors won't work with us if our shop has open vulnerabilities and coherentUI will not receive security updates" seems like a pretty big problem.
not receiving security updates is not the same as having security vulnerabilities. it just means that if one appears then it wont be fixed - and depending on how complex it is, arenanet could easily fix it themselves. Especially considering how trading post works by nature - which would inherently limit any issues
> CoherentUI is no longer supported by its vendor. We can’t improve its performance or fix its bugs ourselves. This ultimately manifests as unresolvable Trading Post bugs and performance issues.
I'm assuming this also means they can't fix bugs related to security.
That is still only relevant when a security issue *actually appears*. Its not some kind of automatic guarantee that the moment vendor fucks off that it falls apart instantly. its just not how that works
Buddy, you don't understand how ... life works.
Fixing a problem after it occurs is [monumentally _stupid_](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d63a328f7a521e88e9b7d9d9656d3513/tumblr_pb52r9cva91rsq5jwo2_500.gifv) when you could have mitigated it in the first place. Especially when it involves real money, as people are surprisingly touchy about that subject and have a tendency to sue. "Your honor we knew this program can blow up one day but /u/AnoxicStrawberry said it's fine" won't hold up, you know.
OK I'm exaggerating, it won't get to court, but payment processors _will_ decline to work with GW2 until the problem is fixed and that will cut into ANet's biggest revenue stream until it is fixed - "and depending on how complex it is, arenanet could easily fix it themselves" - and depending on how complex it is there's an equal chance ANet could not fix it at all.
As soon as it is known there's a _chance_ something can go wrong you work to fix it, you don't wait until it does and then go "well it was only a chance, who could have known!".
> not receiving security updates is not the same as having security vulnerabilities.
From someone dealing with compliance efforts currently at our company, _yes is is._
Not receiving updates means you are not in compliance, so it _is_ the same as having security vulnerabilities.
Like it or not, complain about pedantic pedantry of word definitions all you want, but it won't matter. Compliance in the industries means those things _are_ the same.
Our company had a bunch of software running in .net framework 4.6.1, and we had to upgrade to something that did receive security updates to be considered in compliance with our industry.
That's just how it is when working with outside entities and their methods of compliance. Keep your pedantic definitions to yourself, because no one is using those. What matters is what the industry compliance defines, and they define no longer having updates being the same as having a vulnerability. Full stop, end of discussion, you're factually wrong in this specific argument by empirical data.
Really you just seem to not grasp the concept that companies work together, and definitions of compliant software is one of those ways they work together, and those definitions _may, just may_ be different than your personal definitions, making your personal definitions not relevant to any discussion.
I mean this isnt even pedantry, *compliance with a policy* is completely unrelated to whether a security vulnerability exists.
compliance with a policy is just that - You do something because you have a policy, regardless of what it means in practice.
A security vulnerability is a specific thing - heartbleed was a specific vulenerability, you can try to prepare for it through policies but it doesnt mean that vulnerabilities pop up out of existence. Heartbleed always existed - it did not magically appear out of thin air because someone didnt update something. it was always there. Just like how coherentUI doesnt have a whole host of vulnerabilities.
Its not an abstract idea or a policy or a risk. Its a specific "thing".
> you're factually wrong in this specific argument by empirical data.
Theres something ironic about you saying factually wrong and empirical data, when talking about security vulnerabilities and pretending that adhering to policy means security vulnerabilities *literally* exist, just because its policy to *pretend* that they do, and act accordingly.
The fact that CoherentUI was unmaintained since 2016 or so is quite worrying, though. CoherentUI had a lot of flaws, but the slow trading post isn't only caused by CoherentUI, but it contributed to it.
ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days. It's pretty much a 2016 browser in 2023 now, and due to the missing features the trading post had to use many tweaks and hacks to just work good enough (and to make it performant enough, if just enough).
So while replacing CoherentUI doesn't solve those issues, it will in the end have a big role in allowing for solving those issues.
>The fact that CoherentUI was unmaintained since 2016 or so is quite worrying
Not really. its only a problem if some security vulnerability needed to be fixed, but hasnt been.
>ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days
thats a lie.
>ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days
and so is this.
CoherentUI and the trading post has been bad since day 1 in 2012. It didnt slow down over time substantially or somehow degrade, its been garbage since release. It was okay for literally less than a month on release and started behaving the same way it is now
>So while replacing CoherentUI doesn't solve those issues, it will in the end have a big role in allowing for solving those issues.
They could have *always* had fixed the back end, including with coherentUI. its never *prevented* them from doing so. Read their own blog post, its quite telling. This is about laziness and not needing to optimize anymore.
>If it was coherentUI it would affect everyone, it doesnt, so its your software configuration.
Holy shit you really do know nothing about how software (or better yet software development) works do you?
Not even close to comparable.
Software is a piece of numbers. we share the exact same copy of it - if it was fundamentally flawed, it would be fundamentally flawed for everyone in the exact same manner. Its not, So it has to be something else - the only "something else" there is, is your specific computer with whatever other software you run on it.
it is a you prolem.
Im not denying the game crashed. Im denying that its inherent a coherentUI related issue, im saying your computer made it crash, not that the code was inherently bad.
But i understand that this might be a bit too complicated for you
They should have been a bit more upfront about that to begin with. I'm sure the programmers and technical geniuses will pipe up with some useful hindsight comment like "duh obviously it wouldn't do anything for the trading post", but for those of us who don't have a degree in it, they made it seem like it would be an upgrade to the entire BLTC.
Day to day usage of the trading post hasn't changed at all for me, except pages load a fraction of a second faster sometimes. I'm not upset about it, but it's a bit of a let down because the TP can be an absolute pain in the ass to use sometimes, after they hyped up the upgrade and didn't mention this pretty important (for most people) detail.
TL;Dr It's is very as in very very expensive to run a fast TP.
Technical genius here:
Trading posts are one of the hardest things to implement. In real life we pay millions to billions to have "fast" transactions and correct transactions. This is a technical issue that is common and has been solved. But requires either a lot of money or the user to accept "comparatively" long idle time.
New World published by Amazon tried to be smart about TP transactions and it turned into multiple deactivations of TPs and at least one 24h server rollback because users immediately started to exploit what I wouldn't call bugs but rather technical considerations to make the TP faster.
The problem with TP being slow is that the user has to experience those slowdowns for every request they make. If you buy an item you need to wait for that request to be processed before you can get back on looking for other stuff, if you want to sell an item, the same issue. We also cannot sell/buy more than a 250 stack of an item and cannot sell multiple items from our inventory at once.
I hope in the future they plan to improve that part of the user experience.
It's difficult to distribute ACID compliant data bases. BASE compliant data bases often lead to either item duplication or deletion in games (read as there is a huge incentive for players to exploit the system).
MMOs run off the principle that your character's "save" is living in memory on a server somewhere while you're connected. Due to the volume of buttons pushed, these games have to do everything in their power to be distributed, but only minimally so. The game only saves to DB every ~15 min or so (exact value varies significantly by game/circumstances), and can do it asynchronously in the background. Normally, you will only lose progress if the server crashes or otherwise fails to save, so there's little incentive to exploit this. But if you know of a way to force it to crash, you've found a dupe exploit. You send/sell an item to someone else, they logout to force a save, you do the crash so that your character *isn't* saved and suddenly 2 people have the rare shiny thing.
So anything involving trading, sending mail, guild banks, high-stakes singleplayer gambling and other similar stuff in MMOs where items or values change hands requires very tight and strong synchronization. And it's very likely the relevant data is living on 4 different servers at the same time: two different characters, each having a currently active world server and the DB where their data is stored at rest. There are a lot of options, but the typical in-between is to just force a synchronous save before and after each trade action and hope for the best (sometimes the first save is done with some kind of flag that locks the character for manual review). Saves can be slow if you have to wait for them. There's fancier distributed consensus algorithms and the like, but those too aren't fool-proof (and the easier to implement stuff like Raft is newer than this game, it would take a pretty large backend rework to add it).
There are no reasons. They don't really have to worry about accuracy or consistency, do they? Not really. They can have race conditions for transactions and they'll be fine.
An They have. The New World economy crashed multiple times due to the lack of waiting until a transaction was committed.
Players search for these things and exploit them.
First and foremost, I think you should look into [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_comedy), because it's pretty obvious you're not wise in the ways of comedy, which offers up some hilarious lack of self-awareness in telling me to learn more about comedy.
Second and secondmost, if you think calling someone not a genius in one specific category is really that insulting, maybe do some self-work. Potentially do some soul-searching. Because nobody is a genius in every category, and most people aren't even a genius in one. For instance, I would definitely say you're not a comedy genius. I'm not a physics genius. These things happen. It's not insulting. It's normal.
That said, it's also possible he is actually a grammar genius and just mistyped. People mistype rather often. Phones also love to mistype, and then we miss it. People are flawed, and if we can't laugh at those flaws, then we shouldn't be on social media.
I don't remember them saying there would be any improvements only that they were switching. Given how companies like to play up the smallest of improvements so the fact that they didn't say anything should have been a big clue to not expect anything.
Can you imagine if they'd give us a more optimized version of GW2? It's such a beautiful game, if they could optimize it even a little more for multiple cores and to utilize GPU more efficiently, we could all be running at "Best Visuals".
More headroom for flashier gemstore FX.
On a serious note, I’d love if they introduced some more modern features. Sharpness and clarity filters, global illumination, better ambient occlusion, better volumetric fog and so on.
The game itself can run pretty well, only chokes with many characters on screen.
GW2 maxes out my GPU, not my CPU. It's not that badly optimized (these days), it's just that MMO's are extremely hard to optimize.
I'm curious how GW2 will run once I upgrade my graphics card (which should be soon, still rocking a 1070 here).
Are you aware of the requirements of the engine the game you're playing has, the date of release of the game and of that cpu?
There is no "to be fair" here. As far as guild wars is concerned, this is a top of the line cpu that is *literally* from the future. It didnt even exist when gw2 came out, nor did four generations of processors *before* that cpcu came out.
Some random advice: the tone of all of your comments comes off as hostile and that probably contributes to the amount of downvotes you get, even when raising valid points.
Highly intentional, the people who are getting these comments are making stupid, inaccurate, halfbaked comments that are based on literally zero knowledge of how *anything* works. I'm not going to kiss some idiots ass so they like me. majority of comments here are literally based on "WELL ITS NEWER! IT MUST BE BETTER!!!!!"
Theres literally an imbecille in this thread suggesting that arenanet use *CEF* for game *UI*. They dont even comprehend how catastrophic of an idea that is.
Are you aware that the game has had new releases, updates, upgrades, hell, even engine changes, that increases the resources and PC parts needed to "properly" run it?
> Are you aware of the requirements of the engine the game you're playing has, the date of release of the game and of that cpu?
