ATTN: I have gained a new perspective on "graphics memory shared memory" since making this video. For scupltures, and I believe paints as well, this is a measure of the amount of edits you use. So for sculptures... stamp, smear, spraypaint, and looseness edits in sculpture mode ALL count toward this in some way. Stamp and smear edits interact with spray and looseness in various ways that's somewhat difficult to describe. The more homogeneous your stamp/smear edits are, and the more homogeneous your spray/looseness is the less it will cost relative to bunches of wildly different stamps/smears interacting with largely varying spray/looseness... I THINK. :)
Update to this: its more subtle and complex than this. Graphics shared memory is a measure of color and looseness, not necessarily the raw amount of edits. The last post doesnt describe the ramifications too badly, but It's too subtle to get into in a comment and I don't fully understand it anyway. :D. However, the basic gist is that sculpture shape has a cost that is separate from shared memory, which is comprised of color and sprayed looseness(not through the sculpts tweak menu). Your best practice should be to aim to have your sculpture detail cost and shared memory for an object be equal. Best way to do that is to keep an eye on both in your expanded thermo while working because color edits will only undo so many times and once the cost is over your target, it's often impossible to get it back under without starting over with a new sculpt.
Great video! Thanks for your hard work mate! ^^ I love to do these kinds of detailed thermo investigations, and that's actually what some of my earliest videos were about--just footage proving different things about how sculpt thermo works. Though I know it can be pretty time consuming and mind-bending trying to keep track of what you're actually measuring with an experiment or how to test a specific nuance of the costs involved. So I appreciate how much work something like this takes, and thank you for it! And now, the inevitable questions! XD I appreciate you don't necessarily have all the answers to everything thermo-related. But in case you have answers but couldn't put *everything* into the video, I thought I'd pose them anyhow. What does "stacking groups" mean? And by "not affect cost" are you saying doing this stacking thing doesn't cost anything? Or that it costs the regular amount--1 group's worth per group in the "stack"? The 6900 number... does this work out the same cost for the groups as just any setup of groups? What happens when you hit the import limit? Are you just not allowed to import anything? Or do old things get deleted? Do you get a message explaining what’s going on? Does this mean there can only ever be 256 items items in the genealogy “contains” list? When you say different things are weighted differently, I gather you meant that different “things” cost different amounts on the “things” meter. My understanding is the “doorways” limit is a separate meter, so doesn’t directly impact the “things” cost of a doorway gadget--that’s a separate cost, is that right? The connectors thing is pretty weird, huh? Could it be to do with the hand and foot connectors being ball joints instead of bolts, something like that? What is a “component” for the component limit? And is “components” another meter or just one of those warnings you can get? Do you have any data on how action-recording works concerning things like wires and thermo use? For example, if you change something over time is that lots of wires or one wire and lots of data points? (This may be unknowable from this side of the code, but in case you had any info I’m curious to find out.) Did you figure out the figures for notes? I tried pretty hard once to find a thermo cost for a single note by making a ton of notes. But it didn’t seem to make that much difference. Is “unique sounds” the number of unique slices, or the number of unique audio source recordings? Like, if you clone a sound effect and change all its slice positions will that add to this meter? And if you clone a sound effect and don’t change any slice positions is that free? or will that stuff affect the “shared memory” portion instead perhaps?
1)for stacking groups, in hind sight, "nested groups" would have been clearer. "doesnt affect cost" means theres no cost for nesting. 2)not sure what you mean, but in retrospect, this number will vary depending on what you're grouping. At any rate, its a nonsense number. you'd never get anywhere near it in a real scenario. and it's bounded by the thing limit rather than some sort of group limit. 3)Dont know. I recorded a short amount and extrapolated. 4)I think that's a reasonable assumption. If I recall, things used to get stuck in genealogy even if they werent in the scene anymore. Not sure if they fixed that, or if its still the case. 5)That doorway meter is independent, but doorways do have a gameplay cost which is like most gadgets. Interestingly, there is no cap on doorways at the doorway limit, so you can have 10000+ in a scene and get your gameplay up to ridiculous amounts like 100000% 6)I dont think the limit applies as specifically to puppets. They get some immunity somewhere in the reporting. could be a certain joint? 7)component is any logic gadget as far as I know. 8)my conclusion was that anything you're changing has an invisible wire between the keyframe/AR and it. I would assume that if you change your recording, it will change that with it. 9)no. as far as I can tell is has to do with unique notes using unique sounds. 10)I would assume its slices, but did not test this. I may have had some slices present that skewed results. if they did, the limit is even higher than an already unobtainable amount.
