Model priority is messed up

During big events, lets say randomly.. the raid on Palawadan.There are a lot of people, and a lot of hostile NPCs.So I keep my model quality on medium or high, and turn down the model limit to low.However, as a result I see like 10 players, and the closest few enemies.Heck, even the big boss Archon Iberu will be invisible unless I have him targeted AND be standing within melee range.

Why is this even a thing?Why does the game priotizie me looking at other players before loading the actual game itself?In cities, okay, show players more.But on battlefields, you should always hide away other players if you have the choice between hiding a mob/boss or a player.

Its bad enough most enemies are obscured by the discolights, I don’t need the game hiding more mobs in favor of showing me how much player.8842 is glowing and sparkling.

And no, raising model limit does the exact opposite, it will increase the number of players I see, not making enemies more visible.For me this is a real fun damper as I cannot see the enemies i’m fighting in a big battlefield.

Suggestion:Cities and acknowledged towns: prioritize player models in load orderOpen fields: alternately load players and mobs, with bosses/event-mobs having a priorityMeta-events/group-events: obscure all players that you are not in a squad/group with, and even if you are, prioritize mobs 2 to 1

Solution: change minimum requirements to an SSD, and pretty much all of this goes away. BOOM fast load times for everyone.

@starlinvf.1358 said:Solution: change minimum requirements to an SSD, and pretty much all of this goes away. BOOM fast load times for everyone.

That's not exactly the OP's complaint. The complaint is more that once the map is loaded, when OP is somewhere busy, the low model count (because of the graphics settings) means that enemies aren't very visible because the game gives priority to showing other player characters. All the SSDs in the world won't help with that. (While my PC is fast enough that I don't have the OP's problem, I can sympathise - being unable to see enemies because there are too many players around must be really frustrating.)

So, basically, it's backwards. When loading other models, either load mobs first, or have some priority built in (event related bosses first), using range as sort method?

Somehow, I suspect the loading queue doesn't actually has any priority at all, they just get loaded in the same order they were placed in it. That is, nearby players who were there before the boss spawns will load first, and if you are approaching an event, models will be inserted to the queue in the same order they should be appearing on the screen (based on distance), which explains why other players start loading, but not the actual boss.

This lack of priority is clearly observable with mounts. Get on your raptor, wp somewhere: your character and mount will be there, as the rest of the environment keeps loading. Now dismount and remount. The result? You are riding an invisible raptor until it loads. The kicker is that your mount will load after everything else that came before it does, meaning even the small flowers on the floor will load first. This can take several seconds of "being mounted on the air" even with an ssd in the newer maps due to the amount of details.

If someday they can improve this, by perhaps having two queues, one priority and the standard one, then bosses, your glider and mount could go into the priority queue, ensuring they load before the rest. It would really be a qos feature for heavy activity areas or slower systems.

I play with very low graphics settings to reduce screen clutter. It doesn't help much.

https://imgur.com/a/eBh3p1n

A culling priority system should be an essential part of any MMO. Unfortunately, we can't buy that on the gem store, so it hasn't been made.

@Ayakaru.6583 said:Suggestion:Cities and acknowledged towns: prioritize player models in load orderOpen fields: alternately load players and mobs, with bosses/event-mobs having a priorityMeta-events/group-events: obscure all players that you are not in a squad/group with, and even if you are, prioritize mobs 2 to 1

This seems sensible to me. (Not sure how easy it would be to implement.)

@starlinvf.1358 said:Solution: change minimum requirements to an SSD, and pretty much all of this goes away. BOOM fast load times for everyone.

Is model culling a function of drive response times? Or GPU? Or CPU? I confess that I'm not clear what each of those affects the most.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@"starlinvf.1358" said:Solution: change minimum requirements to an SSD, and pretty much all of this goes away. BOOM fast load times for everyone.

Is model culling a function of drive response times? Or GPU? Or CPU? I confess that I'm not clear what each of those affects the most.

There are two versions of "model culling". One affects which models are loaded(1), and the other affects which of the loaded models are displayed. Disk performance affects the first (the faster the disk, the less effort you have to put into culling or prioritising loads). Memory size has a secondary effect on the first - a system with small memory will have to load different (low-quality) models. Disk performance has no effect whatsoever on the second, since that decision is made after everything is loaded.

The speed of the CPU, GPU and main system RAM combine to influence how models are drawn, and how many are drawn, and that is what the graphics option slider is for - to force a lower limit if needed, or to allow (force?) the game to draw lots of models if the system can handle it.

(1) Example: if there are, say, three different male Bandit models, you might load one of them first and use it for all Bandits, and load the others later and use them when they are available. Or not load the extra ones at all because there isn't enough memory.