Forecast Released

Forecast is moving out of beta and is now available to Bestling and Fledgling subscribers. The automatic fog detection is now substantially faster and handles many more edge cases for better results.

We have completely re-written almost all parts of the forecast computer vision pipeline to make it much more reliable.

The first big improvement is a new room graph architecture. With this we now work out all the walls of a building in its entirety instead of treating each room as an individual piece.

This allows us to better support more complex structures like ships and odd angled walls. Below is an example of this with a ship map from Moonlight Maps. On the left each room is an individual shape whereas on the right there is a cohesive outer shell that extends across rooms.

Next we’ve rebuilt our underlying feature detectors to better understand a larger variety of maps. Below is an example of this in action with a black and white map from Dyson Logos. On the left you can see how much of the walls bleed into the background and on the right the outlines are a lot more stable.

Our simplification algorithm has also been rebuilt to better work with long rectilinear chains such as mazes. Below you can see this map (also from Dyson Logos) has much better adherence to the walls of the maze.

We have also fixed a great many of the artefacts we were seeing in the beta. One of the most annoying was the double wall artefact which nested a building in multiple walls. Below you can see this is now fixed, and we also show the greater detection capability by fully realising the cave.

Along with these better visual results the processing time for Forecast results should be faster and much more reliable. From the start Forecast was built to run on a powerful GPU which allowed us to get blisteringly fast results. With this we were able to see results in under a second in our testing. However during the beta you may have noticed that sometimes it takes upwards of 60 seconds to get a result.

This was unacceptable for us and after some diving into what was causing this slow down we found it was something out of our control. It turns out that almost all that time was actually us waiting for a GPU to be available for our work to run. The demand for GPUs in the cloud is so high right now that at our scale we can’t really get them at a price that would allow us to offer Forecast to as many people as we wanted.

A large part of why Forecast took so long to come out of beta is because we actually re-wrote the whole thing to run on the CPU. After months of effort to get it as fast as we could our initial tests show that the new CPU version runs in as little as 2 seconds. Since there is a lot more CPU capacity the variance is a lot less and it’s cheaper which is why we can now offer Forecast to our Bestling and Fledgling subscribers.

When you combine the new Forecast, our reworked fog cleanup tools and our map alignment tool it now takes no time at all to go from finding a map to running a game.