Origionally posted by Habib Loew (Source)

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In the January update we’ll be making a couple of preliminary changes to WvW.

1. The first of our engine changes will be coming on line to help improve character load times by using fallback models.

2. We’ll be switching over to the culling methodology that we trialed in December.

The engine change we’re making uses fallback models to represent characters until their detailed models are fully loaded. The fallback models are cached so that they can display without any asset load delay and there is a distinct fallback model for each race/gender/armor-class combination. As a result of this change players will be able to see characters represented as fallback models as soon as those characters are reported to the client. Once the specific, detailed model for a given character is completely loaded from disk the fallback model will be replaced with the detailed model. This visual compromise will help to ensure that players see other characters as quickly as possible in WvW. Please note that this change does not eliminate delays due to culling, it only addresses delays due to asset load times. Players on higher spec machines would therefore expect to see fallback models less often than players on lower spec machines. This change also lays the groundwork for more extensive uses of fallback models in future updates.

In December we ran a one matchup trial of an updated culling system. Based on all the feedback we received, both during and after the trial, we will be transitioning to the updated culling system that we used in the trial. This update allows the culling system to handle allies and enemies separately so that being surrounded by a group of allies will not impact the culling of enemies (and vice-versa). The general consensus after the trial is that this system lead to a better player experience in WvW. We further saw that some of the issues people had with the new system were related to asset load times rather than culling issues so making this change in combination with our character loading improvements should lead to an improved overall experience. It is important to note, however, that while we believe this change is an improvement to the WvW experience it does not fully address the issues with culling and we are still working towards our goal of removing culling from WvW completely. This change is intended to give players an improved WvW experience while we continue work on our more comprehensive solution.

While this update only contains a couple of visible changes to WvW it lays a lot of important groundwork for future updates. We have some exciting changes coming and this update is just the beginning!

Habib Loew also posted a second time for clarification, please continue to read to see his response.

One of the largest issues for WvW players currently is the problematic culling effect that happens more often than not when large groups of players collide. Culling essentially throttles the amount of players that a person can see on the screen (no matter their hardware, connection, etc.), yet it doesn’t stop attacks from firing off, which can understandably create quite a bit of frustration during a hectic battle. If you haven’t experienced much WvW, this screenshot represents the issue well.

ArenaNet has been hard at work on a solution to this issue, but it’s not one that comes easily. Yesterday, Habib Loew, Gameplay Programmer, took the time to tell players exactly where the team stands on fixing the culling issues. He also went into some details about what the fix requires, exactly. Quite an interesting read.

Here’s a snippet:

Originally posted by Habib Loew (Source)

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As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:

1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)

Until all three of those issues have been dealt with we can’t turn culling off because doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.

Ok, now let’s talk about what progress we’ve made!

Keep reading to see that progress.

Ever since the latest patch, there have been massive culling issues inside World vs. World. If you don’t know what that means, the picture should tell you. The engine has trouble rendering characters as they come within your viewable range. Props to Nija from FOHGuild.org for giving us this brilliant solution of how to fix your problems.