Icarus Week 129 Update | Late Game Hitching Fix

Performance improvement is an activity we undertake constantly, but it is a bit like prospecting for gold in that it can be a lot of work with no outcome. This week, we have some specific performance improvements for late-game hitching.

We’re rolling out the late-game hitching fix we’ve been discussing for the last two weeks after some rigorous testing. Simply-put, this will reduce or eliminate the hitching when traversing the map in open worlds that you've been playing on for a while.

Why don't we do performance every week?

People often say this in comments. In fact, we work on performance constantly at significant project expense. This work is very exploratory. In this case, our solution was extremely complex and risky. It involved redeveloping our custom voxel mesh generation to be multithreaded, combining several of the most complex areas of programming together. Results in performance optimizations don't come in a straight line, so we can't promise performance optimization work comes out constantly.

This reworks how the game loads the states of mined rock voxels, splitting these onto a separate thread so it takes the strain off the main game thread.

We’ve also got an update on our next task, converting over some more of the Styx and Olympus missions into Open World Operations.

Jump in and have a read.

Notable Improvements

• The destroy button while examining the player's loadout in space will now destroy items as intended, allowing players to remove unwanted items from their space loadout
• Cats and other animals will no longer revert to their base coloring when they are sent up to and retrieved from space (Black cats will now stay black)
• Updated Hyena Bait to require Gamey Meat instead of Fatty T-bone, so requires Antelope or Deer kills instead of Bears
• Fixed Deep Ore Drills from not scaling their speed correctly and updated the UI to reflect the new value
• Terrenus will no longer spawn on easy Outposts making them a safer environment and added Buffalo spawns to Forest Outposts
• Balance pass on Crossbow prices as they were not priced correctly. They have been brought in line with other workshop items and earlier ones have had a massive price reduction
• When obtaining Seeds from Crop Plots they no longer come with the “Grown By Prospector” Stat meaning they can be stacked with Wild Seeds
• Adding allow lists on water and food troughs so you can mark nearby animals as allowed to drink / eat from

This Week: Late Game Hitching Fix

Last week we talked about the improvements we wished to make to the ‘state’ of the mined stone deposits around the map. This was a project we were aiming to include in last week's patch but it was pulled out because of some unresolved issues that came up during testing. This week, it passed the internal testing phase and is ready for the public branch.

What is Late Game?

Over time a prospect contains more and more "data" that is a delta from the base map data. Originally the game as developed for temporary prospects, and so a lot of the systems were not constructed for the scale Open World ends up with. So when we talk about Late Game, we mean after a number of hours in an Open World prospect, or even a long running mission.

What is hitching?

Hitching can be caused by many reasons and we have progressively released fixes for many of these, but there have still been the occasional source of hitches. The end result looks the same, so it can be frustrating for users when we say we have fixed a source of hitching - but it appears not to be because they still experience it. Simply put, hitching is when the game "runs out of time" when preparing what to show on the screen. So to solve this, we need to offload the work somewhere. This specific instance of hitching occurred because as you ran around, voxels that had been mined would be loaded in - but their meshes generated on the main thread and were not multithreaded. Now they are and so the hitching is avoided.

For those who may have not read our last two posts, check out this excerpt from last week's blog:

The change we’re implementing is to do with how objects are loaded and unloaded. When these objects are loaded in, it happens simultaneously with all other objects in the area. As you traverse the map, you load different zones which then require all objects in that area to load. The process we’re specifically looking at here is loading in previously mined stone deposits in the state the player left them (that is every pickaxe swing that was done on the object). Due to the fact all of this loading (it could be in the thousands of instances) happens in one frame, it can cause hitches. This is especially bad at some points across the three different maps - and depending on where you are - you can constantly be loading and unloading these objects due to their relevancy range.

The change involves placing all this ‘logic of loading’ on a separate thread allowing these objects to load in the background while you are playing rather than in a single instance on the main game thread. One of the interesting things about splitting things out to be on separate threads is that you can’t have the main thread or separate threads interacting with the same object simultaneously, otherwise, the data becomes corrupted and can be forced into bad states.

This improvement will now be rolled out to all players, and we’ll still be looking at feedback and bug reports to make sure there are no other issues that may have slipped through. We’ll also be looking at performance reports, and analyzing the impact on late-game hitches across a range of different prospects.

Coming Soon: New Operations

We are currently in the third phase of converting over missions on Styx and Olympus to ‘Operations’ that can be played in Open World.

Why aren't the Missions all Operations?

Simply, time and complexity. Certain missions weren’t converted over to operations due to many reasons, including suitability to an Open World format, but also some requiring complete rebuilding to work in the new Operation system. We also wanted time to see how we needed to adjust our game in general, including and perhaps especially performance in Open World. Now things are more stable, we can look at moving more and more missions to Operations.

These ‘trickier’ missions are currently the ones receiving this work to convert them into Operations, and due to the extent of the reworking required, these will take some time to do. There will also be a robust testing process, as these changes will require them to be treated as ‘new operations’ and all steps and stages will have to go through the trial phase again.

The aim of this project is to provide more operations for people to play in Open World, and to make it so all content can be enjoyed in whatever format players prefer to play it in.

However, certain ‘exploration’ missions just do not work in an Open World game. Ultimately this is because these missions were developed to provide an exploration experience before there even was an Open World mode. Now that you can travel anywhere without limits, those missions are now pointless.

Currently, these are unlocked automatically in the mission tree when you complete the prior mission, and these may even be removed in the future if we feel they are more of a roadblock than content for players.

Next Week: Laika & Pug

We mentioned last week that we were going to deliver Laika and the Pug this week, but the extent of the performance improvements meant we focused our entire effort on that instead. We have pushed these two new pooches to next week so we can spend some more time testing them out.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/40692/Icarus_Pets_Bundle/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

Changelog v2.2.4.123130

New Content

Fixed

Future Content