Is the game still being optimized?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I played a long time ago and started again and can see that there have been some changes/overhauls especially to the building system, which I think is really awesome now compared to before.
Also other minor issues seems to have been updated which is great.

There are some things that I wonder about.

  1. Have pets been nerfed to the extreme? Had a sabertooth cat level 4 getting beaten up by one of those rock monsters in the starting area and inspecting it I can see that its stats are extremely bad, to the point where I almost consider them useless. I recall pets in general being a lot better, have they been nerfed?

  2. The server I play on there is a debate about whether foundations causes server lag or not, which means that they won’t have people using them, it in itself is not a huge issue as you can build around it anyway. But it does require the admins to do a lot of clean up, and it also result in some frustrations for newer players and also in general building things just take longer this way. But would like an official statement about this being true or false? Have searched around the internet on this topic and there seem to be a lot of different opinions about it with a lot of speculations. Can this be confirmed or not to be the case by the developers?

  3. I remember back when I played there was a lot of issues with enemies getting stuck, followers not really wanting to attack or getting stuck in the ground. And im a little surprised to see that this is still the case. Often my pets will run sideways, one follower refuse to attack etc. Because it seems that new content are still being added, but issues like these doesn’t seem to have been improved at all are there any plans of doing this, because it does hurt immersion quite a bit and in general the game is fairly well optimized and look good, so its a bit of a shame that “poor” AI or whatever is causing this ruins the immersion?

Hopefully some of these questions can be answered?

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1: :100:

2: Chests cause more. Storage over all.

3: Prep for deja vue.

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Don’t waste your time with greaters, for now. Last month it seemed everybody had a thrall follower instead of a pet.

Shape of an object does have a role in lag, but we were talking about walls and foundations. I want those less-lag buttons to mash. I’m sure it has to do with concave/convex ops. It trancends me, for now.

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Hopefully they balance the pets again, I really enjoyed them.

There is a difference between FPS stuttering due to meshes etc. But im talking about server lack caused by foundations.

Which I personally find odd, given that I have a difficult time seeing why this would be the case. A pillar surrounded by fences and ceilings seems to require a lot more information to be handled/stored by the server than a single foundation would.

Yet I find it strange that they haven’t made an official statement about this, if it actually is true. It seems kind of stupid keeping this discussion going if there is nothing to it, given that people still apply rules on their server about it.

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Pets and followers have been rebalanced, while there is an issue with NPCs in general having the ability to turn instantly and absolutely wreck things unless they are flinch locked by the player. This will eventually get fixed, but its going to take a bit (next chapter) while they extensively go through each type.

Find another server. There’s been plenty of evidence supplied by modders who specialize in the building system of this game to prove this wrong. The devs have even agreed with that sentiment. Foundation lag is an old myth perpetrated by someone seeing something in the devkit years ago on the foundation blueprint that had neither any impact on the game and hasn’t been present for over 5 years now.

If you have a server owner that believes this, then they are superstitious or purposively gaslighting its members to hide other problems with their server. At best they believe what they say, and don’t know what they are doing when it comes to hosting. Or at worst its a powertrip excuse to control what people are doing. In either case you don’t want to be on a server with an owner like that.

There is a bug currently (as in its new) where followers can have issues switching targets. Like the first issue this will be fixed in the next update, either a hotfix coming or in the chapter update. Not exactly sure which this one will be addressed in.

As for when you probably experienced NPCs getting stuck prior to that particular bug, you probably saw a server environment that needed a restart. Servers need to be restarted every 3-4 days, even after a fresh wipe. Some heavily congested servers will be need to be restarted once a day. That wasn’t an issue I ever saw on a well maintained server or singleplayer.

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I think the thralls are ok, they seem somewhat balanced. The main issue is the pets from what I can see. Both when it comes to damage but also health they die very easy.

That is the issue, I see a lot of these statements, yet haven’t been able to find any official statement whether it has been fixed or not and I think that is an issue. Because some people on the server say they lack due to it, while others like me haven’t noticed any difference at all. The general lag on the server seems present constantly. Sometimes less and sometimes more.

The most obvious thing is enemies lagging around, takes a long time for them to react getting hit etc.

It is extremely difficult to say whether it is one thing or another, given I don’t know what people have build or how to even test it with the tools available. So have to take the word from people saying that they experience lag. Yet it is not always easy to figure out if people confuse low FPS with server lag.

So having an official statement saying whether this is solved or not would be very useful I think, especially if it is wrong, because it does give the game a bad impression of why they haven’t solved it then.

To me, the building system seems very optimized so I agree that im leaning towards this being superstition, but again I have no way of verifying it.

Maybe its a new bug, I seem to recall it being exactly the same back then, there was a lot of issues with followers in general.

