VBLFC event over, more cloud optimizations, new hands, Neos Festa 3 coming soon
Hello everyone and welcome to another weekly update!
This one is going to be relatively short, as we were busy with the VBLFC over past week, the first official online convention held on our platform. It has broken the record number of concurrent users, reaching 432 peak on Steam.
We also look at some of the optimizations and effects on the cloud infrastructure with the sudden surge in users and how they helped to keep the cloud stable and make it more efficient in long term.
The creator festival Neos Festa is also coming next month for its third installment, held by the Japanese team. If you'd like to have an exhibit, you can find more information at festa.neos.com!
[h2]VBLFC[/h2]
During the last Friday through Sunday, Neos saw its official online convention, the Virtual Biggest Little Furry Convention. This event brought hundreds of new users and broke our all time record for number of concurrent users! We reached 432 peak concurrent users on Steam, with our metrics going slightly above 500 with all accounts considered (including headless).
We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the organizers for choosing Neos, building beautiful worlds and a number of interacted gadgets and accessories for the attendants of the event and bringing a number of guests to serve as entertainment for the program. So again, big thanks to everyone for their hard work making this event happen and thanks for everyone participating!
VBLFC plans to reopen the worlds during the physical convention in October, so if you missed them, you’ll be able to revisit them again! The VBLFC suite world is open to the public already and we’ve already seen many people decorate it and make their own versions of it, so feel free if you haven’t!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Analyzing Cloud Usage & Further Optimizations[/h2]
As many people started joining during the VBLFC Opening Ceremony, we started noticing the cloud response times sharply rising up due to the sudden increase of users. This has resulted in noticeable slowness of much of the cloud functionality.
To compensate, we started scaling up (and out) the infrastructure beyond our default limits, which brought it down to usable levels, but still far from ideal. Based on the live metrics, we began optimizing the biggest culprits that resulted in slow responses and releasing them to the cloud as the event was ongoing.
Overall response time during the first night. The sharp increase is when people join in, the decrease is when the scaling up kicks in. Afterwards the drops and smoothing out are due to optimizations being deployed.
The first bits addressed some quick low hanging fruit, like unnecessary database queries and adding some bits of extra caching. This has smoothed out some of the response times, but still wasn’t sufficient to make it snappy.
Following that, we implemented a quick optimization for the user status update system - the one responsible for updating status of your contacts - whether they’re online, which world they’re in and so on. This system was the second biggest contributor in the cloud load after the messaging system, so it was a prime target for the optimization.
Once this update was pushed out, to our surprise the response times have dropped more than we expected them to, under 50 ms on average, despite about 500 people still being on. This resulted in better response times than before the sudden increase in active users, at the cost of some precision - status of new contacts might take a few minutes to show up.
Impact of the status system optimization
Thanks to this optimization the remainder of the convention was pretty smooth and without any cloud slowness or interruptions. Those optimizations still help even after the event has finished. Based on their effectiveness, we’ll be moving the status updates to SignalR next, similarly to the messaging system, which will make it significantly more responsive and improve the cloud scaling even further.
It is always a bit scary getting a sharp increase in users, as it doesn’t give much room for the infrastructure to adjust, but this event has given us a wealth of information on how it behaves with a quickly rising user base and which parts become bottlenecks and need to be redesigned.
With this, we’ll be better prepared for other big events in the future and just general growth of the Neos community, at least from the cloud perspective.
[h2]New Neos Hands[/h2]
Next time you start Neos, you'll see the update I just pushed for the new default avatar. These new hands were designed to match the headset, and the headset itself was updated with a new Neos logo on the back.
Every time you apply the default avatar, you are normally assigned a random color. However, now you can choose to assign yourself a persistent color that can be used beyond your default avatar using the cloud variable G-Neos.CustomUserColor! Please note that this cloud variable's name and function is subject to change.
The whisper bubble's visuals have also been re-imagined as a ring, to be more light and less isolating.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
Hello everyone, friendly neighborhood Turk here! I hope your week has been wonderful! It’s been jam packed these past 2 weeks mixed with all the stuff that’s been going on! So I hope you have been having fun with all the things going on! This month has all kinds of community events and moments going on so here’s some of them for you to see!
[h3]Firr’s New Homeworld[/h3]
VBLFC has come and gone in the community, and there were some fun times! But for one last hurrah it seems like Firr needs a new homeworld! So everyone quite literally had come into his world and trashed his room. Whether he makes this his homeworld is a thing to be seen, but boy is this headless session/world a treat. There is ALOT of memes.
[h3]Neos Festa 3[/h3]
Neos Festa 3 is soon on the way! Neos Festa is a creator showcase event, where folks can submit content and applications to showcase their works in Neos. Neos Festa has been quite the staple in our community bringing many games, toys, and avatars to the community enriching the community in ways we can’t expect. So if you want people to check our work, and see what people think feel free to submit! Find out more details on the Discord, or in the submission world. You can also find more stuff at the website festa.neos.com.
Thank you to everyone who’s collaborating to make this event possible!
[h2]What's next[/h2]
After the event, we're continuing main focus on BEPUv2 integration. We have already finalized all collider types, getting mesh colliders and convex hulls to also work with the asset variant system, precomputing and caching the data, instead of generating it on the fly every time you load into the world.
There's still quite more to do. We'll also be interweaving some more tasks and updates in between. You can always find the latest progress in the official Discord in the #devlog channel or check out the Roadmaps on GitHub.
