Topic

Mo Stuff Mo (Performance) Problems

To put it simply, I would like the performance of the game to mo (more) better in situations where there are large (mo) numbers of items. I find this hard to articulate, as I have absolutely NO (no) technical understanding of the underlying problem, but it is clear that the mo "stuff" in a particular location, the mo my user experience suffers. This is evidenced by severe lag, computer fans kicking into overdrive, and complete frustration.

Why does every single item in a location have to be represented on my screen? If I have 360k meats on the flo (floor)...why do 6000 individual stacks of meats have to be rendered? Why not sho (show) me one stack of 60 and then some logical representation of the other 5999 (perhaps only when interacted with)?

Sure, SDBs remedy this somewhat, but I suspect that the rendering of the SDBs themselves will become an issue as well at some point.

Sure, I might want to see something like 30 pigs, but not 6000 stacks of meats in a given area. Maybe there could be levels of priority as to which items should be seen in their entirety, and those that should be summarized in some way.

I trust that you understand what I am saying. I trust that if this is a problem with an underlying 3rd party technology, a creative solution/workaround can be achieved.

In short, make things mo better.

ETA: I should note that in some situations, this *may* be preferred behavior, such as street art where you want individual items to be viewable over the range of the street. So don't take that away away. But a mass of items of the same type within 1 plank of each other should be viewed/rendered as a single stack imo.

Posted 7 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Yeah, as far as performance goes, I find it somewhat baffling that WoW runs better on my computer than Glitch.
    Posted 7 months ago by Rev. Desdemona Subscriber! | Permalink
  • mo? seriously? since when is mo a word? 

    How about if the game designers were as casual and uncaring as you are about how to communicate your annoyances?

    If you are having problems I would check the internet connection in your parents' basement. The rest of us are fine.  Please don't blame TS for your frustrations.
     
    Most of us seem to be more than fine so I would guess that the people with ongoing problems need to keep working on their connection issues . It is so not a TS issue. Work with your isp. 

    We all struggle to make Glitch work for us. Please dont blame your problems on TS.
    Posted 7 months ago by Miss Bobbit Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's definitely an issue we take seriously and welcome/want the feedback Miss Bobbitt; mo-speak is ok by us. :) I don't think this is a connection issue; we've experienced lots of load time in places with a great deal of inventory in it.
    Posted 7 months ago by kevbob Subscriber! | Permalink
  • i lobe you, kebob<3

    ETA seriously, Miss Bobbit, "the internet connection in your parents' basement"? Try to be a little harsher next time, please. I remember when Glitch was populated (mostly) by kind, polite people.
    Posted 7 months ago by Rev. Desdemona Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Serious question: why not NOT have 360,000 meat on the floor? Optimizing for that case is never going to be high priority for us (since it is so rare) though general performance is extremely high priority. But, what purpose does all the meat on the floor serve? I can't see why you'd want it in terms of game mechanics and it obviously makes the game frustrating to play … so, why not just stop getting more meat?
    Posted 7 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • We are waiting for the Roll About In Bacon command to work
    Posted 7 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • /BACON ROLL
    Posted 7 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the most useless post ever Miss Bobbit.
    Posted 7 months ago by Helvete Subscriber! | Permalink
  • By the way, can we please have a button "don't display any replies etc written by this user"? Seriously.
    Posted 7 months ago by Fly Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I usually keep a piles of spice, eggs, gas, meat, milk next to my trees or collectors. I just harvest/collect and pile things there, so they do not fill my bags. When i pile enough i go and dump them to shrines or sell or cook.

    If this piles get really big it gets laggy for sure. @Joe Blow have a point about grouping large quantities of items and not rendering all of that stuff.
    Posted 7 months ago by Lilla My Subscriber! | Permalink
  •  
    Posted 7 months ago by Goodnight Groddle Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @kevbob and stoot.  If the intention is NOT to let users pile up an infinite number of objects on the floor due to performance, why not prevent it?  I've been wondering this since before the housing reset, when all we had was one dinky little cabinet for a few items even in the biggest houses.  If I can own any amount stuff, why NOT make infinite storage, other than that it makes stuff kind of hard to organize?  SDBs seem to be moving in that direction, but I'm hearing from hoarders who think even that is not enough.

