Odyssey Progress (2)

norlin

norlin
o7 CMDR Braben, that's really great to hear such details. To be honest, personally I was a bit frustrated for last years because of lack of any "inside" info from the team, more tech details, more ANY details is always great to know! Thanks!
 

sneakyc4

sneakyc4
Not amount of apology will make this game engine peform! 19 FPS in battlezone is not acceptable on a 2 year old mid-end gaming rig.

No frustrum/occlusion culling, seriously? This is one of simplest optimization to implement and that brings huuuge benefits.

Also it sounds to me like you are blaming external factors for not doing basic optimization work on your engine...

PS : Am I the only one who hears David B'voice when reading it?
 
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anfuerudo

anfuerudo
At this point I insist on using this as an apology template.

wp8713091.png
 

Sysmon

Sysmon
I knew it! It is always those Fleet Carriers!

Thank you for this great expansion and best of luck getting everything up and running! Game runs OK on my now 6 years old desktop, thanks to a GPU upgrade a few years ago. But there is definitely a CPU bottleneck that I'd like to resolve as soon as the chip production situation starts to look better.

:D S
 
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khalismur

K
Corporate PR speech on damage control mode is nice and all, but actions speak louder than words.

Fix your DLC, which you released in an unfinished state and charged full AAA price for it, expecting everyone to be your alpha and beta testers. Talks of changing the UI now? After the release?!? What was done with the literally DOZENS of threads with feedback regarding the UI that were produced during alpha testing?
 

Mike Dudemeister

M
Darkmatter said:
Pot, meet kettle.
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thistle said:
Joins the forum just to gloat at what he hopes is damage to the company.

Thanks for stopping by.
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Sorry if I hurt your feefees by completely justifiably calling out shoddy management decisions that only put extra work on the developers.

If you respected yourselves and the money you spent on this blatantly unfinished product, you'd be upset too, instead of desperately white knighting, and we'd have a polished product instead of half-hearted damage control posts that demonstrably only exist because of tanking stock share prices.

All of this nonsense could have been completely avoided with the appending of two simple words: "open beta."
 

AtomicJuggler

AtomicJuggler
Cohen the Worrior said:
There is, the release was rushed.
Having to pay to test the alpha was already bad enough.
Then there was no beta and basic suggestions about the alpha were not taken into account.
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I totally agree with you and that was one of complaints I was talking about in my previous post.
But for now, what's done is done. We may as well be constructive in our posts, for the sake of OUR game. :p
 

Darkmatter

Darkmatter
Mike Dudemeister said:
If you respected yourselves and the money you spent on this blatantly unfinished product, you'd be upset too, instead of desperately white knighting, and we'd have a polished product instead of half-hearted damage control posts that demonstrably only exist because of tanking stock share prices.
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White knighting? Now you are just guessing. But carry on.
 

bitstorm

bitstorm
David Braben said:
The whole team are working incredibly hard to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and improve player’s experiences
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And exactly whose fault is it that the whole team are now having to work all hours to fix this?

I mean it's ok telling us the devs are working "incredibly hard", but none of us wanted the development team put through this.

There's a problem somewhere right? And looking in from the outside it does seem like Odyssey was released with full awareness of the issues.

As always it's the dev team and the customers that end up dealing with the aftermath.
 
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CMDR Saigon

CMDR Saigon
David Braben said:
Greetings CMDRs,

Here’s a further update on where we are with Odyssey, and to keep you updated on our progress and our investigations, and talk a little about our next steps. This will be a long post, but please bear with me.

Firstly, once again I apologise for the experience many players have had running Odyssey, particularly the server issues and disconnects. Despite careful server spooling up anticipating significant demand, they were still overloaded. After a good deal of investigation, the main cause of this proved to be to do with Fleet Carriers and the systems they use. I’ll try and explain the gist of what the problem was, how we found it, and why it didn’t show during the public Alpha. The whole team are working incredibly hard to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and improve player’s experiences and this is part of that process.