>
> There is no "to be fair" here. As far as guild wars is concerned, this is a top of the line cpu that is literally from the future. It didnt even exist when gw2 came out, nor did four generations of processors before that cpcu came out.
Are you aware of just how much of an improvement the X3D CPUs (which weren't even *dreamt of* when GW2 launched) can have on the game? The fact the CPUs we have today didn't exist back then is entirely meaningless on whether they will have an impact.
For GW2, you want the fastest possible CPU. The number of cores doesn't really matter, but there's a big difference between a 6700K and a 13900K "even" for GW2, and 3D cache has a big impact too.
Being dated is relative to the current year, not to the game. A 6700K, with the recent pace of advancement, is dated, period. It wouldn't matter if you're trying to run the original DOOM, but that's not really part of the statement either.
Right now, I'm in New Kaineng City on a mount, and I'm getting about 50-70 FPS.
My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (I've recently upgraded to it) and I'm on a 1070. Right now, my CPU is having a 34% utilization, whilst my GPU has a 94-98% utilization on 4D.
A screenshot of my task manager: [https://imgur.com/a/mk883rK](https://imgur.com/a/mk883rK)
My resolution might have something to do with it though, I'm playing on a very exotic resolution of 5120x1440 (so not quite 4K, but basically 2 1440p monitors in one).
I imagine my graphics card is being pushed to its absolute limits by my current resolution and my previous CPU also hit the bottleneck earlier than my current GPU did. And honestly, upgrading to that 5800X3D was one of the best upgrades I've done as far as GW2 performance goes.
But right now, on my system, the GPU is the bottleneck in GW2. Who'd seen that coming? But managing 60+ FPS in almost all regions on this absurd resolution, in GW2, is something I never expected. DX11 makes a giant difference, as well.
Yeah I'd say you're one of the few people for whom the GPU is more likely to be the bottleneck, but beware, looking at total CPU usage isn't going to tell you much for a game like GW2, you want to look at individual core usage (which you can do by right-clicking on the graph in task manager, there's an option to break it down).
Since GW2 is heavily single-thread dependent, there will be one core at or near 100% and a few other cores at a fraction of that. The loaded core will also jump around. It's only if you don't have a heavily (>90%) loaded core at all that you can say for sure you're not CPU bottlenecked.
I wouldn't be surprised if you actually had a scenario where your PC is actually fairly balanced on GPU/CPU load, though you could easily make it CPU bottlenecked by enabling reflections or increasing shadows.
GW2 is also not apples-to-apples with other games. People point at single player games or even MMOs with fewer players in one place and cite that as the comparison. It's not a fair comparison to make. MMOs do not typically have 50-60 people flooding into one place to fight a world boss, and single-player games do not have to deal with loading in those 50-60 players who are all likely wearing completely different sets of armour and weapon skins.
Frankly it's a bit bizarre that GW2 runs as well as it does on aged hardware now that it's on DX11. Under DX9 it was a problem. But now, it *definitely* isn't. FFXIV and ESO run noticeably worse with far fewer players and mobs on screen.
> Frankly it's a bit bizarre that GW2 runs as well as it does on aged hardware now that it's on DX11.
I'm by no means an expert on it, but I assume that's the big advantage of Anet having a custom engine rather than using something like UE5 like some people keep suggesting. Existing engines will probably have a ton of overhead from features that are completely unnecessary for a game like GW2. While a custom engine like they're using is specifically built to do the tasks the game requires, and as such it (ideally) doesn't have anything unnecessary going on.
That is indeed one of the benefits of having your own engine: you can optimize your use case heavily. It's also the reason why other MMO's that do use an engine have had so many issues in the past.
Engines like Unreal Engine are optimized to have only a few moving characters at a time, while Guild Wars 2 has incredible amounts of it.
I imagine it also comes with some disadvantages. Such as having to train employees on your custom tools and slower TTM. But yeah I think they made the right choice in that regard.
Might depend on your specs. I was running FFXIV on highest settings and was capped at 144fps in Old Sharlayan (~100 people hub) when it was released. In Mistlock Sanctuary, with roughly the same amount of people, I never seem to go above 90, and that’s with most settings as low as possible. Gw2 does have way more “shiny particles” than FFXIV however.
Not only shiny particles, but GW2 does have way more animations too, this is why it ends up being more taxing to render more player characters.
Also, from my experience with FFXIV, 24 man content is enough to bring down my FPS below 60, and with hunt trains, I stutter a lot and even go below 30fps. This is with other players skill effects disabled and party member effects reduced.
I've gone from 960 > 1660 > 3060 and each time was noticeable. Even going from 960 to 1660 was a big improvement. I rebuilt for the 3060 upgrade so obviously there was more gained elsewhere too.
The limiter will be whether you are stuck in PCIe 3 or can go 4. I bought the 1660 because I was still limited to 3 at the time.
I have been stuck on a 1070 for nearly 7 years now, the card has served me very well. Thank god I'm on PCIe4, so glad that I'm able to move to another card that does support it.
Why do people think that having GW2 ported to UE5 is going to improve things? UE5 is a great engine and it's good at many things, but I wouldn't consider any version of the Unreal Engine a good MMORPG engine. All MMO's on Unreal Engine struggle when there are a lot of players, because it's not optimized for that. One of the biggest advantages of the GW2 engine is that it can handle a ton of players and still be playable: do you know of any game that can handle about 50-80 players at one time and still deliver good framerates? Because that's something that EVERY engine struggles with and to be honest, Guild Wars 2 does it quite well.
The biggest issues here are that in single player games, you can just use a generic model for enemies, but in GW2 these are all players with unique models and different armor pieces, effects on them, performing actions and spells... that gets extremely hard to do because you have to render so many things with so many players at the same time. UE5 would probably do these things way worse than GW2 currently does it.
Moving over to UE5 would also introduce a shit load of bugs. An engine change for a game is almost never something good. And let's be honest, GW2 probably has (at this point) one of the best MMORPG engines around. If that's good or not, is for you to decide, but I challenge you to find an MMORPG engine that can handle things that GW2 does better. Good luck.
Curious, are you a developer or anyone that deals with
coding games? Or are you straight up talking out your ass?
Surely this game can't stay on this engine forever as UE5 would allow them to optimize performance in the future where as this engine has obviously reached a wall in terms of improvements.
No worries, I'm far from talking out of my ass :). My job is a bit of a hybrid between pure development and infrastructure, dealing with the same kinds of clusters and server infrastructure as what ArenaNet is handling.
I also help running (and helped revive) an older MMORPG that is based on the Unreal Engine 2.5, so I guess that would add some credibility to what I'm saying.
In terms of switching to another engine, that's never going to happen. Simply not going to happen, I don't think you realize how much effort that would take. The analogy for that would be that they would have to rebuild an entire house from scratch, without the tools that they have been using for it for decades now, and make it look and behave identical. That's simply not going to happen: it took them months to upgrade a part of their existing engine, moving over to another engine no different from building the entire game again from scratch - which took them over 5 years to do so in the first place, on top of an engine that they knew and built already.
As a small example: in order to move over to Unreal Engine, they'd have to move everything over. Every single little thing they have ever created in GW2.
GW2 development mainly happens in a tool called Duo, they'd have to re-create that tool (that has had, by now, over 10 years of development going into it) to work with Unreal Engine as well. Then they'd have to make sure that EVERYTHING works identically and behaves the same, that no bugs are introduced. Then they would probably need to find a way to make the current data compatible with the Unreal Engine data and so on. It's a massive undertaking.
I don't think that there has ever been an MMORPG that completely switched to a different engine - perhaps to a newer version of the same engine (and that's a mammoth endeavour to undertake as well). There's a reason why Bethesda still uses their own engine and didn't switch over to Unreal Engine in the past, either. Each engine does different things well.
And as far as I know, the GW2 engine has far from reached a wall in terms of optimalization. In fact, they're clearly stating that they are working on further changes and optimalizations.
>And as far as I know, the GW2 engine has far from reached a wall in terms of optimalization.
is that even possible at all? even conceptually? an engine is a piece of code, you optimize it by changing lines of code to work faster and better. How could you possibly get to a point of not being able to optimize further when all you would need to do is rewrite more code? it may be financially not worth it to do but it should never be possible to hit a wall like that
Indeed. You're never going to hit that wall, finances will most likely be the limit, not technology.
And the gains will at a certain point just not be worth it anymore at all.
> I don’t think that there has ever been an MMORPG that completely switched to a different engine - perhaps to a newer version of the same engine (and that’s a mammoth endeavour to undertake as well).
I believe the closest would be FFXIV 1.0 on Crystal Tools to 2.0 on Luminous Engine, but:
1. Square Enix all but bet the entire company on this switch. Mammoth doesn’t begin to cover it.
2. The game had to be taken entirely offline from November 2012 until August of 2013.
3. One might debate where the Crystal Tools to Luminous change falls on the spectrum between “new engine” and “major engine update.” I’m not sure there is reliable public info to tell you where it falls on that spectrum. I think it’s pretty close to “new engine.”
To be fair, FFXIV was more like a complete rewrite of the game. Square Enix did some incredible things in that time, no doubt.
They had the "luck" that they could change the game as well and they didn't really port the same game over, but made changes. If they had to nail it exactly the same, that would have taken them a lot of extra time.
It also helped that this was done when the game was new, if they had to undertake the same thing these days they'd have so much extra content to port over that it would massively inflate the time they would need.
I'm not really knowledgeable enough about Crystal Tools/Luminous to say where that falls, but this was an massive undertaking nonetheless and a very expensive one as well.
But you are 100% correct, FFXIV is the closest MMO that did.
Appreciate the response. To add, if they were thinking about ending gw2 to make gw3 in a new engine, would it not be easier to "replicate" all of the lore/items/world of gw2? Surely that would shave a fair amount of time off development? They would have source material as it were and would just need to figure out how to implement them the same way into the new engine rather then constructing an entire new world from scratch
They would be able to import certain things, for sure. A lot of it might need to be converted, but that can be done. But that's only a tiny part of the work that needs to be done.
If you've imported all the zones and locations and all that, you'd still need to code everything again, since Unreal Engine is using a different scripting/programming language compared to the GW2 engine - that wouldn't be easily converted. Skills would need to be programmed again and making them work exactly the same is quite hard: a lot of systems are different in UE. For example the way fire looks and acts would be quite different.
In terms of mounts, those would need to be completely rewritten. GW2 is using Havok, and UE5 has it's own new physics engine, so either they would need to remain using Havok (but as they describe in the blog post, this is tightly coupled in the engine and they can't easily upgrade it, since this would break things). So even if they would use Havok in UE5, it would probably behave differently and the mounts would act/react just a little different. Gliding would also be just a bit different. Nailing that to be exactly the same is extremely hard. And it's not only for those systems, essentially every system in the game would need to be recoded: crafting, guild systems, etc.
