Just a question, not a gripe

I don't know where the best place to ask this would be, but as someone having a f$@king whale of a time and loving every minute of SotA while knowing that the game is getting some bad/spiteful attention from some quarters I thought I'd not ask it in the general questions area. So I apologise already for not knowing where to ask this, but in SotA's defense my query isn't one unique to this game and is actually somewhat common in a small number of games.

Right, so, I love this game, I'm having a ball, but every time I close the game down regardless of whether I quit now or I leave the game to count down the 20 safety seconds it always kinds of lulllls. It's not a freeze, I can tell when a game has froze, this is a lull, the game is doing something but it isn't closing down.

Why is that? SotA is not the only game guilty of this, there are others, so that should prove that I'm not just whining about the game, but it intrigues me that why when you tell a game to stop it is the other way around and the game will tell you when it is ready to stop?

Of my 300 games about 95% of them when you Quit-to-Desktop you will find yourself at the desktop within 2-6 seconds, a small handful take up to 15 seconds because they have to save to disk your player state, but some games like this one just sit there, but they haven't froze, they are working on some ****. What is there to do? Are you purging assets from memory or something? Surely when a person quits a program all that program has to do is make sure it has recorded the player state and then completely stop all other functions so that memory is freed up for the next program to use.

When it happens I Ctrl-Alt-Del and kill the .exe and the next time the game will load without a hitch so whatever I just ended clearly left no negative effects.

Any boffins in town that can tell me why some apps just won't stop when you are finished with them?

 

Since this is a general software question, the answer is "lots of reasons," and each beast is different.

You hit one of them - deallocating objects in memory, so you dont end up with memory leaks and such. Some of this may also involve network activity, like updating your state (logged out at such and such time) with the game server.

Also this percieved latency is going to be different system to system, network to network. Do you know if you have the game installed on an SSD? My game always exists pretty instantly. 20 seconds sounds like a very long time. You are likely influenced by other actors (other processes on your system, or your OS itself, bogging things down for nearly countless reasons). Any idea how fragmented the disk space on your hard drive is? How many other applications do you run at once?

Also its still an early access game and needs a lot of refinement, and I doubt the exit process is of primary focus at the moment. The real answer to your question would require engineers to pretty much explain how the main game loop works in terms of a player's choice to terminate the process.

But yeah, its "doing stuff," and how long that takes depends on many conditions. I play on linux on an SSD with a fast processor and a really nice GPU and lots of memory, it runs and responds extremely fast for me, and exiting the game takes under one second.

 

Windows has some rather crap performance with non-responding processes, apparently more so when they are in "full screen" mode. And what is happening is that like any good code, all the objects are being destroyed, and their destructors are running when the game exits. Sure, this is bad because it takes so @#%#@$ long to quit (unless you crash!), but it's also good because it shows that they still need performance work to plug up memory leaks.

 

If you have made any changes to the settings, they will not be persisted.

 

My guess would be with @Black Tortoise thinking it's a memory leak. Proof "of sorts" being that the hang on exit is way longer (and may actually freeze) the longer the game is open. I imagine this will be an issue that gets some attention much closer to release as technically this isn't really a performance issue as much as it is just an annoyance of sorts.

 

It is the assets in the Unity engine unloading. It is a pain, but it is getting better.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...hris-daily-work-blog.85584/page-4#post-876446

 

There is also organization and transmission of all debug alerts and warnings, will last as long as we're in alpha/beta.