Hi everyone! Today’s update is focused on addressing the performance issues that hosting players have been experiencing while several other players are playing on their server.
Hosting player performance:
Previously, hosting players will have noticed an increasing drop in fps (frames-per-second) as more and more players joined their server. Often to the point of having unplayable or uncomfortable framerates.
This update overhauls much of the backend networking code and is showing vastly improved performance.
Performance stats comparison (~200% performance increase):
While benchmarking performance on a typical co-op game of 4 players, I’m am reading more than 200% performance increase for the host (which is huge). I also believe this performance should scale well even with larger player counts.
For anyone interested in technical details, below shows the performance stats for before and after for a hosting player for a 4-player co-op team, running the game at 2560x1440:
Impact on clients:
The intention is for clients to experience no difference during gameplay. However due to the fact that I’m now sending much less data over the network for items/players/AI that are far away from the viewing client, there may be some visual quirks. I’ll be keeping an eye on this and continue to make tweaks accordingly.
Ore nodes visibility:
The netcode for ore nodes is now all new, so I believe this should rectify reported glitches of clients not seeing ore nodes while hosting players do.
Player-count scaling:
Currently I’ve left the max player count at 8, and plan to monitor the performance stats of the new build. I’ll look into raising this count once I’ve collected more data.
My apologies to anyone waiting on a content update, but I felt this issue was important enough that I wanted to get this update out as soon as possible to ensure hosting players have a smooth gameplay experience.
Please stay tuned for further updates soon. If you haven’t already, please join the community Discord (link below). Hope everyone has a great weekend!
Cheers,
ColdGames
Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs
Twitter: @playSubsistence
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playsubsistence