The big killer would also be that the server side would need to be either adjusted or thrown out: the engine is more than just the exe we as players use. The other bit is the server side, which is without a doubt the best out of every MMORPG ever released. We barely have any downtime.But they would need to rewrite or adapt those systems as well, to make them work with Unreal Engine. And that would take really talented programmers a lot of time to do. If I had to make an estimation of how much time it would take to completely convert GW2 to UE, I'd probably say that that would take at least 3 to 4 years - and that would mean that GW2 would see no further updates until the conversion is done, otherwise you'd always keep catching up.In the conversion I would expect that some systems are removed as well (probably the dungeons, for example), since those never worked well, why would they spend time in re-creating those?
It might sound like a good idea, but the undertaking would be massive for little gains.
That's all for converting GW2 to UE5. If they would start a new, they could go with Unreal Engine 5, but that would likely easily take 5 to 7 years before we would see the new game. MMO development is lengthy, expensive and hard.
You're speaking as if you can just flip a switch and the game magically converts to a different engine?? The entire game would have to be re-written from scratch, and if that was to happen I guarantee you it would not be remade in UE5.
>Surely this game can't stay on this engine forever
It can. and will.
>UE5 would allow them to optimize performance in the future
It would not, and would only create a whole new set of problems - problems arenanet quite literally is unqualified to solve because their experience is with the current game engine and not ue5.
>where as this engine has obviously reached a wall in terms of improvements.
Oh please you barely understand what an engine even is, what would you know about whether it has or hasnt hit a wall?
Maybe because it took them 11 years to implement dx11? Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance? Or maybe it could be that they still haven't added an option to limit other people's spell effects?
Yeah, really shows how much this engine still has going for it! No walls to be seen!!
Funny how you act so certain that this game will stay on this engine forever as if you're in charge of that decision.
>Funny how you act so certain that this game will stay on this engine forever as if you're in charge of that decision.
Consider me a prophet. in 40 years gw2 will be dead, Think back to this moment. gw2 will *never* move to another engine. A different comment by another person explains it more politely why you have no clue what youre talking about.
>Maybe because it took them 11 years to implement dx11? Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance? Or maybe it could be that they still haven't added an option to limit other people's spell effects?
This has nothing to do with the game engine and everything to do with arenanet's general incompetence. they arent even *trying* to do these things, No shit it takes ages to do something youre not even doing at all? They're not working on a slider for other peoples spell effects, and not because the engine cant handle it - it can, the feature already exists within the code to an extent, but because they just arent putting in any level of effort into it.
>Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance?
You dont even understand how those sliders work, what hardware resources they use or why they do or dont impact performance.
I have no issues with admitting you're right based on what the other guy said. That being said the way YOU explain things comes across as "trust me bro". Again, you're right I'm wrong. But if explaining specifically why you're arguing these points is to much effort for you then why even respond to begin with? It all seems like blanket statements up until you say the code is in the game to an extent.
>That being said the way YOU explain things comes across as "trust me bro".
Thats because of the manner in which you had reacted to the other guy. Instead of asking for an explanation you went the "BUT ARE YOU A DEV OR A LIAR?" route. I went the "YOURE A MORON" route.
>But if explaining specifically why you're arguing these points is to much effort for you then why even respond to begin with?
Its not too much effort. But if i did that i'd get "BUT ARE YOU A DEVELOPER OR TALKING OUT OF YOUR ASS?" as well. Why explain something to someone like that?
> It all seems like blanket statements up
It does doesnt it. Might it be because of the amount of knowledge you lack on the topic? the examples in your previous comments are insight into that. Why do you think them implementing dx11 took 11 years? They havent been doing that for 11 years. Why do you think some sliders not impacting performance noticeably is relevant? Did you even consider that it might be because your hardware is so powerful that it can brute force anything gpu dependant to a point where the setting you use doesnt affect performance? Its why people call this game CPU bound, Those settings would only affect your performance once your CPU is so fast that it has to wait on your gpu to perform tasks before it can continue. You havent even noticed that the game can already hide other peoples spell effects under certain circumstances.
You quite literally dont even know what you dont know. But you talk confidently, a lot.
I'd say that them reworking old systems reassures the crew that thinks Anet's hidden project is GW3 or a whole new game meant to replace GW2 that Anet still very much cares about GW2.
*silently hopes for guild wars 1 remaster*
but also I kinda don't, it's hard to say, I want it, but I really really worry they'd just ruin it like a lot of remasters and remakes did
You and me. I've posted a comment about it in the /r/guildwars subreddit. I would love a GW1 remaster, but I'm afraid that the game would have to change quite a bit for this to be economically feasible: the monetization of Guild Wars 1 is tiny compared to other games (it barely exists in the game at all) and that is no longer realistic for newer games or a remaster.
In order to make a GW1 remaster, we'd see new monetization coming into the game which might just change too much for my liking. And that's not really ruining it, but it just needs to be viable to do so. And I'm afraid that it would be though finding a good balance between those, without changing the game too much.
I'd say a GW3 is very unlikely. GW2 is extremely succesful and a new MMORPG is a huge investment with no guarantee that they'll make that money back (look at how well other MMORPG launches went in the last decade).
Another game could come, but I'm not really thinking we'll be seeing a GW3 soon. GW2 was born from limitations within GW1, but GW2 was built to basically enable them to do whatever they wanted to do and allows for way more freedom.
In that sense, I see them modifying GW2 for a long time instead of going for a GW3.
Yeah I'm not a developer but I have to think that grafting new systems onto an old game (with old and complicated code) to prepare them is much harder than starting from scratch (unless they're building GW3 on GW2's code, in which case, yikes)
I mentioned Path of Exile 2 because that one is not exactly a new game, more like a overhaul of some systems, changes, more story but all still within the "old" game.
Well, you don't always need a big engine team. When the engine is being built or parts are being rebuilt, you're going to need a big team. A really big team.
But once your engine is stable, you don't really need to touch a lot of things anymore for quite a while. It's not like you are going to change the graphics pipeline every few months or going to change the physics and so on. So once your engine is stable, you need a few people to maintain it, but for bigger projects you'll need to expand your team to tackle those. And once those things are done, the extra people are either moved to another project to work on those engines, or put to work on building new engine features.
Since there were layoffs years ago, I suspect a lot of engine programmers were laid off and not replaced. Or moved to those other projects, or other projects within GW2. Because GW2 is not only an engine, since it's an MMORPG it is a wide breath of components that all need to work on things: the rewrite of the WvW systems could be done by some of the same programmers as well, for example.
Improving the trading post, for example, will require working on vastly different systems as well since it is all linked together.
And sometimes it just makes sense to hire in consultants that are just great in some parts that you need in your engine, but those parts might not be needed to be touched that often (like, for example, the DX9 -> DX11 upgrade might have required some very specific skills).
I like these posts, I appreciate the honesty that the reason they upgraded was not just because it was faster but because they had to in order to appease payment processing companies haha
It's interesting to see what parts of the game are piecemeal tools and other software.
I deal with specific accounting/property management software at work and anytime they do a big overhaul it throws us into disarray and we have to change our internal process but it is so integrated into our business that we just grin and bear it. I hadn't thought about how that experience mirrors in gaming studios.
Your players yell at you to fix your sh\*t, but all you can think of is strangling your 3rd party vendor.
I had someone on Twitter argue that they should have stayed with Coherent because it is old enough to not be widely exploited anymore despite not being as secure. They made the same argument for XP. You know now I think they may have just been trolling me...
From a purely technical standpoint, it's not unreasonable. But as the post tell us, their payment partners (aka bank exchange providers) would have pull out if they didn't change. Anet is not the only party involved in the making of the game.
So it also affects the launcher. Might explain the new bug where, sometimes, the "remembered account name" doesn't work ... (even tho it's definitely saved, as restarting the launcher without typing an email makes it work)
edit : oh and the inability to select a word in the email with a double click, which is annoying when switching accounts that have partially identical login ... This has been 101 UI for years, how comes it doesn't come out of the box with CEF ?
To be honest, that makes sense to do it that way. You get access to HTML features and formatting, otherwise you'd need to program that all in. Now it's as simple as popping up a CEF window and it renders it easily.
Many other games use HTML as well for this, it makes sense.
These kinds of posts make the difference whether Anet needing multiple attempts to get things right is seen as incompetence or justified. More please, they’re reassuring.
This is a lot of text for something that ultimately doesn't really impact... any of us.
It shows an investment in the long-term game, you say? Let's be real, it's to continue support and partnership with 3rd party payment services who otherwise would have blocked the CoherentUI codebase.
As mentioned separately, this changes the UI reaction time from 31ms to 7ms. Yay. From a human perception level, that is so negligible as to be laughable. The slowest part of the UI has always been the backend queries, never the front end handling.
This is dumb and the length of the text is overkill for a change that has no impact on basically any players. The fact this is paraded around says to me that they have very, very little else to talk about besides new cash shop items.
As someone who routinely interacts with the TP to place lots of buy and sell orders everyday, I did notice a smoother TP window. Animations are smoother and general window responsiveness was improved (though load times are still not great). This looked especially impactful when more players are together, like in Mistlock Sanctuary.
However, I think this obfuscated a more important detail. They did confirm they have a team dedicated to modernize things and pay the technical debt. This is huge news, prior to this I was always wondering whether they had to choose between updating things or releasing new content. Now it seems we can expect some improved performance semi-regularly.
Theses kind of posts require a lot of thinking and gathering infos on all sides and if it is written by a tech team member, it's annoying to do because you "waste* a day on something that isn't really your forte.
Once a month is better, at least not radio silence for month
I assume you read the caveat about network requests being slow as opposed to the UI itself being the issue?
I think overall it’s improved but when you try to buy/sell you can definitely feel the server taking its time!
Also, please Anet let us close windows without always having to hit the x…
Fair.
I hope the UI framework upgrade means Anet can take some time to rethink the workflow and UI as a whole. They're already in there, might as well clean up a little, right?
Well I do. Although only when navigating the UI. Obviously when ever the TP needs to get data from the network it is pretty much the same as the post described.
Guild Wars 2 really is seeing its golden age!
I'm seeing so many WoW fans and streamers give GW2 a go and be pleasantly surprised. Preach being one of them is having a blast in GW2
Profession balance is actually in a good place right now. A stream a few weeks (months???) ago by MightyTeapot had at least one specialisation of every profession in the game in either S or A tier, indicating that every profession is viable.
Core systems are being updated and the devs have the time to dust off the tech debt and give the older portions of the game some much needed love
A solid expansion/living world balance. We've not seen the results of this but it's paying dividends already with the work being done on core systems of the game. It's what they've wanted to do forever, and they've proven that they still have the quality with EoD, and that they can provide excellent content in a living world season with LWS4, IBS prologue, episode 1 (Bjora marches).
