Performance Improvements and High Roller Clothing Revealed
1.17.1: Performance Improvements
For the past few months we've
been running tests, adding logging, analysing data, going over client and server
logs and reviewing network latency reports, all in an attempt to find out what
the main causes of our performance bottlenecks are. Frustratingly, the
answer is not entirely straight forward (we can't just blame Howard the server
hamster, for example) as there are a range of potential issues in various areas
of the game that could be causing problems. There are, however, a few systems
that are primary candidates for potential performance hiccups. So - with 1.17.1,
we've made changes to some of these systems that we believe should make a
noticeable improvement to the game.
One of the primary candidates to optimize has been the garbage
collection system - this has nothing to do with the Green Planet trucks and
everything to do with how the game frees up memory by releasing objects no
longer required by the game.
To give you a more technical
overview of what we've done here, we're going to hand you over to the lead
engineer who has been spearheading the development effort to improve
performance, and has written an overview of the problems he's encountered and
how he's gone about addressing them.
Identifying Lag Spikes
We've been looking again at
server performance in 1.17.1 and have been analysing some of the spikes
reported in server log files.
A server ticks (updates) 25
times a second which gives it 0.04 seconds (40 milliseconds) to update the game
world. Every tick we measure the time taken and if this is over a threshold
then we have a spike (slow update) and we log additional information about the
causes of the spike.
Whether a spike affects your
experience of playing the game depends on many different factors. Some will be
noticed, others won't be, but the less spikes we have, the "cleaner"
the server is and the more predictable its performance will be.
The Two Primary Candidates
A game server needs to do
different amounts of work at different times, it does standard things all the
time; for example, moving characters, simulating physics, and sending network
traffic.
The server will often have to do
extra work, however, when a character enters a district, and during garbage
collection. I've been looking at these two cases.
Reducing Impact of Character Entry
When a
character enters a district, the district server needs to grab information from
the database and then initialise itself with this data. After observing that
this involved a lot of time reading files from disk (which is a slow process
because hard disks are often the slowest part of a computer system) I've been
able to reduce the impact on the server of reading these files.
Optimizing
Garbage Collection
Garbage
collection is the process which tidies up unused objects in memory. It
currently runs every minute, at 40 seconds past the minute, and runs in two
phases:
The
first phase is to identify which objects are no longer required. This needs to
be completed in one step, otherwise memory could change and its analysis will
be invalidated.
The
second phase is to tidy up the objects which are no longer required. This was
taking longer than was desirable.
For
some time now, we've been adding extra logging to provide more information
about the process of tidying up objects. From this logging I was able to
identify which sorts of objects take the most time to tidy up. In fact - one
type of object was taking up the majority of time. I've been able to rework
some code so these objects do not always need to be created in the first place.
Improving server performance is
an ongoing process, and there are still improvements we can make. We'll be continuing to work on
identifying the points on the server where spikes occur and figuring out new
ways to smooth these out.
High Roller: New Gear
Welcome to the first
teaser of the High Roller Pack! In this installment, we'd like to showcase the
new clothing items that come in the pack. As you can see from these pictures,
the clothes convey an element of professional deadliness; a mixture of style
and function.
First of all, we have some new
pieces of wearable equipment that will help players intimidate their enemies.
Enforcers will gain access to a vest with a multitude of spaces to store
shotgun shells, while Criminals will be able to adorn themselves with
bandoliers. Female characters will gain access to some very fashionable
threads, including an underbust laced corset, fashionable shorts, skinny glossy
pants and some high heeled ankle boots. Male characters will also be able to
equip some stylish new attire in the form of a bakerboy hat, a waistcoat/tie
& shirt combo, patched fashion jeans and a pair of very chic ankle boots.
Looking good has always been a
priority for the residents of San Paro, and the High Roller Pack will give
fashion-conscious players the chance to create trendsetting new outfits for
their characters.
Join us tomorrow, when we'll be
revealing the new shotgun and talking about the raft of balance changes we've
been making to shotguns in general!
-The Reloaded Team