@@LucidStew 1) Okay. So to be clear, is this true (A): group (group (sculpt sculpt)) costs the same as group (sculpt) group (sculpt)? Or is this true (B): group (group (sculpt sculpt)) costs the same as group (sculpt sculpt)? Thanks for your answers :D
Wow, Stew does the math so we don't have to! Haha, lots of info there, tbh I mainly find myself battling the gameplay thermo as the nature of racing games being open world means you don't get the luxury of utilising doorways. However, I'm now working with a collaborator who understands the ways around the thermo and is able to make assets that are optimised for the purpose, which has been a godsend! Just wish we had a little more leeway so sculpture detail didn't have to be sacrificed so often... ah well, maybe for PS5! :-)
Seems like the node thing limit is pretty accurate. It seems like it is the CPU limit of 64bit architecture. 16382 is close to 16384, which can be devided by 64 and you get 256, which is one Byte, for paging or whatever, I am not an expert. I hope this will improve with the new CPU on the PS5.
We have an abstraction layer below the surface to consider. I can't imagine they just picked these limits because they're kind of all over the place, but it's probably the result of the resources available to the user layer and how the various things we can build with fill them up. As you say the hardware will ultimately determine what those resources are.
Yeah, the setup is in desperate need of some key futures like functions, iterating containers and more variable types. Too much thermo is wasted right now on redundant workarounds. They're working on a scripting feature, but who knows how far off that is.
Do you know how to optimise a song for gameplay thermo? I make a lot of music, but I don't make a lot of big scenes so I should probably start being more conscious of the cost of my songs.
I really didnt go into it, but as far as I can tell, piano roll and a variety of different notes with different sounds is what gets you on gameplay with music. Check out ALAN_MANIAC. He does extratone stuff with tons of notes. He used to regularly max out on gameplay, and it looks like he's cut that 8 or 9 times in a lot of cases. Looks like he uses a lot of nested performances rather than setting notes one by one.
In case your curious, I just did some testing myself and it seems like the best way to reduce cost is to limit the amount of sound gadgets in the timeline. The best practice would be to use one gadget per unique instrument in the scene but this is somewhat inconvenient. The other main influence on gameplay thermo is unique instruments, but I don't feel like cutting much in that department. Drawing notes on an instrument seems to have no effect on anything in the thermo so that's great news because I was often limiting myself because I thought looping would be more efficient. Now I can make every bar unique without worrying.
I wish there was a way for the gameplay memory that a song takes up to be shifted to audio memory. I can easily crack 10% gameplay on a song but I don't think I've ever exceeded 25% audio for anything. Edit: now that I think about it the simplest way would be to have the ability to consolidate/freeze like in any DAW.
Yeah, I'm not sure what happened with music, but its nigh impossible to have a game soundtrack without straight uploading it, which they've essentially outlawed at this point.
Yup, I started goofing around remixing a 4% gameplay track last night and I was horrified to find that my gameplay thermo jumped to 6% just by copying bits of the original! It's really dumb because gameplay thermo is so precious, so I really don't understand why the timelines for music don't use the audio thermo instead which is never going to be very full... hopefully MM find a way to rectify this irritating limitation!
@@atheistsw Kind of surprised this isnt in there or that I havent heard this idea before. Really, if you dont need to interact with music with logic, theres no reason for it to remain in a logically accessible form. I'm going to suggest this on the feedback form if it hasnt been suggested already.
@@atheistsw in a practical sense, you could make a separate scene that only plays the audio, let it play through, record it with the share button, load that video onto your phone/pc and import it in 15sec bits back into the game as recorded audio... maybe it can be made so that the cuts aren't noticeable? haven't played around with that yet.
I have thermo problems with my combo animations, I have 4 combos and split into two for each transformations, and each combo chip eats 8% of thermo, Is there any way around this?