Its not uncommon for monsters to spawn inside obstacles or hills etc. I just find it odd, given how little path finding is actually done in the game, most enemies are just passively standing there, yet they bug quite often compared to what should be expected for a game with so many years of development.

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They have, its just hard to find because it was literally years ago. It doesn’t make sense to have to keep saying it, especially when a handful of server owners are just going to ignore it anyway.

The biggest contributor to server lag and performance is actually from bodies staying in game after logging out. Turning this off has the largest reduction of database size of anything else that could be done. Turning out a 50-80% decrease in database size in some cases.

After that to a lesser degree but no means insubstantial in its own right is what Deacon said about storage. A clan base with 100 large chests on its own won’t contribute to server lag very much. But a 100 such bases across an entire map will.

Another one is follower count. Again a single clan having 50-100 followers isn’t an issue. But several dozen clans with that many, will begin to add up.

Those issues with a server host that puts too many virtual machine instances on a single piece of hardware can result in a degraded experience. Better server hosts can help, to a point. Ideally you’d like to respect the dev limits of 40 players and have a dedicated machine. But frequently owners will make compromises. They’ll take a bit of degraded performance and restrictions to push the player limit to 70 or higher.

Its just in some unfortunate cases the server owners don’t know what restrictions actually matter. Or they attribute some decisions with having an effect when its the side effect that matters. For example, limiting building size. While this isn’t necessarily useless. When you limit building sizes, you inadvertently reduce storage requirements, which has a larger impact than the amount of building pieces used. And it also limits the foot print of builds which can have a performance hit once they start encompassing more land than can be loaded at once for a singleplayer in an area. That tends to add a bit of work to the server that exacerbates the issue, even if the areas are already loaded due to players being spread out.

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I can understand that, yet it doesn’t remove the issue that people think that this is actually causing problems. Something could suggest that the information about it weren’t relayed good enough, given that so many are still convinced about it.

Im not sure this is a huge issue to be honest. (Obviously depending on how they implemented it). But for the most part whatever is in storage is irrelevant until requested and in that case it is a few numbers that has to be transferred, but in most cases these things wouldn’t put a stress on the server.

If we take a “simplified” example and say you have a storage chest.

To keep it simple we just say the server need to have an owner ID of the chest and what content is in it.

The only time it would need to do anything with it is when it is interacted with such as you opening it, it getting attacked or moved etc.

At any other time it is irrelevant, it only need to send you the information when you interact with it. But for 95% of the time the chest is closed. So it would take up server storage keeping track of all the variables, but don’t really see why it would cause lag.

My guess is it is the same with the crafting, despite everything appearing to be on timers. It would be silly for the server to actually keep track of them real time, compared to simply calculating it when needed. So as with the storage chest, when you interact with a smelter, the server would know the crafting speed and the amount of materials. When you close it again and wait a few minutes and open it. The server can calculate the amount of crafting that have been done and just give you the number and update the timer so it appears as if it is “running” in the background.
So again, a lot of these things I assume are done on demand rather than the server actually keeping track of anything real time.

My guess is what would cause the most amount of lag, is the information about the world that needs to be send to each player, but again a player in G2, doesn’t need to know what is going on in A3 in great details etc. And usually there isn’t that many players on the map at the same time. Also areas where there are no players probably update very little. Meaning it is probably an update on demand kind of system.

And again the same ought to be the same with buildings, in my game I haven’t been to the jungle area yet, so I don’t need any information about what is going on there, what buildings are there etc. So I don’t assume that my client get those information.

But again im just guessing here, it just seems weird that enemies etc, given how passive the majority of them are, are so bound to bug.

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I can honestly say this isn’t the truth.

Several years ago on one of the first servers I played on, there was a limit on how much you could use foundations. They wanted players to use a pillar and 4 walls to level off areas. You absolutely could not use a foundation on another. Instead of one building piece they wanted you to use 4-6 (walls, pillar, and ceiling tile) for each spot. They cited it was because of ‘lag’ caused by foundations.

They were perfectly fine with pillars and fence foundations being used.

I went into the devkit and actually showed the owner how pillars, fence foundations, and foundations were no different from each other in how they exude landclaim. And with that evidence, they still wouldn’t budge. Which is their right, its their server. They have the right to be wrong.

There is zero, absolutely zero evidence of Foundations causing anymore server issues than any other building piece in the game. There never has been an instance in any version of the game where foundations have had anymore impact than any other building pieces.

The point is, there is NOTHING Funcom can do, say, or whatever to convince these people. NOTHING. They are absolutely irrationally believing in a zealous way that foundations cause lag. They cannot be convinced otherwise.

