Rain and Load Times

For a while now, players have been saying that if an area has rain, it takes longer to load. This isn't true, because there's nothing additional to load. However, players kept insisting that areas with rain loaded slower than areas without. The frequently cited example was The Crossroads, which received rain at some point in the last year.

As part of the quality of life improvement process, we investigated the effects of rain on load times.

Our test involved enabling or disabling rain in The Crossroads on a copy of 1.3.0l (the current live version of the game) and measuring how long it took to load the area. This was repeated several times and was averaged. All tests were performed with a cold filesystem cache. We then repeated it with a warm cache just in case, but it didn't affect the results.

Rain made no noticeable difference to the load time of the area. The values were all within 1% of each other, with no clear winner.

This prompted the question: Why do people think that the areas are slower to load when rain is present? We believe it's because that at the time that The Crossroads had rain added, we also added a lot of new terrain assets to the area (the abandoned buildings, etc). The load time went up at the same time rain was added, but not because of the rain.

It's absolutely true that rain does cause additional graphical overhead when rendering frames. We're looking at ways to reduce this! I just wanted to address the load time issue in particular in this post.

On a side note, we have already made some improvements to how sound is handled that will yield both a smaller client footprint and also slightly faster load times. The sound changes are scheduled for the next expansion. Other QOL/performance features may be released earlier, depending on how compatible they are with 1.3.x.