Lag, lag, go away! If you play the popular Star Wars Galaxies rogue server known as SWG Legends, you’re probably right there with everyone else in being tired of the lag, even as you know the “problem” is largely to do with so many people playing, the best kind of problem to have. Fortunately, it sounds as if the player team working on the game is staying on top of it. A new dev update this week covers why latency has been such an issue, and it’s down to what the team is calling “area activity” levels.
“These area activity levels vary from area to area per planet depending on the type of things going on within the zone. Development has the ability to split up a server into different game zones, ensuring high activity levels in one area do not cause lag in other areas. […] With more and more players joining our ever-growing community, we have to divide up planets into more game zones in order to accommodate for more activity going on within the galaxy. Our dilemma is the more we divide each planet up, the more CPU resources we are allocating to each zone. As it stands now, we are hitting 95% CPU usage across all 3 of our server boxes, meaning we are reaching the max of our server resources.”
The current plan for addressing it will involve more but smaller servers to handle the load. “While it will cost us a bit more to go through with at first, in the long-run we will be saving a bit more monthly while getting more bang for our buck,” the team writes.
Incidentally, the Jedi themepark that was supposed to launch in January? You might notice it didn’t. It’s now slated for after the new server structure is in place. Expect “prologue content” with “pre-quests” and a pair of new heroic dungeons with their associated rewards.