    I've seen plenty of games where anything dropped and not retrieved within a few minutes decays, effectively imposing inventory limits and doing the garbage collection for both gamers and devs automatically.  I think at this stage that would probably cause a huge, ugly rebellion, since glitchen are currently keen on creating item art and interior decorations.  But you encouraged this situation by suggesting the idea of limits with tiny storage, and then letting de facto floor storage come into play by not enforcing any actual limits on keeping objects.  It seems like a couple solutions at this point are to continue to expand our storage and organization capabilities, to work on the code so that items are using less processing power when they are not really being used, and perhaps around 100K or so say, "I'm sorry but you have reached the maximum capacity of this location; it's full".
    Posted 7 months ago by KhaKhonsu Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Don't be so quick to judge others.  Sure all that meat seems ridiculous but I think the majority of us had thousands of items in out homes and on our streets when we opened our boxes.  Keeping all that meat in a pile, OTOH, is a little unusual but to each his/her own.

    Oddly I had very little lag the day all 10K+ planks ended up on my floor along with 50+ BBs, nearly 500 urth blocks (that was the worst!) and hundreds of herbs which helped to obscure the rest.  I was there when the door opened and played about 7 hours with less lag than I had had in a long time - Amazing!  Since then, however, the lag seems to be increasing and was the worst just a few hours ago when I lost Chat every time I changed streets.  I know this is a difficult issue and I know that it is an ongoing concern and that the Devs are working to fix it or at least improve performance. 

    BTW, I am all for "Mo" and "Moar" and any other shortcut or new Glitchy words or phrases that develop.  I think they enrich the game and add to the fun.
    Posted 7 months ago by Brib Annie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I tried a mo, but it makes me look like a 70's porn star!
    Posted 7 months ago by OL. Der Dan Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Miss Bobbit, who are "The rest of us"?    Please don't presume to speak for me.
    Posted 7 months ago by Iconoclast Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Same, I have a badass computer that I built myself, and my cpu is often at 100% usage (while playing the game).  Can give more details on computer and usage if necessary, but I just woke up and feel like shit right now.

    Flash has always been a beast when it comes to games.  Another game I play (Dofus- made by a french company- most people probably haven't heard of it) was in flash as well, until they transitioned to Adobe Air, which made it better, though not perfect.
    Posted 7 months ago by Serra Subscriber! | Permalink
  • As a developer i can tell why stoot and TS give low priority to this optimization. They have a timeline and plans what to implement and when to release. If they got a pile of tasks and have a deadline to release - every new task shrinks the time of others. This puts more stress to whole team and this is pretty bad. To unrelease a product(going back to beta) is a pretty tough decision and hit them too. Glitch is unique game so keep the good work guys.

    I play Glitch in Debian Squeeze and due to Flash crashes and bugs(it turns Blue when using VDPAU and acceleration) i have to disable Hardware Acceleration. It loads CPU more and after some time becomes laggy. Reload fixes it till next time.
    Posted 7 months ago by Lilla My Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Would love for the cabinets themselves to have the same storage capacity as the sdb boxes! I do find that the more stuff I have in my house the more laggy I get too.  So I now keep objects out of storage to the bare minimum which is kind of a shame when it's much easier to just walk in a grab off a shelf. 

    I get priorites too though - and that ts has to consider the game/players as a whole.
    Posted 7 months ago by ~Arabesque~ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @ Joe Blow - several days ago my game was getting much laggier than usual. After putting up with the lag for a couple of days I remembered and cleared my browser cache. Presto - game running with no lag again. I'm not saying this will help you, and you may have already tried it, but, if not, clear your browser cache and see if that improves your performance at all. Heck, reboot your computer while you're at it (grammar mavens take note of preceding usage); a clean start can work wonders!
    Posted 7 months ago by Hawkwell Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Miss Bobbit, please speak for yourself.

    I have reported issues with TS regarding the fact that I can no longer touch a SDB or enter decorate mode without the game resetting.  This is not something on my end, and it is not something I need to discuss with my ISP.  It is a problem that more and more people are reporting to TS since the housing reset.

    While my issues differ from the OP a little, they did mention issues with SDBs, and your response is useless and just aggressive for no reason.  You have an issue with their typed words, then comment on that, if you honestly feel you must, but leave it at that.  Attacking them and reducing them to a stereotype of someone that lives in their parents' basement (and therefore deserves ridicule according to the internet) isn't helping resolve their issue, or alter how they spell.  It is also invalidating people such as myself who are having performance issues with Glitch and are sick of people saying it can't possibly on TS' end.

    I pay money for this game and I have not been able to enjoy it for a while now due to this issue.  Being told to do something other than enter decorate mode or touch an SDB is telling me to play a game I pay for in a way that I don't enjoy.  It also means that services I offered people (upgrades) cannot be completed.  Also, since I cannot touch a SDB it means I am having to create piles of items on the floor... the exact issue causing the OP's original issue, and what Stoot has questioned why someone would do such a thing.  In my case... it's because I have no other option!

