MattScott

Thanks for the reminder. I'll ask the team to see what we can do. Thank you very much. I'll definitely pass it along.

Hi everyone, Over the last year and half, the Little Orbit team has produced quite a bit of original art which has been incorporated into skins, clothing, and events. These pieces have all been original works created by our talented in-house artists, and a couple months ago, I had a player reach out for permission to use the high rez art I posted from the Kabuki Weapon Skin Collection for a t-shirt. With that in mind, my art team have created a Redbubble store and put most of our original art up there. For those who aren't familiar with Redbubble, they make print-on-demand items showcasing original art. I was pretty skeptical at first, but their capabilities are impressive including custom made prints, mugs, clothing and even phone cases. Having spent some time looking at all the items, I admit there's a part of me that loves the idea of taking virtual customizations back into real life content. To be clear, none of these designs are APB specific art, characters, or logos. So if this isn't your thing, no worries. If you're interested in seeing more, you can see the new Little Orbit channel here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/littleorbit/shop?asc=u As a small Easter Egg, we've also included a couple new designs that haven't been released for APB clothing that you can see first on Redbubble. And we'll be updating the store over the coming months as we release new art. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, This week we began staging networking infrastructure with an entirely new provider. This includes new district server hardware based on the west coast, east coast, and Europe. Please bear with us. We are trying to keep the downtime at a minimum while this is being staged, but we have an aggressive timeline to get entirely cutover by Nov 25th. I'd rather plow through this and get it over with, versus having some rambling effort that takes months to complete. For the next week, we will have periodic windows where systems will be unavailable. @Lixil will do her best to make announcements on the forums. EDIT: We are still working on the world consolidation. We hit some extremely frustrating blockers once we built our proof of concept. The strategy has shifted to worlds that can seamlessly loan their players/characters to other worlds, giving us the same end result of NA - EU cross play. EDIT: District servers for the West and East coast will be consolidated under the Jericho world. For now, players will be able to choose them off the advanced list. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, We had to do a unscheduled reboot. The Login Server should be back online now. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I'm checking with the network team to see if the fix was applied to all servers yet. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I’m going to keep this week’s update a bit shorter. Fixing lighting, shadows, and building features continues to be a bit of a rabbit hole. There is very good progress, and with respect to lighting and shadows, I am calling it ‘good enough’. There are some straggling items that we can revisit post launch. Features on buildings (cProps) is the last area plaguing development. We discovered a horrible issue where props with embedded lights were recreating those lights over and over. We also have a lot of duplicate props in the district (again). This is an issue that popped up a month and a half ago that we solved. But it seems to be back. EDIT: I got the actual stats today. There are currently 12,700+ duplicate objects in Financial alone. There's also a secondary issue that popped up related to props that use the physics engine. Apparently we were at the limit of how many objects can use physics in a single district. It is very possible that we are occasionally seeing crashes in Live due to this issue. So we also spent some time fixing this in APB 2.1. We finished AA (anti-aliasing) and have started work on AO (ambient occlusion). It works for the most part except when the game animated the field of view which causes a flicker. The hope is to get a build to SPCT by Tuesday/Wednesday that has these items all addressed. EDIT: It’s taking a fair bit longer to clean up the dupes. So we wont have a new build tomorrow. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I want to take some time to walk through this, because we have been chasing it for a couple weeks trying to diagnose and fix the issue. I also want to thank all the players who sent us latency reports and helped report the issue. Based on initial reports, it seemed like this was an obvious issue with our provider. So that's where we started, but after many days of extensive research, we couldn't find anything affecting our service. It turns out the problem was in our orchestration layer that controls spinning up and spinning down districts on our many district servers. This system is also responsible for detected hung/non-responsive districts by looking at ping times and CCU counts. If the district has been sitting empty for a specific time period, then we throw it away and spin up a new one. At some point in the last month, we had an issue where the orchestration layer was killing districts with players in them. This issue was difficult to diagnose, because it only happens on Citadel, so it's not a system wide issue. While we were investigating, my network team disabled the ability for orchestration to kill districts, so that we wouldn't accidently keep kicking players. Then we got caught up in Halloween and a number of other pressing tasks, and this issue was left on the back burner. During the last two weeks, it appears that orchestration was still detecting non-responsive districts, attempting to kill them (which was disabled), and then spinning up a new district on the same server. Currently due to memory and CPU constraints, we can only run 3 districts per physical server. Over time, orchestration had fired up 7-8 districts, which caused massive amounts of processing lag and eventually started crashing districts. As of today, we believe we have figured out why orchestration was killing populated districts. It involved a small configuration error from when Nekrova physical servers were merged with Citadel servers (which also explains why only Citadel servers were affected). We have started putting a fix in place, and the lag issue should get better. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Lots of movement this week. 537 unanswered tickets 740 total tickets Both of these are considerably below last week. We are answering tickets from 10/31 with a couple earlier stragglers. So we are now running at a ~16 day response time. Thanks, Matt

