TRIBBLE MAINTENANCE AND RELEASE NOTES - APRIL 27, 2016

coldsnapped

Tribble has been updated to: ST.60.20160417a.5.

General:

• Resolved an issue that was causing a lower performance on high end AMD CPUs.
  • This should also have a small improvement for players with Intel CPUs.
• Resolved an issue with Storming the Spire Elite where occasionally, the team would fail the moment the team warped into the map.
• Reman Males no longer have access to the Caitian tales in the tailor.
• Removed the sort by “Skill Points” option in the queue reward filter.
• Resolved an issue where the Mission Door and associated star were blinking on and off for Deep Space Encounter - Intelligence Disaster.

Known Issues:

• The Assignments to recruit Romulan Bridge officers do not appear
• Selecting “Ready Starship” in the ship selector is not moving slotted items over to the ship for some players.
• Subnucleonic Beam can reset the cooldown of Ablative Shell
• The Polaric Modulator Console's engine power boost doesn't apply after moving to another map.

martakurill

coldsnapped wrote: »

Tribble has been updated to: ST.60.20160417a.5.

General:

• Resolved an issue that was causing a lower performance on high end AMD CPUs.

OMG, will this fix the performance issues on Risa????

*jumps up and down excitedly*

(see my sig for details)

sthe91

It should be Caitian tails not tales. Thanks.

doctornex

This one time, at Caitian band camp...

darkknightucf

coldsnapped wrote: »

Tribble has been updated to: ST.60.20160417a.5.

General:

• Resolved an issue that was causing a lower performance on high end AMD CPUs.
  • This should also have a small improvement for players with Intel CPUs.

Cannot wait to see this on Holodeck. Are there any details that can be provided as to what specific areas this fix will address (UI, streamlined processing, utilization of specific architecture, etc)?

Thanks!

flyingtarg

I would not expect the changes in this patch to drastically affect anyone's frame rate (Although it might!). The change we made addresses a very specific problem that would mostly affect players with 8-core AMD processors and 6-core Intel processors. 8-core AMD processors tend to be more common than 6-core Intel processors, and we mostly tested this as a performance improvement for 8-core AMD processors.

Players with these processors will see a mild increase in framerate in some situations, but the bigger gain is actually in a reduction of frame stuttering. The game should feel smoother to play in most instances.

We do have plans to improve the framerate for all users, no matter what processor or graphics card you use, but some of the things we want to do might take a while to implement.

Edit: I'll try to provide a more concrete example of the sort of thing we fixed. Imagine that you have a game that runs at 40 frames per second. Now imagine that every 20th frame takes significantly longer to render than the previous 19 frames. This makes the game seem very jerky, because things stutter and freeze momentarily every half a second.

By fixing the problem that was causing that 20th frame to take longer, we see a very small increase in overall framerate. Maybe we can fit an extra 2-3 frames per second in. But the bigger impact is that we removed that stuttering that caused the game to feel jerky. That's the kind of issue we fixed with this update.

martakurill

flyingtarg wrote: »

Players with these processors will see a mild increase in framerate in some situations, but the bigger gain is actually in a reduction of frame stuttering. The game should feel smoother to play in most instances.

We do have plans to improve the framerate for all users, no matter what processor or graphics card you use, but some of the things we want to do might take a while to implement.

Thank you for the extra information!

You were correct on both counts, at least for me. I did not see a substantial framerate increase regarding the Risa issue. However, I did see a small reduction in the jerkiness on that map, which is a start.

I'm really glad to see that you're working on the overall framerate as well. STO is a great game, and the poor framerate I'm experiencing on these certain maps (again, see sig.) can make the game feel much lower quality than it actually is, and I think many new players might find it off-putting (especially with the summer event around the corner).

But again, thank you to you and the team for your hard work.

morden613

coldsnapped wrote: »

[*] Reman Males no longer have access to the Caitian tales in the tailor.

tales or tails?
I'm always up for a Caitian tale or two.​​

daveyny

"A Tail of Two Kitty's"

hatax2

Just thought I'd drop a note in this thread to say GOOD JOB! I originally posted about this issue back in February and my 'fix' of disabling core parking in Windows. Here's the thread I posted:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1211539/issues-with-stuttering-hitching-in-sto-have-a-look-at-a-fix-for-my-performance-issues

Most of the detail is in the Reddit post which is linked in the above posting here, but short story is that I no longer need to disable core parking to get rid of the stuttering I was encountering. My CPU is an AMD FX-8350 so I'm guessing it was in the target group for these changes, and it worked!

Thanks for addressing this issue, I think it was probably impacting many more users then was reported. I've got some pretty bad OCD so it bugged the hell out of me and drove me to do some investigating.

EDIT: Additionally FlyingTarg was one of the developers that stopped into my Reddit thread to offer up some advice, so nice to see this come around full circle and be resolved in a short period of time. (I'm a developer myself so I didn't expect this to be fixed quickly, < 3 months isn't bad at all in a game of this scale)