This one has got to be about the least fun sort of release to be working on, for everyone involved (players and developers). There was still a memory leak in the prior version, and it was harming performance as well because of all the garbage collections it was causing.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Though this may be the "less fun patch" released today (or this week), this greatly enhances my inner fun with the game as it is... playing in the 1st continent and wasting 1.8GB RAM is game-braking and slow and boring.
ReplyDeleteSo, i give you my thanks.
P.S.: I was going to report the memory leak, but as I looked the release notes, u guys had already fixed it =D.
Cheers! I know it's something that's really important; that's not really what I meant by less fun for you guys. I really meant that the last 3 days, where things were varying degrees of horribly-broken were not too fun for you. As you pointed out.
ReplyDeleteAnd my stress level goes through the roof whenever I know that the game is publicly in a state like that, which is why it wasn't fun for me. Purely looking at the work itself, if it was just a logic problem to solve, it would actually have been a pretty fun problem; it took three of us with a lot of ingenuity and guesswork to solve it.