Hi Truckers,

This week we focused on optimization. We’ve been having a little too much fun building out new features (no regrets) but we know players are still experiencing some desync issues or issues commonly resolved with “refresh to fix it” aka “resync.” We also know some players are experience sluggishness across the board, including stuttering when opening a crate, delayed button feedback, and other anomalies. While this is expected in a beta, we’re also considering these issues being present when this isn’t a beta and our player numbers have increased substantially. What then? Slap some Flex Tape on that shit and hope for the best? Probably not the best call. Basically as it stands we have an insane amount of calls going to our server even with a limited group of active players. The second we scale up… boom.

Instead, we added a new redis (Remote Dictionary Server) cluster to our system and began aggressively caching key points of our back end. You don’t really need to understand any of that hot nonsense. All you need to know is that this is us trying to fix a whole bunch of issues mentioned above, make everything faster in general, and lock this down before we open the floodgates. Smash that refresh button to check it out.

We know this isn’t the most fun you’ve ever had after a patch. We’re sorry about that, but while slogging through the mud to get that built out, we started discussing and designing an entirely new feature in the works; Crafting. I can’t do a deep dive just yet, but know this is going to be a robust system with multiple pieces (components), recipes, and yes even Parts with multiple stats (+10 Power, +10 Coins/Mile). That’s all I’m going to say for now. We’ve already started actual layouts, and spent like an unreasonable amount of time discussing details. We’re pretty f#$%ing pumped.

As always, feel free to let us know if this patch tickles your pistons or whatever really weird truck-based euphemism you want or don’t want to use. Things should absolutely feel smoother, but we can’t really know that until all of you are testing simultaneously; there are only so many Dan/Mikes on our end (you’re welcome). Hopefully with this massive stride towards optimization we can get back to making the game “fun” and stop worrying about it being “playable,” like that even matters.

Lastly, one thing of note: we’ll no longer be patching over the weekend unless there’s an emergency. We’ll be switching to patching on Tuesdays starting on Feb 9th. That is all 🙂

Fully Optimized,

D/M