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[Happy]

Here is some information from Mitch.  I thought some of you may have missed it.  Since it covers a lot of areas I wanted to post it here.  Again, this was posted within a long thread on the Official SW Forum.  Mitch's comments begin on page 10 of the thread.  The person he is mainly responding to posted her concerns on page 8.  For the entire thread follow link. http://forum.smallworlds.com/showthread.php?t=7812

Thanks for your feedback - ideas about what needs improving are always welcome & indeed essential to our capacity to build a better experience for you & other people in SmallWorlds. Let me respond briefly to some of the issues you raised;


Lag, slowness: Yeah 1.2 does seem to be slower than 1.1 - I agree very annoying. Optimisation is always an ongoing "battle" & every release we try & address some element of performance. In the upcoming 1.3 release for instance we have improved room & avatar loading so that both should load noticeably faster & with less cpu load. This will be particularly noticeable in large rooms with lots of items & in spaces with lots of avatars. I hope this improves your SmallWorlds experience somewhat.

When people talk about "lag" what they are usually experiencing in SmallWorlds - at least in the last few months - is slowness caused by the fact that the poor ole computer cpu is being pushed to its limits - especially on lower speced machines (it has nothing to do with our servers or infrastructure). Optimisation is about trying to get the most features for the least cpu load cost & we will continue to tweak SmallWorlds so that lag is minimised. We are starting work on the next stage of optimisation as soon as 1.3 is deployed next week.

Another performance "feature" we are adding to 1.3 is a button that more conveniently reduces the window size. Whilst you may not see this as a benefit I hope many other people do who might rather sacrifice some screen real estate for less lagginess - of course its your choice. What would be really helpful to help us track down lag issues is to get feedback from people "where" they notice it is worse than usual (by "where" I mean under what circumstances - eg. rooms with lots of avatars, large spaces, magic being used etc). Our aim is simple Erilyn - to give you the best experience as possible with the computer you use - clearly we have some more work to do & this is a top priority for us.


Revenue: Not sure what point you're trying to make here. I think we give pretty good value for money. And we are continuously adding new elements of gameplay & content at a rapid rate with the goal of providing the most engaging & best value SW experience. Of course like any business this is dependent on our capacity to ultimately be profitable, which in turn is dependent on building a product & community that people feel good about paying for with their hard-earned money. Being profitable isn't being a "greedy cash cow corporation" - its as essential to a business as air is to a human being.


Not for children: We have a policy of being a 13+ world. Of course there's nothing we can do to stop people lying about their age, which is why we have a wide range of tools to enable the community to alert our moderation & helper team to inappropriate behaviour or underage players. If you come across behaviour that offends you I encourage you & anyone & everyone else to report the user by clicking on their avatar & using the reporting tools. I seem to recall someone recently posted something about the different ways of reporting within SmallWorlds - can someone post a link to that thread under here please. SmallWorlds is a community & our ability to identify behaviour that negatively impacts on other players experience is partially dependent on people bringing it to our attention in the most timely fashion possible - generally our in-world tools are the best tools here. And like our product itself we also continue to invest in building the effectiveness of our community moderation capability.


Fish tanks: I can assure you that there is little chance that these fish have mercury poisoning. The tanks were thoroughly cleaned & the water left to stand for 24 hours before the little fishies were put in.


Best wishes

Mitch

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I'm sorry to say that the fish tank will not be for sale at this point :-(.

Interest has been noted however & I'm hoping we can build something a little more interesting than a simple static animating fish tank for general availability in the near future.

The Flickr issue shouldn't be an issue once 1.3 is deployed & the additional load caused by new avatars joining a space won't either.

But I'm guessing that some people will still experience lag with spaces that have lots of avatars in them. This is one of our core priorities for addressing in the release after 1.3.

[Astro]

Thanks for posting Happy.  I do appreciate the heads up on important issues, as I for one do not read the SW Forums at all.  OT:  I really hope one of their focuses is to clean up those Forums in the future too. 

Lag has always been an issue, sometimes it's really bad and sometimes none at all.  I'll have to pay more attention to where exactly I'm noticing it the most.  I know sometimes (not often though) I'll just freeze completely -- I just refresh and log in again at that point, if I don't un-freeze shortly.  Most recently this happened during a mission, HyperTerminal.  Well, there's a lot going on in that room to begin with anyway -- and maybe there was too many people in the space at the given time.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that SW does recognize that lag is an issue, even though it's not their equipment.

Darn, I wish we were seeing the fish tanks too.   

[goldengourd]

Thanks Happy for posting.
The main cause of lag for me is people teleporting into a room. I can handle a busy room of people talking and walking around as long as noone else comes in, or it doesn't have in-room teleports (like HyperTerminal/Breakout).

[Krazy_Kim]

Thanks for posting Happy.  I do appreciate the heads up on important issues, as I for one do not read the SW Forums at all.

I too don't really look at the forums.  I posted one thing on there about the animals not appearing when I first log on and it still does it today so I guess it never got fixed.

I have MAJOR lag issues when there is a lot of people in the room especially when doing the quests. 

Krazy_Kim