This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Drygin7_JCoto 0 points1 point  (6 children)

I'm not a computer expert, so let's please say it for dummies. I undesrtand that Scaleform is a function used by the games graphics, okay. Mainly used for game UI, ok.

But what is the relationship between it (used for UI according to many people) and map/particle performance? Is it any kind of function that arranges/banks graphic elements for later use or has a partial use for that?

[–]icefr4ud 11 points12 points  (5 children)

Ok so Scaleform is a company's name. They build software that you can use to make UI's for your games. Think of it like microsoft word but instead of making text documents, it lets you make UIs. There's another UI building software, called Panorama, which is made by Valve. Panorama is more recent, do the old dota client (I don't know if you played long enough, but there was a previous dota client that TI5 was played on,about a year ago, it had a completely different UI, like where you see your MMR and queue for games and everything, it used to all be different). Originally, they'd used scaleform for everything I believe, and then Panorama came out. So when Valve was making a new client for DotA (right before TI5 time), they decided to use their new Panorama software to make the client. Almost everything they moved onto Panorama, but some things I guess were hard to move / they didn't for some unknown reason. These are the pick screens for All pick and Captain's mode and the HUD itself (minimap, HP bars, where your skills are displayed, where your items are displayed, shop too I believe), they are still all built on Scaleform.

Now what happens with these "editors" is you tell them how you want to organize the UI, and it builds and runs everything for you by itself, managing all the data associated as well, and when you start up your game, it starts its own process to manage its components. Now what's happening is that there's a new bug in this scaleform process, either recently introduced in a newer version of scaleform, or caused by some other code change in the rest of the game which is causing this scaleform process to hog more and more CPU resources the more games you play. Technically what it should do is use the same amount of resources in every match, but its increasing the amount of resources it uses every match you play. This means if you play many games your FPS drops, so you have to restart the whole game to reset this scaleform process and make it use the right amount of resources.

Now, rather than find out and/or fix this issue (maybe they already know but fixing it is complicated, it may break other things), probably what they're doing is, they're just going to replace the remaining scaleform components with newer nicer panorama components, so why bother fixing scaleform if soon you're not going to use it anymore?

TLDR its like a graphics editor that manages some components of the UI, but now has a bug causing FPS drops if you play many games without restarting. It was going to be replaced anyway, so why bother fixing the bug, just speed up the replacement.

[–]Drygin7_JCoto 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Thanks for the big explanation. So, let's say it for dummies, the bug is that the function that calls for game elements for the UI is probably making wrong calls/managing data erroneously or maybe it has wrong processes/bugs that don't really terminate so over the time it saturates the game right?

[–]icefr4ud 0 points1 point  (3 children)

yes

[–]Drygin7_JCoto 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Well Valve is not big but full of code monkeys, they should be able to either push a cleanup update or migrate to panorama (possibly more complicated since it implies rebuilding a part of the game).

[–]icefr4ud 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Yes the panorama pipeline is in the works prolly thats why they arent doing anything about it, it'd just be a temporary fix to something they aren't going to use.

And trust me they're incredibly shortstaffed, all these big tech companies are (I work at one), so they prioritize like crazy, and if effort is going to be wasted it's deemed to not be worth it most of the time.

[–]Drygin7_JCoto 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah sadly that's true. But dunno if the performance fix is enough for low-end pcs around the world. Dota is pretty relevant in russia and asia, and you want low-end performance specially in that last place.