Downtime Notice: Thursday, January 25th from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT)

[fmalfeas]

I fully agree with this. I am playing on a 2month old computer, with an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, 11GB RAM videocard in it, and I get 5-15fps in that quest. There seriously is something wrong with the design of that quest, if even the latest videocards cannot run that instance smoothly...

May not be what you think. I have /no/ problems in that quest, at all. I'm running a GTX 960 4gb, and an i5 3.2ghz. Not a potato, but far from state of the art. Not running with my graphics neutered either. I do run fullscreen, though.

[Gratch]

The only things in this patch are the things listed in the OP.

If only there was this Artificer class lacking a 3rd enhancement tree and someone that could post some betaThoughts on said tree while we wait for server up.

*POKES TORC* (to POKE Steelstar)

Also why no mention of a 3rd FVS tree in DDOCast? Is that abandoned for a while? If so I'm going to blame engine coders got stuck working on lag fixes instead of *SUPER CRAZY NEW ENGINE FEATURE FOR 3rd FVS TREE*

[math92]

cant think of game that puts they servers sleep for 8 hours FeelsBadMan

[vegabond1969]

cant think of game that puts they servers sleep for 8 hours FeelsBadMan

You would of really felt bad back in the days when the hampsters would kill over and the game would be down for 12-16 hours then. The launcher would change from 4 hour downtime, to six, then ten, etc. I always felt they should just put the launcher notification as when it's ready it's ready lol

[Cocomajobo]

The game worlds are now open!

[Cordovan]

The game worlds have reopened. Thank you.

[QueenOfTheHook]

The small update, does it include the Cry for Battle set working? as for the client performance, every time I step into the Tesla tower inspired Wrath of Earth my game performance drops from 60-100 FPS to 10-20 fps, sure it looks pretty with the lightning jumping from pillar to pillar but I would suggest looking into the effects as to lose so many fps is crazy, running at 1440p on a dual Xeon e5 rig with 32 gig ram and a new AMD 56 off a ssd, there is no lag this end when playing much newer games like Wolfenstein at 70 fps.

I'm not sure if this fix will fix this, but if you restart your entire client before running the quest, it helps dramatically.

[Buddha5440]

The game worlds are now open!

Amazing how, less than 5 minutes past a scheduled down time, there are complaints galore but when the worlds reopen early (1 hr + early) you don't hear a thing...


GOOD WORK you guys, keep it up!

[Dragavon]

The game worlds have reopened. Thank you.

First impression is that performance is much improved.

[Mindos]

There is now a 1 second cooldown on equipment swapping. Is this Working As Intended? And why?
Trying to quickly find a secret door etc, and having to wait 1 second between each swap is lame, imho.

[Zyrca]

now that the game is down, can we get insight on what was causing game performance issues?

This patch includes a change that we hope will address hitching that sometimes occurs when using an ability or displaying a tooltip. Without getting into the gory details, we have an object that, when referenced, needed 11,000 additional objects from the dat files. We have a caching layer, so once you, for example, cast a spell and this object is in memory, it was fine, but it would fall out of memory after a time and need to be loaded from disk again - causing a hitch. This is why it had a tendency to be the first time a spell is cast in a dungeon, for example.

This patch will keep that large object in memory all the times. A future patch will address always loading the 11,000 dependencies and give that memory back. The reason for doing it in two steps is that the change to just keep it in memory is a simple, reasonably low risk change, so we wanted to get it out there to hopefully improve your experience and also verify that we are barking up the right tree The second change is a bit more involved.

[Mindos]

This patch includes a change that we hope... ... hopefully improve your experience and also verify that we are barking up the right tree The second change is a bit more involved.

So what changed? Why did this become a problem now and not before?

[Grimlock]

This patch includes a change that we hope will address hitching that sometimes occurs when using an ability or displaying a tooltip. Without getting into the gory details, we have an object that, when referenced, needed 11,000 additional objects from the dat files. We have a caching layer, so once you, for example, cast a spell and this object is in memory, it was fine, but it would fall out of memory after a time and need to be loaded from disk again - causing a hitch. This is why it had a tendency to be the first time a spell is cast in a dungeon, for example.

This patch will keep that large object in memory all the times. A future patch will address always loading the 11,000 dependencies and give that memory back. The reason for doing it in two steps is that the change to just keep it in memory is a simple, reasonably low risk change, so we wanted to get it out there to hopefully improve your experience and also verify that we are barking up the right tree The second change is a bit more involved.

Good work and solution to that memory problem by adding a caching layer. Look forward to testing tonight.

[cru121]

So what changed? Why did this become a problem now and not before?

tooltips changed recently, didn't they?

