Hello everyone,
It’s been a little while since the last update – I had quite a lot going on in real life and also I think I needed a little bit of a break from the project so I figured things would be alright for a little while until the gofundme neared the end of it’s run.
I have been spending some time going through the server engine code, reworking it and taking a critical look at how it is working, and today I deployed some architectural changes to the server that have eliminated the primary source of server-side frame skipping (you guys would see it as lag) tied directly to how many people are online, logging in or logging out at a given moment. In addition, I had a brainwave and have made some changes to how the lighting engine works on the client. You should see:
- No more lag when hundreds of players log in / out at once (i.e. after a server restart)
- No more lag when there are 500+ players online
- Much smoother performance in general when you are on a map with a lot of other players
- If you had low FPS in abyss and other maps with lots of light sources (lava), you should now have much better performance
I have identified another reasonably heavy architecture change that will speed things up even further, though this is going to take me a while to deliver. This is all of course still running on the original server hardware, I am going to be ordering the new machine tomorrow which will again significantly increase performance.
To celebrate this purchase I have activated 5 days of events. Egon has kindly expanded some of the hunting zones so everyone isn’t quite as squished, I am testing these now and will be releasing them during the week.
Thanks everyone!
Liam