Tribble Maintenance and Release Notes - February 6, 2015

coldsnapped

Tribble is being brought down for maintenance to update it to build ST.47.20150112a.26.

General:

• Resolved an issue which was causing a delay in the power tray UI when clicking on a power that has a countdown timer.
  • This will also resolve a number of other minor delays in the UI.
• Resolved an issue which was causing the ability to set quantities to create in R&D to not actually set the quantity correctly such as when attempting to craft multiple PADDs.
• Resolved an issue that prevented the Vaadwaur Manasa Escort [T6] from receiving its Starship Mastery buffs.
• Resolved an issue which was causing icons in the space power tray to be off center.
• Added audio which was missing from a few Vaadwaur ground weapons.
• The power Evade Target Lock III now correctly appears as a space power.
• Resolved an issue which was causing the Vaadwaur Astika Heavy Battlecruiser’s shields to display damage on the opposite of where the damage is coming from.
• Resolved an issue causing the Kobali Arm Attachments on males to have color choices that were not working.
• Resolved an issue causing the Kobali Boots on males to have color choices that were not working.

Known Issues:

• Foundry functions are not available at this time.
• A few lines of VO are missing from the episode “Taris”.
• The Captain’s chair on the bridge on the APU ship cannot be sat in.
• KDF players do not appear in the scoreboard at the end of a PVP match.

captainpurple

coldsnapped wrote: »

Tribble is being brought down for maintenance to update it to build ST.47.20150112a.26.

General:

• Resolved an issue which was causing a delay in the power tray UI when clicking on a power that has a countdown timer.
  • This will also resolve a number of other minor delays in the UI.

Thank you very much for this. Much appreciated.

tehbubbaloo

coldsnapped wrote: »

Tribble is being brought down for maintenance to update it to build ST.47.20150112a.26.

General:

• Resolved an issue which was causing a delay in the power tray UI when clicking on a power that has a countdown timer.
• This will also resolve a number of other minor delays in the UI.
• Resolved an issue which was causing the ability to set quantities to create in R&D to not actually set the quantity correctly such as when attempting to craft multiple PADDs.

some needed fixes and no nerfs.
i like this.

virusdancer

Fixing the UI delays? HOW dare YOU? Wait, I messed that up. How DARE you? Meh, I just don't know how to do that word capitalization thing that's all the rage with the kids these days.

Heh, thank you for addressing that and here's hoping that it takes. Cause I'll be honest, nothing else that Cryptic has done intentionally or unintentionally has had me thinking about uninstalling and walking away from the game like that UI stuff has. So definitely, thanks for working on that.

dragonsbrethren

virusdancer wrote: »

Heh, thank you for addressing that and here's hoping that it takes. Cause I'll be honest, nothing else that Cryptic has done intentionally or unintentionally has had me thinking about uninstalling and walking away from the game like that UI stuff has. So definitely, thanks for working on that.

It's weird how quickly I got used to it. It'll be nice for the tray to be instantaneous again, though

nandospc

Very nice, thank you for the ui lag fix

flyingtarg

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

dragonsbrethren

Thanks for explaining. I definitely got a noticeably higher framerate with the anniversary update, the change is really appreciated.

rsoblivion

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

At least we don't have the 180FPS to 20FPS discrepancy any more. When is the tray fix likely to be applied to Holodeck?

mengde74

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

This was not at all too much technical information, quite the opposite actually.

Knowing why you choose to change things, and how and why those changes cause bugs makes it much easier to put those bugs in context. Without this information, the ui lag seemed like an arbitrary nerf on a system that was working just fine. With this information, the ui lag seems like a reasonable attempt to fix what was an issue for some players, that had an unintended consequence.

Please continue to provide us with as much technical information regarding bugfixes as humanly possible.

hypl

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

Wild shot in the dark here, but might as well ask.

Is there any way to tell if these optimizations to the UI could be linked to the various random crashes some people have been experiencing since the anniversary update?

mightybobcnc

I love the technical jargon, even if I myself am incompetent as a programmer. :P Keep providing it. ^_^

battykoda0

Thank you for the power trays fix. Hope it works well enough to get to live in the next patch.

ukcaptain420

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

I've tested this and it does appear to better than the current build on holodeck, so thanks for that, however, it does seem like there is still some minor UI lag.

