Hello CubeCrafters,
We've just rolled out a major performance update to our Bedrock Network which solves many of the client lag issues and slow rendering for skins. Upon joining games and lobbies, you will now notice that many of the NPCs and player's skins should render at a much faster speed. We've put a large effort into optimizing skins and render times as much as possible in this update, and also fixing the infamous "Steve bug", where every skin stops rendering and turns into a Steve.
This had been a longstanding issue on CubeCraft for some time now. Joining lobbies would lag the game, joining games would also cause some lag, and every now and then all skins would eventually break and turn into Steves. This went beyond the scope of just skins, and would cause NPCs and other parts of the server to just stop rendering and ultimately it was not a good experience.
I tried implementing a handful of fixes, most of which being trivial changes that unfortunately had no effect, some of which consisted of delaying the sending of skins, sending them earlier, reordering how some data was sent, and a handful of other technical changes. This wasn't easy; I ran into some obstacles along the way, one of which being unique to my local test server, which oddly enough when tested on CubeCraft itself ended up actually causing more of a delay for some players. It was all frustrating work! There was lot of trial and error, and many pots of coffee. I eventually decided to look more deeply into the character creator skins, and after more research and testing I found that it to be the main culprit.
After further testing, I found that disabling character creator skins resulted in lobby NPCs loading in blazingly fast and also normal player skins. By doing this we noticed a huge boost in client performance all around - both in games and in lobbies. Along the way we also found ways to optimize the loading of other server entities, which appeared to have a fairly significant boost on this as well, so overall the playing experience on CubeCraft should be much more enjoyable and a lot more lag-free. For those of you using character creator skins, we've opted to apply some of our free marketplace skins so you don't appear as a Steve to everyone else.
Over the past couple of weeks, we've also focused on fixing some of the other highly reported bugs and overall improvement of gameplay. For a full list of fixed bugs, see below:
• Improved the rendering speed of NPCs in lobbies.
• Improved the rendering speed of player skins.
• Fixed a bug where placing signs would kick you.
• Fixed a bug where walking through doors would cause you to get stuck in them.
• Fixed many wrong or invalid sounds when playing on the server.
• Fixed a few blockstate problems with slabs appearing to be the wrong block.
• Fixed the "stuttering" when near a TNT explosion.
• Fixed noteblock particles not showing up.
• Fixed eating particles.
• Fixed a few skins not properly showing up.
• Disabled character creator skins.
Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs over the past few weeks. These reports have been extremely helpful when it comes to these things.
We've just rolled out a major performance update to our Bedrock Network which solves many of the client lag issues and slow rendering for skins. Upon joining games and lobbies, you will now notice that many of the NPCs and player's skins should render at a much faster speed. We've put a large effort into optimizing skins and render times as much as possible in this update, and also fixing the infamous "Steve bug", where every skin stops rendering and turns into a Steve.
This had been a longstanding issue on CubeCraft for some time now. Joining lobbies would lag the game, joining games would also cause some lag, and every now and then all skins would eventually break and turn into Steves. This went beyond the scope of just skins, and would cause NPCs and other parts of the server to just stop rendering and ultimately it was not a good experience.
Old behaviour (before we fixed it)
I tried implementing a handful of fixes, most of which being trivial changes that unfortunately had no effect, some of which consisted of delaying the sending of skins, sending them earlier, reordering how some data was sent, and a handful of other technical changes. This wasn't easy; I ran into some obstacles along the way, one of which being unique to my local test server, which oddly enough when tested on CubeCraft itself ended up actually causing more of a delay for some players. It was all frustrating work! There was lot of trial and error, and many pots of coffee. I eventually decided to look more deeply into the character creator skins, and after more research and testing I found that it to be the main culprit.
After further testing, I found that disabling character creator skins resulted in lobby NPCs loading in blazingly fast and also normal player skins. By doing this we noticed a huge boost in client performance all around - both in games and in lobbies. Along the way we also found ways to optimize the loading of other server entities, which appeared to have a fairly significant boost on this as well, so overall the playing experience on CubeCraft should be much more enjoyable and a lot more lag-free. For those of you using character creator skins, we've opted to apply some of our free marketplace skins so you don't appear as a Steve to everyone else.
New behaviour (after we fixed it)
Over the past couple of weeks, we've also focused on fixing some of the other highly reported bugs and overall improvement of gameplay. For a full list of fixed bugs, see below:
Fixed Bugs and Changes
• Improved the rendering speed of NPCs in lobbies.
• Improved the rendering speed of player skins.
• Fixed a bug where placing signs would kick you.
• Fixed a bug where walking through doors would cause you to get stuck in them.
• Fixed many wrong or invalid sounds when playing on the server.
• Fixed a few blockstate problems with slabs appearing to be the wrong block.
• Fixed the "stuttering" when near a TNT explosion.
• Fixed noteblock particles not showing up.
• Fixed eating particles.
• Fixed a few skins not properly showing up.
• Disabled character creator skins.
Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs over the past few weeks. These reports have been extremely helpful when it comes to these things.
