This issue has been driving me nuts. The problem: In matches with no players, my CPU and GPU are utilized more or less as expected and I get high framerates. However, in matches with players, CPU and GPU usage decreases and causes significant framerate drops. This should not happen. If anything, CPU and GPU usage should increase in order to maintain a decent framerate. In short, system resources are underutilized in matches with many players. Memory usage is not a problem. My specs: CPU: i5-6300HQ @ 2.30 GHz GPU 0: HD Graphics 530 GPU 1: GTX 960M, 2GB VRAM 32 GB RAM, Windows 10 TO client is set to run using GPU 1 Screenshots: Empty battle. FPS is ~400, CPU usage at ~70%, GPU 0 usage at ~75%, GPU 1 usage at ~35%: Battle with 29 players, same map, same spot on the map. FPS is ~100, CPU usage at ~55%, GPU 0 usage at ~20%, GPU 1 usage at ~15%.

Why is this sad?

After launching the client or exiting a battle dynamic shadows will be rendered even if they are turned off. To turn then off I need to enable shadows and then disable them again. Video:

TX failed for many reasons, and I would say the module system was not one of them. Perhaps the way in which modules were upgraded - via random container drops - was not good, but the system itself was not bad.

That's not what I mean. I mean that if you are matched with players who use their Zero Supply ODs selfishly while the enemy team works together and chains their ODs, you will get absolutely dominated. My point is that excessively rewarding teamwork doesn't make sense in a game where you can't choose your teams and in which players are not always motivated to win. Zero Supply gives too great a reward for too little teamwork. That's my main problem with it. As I said before, I don't want to lose horribly just because my teammates can't group up together and press a button while the other team can. I agree that teams should be evenly matched equipment-wise and that the current matchmaker is pretty terrible in this regard. But what is wrong with players having drones, ODs, and augments, so long as they are evenly matched? There is no issue if the players on both teams have drones and augments, and everyone has access to ODs. I would argue that this is still the case. In fact in my opinion there is no combo in the game that is unkillable, at least at higher ranks. The problems arise when there are multiple OP combos in a single match. When a group of players with OP equipment works together, then they are unstoppable. This is another reason as to why I am opposed to mechanics that give too great a reward for a small amount of teamwork. A few players that use meta combos that do not collaborate can still be dealt with. But if those same players teamed up with each other AND were rewarded with even greater power for doing so (for example, if they coordinated their Zero Supply activations), they would absolutely dominate. ODs that only benefit one player are better because they don't allow a group of players to become too powerful by working together. Yes. In my opinion TO is not a game about aiming or driving - that is, mechanical skill. It's not an extremely fast-paced twitchy shooter where you need split-second reaction times or good aim. Instead, it is about timing your abilities and activating them at the right time, countering your enemies' abilities, and building an equipment setup most relevant to the current situation. TO is more like an action RPG or even a turn-based game rather than a traditional shooter. You need to manage reload times, supply cooldowns, drone abilities, and ODs; and select equipment in order to best deal with the modules other players have, the map you are playing on, and the equipment setup of other players. ODs fit into this model very well. They add an extra layer of strategy to the game. You have to take into account the OD situation of the enemy team and your team and act accordingly. Prioritize killing Dictators. Bait Titans into using their ODs prematurely. If you under a Titan's dome and see an enemy Wasp coming your way, push it out of the dome, even if it means that you end up dying, so that the bomb blast doesn't kill your teammates. If an enemy Viking has activated OD and there is a group of your teammates who are at risk of getting destroyed, drive out into the Viking's line of fire. If an enemy Titan has used its dome and you are using Smoky, fire at it a few times even though it is invulnerable in order to increase your critical hit chance.

Yeah I think teachers should be armed. If they didn't have any arms they probably would have a hard time doing things.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I think that team-oriented ODs in general are bad for the game. It is impossible to force players to work as a team. Furthermore, you cannot choose who your teammates are. Introducing a mechanic that greatly rewards cooperation results in extremely lopsided matches. If your teammates cooperate, you will be able to exploit that mechanic to steamroll the other team. If the players on your team don't work together, your team will be steamrolled. It is possible to argue that that is how it should be - the more cohesive team should win. But by how large a margin? Giving a small reward for teamwork results in overall more competitive (and therefore more fun) matches, as the better organized team will have a smaller advantage. Giving an excessive reward for teamwork (such as Zero Supply) results in blowout matches, where the more organized team absolutely dominates the other. In a game where you cannot choose your teammates the former option is more desirable. I don't want to get obliterated just because my teammates can't group up together to press a button. ODs are now an integral game mechanic like any other. Strategically using your OD in my opinion is comparable to timing your shots, movement, etc.

