Regarding Server Load Times and Stuff (incl. Goon Chat)

[Skull132]

I probably should have made this post whenever we originally did those changes, but I was having a bit of trouble IRL and couldn't really focus. But here goes.

SKULL! WHY DOES MY GOONCHAT TAKE FOREVER TO LOAD?!

Short answer: You're A*stralian. I'm sorry, it's a terminal issue. There's nothing we can do about it.

Long answer:

Okay, so first, let's take stock as to how resource management worked before our changes. In ye olden days, if you remember, you would regularly encounter the long black loading screen when loading onto the server. The one that would be anywhere from 50 MB to 120 MB. This is BYOND preloading resources to your machine from our server. There was one major issue with this system:

It was horribly slow. The issue is that it used the BYOND server process, which alongside sending you your 100 megabytes of resources, still had to deal with actually running the server. Because BYOND is coded in a really old fashion, this did not scale. The resource download times would be unreasonable slow -- trust me, our server(s) are capable of way more throughput, the bottle neck in the download speeds was BYOND itself.

This started perking up on our radar as our resource size kept rising and rising due to new sprites, sound effects, etcetera being implemented. It was simply not reasonable to continue with this process, as it would result in longer and longer download times for everyone.

So what did we do? We did two things. First, we moved the resource downloading over to another process. We basically set up a small webserver on our main box (I thiiink?) which would now hold the newest resources. This meant that the download speed was no longer capped by the horribly ancient BYOND limitations, but instead, by how fast our webserver can distribute shit. And that is way faster than BYOND ever could. And this includes in parallel download scenario also. So this is a clear download speed gain for most people. The aforementioned A*stralians likely won't see that much of a performance boost, but it should be there.

But there's another thing we did. And this is the likely thing that was causing a whole bunch of "issues" for people. We removed the preloading of resources. I forget but I think this is necessary for the other resource distribution method to actually work. So what happens now is, even if you don't have all of the resources downloaded, you can join the server and the server will let you join. So you get the impression that you're all good to go. But this is not the case: in the background, your game is still frantically trying to download everything. Depending on how fast it manages, and in what order, certain things (like goonchat and UIs) may "not work", as their files still haven't arrived yet. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about it. You'll just have to sit it out and "hope" that the resources get finished. In the worst case, it should only take as long as it would have taken you to sit behind the 120 megabyte black screen. Though in the average case, it'll definitely be faster.

As time goes on and we remove NanoUI, we should be able to remove some stuff from being downloaded. Which will make life a bit easier. There's an improvement in BYOND 514 planned which should also make certain things download faster. This specifically ties to how the UIs are delivered. So hopefully that'll bring a performance boost int he future as well.

But ye. That's it. So basically: goonchat isn't any slower than life would be using the old download system. And in the average case, it's likely way faster to download everything.

Questions welcome.

[Scheveningen]

i can happily say with my potato pc that i am very happy for these changes and i've had way less problems playing spess.

[Kintsugi]

Australians aren't people, anyway