Players reported the game hanging for about a second while skating. A
profile showed the memory line in the log walking every heap
(HeapSummary) on the client thread, 0.5 to 2 s every two minutes. An
audit of everything that runs on the game's update and render threads
found more of the same, and Sentry's top crashes had causes of ours.
Freezes:
- Memory log line: no heap walk or thread snapshot; the GPU part and the
write happen on a thread of their own.
- Profile database: synchronous=NORMAL in WAL mode. A save is still kept
when the game crashes; every play event no longer waits for the disk
inside the game's hooks.
- ReSkate's own preferences and values (menu clicks, session sliders,
Discord) are saved by a background writer in order; reads see a value
until it is saved.
- Input: the foreground window and the keyboard are sampled on a thread
of their own (GetAncestor and GetAsyncKeyState stalled the client tick
40-50 ms when another program held Windows' lock); flight input uses
the sample; ClipCursor at most twice a second while a menu has the
pointer.
- Hooks installed while the game runs go in one transaction per place
(HookBatch): throwdowns, remote players, the party, Hall of Meat.
- Off the update thread: the host's map package lookup (one table read in
the background, not the Mods folder per offer), the trainer's map file
and settings save, Board Break's settings save, mod music playlists and
their covers, the Spotify station covers.
- Off the render thread: the Modding page's and the deck card's Mods
folder reads. The overlay's three startup waits share five seconds.
- Less work per frame: Steam names reused while one a frame is asked
again, 2 friends a tick, steam_api64.dll checked once per process,
cosmetic names read in place rather than a system call per character,
an outfit load no longer copies the inventory per slot, the throwdown
type scan runs at background priority over resident memory, the Board
Break deck label is kept a minute.
Crashes:
- Render-resource pool: the metadata fields are written to the state
owner only. The other renderer is 0x2daa00 bytes, and +0x11aae28 is far
past its end (store_field crash; heap corruption in every release).
- Other players' skateboard effects: a stale skateboard component is no
longer followed, and the joint lookup is walked with a bound first (an
endless loop in reused memory ended in GameStall).
- Launcher: Oodle decodes into the buffer it asks for with corrupt data
possible, and its assertions no longer stop the process (heap corruption
in the store-copy scan; a breakpoint in oo2core).
Timings (Send performance timings):
- A frame of half a second or more in a level is sent as game.freeze:
where the time went (ReSkate's tick, the game's frame, or outside it),
whether the renderer kept presenting, and ReSkate's busiest zones.
- Closing the game sends the level session it was in.
Music after a connection drop:
- Spotify device: an account Spotify could not be reached with is kept and
tried again (3 s doubling to a minute); a session that drops is taken
up again. Only an account Spotify refuses is asked for anew.
- YouTube playlist pictures that could not be fetched are tried again,
from 30 s to 10 minutes apart.
Crash dumps now go to the project's own Sentry server. The launcher's
out-of-process helper is unchanged; only where it posts and what it expects
back are:
- The default endpoint is the Sentry project's minidump URL. Report
attributes travel as Sentry tags, with the release as reskate@<version>.
- An upload counts as accepted when the server answers with an event ID.
- "backtrace" is "crash_report" throughout: the namespace, files, CMake
targets, DINGOSDK_CRASH_REPORT_URL, DINGOSDK_BUILD_CRASH_REPORT_TESTS and
the RESKATE_CRASH_REPORT_URL override.
Performance timings are new, and off unless "Send performance timings" is
ticked in the launcher's settings (RESKATE_TRACING=1). A small tracer
(Engine/Core/Debug/trace.h) posts each finished step to Sentry as a
transaction from a background thread; the launcher and the game it starts
share one trace. Timed: the update check, the Steam download, Thunderstore
installs, the mod merge, starting the game, the launch up to the first
playable level, each level load, joining a session, fetching the identity
lists, and the time spent in each level with its average frame rate and
long frames. Turning crash reports off turns timings off too.
AyeZeeBB