Sophiie

Right, this issue isn't to solve the matchmaking issue. This issue is to get a mission in a district you actually want to play in. Both Citadel and Jericho have 'dry hours' where either Financial or Waterfront is completely dead. This is aiming to solve that.

Has Little Orbit considered merging Citadel and Jericho? At times, one of these servers is unplayable in specific districts due to lack of population, and players are forced to go to the other server with horrible ping and a character they don't own. It is completely unfair to players who want to play in off-hours, or might work a night shift, to be forced to play on a different server. Additionally, it looks bad on the game if there's only 300 people playing on US, and 500 on EU. Imagine if they had a player pool that could be expanded. Some of those players might get horrible ping, but it's better than getting no matches at all. And especially with Riot's release, that may be a legitimate concern for those trying to progress. To this extent, the proposal would also place the district servers in their own geographic locations. NA/EU district servers, as opposed to servers. Players would be placed in the appropriate region based on GeoIP if they quick joined or used DAM in the engine upgrade. They could still manually join a district of the appropriate threat. Now you're thinking, "Maybe MSSQL might not be able to handle that? Wouldn't that cause worldserver issues?" The server architecture is set up to split district servers into their own datacenter and tunneling / VPN technology has pretty much advanced to the point where this would not cause increased response times between the world and district servers. Additionally, now that you're off Reloaded's old datacenter and stabilized, maybe it's time for a change that would benefit the game? Yes, there would be an incredible amount of name conflicts. There would be some drama about who keeps what name. There's the chance of potential database corruption. There's a possibility that RIOT could explode in popularity or the engine upgrade would cause overpopulation. But I think the positives outweigh the negatives and any architectural issues could be solved quite easily. What do you guys think? Is this something Little Orbit should pursue?

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, OP. They had a subscription service for Fallen Earth, all the code is likely written to support such a system on the G1 backend. It was likely a few lines of code to even support this type of thing, and only required one web/platform engineer. The rest of this was likely political. Plus, the team and code knowledge needed for the game systems is completely and utterly different compared to game logic. It's likely a PHP backend, which means most gameplay programmers aren't going to touch it unless they absolutely have to. It was likely done by the web/platform team, which has been incredibly busy especially when you look at the front page of Gamersfirst. The rest of the team is likely working on the engine upgrade. You think LO must be incompetent because an engineer likely spent some of his free time trying to help his company obtain money, and because of that, you believe Little Orbit to be a bad company. Here's some facts: Subscriptions give potential investors and the company itself numbers regarding whether or not they should invest in a product. Subscriptions give a recurring charge so you can estimate how much money you are guaranteed to get at the end of a month, day, or year. This is incredibly helpful from an analytics perspective; if you know you have, say, 100 people signed up for that day, and you have guaranteed income on that day, you may be able to pay x y z employees with that money, or invest in a b c systems. It's all about the bottom line. This is actually a great tactic on LO's part. It means that they get free analytics info about who signs up for their product, it provides another means to convert players to paid status, and provides an easier, manageable subscription service that players can utilize and cancel whenever they want. Imagine you're Little Orbit. F2P games are a wild market. They might give the company $5,000 revenue one day, and the next day, they may give you $50. A subscription guarantees you get that money, or at least have a way of tracking subscriber numbers. What I do not agree with, from a business perspective, is Lixil even entertaining the idea of adding an option to pause premium in another thread. This is a net revenue loss, even though it would be nice for the customer, it destroys the concept of premium. If you have to provide that service, they should be going through customer support and the refund should be one-time only. She should have talked to her coworkers instead of making another blanket statement that gives false hope to the community.

Hi, software developer here. They already said they're doing both options. Reading comprehension is hard.

There's often more people watching on Twitch than there is on Jericho. The engine upgrade, when it comes out, should bring back a lot of people. Many were disenfranchised by the promises that Reloaded gave them and you shouldn't expect miracles, but you should expect more people then.

Bring back RTW TTK. It was amazing, and I never liked how APB was turned into a twitchy TPS.

Bring back "Little Boots - No Brakes" and I will pay for 12 months of premium.

I have my account banned for NO reason, I did not cheat, grief or refund anything. And LO did not reply in the last few weeks. Wait longer, then.

dude theres no freakin way i got RAT'd or keylogged. i have no idea how something like this could happen That's not even the point. You're looking at my assumptions and not my facts here: You posted about a private account issue in public and demand that Little Orbit take priority to you compared to everyone else. That's pretty selfish, and not how it works in any customer support department.

this forum account isnt linked to my compromised account so. i doubt someone is smart enough to try that You could have a RAT on your computer, a keylogger or other virus. Or you could've shared your account with someone, and that resulted in the compromise. If you've shared your account with someone else support will refuse to help you. Or your account info could've been harvested if you've reused the information elsewhere. In the other case, the RAT/trojan may still be on your computer. Your best bet is being patient and not posting about it publicly. Account compromises are not an 'urgent' issue by any means. You don't take priority over anyone else that has an account compromise issue because you posted on a forum.

