Lamannia Update 59 Preview 1 Feedback: Performance Adjustments

[mikarddo]

I'm Codog Cuisinart!

I started at Turbine in 2004 and worked on Dungeons and Dragons Online from incubation to the launch of DDO Unlimited when the game turned free to play. I recently (2 years ago) rejoined the Standing Stone Games crew to work on both DDO and Lord of the Rings Online functioning as lead engineer. It appears my title on the forums was not set up correctly since I don't tend to post on the forums. My apologies if this seemed like a clever phishing scam.

Well, we will believe you - as soon as you post using an official account

[CodogCuisinart]

Would it be possible to understand how this fundamentally changed and if there are potential interactions (enter or leaving a quest, shrining, buffing, other) that have a greater potential to cause discrepancies.

Reincarnation and past lives have me a little worried since the test cycle on those takes a lot of time and have a kind of funky flow behind the scenes.
Feats temporarily granted by effects is another area of worry for me especial with disconnects and logouts stewn in there.

I'd try different load outs with different enhancements and different epic destiny abilities to kind of get the maximum coverage of the types of bonuses we are looking to exercise. It sounds like we might have a bug in max spell point bonuses not giving enough bonuses in some cases, so a little focus on that would be helpful. One of the beauties of our game is that we have a robust build meta. The interactions between bonuses has so many permutations and combinations that it is impossible to brute force test it.

I'll be clear that we were just looking to fix lag, not reswizzle any stats or balance them.

[CodogCuisinart]

Well, we will believe you - as soon as you post using an official account

As well you should!

[Firebreed]

Happy to report that everything looks good on my main in terms of numbers (in the character tab and all its sub-tabs). What I didn't (and will not) check is if things are actually applying properly through the combat log. Also please note that I didn't Reincarnate while on Lamannia.

[Firebreed]

Transferred a character to Lamannia, after Heroic TR I observed that I was missing the Universal AP point.

Cheers,
M.

There's another post saying the same thing in another thread.

[Aelonwy]

I took pics of my main character sheet and + tab, my skills, enhancements, epic destinies, and compared to Lamannia. On Lamannia I have 80 sp points more I have no idea why and 5% more spell crit chance, ALL spell types have 5% more. Again no idea why. I did NOT change anything or equip anything else. I took pics from live and copied to Lamma and compared immediately.

[mikarddo]

As well you should!

Cheers

I took a closer look. The difference is 80 spell points. I have 80 more on Lam than on Orien. This is on my bard Mikarto if you want to further inspect.

I then looked at the numbers by mousing over spell points. The difference is from the line Feats.

I suspected a bugged Magical Training. I have that from the first core in the Draconic Epic Destiny. I tried to reset and reapply the points on Orien (where I have 80 spell points less). This didnt have any effect - still 80 less spell points on Orien than on Lam.

If you need me to post screen shots or test anything else just let me know. If you have the ability to simply log in my character on both servers you are welcome to do so as that would likely make for faster investigation.

[mikarddo]

I took pics of my main character sheet and + tab, my skills, enhancements, epic destinies, and compared to Lamannia. On Lamannia I have 80 sp points more I have no idea why and 5% more spell crit chance, ALL spell types have 5% more. Again no idea why. I did NOT change anything or equip anything else. I took pics from live and copied to Lamma and compared immediately.

I am seeing exactly the same. +80 spell points and +5% spell crit to all spells.

This fits exactly with Magical Training so maybe that is being applied twice.

[GoldyGopher]

I'm Codog Cuisinart!

I started at Turbine in 2004 and worked on Dungeons and Dragons Online from incubation to the launch of DDO Unlimited when the game turned free to play. I recently (2 years ago) rejoined the Standing Stone Games crew to work on both DDO and Lord of the Rings Online functioning as lead engineer. It appears my title on the forums was not set up correctly since I don't tend to post on the forums. My apologies if this seemed like a clever phishing scam.

There used to be a developer way back when (2004 - 2011) named Codog who built this amazing Castle bed for his daughter while attempting to fix projectiles and levers.. Any relation?

[mikarddo]

I'm Codog Cuisinart!

I started at Turbine in 2004 and worked on Dungeons and Dragons Online from incubation to the launch of DDO Unlimited when the game turned free to play. I recently (2 years ago) rejoined the Standing Stone Games crew to work on both DDO and Lord of the Rings Online functioning as lead engineer. It appears my title on the forums was not set up correctly since I don't tend to post on the forums. My apologies if this seemed like a clever phishing scam.

It brings a level of confidence to this endaveaur that I have not had in a while that someone who was actually there at the start and thus knows the old code (in the sense that something like that is even possible).

I am slightly more hopeful that this might improve lag significantly now.

