News Update: Work And Progress. Week 4

[ErikN 452]

Wow, Im lucky if I can even see another player on test half the time, let alone animals around the various spawn points.

 

Wonder if a GM was on doing something or some such.

It was probably the ones I spawned when we did some testing trying to track down memory issues.

I spawned around 800 animals in the start area.

[Theflash 54]

Bridges to come soon.â„¢

Edited January 23, 2015 by Theflash

[chademaster 33]

Stop workin' on all that stupid stuff and get challenge running again. even the exact same broken challenge minus the prizes just to keep it going. wurm bling. smh

[Klaa 4,872]

It was probably the ones I spawned when we did some testing trying to track down memory issues.

I spawned around 800 animals in the start area.

 

Nice, memory leaks have been an issue. Any success there?

[Mclovin 2,590]

the first hunt is going to take place on deliverance... we have the potential to do them on any and all servers. (i'm personally not sure there would be much point to a hunt on challenge however, with the limited duration of that server type and the gameplay there it would seem to be an un-needed feature for challenge)

 

There are some ideas being tossed about for chaos and epic hunts, the hunts however are a GM TEAM creation using existing tools and assets that are already in game. (in other words, minimal to no coding time needed from either client or server devs)

 

As a result, we decided to start somewhere that we can get the details sorted without the variables of PvP being added as well as to allow everyone to try the first one. (for instance, no participants will be ambushed and killed in this hunt, unless its done by a critter)

I always thought treasure hunts for epic was like missions; except maybe in strings of 3-4 before a random reward, if any, was given.

So go to a tree---look under a tower...Kill a certain animal...Then eventually a chest was dropped or something...Guess I was thinking Runescape ^.^

[Onyr 185]

the first hunt is going to take place on deliverance... we have the potential to do them on any and all servers. ...

 

That sounds like you will be having as much fun hiding the eggs as we will finding them, so to speak.  I can't wait

Edited January 25, 2015 by Onyr

[ErikN 452]

Nice, memory leaks have been an issue. Any success there?

Depends on how you see it, this test helped us narrow things down by excluding a couple of things, but we have not found any definite cause for the leak.

I have also fiddled with the GC settings as an attempt to at the very least slow the effect of leakage down a little, and that might have helped a little, but not enough to say that everybody should use those settings.

[permo 1,263]

Depends on how you see it, this test helped us narrow things down by excluding a couple of things, but we have not found any definite cause for the leak.

I have also fiddled with the GC settings as an attempt to at the very least slow the effect of leakage down a little, and that might have helped a little, but not enough to say that everybody should use those settings.

 

Why is it that a client that you tell to use more RAM with a xmx-command is able to run MUCH longer without experiencing the freezes due to leak then a straight up client? Even Nathan says it helped a lot and he is a demigod so he should know. Is'nt there a way to make it that the client recognizes how much RAM you have and does this automatically?

Edited January 27, 2015 by permo

[Klaa 4,872]

Depends on how you see it, this test helped us narrow things down by excluding a couple of things, but we have not found any definite cause for the leak.

I have also fiddled with the GC settings as an attempt to at the very least slow the effect of leakage down a little, and that might have helped a little, but not enough to say that everybody should use those settings.

 

Eh, any progress is progress.

[Snare 11]

Astounded to see how many updates there have been in a few years absence!

[ErikN 452]

Why is it that a client that you tell to use more RAM with a xmx-command is able to run MUCH longer without experiencing the freezes due to leak then a straight up client? Even Nathan says it helped a lot and he is a demigod so he should know. Is'nt there a way to make it that the client recognizes how much RAM you have and does this automatically?

Freezing may occur due to several reasons:

Huge allocations

Full GC sweep

Memory allocation failure (triggers a full GC and retry of allocation)

The huge allocations can cause the heap allocation of memory to be re-sized closer to the maximum size set by the xmx command, and therefor cause a minor freeze.

A full GC will trigger a "stop the world" event, where java will freeze the application in order to do a full sweep of the allocated memory in order to try and remove as much as possible.

 

The memory allocation failure is the one that you are experiencing when it becomes unplayable. It will eventually lead to the client crashing completely.

This can be staved off for a while by increasing the memory that Wurm can use, but the side effect is that the freezes will be longer due to there simply being more things to check for removal once the GC's occur.

There is more to the tuning then simply allocating memory: number of parallel GC tasks, allocation region sizes, which GC algorithm to use and so on.

 

As far as I know Java don't have any way to change those things or even the memory during runtime, so a bootstrap exe or something to check and launch with, it would also have to check if it's launching with 64 or 32 bit and things like that.

