Client Performance (Updated June 16)

Graphical performance of the game client is an ongoing area of improvement that is being tackled from many directions. In this article I'd like to briefly detail a few of the things we're currently actively working on that will affect client performance.

Trails
Our engine currently doesn't support trails (sometimes called ribbons in other games). Jonathan is working on experimental support for this technology, which will both allow us to create many new types of visual effects, but also to replace old slow effects with much more efficient ones that use trails rather than particles.
Update May 16, 2014: Work on trails is completed and Russell is using it to redo a lot of old skill effects. Skills like fireball perform noticeably better now. We don't yet know which patch these updated skills will make their way into.
Update June 16, 2014: The 1.2.0 mini-expansion will swap a lot of skills over to using trails, which will make them faster.

Text Rendering
The way we currently render text is slow and has some issues with foreign languages. This slowdown can sometimes be felt when you open chat while playing. Harry is rewriting this system in a way that will fully cater for our foreign text requirements while also getting every bit of speed we can out of our text rendering.
Update May 16, 2014: This is mostly complete and Harry notes that it's around 10x faster at rendering text. It's almost certain that this will be included in the 1.2.0 expansion in July.

Preloading of Large Sounds (New: May 16, 2014)
We've found an issue where many objects in-game have really long sounds attached that could instead be streamed from the drive as they play. This causes them to take too long to load, and is easily noticable in areas that contain Vaal side areas (as the heart has a long sound on it). Fixing this will reduce RAM requirements and load times.
Update June 16, 2014: This was included in patch 1.1.4. We're keeping an eye on sound sizes in the future.

Please note that much larger improvements are underway but may not be listed here because they don't actively have a developer on them this week. I'll keep this document update as we progress on other optimisation tasks.

The initial post has been updated today!

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elitedesolator wrote:

Thanks Chris!

With regards to text display are there any upcoming plans to provide Chinese translations to the game? I think a lot of us would agree that this game is amazing and we'd love to see it grow. Giving this access to Chinese players would be a huge step forward, plus your servers are geographically advantaged to begin with.

Yes