Kevin Klemmick Player Bubble Interview - By Glen "Sleepdoc" Kletzy
For those of you who read
the article on my interview with Kevin Klemmick, I hope you got a new
understanding of the deep seeded AI of Falcon 4.0. In this second part
of the article, we move on to the subject of the mysterious and elusive
"player bubble". Many people on the newsgroups have been hypothesizing
about what it is, and finally, we get the true answer. Oddly enough, the
hypothesis' put forth were either completely wrong or only part way down
the road to the correct answer. I found the answers from the man who "made
it so" (sorry for that, I'm a trekkie) to be quite interesting. If you
like to understand the deep inner workings of your favorite sims, then
this article is for you.
As an aside, we also discussed at great length the ground war element
of the TE mission builder. In part three of this article to be released
soon (give me a break guys, this stuff is really time consuming !!), I
will reveal some very exciting and promising news on the topic. The ground
war is broken in TE right now, but Kevin was so confident (and excited)
about the ground war element of the TE mission builder, that he told me
exactly what we can all expect once it is patched. He also was confidant
that it would be nicely fixed at least by the third patch (we are expecting
the second one in February as per Mr. Louie's post on the newsgroups).
I will also tell you about the implementation interface for the ground
war we can expect. It is nothing like the broken thing we have now. Now
back to the subject of this article, the "player bubble".
We pick up from our last article talking about the "player bubble". Mr.
Klemmick noted to me that the bubble is not as "imprecise" as people think
it is. We have all seen attempts by players to explain and understand
the "player bubble" and many people on the Newsgroups believed that once
a battalion of tanks left your bubble, it no longer existed at all, or
at least, the individual tanks of the battalion were no longer tracked.
Many hypothesized that calculations relating to battles between tanks
outside your bubble were reduced to much simpler calculations. Surprisingly,
Kevin corrects us all on that. He stated that every single tank in the
game and every enemy/friendly force encounter is tracked, whether or not
it is in your bubble. The difference is that the individual units increase
their "granularity" (his word) and they actually become "discrete physical
entities" (again, his words), once they enter the player bubble.
Let me explain. Tanks and planes etc, exist as individually tracked items
throughout every mission no matter if they are in or out of the bubble.
They decide what they are going to do and then they do it. The results
are scored no matter where they are. If a tank battalion decides that
it detects an enemy tank, and it fires on it, and he hits it, that tank
is registered as damaged. All these things occur in real time. What DOES
NOT happen, however, is what defines the meaning of a bubble. If you are
outside the bubble, the game in no way develops a drawn object to be seen
on the screen. Remember, if an object is "beyond visual range", you can
still commit CPU cycles to fully draw and texture it, and then scale it
to the visual distance. Of course, once the computer has done all that
and then scales it to your viewing distance, it has calculated to draw
the thing at less than 1 pixel large, so it decides to not draw anything!!
So why in the hell would you commit CPU cycles to calculate the fully
textured and articulated polygon image if the end result is that nothing
can be seen on your monitor at its current resolution, based on your viewing
distance? The answer is, you wouldn't. And that boys and girls, is the
first point. If you feel I am getting down to the nitty gritty of programming
here, and you are wondering why I'm boring you, then stop reading right
now. Because this IS all about programming. That's what Mr. Klemmick is.
A programmer. If you are intrigued, then read on.
Ok, so now you understand that you will waste boodles of CPU cycles trying
to draw things you can't see anyway if you don't have a bubble. Intuitively
then, you should also see that as the bubble gets larger, more things
must be drawn, even if they cant be seen. And there is more "CPU overhead"
to drawing objects than just the initial draw. You must continue to calculate
"how to draw them" for every subsequent frame. The turrets swing to fire.
They fire and they smoke and blaze. They run across the landscape, animating
their movement and blowing up dust. And every step of the way, you have
to draw them. Its one thing to calculate and store in memory the movement
of an object and its behaviors and responses. Its an entirely different
thing to pile on top of that, the 3 dimensional, gaurad shaded, texture
mapped, dynamically lighted, alpha blended vehicle itself with all its
special effects and animated movements. Klemmick said that his AI tracks
"literally tens of thousands of ground objects and thousands of aircraft
all the time" (his exact words), and in the campaign, often many of those
objects are flying, fighting, thinking and planning all over the map at
one time. That is daunting to say the least. Can you imagine ?
Further more, he goes on to say that the "granularity" of an object not
only involves drawing it, but it also gets an "individual AI brain" and
departs from a more "battalion or flight minded AI" that was controlling
the "calculation only" tanks and planes outside the bubble. So clearly,
with thousands of objects potentially in your bubble at any one time,
removing a few can dramatically return CPU cycles back to your processor.
Before I tell you this next tidbit, I must warn you now (because I promised
Kevin that I would). I am about to tell you the hard coded reality of
what the actual "bubble distances" are in this game. He hesitated when
I asked because he feared that I might "destroy the illusion" for people
by letting them know exactly what distance an object becomes a physical
entity on the screen, and leaves the realm of "in the memory only". I
didn't share this concern, but he had it, so I am going to respect his
wishes. IF YOU THINK IT REALLY MATTERS TO YOU, THEN SKIP THE REMAINDER
OF THIS ARTICLE. JUST STOP READING NOW.
Before I reveal the actual numbers to you, you should understand, however,
why I think it does not "destroy the illusion". Remember Klemmick said
that objects are tracked but not drawn outside your bubble? And that battalions
pull from a "battalion AI" and not an "individual unit AI" to direct their
actions? Well don't you worry my boy, because that battalion or wing or
whatever, can still fire at your complacent, "he's-not-in-my-bubble" ass.