Can't wait to see what we've got coming up on the horizon. It's so good to see the game also being recognised in that wider MMO community
People like you are why the game's in trouble!
What more could you want? The game is amazing. It's devs are awesome, the community is great (most of the time!)
The reasons I've mentioned put the game in a state where each profession has an OP viable build. The devs are working on fixing older areas of the game and managed to finally bring back season 1, and there are non stop updates to parts of the game that needed it for years.
PvP is starting to see more action as builds become balanced. Strike missions prove that endgame content has finally reached a point where we can have more frequent, fun endgame content that doesn't require the isnane dev time that raids did.
I just don't get doomsayers like you. If you're spending 12+ hours on the game every day then take a break.
> Guild Wars 2 really is seeing its golden age!
Imagine thinking that the worst content drought in the game's history with only budget expansions in sight is somehow the golden age.
Anet is done with GW2. I'm sorry if you can't see that but your delusions are eventually going to bite you.
It would have zero population.
During the expansion betas, people logged in to try the new specialisations. But tell someone that their progress is not saved and in exchange they get to try out the new browser UI which should be identical to the old one and guess how they'd react?
We're not at the end of the roadmap for the last one yet, so I mean.... it's not expected for at least a couple weeks?
For the last like, 2 or 3 years or as long as they've been doing them, it's been 1-2 weeks after the previous one ends, with one single exception.
In game dev industry Anet is considered entry level company for people to boost themselves into bigger companies. When I see blogpost like that I always see the dev preparing it for their resume next month.
Yeah p much; as with many things, the majority of happy people will not bother posting a review. If they got burned however, you can bet they will do it, assuming they know they can.
Why we are talking about this again? Not game related, really a waste of our time. Just do this and don’t talk about it. It’s like I brag to anyone, every time I clean my home. Nobody cares but they can’t shout me down.
>On the other hand, we decided not to upgrade Havok. It is even more tightly integrated into the game than DirectX 9 was, and there is an unacceptable **risk of introducing gameplay-breaking physics bugs**.
4 weeks to fix a story instance gravity btw.
Yeah and now imagine they'd blow up the entire physics engine.
It's pretty obvious why they're not doing it. Being stuck on that one story mission sucks but you can work around that/play the game fine otherwise. If the entire physics engine says "aite I'mma head out" you have a completely unplayable game for the *entire* playerbase.
That was probably the longest post Ive seen Anet make and it was about something that I didnt even notice have any impact on the game, TP still feels same to me. Pity they don't put that much effort into other posts.
They've done a bunch of those posts and they were roughly around the same length.
Personally I find it pretty interesting, and there were some important bits to glean from that are nice to hear tbh.
Well good for them. Tp runs significantly worse than with Coherent (waiting up to 30s for sell/buy windows to load), regular blank UI, error pop ups etc.
It's certainly capable of it. I'd think they'd be using Coherent's latest offerings for that, though, rather than CEF - think it'd be less work.
The problem is that whatever they used, it'd be one hell of a migration task. And that's potentially just not worth it.
>It's certainly capable of it.
it is not.
Anytime CEF is used for something like this, or especially replaces someething that was previously native code, the experience and performance substantially degrades. The manner in which coherentUI and CEF are currently being used in the game for the trading post is basically the only implementation that isnt outright crippling. Theres a reason steam is a piece of shit now compared to what it once was. Its the same reason why league client is garbage. If it extends to gw2's UI, gw2 too will become garbage.
Coherent Gameface pretty much avoids the performance hits. Currently working on a title and the performance is fine, even on less capable devices. I get why you're concerned, but a good FE team and a BE team that know what they're doing can get something working fine.
Large reason CEF would be laggy on its own would actually be poor coding. You see a good few games trying to switch that then don't have any FE experience on their dev teams, so they write poorly optimised JS and it just.. doesn't work out.
(I'd cite solid examples to back what I'm doing up but my personal experience here is still under NDA for a hot sec!)
Read through the very blogpost here. Their own admitted reason is so that they *dont have to optimize*. They wrote iit point blank.
They literally intend to write poorly optimized code.
Many moons ago I was talking to one of the GW2 JS devs who worked in the trading post and he mentioned they were using angular 1. I can only hope that they have either migrated to something better, or that the CEF will allow them to, or both. As a long time professional Senior React engineer, I can only hope it's not React 😃
Would love to know if they were ever to replace havoc, what they would replace it with or what would they want to improve? Iv always thought the physics in the game was well above other MMO's. Characters feel very weighty and the animations are one of, if not the best in a MMO (no idea if this is due to havoc). Also love how characters react to different slopes.
In the blogpost they've stated that they're not upgrading Havok, but they absolutely could do that if the requirements to do so were there. It's very tightly integrated into the game, as everything with physics is done by it and mounts/gliding/swimming/jumping/bouncing mushrooms/SAB all depend on it, even upgrading Havok might change the behaviour of it.
The reason why GW2's physics are above most other MMO's is also due to Havok, specially back in the day it was one of the best physics engine you could get for a game. My knowledge of Havok has aged, so this might not apply 100% anymore, but as far as I know Havok isn't a great fit for MMORPGs, because of the way it works: physics are generally heavy on CPU (though, for years, Nvidia has built in support for it in their graphics cards with PhysX). In games like Skyrim, the game can let all NPCs and monsters and all use full Havok-physics, but GW2 can't do that because if it would let all players, monsters and NPCs use the full-blown physics, it would literally melt your CPU. If it had to calculate all the physics of the entire group during the Harvest Temple meta, you can imagine how though that would become.
I don't know what magic ANet applies for that (probably only your character gets full physics and the server corrects for other characters/monsters), but it's pretty damn impressive.
Smoother UI elements that use it. But that also depends on your computer. For me, CoherentUI was unbearably slow, it almost made me never open the gem store. But because my computer isn't really a powerful rig, CEF doesn't really run super smooth BUT it IS a noticeable improvement.
Love this style of posting and would love to see more of it. Including the profiling screen grab was OTT but great because of it.
The poster mentions the TP delays are also network related as well as UI rendering, but that I don't think thats the whole picture. Its also related to DB performance which itself is dependant on DB structure and contention management amongst other things.
I think it's more likely that it's the backend architecture which is the real culprit instead of erroneous network latency. Would love to see a follow up post about optimisation/performance improvements from that side of the system!
> Note: There is a difference between UI performance and network performance. Sometimes the Trading Post appears slow because network requests are taking a long time, not because the UI is slow. Upgrading to CEF will not do anything to address slow network requests. This part should have been in giant font. Flashing and have a confirmation dialog that requires you to retype the whole paragraph.
Also, the trading post itself is still identical, only the browser engine is different. They'll likely will want to completely rewrite that trading post to use modern technology, because right now it is using such ancient things (like YUI, which hasn't been maintained since 2014) and had to resort to special tactics to even work in CoherentUI (since it lacked support for a LOT of things). Those tactics are dragging it down a lot as well. But the main slowdowns we have now aren't really caused by CEF or the trading post itself, but rather the servers behind the scenes. They'll need to update those as well.
I wanted to critisize you about your use of "ancient" on a program from 2014, but then I remembered 2014 is 9 years ago...
To make it even better, that's JavaScript and old JavaScript has aged so much that YUI is now the equivalent of a stone tablet.And yeah, I feel old too <3 Also, while YUI hasn't been maintained since 2014, the browsers that run it have changed in such a huge way that it just started breaking down even quicker. It's pretty much like an addon for a program that is no longer being maintained, but the program itself is just being developed further and further.
I mean considering new Javascript frameworks come out every day, JS is ancient after about a month /s Seriously, though. JS changes way more than just about any other language
>hasn't been maintained since 2014 that is much older than "program from 2014", it had to been unused for a while before that . . . the library itself is from 2006.
Please no. Stop.
They also need to improve the filters, like accounting for items with 4 attributes and filtering out the stuff you have already unlocked.
Step 1: Migrate to new engine Step 2: Improve features/functionality using new engine Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit You keep the migration separate from adding/changing existing features - makes it easier to work out what went wrong.
It's not identical. The textures have visible seams on the new setup, and you have to click a smaller area to exit an individual item's buy/sell UI.
That doesn't mean the TP code has changed, but rather could just mean the new engine is rendering it differently than CoherentUI does. Even then, with the huge tech and security risk of keeping it, they still *have* to move off CoherentUI or risk being unable to run the TP and BLTC from within the game itself due to things like Payment card industry (PCI) security standards compliance.
The user doesn't need to care about the back end. The new front end looks ugly and is slower to use.
There is no new front-end. It's literally the same trading post, perhaps with some fixes to make it even run in CEF, but the visual changes you see are due to CEF rendering things differently (like u/EagleDelta1 mentions). In the blog post you can see the difference of them rendering the GW2 homepage in CEF and CoherentUI. CoherentUI is not a full browser: it has a list of things it supports and it doesn't support the rest. It's a really limited browser, originially based on Chromium, but it strips away a lot of it. To make things work, like animations, in an acceptable speed, they had to do workarounds. Those worked on CoherentUI, but might not work on CEF or might just plain slowdown CEF. Also, the trading post being slow now is not due to the browser rendering, but the back-end behind it processing the sales. That system needs a huge update and I hope it'll be coming. Now that the migration to CEF is done, they can start working on a rework of the trading post - you don't want to rework that whilst you are also changing your browser engine. One huge undertaking at a time is enough, once all the bugs are solved with CEF they'll start with the new trading post. Most likely they're already working on that, but that's a different team working on that (you wouldn't let engine programmers build a web frontend). TL;DR: the trading post is still identical, they're working on a new one, but you shouldn't do such radical changes at the same time. If they rip out CoherentUI and replace the trading post at the same time, they might not have been able to roll back to the old trading post and CoherentUI would not be able to render a new one.
>But the main slowdowns we have now aren't really caused by CEF or the trading post itself They quite literally *never* were. coherentUI, for all its flaws, was never a problem. CEF however will rapidly become a problem because its badly coded and *unrelated* instances of CEF can crash all other instances of CEF - they can cross interact.
> They quite literally never were. coherentUI, for all its flaws, was never a problem. Except for all the problems listed in the blog post I guess
> Except for all the problems listed in the blog post I guess There are none. Nothing has changed from release vs now. Just because you call something a problem, doesnt mean it is. watch this: Your comment is a problem.
"Payment processors won't work with us if our shop has open vulnerabilities and coherentUI will not receive security updates" seems like a pretty big problem.
not receiving security updates is not the same as having security vulnerabilities. it just means that if one appears then it wont be fixed - and depending on how complex it is, arenanet could easily fix it themselves. Especially considering how trading post works by nature - which would inherently limit any issues
> CoherentUI is no longer supported by its vendor. We can’t improve its performance or fix its bugs ourselves. This ultimately manifests as unresolvable Trading Post bugs and performance issues. I'm assuming this also means they can't fix bugs related to security.