The thing is supplies on their own do not last long - only 30 seconds. With an OD that duration is extended to 90 seconds. Currently the supply situation is tolerable because even though it is possible to activate multiple supplies relatively quickly in succession, that ability is balanced by having short supply durations. Thus not all players have multiple supplies active at all times. With Zero Supply one team was able to continually have all or most of their supplies active by chaining ODs while the other team was not able to destroy players fast enough in order to charge their ODs. This was a serious problem - I suggested introducing a cooldown on the Zero Supply OD at the time. Most liked it launch because it was novel mechanic. I remember voting that it was a great feature when it was first released, and then wishing it was gone a week later. The issue was that if you used the Zero Supply OD for yourself only, you would put your team at a disadvantage. At the time Zero Supply was released if the players on your team did not share their ODs you were more or less guaranteed to lose, because they would disrupt the positive feedback loop. At least with the current ODs, selfish activations don't cost the entire team that much. Also note that Dictator's OD charges the ODs of your teammates. So if that feature were to be kept, a team could have several ODs ready to go at any given moment. There were plenty of problems with the Zero Supply OD that were widely discussed when it was first released. While the current ODs are far from perfect, things back then weren't so rosy either.

In my opinion that would be much worse than the current OD system. Everyone in the match would have multiple supplies enabled almost always. ODs result in a positive feedback loop. Enabling OD allows you to easily gain kills or score, which charges your OD further, which allows you to enable it again, which allows you to get more kills, and so on. Currently, most ODs (save Dictator's) create a positive feedback loop that primarily only affects the user - for example Viking's OD. With Zero Supply, the positive feedback loop affected multiple players - everyone who received the effect of the OD, and not just the player who enabled it. This resulted in very lopsided battles where the team who activated their ODs first had an enormous advantage. The other team could not charge their ODs fast enough to respond and ended up getting wiped.

There is a Reload parameter on the Wiki, which gives the time between between consecutive shots in milliseconds. You can use it to calculate the rate of fire. The gyroscope effect was reduced when Vulcan was reworked, I believe.

The "Tanki is dying" posts strike back.

More info: AKD - Understanding the Dutch ‘lootbox’ judgment: Are all lootboxes now illegal in the Netherlands?

AP augments are probably at fault . . . they completely bypass all protections.

Afterburn is simply brutal in its current state. I also have Heat Resistance and find myself wishing for Heat Immunity all the time. In my opinion only Firebird should have the ability to deal the full 300 hp/s. Other turrets should deal perhaps half of that.

I did some more experimentation and I feel that I can conclusively say that the more players in a match, the lower GPU usage is, the lower the FPS. In empty matches I get 50-60% GPU usage and 300-400 FPS, in 16v16 GPU usage drops to less than 20% and I get 60-100 FPS, sometimes even lower. I found that another game suffers from a very similar problem, so I think this is a problem with TO, and not with my system or hardware. It is possible that the CPU actually is a bottleneck despite the low usage because only one or two cores are being fully utilized. I will do some more tests. Edit: I checked and all CPU cores are being used about equally. RAM and VRAM are also not the issue.

The fact that they are deciding not to remove containers suggests to me that these locales do not bring in enough revenue to justify going through the effort of removing them.

I have played many online games that were more demanding than TO and haven't had any issues.

My hardware is not particularly amazing for 2020, but for a game like TO it is more than enough. If you read the topic, you'll notice that my CPU and GPU are being underutilized. In matches with players, my GPU usage is less than 15%. There is plenty of power there that is going unused.

The thing is, I am using the discrete GPU. I've set TO to use it in both the Nvidia control panel and in the Windows graphics settings. Yet the game still underuses it.

I had FPS problems with Flash too, on the same hardware. And HTML5 has many times been advertised to support discrete graphics cards. I am using the HTML5 downloadable client, otherwise I would not be able to get 300 FPS. I have explicitly set TO to run using the discrete graphics card, which the developers have said numerous times should lead to better performance.

