Feedback stress test town Ravensend

The test is over so now it is time to collect your impressions on loading issues and other problems that might have occured when you visited the town.

Some stats for you:

• we claimed all 39 lots
• I think we managed to fill around 35 to the limit
• I guess we filled around 16,000 items in this town.

I personally had some issues on sunday, the day when we reached the peak of items, but they wre gone after one lot was wiped by the devs so it could be a problem of the used items on this lot. During the chess event it got a little bit laggy but I could bring it back to a normal state when I switched of the shadows and set my graphics to medium. To much torches so close together.

From the layout of Ravensend there is a lot which has no connection to any road. I had to set out a bounty so someone else could find it for me. That should be changed to make this specific lot more attractive.

It seems there is a global light limit for the town which doesn't allow that each lot can use his personal light limit. This should be changed and for the time being it should bring up a message. I was the whole time wondering why I could only place 4 light sources on my town lot and didn't get a message ragarding the 5th light which didn't want to be placed. It took a while to figure out with the other helpers, that this was the cause.

We found many other bugs during the test, but they are not related to performance or item limit.

I would like call out to all visitors and inhabitants to write down there performance experience of Ravensend here so we could start a discussion about raising the limits. My personal suggestion is, that we on the one hand raise the item limit so, that village lot stays with 400 items ( I think more than enough especially when you have an house on it) and then double the limit like the size of the lot. So town lot gets now 800 instead of 700 items and ongoing. The second thing is a raise of the light limits. First the town wide limit and then the lot limit. We don't really need more items if we can't put them in the right atmosphere.

 

Besides the stress testing, you (plural to all builders there) manage to come up with some awesome ideas and designs. Thanks for the inspiration!

 

I fully expected to have a lot of trouble loading this scene and was pleasantly surprised when I had no problem at all.
Walking through the decorated lots made the screen stutter a bit, but nothing was crippling me.
With the chess event, again I had no trouble. Didn't disconnect once. Granted I was in one place the whole time, but I was pleased none the less.

 

Well, the scene was working fast as a charm, no issues with the exception of the chess event.

I think that Village lot could use more than 400 items, I think that ideal would be around 1000 (2000 for Town and so on). The most important thing is to have way more lights on lots. I think perhaps 12 or 16 on Village lot, 24-32 on Town and so on. Also light sources might be bit sronger and lit larger area. I would like to see Light limit increased sooner than the item limit.

Only issues I experienced were during chess event with 40+ people (maybe 50?) on fully decorated lot, many of them used torches. People did not crash there though, it was not easy to move precisely though. I hope that Devs have data for what was causing performance to drop down and optimize things if possible, but I think the issues were related to too many avatars in one scene rather than decorations, I have experienced similar issues at Fire Lotus party.

 

I think it worked well over expectations. I was running a fastish rig though, so I wouldn't necessarily be the norm.

I had very rarely any load issues and the ones I did was when there were lots of players there - not when running solo.

The load issues that I had was rather from the devs not having LODs in yet - so sometimes you'd run towards a lot and its items wouldn't load until you were really close - then poof you'd have lots of items in your way. Or when zone-ing to the chess event you could walk around for about 20-30s before the items would load - so there would be lots of floating people running around and one could simply walk through the non-existant walls. Halfway through the event I even saw someone get stuck inside some of the walls built as stands - took a screenie of the poor person, must have been a total suprise when caught by the suddenly appearing walls...
That will be gone later when they have added the LODs etc and when zone-ing is restricted to GMs.

My biggest issue with the limits got to be with the light restrictions. I wonder if one could make a strong/weak light distinction feature? That way only strong lights would be visible from more than a few meters and would have the current limit, but weak lights could be placed more abundantly.
I mean at the moment you couldn't really create a copy of the Ardoris/Owl's Head crafting pavillions due to the lights limit, something which I think lots of people are planning. Well unless they remove the lights from them.


Outside of the stress test itself.
Found a handful of bugs related to decoration, about what I was expecting from a pre-alpha. Had a lot of problems with the bucket issue (would have been so much better if that was actually an insect so that anyone can see that it is a bug).
Found a lot of issues with the assets though. Sizes, place-on-top or not, transperancies, skins, models, etc. Then that you don't know which type it is when you purchase it, like some sausages were table decoration others were wall decorations. Don't know how to report such things effectively though and we don't know which items are considered "finished" or which are just "alpha" or even "placeholder". Maybe we should do a community thing for R13 where we gather such input from all the top decorators on as many assets as possible and put into a single doc with things comfirmed by more than 1 player - so that it is much more manageable from the dev point of view. I have some brainstorm ideas if that sounds like something people would be a good idea.

 

Hallo Riya,
ich hatte keine Probleme auf meinem Hausplatz (trotz Keller, 6 Lichtern und 0 Items frei), in Ravensend.
Ich spielte mit minimalen Einstellungen auf 32 bit im Multi-Player.
Laggy wurde es bei mir immer nur ganz kurz (Sekundenbruchteil).

Edit:
Mein PC...

DELL Optiplex 755
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
NVIDIA GeForce GT 610
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz
1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (59Hz)
RAM 4GB

 

I haven't heard of or seen any reports of anyone crashing while trying to load this scene, even with all the lots decorated. The scene did seem to load slower for me (about 25 seconds). And it takes about 7-8 seconds for a fully decorated lot to load if you /zone directly there rather than allow the game client to stream it in as you approach it.

I induced this effect and made a video of it here:



Given that we will get further optimizations to level loading, the way objects are streamed in, etc., I think we can propose that exterior/interior lot limits can be raised beyond what they are now.

The Row House I decorated felt very empty even at its max limit. I could have easily decorated 5x more items to make it feel lived in.

 

I know Ravensend had more visitors than comments here. It is for more lights and items. Please give your feedback.

 

Found some decorating bugs. Sometimes the cursor would stop glowing green. Other times the game would stop allowing me to put items on top of each other, though allowed me to place them directly on the ground. I'd have to exit the scene and come back for it to work properly. Also, I was able to stick plates, not on top of tables, but in the middle of the side of the table top... just sticking out.

No lag, although when I went back later to clear my lot, I was clearing it manually, and sometimes I had problems dragging things to my inventory. It wouldn't stick... so I had to try to do the drag over and over. In some cases, getting closer to items helped, in other cases it didn't.