Sometimes when activating powers quickly, the activation animation doesn't appear to start until the next button is clicked. This was only in some cases, not all. Unable to replicate effectively.

lucho80

Seems Salami has already made positive changes to dev communications. Bravo.

graleron

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

This is an excellent explanation. Thank you for taking the time to keep us informed.

virusdancer

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

I'm a little concerned reading this. It may be that my brain is a wee bit fizzled out from other discussions recently (I've read a couple of things wrong here recently and had to apologize for that); but the way I'm reading this...

It's more about the UI updating to reflect what's going on, rather than it is about actually being able to activate abilities.

Say I click X, my complaint isn't that it takes a moment for the UI to reflect that I clicked X. Yes, I've seen that happen with things - it's kind of trippy, the ability's activated but the UI doesn't realize it. No, that's not my complaint at all.

My complaint is say I click X...nothing happens. I click X again. Nothing happens. I beat the Hell out of X long after I'm already dead and watching the Respawn timer...because X never happened.

I'd almost say, based on what you said there...that it's not just a case that the UI was slowed down in how it displayed what was going on, but that it was also a case that it was slowed down in how it checks for input.

Basically, if I wasn't trying to offer input when it was checking...then my input didn't happen. Which would definitely explain what I was experiencing...

tehbubbaloo

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

im sure i am not the only one that loves techobabble!

pottsey5g

Is there any chance the devs could look at the Thoron Mines from the Delta Reputation store as they are completely broken. No proc, no thoron bonus. 20,000 dilithium and all you get are basic Quantum mines instead of Thoron mines.

organicmanfred

Wait, it wasnt me? It was the UI-lag?

Yeeahh, now I will show this Tufli freighter who's the boss. Woohooo!!!

lebtron

flyingtarg wrote: »

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

I really look forward to this. I gained so much FPS back with the UI improvement, it was one of the best fixes since I play this game. Hopefully the improvements will stay with this new patch.

battykoda0

virusdancer wrote: »

My complaint is say I click X...nothing happens. I click X again. Nothing happens. I beat the Hell out of X long after I'm already dead and watching the Respawn timer...because X never happened.

I'd almost say, based on what you said there...that it's not just a case that the UI was slowed down in how it displayed what was going on, but that it was also a case that it was slowed down in how it checks for input.

Basically, if I wasn't trying to offer input when it was checking...then my input didn't happen. Which would definitely explain what I was experiencing...

This is exactly what I am experience much of the time, but not all of the time. I can see a gravity well going out even if the icon doesn't change. But I can also, at times, click the button multiple times and it just never fires. Sometimes I have to mash and hold the button. It will eventually fire. Sometimes, yet again, I hit it, it fires, and it updates. It's so inconsistent that I can't even keep track of what is going on when it happens. I don't know if it is related but I have had times where they just don't work period for long spans of time no matter how mad-hatter I click and the FPS will drop to as much as 1. When it snaps back, I'm usually in need of a respawn.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

englishnod

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

At least there is some good news around here
Insane UI lag being fixed, maybe the missus laptop will play this game at a decent pace now.
Can you also add the ability to remove/turn off the alpha layers on the UI as well as this will also help to improve the fps on older machines (this usually works in other games for me on that laptop) cheers.

kadams

mengde74 wrote: »

This was not at all too much technical information, quite the opposite actually.

Knowing why you choose to change things, and how and why those changes cause bugs makes it much easier to put those bugs in context. Without this information, the ui lag seemed like an arbitrary nerf on a system that was working just fine. With this information, the ui lag seems like a reasonable attempt to fix what was an issue for some players, that had an unintended consequence.

Please continue to provide us with as much technical information regarding bugfixes as humanly possible.

Yes.

Yes yes yes YES all of this and more please.

The "arbitrary nerf and interface TRIBBLE for the sake of interface TRIBBLE" is precisely what I was thinking, and exactly why I was considering leaving STO. Now that I know that this is acknowledged and being fixed I'm not.

admrenlarreck

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

This is great news, thanks for the update.

