This reworks how the game loads the states of mined rock voxels, splitting these onto a separate thread so it takes the strain off the main game thread.Why don't we do performance every week?People often say this in comments. In fact, we work on performance constantly at significant project expense. This work is very exploratory. In this case, our solution was extremely complex and risky. It involved redeveloping our custom voxel mesh generation to be multithreaded, combining several of the most complex areas of programming together. Results in performance optimizations don't come in a straight line, so we can't promise performance optimization work comes out constantly.
What is Late Game?Over time a prospect contains more and more "data" that is a delta from the base map data. Originally the game as developed for temporary prospects, and so a lot of the systems were not constructed for the scale Open World ends up with. So when we talk about Late Game, we mean after a number of hours in an Open World prospect, or even a long running mission.
For those who may have not read our last two posts, check out this excerpt from last week's blog:What is hitching?Hitching can be caused by many reasons and we have progressively released fixes for many of these, but there have still been the occasional source of hitches. The end result looks the same, so it can be frustrating for users when we say we have fixed a source of hitching - but it appears not to be because they still experience it. Simply put, hitching is when the game "runs out of time" when preparing what to show on the screen. So to solve this, we need to offload the work somewhere. This specific instance of hitching occurred because as you ran around, voxels that had been mined would be loaded in - but their meshes generated on the main thread and were not multithreaded. Now they are and so the hitching is avoided.
These ‘trickier’ missions are currently the ones receiving this work to convert them into Operations, and due to the extent of the reworking required, these will take some time to do. There will also be a robust testing process, as these changes will require them to be treated as ‘new operations’ and all steps and stages will have to go through the trial phase again.Why aren't the Missions all Operations?Simply, time and complexity. Certain missions weren’t converted over to operations due to many reasons, including suitability to an Open World format, but also some requiring complete rebuilding to work in the new Operation system. We also wanted time to see how we needed to adjust our game in general, including and perhaps especially performance in Open World. Now things are more stable, we can look at moving more and more missions to Operations.