Hitching info/FYI

I set HT back to enabled on my Xeon W3550 - and I'm not seeing the amount of stuttering when moving around anymore that I was several months ago.. so it looks like whatever was causing that, was fixed.

Progress is good

 

Indeed, some issues were identified merely a month or two ago, and there is already progress. I got a 5 fps boost on my very sub-par home computer, scenes I have already loaded load now twice as fast.

Most development teams would have to pay 500K+ to have such result by hiring a pro, and its just the beginning, very encouraging.

 

Hitching in game sounds vs Radio.

Radio runs through streams/ports which is completely different then the sound bank system used by the game. This is why you do not notice it on the radio vs the other audio

 

At some point I got the feeling that they sprinkled GC.Collect() calls all over the place, so instead of the pauses happening every few seconds, they now seem to happen right when you're about to do something. I mean, it might even have worked, if it weren't for the heap apparently going into a pessimal state where GC can take hundreds of milliseconds.

But this is all my gut feeling guess about what's going on. All that really matters is that I am certain there is nothing that can be done by players to stop hitching other than to quit and restart every hour or two.

 

Looking at what is going on when you get an audio shutter. It seems to be memory related and internet related.

Shutters start to happen after visiting many zones. It almost never starts right away. Over time I see it progressively gets worse after visiting lots of places going in and out of zones. I also have seen this happen if you have a slow internet connection. It seems to also cause some shutters although I think they are different.

 

For now they should give a visual indicator of when GC runs, so we know what we're talking about

If it is the GC, I think the fix is to find the worst offenders and keep them in lookaside lists ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/kernel/using-lookaside-lists ), since the c# GC has to block the main thread.

 

Here's an example of the music hitching during a scene load in current live build, after playing for over an hour with about 10 scene changes.
(audio level isn't very loud - you'll need to turn it up)