Hey, all! We hope you’re all enjoying Primal Carnage: Extinction so far. We just wanted to do a bit of a Day One post-mortem and kind of explain the highs and lows of our first 24 hours post-launch.
What Happened? Why am I on fire?
One of the major things we’ve been working on adding in Primal Carnage: Extinction is Steam Economy support. With Steam Economy, players earn items in game including dinosaur skins, human weapon skins, and other cosmetic items which they can trade or sell on the marketplace.
When our initial build became available to players, our Economy Server was completely overwhelmed by the traffic from players and game servers making calls to it. As a result players immediately encountered issues with their in-game inventory not reflecting their Steam Economy and our servers crashing after failing to receive information that they needed from the master Economy Server. This also created increased lag and severe framerate drops.
One of the advantages of utilizing Early Access was our ability to test our infrastructure in an environment with large amounts of players. We don’t have the resources that large AAA developers will have to stress test this stuff internally, so we are very thankful for everyone jumping in and playing Extinction from day one. We didn’t expect the volume of people so keen to play the game so quickly, which contributed to our servers struggling so much.
So, how did we fix it? How was the fire put out?
Our developers immediately got to work coming up with fixes for the critical issues. Already tired developers worked through the night to improve build stability and solidify our servers and optimized our requests so that we could withstand the traffic that we were receiving. We didn’t want to leave the build in a state that would be broken, so we marathoned through the night to make sure that our players had a stable build to test by morning. In less than 12 hours, we managed to put together a new build and a solid changelog to fix as many player issues as possible that were logged from the first few hours of release.
We have received amazing feedback from players on our forums in reporting bugs, along with our team of dedicated volunteers working in Quality Assurance. All of your responses have made the Early Access process go even better than expected, and your continuing support will help create the best Primal Carnage: Extinction for everyone.
DLC migration, where did my stuff go?
One side-effect of the initial network instability was that items were sometimes incorrectly duplicated for a short period of time as part of the DLC migration and a small group of people who connected to the Economy during a certain window of time did not receive their content. In order to make sure that duplicate items received through glitches or exploits are removed as well as to ensure that everyone receives their DLC, we’ll be selectively removing people’s DLC items and re-doing the DLC transfer to ensure that everyone ends up with the DLC that they should have.
Stats, stats and more stats
So, one of the coolest things about our first day on Early Access is that we’ve been able to start tracking player match data for real games so that we can make decisions based on data for how to make tweaks and changes. The more people play, the richer the data becomes and Extinction will become more balanced and refined.
We thought we would provide an insight into the data we are collecting and how powerful it can be.
This is a heat map of where people spend their time in Docks playing Team Deathmatch.
This shows a heat map of where people are dying in Docks playing Team Deathmatch.
A handful of matches worth of movement data showing the paths different classes take through Utility Base. Have a guess which color is a Ptera.
What are we doing next?
We have already pushed out a big patch, but we aren’t done yet. After a short sleep, we will continue to work on another patch to be released in the coming days. You can see the details of what are are doing in our public Trello Boards for both our Roadmap and Known Issues. Jump in and check out our future plans and vote on the features you most want to see!