So, how are you stuttering today? [yeah, not over yet]

I am testing a lot of heavy scenes swaps and noticed that sound stuttering is about over in this release.

The patch notes says FPS increased, but i didn't see that much of improvement on heavy-loaded scenes (eg: Brittany Center, Wharfs, Ardoris, etc). BUT, even having about the same FPS (18-19 right now in front of my absurdly decoration-heavy home), it is very noticeable that the game runs a lot smoother than before! Even lower FPS feels playable right now.

Loading times are the same.

Interface hiccups are still visible as are some movement hiccups in movement while loading decorations and houses and when you recall/teleport. This denotes that some parts of the game engine (especially interface) is still tied single-threaded to disk throughput and this may be revisited before launch (I use a very fast "Samsung 960 EVO NMVe SSD" btw)... BUT, this also is minimal and kind of "negligible" given the previous state of the game.

Ah, and memory footprint stood the same also. About 14GB as i am typing right now and it increases after new scenery loads, don't know if because of memory leakage or by desing to boost disk performance (i got 32GB RAM, so...).

Tomorrow i'll stay for hours in the QA Server to see if results are consistent and the game is still responsive in the long run. For now, congratulations team Portalarium for the achievement! Not being forced to close the game every 2 loading screens because of sound issues and memory/graphics is a HUGE step for this game. Can't wait until this goes live.

I'll give more feedback later.

Bye!

PS: Here are my specs

OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz (8) System RAM: 32704
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU RAM: 8110
Screen Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Video Quality set to "Good"

SotA.EarlyAccess.QA.Win.64.522.Date.07.19.17
Area: Novia_R3_City_Brittany_Wharfs
Area Display Name: Cais de Bretanha
Loc: (-10.3, 43.7, 232.6)
Debug: Tm92aWFfUjNfQ2l0eV9Ccml0dGFueV9XaGFyZnN8fCgtMTAuMjk4LCA0My42OTgsIDIzMi42Myl8KDAsIDAuMDAzLCAwLCAxKXwwLjM0Mzc3MzZ8MTB8NS43NDkzODQ=

 

Well, after playing for some time in some favored scenes... yeah, guess who came back... >.>
At least it took more time to start kicking in.

So yeah, as we say here in my country: a poor's joy is of short lasting. ¬_¬

Let's go back to design. :/

 

I believe the stuttering you get after playing for a long time without restarting the client is from memory fragmentation and the garbage collector kicking in to clean it up.

 

But when this starts, it becomes non-stop, so don't think is just that...

 

I think it's exactly that. The game needs to allocate some memory, the garbage collector kicks in to compact some stuff in order to make a contiguous space large enough for the allocation and you get a stutter. Repeat.

 

Define "Long time"

For me it's not time so much ... its about the 4th or 5th scene load. Then I stutter from that point on until I restart SOTA. Repeat.

 

@Sir Brenton i define long compared to what it is today. I played for about 1.5 hours before it was visible (and audible) again.

I changed scenes from Brittany Wharfs, Owl's Head and New Brittanian Market multiple time, went to Boreas Colossus, died a few times, went in the purgatory and left... it only came out when I zoned again tô world map.

Usually just a couple of scene switches in between Wharfs and Owl's already make me want to close the client, hence why I deemed this a "long" time.

 

PS: I also recognize that for any commercial released game even those 1.5 hours is still unacceptable. Game should not need to be closed periodically (nor even in 8 hours) to be playable. This is what already happens with every commercial title. Still, I have to give in and consider that given current state, this was an amazing feat.