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Update 9.7 - Focus on Performance
There are tons of plants and every plant now has a game object with a few components (including a transform). In previous patches we optimized rendering to be less expensive and now we are ready to make the next step - fully replace these game objects with Unity DOTS lightweight entities. It benefits us in all aspects: memory, maintenance cost, instantiation and destruction speed. Also it lets us use job threads (multi-threading) for plant related updates such as move through detection.
With the power of DOTS (Unity Data Oriented Technology Stack focused on performance and multi-core utilization) we are able to heavily parallelize chunk builds and updates. A chunk is a minimal unit of terrain to be processed by a terrain rendering system and basically is 10x10x10 blocks in Eco. Effectively it reduces the time between chunk data being received from the server and then rendered in the game. And that's it from Alex. Update 9.7 will be shipped through several 9.7.x updates - we're aiming for at least two, one in mid-late November and one in mid-late December. After that, the next shipment will be Eco 10, which will have two giant additions you've been waiting for: boats and settlements. Well have more updates on this and our long-term plans for Eco soon, so stay tuned. Spoiler alert, theyre big - and some are fluffy.
[ 2022-11-15 09:17:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Eco Citizens,
today we'd like to give you an update on where were taking Eco after our 9.6 release. As an Early Access title, were always looking to balance adding features with polishing existing ones, and weve decided to have a final Eco 9 update that is focused solely on performance - Update 9.7.
A major part of our team will be focused on both client and server performance, fixing some long standing issues that should make the game a much smoother experience, especially on lower end machines. Our CTO Alex will tell you a bit of the details on how we plan to make it work:
Our strategy is to compare profiling snapshots we collect from QA and players on public test servers after hours of gaming. There are no obvious reasons we can easily fix, but one thing we noticed is greatly increased transform update time (every game object in game has a Transform with its position, rotation and scale) while the amount of game objects is not so different. These updates happen inside of the Unity Engine and we dont have direct control over it, but fortunately we found a way how we can inject a tracking for all transform changes and identify places which cause most of the updates and potentially fix them.
And you can help us with that by playing on our public playtest server for the first part of Update 9.7 that will start tomorrow at 18:00 CET / 9am PT on our official server Giant Panda - all details and how it works will be published on our discord: https://discord.gg/eco
In an average Eco world you have a lot of trees especially with user tree farms. FPS may drop significantly in such areas. There is also time and resources which need to be spent to create a new tree and destroy a tree which impacts the speed of loading objects received from the server.
We are working in two main directions:
- Simplifying tree models to improve instantiation time, saving memory resources and cost of component updates.
- Optimize rendering, especially at a distance. Right now a tree is a set of trunk and branches, but on a far distance (LOD1, LOD2) it may be replaced with a single mesh which might be a bit different, but still pretty recognizable and saves a lot of GPU resources - see the video below.
There are tons of plants and every plant now has a game object with a few components (including a transform). In previous patches we optimized rendering to be less expensive and now we are ready to make the next step - fully replace these game objects with Unity DOTS lightweight entities. It benefits us in all aspects: memory, maintenance cost, instantiation and destruction speed. Also it lets us use job threads (multi-threading) for plant related updates such as move through detection.
With the power of DOTS (Unity Data Oriented Technology Stack focused on performance and multi-core utilization) we are able to heavily parallelize chunk builds and updates. A chunk is a minimal unit of terrain to be processed by a terrain rendering system and basically is 10x10x10 blocks in Eco. Effectively it reduces the time between chunk data being received from the server and then rendered in the game. And that's it from Alex. Update 9.7 will be shipped through several 9.7.x updates - we're aiming for at least two, one in mid-late November and one in mid-late December. After that, the next shipment will be Eco 10, which will have two giant additions you've been waiting for: boats and settlements. Well have more updates on this and our long-term plans for Eco soon, so stay tuned. Spoiler alert, theyre big - and some are fluffy.
[ 2022-11-15 09:17:21 CET ] [ Original post ]
Eco
Strange Loop Games
Developer
Strange Loop Games
Publisher
2018-02-06
Release
Game News Posts:
193
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Very Positive
(10380 reviews)
The Game includes VR Support
Enter the world of Eco, where you must team-up to build civilization and prevent a disaster, using resources from a fully simulated ecosystem, where your every action affects the lives of countless species.
Will you and your fellow builders collaborate successfully, creating laws to guide player actions, finding a balance that takes from the ecosystem without damaging it? Or will the world be destroyed by short-sighted choices that pollute the environment in exchange for immediate resource gains? Or, do players act too slowly, and the world is consumed by a disaster that could have been avoided if you developed the right technology? In Eco, you must find a balance as a group if the world is to survive.
Enter humans into this equation, and things get complicated. It is the role of players to thrive in this environment by using resources from the world to eat, build, discover, learn and invent. However, every resource they take affects the environment it is taken from, and without careful planning and understanding of the ecosystem, lands can become deforested and polluted, habitats destroyed, and species left extinct.
In the extreme, the food supply of the ecosystem can be destroyed, along with all human life on it, resulting in server-wide perma-death. Eco is a game where the player’s actions have meaningful consequences.
Will you and your fellow builders collaborate successfully, creating laws to guide player actions, finding a balance that takes from the ecosystem without damaging it? Or will the world be destroyed by short-sighted choices that pollute the environment in exchange for immediate resource gains? Or, do players act too slowly, and the world is consumed by a disaster that could have been avoided if you developed the right technology? In Eco, you must find a balance as a group if the world is to survive.
A world-survival game
Eco is a survival game in a global sense, where it is not just the individual or group who is threatened, but the world itself. The world of Eco will be home to a population of thousands of simulated plants and animals of dozens of species, each living out their lives on a server running 24 hours a day, growing, feeding and reproducing, with their existence highly dependent on other species.Enter humans into this equation, and things get complicated. It is the role of players to thrive in this environment by using resources from the world to eat, build, discover, learn and invent. However, every resource they take affects the environment it is taken from, and without careful planning and understanding of the ecosystem, lands can become deforested and polluted, habitats destroyed, and species left extinct.
In the extreme, the food supply of the ecosystem can be destroyed, along with all human life on it, resulting in server-wide perma-death. Eco is a game where the player’s actions have meaningful consequences.
- Everything you do affects the ecosystem, and players can destroy their food supply and world (server-wide permadeath)
- Create a player-run government to make decisions as a group, proposing and voting on laws
- Use data gathered from the world to propose and vote on laws as a group. Debate with scientific argumentation.
- Create a player-run economy that allows you to sell not only good but services in the form of server-enforced contracts (simulating a player driven quest system).
- Your food level determines your skill-increase rate, making food very important and tying players directly to the ecosystem from which it comes.
- A game with goals higher than entertainment. We plan to build it for schools as an augmented classroom world students share.
MINIMAL SETUP
- Processor: Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHzMemory: 2 GB RAM
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 or AMD Radeon HD 5850 or Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 512 MBNetwork: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 or AMD Phenom II X4 940 or betterMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 or AMD Radeon HD 7750 with 1 GB VRAM or betterNetwork: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 2 GB available space
GAMEBILLET
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