Make a clone like you normally would with L1+R2, but hold R2. tap right d-pad to make clones away from the clone and the original. tap left d-pad to make clones between the clone and the original. release R2 when you're done making clones.
This is too fricken complicated. I dont understand why the game cant process a few individual leaf sculpts on a ground, cloned a few times. Its preposterous.
@@LucidStew i dont understand why though. Ive seen so many creations in dreams that have much more going on visually than my game, and yet theirs works fine. I read somewhere that ungrouping objects after laying them out will reduce gameplay thermo. I tried it and of course it didnt work. Is there any way at all that I could make this work with the sculptures i already have?
@@mattdamsel2176 Because the scene sculpt limit is 10,000 and the painting fleck draw limit is about 3 million. Groups have a cost of about 1/2 a sculpt. If you've already made the things, the only way to reduce their cost is with the sculpture detail tool, and that's assuming that their sculpture data cost is lower than their shared memory cost. The key to getting more detail out of sculpts can be found here: th-cam.com/video/-Tkt80MQWl8/w-d-xo.html
ATTN: I have gained a new perspective on "graphics memory shared memory" since making this video. For scupltures, and I believe paints as well, this is a measure of the amount of edits you use. So for sculptures... stamp, smear, spraypaint, and looseness edits in sculpture mode ALL count toward this in some way. Stamp and smear edits interact with spray and looseness in various ways that's somewhat difficult to describe. The more homogeneous your stamp/smear edits are, and the more homogeneous your spray/looseness is the less it will cost relative to bunches of wildly different stamps/smears interacting with largely varying spray/looseness... I THINK. :)
Update to this: its more subtle and complex than this. Graphics shared memory is a measure of color and looseness, not necessarily the raw amount of edits. The last post doesnt describe the ramifications too badly, but It's too subtle to get into in a comment and I don't fully understand it anyway. :D. However, the basic gist is that sculpture shape has a cost that is separate from shared memory, which is comprised of color and sprayed looseness(not through the sculpts tweak menu). Your best practice should be to aim to have your sculpture detail cost and shared memory for an object be equal. Best way to do that is to keep an eye on both in your expanded thermo while working because color edits will only undo so many times and once the cost is over your target, it's often impossible to get it back under without starting over with a new sculpt.
Gameplay > Things - 0:00
Gameplay > Unique Stamped Elements - 1:26
Gameplay > Doorways - 2:10
Gameplay > Connectors - 2:22
Gameplay > Wires & Animation - 4:12
Graphics > Sculpture Data - 5:41
Graphics > Shared Memory - 6:07
Graphics > Paint - 6:41
Graphics > Sculpture Physical Shape - 8:11
Graphics > Sculptures - 9:26
Audio > Audio Memory - 10:30
Audio > Audio Download Size - 11:16
Audio > Unique Sounds Limit - 12:13
Stew, if you copy that into the description, they'll become bookmarks in the bar along the bottom of the video. :D
thanks. I'm working on starting to incorporate chapters.
@@LucidStew Ah nice... I only found out about them recently, from Aecert. Now I use them everywhere XD
Fantastic investigative work there @LucidStew. This series is an invaluable resource to the community, thanks!
you're welcome. :) and thank YOU!
I'm getting more out of this channel and any other, you deserve the imp award from media molecule
lol, I got one, dude! th-cam.com/video/MYVzC5VdKRk/w-d-xo.html
agreed
Thanks for the detailed analysis work Stew. The results are really helpful.
very good to hear
Love the hard work! Such dedication man
Awesome work Lucid Stew 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Great video! Thanks for your hard work mate! ^^ I love to do these kinds of detailed thermo investigations, and that's actually what some of my earliest videos were about--just footage proving different things about how sculpt thermo works. Though I know it can be pretty time consuming and mind-bending trying to keep track of what you're actually measuring with an experiment or how to test a specific nuance of the costs involved. So I appreciate how much work something like this takes, and thank you for it!
And now, the inevitable questions! XD I appreciate you don't necessarily have all the answers to everything thermo-related. But in case you have answers but couldn't put *everything* into the video, I thought I'd pose them anyhow.
What does "stacking groups" mean? And by "not affect cost" are you saying doing this stacking thing doesn't cost anything? Or that it costs the regular amount--1 group's worth per group in the "stack"?