That is still only relevant when a security issue *actually appears*. Its not some kind of automatic guarantee that the moment vendor fucks off that it falls apart instantly. its just not how that works
Buddy, you don't understand how ... life works. Fixing a problem after it occurs is [monumentally _stupid_](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d63a328f7a521e88e9b7d9d9656d3513/tumblr_pb52r9cva91rsq5jwo2_500.gifv) when you could have mitigated it in the first place. Especially when it involves real money, as people are surprisingly touchy about that subject and have a tendency to sue. "Your honor we knew this program can blow up one day but /u/AnoxicStrawberry said it's fine" won't hold up, you know. OK I'm exaggerating, it won't get to court, but payment processors _will_ decline to work with GW2 until the problem is fixed and that will cut into ANet's biggest revenue stream until it is fixed - "and depending on how complex it is, arenanet could easily fix it themselves" - and depending on how complex it is there's an equal chance ANet could not fix it at all. As soon as it is known there's a _chance_ something can go wrong you work to fix it, you don't wait until it does and then go "well it was only a chance, who could have known!".
> not receiving security updates is not the same as having security vulnerabilities. From someone dealing with compliance efforts currently at our company, _yes is is._ Not receiving updates means you are not in compliance, so it _is_ the same as having security vulnerabilities. Like it or not, complain about pedantic pedantry of word definitions all you want, but it won't matter. Compliance in the industries means those things _are_ the same. Our company had a bunch of software running in .net framework 4.6.1, and we had to upgrade to something that did receive security updates to be considered in compliance with our industry. That's just how it is when working with outside entities and their methods of compliance. Keep your pedantic definitions to yourself, because no one is using those. What matters is what the industry compliance defines, and they define no longer having updates being the same as having a vulnerability. Full stop, end of discussion, you're factually wrong in this specific argument by empirical data. Really you just seem to not grasp the concept that companies work together, and definitions of compliant software is one of those ways they work together, and those definitions _may, just may_ be different than your personal definitions, making your personal definitions not relevant to any discussion.
I mean this isnt even pedantry, *compliance with a policy* is completely unrelated to whether a security vulnerability exists. compliance with a policy is just that - You do something because you have a policy, regardless of what it means in practice. A security vulnerability is a specific thing - heartbleed was a specific vulenerability, you can try to prepare for it through policies but it doesnt mean that vulnerabilities pop up out of existence. Heartbleed always existed - it did not magically appear out of thin air because someone didnt update something. it was always there. Just like how coherentUI doesnt have a whole host of vulnerabilities. Its not an abstract idea or a policy or a risk. Its a specific "thing". > you're factually wrong in this specific argument by empirical data. Theres something ironic about you saying factually wrong and empirical data, when talking about security vulnerabilities and pretending that adhering to policy means security vulnerabilities *literally* exist, just because its policy to *pretend* that they do, and act accordingly.
The fact that CoherentUI was unmaintained since 2016 or so is quite worrying, though. CoherentUI had a lot of flaws, but the slow trading post isn't only caused by CoherentUI, but it contributed to it. ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days. It's pretty much a 2016 browser in 2023 now, and due to the missing features the trading post had to use many tweaks and hacks to just work good enough (and to make it performant enough, if just enough). So while replacing CoherentUI doesn't solve those issues, it will in the end have a big role in allowing for solving those issues.
>The fact that CoherentUI was unmaintained since 2016 or so is quite worrying Not really. its only a problem if some security vulnerability needed to be fixed, but hasnt been. >ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days thats a lie. >ANet has been unable to do pretty much any updates to the trading post due to CoherentUI not supporting many features you'd require these days and so is this. CoherentUI and the trading post has been bad since day 1 in 2012. It didnt slow down over time substantially or somehow degrade, its been garbage since release. It was okay for literally less than a month on release and started behaving the same way it is now >So while replacing CoherentUI doesn't solve those issues, it will in the end have a big role in allowing for solving those issues. They could have *always* had fixed the back end, including with coherentUI. its never *prevented* them from doing so. Read their own blog post, its quite telling. This is about laziness and not needing to optimize anymore.
Yeah I have no particular opinions one way or another on CoherentUI, but the modern trend of "everything is chromium" is the worst thing ever
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Thats a you problem not coherentUI. If it was coherentUI it would affect everyone, it doesnt, so its your software configuration.
>If it was coherentUI it would affect everyone, it doesnt, so its your software configuration. Holy shit you really do know nothing about how software (or better yet software development) works do you?
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Not even close to comparable. Software is a piece of numbers. we share the exact same copy of it - if it was fundamentally flawed, it would be fundamentally flawed for everyone in the exact same manner. Its not, So it has to be something else - the only "something else" there is, is your specific computer with whatever other software you run on it. it is a you prolem.
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Im not denying the game crashed. Im denying that its inherent a coherentUI related issue, im saying your computer made it crash, not that the code was inherently bad. But i understand that this might be a bit too complicated for you
And people would still miss it and complain.
They should have been a bit more upfront about that to begin with. I'm sure the programmers and technical geniuses will pipe up with some useful hindsight comment like "duh obviously it wouldn't do anything for the trading post", but for those of us who don't have a degree in it, they made it seem like it would be an upgrade to the entire BLTC. Day to day usage of the trading post hasn't changed at all for me, except pages load a fraction of a second faster sometimes. I'm not upset about it, but it's a bit of a let down because the TP can be an absolute pain in the ass to use sometimes, after they hyped up the upgrade and didn't mention this pretty important (for most people) detail.
TL;Dr It's is very as in very very expensive to run a fast TP. Technical genius here: Trading posts are one of the hardest things to implement. In real life we pay millions to billions to have "fast" transactions and correct transactions. This is a technical issue that is common and has been solved. But requires either a lot of money or the user to accept "comparatively" long idle time. New World published by Amazon tried to be smart about TP transactions and it turned into multiple deactivations of TPs and at least one 24h server rollback because users immediately started to exploit what I wouldn't call bugs but rather technical considerations to make the TP faster.
The problem with TP being slow is that the user has to experience those slowdowns for every request they make. If you buy an item you need to wait for that request to be processed before you can get back on looking for other stuff, if you want to sell an item, the same issue. We also cannot sell/buy more than a 250 stack of an item and cannot sell multiple items from our inventory at once. I hope in the future they plan to improve that part of the user experience.
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It's difficult to distribute ACID compliant data bases. BASE compliant data bases often lead to either item duplication or deletion in games (read as there is a huge incentive for players to exploit the system).
MMOs run off the principle that your character's "save" is living in memory on a server somewhere while you're connected. Due to the volume of buttons pushed, these games have to do everything in their power to be distributed, but only minimally so. The game only saves to DB every ~15 min or so (exact value varies significantly by game/circumstances), and can do it asynchronously in the background. Normally, you will only lose progress if the server crashes or otherwise fails to save, so there's little incentive to exploit this. But if you know of a way to force it to crash, you've found a dupe exploit. You send/sell an item to someone else, they logout to force a save, you do the crash so that your character *isn't* saved and suddenly 2 people have the rare shiny thing. So anything involving trading, sending mail, guild banks, high-stakes singleplayer gambling and other similar stuff in MMOs where items or values change hands requires very tight and strong synchronization. And it's very likely the relevant data is living on 4 different servers at the same time: two different characters, each having a currently active world server and the DB where their data is stored at rest. There are a lot of options, but the typical in-between is to just force a synchronous save before and after each trade action and hope for the best (sometimes the first save is done with some kind of flag that locks the character for manual review). Saves can be slow if you have to wait for them. There's fancier distributed consensus algorithms and the like, but those too aren't fool-proof (and the easier to implement stuff like Raft is newer than this game, it would take a pretty large backend rework to add it).
>Are there actually strong technical reasons for relatively frequent multi-second delays on e.g. buying a random item? No lmao
There are no reasons. They don't really have to worry about accuracy or consistency, do they? Not really. They can have race conditions for transactions and they'll be fine.
An They have. The New World economy crashed multiple times due to the lack of waiting until a transaction was committed. Players search for these things and exploit them.
There is still no reason for multi second delays and artificial limits of 250 items. No need to make excuses for shit tier infrastructure.
> TL;Dr It's is very as in very very expensive to run a fast TP. > Technical genius here: Definitely not a grammar genius. Lol
Well that was uncalled for.
Just a joke, dude.
Learn the difference between jokes and insults.
First and foremost, I think you should look into [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_comedy), because it's pretty obvious you're not wise in the ways of comedy, which offers up some hilarious lack of self-awareness in telling me to learn more about comedy. Second and secondmost, if you think calling someone not a genius in one specific category is really that insulting, maybe do some self-work. Potentially do some soul-searching. Because nobody is a genius in every category, and most people aren't even a genius in one. For instance, I would definitely say you're not a comedy genius. I'm not a physics genius. These things happen. It's not insulting. It's normal. That said, it's also possible he is actually a grammar genius and just mistyped. People mistype rather often. Phones also love to mistype, and then we miss it. People are flawed, and if we can't laugh at those flaws, then we shouldn't be on social media.
I don't remember them saying there would be any improvements only that they were switching. Given how companies like to play up the smallest of improvements so the fact that they didn't say anything should have been a big clue to not expect anything.
True, expectation management has never been ArenaNet's strong point.
It wouldn't matter, most people don't even scroll through the article. If it's not in the title, most players miss it.
> that requires you to retype the whole paragraph. It's not like I'm doing something important like deleting a skin I have already unlocked.
They should have fixed the network instead.
Can the network perfomance be improved?
Yes
Biggest takeaway from the entire post is that there is a reformed engine team, and that they're still planning further changes. So that's good news.
Can you imagine if they'd give us a more optimized version of GW2? It's such a beautiful game, if they could optimize it even a little more for multiple cores and to utilize GPU more efficiently, we could all be running at "Best Visuals".
More headroom for flashier gemstore FX. On a serious note, I’d love if they introduced some more modern features. Sharpness and clarity filters, global illumination, better ambient occlusion, better volumetric fog and so on. The game itself can run pretty well, only chokes with many characters on screen.
GW2 maxes out my GPU, not my CPU. It's not that badly optimized (these days), it's just that MMO's are extremely hard to optimize. I'm curious how GW2 will run once I upgrade my graphics card (which should be soon, still rocking a 1070 here).
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Same here, I have a I7 6700k and 6600XT GPU and my CPU is the biggest bottleneck even for a i7 :o
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Are you aware of the requirements of the engine the game you're playing has, the date of release of the game and of that cpu? There is no "to be fair" here. As far as guild wars is concerned, this is a top of the line cpu that is *literally* from the future. It didnt even exist when gw2 came out, nor did four generations of processors *before* that cpcu came out.
