Happy September, Renowners, Mr. Z speaking here. Release is extremely close now and we'd like to keep everyone updated on our latest exploits.
Last week we did a huge stress test with our crowdfund backers to see how well the servers would hold up for launch. We'll also be discussing some of the work we'll be doing to prepare for launch.
During our stress test we tried to see how well the game would hold up with the most players we've ever had on a single server. We're pleased to announce that the game held up convincingly at 80 players, but we were able to reach even higher to 100 with some instability.
The goal was to discover all the performance and stability issues we could to fix things before release. We discovered a few key things, mainly that buildings are still a large source of performance degradation, but also there were many minor pieces of the code that became incredibly expensive with so many players online at once, as well inefficiencies in the way our save system functions that could only have been seen with lots of player activity.
We had to keep a strict building limit for performance reasons, but even with that included, we had over 25 thousand building pieces in the server.
Its important to note that the goal of this stress test was to see if the game could hold up under load, that being said we learned a few gameplay problems that we'll be addressing in the next few weeks. We really appreciate all the bug reporting and feedback we've been getting lately, its helping us tremendously to improve the state of the game. With that said, we will be holding another stress test soon, although this next one will be focused more on improving the gameplay experience.
We have a few things coming soon, for the game, namely; New melee animations are on the way, Backer rewards, gameplay balancing, bug fixes and improvements to the melee combat. We'll keep you updated as they get completed, but for example we've already begun optimizing some of the performance issues we recorded and have started work on a 1 hand sword animation set that will feel like a tremendous improvement.
Thank you so much to all the backers that participated in the stress test and everyone who has contributed towards our crowdfunding campaign. Your support means everything to us, because of you we have been able to stay independent this whole time, without a publisher conflicting with our creative vision for the game.
We hope to see you on early access launch very soon. Stay tuned for our next announcement.