As you probably know, we split Horizons and Odyssey into two sets of servers – with the plan to keep it that way until we ship Odyssey on console. Fleet Carriers exist in both ‘worlds’ and when a Fleet Carrier jumps, this (and all the players on board) are kept in sync between the two galaxies. Due to a bug with them, significant amounts of data were going back and forth between the two worlds unnecessarily, and this loop between the sets of servers simply mounted up and started bringing servers down or blocking them (resulting in many players getting disconnect errors). This is why we stopped Fleet Carriers jumping, and immediately we saw a significant improvement overall. There were other issues too with this subsystem, keeping the BGS and other things in sync between the ‘worlds’. Once we had a solid fix for the Fleet Carrier and sync issues we deployed it to the servers, and re-enabled Fleet Carriers jumping. This was compounded by the fact we had a record number of concurrent players, so the servers were already working hard. Initially we thought this was the effect we were seeing – that the high number of players was the main issue - but eventually some very smart people determined what was happening with Fleet Carriers.

Turning to the subject of performance, first of all I’d like to provide some background. When we first set the min specs for Elite Dangerous (back at the time of the Kickstarter in 2012) we made the assumption that for low-spec machines the game was playable as long as the frame rate was above 30 fps, with 60 fps for higher spec machines. Over the subsequent weeks and months after release in 2014 we optimised the game significantly. We had a similar thought process for Odyssey, especially considering that the lower spec machines will tend to be five years old or more, or be laptops, that 30 fps would be acceptable as a minimum spec performance. Separately, we have heard reports of very high spec machines failing to perform as expected. We believe this is a different issue, possibly CPU-related, and are looking into that too, as we speak.

We will get to the bottom of the performance issues, particularly with the support of the community who are already providing useful information.

Elite has always been about scale and ambition. With this latest, and biggest, expansion the team have taken on an amazing challenge. The whole galaxy in 1:1 scale, now down to the millimetre. Millions of players interacting with each other and many millions of AI game characters on billions of worlds, all orbiting around each other in an incredibly rich galaxy-wide ballet. I truly believe the team have created a milestone in modern video game history. This is not a static arena shooter where all the players join at the start, but where players are continually joining, leaving, travelling between servers alone and in groups, and so many other things. It is a real shame this incredible achievement is somewhat overshadowed by the issues we have been seeing. We remain committed to improving everyone’s experience. In the words of JFK: “We choose to go to the moon this decade and do the other things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

So what are we doing to fix the issues?

As mentioned above, the team have been working incredibly hard to support and fix critical issues. They have already made good progress with three hot fixes and many server tweaks too, but we can see there is still more to come. Disconnects are now greatly reduced, despite record concurrent player numbers.

As already explained, the performance issues may take a little longer to resolve, and we greatly appreciate your patience.

Our plan is to publish a road-map by 4th June as we continue to push forward addressing issues, including giving some details on specific improvements, building upon the fixes the team have already made.

Thank you and my apologies again for the bumpy start to Odyssey.
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Thank you very much indeed David. Very reassuring to hear of the above and all the best to the team, I am sure the whole community truly appreciate all the hard work!
 

czaux

C
Millions of players interacting with each other and many millions of AI game characters on billions of worlds
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There's 0 punishment for killing players and costing them hundreds of millions. Trolls wait outside the starter zones to kill new players all the time. Open Play is suicide, there's not millions of players interacting with each other. Most are in private play, only being in open play in areas that are not commonly populated. inb4 contrarians.
 

Gvine

G
David Braben said:
We believe this is a different issue, possibly CPU-related, and are looking into that too, as we speak.
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I do not think this is a CPU issue. I've got a recommended RX 580 but I've got a Ryzen 7 3800X and 32 GB of 3200 MHz CL14 RAM. I still get below-30 FPS in some places and just above-30 in others. The only place where I get 60 FPS is deep space but even that is more taxing on the GPU, spinning up its fans.
 
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