These patch notes are going to deviate from our normal template because I wanted to include a more detailed description of what we've been doing the past few days.
As many of you know there have been some issues with server lag, logging into servers, black screens after loading the world, etc.
We have spent a lot of time over the past several days tracking down what has been causing the issues and making frequent patches to the US 74 server to test fixes as we've developed them.
The root cause of the issue is that the physics engine of CRYENGINE continually gets slower and slower the longer the server is running and eventually just uses up a lot of CPU resources on the server machines. That causes the SFPS (server frames per second) to decrease and be a lot lower than it should be, so the server isn't processing data as fast as it should. This issue is not a physical server issue - the servers from TrinityGames.com are running really well, but a software issue instead. We have let Crytek know of the issue, and we hope we can work with them to get it fixed, but at this point it isn't something we can solve without replacing the entire physics library with something else, which would be a massive amount of work for our small team.
In this patch we have done all that we can to decrease the physics loads on the servers. You will notice that items will now sometimes slightly hover above the tops of surfaces (or in some cases slightly inside of them) when they are spawned into the game. Dropped items still have full physics enabled, so you can still skate down the mountain on plywood, roll items down stairs, watch flashlights float down the rivers at night, and all kinds of fun things, but dropped items will now be removed after two minutes. So, if you want to keep the item, just pick it up within two minutes after dropping it.
I want to point out that the above are considered temporary workarounds, and we fully plan to have them all physicalized again as soon as the issue with the physics engine is resolved.
As part of this patch there is now more feedback during the log in process as well. It now contains three steps, "Joining server", "Loading world", and "Synchronizing world state". The last part, synchronizing, is when your game is receiving the current state of the world from the server - it should ideally only last 3 or 4 seconds, but may be longer if the server is under a lot of stress from the physics issues.
In addition, and again let me stress that this is a temporary solution, all servers will be restarting every four hours to keep them running well.
All of the above is the main focus for this patch. However, there is another clothing item in this patch as well for you to discover.
Reductions to server load.
- Spawned items will hover (no longer have physics) to reduce server load, dropped items still have physics.
- Dropped items disappear after 2 minutes.
- Other minor optimizations.
Items
- New clothing item