Feedback regarding the latest hotfixes

[iuli24]

I want to start this by telling you that I am referring to the latest hotfixes from here: https://forum.pirategalaxy.com/threads/game-update-july-16-2026.39724/.

I don't spend that much time on the forums nowadays but considering the results I have personally seen from this patch.. (WOW) it is worth congratulating big time.

Not sure if I reported the performance issues first or not / if my details to @StickManTwit helped more or less (probably they did and thanks sticky for forwarding it to the dev team).

I mostly reported the rapid blaster effect on pink remnants causing huge fps drops on large fights. I was mostly expecting that to be fixed and meh prob not much else. I definitely didn't expect what I am about to say below:

You guys (highway dev team etc) mentioned some memory leaks fixes alongside other things. Those things are definitely nice and probably (likely) what improved the overall game stability.

For context I haven't been playing PG on windows for over 8+ months. I am a permanent Linux PG player and the performance I have here is usually upwards of 100-150% higher average fps than it is on the windows side (on very intensive scenarios like big fights OTBs etc). This being said it was never perfect. There have always been annoying large stutters especially immediately after starting the game and it would kinda stabilize over 1-5 minutes. You can probably guess it was bugging me A LOT.

Even with this extra variable i mentioned above.. before the patch my fps would rapidly tank from 60 to 30 when the remnant would shoot its blasters (you would think meh that's not that bad) well... people with good computers on windows were telling me that their fps would tank to 0.9 =))))). I mean.. if this doesn't showcase the difference between windows and Linux performance.. I don't know what does. But this made me think that it is worth reporting in detail and potentially getting it fixed (which you did and THANK YOU).

To close this thanks note.. the reason I was so excited to the point where this morning I told @StickManTwit in discord in private "Can I kiss Highway?" XD was because.. somehow.. you guys improved the overall game performance, not just remnant rapid blaster spam. I booted the game up this morning and... 1 small stutter.. I was like..hmm.. weird (this was with me logging in directly on the calon surface which before made me stutter HARD more than 10 times before it would stabilize). Then I filled up.. moved around a bit.. no stutters.. hmm.. leaped around (this would also trigger stuttering for me).. gone.. Moved with freecam 2532323 lightyears per second across the entire calon map. 1 small stutter. THAT'S ABSOLUTELY INSANE. No idea what exactly was causing this under the hood cause I tried soooooooooooooooo many different things on Linux to get the game to stop stuttering on me so much but its finally pretty much perfect.

I also played today over an hour on multiple planets with yellow and pink remnants and in total i can count the number of stutters i had on 1 hand. So my "Can I kiss Highway and likely the entire dev team cause i'm pretty sure everyone worked on this? is not an understatement ))).


P.S. I am positively sure that its not a "magic" Linux fix from it simply updating. I have used the same proton version and arguments prior to the patch and it was basically the same. Either way. Keep up the good work and I love to see that the game improves over time and that you guys listen to feedback more and more.

 

[Highway]

Great to hear such feedback.
There where several issues fixed while getting deeper in that old codebase to debug that remnant blaster slowdown players have reported.
The main issue was a leak in the sound caching for the projectiles, never freeing up and constantly creating new sound object and giving the CPU a hard time going through that large list for each new projectiles fired...

Then the whole projectiles logic code was also reworked to reduce the overall render batches and properly cache the visual as well. There where also some stuff that did not get cleared properly and the caches did not have a limit. Also nodes in the render hierarchy where to flat for the hit effects causing each frame to cost more CPU as well. So overall the update freed up CPU cycles per frame.

 

[iuli24]

Love to see it. Glad that improves the performance for everyone. Recently I got friend on the penguin side of things (he has a laptop with a much weaker cpu than mine) and he has severely less stutters than he had when we tried quite a while ago.

Also weirdly enough when i open ingame menus like the news shop etc.. it doesn't stutter. Or if it does its imperceptibly small. So many unexpected improvements. (I reaaaaaaally hope its not placebo with these menus ))) )

And ah yes. A small thing if you can take a look into. Can you set a timeout for in game item effects? I really think that is a more or less visible memory leak. For example thermoblasts not clearing.. magnet trap effects etc (on the player ship. it seems to be a client side issue because not everyone sees the same thing when it happens. maybe i see 10 trap effects on myself but other people don't). For example if X item is supposed to last 10s but the effect remains longer than 12.. automatically clear it? Its just a suggestion. If you can find any other better solutions that would be nice. And thank you ahead of time.

 

[iuli24]

And if you are gonna take a look onto it.. it seems to happen when multiple effects try to stack at the same time. for example sentry thermoblasting with multiple thermos.. multiple pyros turning on thermo.. sometimes even from just 1 if it turns on the effect and dies fast enough.. it kindof smells like race condition on the last one cause it looks like it removes the effect for like 50ms and then reappears and stays on forever.