The 6900 number... does this work out the same cost for the groups as just any setup of groups?
What happens when you hit the import limit? Are you just not allowed to import anything? Or do old things get deleted? Do you get a message explaining what’s going on?
Does this mean there can only ever be 256 items items in the genealogy “contains” list?
When you say different things are weighted differently, I gather you meant that different “things” cost different amounts on the “things” meter. My understanding is the “doorways” limit is a separate meter, so doesn’t directly impact the “things” cost of a doorway gadget--that’s a separate cost, is that right?
The connectors thing is pretty weird, huh? Could it be to do with the hand and foot connectors being ball joints instead of bolts, something like that?
What is a “component” for the component limit? And is “components” another meter or just one of those warnings you can get?
Do you have any data on how action-recording works concerning things like wires and thermo use? For example, if you change something over time is that lots of wires or one wire and lots of data points? (This may be unknowable from this side of the code, but in case you had any info I’m curious to find out.)
Did you figure out the figures for notes? I tried pretty hard once to find a thermo cost for a single note by making a ton of notes. But it didn’t seem to make that much difference.
Is “unique sounds” the number of unique slices, or the number of unique audio source recordings? Like, if you clone a sound effect and change all its slice positions will that add to this meter? And if you clone a sound effect and don’t change any slice positions is that free? or will that stuff affect the “shared memory” portion instead perhaps?
1)for stacking groups, in hind sight, "nested groups" would have been clearer. "doesnt affect cost" means theres no cost for nesting.
2)not sure what you mean, but in retrospect, this number will vary depending on what you're grouping. At any rate, its a nonsense number. you'd never get anywhere near it in a real scenario. and it's bounded by the thing limit rather than some sort of group limit.
3)Dont know. I recorded a short amount and extrapolated.
4)I think that's a reasonable assumption. If I recall, things used to get stuck in genealogy even if they werent in the scene anymore. Not sure if they fixed that, or if its still the case.
5)That doorway meter is independent, but doorways do have a gameplay cost which is like most gadgets. Interestingly, there is no cap on doorways at the doorway limit, so you can have 10000+ in a scene and get your gameplay up to ridiculous amounts like 100000%
6)I dont think the limit applies as specifically to puppets. They get some immunity somewhere in the reporting. could be a certain joint?
7)component is any logic gadget as far as I know.
8)my conclusion was that anything you're changing has an invisible wire between the keyframe/AR and it. I would assume that if you change your recording, it will change that with it.
9)no. as far as I can tell is has to do with unique notes using unique sounds.
10)I would assume its slices, but did not test this. I may have had some slices present that skewed results. if they did, the limit is even higher than an already unobtainable amount.
@@LucidStew 1) Okay. So to be clear, is this true (A): group (group (sculpt sculpt)) costs the same as group (sculpt) group (sculpt)? Or is this true (B): group (group (sculpt sculpt)) costs the same as group (sculpt sculpt)?
Thanks for your answers :D
@@TAPgiles A. the groups have a cost. doesnt matter if they're nested.
@@LucidStew Cool. Makes sense. Ta
You are the king.
"...but you wont find the crown sitting up on my head. I don't wanna be a king, I'll be a wizard instead."
Excellent info.
Wow, Stew does the math so we don't have to! Haha, lots of info there, tbh I mainly find myself battling the gameplay thermo as the nature of racing games being open world means you don't get the luxury of utilising doorways. However, I'm now working with a collaborator who understands the ways around the thermo and is able to make assets that are optimised for the purpose, which has been a godsend! Just wish we had a little more leeway so sculpture detail didn't have to be sacrificed so often... ah well, maybe for PS5! :-)
Lucid Stew = BIG BRAIN
Seems like the node thing limit is pretty accurate. It seems like it is the CPU limit of 64bit architecture. 16382 is close to 16384, which can be devided by 64 and you get 256, which is one Byte, for paging or whatever, I am not an expert. I hope this will improve with the new CPU on the PS5.
We have an abstraction layer below the surface to consider. I can't imagine they just picked these limits because they're kind of all over the place, but it's probably the result of the resources available to the user layer and how the various things we can build with fill them up. As you say the hardware will ultimately determine what those resources are.
