Test Server Feedback

Hi,

For the next few days we are testing our Brain in a Box branch on Singularity. Tomorrow on Thursday we will be running a mass test at 17:00 EVE-time.

Disclaimer: We have still a bunch of known bugs (and probably even more not known bugs) and we are still several months from release. Your ride on Singularity can be a bit bumpy (but most known bugs should be quite hidden).

Why this test?

• We want to validate our internal performance measurements and see if we missed any performance problems (quite likely) - both for CPU and memory performance
• We want to get many bug reports from you about bugs, which we missed. :)

What has changed?
This current test includes Brain in a Box (BIAB), a rewrite of Dogma attributes and a rewrite of skills.

Brain in a Box:
On Tranquility all your skills are recalculated each time you jump to a different system and then the skills are re-applied to your ship. With this change all your skill-effects are being pre-calculated on a different server node and then this pre-calculated brain is applied when needed. This improves the performance of jumping through gates and many other session changes (docking, undocking, switching ships in space, being killed).

Rewrite of Dogma attributes:
Dogma attributes are nearly all of the values on your ships, modules and similar. Many of those you can see in the show info window in the "Attributes" tab or in your HUD (like your current shield). This rewrite changes how these attributes are stored and calculated on the server and the client. This change was done to allow the implementation of Brain in a Box. If you want to know more about this, feel free to watch the recording of our fanfest presentation from this year. As part of this we also rewrote most of how fleet bonuses work internally and we also had to re-implement the system of heat and overloading modules.

Skill rewrite:
Together with BIAB we also moved all skill training to different server nodes. We also changed how trained skills are stored: On TQ all your skills are just inventory items, which are located within your character (=brain). After these changes they are now stored separately as skills.
For this we had to change all related systems like skill training, skill queues, implants, attribute respecs, and similar - everything should behave the same, but the code behind it changed quite a bit. These changes should also fix some old issues with skill training (example: skill queue getting stuck, when the skill completes exactly while jumping between systems)

Known issues:
The current test build does not include the latests fixes for the Mosaic release - everything from the last 3 weeks is missing. Please ignore any related bugs.
BIAB bugs: We have currently about 30 bugs in our defect tracking system. Most of them are very hidden, but here the more visible ones:

• The skill training indicator in the Neocom is not correct
• Various e-war notification are not displayed in the HUD or the overview
• The bonus of control towers is not applied correctly
• Some skill bonuses are not applied correctly (but please send bug reports about this, if you find anything!)
• Fleet bonuses are wrong / lost in some cases (please send bug reports about specific cases)
• Show info window does not show correct modified values for drones
• Everything with missiles and drones is still a bit in flux - but please send bug reports about it
• added: Warp Disruption Field Generators are broken and cause black screens. Please avoid fitting them.
• added: Chremoas is causing crashes. no clue why - unrelated to BIAB.

What shall we test?
Just for the case that you really want to help with testing, here some areas:

• Skill training
• All various skill effects (on ships, modules, completely different features, ...)
• Implants
• Ship, ship modules, fitting
• Session changes like jumping, docking, ...
• Fleets

FAQ:

• When will it be deployed to TQ? - Not soon. We are still several months away from being ready to ship. Our internal plans are aiming for a release at the end of summer 2015, but this can change.
• Will this fix all our lag? - No. It will help quite a bit for everything to do with jumping and similar - but in our current version there are also some cases which are slightly slower (for example shooting missiles). We working on improving this, but BIAB is not magic, which makes all our lag problems go away.
• Will this change feature x? - Very likely no. We have so far only one very minor feature change for fleets (the wing commander receives now fleet bonuses from the fleet commander) and we are not planning any further changes. Further changes might come in later releases, but mostly from other teams.
• Will this allow changes to offgrid links? - It gives our gameplay team a bit more options - but it is completely on them to decide on what changes will be made to the game.

I've been staring at this topic for almost five minutes thinging about a clever way of saying that I'm not stressing over this.. but I'm way to stressed over this to think clearly.

This is one of the big problems actually. W spend quite some time testing that the information is correct in all places (on the server, in the client internally and in the displayed UI). A good example are the values on drones, which are currently not updated with skills (even on TQ they are only correct in the drone bay and not in space).
But: If you are just helping in the mass test - feel free to ignore these details. If you want to go a bit further with testing: Send us details in bug reports if you assume that something does not match. We have then further tools to poke at the values directly.

Just to make things a bit more convoluted:

There are certain modifiers that only apply under certain conditions. For an example it makes little sense to waste processing power on contructing the complete attribute state of a missile that is located in the cargohold of a ship that you own but is just chilling in a safespot in the system you are in. You wont be firing that missile anytime soon.

But you could perhaps do a show info on that missile, and that would query all sorts of information for you to show you the correct info. The querying of this information requires the missile to be properly initialized and everything works fine and when you switch to that ship, and load your missile launcher, everything is correct.

But if you do not do the show info then you do not initialize the attribute before moving the missile to the launcher and firing it, because you do not request the attribute value until damage application. This might potentially take a completely different codepath to apply these previously mentioned modifiers. In one case you initialized and applied modifiers, in the other you initialized and had to request modifiers that had already been set up but not applied. If something is broken one codepath but not the other you might now have a different state on the missile just because you didn't show info on the missile before loading it.

So attempting to observe the existence of a problem can be enough to make it go away. But like Habakuk says you shouldn't worry about these things. We worry about these things, I'm just describing the problem because I like saying Dogma is kind of like quantum physics, observing the dogma state will change it. It's a silly joke. Carry on!

Sounds like a really huge improvement.

I'm curious from the technical perspective, how are you operating caching, and are you mapping which skills effect which modules?

So for example, in a fleet if 200 identically fit ships jump in, and let's say 150 of them have the same skills that effect drones, are steps being taken to cache that information and avoid needing to calculate it, or with the server offloading are such micro-optimizations not necessary?

How are you dealing with activated effects such as hardeners being turned on, are these going to be pre-calculated and shared between pilot instances too on the same system node?

I would like to take my time and say "thanks for this".
I'm a developer and I know that legacy code is a pain and we often look at these old things and just say "lol nope".

It's a huge step forward and I love to see CCP doing these things. I know that there is a fear hiding somewhere but the amount of :smug: will be big in the future when this thing get deployed.

<3

I am pretty sure that this is not the end.

For everything else: A bit too early to tell. This mass test will help us a bit to make some estimations.

Schrödinger's Missile. I dig it.

Okay so potentially every statistic in the game may be wrong on the client, server or both depending on a very large number of conditions. Fun testing times, I'll see if I have some bug reports for you later.

there have been various fan fest presentations and dev post about BIAB and Dogma for a few years now actually. watch he FF 2015 rewrititng dogma and you will get info as to why there was not a big hoopla till now