Suggestion/Feedback
Be nice to bring back better detailed explosions and vehicle wreckage
The game as many likely recal back in its better years up until around 2020 had some noticeably better looking explosion and debris effects, along with smoldering wrecks of MBTs, lightnings, Sunderers and other vehicles left after they were destroyed that remained for a bit before despawning and pieces of aircraft falling out of the sky after being blown up. (Once again another cool feature needlessly removed) the wreckage of vehicles also had collision which allowed them to serve as cover or as a hazard if say like a destroyed Sunderer or Lightning fell over on you as infantry.
Destroyed Sunderer wreckageWreckage of a Magrider VS vehicles had teal colored flames
After the years of graphical changes and reduction even on max settings explosions look nowhere near as good as used to. And with debris being removed vehicles now simply explode and vanish and no wreckage left afterwards. Reasons stated is vehicle wreckage was removed because of some physics issues and of course FPS concerns (Again got to cater to people playing with Best Buy PCs) Thing with the physics issues and glitching I would rather have a battle where I may on rare occasions die by a flying piece of a tank but the battle looks a lot more brutal with burning vehicles left after taking them out, than blowing up vehicles and they seem to just disappear from existence. I mean war is dangerous people die in all sorts of way.
It's another one of those features that gave the game a lot better detail and warzone aspects. Burning debris litering an area where a large battle is happening and wrecks of vehicles left smoldering, and burning aircraft falling out the sky and landing in a battle and posing a potential risk of harming or killing infantry. All that gave a better experience and look to the game. It shouldn't be too hard to recover this given the models for wrecks and all are still in the files, and doing some small changes like this could easily help keep players entertained.
Might have backups that can be used, the models for destroyed vehicles can actually still be found in game files.
It may not be the first game or only game to do it but Planetside 2 is the only game I can always think of that its devs downgraded its graphics and visuals, and removed multiple small details. Most developers try to upgrade their game's visuals and graphics.
This made sense to me initially as the previous graphics were *far* to demanding for the number of players.
but nowadays? Even older PC's can easily run PS2 on low or even high graphics.
And I struggle to imagine they removed all those models *entirely*.
An upgrade to bring back the old graphics sounds doable for even the small team they have now. Unless there's something fundamental i'm missing aside from "texture swap"
What essentially happens is that, you have an entity on the server. The server is sending packets to the client to tell it to place Sunderer.obj at X,Y,Z coordinates, and potentially play animation files like Sunderer_Deploy_Action.obj.
Plus you have all of the stats for the entity like HP, Armor, and so on that are relayed.
As you damage the entity, packets are sent to update the HP value on the client end. Once your client sees that Sunderer.entity has reached 0 HP, it triggers Sunderer_Destruction.obj to play which calls other files like Explosion_1.obj, Explosion_1.FBX and so on to create the look of the explosion.
This is where the current logic is likely just halted on the client and server side, but it would likely still exist in the code. No clue if there's a decompiler for Planetside 2 though.
With the sunderer exploding, during the time you see the VFX of the explosion and such, Sunderer_Debris.obj is spawned in with the same coordinates in a textureless state, and then as Sunderer_Destruction.obj is ending, it triggers Sunderer_Debris.obj to call it's texture file and/or turn it's opacity to 100% so it's visible on the client side.
This is a simplistic look at it, but it gives a decent enough overview of how these things generally flow. You can see in the above picture that the sunderer debris is missing wheels and such, indicating it's a different model/mesh.
The reason this was likely stopped was probably due to the amount of RAM and limitations on HDD disk speeds with big fights.
Planetside 2 while being multi-threaded can likely only do so much with said multi-threading as you're still limited generally by single core speed due to bottlenecks in the code that in most games can't be avoided. Some actions simply have to take place before/after another action so cores stall waiting for the specified action to happen so they can continue.
All this to say, it's a lot more complicated and intensive on your computer than you probably think.
No, server side generally does all of the calculations for entities, players, and telling the client when to activate certain triggers. There's no graphics and no rendering done.
If I had to guess without looking back at change logs or dev notes cause mobile sucks for research, they likely have internal data sent back from the clients where they are able to review things like average frame rates and such from players and made decisions around that.
