MPQ State of Unity Update #1

S0kun

At the point of this blog’s release, many of you have already experienced the Unity engine. A long-awaited and touted milestone in the life cycle of MPQ that we’ve been talking about for years now. We knew it was going to be a bumpy start and wanted to extend our apologies for the poor experience this has been for players.

We also want to thank everyone for reporting issues that they’ve experienced while we work towards getting things in a more stable place. That stable place means a much more flexible framework for us to continue developing MPQ and most importantly, introducing new features and mechanics to the game. There’s still a ton of exciting possibilities under the Unity hood and we’re confident that this rocky start will be worth it in the future when we start talking about the exciting roadmap of MPQ.

Meanwhile, we really appreciate your patience as we work through this and want to address some of the questions you may have to understand why we decided to pull the trigger on Unity’s launch in its current state.

Why was Unity released in this current state?

At the beginning of the year, we had to cut back on the live version of the game in order to get the Unity engine to the finish line. This shift was only supposed to take a few months, as the port was making steady progress at that time. However, it has recently created a scenario where sustaining development work on both engines has proved very difficult. This was compounded by the early release of Unity on Amazon and a tech stack with outdated or no longer supported infrastructure. We found ourselves forced into working on two full engines that required equal support vs a fully functional, pared-down old engine while getting Unity ready.

During this time, we also ran a closed beta that helped shape a playable version of Unity, but still had several bugs that needed further optimization. Ultimately, these bugs were identified and prioritized based on our risk tolerance to leave them in during our initial Unity launch or continue several more months of development struggles as mentioned earlier.

After a few months of testing, we got the build into a stable enough state that would allow us to launch and we’d then start prioritizing pushing out hot fixes as soon as possible. This while also acknowledging that some of it wasn't perfect but needing to get overall development back into a space where we could support four platforms properly instead of essentially double that with two concurrent game engines. What we didn’t anticipate, however, is that some of these bugs which were found during our device and build testing before launch, became far more severe after launch than had been previously observed. And along with the new bugs that appeared after launch, the new engine has definitely started off rockier than we had expected.

Why haven’t you addressed beta or preexisting bugs?

The intent of this first Unity release is to be as close to a snapshot of the original game as possible. This required including all the pre-existing bugs, such as the broken Facebook refer-a-friend, bugged character abilities, and anything else that was part of the original game. Trying to fix things prior to importing into Unity would’ve been a versioning nightmare since the game would constantly be changing, and ensuring that fixes worked on both versions of the game would have doubled our time spent investigating, fixing, QAing, and releasing builds.

When can we expect some improvements to Unity so that it can “remain the same as the current live version”?

Our first order of business upon launch was to identify the impact of known bugs, issue hot fixes, and tackle any new bugs that had surfaced. Unfortunately, the impact of the known bugs is more than we had anticipated, and we’re still very much in the midst of trying to push out as many fixes as we can.

We’re also seeing issues such as account linking and worse than expected performance, which we’re actively working on addressing. Part of that stability will come this week via version R326 on all devices. This release aims to decrease and stabilize the frame rate to 60fps on PC and 30fps on mobile, which will greatly help resolve some performance issues. It also fixes a variant of the black loading screen and brings back the “back" button on Android devices. Most importantly, this release puts all platforms back to one release version instead of two.

What are our current priorities now?

Stability is our number one priority at the moment which encompasses a wide array of elements in the game. From laggy gameplay experiences to broken events, we now have our entire team prioritizing getting the game into a stable state where we can start releasing updates that weren’t previously feasible. Until then, here’s some visibility into some of the priorities we’re focusing on to allow us to start improving on the Unity experience in the immediate and near future.

• Bugs! Bugs! Bugs! We’re trying to put out as many bugs as we can so please keep an eye out for the latest release notes as more builds get deployed to improve all areas of MPQ, from alliance chat to UI improvements.
• Memory allocation to help performance on lower-spec devices. MPQ has historically been a low resource-intensive game, but with Unity, there are more resource requirements that we’re working to optimize to minimize the negative impact on less powerful devices.
• Improved frame rate for less jittering. This also potentially helps improve performance and battery drain on mobile devices. We’ll look to implement an option to select frame rates in the future, but this change should help fix the immediate issues we’re seeing.
• Smoother screen transitions, which include some animation improvements causing motion sickness in some players.
• Improvements to asset streaming to decrease load times.
• Investigate a batch asset download button that allows players to download all assets at once, rather than streaming them during gameplay. This type of UI and feature option was something not in the original game, and was previously a very tedious process to change.

Lastly, we realize that some of the above things that we’ve pointed out is a bit nebulous in the world of game dev speak and to better explain how we’re handling the launch of Unity, we’d like to invite you to join us on Wednesday July 16th at 10am PST in our official MPQ Discord Server for a State of Unity AMA. Our very own MPQ Game Producer, @IceIX will be around for a few hours during our regular work day to answer some of our community's question regarding the state of MPQ's Unity launch and what plans we have to get things back on track after our recent rough start to the new game engine.

If you’re unable to make it for the live chat, we’ll do our best to take some notes and post them as a post-AMA F.A.Q. on our forums. Additionally, please feel free to ask questions in our State of Unity AMA forum post and we’ll try to also address them during the AMA. See you then!