Developer Update: Performance issues update & hotfix incoming tomorrow - Feb 2nd

Hunters,

We wanted to give you another update around the recent performance issues.

First let's talk about 1.7.2 - with this update we introduced some fixes to help with some of the problems that have been reported since 1.7.

The first fix relates to the steam overlay – in a previous update, a change was made that caused the game client to make repeated calls to the steam overlay (basically requesting information from the steam overlay every frame). In this manner, the overlay can be quite taxing and for some can have a serious impact on performance. The team was able to find this issue and resolve it meaning the client will only make a select number of calls to the overlay throughout your play session (for example, when you launch the game or invite friends to a lobby) instead of every frame, which was not intended.

The other main fix relates to layer switching, something that occurs when transitioning from one compound to next. This fix was aimed at optimising this process so that less resources are required, which in some cases should help those who encounter stutters whenever the move between compounds.

However, as some of you may have noticed, 1.7.2 came with its own set of performance problems. To put it simply, we inadvertently changed a setting that shouldn’t have been changed relating to code optimisation and did not realise this until the update went to the Live servers, which was then reported by the community.

After digging into this issue, the team have been able to track and resolve this internally and we plan to release a hotfix tomorrow, February 2nd to address this specific performance issue from 1.7.2.

While this will not solve the problems for everyone, this should help with the problem introduced last week and hopefully allow us to see for sure if the fixes from 1.7.2 will help with the FPS drops and stutters as initially intended. Please let us know how performance is for you after the hot fix tomorrow.

Our next steps – we know there are still some underlying performance issues that we are continuing to investigate. We are currently working on some new tools to help us dig deeper into the potential causes for these issues and will keep you all updated when we have more information.

Thanks.

~The Hunt team.