[Whatthetruck 30]

Yep, I don't know how many times I have tried to tell people that the devs are doing what they can. The problem is in Java, and while there are a few bandaids that can be applied, Oracle needs to fix the problem (the company not the GM).

[permo 1,263]

Freezing may occur due to several reasons:

Huge allocations

Full GC sweep

Memory allocation failure (triggers a full GC and retry of allocation)

The huge allocations can cause the heap allocation of memory to be re-sized closer to the maximum size set by the xmx command, and therefor cause a minor freeze.

A full GC will trigger a "stop the world" event, where java will freeze the application in order to do a full sweep of the allocated memory in order to try and remove as much as possible.

 

The memory allocation failure is the one that you are experiencing when it becomes unplayable. It will eventually lead to the client crashing completely.

This can be staved off for a while by increasing the memory that Wurm can use, but the side effect is that the freezes will be longer due to there simply being more things to check for removal once the GC's occur.

There is more to the tuning then simply allocating memory: number of parallel GC tasks, allocation region sizes, which GC algorithm to use and so on.

 

As far as I know Java don't have any way to change those things or even the memory during runtime, so a bootstrap exe or something to check and launch with, it would also have to check if it's launching with 64 or 32 bit and things like that.

 

Well, I'm not that tech-savvy, but me and my friends have never had any freezes nor crashes with xmx set at 6144 and we've had 12h+ roaming/pvp-sessions. I'll get freezes within the first hour without it.

 

I just want everybody to have as great wurm experience as I do, kinda hard to yell at everybody "hey, try this!". But those that do swears by it.

[ErikN 452]

Well there might be a sweet spot where the leak no longer matters because you have enough memory to hold the leak until it's cleaned up without causing major freeze issues.
As things are right now we can't really preset things to those values because then the client won't work very well on a system with less memory, and 32-bit is even more limited in how much memory it can use.

 

[permo 1,263]

Well there might be a sweet spot where the leak no longer matters because you have enough memory to hold the leak until it's cleaned up without causing major freeze issues.

As things are right now we can't really preset things to those values because then the client won't work very well on a system with less memory, and 32-bit is even more limited in how much memory it can use.

 

 

Yeah, I get that.

Edited January 28, 2015 by permo

[Aaron_IRL 256]

I don't know what has changed, but the memory leak seems worse to me.  I used to be able to go a couple hours longer between re-logs.  Now it's about every 3 hours.  The game becomes a 2 tile slide show.  I have not made any long trips since it has seemed different, and I am not looking forward to it.  Traveling always accelerated the need to re-log.

[RockyBalboa 565]

i would be happy of eta for bridges...   staircases and so

 

 

from last eta is now em... more then month?

Edited January 29, 2015 by RockyBalboa

[Tathar 48]

*snip*

What are the cylindrical buildings in this picture?

[Brash_Endeavors 4,735]

I am pretty sure those are guard towers from the PVP servers, I forget which kingdom

 

looks like MR

 

If we could only convert those to cotton silos ....

Edited February 1, 2015 by Brash_Endeavors

[RockyBalboa 565]

our guard towers yes....  i just wonder how they can be made so close each to another...

[Lei 346]

Maybe this is what the pre-built starter towns will look like on the new challenge? Dev-override of the tower rule to increase difficulty breaching the noob towns of the enemy perhaps?

[Arronicus 634]

we would at a minimum need an additional skill for miners: survey.  Honestly, I have no idea how collisions are going to work in caves.  For goodness sakes, how will we turn horse led carts and wagons?

 

Due to the hassles of taking wagons through mines, I already made all my tunnels 2-3 wide on the corners/turns. Given that access to my deed is only viable through VERY long tunnels, it was simply a matter of obvious practicality. The more time you spend travelling underground (not mining, but actual travel, driving, etc), the more you slowly fix your mines for ease of use. 

 

TL:DR; widen the turns in your caves to 2-3 squares on the inside of corners, and 3-4 at deadend turnaround spots. Not rocket science.

[Arronicus 634]

our guard towers yes....  i just wonder how they can be made so close each to another...

Devtools. Seems a bit silly to create a village to show off (through the banner) that players will never be able to create, though.

[Laamatynnyri 4]

What did the performance fix change? My game is much smoother now!

[ErikN 452]

Minor memory optimizations in some areas that will reduce the allocation rate over all. Still not solved the leak issue, but it might be possible to play a little while longer without it causing problems.

 

We are still looking for more things to fix, so hopefully there will be more to come.

 

And I'm glad that it seems to be helping someone