Few things that's wrong with this post: 1) The original poster (OP) should be patient and not bump your support tickets. They're supposed to be handled in the order they are received, sorted by last updated. Customer support's job is to handle tickets as they are able to. 2) Lixil should not advertise openly that she is able to handle 'urgent/immediate' tickets without specifying what matches that criteria, because it leads to posts like the OP's thread. 3) OP shouldn't be posting about account-related information out in the public, as if the account is actually compromised, what's stopping them from compromising another account and posting as you? Only Little Orbit's customer support reps can truly verify account identities based on several different factors, and that's why you should be patient. 4) OP should just be patient as there's really no such thing as an 'urgent account compromise' or 'urgent false positive ban' - the burden should always be placed on the customer support rep who didn't clear out the queue fast enough and never the customer. Likewise, the CSR rep should be able to assist people that have been waiting longer than OP has.

The game will automatically empty the AssetCache folder. I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you have a 5400 RPM disk, but have 8GB of ram (or more), this guide is not useless to you. RAM is going to be faster than your disk.

Hey guys, I'd like to present a pretty helpful guide today. This guide is aimed at people with 7200 RPM HDDs, and to highlight the importance of solid state drives. I would also like to mention that this guide is very limited to those with 8GB RAM or higher. Anything you do to your computer in this guide is at your own risk. I, nor Little Orbit, are responsible for any damage you do to your computer by misconfiguring or altering your PC. The RAMDisk Guide I'd like to preface this guide with a little Q&A. What's a RAMDisk? A RAMDisk is an optional piece of software that converts RAM on your computer to virtual disk space, and allows RAM to be used as temporary, ephemeral storage that is reset upon your computer restarting. Why even do that? Isn't the whole point of installing something to use it on your computer permanently? Not exactly. You will want anything that's already loaded into memory and not time sensitive on the main drive. Yes, some HDDs and SSDs are quick for some operations. Some applications will use the hard drive as temporary storage, however. In the case of APB, there's a lot of disk read/writes going on, and most of it is due to the asset cache. What IS an asset cache for? APB uses an asset cache to store temporary textures each time the game is ran. The asset cache stores information about clothing and serialized customization data that gets streamed in through the technology Realtime Worlds had created. It's basically an Unreal 3 extension that required a significant rewrite of the codebase to pull off. Technically speaking, it's impressive that they were able to push Unreal so far. Unfortunately for us, that data all gets written and read from the hard drive. This can lead to long-term health problems for the hard drive, and not only that, but it's terribly inefficient. Concessions had to be made with the technology available at the time, plus for general market availability, RTW had to consider that most players would use low-end PCs. Why does APB: Reloaded use an asset cache? When APB was being developed, the game engine ("Unreal 3") was already pushed to its limits. APB: Reloaded is distributed as a 32-bit application, and as such, has a lower memory ceiling. In the year of 2010 when ~4GB RAM was the norm, it was simply unfeasible to: 1) Make a confusing 64-bit application versus 32-bit application choice for end-users. 2) Not all PCs would have more than 4GB RAM. 3) Consider compatibility issues and 'edge cases' between architectures that would arise. Developers at the time were scared of that 4GB limit. They'd already push the engine to its limits with the districts they had, and also had intense memory leak issues. APB was marketed as a high-end PC title with stunning visuals and a in-depth customization system. In order to provide those visuals - period - on any system, there had to be considerable concessions made. One of them being the asset cache. So they opted for this option, which would save parts of the game that should have been in RAM to disk as a form of storage. OK, I know why and how an asset cache is used. What's this RAMDisk going to do to solve it? It's 2018 now, and we have a bit more RAM available. A quick glance at Dell's website shows even mid-range laptops having 8GB of RAM. This guide assumes you have one of those slow, 7200 RPM drives in a monstrosity that has 8GB of RAM, a i3 @ 2.6ghz and a dedicated GPU minimum. The GPU doesn't even have to be good, as long as it's not on the same board. If you have an onboard GPU, there's really nothing you can do to prevent lag - Unreal 3 is notoriously bad with integrated Intel cards for example. A RAMDisk does exactly what it says it does. For those that don't know what RAM is, it's 'Random Access Memory' - it is memory that can be accessed at any point and wiped in the same manner that it is created. Applications reserve a portion of this memory when they are allocated, and can 'ask for more' if they need it. A RAMDisk makes your RAM into a hard drive, essentially. You can allocate any amount of RAM for this virtual drive, however, we'll cover that later. By putting the asset cache on RAM, you effectively reduce the impact it has on actual gameplay. APB constantly has framerate issues, notably little 'spikes' when players enter the district. After you've been in a district and have established most of the data, you typically don't need to load it again. So the longer you're in the same district with the same people, the less impacted you are by these spikes. Of course, a new player could enter the district and freeze the rendering thread by simply spawning next to you at any point. So that's where the RAMDisk comes in... by effectively reducing the wait time on the disk, you are increasing your framerate as the game spends more time doing other tasks and does now not have to wait for that task to complete. Great! How do I get started? Here's the actual guide portion of the guide: Download and install ImDisk: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk Next, open the GUI version of ImDisk from the 'Classic' Control Panel. You can get there on Windows 10 by typing 'Control Panel' into search, and then navigating to 'ImDisk'. Once in ImDisk, go to File -> Mount new virtual disk... Select the following options in the prompt that appears. The drive number can be anything, but you *MUST* remember it later. A prompt will appear to format your drive. Select the following options for your RAMDisk drive. If you have 16 GB of RAM or more, you may consider a 9.5GB RAMDisk and just moving the whole APB folder onto the RAMDisk. **IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN 16GB OF RAM FOLLOW THE STEPS IN QUOTES** And that's it! You should be able to start APB: Reloaded now and play the game. Please note that APB: Reloaded won't start unless the RAMDisk is allocated and created, so remember to do that (or set ImDisk up to do that automatically, though that should be its own guide. How do I undo this? If you wish to get rid of the symbolic link and go back to sluggish FPS, there's a way to do that too: Delete the C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\APB Reloaded\APBGame\AssetCache folder in your APB: Reloaded game folder and restart the game. A word to the developers: It's 2018. Can we PLEASE have the option for a RAM-based asset cache instead of a disk-based one , somewhere on the lifecycle of the game? It is something I'd like you guys to prioritize in development with the engine upgrade. Something like GNU's mmap but for the asset cache. It's long overdue, but I understand Reloaded had other priorities at the time. Little Orbit, if you want to do something that will impact new user retention greatly, this would be it.

