After Multistory, Multiplayer!

[Heroic 30]

Hi,

After 1.0 update along the happiness of really nice new features, we all suffer from the performance of the new client.

Here are some of the main issues:

1. Framerate is too low for 10 seconds after client startup

- This caused by the new model format. Collada is not designed for games, so not optimal to parse all xml data at startup, also multi-story buildings may increase the data being streamed at startup from the server.

Solution: it will be possible to cache the calculated data, serializing to binary format then deserialize it so no parsing necessary - this would eliminate these kind of problem

2. No way to turn back to non-animated old models

Players who need less memory usage, had an option to lower the tree models, visible distance etc. Now with 1.0 the player and animal models stay as high like the new ones, no option to select lower poly or optimized versions for lower graphics settings. Only just the animation phases can be reduced.

Solution: add old or new lower count formats and ability to switch back to lower settings.

3. No way to run as much clients as before, in parallel

The style of this game allows players to use multiple alts (priests and main char, and now alts for the new servers) parallel. This benefit for the players and for the developers because of paid prem count.

Before 1.0 an instance of a client used 300M-500M. After 1.0 update, it now using 800M-1.5G.

This will reduce the possibility of multi client play which is bad, because the paid prem accounts will became non-prem some months after 1.0 release, due to lack of usability. Also when the new servers will lost interest, this will happen with the alts on there too (or with the old main chars).

This problem also related to point 1. and even if a memory leak removed the client's memory fingreprint is a bit too high compared to other games.

My suggestion is to able to use multiple chars inside one client - I know this might be a bigger piece of work but it will worth both from a view of prem players and both from view of the developers (more paid prem accounts and keeping the number of current ones).

Solution: This can work to let the possibility to run multiple characters inside one client. Like that way to have tabs or character faces which you can click and switch to the alts. No extra memory needed just a few changes in communication code - using one instance of java wm this can be also achieved to use a shared storage for objects on the same machine.

Benefits: the client will load all models/graphics once, use less memory.

P.S. I think this is a great game but it can be more user/os friendly. I wrote this thoughs without knowing the current structure of the game just seeing where the bottlenecks are - as an experienced game developer my suggestions may count, please fix me if anything I found is work different already.

Edited January 2, 2013 by Heroic

[Heroic 30]

Also this change would add an oldschool RPG-party feeling to the game

[fatboy 448]

+1 to this idea, good post!

[joedobo 1,187]

#2 please.

Here's a temporary fix. Client version 3.1.77 has made all that stuff below useless. It is better now but I'd still want an option to use low poly count objects with very low resolution texture masking over the objects.

I got my priest client's memory use down to 550M by using some of java's memory use restrictions, added:

-J-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=40 -J-Xss128k -J-Xmx400M -J-Xms256M

.

It not optimal by far, low FPS even choppy sometimes, occasional crashes. For a priest all that doesn't matter. You can pass different options in to each Java exe too. I'm using whatever the standard is for the main toon.

I made an altered version of the shortcut they put on my start menu. I had to make into a bat file because was too long. It will only work if you turn everything down and use a smaller game window (mine's 800 x 480). Your shortcut is likely a little different because of file paths.

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\javaws.exe -localfile -J-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=40 -J-Xss128k -J-Xmx400M -J-Xms256M -J-Djnlp.application.href=http://www.wurmonline.com/client/wurmclient.jnlp "C:\Users\lalala\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\6.0\41\5fef8269-51fb94fd"

Edited January 3, 2013 by joedobo

[Shrimpiie 3,665]

#1 has been going on since before 1.0, it has always taken a little to load up everything, but a change to it would be great

[meiyeeer 78]

Having all characters on one account and having them be able to share silver and such would be nice.

[Heroic 30]

#1 has been going on since before 1.0, it has always taken a little to load up everything, but a change to it would be great

The old model format (XSI) was also not opimized for games.

[jacobw 23]

+1 havn't been able to effectively run more then 2 clients at once since 1.0 came out and even that is scetchy at times ,used to run 3-5 clients at once pre-1.0 and as a result have been seriously considering dropping at least 2 toon's prem since i cant leave all the toons i pay for up and runing so i can gain favor/enchant on the priests and work on mining/building my new multi-story buildings on the others

[Shrimpiie 3,665]

The old model format (XSI) was also not opimized for games.

Ah, gotcha, thanks

[Deadcenter 2]

+1 Really like the time and thought that the OP put in to this post. Dev's might want to look and consider whats being said. Very nicely put Heroic!

[Miretta 1,415]

I agree, but for your 2. you can set "off" the animations completely and for a more optimized use you can reduce the "player" texture size (it looks odd but it was for me the main problem with my fps rate)

it also seems they have overall increased possible "high" settings in the client, so decreasing the range of sight is helpful too, since it got massively increased