Playkey DevLog. Issue Twenty
Consistency is the DNA of mastery! That’s why we post on our devblog with frightening regularity. Although it’s also because we always have something to tell you.
Our latest news: we’re continuing to optimize the Desktop version. The major errors that made sessions stuck have been fixed. Now we’ve moved to the next level: scaling up the Desktop. At first we have to accept a challenge from the servers with NVIDIA Tesla M40 video cards. For some unknown reason, they’re freezing! All the efforts of one of our teams have been redirected to solving this problem. As soon as we solve it, we’ll continue transferring the next batch of games to Desktop, including the legendary Witcher 3!
In spite of the unexpected difficulties with the NVIDIA Tesla M40, the work on the H.265 video codec was finished in time. Players whose video cards support it will now have a crisper picture (although it seems like it can’t get any clearer!). The codec is enabled automatically based on the computer’s parameters. But if you don’t trust our autoconfig tool, go ahead and set it up yourself. All you have to do is open the config tool in the Playkey app manually (Ctrl+F2) and select H.265 beta as the codec. Naturally, we cannot guarantee stability when you perform changes yourself.
The feature is in beta now. If you switch it on and your video card does not support the codec, rollback is possible. In this case, the stream will go back to H.264. Or the image will freeze. Or the client application will stop working. Or… Actually, maybe we shouldn’t have told you how to turn on the codec yourself. Onto other news!
In addition to everything above, we’ve launched a distributed video streaming in 33 fps mode. Read more about this in the last issue. After the launch, data packet loss in 33 fps mode was reduced by a factor of 3 and a half — from 4.2% to 1.1%. The number of unassembled frames fell by a third — from 0.9% to 0.55%. And the network bitrate increased from 12 to 14 Mbps. If these numbers don’t mean much more to you than numbers on a lottery ticket, just trust us — they’re fantastic!
To increase success, we’ve started integrating Intel Quick Sync Video technology to the client application for users with Intel video cards. We’ll tell you about the results in upcoming issues.
Everything listed applies both for the current version of the platform and for the decentralized version of Playkey. As for copying user profiles into several profilers (servers on which profiles are kept), we’ve started developing this specially for decentralization. Previously a profile would be saved only on two servers after the end of a game session, but that isn’t enough for a decentralized platform. Scaling means increasing the number of players, and as a consequence, the number of profilers, which ideally should be located in the same place as the game servers. So we’re a small step closer to a distributed architecture!
On this positive note, we’ll stop talking and go do some work. See you in the next issue! And remember: every time you give us +50 claps, subscribe to our YouTube channel and our Telegram chat, a little orphan kitten finds a home somewhere in the world…