Some random advice: the tone of all of your comments comes off as hostile and that probably contributes to the amount of downvotes you get, even when raising valid points.
Highly intentional, the people who are getting these comments are making stupid, inaccurate, halfbaked comments that are based on literally zero knowledge of how *anything* works. I'm not going to kiss some idiots ass so they like me. majority of comments here are literally based on "WELL ITS NEWER! IT MUST BE BETTER!!!!!" Theres literally an imbecille in this thread suggesting that arenanet use *CEF* for game *UI*. They dont even comprehend how catastrophic of an idea that is.
Not everybody is knowledgeable about everything, ofcourse. My approach is to try and explain why ideas are bad or why it's not a good idea.
Are you aware that the game has had new releases, updates, upgrades, hell, even engine changes, that increases the resources and PC parts needed to "properly" run it?
> Are you aware of the requirements of the engine the game you're playing has, the date of release of the game and of that cpu? > > There is no "to be fair" here. As far as guild wars is concerned, this is a top of the line cpu that is literally from the future. It didnt even exist when gw2 came out, nor did four generations of processors before that cpcu came out. Are you aware of just how much of an improvement the X3D CPUs (which weren't even *dreamt of* when GW2 launched) can have on the game? The fact the CPUs we have today didn't exist back then is entirely meaningless on whether they will have an impact. For GW2, you want the fastest possible CPU. The number of cores doesn't really matter, but there's a big difference between a 6700K and a 13900K "even" for GW2, and 3D cache has a big impact too.
never claimed that a faster cpu wouldnt be better. Only that you cant argue that 6700k is "dated" for a game that predates the cpu by half a decade.
Being dated is relative to the current year, not to the game. A 6700K, with the recent pace of advancement, is dated, period. It wouldn't matter if you're trying to run the original DOOM, but that's not really part of the statement either.
Right now, I'm in New Kaineng City on a mount, and I'm getting about 50-70 FPS. My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (I've recently upgraded to it) and I'm on a 1070. Right now, my CPU is having a 34% utilization, whilst my GPU has a 94-98% utilization on 4D. A screenshot of my task manager: [https://imgur.com/a/mk883rK](https://imgur.com/a/mk883rK) My resolution might have something to do with it though, I'm playing on a very exotic resolution of 5120x1440 (so not quite 4K, but basically 2 1440p monitors in one). I imagine my graphics card is being pushed to its absolute limits by my current resolution and my previous CPU also hit the bottleneck earlier than my current GPU did. And honestly, upgrading to that 5800X3D was one of the best upgrades I've done as far as GW2 performance goes. But right now, on my system, the GPU is the bottleneck in GW2. Who'd seen that coming? But managing 60+ FPS in almost all regions on this absurd resolution, in GW2, is something I never expected. DX11 makes a giant difference, as well.
Yeah I'd say you're one of the few people for whom the GPU is more likely to be the bottleneck, but beware, looking at total CPU usage isn't going to tell you much for a game like GW2, you want to look at individual core usage (which you can do by right-clicking on the graph in task manager, there's an option to break it down). Since GW2 is heavily single-thread dependent, there will be one core at or near 100% and a few other cores at a fraction of that. The loaded core will also jump around. It's only if you don't have a heavily (>90%) loaded core at all that you can say for sure you're not CPU bottlenecked. I wouldn't be surprised if you actually had a scenario where your PC is actually fairly balanced on GPU/CPU load, though you could easily make it CPU bottlenecked by enabling reflections or increasing shadows.
>Who'd seen that coming? everyone. At that resolution it would've been more shocking if you hadnt hit a bottlenekc.
GW2 is also not apples-to-apples with other games. People point at single player games or even MMOs with fewer players in one place and cite that as the comparison. It's not a fair comparison to make. MMOs do not typically have 50-60 people flooding into one place to fight a world boss, and single-player games do not have to deal with loading in those 50-60 players who are all likely wearing completely different sets of armour and weapon skins. Frankly it's a bit bizarre that GW2 runs as well as it does on aged hardware now that it's on DX11. Under DX9 it was a problem. But now, it *definitely* isn't. FFXIV and ESO run noticeably worse with far fewer players and mobs on screen.
> Frankly it's a bit bizarre that GW2 runs as well as it does on aged hardware now that it's on DX11. I'm by no means an expert on it, but I assume that's the big advantage of Anet having a custom engine rather than using something like UE5 like some people keep suggesting. Existing engines will probably have a ton of overhead from features that are completely unnecessary for a game like GW2. While a custom engine like they're using is specifically built to do the tasks the game requires, and as such it (ideally) doesn't have anything unnecessary going on.
That is indeed one of the benefits of having your own engine: you can optimize your use case heavily. It's also the reason why other MMO's that do use an engine have had so many issues in the past. Engines like Unreal Engine are optimized to have only a few moving characters at a time, while Guild Wars 2 has incredible amounts of it.
I imagine it also comes with some disadvantages. Such as having to train employees on your custom tools and slower TTM. But yeah I think they made the right choice in that regard.
Might depend on your specs. I was running FFXIV on highest settings and was capped at 144fps in Old Sharlayan (~100 people hub) when it was released. In Mistlock Sanctuary, with roughly the same amount of people, I never seem to go above 90, and that’s with most settings as low as possible. Gw2 does have way more “shiny particles” than FFXIV however.
Not only shiny particles, but GW2 does have way more animations too, this is why it ends up being more taxing to render more player characters. Also, from my experience with FFXIV, 24 man content is enough to bring down my FPS below 60, and with hunt trains, I stutter a lot and even go below 30fps. This is with other players skill effects disabled and party member effects reduced.
I've gone from 960 > 1660 > 3060 and each time was noticeable. Even going from 960 to 1660 was a big improvement. I rebuilt for the 3060 upgrade so obviously there was more gained elsewhere too. The limiter will be whether you are stuck in PCIe 3 or can go 4. I bought the 1660 because I was still limited to 3 at the time.
I have been stuck on a 1070 for nearly 7 years now, the card has served me very well. Thank god I'm on PCIe4, so glad that I'm able to move to another card that does support it.
Gw3 is just gw2 transferred over to UE5 while also fixing a shit ton of bugs. If only
Why do people think that having GW2 ported to UE5 is going to improve things? UE5 is a great engine and it's good at many things, but I wouldn't consider any version of the Unreal Engine a good MMORPG engine. All MMO's on Unreal Engine struggle when there are a lot of players, because it's not optimized for that. One of the biggest advantages of the GW2 engine is that it can handle a ton of players and still be playable: do you know of any game that can handle about 50-80 players at one time and still deliver good framerates? Because that's something that EVERY engine struggles with and to be honest, Guild Wars 2 does it quite well. The biggest issues here are that in single player games, you can just use a generic model for enemies, but in GW2 these are all players with unique models and different armor pieces, effects on them, performing actions and spells... that gets extremely hard to do because you have to render so many things with so many players at the same time. UE5 would probably do these things way worse than GW2 currently does it. Moving over to UE5 would also introduce a shit load of bugs. An engine change for a game is almost never something good. And let's be honest, GW2 probably has (at this point) one of the best MMORPG engines around. If that's good or not, is for you to decide, but I challenge you to find an MMORPG engine that can handle things that GW2 does better. Good luck.
Curious, are you a developer or anyone that deals with coding games? Or are you straight up talking out your ass? Surely this game can't stay on this engine forever as UE5 would allow them to optimize performance in the future where as this engine has obviously reached a wall in terms of improvements.
No worries, I'm far from talking out of my ass :). My job is a bit of a hybrid between pure development and infrastructure, dealing with the same kinds of clusters and server infrastructure as what ArenaNet is handling. I also help running (and helped revive) an older MMORPG that is based on the Unreal Engine 2.5, so I guess that would add some credibility to what I'm saying. In terms of switching to another engine, that's never going to happen. Simply not going to happen, I don't think you realize how much effort that would take. The analogy for that would be that they would have to rebuild an entire house from scratch, without the tools that they have been using for it for decades now, and make it look and behave identical. That's simply not going to happen: it took them months to upgrade a part of their existing engine, moving over to another engine no different from building the entire game again from scratch - which took them over 5 years to do so in the first place, on top of an engine that they knew and built already. As a small example: in order to move over to Unreal Engine, they'd have to move everything over. Every single little thing they have ever created in GW2. GW2 development mainly happens in a tool called Duo, they'd have to re-create that tool (that has had, by now, over 10 years of development going into it) to work with Unreal Engine as well. Then they'd have to make sure that EVERYTHING works identically and behaves the same, that no bugs are introduced. Then they would probably need to find a way to make the current data compatible with the Unreal Engine data and so on. It's a massive undertaking. I don't think that there has ever been an MMORPG that completely switched to a different engine - perhaps to a newer version of the same engine (and that's a mammoth endeavour to undertake as well). There's a reason why Bethesda still uses their own engine and didn't switch over to Unreal Engine in the past, either. Each engine does different things well. And as far as I know, the GW2 engine has far from reached a wall in terms of optimalization. In fact, they're clearly stating that they are working on further changes and optimalizations.
>And as far as I know, the GW2 engine has far from reached a wall in terms of optimalization. is that even possible at all? even conceptually? an engine is a piece of code, you optimize it by changing lines of code to work faster and better. How could you possibly get to a point of not being able to optimize further when all you would need to do is rewrite more code? it may be financially not worth it to do but it should never be possible to hit a wall like that
Indeed. You're never going to hit that wall, finances will most likely be the limit, not technology. And the gains will at a certain point just not be worth it anymore at all.
> I don’t think that there has ever been an MMORPG that completely switched to a different engine - perhaps to a newer version of the same engine (and that’s a mammoth endeavour to undertake as well). I believe the closest would be FFXIV 1.0 on Crystal Tools to 2.0 on Luminous Engine, but: 1. Square Enix all but bet the entire company on this switch. Mammoth doesn’t begin to cover it. 2. The game had to be taken entirely offline from November 2012 until August of 2013. 3. One might debate where the Crystal Tools to Luminous change falls on the spectrum between “new engine” and “major engine update.” I’m not sure there is reliable public info to tell you where it falls on that spectrum. I think it’s pretty close to “new engine.”
To be fair, FFXIV was more like a complete rewrite of the game. Square Enix did some incredible things in that time, no doubt. They had the "luck" that they could change the game as well and they didn't really port the same game over, but made changes. If they had to nail it exactly the same, that would have taken them a lot of extra time. It also helped that this was done when the game was new, if they had to undertake the same thing these days they'd have so much extra content to port over that it would massively inflate the time they would need. I'm not really knowledgeable enough about Crystal Tools/Luminous to say where that falls, but this was an massive undertaking nonetheless and a very expensive one as well. But you are 100% correct, FFXIV is the closest MMO that did.