I've alerted the devs.

Hi everyone, This week was a bit frustrating marked with stalls, blockers, and rabbit holes. We ran another series of benchmarks and things are steadily looking better. - Interactive building features / windows are almost done This is an example of something that was on our schedule as a week long item. Instead we have had to massively re-write the system to pull together better LOD (Level of Detail) techniques but also preserve some of the old RTW code. The system now works properly, but we're missing the data that links interactive features to the proper LOD on the building they are attached to. We spent days going back through old data, and finally found it. Then we spent more days parsing it different ways to reapply it. Then we spent more days fixing crashes that would appear after an hour of running the tool to apply the data to Financial and Waterfront. As of yesterday, we were running the tool and it hadn't crashed. Hopefully this will be done early next week. I recognize this issue is hard to describe, and even harder to visualize, so we took some screenshots to compare. Here is what the game looks like now in APB 1.20. There is a lot of cheating going on, because they can hide poor Levels of Detail behind the massive amounts of fog. Next up is the what APB 2.1 looks like from roughly the same shot. We don't have the same level of fog now, so our LODs need to look better. For this shot, we are at the edge of rendering LOD1 (the 2nd most detailed version of buildings). And this is the bug we're fixing. For this shot, we are now rendering buildings at LOD0 (the best detail on buildings). But the interactive features and some lower windows are too far away to render. This leaves "holes" where the feature/windows should be. If I move closer the features and windows will reappear. The solution we are implementing is to sync the distance that we turn off features to when we render LOD1. Side note: The dev in charge of this task found a bug that relates to why traffic signals are broken. Apparently these have not worked properly for some time, and he's going to take a look on Monday to see what can be done to fix those. - Shadows have been a pain This effort has been to properly render all the shadows around a character based on interior lights, night time lights, and the sun/moon. So far, we have rewritten elements of the core Unreal shader to get this working properly, and characters now render great. However, we've had a steady stream of issues with shadows from props acting up and not rendering properly. Currently there is a very irritating flicker where some props have lights embedded in them that are now casting shadows using the prop's geometry. The team has made excellent progress, and cleaning up this code has led to other optimizations and fixes. But I'm hoping this will finally be done next week. To get this working properly, we had to create a small test scene with a ton of lights at various locations. - Indirect lighting is still not working This got tabled till shadows are fixed. Lastly, just like the traffic light bug, sometimes we end up finding other things that can be fixed. This week it was Anti-aliasing. Our old technique, MSAA was removed from DirectX 11, and AA has never worked in APB 2.1. A different dev ran across some code that looked to be causing the problem, and he was able to run some quick tests and get AA working again. Here is a quick shot of what APB 2.1 looks like right now with AA. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, We started to hand out a couple codes for Tier 2, but we immediately got reports that the skin had a bizarre issue that caused a lot of guns to show up with their default look. We hadn’t seen this behavior before, and just haven’t had a lot of time to troubleshoot. Now that Halloween is over, I’ll have the team dive back in and check it out. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I am very proud of the CS team. They handled a lot of extra load this week due to Halloween Pumpkin issues and repeat network outages. I know these numbers came up, but we cleared twice as many tickets as normal. 680 unanswered tickets 808 total tickets We are answering tickets from 10/20 with a couple earlier stragglers. So we are still running at ~19 days. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, I announced a week ago that we would be making some network changes to support more local district servers starting with New York. And even though our intention is to make this transition seamless, we have encountered a couple problems. We hope to complete this work soon. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Login servers are back up. Sorry, Matt

Hi everyone, Our login servers are having some issues. We are working on it right now. I'll post here when it is back online. Thanks, Matt