Welcome to the forums

[Arkat]

We changed some algorithms to be more optimized and need feedback if anything big broke in the process. This was a fundamental rewrite to a delicate system hoping to have the exact same result minus the lag. So we "changed stuff" hoping it didn't change stuff. :P We'd like to be able to address problems before the release as opposed to turning off the lag fix post-release if we find a show stopper. So please kindly report discrepancies if you see any.

Thanks for caring about our game!

Thanks for the constructive response.

[CodogCuisinart]

There used to be a developer way back when (2004 - 2011) named Codog who built this amazing Castle bed for his daughter while attempting to fix projectiles and levers.. Any relation?

That's me!

[Stradivarius]

I'm Codog Cuisinart!

I started at Turbine in 2004 and worked on Dungeons and Dragons Online from incubation to the launch of DDO Unlimited when the game turned free to play. I recently (2 years ago) rejoined the Standing Stone Games crew to work on both DDO and Lord of the Rings Online functioning as lead engineer. It appears my title on the forums was not set up correctly since I don't tend to post on the forums. My apologies if this seemed like a clever phishing scam.

This was quite the risky move @CodogCuisinart; there's bound to be some unforseeables even through careful dev + player testing for extended periods of time.

But... kudos and congrats for doing it. The lag is far far better (pretty much gone! imho) on Lam which was a fairly laggy server to begin with.

Thanks for being brave!

[Captain_Wizbang]

That's me!

Well played Codog, well played.

[GoldyGopher]

That's me!

Welcome Back!

[LightBear]

There are more than 485 bonuses affected and not all of them are on the character sheet and easily displayable.

Well, you just gave the solution for your problem there.
Eg, would be super nice if we get some way to get all those 485 bonuses to display on our + tab of the character sheet.
Even if it is just displayed under the section "Unsorted".

I mean, I'm sure some of these will just be displayed as a "You roll a 17, +56..." and that +56 might/could vary on live and on Lamania.
So just a blank comparison is a good start, sure but more tests would be needed.
Like:
Doing a ETR, TR, ITR or LTR.
Reading a tome.
And ofc the actual questing.

I do wonder what they changed, would be nice to get some interview with a dev and ask the technical details about it.
Like, less codestandards but more performance?
How did they measure this and did they try out various code structures to measure how it performed?

Edit: Read some of the responses of Codog, seems we need to test abrupt terminations of the client
Also, I read that you're doing C++ Templates, why do we need to run the game to get the results?
Aren't those calculated at compile time instead of runtime?

[LurkingVeteran]

I wrote the new algorithm and tested against the old in our development environment for quite a long time. We optimized how we pre-cache bonuses granted by feats. Giving too much information could tip off exploiters on where to look for vulnerabilities. When changing the underpinnings of a game that has been in development for close to 20 years, there are a lot of special corner cases in the code itself... and then there is a lot of content on top of it that sometimes will surprise you. I had many moments of "We used a feat for THAT? We gave you that feat HOW?" Being that a huge part of our game is our build meta, the sheer number of permutations and combinations of builds and interactions between bonuses makes it impossible to brute force test everything. So I appreciate all your observations and hope to find and fix any discrepancies that come up.

Best wishes!

First, thanks for looking into the lag, and talking about it on the forum! Second, it is a bit surprising that adding points to reaper trees at login can somehow have a noticeable impact on a modern server CPU (simple arithmetic). Additionally, most changes so far have focused on tweaking such scripts to be faster. However, have you tried profiling the (C++?) scripting engine itself to figure out why it is slow? Maybe nobody has remembered to grease the hamster wheel since back in 2006?

[Ordinary]

On my main Maetrim (Monk), I am missing 3 constitution from the 3 Wild Fortitude augments I have (Bracers, ring and gloves). Removing any of these 3 items and then re-adding them does not increase or decrease my Con ability.
This may be down to a bugged ring: I have Wild Fortitude in a Legendary 5 rings. Since bringing the item to Lamannia it has lost its special silver background colour, which it had on my main server.

[Krimer]

On my main Maetrim (Monk), I am missing 3 constitution from the 3 Wild Fortitude augments I have (Bracers, ring and gloves). Removing any of these 3 items and then re-adding them does not increase or decrease my Con ability.
This may be down to a bugged ring: I have Wild Fortitude in a Legendary 5 rings. Since bringing the item to Lamannia it has lost its special silver background colour, which it had on my main server.

This bug has always existed. Try removing the augments and putting the augments back in.

[FURYous]

Here are the differences I found, same toon on Orien and Lamania with the same self buffs:
Orien has less total SP:
Orien:

Lamania:


Spell critical chance:
Orien:

Lamania: