UNIT: Dedmen, Programmer, Programming
TO: Arma 3 Users
OPSUM: An analysis of recent multithreading improvements for a smoother game experience
SITREP
Welcome to this technical deep dive into Arma 3's performance optimizations in update 2.20. Before handing you over to this blog's actual author, I wanted to share a few words on the state of Live Ops. Yes, REPception is now a thing.
Some 12 years since its initial release, we still find ourselves releasing free platform updates to the game. This is something we can hardly believe ourselves, and we think you'll agree that it's a splendid situation! Thanks to the continued support from the game's community and Bohemia Interactive leadership, we're still in a position to offer some limited Live Ops development. The hands-on team can be counted on one hand now, but we should not forget it takes a bigger support network to keep things flowing smoothly. Publishing, Quality Assurance, Localization, Legal, IT, and more teams and individuals have a hand in getting these updates out. Meanwhile, some of our longer-term plans, as outlined in older SITREPs, are still on our list. Their roll-out has been slower than anticipated, but that's in part due to it just not being necessary to switch to the next phase of Arma 3's life cycle. Even now that we're steadily traveling the road towards Arma 4, there is still plenty of life left in our pinnacle Real Virtuality (RV) title.
Those of you who are on our Discord server (#perf_prof_branch channel) may have been following along with the optimizations now released to main branch in 2.20. You may have already enjoyed Programmer "Dedmen"'s incredible monologues on specific issues, solutions, fixes, and a myriad of other RV topics. You may have also wondered why these optimizations only arrive now. There are many reasons for that, some of which Dedmen will outline below. It's hard to compare the prime-time development circumstances a decade ago to how things are now. There are effectively no hard deadlines for Arma 3 anymore, so there is ample time to investigate and experiment. There also aren't hundreds of commits from tens of people every day, with a constant stream of new features arriving and bugs being squashed. We are building upon the work of legends, going all the way back to the first lines of code for RV by Ondřej Španěl.
Nonetheless, I want to give massive kudos to the incredible work by our talented Dedmen. He has accomplished low-level and risky changes that I would have never anticipated at this stage. They will not magically give everyone the same performance boost across the board, but don't just stare blindly at the numbers. Play the game. Most everyone who's tried the update has said the game feels smoother. Thank you for the passionate and hard work, Dedmen. And a big thanks to everybody who has helped us test these changes via Profiling branch as well. Your feedback has been very important in testing under real-world conditions.
Enough from me, let's finally get to the meat of this Operations Report.
- Joris-Jan van 't Land, Project Lead
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