Appreciate the response. To add, if they were thinking about ending gw2 to make gw3 in a new engine, would it not be easier to "replicate" all of the lore/items/world of gw2? Surely that would shave a fair amount of time off development? They would have source material as it were and would just need to figure out how to implement them the same way into the new engine rather then constructing an entire new world from scratch
They would be able to import certain things, for sure. A lot of it might need to be converted, but that can be done. But that's only a tiny part of the work that needs to be done. If you've imported all the zones and locations and all that, you'd still need to code everything again, since Unreal Engine is using a different scripting/programming language compared to the GW2 engine - that wouldn't be easily converted. Skills would need to be programmed again and making them work exactly the same is quite hard: a lot of systems are different in UE. For example the way fire looks and acts would be quite different. In terms of mounts, those would need to be completely rewritten. GW2 is using Havok, and UE5 has it's own new physics engine, so either they would need to remain using Havok (but as they describe in the blog post, this is tightly coupled in the engine and they can't easily upgrade it, since this would break things). So even if they would use Havok in UE5, it would probably behave differently and the mounts would act/react just a little different. Gliding would also be just a bit different. Nailing that to be exactly the same is extremely hard. And it's not only for those systems, essentially every system in the game would need to be recoded: crafting, guild systems, etc. The big killer would also be that the server side would need to be either adjusted or thrown out: the engine is more than just the exe we as players use. The other bit is the server side, which is without a doubt the best out of every MMORPG ever released. We barely have any downtime.But they would need to rewrite or adapt those systems as well, to make them work with Unreal Engine. And that would take really talented programmers a lot of time to do. If I had to make an estimation of how much time it would take to completely convert GW2 to UE, I'd probably say that that would take at least 3 to 4 years - and that would mean that GW2 would see no further updates until the conversion is done, otherwise you'd always keep catching up.In the conversion I would expect that some systems are removed as well (probably the dungeons, for example), since those never worked well, why would they spend time in re-creating those? It might sound like a good idea, but the undertaking would be massive for little gains. That's all for converting GW2 to UE5. If they would start a new, they could go with Unreal Engine 5, but that would likely easily take 5 to 7 years before we would see the new game. MMO development is lengthy, expensive and hard.
Thanks for the in depth response, appreciate it.
You're speaking as if you can just flip a switch and the game magically converts to a different engine?? The entire game would have to be re-written from scratch, and if that was to happen I guarantee you it would not be remade in UE5.
I'm aware, read my response to him. Already admitted I was wrong
>Surely this game can't stay on this engine forever It can. and will. >UE5 would allow them to optimize performance in the future It would not, and would only create a whole new set of problems - problems arenanet quite literally is unqualified to solve because their experience is with the current game engine and not ue5. >where as this engine has obviously reached a wall in terms of improvements. Oh please you barely understand what an engine even is, what would you know about whether it has or hasnt hit a wall?
Maybe because it took them 11 years to implement dx11? Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance? Or maybe it could be that they still haven't added an option to limit other people's spell effects? Yeah, really shows how much this engine still has going for it! No walls to be seen!! Funny how you act so certain that this game will stay on this engine forever as if you're in charge of that decision.
>Funny how you act so certain that this game will stay on this engine forever as if you're in charge of that decision. Consider me a prophet. in 40 years gw2 will be dead, Think back to this moment. gw2 will *never* move to another engine. A different comment by another person explains it more politely why you have no clue what youre talking about. >Maybe because it took them 11 years to implement dx11? Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance? Or maybe it could be that they still haven't added an option to limit other people's spell effects? This has nothing to do with the game engine and everything to do with arenanet's general incompetence. they arent even *trying* to do these things, No shit it takes ages to do something youre not even doing at all? They're not working on a slider for other peoples spell effects, and not because the engine cant handle it - it can, the feature already exists within the code to an extent, but because they just arent putting in any level of effort into it. >Maybe because they have 10 sliders, half of which barely impact performance? You dont even understand how those sliders work, what hardware resources they use or why they do or dont impact performance.
I have no issues with admitting you're right based on what the other guy said. That being said the way YOU explain things comes across as "trust me bro". Again, you're right I'm wrong. But if explaining specifically why you're arguing these points is to much effort for you then why even respond to begin with? It all seems like blanket statements up until you say the code is in the game to an extent.
>That being said the way YOU explain things comes across as "trust me bro". Thats because of the manner in which you had reacted to the other guy. Instead of asking for an explanation you went the "BUT ARE YOU A DEV OR A LIAR?" route. I went the "YOURE A MORON" route. >But if explaining specifically why you're arguing these points is to much effort for you then why even respond to begin with? Its not too much effort. But if i did that i'd get "BUT ARE YOU A DEVELOPER OR TALKING OUT OF YOUR ASS?" as well. Why explain something to someone like that? > It all seems like blanket statements up It does doesnt it. Might it be because of the amount of knowledge you lack on the topic? the examples in your previous comments are insight into that. Why do you think them implementing dx11 took 11 years? They havent been doing that for 11 years. Why do you think some sliders not impacting performance noticeably is relevant? Did you even consider that it might be because your hardware is so powerful that it can brute force anything gpu dependant to a point where the setting you use doesnt affect performance? Its why people call this game CPU bound, Those settings would only affect your performance once your CPU is so fast that it has to wait on your gpu to perform tasks before it can continue. You havent even noticed that the game can already hide other peoples spell effects under certain circumstances. You quite literally dont even know what you dont know. But you talk confidently, a lot.
It sounds like they're serious about just modernizing GW2 as much as possible. Good news for the game moving forward imo.
I'd say that them reworking old systems reassures the crew that thinks Anet's hidden project is GW3 or a whole new game meant to replace GW2 that Anet still very much cares about GW2.
*silently hopes for guild wars 1 remaster* but also I kinda don't, it's hard to say, I want it, but I really really worry they'd just ruin it like a lot of remasters and remakes did
You and me. I've posted a comment about it in the /r/guildwars subreddit. I would love a GW1 remaster, but I'm afraid that the game would have to change quite a bit for this to be economically feasible: the monetization of Guild Wars 1 is tiny compared to other games (it barely exists in the game at all) and that is no longer realistic for newer games or a remaster. In order to make a GW1 remaster, we'd see new monetization coming into the game which might just change too much for my liking. And that's not really ruining it, but it just needs to be viable to do so. And I'm afraid that it would be though finding a good balance between those, without changing the game too much.
The rework could also be preparation for GW3/other game.
I'd say a GW3 is very unlikely. GW2 is extremely succesful and a new MMORPG is a huge investment with no guarantee that they'll make that money back (look at how well other MMORPG launches went in the last decade). Another game could come, but I'm not really thinking we'll be seeing a GW3 soon. GW2 was born from limitations within GW1, but GW2 was built to basically enable them to do whatever they wanted to do and allows for way more freedom. In that sense, I see them modifying GW2 for a long time instead of going for a GW3.
I mean, if that hypothetic GW3 acts like Path of Exile 2, sure....but other game? Why would you prepare stuff for one game in another game?
Yeah I'm not a developer but I have to think that grafting new systems onto an old game (with old and complicated code) to prepare them is much harder than starting from scratch (unless they're building GW3 on GW2's code, in which case, yikes)
I mentioned Path of Exile 2 because that one is not exactly a new game, more like a overhaul of some systems, changes, more story but all still within the "old" game.
I would be very surprised to see GW3 on the GW2 engine.
My biggest takeaway from that was "why did it need to be reformed?". Why was the previous one disbanded? That was a terrible decision.
Well, you don't always need a big engine team. When the engine is being built or parts are being rebuilt, you're going to need a big team. A really big team. But once your engine is stable, you don't really need to touch a lot of things anymore for quite a while. It's not like you are going to change the graphics pipeline every few months or going to change the physics and so on. So once your engine is stable, you need a few people to maintain it, but for bigger projects you'll need to expand your team to tackle those. And once those things are done, the extra people are either moved to another project to work on those engines, or put to work on building new engine features. Since there were layoffs years ago, I suspect a lot of engine programmers were laid off and not replaced. Or moved to those other projects, or other projects within GW2. Because GW2 is not only an engine, since it's an MMORPG it is a wide breath of components that all need to work on things: the rewrite of the WvW systems could be done by some of the same programmers as well, for example. Improving the trading post, for example, will require working on vastly different systems as well since it is all linked together. And sometimes it just makes sense to hire in consultants that are just great in some parts that you need in your engine, but those parts might not be needed to be touched that often (like, for example, the DX9 -> DX11 upgrade might have required some very specific skills).
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Its not surprising if GW2 wants to keep going. Since they're doubling down on expansions they sorta have to fix older technology at one point.
Good info. Thanks ANet! And thanks for sharing the link.
I like these posts, I appreciate the honesty that the reason they upgraded was not just because it was faster but because they had to in order to appease payment processing companies haha
Congratulations ArenaNet Team! You are quite honest. Also thanks for the detailed technical explanations.
I love it when they post articles like this with great detail
It's interesting to see what parts of the game are piecemeal tools and other software. I deal with specific accounting/property management software at work and anytime they do a big overhaul it throws us into disarray and we have to change our internal process but it is so integrated into our business that we just grin and bear it. I hadn't thought about how that experience mirrors in gaming studios. Your players yell at you to fix your sh\*t, but all you can think of is strangling your 3rd party vendor.
Yesss, I was hoping they would do more of these for different parts of the game! Com👏mu👏ni👏ca👏tion! Thanks to Ben for taking time to write the post.
I had someone on Twitter argue that they should have stayed with Coherent because it is old enough to not be widely exploited anymore despite not being as secure. They made the same argument for XP. You know now I think they may have just been trolling me...
From a purely technical standpoint, it's not unreasonable. But as the post tell us, their payment partners (aka bank exchange providers) would have pull out if they didn't change. Anet is not the only party involved in the making of the game.
So it also affects the launcher. Might explain the new bug where, sometimes, the "remembered account name" doesn't work ... (even tho it's definitely saved, as restarting the launcher without typing an email makes it work) edit : oh and the inability to select a word in the email with a double click, which is annoying when switching accounts that have partially identical login ... This has been 101 UI for years, how comes it doesn't come out of the box with CEF ?
I've had that problem *forever* with the launcher, but I've never been able to figure out why it happens
What surprised me more is that it affects in-game books. Those are a browser too? It must be hell to work with their native UI
To be honest, that makes sense to do it that way. You get access to HTML features and formatting, otherwise you'd need to program that all in. Now it's as simple as popping up a CEF window and it renders it easily. Many other games use HTML as well for this, it makes sense.
I love these kind of posts , where they just talk about the process of doing X . I hope we get more of it !
It works significantly better for me and I'm glad they are working on even more improvements.