Now I have to say that this is the type of communication the ENTIRE dev team needs to do. You have set the bar. I applaud you sir! If everybody else talked like this then 90% of the so called forum fires could be extinguished!.

comtedeloach2

coldsnapped wrote: »

Tribble is being brought down for maintenance to update it to build ST.47.20150112a.26.

General:

• Resolved an issue which was causing a delay in the power tray UI when clicking on a power that has a countdown timer.
  • This will also resolve a number of other minor delays in the UI.
• Resolved an issue which was causing the ability to set quantities to create in R&D to not actually set the quantity correctly such as when attempting to craft multiple PADDs.
• Resolved an issue that prevented the Vaadwaur Manasa Escort [T6] from receiving its Starship Mastery buffs.
• Resolved an issue which was causing icons in the space power tray to be off center.
• Added audio which was missing from a few Vaadwaur ground weapons.
• The power Evade Target Lock III now correctly appears as a space power.
• Resolved an issue which was causing the Vaadwaur Astika Heavy Battlecruiser’s shields to display damage on the opposite of where the damage is coming from.
• Resolved an issue causing the Kobali Arm Attachments on males to have color choices that were not working.
• Resolved an issue causing the Kobali Boots on males to have color choices that were not working.

Known Issues:

• Foundry functions are not available at this time.
• A few lines of VO are missing from the episode “Taris”.
• The Captain’s chair on the bridge on the APU ship cannot be sat in.
• KDF players do not appear in the scoreboard at the end of a PVP match.

I don't see the fix for the rep mark turn in bonus, you don't have a lot of time to get that fixed. You do know that's a bug, or a really dumb decision, right?

solemkof

comtedeloach2 wrote: »

I don't see the fix for the rep mark turn in bonus, you don't have a lot of time to get that fixed. You do know that's a bug, or a really dumb decision, right?

That's not a bug, it's intentional: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=22133821#post22133821

ednaftw

flyingtarg wrote: »

Thought I'd pop in here and explain a little bit about what was going on with the tray UI lag. And I hope this isn't too much programmer technobabble, but I'll try my best.

As a part of the Anniversary update, we made some optimizations to the tray UI so that it wouldn't eat up nearly as much of your CPU as it did before. The effect of these optimizations was pretty drastic, and we were delighted to see that some players reported drastically improved frame rates from the change.

From a very high level standpoint, the way the tray UI worked before is that we would run a full update pass for every single ability in the tray on every single frame. So if you ran the game at 60 fps, each individual ability would update 60 times per second. These updates were very expensive on the CPU. We changed the trays to no longer do that, and to instead only update an ability when some data behind it had changed. Essentially, the tray UI no longer updates on every single frame, it updates on demand, which drastically reduces the CPU overhead of that entire UI.

The problem is that we have to setup that UI to know which pieces of data are important for updating, and we missed (at least, but hopefully only) one important piece of data. This meant that even though some data was changing when you used an ability in the tray, the tray UI wasn't updating like it should have been. It was waiting for some other data to change before doing that.

We're hoping (with fingers crossed) that this change eliminates the tray lag players have been experiencing, while also improving the gameplay experience for players who were dealing with low frame rates due to the heavy CPU overhead of the tray UI.

If the game would be just as good as that post is we'd not need a feedback forum.Great update and yes the CPU load is much less after the update.One of the best updates since the game was released.

jrichard1979

The thing is, most computer gamers know the techno babble to a degree. I know you can't give all details etc, but I think most of the players are going to enjoy the extra communication.

It wouldn't hurt to have a dev dedicated to the test forums as well. I have heard several people say this stuff was reported during testing.

Anyways, a big thanks for the information.

captainpurple

hypl wrote: »

Wild shot in the dark here, but might as well ask.

Is there any way to tell if these optimizations to the UI could be linked to the various random crashes some people have been experiencing since the anniversary update?

And here I thought it was just the client taking a dump on my end. So I guess this is an issue not isolated to my machine after all. Hope some headway is made on that problem.

Also, I'd like to reinforce the positive response and helpfulness of the post from flyingtarg. That's the kind of update and communication players are hungry for when there's issues to fix or just plain feedback to the players so we know what's going on. Thank you very much for that. More of that would be most appreciated. And don't be afraid to use "technobabble." A lot of gamers will understand the concepts. And if not, there's always Wikipedia and Google.