Shadowrun Chronicles - Boston Lockdown released

[Nefaro]

Yeah, the lag can be annoying.  I played a bit in the early hours this morning and it wasn't bad at all so obviously there are a lot of people overloading the thing.

I'm sure the server lag will improve over time, as it always does, but the three character slot limit is also disappointing.  Five races and only three slots?  Bah! That probably means they'll add a paid option for more, later on, like Guild Wars 2.

[spelk]

I can't get over the lag issue at the minute - so have resorted to dropping back into Shadowrun Dragonfall DC, to get my SR fix there. Still finding it a bit hard actually compared to the Chronicles one. Trying to build the same blademaiden, but she just doesn't have the staying power. Obviously besotted with the SR theme now, and am reading short novella's based on it ("Neat", and "Dark Resonance" so far). If Chronicles just worked, and didn't have 10 second delays on each move, I'd be in there all the time methinks.

Not really dabbled much in this IP, short of obsessively playing the 2007 first person Xbox 360 game Shadowrun, although I thought they killed the online servers quite quickly. It seems to have hit me this time. Damn you Chronicles! You caught me in the mood for Cyberpunk RPG nonsense!

[Nefaro]

I've put a fair bit of time on Chronicles during some non-primetime hours.  Steam says I have 8 hours in but I'm not sure if that's right. 

My dwarf is Summoner Lv5/Mind Lv3/Automatics Lv2.  I'm wondering how many missions are left and whether it just hits a content wall at the end.  Also whether it's worth saving my character for future content if slots get tight.  Because those filthy slots are always tight.

[Boggit]

Steam says I have 8 hours in but I'm not sure if that's right. 

I often play offline, and I don't think Steam counts that, leading to weird stats.

I was wondering about SR. How do you rate it out of 10? I'm curious what feature you like the most, and like the least. Gamewise that is... I can tell you're not thrilled with the server.

[spelk]

I was wondering about SR. How do you rate it out of 10? I'm curious what feature you like the most, and like the least. Gamewise that is... I can tell you're not thrilled with the server.

I thought I'd stick my nose in here...

I presume SR is Shadowrun Chronicles? Rather than Shadowrun Returns?

Chronicles is basically a 3d rendering of a similar tactical engine as Returns and Dragonfall, but, it has multiplayer co-operation. It's not quite the Shadowrun Online they originally pitched, but it does provide people with a way of playing a streamlined version of the Shadowrun IP in a co-operative sense.

So I guess the feature I like the most is being able to take part in a turn based co-operative cyberpunk fantasy fight with friends. It is compared a lot with recent X-Com's, but I'm drawn to it, more because its nudging its way towards a multplayer sci-fi version of Temple of Elemental Evil. You roll a character, you take that character out with a friend(s) and you can hum and harr over the tactical options available to you in a turn based combat situation.

I guess the least liked part to it all, is the lack of any meaningful story built into the game, most of which has to come from your imagination and your external knowledge of the IP's Lore. Plus the game crippling amount of lag that goes on at the moment, rendering the entire game unplayable at peak times. As far as I can see there is absolutely no reason a turn based tactical game with instanced play should be contacting the server every action of every character of every turn. For recording stats purposes only the end result of the mission would be relevant. Here, every player is time penalised, because it seems to transmit every inch of data back to jam packed servers and the time delay is 10-15seconds after a click to the animation and pathing/combat routines running. Ridiculous.

My fear is that they will just wait till enough of the original purchasers abandon the game, so that the amount of server coverage handles the remainder of die-hard customers. It will mean the game will be unplayable for large swathes of time, until the population regulates itself. Or they fix the issue, change the games very architecture or put more hardware into the mix.

[Nefaro]

<What Spelk said.

It's quite similar to the Shadowrun Returns RPGs, although this one is focused on multiplayer co-op.  Not storyline.

I'd still like to see a deeper Shadowrun RPG with more replayability & open world content than what we've had thus far.  For all the millions they've made from these dumbed down treatments, you'd think someone would capitalize and do it.  That being said, I'm just happy we're getting digital RPGs for it.

[RooksBailey]

Glad I waited.  Nowadays, it is always better to wait a few weeks post release. 

The best laid plans...

MAY 2   - PRIMETIDE_DEV

This has been the roughest week of our collective studio live – and we had a number of rough patches as some of you know. We are a small team and creating an online game – regardless of whether it is a massive open world MMO or a more modest game like ours- is a big undertaking. When we launched, we were reasonably certain, that everything worked out. So what has gone so horribly wrong and have we all been blind or stupid? If you want to understand what happened, below is the rundown on things. If you are not interested in explanations or excuses, just scroll to the announcement at the end for how we try to at least make amends for this clusterdrek.