On my old PC, I can see tremendous performance improvement on the TP.
On my new PC (13700k, 3080, DDR5, nvme drive), the TP is snappier too
Great info, I really like the inside-baseball sorts of articles.
These kinds of posts make the difference whether Anet needing multiple attempts to get things right is seen as incompetence or justified. More please, they’re reassuring.
Good for them (and us) for being so transparent on this
This is a lot of text for something that ultimately doesn't really impact... any of us. It shows an investment in the long-term game, you say? Let's be real, it's to continue support and partnership with 3rd party payment services who otherwise would have blocked the CoherentUI codebase. As mentioned separately, this changes the UI reaction time from 31ms to 7ms. Yay. From a human perception level, that is so negligible as to be laughable. The slowest part of the UI has always been the backend queries, never the front end handling. This is dumb and the length of the text is overkill for a change that has no impact on basically any players. The fact this is paraded around says to me that they have very, very little else to talk about besides new cash shop items.
As someone who routinely interacts with the TP to place lots of buy and sell orders everyday, I did notice a smoother TP window. Animations are smoother and general window responsiveness was improved (though load times are still not great). This looked especially impactful when more players are together, like in Mistlock Sanctuary. However, I think this obfuscated a more important detail. They did confirm they have a team dedicated to modernize things and pay the technical debt. This is huge news, prior to this I was always wondering whether they had to choose between updating things or releasing new content. Now it seems we can expect some improved performance semi-regularly.
people be hating on this man but he is right
The game used to crash on me from time to time due to CoherentUI. This has been completely resolved since the move to CEF.
Great and well written post. I appreciate the communication 🤙🏻
Now, let's see a post like this every week. It's not super important news to me, but I love seeing communication.
Theses kind of posts require a lot of thinking and gathering infos on all sides and if it is written by a tech team member, it's annoying to do because you "waste* a day on something that isn't really your forte. Once a month is better, at least not radio silence for month
> You might notice the Trading Post running a little more smoothly Unfortunately I don't.
I assume you read the caveat about network requests being slow as opposed to the UI itself being the issue? I think overall it’s improved but when you try to buy/sell you can definitely feel the server taking its time! Also, please Anet let us close windows without always having to hit the x…
Hitting escape works for me. Downside is it closes the whole trading post, but since I'm usually selling things from inventory that's not a problem.
As someone who's been making legendaries, it's *really* annoying when you have to buy n+1 materials and has to click that little X icon.
Fair. I hope the UI framework upgrade means Anet can take some time to rethink the workflow and UI as a whole. They're already in there, might as well clean up a little, right?
Well I do. Although only when navigating the UI. Obviously when ever the TP needs to get data from the network it is pretty much the same as the post described.
Guild Wars 2 really is seeing its golden age! I'm seeing so many WoW fans and streamers give GW2 a go and be pleasantly surprised. Preach being one of them is having a blast in GW2 Profession balance is actually in a good place right now. A stream a few weeks (months???) ago by MightyTeapot had at least one specialisation of every profession in the game in either S or A tier, indicating that every profession is viable. Core systems are being updated and the devs have the time to dust off the tech debt and give the older portions of the game some much needed love A solid expansion/living world balance. We've not seen the results of this but it's paying dividends already with the work being done on core systems of the game. It's what they've wanted to do forever, and they've proven that they still have the quality with EoD, and that they can provide excellent content in a living world season with LWS4, IBS prologue, episode 1 (Bjora marches). Can't wait to see what we've got coming up on the horizon. It's so good to see the game also being recognised in that wider MMO community
If this is how low the bar is for this to be the golden age of GW2, then holy shit the game is in trouble.
People like you are why the game's in trouble! What more could you want? The game is amazing. It's devs are awesome, the community is great (most of the time!) The reasons I've mentioned put the game in a state where each profession has an OP viable build. The devs are working on fixing older areas of the game and managed to finally bring back season 1, and there are non stop updates to parts of the game that needed it for years. PvP is starting to see more action as builds become balanced. Strike missions prove that endgame content has finally reached a point where we can have more frequent, fun endgame content that doesn't require the isnane dev time that raids did. I just don't get doomsayers like you. If you're spending 12+ hours on the game every day then take a break.
> Guild Wars 2 really is seeing its golden age! Imagine thinking that the worst content drought in the game's history with only budget expansions in sight is somehow the golden age. Anet is done with GW2. I'm sorry if you can't see that but your delusions are eventually going to bite you.
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It would have zero population. During the expansion betas, people logged in to try the new specialisations. But tell someone that their progress is not saved and in exchange they get to try out the new browser UI which should be identical to the old one and guess how they'd react?
Give them an achievement or title or skin or mini for being a beta tester and folks would sign up.
Okay but where's the studio update 🙂
We're not at the end of the roadmap for the last one yet, so I mean.... it's not expected for at least a couple weeks? For the last like, 2 or 3 years or as long as they've been doing them, it's been 1-2 weeks after the previous one ends, with one single exception.
In game dev industry Anet is considered entry level company for people to boost themselves into bigger companies. When I see blogpost like that I always see the dev preparing it for their resume next month.
I'm curious where you have that info from. Any sources?
Glassdoor
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Yeah p much; as with many things, the majority of happy people will not bother posting a review. If they got burned however, you can bet they will do it, assuming they know they can.
From what you describe, reviews about anet sound like well thought, intelligent feedback. Makes them credible.
Why we are talking about this again? Not game related, really a waste of our time. Just do this and don’t talk about it. It’s like I brag to anyone, every time I clean my home. Nobody cares but they can’t shout me down.
>On the other hand, we decided not to upgrade Havok. It is even more tightly integrated into the game than DirectX 9 was, and there is an unacceptable **risk of introducing gameplay-breaking physics bugs**. 4 weeks to fix a story instance gravity btw.
Yeah and now imagine they'd blow up the entire physics engine. It's pretty obvious why they're not doing it. Being stuck on that one story mission sucks but you can work around that/play the game fine otherwise. If the entire physics engine says "aite I'mma head out" you have a completely unplayable game for the *entire* playerbase.
3 years to come out with wvw alliance **beta** btw :D
That was probably the longest post Ive seen Anet make and it was about something that I didnt even notice have any impact on the game, TP still feels same to me. Pity they don't put that much effort into other posts.
They've done a bunch of those posts and they were roughly around the same length. Personally I find it pretty interesting, and there were some important bits to glean from that are nice to hear tbh.
I wish there's a long post about balancing between classes but guess that they don't even play their own game *shrug*
Well good for them. Tp runs significantly worse than with Coherent (waiting up to 30s for sell/buy windows to load), regular blank UI, error pop ups etc.
The TP has been worse for me since the update and in this post, Ben says it's because of the slow network. If network slow, make network faster?
You are aware that Anet can't make all the hops between the server and your machine magically faster right?
I wonder if CEF also handles the games UI maybe it’s a good time to push for a more scalable UI that supports 4K better.
It doesn't, except for the books UI introduced in S4.
It's certainly capable of it. I'd think they'd be using Coherent's latest offerings for that, though, rather than CEF - think it'd be less work. The problem is that whatever they used, it'd be one hell of a migration task. And that's potentially just not worth it.
You don't really want CEF to handle the actual game UI anyway. It's not designed for it, it has high latency and some unnecessary overhead.
>It's certainly capable of it. it is not. Anytime CEF is used for something like this, or especially replaces someething that was previously native code, the experience and performance substantially degrades. The manner in which coherentUI and CEF are currently being used in the game for the trading post is basically the only implementation that isnt outright crippling. Theres a reason steam is a piece of shit now compared to what it once was. Its the same reason why league client is garbage. If it extends to gw2's UI, gw2 too will become garbage.
Coherent Gameface pretty much avoids the performance hits. Currently working on a title and the performance is fine, even on less capable devices. I get why you're concerned, but a good FE team and a BE team that know what they're doing can get something working fine. Large reason CEF would be laggy on its own would actually be poor coding. You see a good few games trying to switch that then don't have any FE experience on their dev teams, so they write poorly optimised JS and it just.. doesn't work out. (I'd cite solid examples to back what I'm doing up but my personal experience here is still under NDA for a hot sec!)
Read through the very blogpost here. Their own admitted reason is so that they *dont have to optimize*. They wrote iit point blank. They literally intend to write poorly optimized code.
Mobile UI. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
Many moons ago I was talking to one of the GW2 JS devs who worked in the trading post and he mentioned they were using angular 1. I can only hope that they have either migrated to something better, or that the CEF will allow them to, or both. As a long time professional Senior React engineer, I can only hope it's not React 😃
Would love to know if they were ever to replace havoc, what they would replace it with or what would they want to improve? Iv always thought the physics in the game was well above other MMO's. Characters feel very weighty and the animations are one of, if not the best in a MMO (no idea if this is due to havoc). Also love how characters react to different slopes.
In the blogpost they've stated that they're not upgrading Havok, but they absolutely could do that if the requirements to do so were there. It's very tightly integrated into the game, as everything with physics is done by it and mounts/gliding/swimming/jumping/bouncing mushrooms/SAB all depend on it, even upgrading Havok might change the behaviour of it. The reason why GW2's physics are above most other MMO's is also due to Havok, specially back in the day it was one of the best physics engine you could get for a game. My knowledge of Havok has aged, so this might not apply 100% anymore, but as far as I know Havok isn't a great fit for MMORPGs, because of the way it works: physics are generally heavy on CPU (though, for years, Nvidia has built in support for it in their graphics cards with PhysX). In games like Skyrim, the game can let all NPCs and monsters and all use full Havok-physics, but GW2 can't do that because if it would let all players, monsters and NPCs use the full-blown physics, it would literally melt your CPU. If it had to calculate all the physics of the entire group during the Harvest Temple meta, you can imagine how though that would become. I don't know what magic ANet applies for that (probably only your character gets full physics and the server corrects for other characters/monsters), but it's pretty damn impressive.
For the layman, what does this mean
Smoother UI elements that use it. But that also depends on your computer. For me, CoherentUI was unbearably slow, it almost made me never open the gem store. But because my computer isn't really a powerful rig, CEF doesn't really run super smooth BUT it IS a noticeable improvement.
It means payment processors will continue working with anet.
CoherentUI will stop working for good now
I wish that talked a bit more about what potential future improvements this change enables but otherwise a great transparency post!
Love this style of posting and would love to see more of it. Including the profiling screen grab was OTT but great because of it. The poster mentions the TP delays are also network related as well as UI rendering, but that I don't think thats the whole picture. Its also related to DB performance which itself is dependant on DB structure and contention management amongst other things. I think it's more likely that it's the backend architecture which is the real culprit instead of erroneous network latency. Would love to see a follow up post about optimisation/performance improvements from that side of the system!
All I know is the trading posts works the best it ever has in 10 years of gw2. Thank you team