I rarely have lag, but I also keep my voice channels to a minimum.
I will join your channels Aeon, and see if it makes a difference.



Regarding your comment above:
If I understand you correctly, if I create a chat channel in Dust it will be forever be there, even if there are nobody on it?
Would that not eat up resources in an alarming rate?

I can think of a few occasions when I wanted to join a chat, but made a typo, effectivly creating a chat instead of joining one.
Personally I don't like the "Create/Join" option, as these mistakes are probably quite common.

There should be a search functionality where I can enter a name (or start of) and get a list of all available chats. It would also be nice to have a "favourite" selection with "saved" chat channels (I.e You have a list of channels you like, but you have actually not joined the channel).

If we could have this (search and favourite), I believe all players will reduce their active channels, as there is no need to join them all the time.

Rattati,

If these chat channels prove to be affecting performance is there any way we could get a chat history log in Dust so we can rejoin channels at a later date after we leave a channel?

For me I just use my Eve character to create this list, but that's not available to 90% of Dust users.

I've found that my personal threshold is about 8 total chats. I can play the game with decent performance and little chance of crashing at that point. However, adding more chats past that point sharply increases the frequency as which I experience issue, namely game crashes and severely long load times.

Could you good people ask around in game and find out how many channels they have open and use on a regular basis. We want to get a good average figure.

Also, how important to you are the chat channels, how do you use them? Do you use them? Would you support a fixed upper limit on open channels to boost performance? Would you support their optional removal from the game if it meant a huge boost in frame rates? Are you prepared to accept dropped frames to keep them open? Do you want them to have more features?

We want your feedback on this one.

Cheers.

Short update

The simple number of chat channels does not seem to be a problem.

A) We still recommend closing them and deactivating voice if you are not using it.
B) We are doing testing on the texture quality, and would like to be able to recommend to players what to expect in frames by tuning it down.

However, when a player does some actions, there is a "refresh all chat members" call that happens across all channels, even if it's not an active channel. We will be trying to stop that from happening as it can cripple the performance in large alliance chats.

We will also be testing whether the icons/portraits are causing load issues. They do not seem to be.

Based on testing we will probably instill two clean up rules:

1) All email older than 30 days will be deleted during downtime. Store hatemail by forwarding to alts, or take a picture, it lasts longer.

2) All channels that have had no activity in a certain period will be deleted during downtime.



I also have a question, in the many threads, I remember someone mentioning some work done on bringing up Corp MEmber info, versus the Contact list being super slow to load. This optimization happened before I was on the team so help would be appreciated.