With the last update, work began in response to broad and worrying feedback regarding game stability and performance at the start of the year. We have continued to make progress, and here are the main improvements that will be available in update 2.52.
Optimizations and Memory Leaks
We continued to plug memory leaks, in particular regarding loading and changing characters, which also greatly sped up character loading times (from 25 seconds to 3 seconds during our tests).
Animation System and Character Display
A lot of work has been done on the display, loading and storing in memory of character animations, appearances and auras. The result is improved performance on the most crowded maps, and a limitation on memory use during game sessions as you encounter other characters with diverse appearances.
Chat
The chat feature is a relatively large area of work and the source of large game slowdowns and freezes. Its optimization is far from complete, but we have been able to resolve the cases of the game freezing for several minutes in the event of flooding in the chat (for example, floods of achievement completion, level up, and AvA combat notifications).
Marketplace
Searching and sorting has been greatly optimized in the Marketplaces when many categories are selected in order to improve search times.
Pathfinding, Map, and Worldgraph
One of the areas of work was also improving performance when displaying the game map and icons present on the map, calculating paths taken during movements, and calculating possible paths when using Globally Pre-Sentient mounts.
Previews
Finally, many preview issues have been fixed when it comes to calculated values and fixing potential crashes when displaying previews.
Upcoming Work
We are continuing the optimization and debugging work that's begun, with the priority goals being to continue efforts on animations and the chat that are not yet finished, and tackle map loading. See you after the summer for the next steps!