    I'd like a fix, I'd like it soon, and I appreciate everyone that raises their voice to be heard about this issue so it's made the foremost priority by TS.
    Posted 7 months ago by xombiekitty Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 Joe Blow :)

    -1 Miss Bobbit :s
    Posted 7 months ago by Misha Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Like many others here I do not play "on a computer in my parents' basement." My husband built my computer and, like Serra's, it is "badass." I have a high speed cable connection, so that's not the problem either. While I don't have 360,000 meat on my floor, I DO encounter this lag when I go to a street with a lot of people and a lot of dropped items: Cebarkul on a busy dying day, some of the street art sites that used to pop up, etc. I empathize with the OP because I have had similar experiences.
    Posted 7 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "This is evidenced by severe lag, computer fans kicking into overdrive, and complete frustration."

    Many things in flash = computer going into full fledged cool down mode.
    Posted 7 months ago by Elly Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I can not say problem is in lag. My connection is pretty good. From my ISP to my apartment house connection is fiber optics. Then it is 100mbit copper. Internet connectivity in Bulgaria is one of best in the world. It is not a matter of connection. Flash just do not manages some stuff well. Maybe after some use memory start to fragment.

    Still if you have 1000 stacks of meat it is sufficient to display 1 stack and in selector to say "there are 1k stacks here - what do you want to do with them". 
    Posted 7 months ago by Lilla My Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I find after about an hour of playing, Flash has consumed over 700 MB of memory and needs to be shut down. It's not anyone's internet connection, "Miss Bobbit", and it's ignorant of you to say so - ignorant both in the rude and the lack of knowledge meanings. Flash has long been a pig for computer resources, and anyone with a lick of sense knows this.
    Posted 7 months ago by Kelti Subscriber! | Permalink
  • For the record, I don't have that many stacks of meat, nor do I expect the game to be designed for corner cases. I was using an extremely high number to illustrate my point that the number of items in a location directly impacts performance. My suggestion of simply representing multiple items as a single entity was merely a thought that popped into my head as I watched stack upon stack being rendered upon entering my laggy house.

    So...without any examples, suggestions or language missteps:

    I would like to see Glitch performance improve when there are reasonably large numbers of items in a given location.

    Guess I should have lead with that :)
    Posted 7 months ago by Joe Blow Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 Joe.  Sometimes I feel like my laptop is gonna melt.
    Posted 7 months ago by Mablem Tiipot Subscriber! | Permalink
  • ...lol RTF!!

    +1 Joe....yep my fan has been whining alot lately, and just started with BAD lag these last couple of days. No problem playing Glitch until the last update.
    Posted 7 months ago by im4noles2 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Ugh. Miss Bobbit does not speak for me. 

    I know what you mean, though, Joe. I'm using a laptop and it gets HOT when I play. I can't even imagine going in-world on my netbook right now. My husband's computer? WOWIE! I was stunned by how smooth and fast the world was. Especially when he visits my house. If there was some kind of tier of performance, it would be great. Then I could play on my netbook just fine without it being crippled by rendering.
    Posted 7 months ago by Jarhaven Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Granted I have a pretty nice machine, but I'm not having any problems with lag.  How much RAM do you guys have?
    Posted 7 months ago by Fleep Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This place seems like a good spot to put my experience with memory issues.

    Whenever I play Glitch, my computer renders each street and movement slower and slower as my Glitch day progresses.  Eventually (on my Windows netbook with Chrome or Firefox) it gets so choppy that I need to exit the browser and reload it.  This clears something up and it runs super fast again for a few streets.  The time to reload for me varies, but it about an hour and a half typically.  But, often, within just a few streets, the choppiness is enough to interfere with game play, and there are some things I often don't do because of it: hug, kiss, RK, or chat with other players...

    So, seeking a set up that used less RAM right off the top, I installed a dual boot of JoliCloud on my netbook, and started using it's Chrome based browser.  This is great!  Right up until the memory leak that is apparently inherent in most flash apps gets so big that it freezes up the whole computer.

