Hi all,
I wanted to give you an update on our latest progress, and what we have done in the past weeks / days, from the technical side. Obviously we have also worked on game balance, feature polish, and exciting new free content.
As I told you the last time, we have prioritized our technical work following these rules:
- Make sure everyone can run the game
- Remove any experience breaking issues
- Improve performance
We have solved most graphics cards / drivers / configuration issues of point 1. The only issue which remains concerns some crashes at launch due to outdated video codec files (and especially a 2012-old version). Affected users can fix the issue by updating their video codecs. We are nonetheless trying to display an error message to explain to the user what they have to do, instead of browsing the G2G/Steam forums.
Regarding point 2, this has been our priority over the past few days, working on the hanging end turn and multiplayer desync bugs. There was one last instance of the hanging end turn bug caused by a repeating ground battle. We analyzed your saved games (thanks for that!), but the trick was that the source of this problem was probably generated a few turns before. We have pinpointed the source of the problem and put a fix in place, and so far it seems the issue has stopped emerging.
As far as multiplayer is concerned, we have doubled our efforts to test game sessions with high number of players and higher stress (joining and quitting). We have fixed some visibility sync issues with a fresh architecture, addressed several join/quit issues which caused the game simulation to go awry, and generally improved the stability of multiplayer sessions towards desyncs. There are still some instances where the game can desync, and we will be working on these in the coming days.
We have prepared a preview version of this patch for you to test (the one we were testing internally). Once we are confident there are no regressions / major issues, we will push it out to the whole community, possibly as early next week. It is available here.
Regarding point 3, we have already started working on it, and specifically on turn ~150 situations, where input lag spikes can be experienced. We have worked on the following aspects:
- Optimized the visibility computation algorithm: each fleet has to compute its visibility, and the total can be very expensive.
- Added a simplified battle resolution: when an AI fights another AI or pirates, it will use a simplified algorithm, which is almost seamless in terms of performance. We now need tune it so that the result is close to identical to a full-fledged battle.
- AI orders: when an AI interacts with the game, the execution of its orders can cause complex simulation computations, and well as expensive memory allocations. We are still investigating this issue and trying different optimization methods.
- Network communication: the C# code used to pack orders for the multiplayer was actually quite memory-greedy, making input lags worse on multiplayer because it was adding an extra layer of computation / memory consumption. We have replaced it with a faster algorithm.
- Optimized the influence area (the star system circles) computation code, which could slow down computers with weaker graphic cards.
- The AI performance has also been greatly improved, by a factor of 8 in some situations.
As you can see we are working on different fronts, and we now need to gather the pieces and start testing this patch (which will be delivered after the stability/multiplayer patch). We do not want to reproduce the hasty patch (1.05) situation by going too fast, so we will need a full week of internal testing / regression tests before we deliver a preview of this patch. We will keep you updated when we are confident this patch is ready for public testing.
Thanks for your attention!