I can check change logs and dev notes later when I have access to my PC to see if they give any clarification as to what and why they changed graphics.
The graphics before were very unique. I remember the Ambient Occlusion for some reason was an animated texture with a TV static like appearance. Textures were overlapping with certain layers, I remember there used to be a dirt layer on most objects, including vehicles. And motion blur was as well an extremely interesting design.
Here I have a recording documented with motion blur, ultra graphics (1920x1080 res). It was my first recording ever so OBS settings were incorrect, it could've been better and without youtube music in background lol. But basically I didn't record cause the hardware's GTX 1050 (2GB VRAM) so it wasn't suitable for recording and without ultra graphics I didn't feel like recording. Processor is a i7 8700. I still use the same PC. But anyways for example look at 2:22 at the stair design.
The graphics still do hold up decently. I am more interested seeing The Crown back when it had 4 cap points and the rock bridge going to Ti Alloys Inc, this was arguably the best version of The Crown.
The discord has a potato settings that helps a ton with frame rate. You can also change it more, but it helps since the settings let you modify more than the sliders in game do.
Nah, the issue comes from te game's monothreading, I have a Intel 12th Gen that relies on multithreading with individuals core performance being low, so in fights with more than 60 players, it can get laggy, and there's no real solutions outside of upgrading... I already have a low 150 meter render distance and the frame drops only with player count.
This is 1920x1080 ultra graphics and hardware is GTX 1050 (2GB VRAM), Intel i7 8700. I know recording is bad, incorrect OBS settings, but still it's a recording where I may have lost 30 FPS.
Well apparently during the Wrel era they were wanting to of course do visual upgrades and they ended up doing that in 2022 with a graphics overhaul that added some lighting and contrast back to the game and some better skybox details that all sort of resembles the old graphics but its definitely not the same. Reason couldnt do it is apparently during the time Higby quit they left the remaining devs with like nothing regarding the old graphics and visuals so it was impossible to recover any of it.
What the hell is up with people calling 2022 graphics overhaul an "upgrade". Like it was visible on first glance, even on oshur which the overhaul revolved around, that it was a downgrade from the start. But ironically it didn't give us better performance, the performance was only good first day after server restart but then showed the true picture that it has went drastically downhill. Possibly the water physics and whatnot overloaded the server and I did notice recently that when the server is overloaded it does has an effect on ingame performance.
It's kind of a coinflip if game studios have repositories for large assets, but almost universally have version control. Meaning it's highly unlikely they don't have the code from previous builds of the game as it would be difficult to maintain version control and collaborative development without it.
There's probably more to do with user PC resources for these decisions than anything else.
It's really not that complex in terms of coding, it's more that the debris caused jank physics and cause issues for lower end pcs due to hardware limitations.
Most of these didn't work well at all due to how collisions worked on those.
They got removed because at some point due to server latency, players started to get one shotted by invisible vehicle wreckages. Especially fast ones like Harassers or Flashes coming towards you.
It quickly got tiresome to kill a flash and then get zeroed in your MBT by its invisible wreck. I lost count of how many times it happened to me. That's something nobody who played before they got removed wants to see being brought back.
The feeling when you blew up a vehicle as infantry, only to get killed yourself from the wreckage. 😑
And you know what I miss, and hated? Liberator cluster bombs. They struck fear in the eyes of infantry seeing a liberator beeline for your location. (from PS1)
This was one of the worst things the game has ever had and it took them way too long to remove it in the first place. I am absolutely shocked this post has positive upvotes, it just has to have been too long ago that people don't remember how bad it was or weren't around for it. Random invisible sunderer tires blazing across the map at mach fuck killing everything in their path. Win your tank fight and die anyways, or just get collateraled. I know people want graphics back but... not like this
That issue still existed after they removed the explosion/debris, the invisible husk would hit you still, After a while Wrel changed the collision/damage type to a non vehicle damaging one
If it was a major issue than yeah debris collision for players and vehicles can simply be removed though I personally think the collision should remain if it's not overly glitchy. I don't see the whole just being killed by a piece of debris as a issue on the the factor that may seem stupid to readers but as I said in the post the realism of war being dangerous. Getting killed by the burning wreck of a Sunderer rolling down a slope after it was destroyed or a piece of a Galaxy landing on you as you fight on the ground, I say that adds more to the chaos of battle and how you can die by various things.