    I'm pretty sure that TS is already aware of this memory leak issue.  I've seen at least one other thread about it.  But I thought it might be nice to have a little more data on it.
    Posted 7 months ago by Carl Projectorinski Subscriber! | Permalink
  • ^-- This
    Posted 7 months ago by MarbhDamhsa Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Optimizing for that case [360,000 meat on the floor] is never going to be high priority for us (since it is so rare) 

    Stoot is very nicely saying that you are Doing It Wrong, and I'm inclined to agree.   I have piles, but when I pile up to the point where there is serious lag then it's MY fault, not the game's fault, and it's up to me to do something about it.   Playing the game so you can just pile things up to infinity is whacked, hence Stoot's very reasonable and very serious question above - why are you even doing that?

    Ultimately TS does not need to do anything about it because it's a self-limiting problem.  If having a gazillion items in an area house causes lag, eventually people will be motivated to do something about the gazillion items, either put them in bags or SDBs or perhaps even (gasp) USE them for something.
    Posted 7 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • xombiekitty- re: "I can no longer touch a SDB or enter decorate mode without the game resetting"

    Note: This is a separate issue from the OP post; and one we are reasonably sure we fixed in the last two days. If you would please try it again, click the SDB boxes, go into storage mode and see how it is, we would appreciate it. If it is still a problem, click the bug icon, and send us a brand new report.
    Posted 7 months ago by kevbob Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think that everyone knows by now that Flash is shit.  :P  But I'm willing to put up with it since it would take TS too much effort to rewrite Glitch into Air or Shockwave or something else better!

    Edit:  Even with a i5-2500k (quad core 3.3ghz) and 16gigs of ram, the game still gives me the shits sometimes because of Flash.  :P
    Posted 7 months ago by Serra Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I apologize for my grumpy. You caught me at the end of a bad day and I should not have been so harsh.  

    What I wanted to say was that TS has done an amazing job optimizing an extremely complicated system to run on our hardware.

    If you participated in any of the system tests you saw how they maxed out the numbers of everything on our screen and ran it over and over on thousands of our computers to make sure it worked.

    TS really bends over backwards to make this a good experience for us. I have run Glitch on an underpowered netbook in my backyard at the edge of my wireless coverage and I would say the performance is amazing even under the worst conditions.

    Cebarkul is a lot less laggy if no one is in it, but who would want to play Glitch if it was always deserted? I would rather have a street crowded with wireframes than an empty street.

    I think that you are going to get lag in any popular graphic-intensive game if you have slow internet and an underpowered computer. If you don't believe me, try running Second Life! Or any of the other popular mmorpgs. This is not a Glitch problem. And I don't think it is fair to put the blame on TS. 

    Before you blame TS I think you should make sure you have the latest version of Flash and your browser. Try running Glitch on Chrome, which is very fast, and close out all your other windows. Clean your browser's cache. Check to see if there is an update for your router. Do a complete reset of your modem and router. Run system cleanup software like System Mechanic. If you do these things I guarantee that Glitch will run better for you. I hope that helps.
    Posted 7 months ago by Miss Bobbit Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm going to give Miss Bobbit the benefit of the doubt and assume she was doing a recreation of Evil Miss Bobbit from episode 37.
    Posted 7 months ago by Otto Otto Subscriber! | Permalink
  • To be clear, we have some of the best low-level Flash engineers in the world and they are  working hard every single day shaving fractions of milliseconds off the time required to complete each render loop: it's just not an easy problem. Every 30 milliseconds (or so) a few tens of thousand of things have to happen for the next frame to appear on your screen — just profiling/measuring where the CPU cycles go is an extremely hard problem.

    I'm not complaining or trying to dismiss the concerns: just saying that we are aware and are working very hard on it, every single day. And, things are much better than they were and they will continue to get better. We just can't press a "Run Faster" button and have it run faster …

    HOWEVER, there is a "run faster" button available to you, often:

    • Run Glitch in a different browser than the one you use for everything else (if you have a few tabs with youtube videos and intensive JS applications like gmail or even just pages with lots of ads, Glitch will run much, much, much worse

    • Restart that browser from time to time (contrary to what people write in the forums, clearing your cache won't help and it can even make things a bit slower since you'll have to re-download stuff you already downloaded)

    • Don't put even 36,000 meat on the floor … let along 360,000 ;)
    Posted 7 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I am interested in this: http://www.glitch.com/groups/RHFLABT42KE2VI8/discuss/4408/
     
    Posted 7 months ago by Rook Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'd like to be clear, too, since I've now lodged a report here: I've worked in Flash myself.  Really small projects.  And I've looked into how to manage memory just for them.  The idea of making a game like Glitch even remotely clean in Flash makes me blanch and stay awake at night if I try to comprehend it!  You guys have my utmost respect for even trying this project, let alone pulling it off as well as you do.