I have always found TO's performance rather questionable. It is rather inconsistent, and I have been able to run much more graphically advanced games at higher framerates. The 16v16 experiment dropped my framerate to very uncomfortable levels, so I have decided to conduct a very unscientific experiment regarding game performance. I ran TO using the HTML5 client at approximately 990x1920 resolution, with skybox, dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, dust, soft particles, sprites for bushes, and uncapped FPS. I could have gone further with the graphics settings but I don't think it would have mattered much. My setup was as follows: CPU: i5-6300HQ @ 2.30GHz Integrated GPU (GPU 0): HD Graphics 530 Discrete GPU (GPU 1): GTX960M, 2GB 32 GB RAM TO was set to run using the discrete GPU at the maximum performance power setting. I first drove around an empty Silence map in parkour mode. The results were as follows: FPS: ~350 CPU: ~50% GPU 0: ~60% GPU 1: ~50% It is interesting that even though the game was set to run using the discrete GPU, the integrated GPU still ended up working more. But OK, let's move on to further tests. I then joined a parkour match with 18 players, also on Silence, in parkour mode. FPS: 60-80 CPU: ~50% GPU 0: 10-15% GPU 1: 10-15% Now this is strange. I expected an FPS drop because of the players in the battle. But I did not expect an FPS drop from 300+ to less than 100. On top of that, GPU usage decreased substantially. There was more than enough GPU power left to run the game at a higher framerate. Why was it not being used? Perhaps the CPU was the bottleneck? But even then CPU usage was only at 50%. These results were baffling. I stayed in the Silence parkour match, and mine wars broke out. Mines were spammed all over the map. FPS: ~30 CPU: ~40% GPU 0: ~10% GPU 1: < 10% FPS fell again, but so did CPU and GPU usage. Again, there should have been enough power to raise FPS - combined GPU usage did not exceed 20%! To get away from the madness I made an empty Kungur match. FPS: 300-360 CPU: 65% GPU 0: 50% GPU 1: 50% Then I joined a Kungur match with 10 players: FPS: 170-230 CPU: 50-60% GPU 0: 30% GPU 1: 35% Conclusions: Despite being set to use the discrete GPU, TO ends up splitting the load between the integrated and discrete GPUs anyway. TO does not use GPU resources to their full potential. This is evidenced by low framerates accompanied by low GPU usage. In high stress situations, TO should ideally increase GPU usage to cope with the load, but for some reason it decreases it. Note that the CPU is not a bottleneck - it sits only at around 50% usage. This is latter phenomenon is very frustrating. My system clearly has enough resources to handle matches with many players, given how low the GPU usage becomes in those scenario, but they are not being used. My FPS drops significantly in battles with many players, not because my hardware can't keep up, but because for some reason TO decides not to use it. Perhaps there are other factors I am not taking into account, like memory usage. I might do a more detailed and comprehensive test later. Regardless, these results are very disappointing and confusing. With the hardware I have TO should run without any problems. Has anyone else experienced something similar, or perhaps found a solution?

Features Flash had that HTML5 does not: Deep shadows (aka SSAO or contact shadows) Proper dynamic lighting (emitted from shots, drop boxes, flags, capture points, and rugby balls) Fog Decals (marks on props from shots) Bush sprites that received and cast shadows, and had semi-transparent edges (HTML5 uses a cutout shader) Features HTML5 has that Flash did not: Anisotropic filtering 3D bushes For a few months HTML5 featured baked lighting on a couple of maps, but that has since been removed I really wish HTML5's graphics would be brought up to at least the same standard as Flash, especially given that it's 2020. Adding something as simple as fog would not take much development time but would improve the overall image drastically.

All you have to do is change the minimum rank . . . then you will be able to set Legend as the maximum rank.

I used to use keyboard controls, and now use mouse controls, which I think are superior. The only situation in which keyboard players might have an edge is when playing turrets with a high rate of fire like Striker and Smoky at long ranges. In this situation you need to make a lot of small adjustments in a short period of time to hit shots immediately after reloading and keyboard controls are better at those fine adjustments.

Most of this is tangential to the matter at hand. Can you deny that TO mobile was an opportunity to gain players and revenue, regardless of what happened afterwards and regardless of whether things happened as you claim? It would tap into a market that was previously untouched by TO, and target a playerbase that would likely have lower standards for online games, than say, PC users. PC arcade shooters are a dying genre. Tanki X was an attempt to modernize and refine the TO model - and while in my opinion it succeeded in this goal, it failed as a game anyway. On mobile things are a different story. The developers see more potential in TO as a mobile game than as a browser game. And to address your claims, how do you know that TO mobile hasn't gained players and revenue? Perhaps if it were not for the mobile version TO would have lost all its players and died already. How do you know that it is updates that have caused a decline in players? Do you know whether new player retention is lower than it was before? It is true that player count has declined since 2015. But I would not be so quick to point to a specific reason as to why. Players who started playing the game after the Mk conversion should not have GS scores near yours. Note how you are an outlier - the majority of players in the battle have GS in the 3500-5500 range, while you have 7500. Most battles you join look like this because you are the exception rather than the rule. You were one of the people who greatly benefitted from the Mk conversion because you had a full upgraded M2 hull which was converted into a Mk7. Judging by their GS, most other players have Mk5 and Mk6 equipment, which is exactly what they should have at their ranks. The conversion from M to Mk was certainly botched, resulting in players like you who ended up with better equipment than they should have had, but the progression system for players who started playing after the conversion improved. The situation before Mk was worse. Take Viking for example, the M2 modification of which unlocked at Lieutenant Colonel. Viking M1 unlocked all the way back at Warrant Officer 4. The rank difference was enormous. Buyers could MU their Viking M1 and have arguably the best M2 medium hull at the time at WO4. If you were not a buyer, you either had to invest in MUs, which was a slow process and limited how much you could take advantage of sales, buy a different M2 medium to bridge the gap (I bought Dictator M2 for example), or be severely underpowered. The Mk system fixed all of these problems. Buyers cannot gain an extreme equipment advantage through MUs, there is no need to MU equipment except at Mk7, and you don't need to buy another piece of equipment to hold yourself over while you wait for the next modification of your desired hull or turret because the difference between unlock ranks is smaller.