SAMs that exist outside your bubble will still utilize a "group AI" and
they will detect you and fire on you. And brother, when that SAM leaves
"not-in-your-bubblesville" and makes its way into your bubble, that's
one object the CPU ain't gonna have to animate for long. It is now a "physical
entity". And although the ground unit that fired that SAM is not yet a
"physical entity", you won't be thinking much about your damn bubble when
that launch warning gives you an adrenal squeeze. I highly suggest you
keep your mind off the bubble and on the incoming missile.
The point is this. The "illusion" of the bubble is really no illusion
at all because units outside your bubble engage each other. And more importantly,
units outside your bubble can still engage YOU. And once their missiles
leave their "in-memory-only-launchers", they are gonna bust YOUR bubble
if you don't get tight and fly right.
Ok. Enough bubble babble. Lets get to the numbers. He told me that the
bubble for air units and the bubble for ground units are different. When
you reduce your bubble to 1, for ground units, you are essentially reducing
the player bubble to about 8 nautical miles. If you recall, and you read
the manual, MPS says that "visual range" in this sim is about 8 nm. That
is why you can only "padlock" out to 8nm. He could not recall the maximum
range for ground units, but its probably about 40 nm. He went on to say
that the bubble of 1 for air units was about 40 nm. And when you max out
your air unit's bubble, you reach out to about 80 nm. Many Techno-hackers
who have diddled with the files have discovered "hacks" for the bubble
size. Some have made the bubble very small (less than one) so that they
can fly F4 campaign on their relatively under powered machines without
taking such a massive framerate hit. They are unloading the CPU. Plain
and simple. Smart guys out there.
So all this "bubble babble" leads us to an interesting question. If you
can't see anything outside of 8 nautical miles, then why on God's green
earth would you need a bubble adjustment option at all? Just shove everything
beyond 8nm out of the bubble, and pull everything within 8nm within my
bubble. Why let the user adjust it at all? Well, because this ain't no
dog and pony show people. There is something going on here we have totally
neglected to mention thus far. It is one of the premier features of this
sim that further validates the hyped statement "new Benchmark". I am speaking
of the ACMI. How many of you have really tinkered with the potential of
this incredible module? You haven't lived until you sat on the rails of
a SAM launcher, looking through the eyes of the very SAM that swung around
from 60 miles out, and launched to knock your rocket ass out of the sky.
And the fact is that if that SAM were outside your bubble when he swung
around (still on the ground) you would not be able to view him (but you
would be able to view the missile once it launched. Interesting note here.
All missiles, no matter how far out of your bubble they are, become physical
entities once they leave the launch site or aircraft rails). For that
matter, if you are in a multiplayer game, and you are all excited to watch
how your buddy bombed Sinan-ni while you were off CAP'ing at some distant
airbase, you better check that bubble son. If his bombing run occurred
outside of your bubble while you had the ACMI set to "record", then you
didn't record it. But what is amazing, is that if your LAN/Internet buddy
was inside your bubble, you wont miss a lick. So we see here that the
ACMI file which is being filmed in real time only accounts for those objects
within the players bubble. And truly, it makes sense to do it this way.
They give you the option of how much of the world you really want to record.
Hmmm? I wonder aloud now. If you are recording a plane that is inside
your 40 - 80 nm "air object bubble" and he bombs a ground unit that is
simultaneously outside of your 8 - 40 nm "ground unit bubble", then will
it appear on ACMI as if that plane is bombing the empty ground? Anyone
wanna test this one and let me know ? Ill also ask Klemmick next time
we speak. Curious, huh?
To recap, 3 main things occur when a unit enters your bubble.
1. A unit inside your bubble is drawn in all its glory (at least the work
necessary to draw it on screen is completed) with all its articulated,
moving parts, and all the visual effects that occur as a result of its
actions.
2. It receives a fully individualized AI brain (although it did have a
"battalion or flight level brain" before)
3. It becomes "granular" to the ACMI, and therefor has been recorded on
the ACMI file in full motion and action detail.
A typical example of where you can start to recognize granularity is on
the air radar. Have you ever locked up a target at 80 nm, but when it
gets inside of 40nm, you start to see that the single blip on your radar
is slowly looking like 4 separate blips? That's the "flight entity" outside
the bubble converting to a higher "granularity" and becoming individual
"physical entities" inside your bubble. People with bigboy horsepower
machines won't ever have the opportunity to notice this unless they turn
down their bubble. Most of us love to crank up all the options and leave
it there. The event is so subtle, it is practically meaningless, and can
be viewed as simply a flight at distance not being individually discernable
by the radar at distance. So, IMHO, all this knowledge better helps us
to satisfy our urge to know as much as we can about Falcon 4.0, but in
no way destroys any "illusions" for you. It certainly doesn't for me.
Actually, all it does is impress me with the complexities needed to create
a great sim.
I hope my review of Mr. Kevin Klemmick's explanation of the "player bubble"
has demystified it for you. The next part of the interview, which I will
cover in the next article, will be about the amazing potential of the
ground war element of TE. How we will soon be able to play mini-campaigns
and issue not only new flights, but new ground war objectives "on the
fly". I can't wait to get completely destroyed by Jeff "Rhino" Babineau
in a multiplayer battle (he was a real tank commander and actually knows
about ground war tactics. He is also the guy that got me going on TE.
Jeff… you have created a monster!). That's the beauty of the ACMI. After
he spanks me, I can go back and study his tactics. Who knows? Maybe I
will actually learn something for once. I better keep my bubble wide open
so I can record all his tricky moves !
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