    Also, thanks to Glitch, I now have a real incentive to get a faster computer... ;)
    Posted 7 months ago by Carl Projectorinski Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Memory upgrades work wonders, and detailed how-to pages can be found using Google. 

    If you have a Windows machine, consider downloading and installing Pale Moon (firefox optimized for Windows) and using it to only play glitch. 
    Posted 7 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I don't get much lag from my house, only rarely...tho the items will be slow to pop up on screen, my little glitchy person can still move and do things relatively fast.
    I get hit with my house lag (and this is a guess that it's caused from all the things I save in my house) is when I first log in and it starts me in my house and I exit to my front street (or anywhere else for that matter) before most everything in it has a chance to load - then it's very hard to move until I refresh.
    The times I get hit with lag the most is when I go to Cebarkul and Ix, especially GGW in Ix. Don't know if it's the same thing that causes lag in those places or not, since I am very dumb when it comes to computer stuff lol
    Posted 7 months ago by sgjo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Restarting the browser regularly works great for speed issues. If I enter a new level and the progress meter creeps up by one percent every second or so it's time  for a restart, it can take a while for this problem to occur although leaving the house for the first time each day used to be a killer, doing this reset makes the difference from between two or three minutes to enter a level and ten to twenty seconds, it is somewhat unpredictable how long it'll take to bog down but it always happens at some point and a restart always cures the laggy behavior.
    Posted 7 months ago by Benzyl Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "I think that you are going to get lag in any popular graphic-intensive game if you have slow internet and an underpowered computer."

    True. However, I do NOT have an underpowered computer, nor do I have a slow internet connection. I also do not have a lot of stuff in my house. The lag that I'm experiencing began concurrently with the most recent update. It did not exist before. I have made no changes on my end. It happens in areas over which I have no control. I appreciate that TS is aware of, and working on, this problem. But, to say that it is "my own fault" is ridiculous."
    Posted 7 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • When you say you should run non-Glitch web stuff in a different browser, do you mean another program entirely (eg, Firefox vs. IE) or do you mean another browser window as opposed to another tab?

    If the latter, then maybe in-game links (like the Auction) should pop out a new window instead of another tab.
    Posted 7 months ago by Biff Beefbat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Audaria  - is Flash up to date?
    Posted 7 months ago by shhexy corin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, it is, shhexy.
    Posted 7 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • it's just so much less satisfying to try to roll around in my SBD of meat...
    Posted 7 months ago by Tribeca Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I actually have more of a problem with lag when using SBDs than when I have stuff piled on my floor. Granted, I had a whole wall displaying every craftable (and vendorable) food/drink item in the game (aside from Wine of the Dead) for awhile. Since I've dismantled it (you can access a snap of it from my profile), my house and its contents are rezzing (is that just a SecondLife term? I haven't played that game for ages!) much faster.

    (I know. I use a lot of parentheses.)

    I now plan on crafting a bunch of cabinets (though probably not in the triple digits like with SDBs) in which to keep my stuff. I'm not really a hoarder. I'm a collector. And not a particularly thorough one at that. So cabinets shouldn't cause nearly the issue, because I will only ever be displaying the contents of one cabinet at a time.
    Posted 7 months ago by Quirk Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If I might make an observation...

    While gardening, I see not one, not two, but three separate notifications of the same event - the little dialog above the garden plot, the "growl" (is that what it's called) on the bottom of the main window, and a local chat notification, plus the flyaway energy, mood and img numbers.

    Is all that redundancy really necessary? 
    Posted 7 months ago by Kelti Subscriber! | Permalink
  • What Quirk just said.  I had insane lag when going into my house.  I took out 24 of my SDBs, put in regular cabinets and went back to using those instead. Lag problem is SOLVED!  The game is no longer eating all my RAM, forcing to relog every 30-40 mins.  Also, I experience way less lag from stuff piled all over a floor, than from SDBs.  SDBs are evil!

    Yes my flash is up to date. I am running Win 7 pro, Firefox 12.0.
    Posted 7 months ago by Innie✿, Obviously Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Small cabinets are really nice.  You can put stuff on them like counters, but they have 16 slots in them too.   Bigger bags are still your friend.    I have seen SDB setups where every game item got it's own, and I wondered.  Dice?  You need an SDB for dice?  
    Posted 7 months ago by WalruZ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Biff Beefbat: I meant another program/totally different browser. Having another window/tab or two open in the same browser won't hurt (things like the auctions, homepage, or even some random Tumblr) but if you've been using the same browser for a few days fairly intensively, Glitch will definitely run very slowly in the browser.
    Posted 7 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink