Increase Maximum Entities

[cadika-orade]

Some popular custom maps simply don't work because they contain too many entities for the engine to handle. I'd like to suggest this hard limit be increased or in some way softened.

From what I understand, here are the benefits of the hard limit, and an argument against each:

1. Improve performance by limiting the number of entities. I can understand why the original devs included this limit a decade ago, but with modern systems boasting RAM and processor speeds several orders of magnitude about what JA was designed to fit on, I think the limit could be considered outdated.
2. Limit bandwidth usage. I can understand this for multiplayer play, but it hardly seems applicable for singleplayer. Even for multiplayer, I would consider it more the problem of the server admin to make sure they don't load a map with so many entities that it creates lag for everyone.
3. Improve performance predictability. Considering the vanilla maps (obviously) don't use more than the allowed number entities, any sort of instability would have to come from either custom maps with tons of entities or (as is typically my case) spawning hundreds of items and NPCs at once. Either way, I can't imagine anyone blaming performance issues on the OpenJK developers. As long as everything works for the vanilla maps, then you've done your job. Upping the limit would just allow some freedom for players who like to push things until they break.

It has also been mentioned that upping the entity limit would break mods. I'm no expert, but I fail to see how this could possibly break the vast majority of mods. It could possibly break hacked JA clients if the limit on the server were increased, or possibly break the client if it connects to modded vanilla server. Either way, it seems that could be avoided by not increasing the limit on the multiplayer code.

TL;DR: 90% of my JA play is spawning NPCs and staging battles, but the entity limit... limits that. Please fix it.

[shinyquagsire23]

I do see one issue with your arguments on number 1. Currently OpenJK is planning to support the Raspberry Pi platform, which does not currently sport the best specs when compared to modern computers, having a 700Mhz processor and only half a gig of ram (or 256MB if you have an older model...) which also happens to be shared with the GPU, meaning that we're actually dealing with a lot less RAM than advertized . So if this is implemented, it should have a way to revert back to the old limit for some of the older devices which will run OK.

[JunielKatarn]

This can be a naive comment but, can't the hard limit be increased and be overrideable on runtime for limited systems? Maybe a conditional definition?

[eezstreet]

GENTITYNUM_BITS isn't something that can be raised simply by cvar or whatever. Changing it has serious implications, such as static buffer sizes in the snapshot, which will for sure break compatibility.

Sent from my Windows Phone

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From: Julio César Rochamailto:notifications@github.com Sent: ‎6/‎2/‎2013 7:08 PM To: Razish/OpenJKmailto:OpenJK@noreply.github.com Subject: Re: [OpenJK] Increase Maximum Entities (#276)

This can be a naive comment but, can't the hard limit be increased and be overrideable on runtime for limited systems? Maybe a conditional definition?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/Razish/OpenJK/issues/276#issuecomment-18815978

[ensiform]

Related to issue #206 Can't simply increase maximum number of entities. This is shared with clients and servers and no longer is compatible with old mods and old clients and new clients on old servers.

[cadika-orade]

@ensiform Then why increase the limit on the Multiplayer version? Just increase the limit in Single Player so that people can spawn entities and NPCs without the system just shutting down the whole game because an arbitrary limit was reached.

Did you just read the title close the thread? Please actually read what I wrote.

[cadika-orade]

@eezstreet Then just don't change it for the Multiplayer version! Why is this such a complicated concept?

[cadika-orade]

@shinyquagsire23

Then I suggest people playing single player games on a RasPi not spawn thousands of NPCs. If they do that and the game freezes because it runs out of RAM, I'd say that was their own doing.

[mrwonko]

Then I suggest people playing single player games on a RasPi not spawn thousands of NPCs. If they do that and the game freezes because it runs out of RAM, I'd say that was their own doing.

The game needs the space you specify at compile time even if you don't actually have that many entities in your level.

And did you really have to answer 3 times?

[ensiform]

@cadika-orade if we increase the limit in SP but not MP that leads to SP maps not actually working in MP at all. Besides, the Ultimate final goal would be to replace SP with coop mode in MP.

[cadika-orade]

I wasn't aware that SP maps worked in MP. They never worked in Vanilla. I tried. NPCs just stand there and do nothing.

I also wasn't aware that Vanilla had a co-op mode. I suppose if increasing the entity limit really would break compatibility with a feature in Vanilla SP, then I'll drop it.

But could you do a favor for someone who completely detests MP and the royal arses who populate the servers and please tell me where the limit is defined so that I can adjust it myself? SP is all JA has to offer for me, and once I've memorized the story campaign I rather enjoy staging battles on custom maps. Unfortunately, the one thing I enjoy doing in JA is severely limited by this limit.

Does anyone really still play MP anymore? Every time I ever tried to every server was either people sitting and chatting (a fighting game where fighting is against the rules!?) or people with hacked clients insta-killing everyone. Often both. MP sounds like a good idea, but it doesn't seem to really work.

[ensiform]

They "work" as in loading, and several mods make them actually work better. And vanilla does not have coop, but we intend to add this at some point.

Presumably you'd need to change the GENTITYNUM_BITS to a bit number. Currently 10, which means 10 bits which is 1024 (1022 technically allowed).

There is likely other stuff that would need to be changed too. Any existing saved games even from openjk prior to change will likely no longer work.

Renderer is also capped at 2048 max ref entities which is slightly different but yea careful with messing with it.

Yes, people still play MP but its far less than could be.