Forged in Aeternum – Tech Improvements
Performance and bugs
This week AGS have published a video where they put four of the engineers in front of the camera and ask them to explain the performance improvements that have been put in place since the inception of New World. I always feel a bit bad for the people appearing in these videos, surely when you decided to go into writing code for games, sitting in the spotlight for players to pick apart your every comment wasn’t what you had in mind.
The video focused on explaining the challenges that come with optimising performance for an MMO like New World, partially due to the dynamic combat system we have.
Something I found interesting was that they use bots for scale testing, and program them to behave the way they think players will. Which often results in the live version spinning out unexpected problems, due to the chaotic nature of real players.
There has been some speculation in the community about a comment made by Delakron on the New World Official discord, stating the combat code is being “completely rewritten”. Some players thought this might change up the meta again, while others felt it sounded like an “under the hood” kind of change. Kevin’s explanation about player optimizations seems to confirm the latter:
"Well, so one of the most expensive parts of the game is the player simulation because the player has so many things that they can do, so many abilities, they can cast spells or shoot weapons or interact with different things in the environment like gathering things. In order to help improve on that, we are working on lots of optimizations on on the player and trying to improve its memory footprint as well as it is the amount of time it takes for it to to do all these abilities. And so it's a significant amount of work that we've been working, that we've been doing this past year. And it's getting close to being done."
Bugs and performance issues have plagued New World since its launch but I think we can agree the team have consistently worked to remedy them, in what is a challenging and rewarding gaming environment. I think most people are happy they didn’t take the easy route and use a tab target combat system.
From the source:
You can visit a direct link here, or read a copy of the news below:
In episode 64 of Forged in Aeternum, host David Verfaillie (Creative Director) is joined by four senior engineers to talk about recent tech improvements. Ed Corlew (Senior Programmer), Scott Geiser (Senior Gameplay Engineer), Kevin Christensen (Senior Engineer) and Julien Jegou (Senior Software Development Manager) join David to walk you through some technical problems the team has seen and how they’re approaching them, plus a little taste of future tech coming to New World.