We know the risk associated with online games, especially if it is structurally and technically an MMO (in the sense of most of the AI, Logic, Persistence and all the other stuff that makes the game operate being done via server). This is why we have been extra careful before we released Shadowrun Chronicles – the game had been running for months before launch without any issues (as our Early Access and Kickstarter players can attest to), we did a series of Mass Tests (simulating thousands of concurrent user sessions) and a day prior to launch we invited our Early Access community to come in droves by allowing them a day head-start for their characters (whom the previously had to endure to see wiped time and time again as we balanced and reworked the game). We upgraded our hardware to be extra safe, even though our servers rarely went above 5% load.

Come launch day and things work without a glitch...until they suddenly don't. Shortly after our studio fell victim to a district wide blackout at the most inopportune of times, our external server inexplicably slows down. The source for this was quickly identified (once we were back on line) – a specific task called "garbage collector", which cleans up leftover allocated things in the memory and with the amount of players suddenly has too much to do, which results in things cueing up and eating away the hardware resources for every other process (like walking from a to b). So we reduced the amount of garbage produced, patched, and off we go...

Only to see lag creeping into the game again. Looking at the server actions and our logs, it turns out our servers clog up with threads they cannot compute fast enough, leaving ever more threads hanging, which results in the game becoming ever more unresponsive. So, what do players do, if the game does not react when they click on something? Right, they click on it again and again and again...creating more commandos for the server, who is struggling as it is. Vicious circle anyone?

Now these issues are something that accumulates over time...which is almost impossible to test without actual people doing a thousand actual things which differ from our mass tests. It also exposes problems by adding a magnitude. Things that worked badly but did not register when we had a little over hundred players concurrently suddenly explode with 500 players. Take our hub: To be able to see other players running around, the server needs to collect the "commands" from every player and update every other client about the movements of each character in the hub. Previously that was never an issue. But with dozens of hubs open the small things stack up. And if they do, the server gets clogged up...and if that happens long enough it simply cannot work through commands fast enough...resulting in lag. One of the patches has reduced the size of each command (so the amount of data the server has to compute) to 20% of what it was and optimized the associated logic at the server, so it is 40 times as fast as it has been before.

So why didn't we do this before? Simple: It wasn't a problem, so we weren't fixing it – every change of a running system has the risk of creating new bugs and if it ain't broken...

The example above is but one part of the complex and interwoven web of logic and relations and we wish we could enter that code Shadowrun style and hack our way through things with ease, but unfortunately that is not the case. Instead our 6 coders and IT as well as QA have worked day and night for three days to correct problem after problem, but as with any intricate webs, when you start pulling one strings, the whole thing changes and transforms. So every patch improved parts of the problem...only to see another issue creep up. And we may not have seen the end of this, as we continue to fix things. And it does not help if people don't sleep for over 40 hours...

TL;DR: This is fragged and we are desperately trying to fix it, but we are stretched to the limits.

As a way of saying sorry, we want to give everyone who endured this week of constant patching and those who just gave up a little gift and ask them to give the game one more shot.

Mid next week, every user will receive three things:
-   A free additional character slot (so if all that patching messed up your builds, you can start a clean one)
-   Two pieces of cultured bioware – these cost zero Essence so you can use them with any character even mages or make sure you cybered up street sams get that extra boost they have been looking for
-   A flamethrower, so whenever you get really angry at us for that drek, you can just incinerate a few enemies and think of us.

We are still working on creating a PvP and Endgame mode – most of this is design and thus not overly affected by the massive amount of work our coders had to do, but then our coders will need some sleep after this marathon.

Again, we are sorry for this and after putting years of work into this, it is unbelievably disappointing for us to see this happen and leave a bad impression.

But for the launch problems, I have been hearing mostly good things about the game.  Like others have said, I hope this doesn't hamstring the game too much. 

[undercovergeek]

yeah i was sat with card in hand until i saw a few steam reviews and came back here to check - im happy to wait it out until the server gets fixed

[spelk]

If their mass tests were 500 players, then they really haven't planned for or tested out scaling up to Steam market conditions.

If their answer is to optimise the data packets to cut traffic, then they probably need to look at just what traffic they are passing. And how they are threading everyones turns, actions and combat resolutions. Most of this should be pushed client side, and only the results pulled back server side.

I suppose if its all server-client based, with instances ALL on the server regardless of who is in them, then their entire networking code needs a rethink.

