Questions about performance

@Jip In https://replay.faforever.com/15287785 , somebody said that the explosions from UEF T2 Destroyer shots looked like the ones from a battleship. Might apply to UEF T2 PD, too.

Yes - that is part of the change by @keyser if I am correct. It is intended, to give the unit more 'wow'.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I didn't change the explosion fx, just the decals

🤔

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I'll look into that too tonight 🙂 .

On another note: a milestone! The benchmark map that we'll use is made by Marlo and has recently been finished! You can find the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-F_-HXgO_M

The trailer was made on the regular branch. As you can see the game starts to stutter more and more as it continuous. Our job is done when we can record this trailer with no stutters at all.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Upcoming Sunday (yes - it got moved slightly) the new patch will be live! This means that we're merging the develop branch with the standard branch that everyone plays by default, including ladder.

Soon after new PRs will merge into the develop branch with more optimizations and features. You can read up about some of them in this post or by checking the pull requests on Github. Please keep playing the develop branch as it provides us with important feedback on whether the changes help and are appreciated in general. It is a solid approach to contributing to FAF while literally just playing the game and reporting back.

As an example, with thanks to @WhenDayBreaks and @snagglefox some critical errors were found and fixed, including a few that were present in the standard branch too. The ping-preventing code got re-implemented and is now the same as you had before, but without the ability to abuse it in the name of someone else as easily. I can keep going with examples - know that your feedback is appreciated and I hope you all keep them coming in the future.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

And with the patch live we continue: debris is now significantly cheaper on the sim and available on FAF develop. Up to the degree that they have essentially no impact on it anymore! This should speed up the game during battles as that is when a lot of debris is made in general. See also this pull request for more information.

Overall - please keep playing FAF Develop as you have done previously. The input you provide is appreciated and is important to us and for us to make sure everything is stable.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Thanks to the whole team for all the work on this!

@jip Today #15350662 enemy GC dies leaves no reclaim
#15351245 game hard crashed for me, not even control alt delete or alt f4 worked

i'm pushing an hotfix rn to fix the GC not dying

@kdrafa91 Thank you for reporting it - it is fixed!

About the hard crash - can you describe what you were doing right before?

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip selecting units, drag selecting

Do you have the exception code? And a game log?

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip well the game just completely froze my windows i had to press the turn off botton and i dont know how to get the game log.

@jip game_15351245.log that´s a lot of text how do i send to you? email?

You can find me on Discord.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I am running a test game next Saturday the 25th 20:00 GMT +2. I am looking for volunteers to help with this. The game should be balanced: it should represent a typical seton game that slows down at some point. Please contact me on Discord if you have time and interest in joining in. I suspect the minimal rating will be about 1200+ as the game needs to be balanceable.

The aim of the session is to:

  • Attach the profiler to the game - this requires a sim mod to function properly. Therefore the game will be unranked. With this data I can view what happens throughout the game and how often certain functions are called. This will help us focus our attention to the things that matter most.
  • CTRL + K everything right before the game ends to see if there is any memory / performance leaking happening.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip if I’m in town and online I’ll help with this

@Exselsior thank you for the heads up, I'm afraid I have to cancel it however. There are quite a few issues with the patch that require a hotfix but are not easy to solve. Among them, why games are unranked and the cause of a significant increase of hard-crashes. I need this weekend to try and fix it and aim for a hotfix on Monday.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

With the initial version of the profiler merged into FAF Develop I am re-announcing running a few test games to find out where the simulation hurts the most. I need your help for that - please respond below with your Discord name if I can ping you for help. The aim is to do one game tomorrow at around the same time of this message (12:00 GMT + 1), this has a short deadline because there is a game-dev session tomorrow evening and I'd like to discuss the initial results there. Throughout the next weeks I'll have more events planned.

With this information we can finally compare our results with that of LOUD. And with that comparison we can start sniping performance obstacles, similar to how you would snipe a commander in-game.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned