Nightly Build: Preview 02
Hello everyone! I would like to share with you the latest updates on the development.
There have been some new improvements in the nightly build that are extending the development time more than initially estimated.
Apart from the improvements in the database management, as mentioned in the previous preview, substantial improvements have been added to the execution of scripts by players.
To prevent server saturation issues that cause lags and slowdowns, usually caused by scripts that use a lot of server resources, a deep refactoring of the game has been carried out. Now, scripts will run as actual independent processes separate from the game, allowing for accurate monitoring of how much memory and CPU a script is using at any given time, which is not consistently measurable in the current public version.
This monitoring will allow the server to limit resources for players who are using too much CPU time across all their scripts, avoiding resource saturation and, therefore, the lags and slowdowns caused to other players. Additionally, there will now be a maximum limit of actual RAM memory that a script can reserve during its execution, also preventing complete server crashes if any script tries to use all available server RAM.
These changes also have some positive side effects, as it is no longer necessary to use some artificial limits introduced in Greyscript to prevent excessive memory reservation issues, such as the maximum total number of instantiated elements across all lists and maps in a script, as well as other similar limits.
The difficult part is already done, and the nightly build is now privately available for the debuggers group. Due to the deep changes made in the code, there is work to be done fixing critical regressions, so I cannot estimate when it will be available for everyone, but I hope it will be soon if no unexpected issues arise.
There have been some new improvements in the nightly build that are extending the development time more than initially estimated.
Apart from the improvements in the database management, as mentioned in the previous preview, substantial improvements have been added to the execution of scripts by players.
To prevent server saturation issues that cause lags and slowdowns, usually caused by scripts that use a lot of server resources, a deep refactoring of the game has been carried out. Now, scripts will run as actual independent processes separate from the game, allowing for accurate monitoring of how much memory and CPU a script is using at any given time, which is not consistently measurable in the current public version.
This monitoring will allow the server to limit resources for players who are using too much CPU time across all their scripts, avoiding resource saturation and, therefore, the lags and slowdowns caused to other players. Additionally, there will now be a maximum limit of actual RAM memory that a script can reserve during its execution, also preventing complete server crashes if any script tries to use all available server RAM.
These changes also have some positive side effects, as it is no longer necessary to use some artificial limits introduced in Greyscript to prevent excessive memory reservation issues, such as the maximum total number of instantiated elements across all lists and maps in a script, as well as other similar limits.
The difficult part is already done, and the nightly build is now privately available for the debuggers group. Due to the deep changes made in the code, there is work to be done fixing critical regressions, so I cannot estimate when it will be available for everyone, but I hope it will be soon if no unexpected issues arise.