I'm sure with time they'll get a workable solution, but you can't help but think that with a turn based tactical game, where almost everything can be controlled by the structure of play, they've not really analysed and optimised the workflow for their server loads. Probably a symptom of coming from a wider reaching MMO structure and pairing it down to a instancing/hub structure without doing a complete underlying re-write.

I've bought it, so I'll stick with it, see how it goes. But this first week for me has been a) an enthusiastic spark for me to explore the Shadowrun Lore and b) a huge lag ridden frustration fest, that freeze frames a decent enough tactical game that has been done before and was very successful, just as a single player experience. I can't help but feel time and money would have been better spent getting Shadowrun Returns or Dragonfall to support co-operative play through a player based host/client setup.

Just my two penneth.

[panzerde]

yeah i was sat with card in hand until i saw a few steam reviews and came back here to check - im happy to wait it out until the server gets fixed

I like what I see in the videos. I'm with you UCG - I'm grabbing this once they get the servers tuned.

[Nefaro]

I've been treating it like an MMO release because it's having the same issues.

Playing if I'm up at odd hours.  Doing something else and waiting another week or two until they get the overload worked out.

I put in ~10 hours thus far and it's been some fun tactical battles & levelling-up, even just single-player.  I didn't bother attempting co-op yet with the sketchy lag.

[panzerde]

I think coop in this setting could be a lot of fun. Maybe once the servers settle down we can pull together some GH runs.

[Nefaro]

I think coop in this setting could be a lot of fun. Maybe once the servers settle down we can pull together some GH runs.

Yeah, that would be good.

[RooksBailey]

Looks like they finally fixed the issues:

Frag the lag!
MAY 8   - PRIMETIDE_DEV
Today is the day!
We have finally fragged the lag issue it seems when our servers will be patched one last time at 15:00 alongside some other fixes.

We don't want to jinx it, there may still be gremlins lurking around, but we seem to be back to normal. Today, with our hopefully last lag related server patch, you will find your well-deserved apology gifts on your inventory:
-   3 Flamethrowers (so you can flame enemies and think of us)
-   1 additional character slot
-   2 new Bioware augmentations (Zero Essence, usable for awakened characters as well)

Many people have given us good advice on how to handle the issues and told us what they suspected the culprits were. As it turns out, we had three main issues and tragically two of them have very little to do with our team's ability to code and code well. It is both more tragic and more comical tale (that is if it hadn't affected our rating s and sales so massively. Maybe one day, looking back, we can laugh without bitterness about it).

The first issue was not enough optimization in certain areas – as described previously, the game had been working so brilliantly from a technical and performance standpoint, that we did not dedicate too much resources to it. We knew we needed to do more optimization, but it did not seem to be a big concern. If it hadn't been for the other two things, we might have been right.

Issue two was one of our middleware licenses actually putting the break on our servers once a certain number of concurrent users were active (which we were not aware of). Above that number it would slow down throughput, so all our other services (which kept listening to certain commands or pushing things to the client) slowed down with it. As some of them were serialized, meaning they were acting like a chain, they were actually really waiting for something to happen from the previous link of the chain, multiplying the effect of the license slowing down the speed at which commands were coming and going and putting other services like load balancing and thread management into overdrive, crashing CPU. Our servers overheated with waiting and managing that slowness, absurdly enough. This was fixed easily enough once discovered but it took us a few days to identify this weird behavior and the culprit.

The third and most tragic point has to do with the letter D. As in "enableD=garbage collector". While we optimized the garbage collector (which cleans up "leftovers" on the server, so they don't clog memory) and following some of the suggestions we got from our code-slinging community members, it did not seem to do the trick. We dug deeper and deeper into garbage collector settings but to no avail – each time the game would just use up the memory available and despite further optimization efforts this did not change considerably. The reason was finally found to be a missing "D" in the config file, which read "enable=garbage collector" instead of enabled. Of course we had looked at every line of this configuration file what must have been a hundred times, but you know how the brain tends to just create the word it expects to see, especially when you did not have more than two hours of sleep for days fighting a lag that was killing your game? This was one of the cases (and enable and enabled are not that far apart). Once we found it, we hit ourselves over the head repeatedly with blunt objects.

All three issues combined killed us in a most unfortunate way. Now with those resolved we actually have 10.000 concurrent players in our mass test and the servers don't even get warmed up about that. We are cautiously optimistic we are ready to declare the lag fragged for good!
Now we can get back to actually improving gameplay and adding end-game missions and rewards! Please spread the good news and let your friends and Steam or Metacritic ratings know, so we can try and get the game off the ground again.

Thank you all for your patience and support in this really rough patch of our life as a developer.

[undercovergeek]

Ooooo oooo purchase senses are tingling

Anyone had any luck?