Making this post here until there is a category for normal Creative, will prob move it there later.
So I wanted to raise concern into memory and specifically XL islands in Creative atm, because for the past year there have been issues introduced that have made memory management and optimization harder to control and balance. I will list those below for full context. This post is not UEFN-related btw, just normal Creative.
- Display of memory
The hardest and biggest change in memory management in XL originally and now in all Creative islands has been to know what is your max memory. Currently, you only know the memory of the memory cell your player is standing on, but that prevents you from knowing if a prop you are adding is actually affecting the entire island memory or just the cell you are on.
Originally, it used to be that you d always see the highest cell in the island, then once you pick up a prop you would then see the cell you are currently standing on. This was a great design choice because it gave us insight into everything using only one memory bar. Now you just have the same memory regardless and it changes constantly based on where you are looking which makes things even harder to optimize. In fact, the original design was so precise that I could visualize the range of which a prop derendered and its memory wasn’t counting where I was standing, now this is impossible regardless of workarounds and approach.
A good example of an optimization that we can no longer do is when we deleted a prop we would see whether initial or instance cost would be subtracted from memory, which gave us insight into whether that prop was the last of its kind. Adding to that, before we would even see the subtraction cost (initial or instance) only by hovering on the prop, now it only shows the instance cost even if it is the initial cost that will be removed, so we have to keep our eyes into the memory bar and see what gets subtracted. However, this was also removed in the last update, and now you see a completely different memory bar when deleting things, which makes optimization even harder. And this is the main reason I am making this post because in just this one area we have seen our optimizations become harder 3 consecutive times, feels like we are taking steps back on that front.
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As a side effect of 1), we can no longer tell if something is a prop or a device in terms or memory (affects current cell or all cells), because we don’t know how to see all cells being raised in memory if we only see one. The only way atm is to have 2 accounts be at the same island at the same time and place the said prop then look into both to see if they both increased (players are far away from each other). This was something we could originally do when the highest memory always showed.
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A couple of updates back, when the algorithm to determine memory was introduced, a massive amount of maps had a massive memory increase (I 've had 4 maps increase in memory and one of them increased by 20k which is 1/5th of the entire budget). This change alone caused me to kill 2 major projects that I have been working for months, and there is no way for me to optimize them without 1) and 2) (and besides, I had them very optimized because I always do that, meaning I have to delete content or move a massive amount of geometry to lower cluster congestion).
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Minimap/overview map only renders what is rendered around the player, it would be ideal to render the entire map instead, even if it comes at a cost of never changing in gameplay (maybe an option we can choose?). The reason behind it is in large maps that have different regions and key POIs, you need to see everything not just what you are close to. Imagine BR minimap/overview map without seeing the entire map.
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Deleting a prop changes memory in a weird way now. Hard to know how much you deleted (and whether it was instance or initial cost removed). Hovering preview is not accurate either (only shows instance cost if removed, not initial cost). Notice that memory changes 4 times on top even though I am doing 2 actions:
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Island memory (visually) capped at 100k (added last update). How are we to know how much we need to optimize to bring it down to the needed limit now? This is 8k over, but I don’t know how much to optimize now that the number simply says 100k:
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A big issue is that over 100k memory locks editing, testing and publishing. Used to only be editing (only for adding things) and in case of new updates we were able to fix game settings and republish. Now we have to remove content all the time once a new update decides that memory is now increased (has happened more times than I can count the past 2 years).
I can showcase all these in a live session if needed. DM me if you have any questions.
EDIT:
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Autosave lags Creative when it happens, past 50k memory. Since autosave is frequent, so are the jitters. Depending what are doing at that moment it may affect it because during that quick jittering 1 sec anything doesn’t register, including player controls, and once it ends everything reverts back 1 sec, with your player teleporting to a location that the server thought you d be. This causes us to accidentally delete unwanted things, as we lose control of the character (and this happens very frequently on large islands).
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T doesn’t show thermo numbers for me, so its not helpful unless I see the full number per cell (not just thousands) so I can tell if a prop with initial say 512 memory adds to the surrounding clusters, how far and where it stops counting.
- Memory vis updates on cursor position, not player position. This causes confusion for memory optimization because when you delete a prop the cursor will point to what is behind it and change the memory, making it more confusing.
I will get this in front of the right folks.