It is absolutely impossible to convince them.

They will run their servers in ignorance forever.

They are active when people are close enough to them to be rendered. This is where Funcom kinda screwed up by giving us a feature we don’t really need. That is when you look at a chest and can see its contents without opening it. I would be perfectly fine if they removed that. We have signs we can use to label our chests anyway, as well as changing the name of the container itself.

But the storage still adds to much of the content stored in the database and after several hundred people play on a server for a bit, it gets quite large. What helps with this is increasing stack sizes. We used to be able to stack stone, wood, shaped wood, and bricks only to 100
 that got bad quick.

What I’d like to see is have the specialized storage not store things in stacks, but by total amount. That would help out quite a bit with storage, but of course they would need to add it in as vanilla content instead of a Battlepass no longer available.

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I agree with what you are saying. Even though I haven’t tested it, simply from a logical viewpoint it would make sense. I would even think that foundations would be better because of the reduced number of blocks if anything. So it purely depends on whether there is a bug with them or not as I see it. Which again, I can’t confirm as I haven’t seen it being an issue.

But those on my server are as you describe, they seem convinced that it causes lag and will only listen to an official statement. Which is fine as you say it is their server and if they believe it is the case, no real harm done by it. I just think it must be annoying for them having to inspect all bases for no good reason, as they do now.

That is true, if this information is actually loaded simply being in the area and not having to look at them. But it should be a fairly simple fix to simply remove that feature, if it would improve on the lag. Then they should do it, it is not a crucial feature anyway.

Agree add a sign to be attachable to the chest or simply update the model, you can already place signs now, it is just not optimal.

Honestly I think simply removing it so all the content of storage chests weren’t loaded constantly if that is the case would help. Also minor things like campfires you place only lasting 10 minutes, there isn’t really any reason for them to stick around. I think there is a lot of minor optimizations they could make.

But still not sure what the issue is with the monsters still or the followers, it seems more like an AI issue than anything else. Because I have noticed that sometimes one thrall will attack while the other is just standing there, again a lot of weird issues with them.

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Chests are a missive problem. The chest is an entity and everything in the chest is an entity. Having 20 chests filed with full stacks of stone are thousands of entities all sitting in a single square. Unfortunately it is a Unity 4 problem. This issue was fixed in Unity 5.

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Do you mean UE5?

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Who has just 20 chests? PVE and I know someone on the public server I’m on with 10 vaults at one of their 7 bases.

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It seems like something that should be redesigned then, because as we know storage containers are heavily used in the game and often condensed in a very small area for practical reasons.

Which is also why (depending on how it is implemented) would make sense that the storage container’s contain wouldn’t be loaded before you actually interact with the chest. Because I would assume that the contain doesn’t exist in the world in the same way as if you drop 100 stones on the ground and it create this loot bag.

But if it is as some Taemien said and it loads all the storage containers content simple you being in the area and constantly having to update them, that seems really bad to be honest.

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I get the names mixed up all the time.

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Was just a small example of numbers.

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It’s part of the core system. The only fix is to update to UE5. Funcom won’t do that because they would need to basically remake the entire game.

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Slots matter, quantities do not. 20 full chests is 900 slots. It doesn’t matter if each slot is 1000 stones or a single stone.

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It absolutely matters. A vault full of stone has more weight then a vault filled with swords.

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Try again


Try yet again

Why?..
because unreal doesn’t come with an inventory system at all


All items
 inventories
 etc
 it’s all Funcom’s custom code.

So no
 it’s definitely not a “UE4 problem” (much less a Unity one :stuck_out_tongue: )

Wrong again

the stack size is a simple integer property of the same game item
 doesn’t matter if you have 50 in a stack or 2000, it’s a single item that has “2000” written on it basically.
When you split them in two
 you create TWO items
 that each have 1000 written on them. (so stacksize increasing mods can actually help with this part of things)

As for inventories in general messing up the server
 no
 they slow down replication only
 not the tick rate
 which means that you’ll have other things that need to replicate potentially load in slower


What really messes up your servers and creates “lag” is the placeables
 Each placeable is an individual actor, which ticks and does all its fancy stuff on the server
 some more than others ofc.
And what really kills the server is when you have a super cluttered base and you start placing thralls in the middle that might need to path through that mess doing repeated traces :stuck_out_tongue:

While on the client side your “lag” will be on most modern hardware from simply the thread capping out
 too much stuff happening, too many actors loaded
 and the game runs on a single thread regardless of what cool machine you have
 that’s the limitation of the engine right there, when you see your hardware not even close to being fully utilized but your fps still drops

So doing things that require less “stuff” and less calculations on the client will help
 such as not placing intersecting lights and that sort of stuff


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