Test Server Feedback

Hi,

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

Why this test?

• Validate our performance measurements - both for CPU and memory performance
• Validate the readiness of Brain in a Box (BIAB) for deciding a release date for TQ

What has changed?
Nearly no player-facing features have been changed. On the back end this contains three major refactoring projects: Brain in a Box, 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). Implants and Boosters were also changed fundamentally for this.

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:

• Bonuses from control towers are not working correctly

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 and boosters
• Ship, ship modules, fitting
• Session changes like jumping, docking, ...
• Fleets

FAQ:

• When will it be deployed to TQ? - Will be decided after the mass test.
• Will this fix all our lag? - No. It will help a bit for everything to do with jumping and similar - but BIAB is not magic, which makes all our lag problems go away. We will very probably also need to make further improvements after the initial release to TQ.
• Will this change feature x? - Very likely no. We have so far only two very minor feature change for fleets (the wing commander receives now fleet bonuses from the fleet commander, and some fleet bonuses are now stacking nerfed) 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 game designers a bit more options - but it is completely on them to decide on what changes will be made to the game.

i thought past behavior was to use the single highest value bonus? do multiple booster bonuses now stack?
and congrats!

To clarify the Fleet Booster comment, the only bonuses affected by this particular issue are those provided by three leadership skills (just the skills, not booster modules).
The affected skills are Leadership (with its scan resolution bonus), Skirmish Warfare (with its agility bonus) and Information Warfare (with its targeting range bonus).

Very glad to see such impressive BITB progress. We've been hearing about it for a long time, and my understanding was that the limitations imposed by Dogma were tying the hands of game balance staff quite a bit. I'm hoping that, with the improved technology in place, we'll have a much more open future going forward.

hmm. i am wondering if the rewrites also fix the drugs bug where the client thinks you lost the penalties after docking a few times.

looking forward to BIAB i will try to attend the mass test

Cool beans. I'll check it out as soon as I get a chance. Might not be tonight.

Will this help eliminate the need to 'pause' skill training when you clone jump (surely cant be that hard, you don't pause skills when you DIE and that has a similar effect to clone jumping) - or indeed to eliminate skill 'pausing' altogether since 'pausing' training has no benefit whatsoever now that the last advantage of keeping skillpoints low, ie reducing clone costs, has been got rid of?

So, Singularity has been updated - feel free to jump on and break stuff (and don't forget to send bug reports)!

Not planned at the moment - but I'll see what I can do. We'll probably need quite a few mass tests in the next weeks - maybe I can sneak something into another TZ.

Will we still recieve the 2m SP award if joining in a bit late?