From the 0.7.4 patch preview “We are preparing to update our game engine. This will take a significant amount of time to QA, however it will bring improvements of its own while also facilitating us making additional optimisations ourselves.” A dev later confirmed on the official forums that they are upgrading the game to a newer version of unity. I don’t know a lot about this kind of stuff but am very interested what it might mean for us players? Any ideas? [post moderated —Sarno] [post moderated —Sarno]
I might get this wrong cause i was playing as i listened, but the update to unity is so suppose to make it so when a frame gets overloaded or still has calculations, it just passes them on to the next frame and in doing so there is no more stutter. To me it seems like this would be a pyramid effect until u crashed, but its been tested and everyone says it works.
When they refer to engine update it’s just using a new version of Unity. It is supposed to bring engine bug correction or/and engine optimization but it can also bring new bugs/deprecated functions etc… So I assume it is pretty annoying and time consuming to update the engine and they do it when they really feel it useful.
Hi mate I asked this exact question a few weeks ago on reddit and one of the devs “ekimarcher” responded with the below. Hope this helps.
As one of the people working on this, it means better performance. The biggest thing it will add is a new garbage collection system. I know that might sound insignificant but if you are interested, while the game runs, certain variables and objects are created and assigned. This takes up memory. When they are no longer needed, that memory is freed up to be used again by a garbage collector.
Currently, at the end of every frame, all the garbage is collected. Each frame can’t end completely until all the garbage is collected. This means that if one frame happens to have a lot of garbage, the game briefly pauses while it waits for the garbage collector to finish. This results in what most people report as stutering.
The new version of unity that we are targeting 2019.3 is still in beta but as soon as it has a full release, we will start making the switch on our master branch. We’ve been testing it with a beta version and it’s going well but we don’t like to use beta versions on production if we can avoid it. Learned that lesson a couple years ago. This switch will take some time so it might not happen in the first patch after 2019.3 is released.
The new version changes the garbage collector to only do as much as it can without stalling the frame and leaves the rest to be collected next frame. This results in smoother cleanup and less stuttering. We find it ends up not affecting actual frame rate too much but has a big improvement on the overall feel.
This is still a work in progress for us so I can’t give a specific when this will happen.
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