Now I can finally make unbelievable gameplay. Oh wait.
Yeah, the setup is in desperate need of some key futures like functions, iterating containers and more variable types. Too much thermo is wasted right now on redundant workarounds. They're working on a scripting feature, but who knows how far off that is.
Do you know how to optimise a song for gameplay thermo? I make a lot of music, but I don't make a lot of big scenes so I should probably start being more conscious of the cost of my songs.
I really didnt go into it, but as far as I can tell, piano roll and a variety of different notes with different sounds is what gets you on gameplay with music. Check out ALAN_MANIAC. He does extratone stuff with tons of notes. He used to regularly max out on gameplay, and it looks like he's cut that 8 or 9 times in a lot of cases. Looks like he uses a lot of nested performances rather than setting notes one by one.
In case your curious, I just did some testing myself and it seems like the best way to reduce cost is to limit the amount of sound gadgets in the timeline. The best practice would be to use one gadget per unique instrument in the scene but this is somewhat inconvenient. The other main influence on gameplay thermo is unique instruments, but I don't feel like cutting much in that department.
Drawing notes on an instrument seems to have no effect on anything in the thermo so that's great news because I was often limiting myself because I thought looping would be more efficient. Now I can make every bar unique without worrying.
I wish there was a way for the gameplay memory that a song takes up to be shifted to audio memory. I can easily crack 10% gameplay on a song but I don't think I've ever exceeded 25% audio for anything. Edit: now that I think about it the simplest way would be to have the ability to consolidate/freeze like in any DAW.
Yeah, I'm not sure what happened with music, but its nigh impossible to have a game soundtrack without straight uploading it, which they've essentially outlawed at this point.
Yup, I started goofing around remixing a 4% gameplay track last night and I was horrified to find that my gameplay thermo jumped to 6% just by copying bits of the original! It's really dumb because gameplay thermo is so precious, so I really don't understand why the timelines for music don't use the audio thermo instead which is never going to be very full... hopefully MM find a way to rectify this irritating limitation!
As said above, having the ability to 'Mix-Down' the finished track so it just becomes pure audio in the scene would be the most logical solution!
@@atheistsw Kind of surprised this isnt in there or that I havent heard this idea before. Really, if you dont need to interact with music with logic, theres no reason for it to remain in a logically accessible form. I'm going to suggest this on the feedback form if it hasnt been suggested already.
@@atheistsw in a practical sense, you could make a separate scene that only plays the audio, let it play through, record it with the share button, load that video onto your phone/pc and import it in 15sec bits back into the game as recorded audio... maybe it can be made so that the cuts aren't noticeable? haven't played around with that yet.
I have thermo problems with my combo animations, I have 4 combos and split into two for each transformations, and each combo chip eats 8% of thermo, Is there any way around this?
Don't think so outside of using fewer keyframes.
@@LucidStew Well there goes my dream of making a hack and slash game, with dope combos at least
Das kewl......
Shared
Skip to 15 seconds how do you do that copy the block like that I don’t know how to do that
Make a clone like you normally would with L1+R2, but hold R2. tap right d-pad to make clones away from the clone and the original. tap left d-pad to make clones between the clone and the original. release R2 when you're done making clones.
Scientist!
I will accept this title.
This is too fricken complicated. I dont understand why the game cant process a few individual leaf sculpts on a ground, cloned a few times. Its preposterous.
if you're trying to do something like unique leaves, you'd be better off using paintings instead of sculpts.
@@LucidStew i dont understand why though. Ive seen so many creations in dreams that have much more going on visually than my game, and yet theirs works fine. I read somewhere that ungrouping objects after laying them out will reduce gameplay thermo. I tried it and of course it didnt work. Is there any way at all that I could make this work with the sculptures i already have?
@@mattdamsel2176 Because the scene sculpt limit is 10,000 and the painting fleck draw limit is about 3 million. Groups have a cost of about 1/2 a sculpt. If you've already made the things, the only way to reduce their cost is with the sculpture detail tool, and that's assuming that their sculpture data cost is lower than their shared memory cost. The key to getting more detail out of sculpts can be found here: th-cam.com/video/-Tkt80MQWl8/w-d-xo.html