And as always, huge thanks for everyone's support! Thanks to your passion and creativity, this place keeps growing and becoming better every day! See you next week!
This one is going to be relatively short, as we were busy with the VBLFC over past week, the first official online convention held on our platform. It has broken the record number of concurrent users, reaching 432 peak on Steam.
We also look at some of the optimizations and effects on the cloud infrastructure with the sudden surge in users and how they helped to keep the cloud stable and make it more efficient in long term.
The creator festival Neos Festa is also coming next month for its third installment, held by the Japanese team. If you'd like to have an exhibit, you can find more information at festa.neos.com!
[h2]VBLFC[/h2]
During the last Friday through Sunday, Neos saw its official online convention, the Virtual Biggest Little Furry Convention. This event brought hundreds of new users and broke our all time record for number of concurrent users! We reached 432 peak concurrent users on Steam, with our metrics going slightly above 500 with all accounts considered (including headless).
We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the organizers for choosing Neos, building beautiful worlds and a number of interacted gadgets and accessories for the attendants of the event and bringing a number of guests to serve as entertainment for the program. So again, big thanks to everyone for their hard work making this event happen and thanks for everyone participating!
VBLFC plans to reopen the worlds during the physical convention in October, so if you missed them, you’ll be able to revisit them again! The VBLFC suite world is open to the public already and we’ve already seen many people decorate it and make their own versions of it, so feel free if you haven’t!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Analyzing Cloud Usage & Further Optimizations[/h2]
As many people started joining during the VBLFC Opening Ceremony, we started noticing the cloud response times sharply rising up due to the sudden increase of users. This has resulted in noticeable slowness of much of the cloud functionality.
To compensate, we started scaling up (and out) the infrastructure beyond our default limits, which brought it down to usable levels, but still far from ideal. Based on the live metrics, we began optimizing the biggest culprits that resulted in slow responses and releasing them to the cloud as the event was ongoing.
Overall response time during the first night. The sharp increase is when people join in, the decrease is when the scaling up kicks in. Afterwards the drops and smoothing out are due to optimizations being deployed.The first bits addressed some quick low hanging fruit, like unnecessary database queries and adding some bits of extra caching. This has smoothed out some of the response times, but still wasn’t sufficient to make it snappy.
Following that, we implemented a quick optimization for the user status update system - the one responsible for updating status of your contacts - whether they’re online, which world they’re in and so on. This system was the second biggest contributor in the cloud load after the messaging system, so it was a prime target for the optimization.
Once this update was pushed out, to our surprise the response times have dropped more than we expected them to, under 50 ms on average, despite about 500 people still being on. This resulted in better response times than before the sudden increase in active users, at the cost of some precision - status of new contacts might take a few minutes to show up.
Impact of the status system optimizationThanks to this optimization the remainder of the convention was pretty smooth and without any cloud slowness or interruptions. Those optimizations still help even after the event has finished. Based on their effectiveness, we’ll be moving the status updates to SignalR next, similarly to the messaging system, which will make it significantly more responsive and improve the cloud scaling even further.
It is always a bit scary getting a sharp increase in users, as it doesn’t give much room for the infrastructure to adjust, but this event has given us a wealth of information on how it behaves with a quickly rising user base and which parts become bottlenecks and need to be redesigned.
With this, we’ll be better prepared for other big events in the future and just general growth of the Neos community, at least from the cloud perspective.
[h2]New Neos Hands[/h2]
Next time you start Neos, you'll see the update I just pushed for the new default avatar. These new hands were designed to match the headset, and the headset itself was updated with a new Neos logo on the back.
Every time you apply the default avatar, you are normally assigned a random color. However, now you can choose to assign yourself a persistent color that can be used beyond your default avatar using the cloud variable G-Neos.CustomUserColor! Please note that this cloud variable's name and function is subject to change.
The whisper bubble's visuals have also been re-imagined as a ring, to be more light and less isolating.
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
Hello everyone, friendly neighborhood Turk here! I hope your week has been wonderful! It’s been jam packed these past 2 weeks mixed with all the stuff that’s been going on! So I hope you have been having fun with all the things going on! This month has all kinds of community events and moments going on so here’s some of them for you to see!
[h3]Firr’s New Homeworld[/h3]
VBLFC has come and gone in the community, and there were some fun times! But for one last hurrah it seems like Firr needs a new homeworld! So everyone quite literally had come into his world and trashed his room. Whether he makes this his homeworld is a thing to be seen, but boy is this headless session/world a treat. There is ALOT of memes.
[h3]Neos Festa 3[/h3]
Neos Festa 3 is soon on the way! Neos Festa is a creator showcase event, where folks can submit content and applications to showcase their works in Neos. Neos Festa has been quite the staple in our community bringing many games, toys, and avatars to the community enriching the community in ways we can’t expect. So if you want people to check our work, and see what people think feel free to submit! Find out more details on the Discord, or in the submission world. You can also find more stuff at the website festa.neos.com.
Thank you to everyone who’s collaborating to make this event possible!
[h2]What's next[/h2]
After the event, we're continuing main focus on BEPUv2 integration. We have already finalized all collider types, getting mesh colliders and convex hulls to also work with the asset variant system, precomputing and caching the data, instead of generating it on the fly every time you load into the world.
There's still quite more to do. We'll also be interweaving some more tasks and updates in between. You can always find the latest progress in the official Discord in the #devlog channel or check out the Roadmaps on GitHub.
And as always, huge thanks for everyone's support! Thanks to your passion and creativity, this place keeps growing and becoming better every day! See you next week!