They've already stated in another topic that they have to go through a submissions / approval process for new patches. From the link below: https://apbreloaded.gamersfirst.com/2018/07/end-of-july-update.html "I want to take this time to acknowledge all of the console players who have reached out with their frustrations. I feel pretty comfortable with our PC development schedule now, so my focus is to get the console platforms under control. These builds require a few extra steps than PC - which is why we haven't yet done an update. I do want to set some expectations. As soon as we're done with upgrading the XboxOne version, we'll do some internal QA. Once that passes, then we'll work with Deep Silver to submit both builds. It is my goal to get into submission by the end of August. Then it takes a couple weeks to get reviewed and pushed live. I seriously doubt we'll get an approval the first time through."

High FPS is about reducing input lag, which is why it can feel beneficial, even if your monitor can't display the extra frames in between. How many frames your eyes are seeing is not that relevant, it's how much of the delay you can see / feel from when you move your mouse to when the screen updates. Inputs go off regardless of the rendering thread. It gets processed the next frame with the actions of whatever happens in the main thread. UE3 has two different threads, and one is separate from the main thread. Inputs are also processed on their own thread, at least they are in dinput. So if you input a left mouse click, it won't actually trigger the delegate associated with that left mouse click until the system sends that window event to the process. Which won't happen until the next loop in the main thread. But - if we're rendering thousands of frames per second, input delay will actually be too quick and have varying delays because the frame being rendered may take priority over the main thread. Whereas if you cap at a stable framerate (ie; a minimum of 10 below the max fps value observed uncapped) you'd actually have more stable and reliable inputs due to less wasted CPU cycles on rendering without reason. Let's say your framerate uncapped fluxes to 500... You'd want to put it at 450 - that way, you don't over-budget your CPU, if you know you always can get 450 FPS. You never want to go below the server's framerate, ideally. The client will have to play catchup constantly otherwise, even if it's for a little bit of time. If you're spiking due to UE3's rendering thread blocking the game thread somehow (which is the case in APB a *lot*) you'll actually end up with worse input lag, some stuttering and the networking layer will be less reliable. Back in the day, that was 30 fps for APB when we had fpsdetail. Don't know what it is now, but stable FPS above 30 and ideally 10 fps below your maximum observed framerate would be ideal.

High framerate used to be an issue in UE3, namely with networking performance. Plus... Why would you want your PC to use more CPU cycles when it doesn't have to? More framerate isn't going to stop the poor threading done in code by UE3. It's going to make it worse. The human eye definitely can't see past 120hz.

Looking forward to this.

Former SPCM here. I'd like to see the program continue on in some capacity, but realistically, as others have pointed out there is no purpose to the program if Little Orbit has active GMs ingame, however, please note that customer support wasn't the point of the program, it was a tag for helping others with issues that other players could already assist with. The tag just meant the information was supposedly reliable. The program was a great recruitment tool for Reloaded in finding prospective CSRs, as they already had to sign an NDA and were monitored in their behavior. Plus SPCMs weren't paid where as CSRs were, so it's a great vetting process to have people that are passionate about helping others and genuine from the community. You have to be careful to make sure you don't get bad apples and people who will actually understand that a job is a job, so in that sense SPCM was pretty great. It's my personal opinion that helping others can be done without the tag, though. If players genuinely care about new players, they don't need to have a tag to show that they do care.