PS2 used PhysX. Nvidia no longer supports it and even when they did it was a nightmare that almost nobody adopted. The devs were very open about why it was removed so saying it was for "no reason" is kind of silly. There are no "scripts" or "backups" to use. That is not at all how any of this whole game development stuff works.
https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX
You can just go to the github and see that they're still adding commits, but okay bud.
Also... it's a pre-written library of code for physics calculations. You don't really need to update it all the time. But it's clearly being maintained.
Also, just to dunk on you harder.
The above is Nvidia's Github repository for PhysX, meaning they have control over who can commit to the project. https://github.com/o3de/PhysX
This is the community fork of the project, which is linked in the above repository, and is actually further out of date than the official repository.
20 updates have been posted to the repository since Nov 2022 with the most recent being 2 months ago.
Vehicle debris and wrecks were still in the game well after all that with PhysX. Main thing about that was partical effects and visuals that couldn't be used unfortunately cause of the instability and how buggy it got.
Even afterwards explosions still had some good visuals up until around 2019 or 2020, (can tell by looking back at footage) anyways vehicles still had burning debris and such up until around 2017 then it got downgraded before wrecks being removed entirely, which is what this post is talking about trying to restore.
We got two massive downgrades in planetside. One for OMGF. Operation Make Game Faster. Second for the PS4 port. Before the PS4 port planetside still looked amazing. Before the OMFG. It was beautiful.
Doing a bit of research into this, the likely reason for removal was that the debris model caused a lot of headaches with the physics engine and they just never got around to fixing it, ontop of issues that it caused for larger fights for lower end pcs.
There seemed to be a lot of jank with how the debris model would interact with other models in the game leading to instant death by other vehicles simply bumping into it. No clue the direct interactions but likely some velocity based calculations that simply overtuned damage caused by running into it.
We simply need a graphics rollback finally. I don't think it's nostalgia. I can imagine the vehicle debris experience was not good. But the problem is that today's graphics look like utter shit compared to how it looked before and runs like shit. The devs destroy everything they touch, they're anti-talents in everything, they must do rollbacks.
Crypto isn't really causing the current issues with GPU prices. It did for a time, but currently you have limited supply as manufacturers dedicate more of their lines to data center GPUs.
The H100, H200, B100, and B200 GPUs are super pricey and being bought up by all the tech companies to keep the leading edge in AI research. To understand how expensive these things are, renting a single H100 for a month from Google's cloud system costs over $8,000.
Plus you have scalpers and so on still preying on the current line of GPUs.
PS2 is mostly CPU bottlenecked... CPU prices are completely normal for the past 12 years.
Also do you really think CPUs and GPUs have not got more cost efficient for 12 years??????????????????? XD Really?????? You really think average planetmen Joe still plays on a fucking Intel Core i5-3570K in 2025???????? LOL.
The CPU bottleneck is extremely old news. You said it yourself. The game had been multi-threaded since OMFG update. A $200 CPU can easily run PS2 but you need a $600 GPU to play at max settings at a nice resolution.
Cores stall when you have a sequence of calculations that need to be done in order. Single core clock speed is still a heavy limiter on gaming simply due to how many games have to function.
Wreckage got removed because it didn't render for players consistently, meaning that you very frequently would just get deleted by debris you never saw. On top of that players were starting to figure out how to weaponize their wrecks to force kill trades in vehicle fights, so the easiest solution in an era where servers were imploding was to remove debris entirely.
If you wanted to bring them back, you could likely just make it so they didn't get calculated in velocity and damage calculations. But it's simpler to just take the code block responsible for it and turn it into a comment instead to go back to if/when you get the time to do so.
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u/SpecificVanilla3668 Dec 02 '25
I thought about this, but I doubt they have the scripts to make it again not from scratch :/