[Ryan220]

This patch includes a change that we hope will address hitching that sometimes occurs when using an ability or displaying a tooltip. Without getting into the gory details, we have an object that, when referenced, needed 11,000 additional objects from the dat files. We have a caching layer, so once you, for example, cast a spell and this object is in memory, it was fine, but it would fall out of memory after a time and need to be loaded from disk again - causing a hitch. This is why it had a tendency to be the first time a spell is cast in a dungeon, for example.

This patch will keep that large object in memory all the times. A future patch will address always loading the 11,000 dependencies and give that memory back. The reason for doing it in two steps is that the change to just keep it in memory is a simple, reasonably low risk change, so we wanted to get it out there to hopefully improve your experience and also verify that we are barking up the right tree The second change is a bit more involved.

I have absolutely no idea what any of that means, but it seems to have fixed my freezing issues.

Thank you.

[MeliCat]

This patch includes a change that we hope will address hitching that sometimes occurs when using an ability or displaying a tooltip. Without getting into the gory details, we have an object that, when referenced, needed 11,000 additional objects from the dat files. We have a caching layer, so once you, for example, cast a spell and this object is in memory, it was fine, but it would fall out of memory after a time and need to be loaded from disk again - causing a hitch. This is why it had a tendency to be the first time a spell is cast in a dungeon, for example.

This patch will keep that large object in memory all the times. A future patch will address always loading the 11,000 dependencies and give that memory back. The reason for doing it in two steps is that the change to just keep it in memory is a simple, reasonably low risk change, so we wanted to get it out there to hopefully improve your experience and also verify that we are barking up the right tree The second change is a bit more involved.

"fall out of memory after a time" - so some chunk of memory dedicated for spells is overwritten if so many things happen... ? intriguing

[zehnvhex]

I have absolutely no idea what any of that means, but it seems to have fixed my freezing issues.

ELI5 version:

----

Programs use memory to run quickly.

When you run a program, any program, the program tells your computer "Hey I need to use some memory!"

Windows goes, "okay!" and gives the program some memory to work with.

In order to keep games from needing obscene amounts of memory, typically they only request enough memory for the game to function at that moment. The game then only puts what it absolutely needs into that memory that it's been given to work with.

The game will constantly be putting things in and out of memory. Whenever you're loading a zone for example this is part of what's going on.

---

DDO sometimes needs to do a thing that requires it having 11,000 things loaded into memory. So whenever you did that thing it would check if the 11,000 things were in memory and then do that thing.

However, if the 11,000 things weren't in memory, it would need to load them into memory.

This would take a second so your client would hitch. No big deal right?

Well, occasionally the game would be like, "oh hey, I don't need this 11,000 things in memory anymore!" and would drop them.

Then you would do a thing that required those 11,000 things again. Whoops, another hitch!

Rinse, repeat.

---

What they're doing is two part.

First part is now they said, "Hey, load up those 11,000 things when you start the game and don't ever drop them!" This is an easy short term fix but increases the amount of memory the game needs to run.

Part two is going to be them telling the game, "Hey, you don't need those 11,000 things anymore." This is a good fix but will take a lot of work.

[Memnir]

but it would fall out of memory after a time and need to be loaded from disk again - causing a hitch.

This patch will keep that large object in memory all the times.

[Ryan220]

ELI5 version:

----

Programs use memory to run quickly.

When you run a program, any program, the program tells your computer "Hey I need to use some memory!"

Windows goes, "okay!" and gives the program some memory to work with.

In order to keep games from needing obscene amounts of memory, typically they only request enough memory for the game to function at that moment. The game then only puts what it absolutely needs into that memory that it's been given to work with.

The game will constantly be putting things in and out of memory. Whenever you're loading a zone for example this is part of what's going on.

---

DDO sometimes needs to do a thing that requires it having 11,000 things loaded into memory. So whenever you did that thing it would check if the 11,000 things were in memory and then do that thing.

However, if the 11,000 things weren't in memory, it would need to load them into memory.

This would take a second so your client would hitch. No big deal right?

Well, occasionally the game would be like, "oh hey, I don't need this 11,000 things in memory anymore!" and would drop them.

Then you would do a thing that required those 11,000 things again. Whoops, another hitch!

Rinse, repeat.

---

What they're doing is two part.

First part is now they said, "Hey, load up those 11,000 things when you start the game and don't ever drop them!" This is an easy short term fix but increases the amount of memory the game needs to run.

Part two is going to be them telling the game, "Hey, you don't need those 11,000 things anymore." This is a good fix but will take a lot of work.

Thank you for the explanation.

[Gabrael]

This patch includes a change that we hope will address hitching that sometimes occurs when using an ability or displaying a tooltip...

Thank you.