Feedback Game Optimization Suggestions/Feedback (For Skyrama Dev Team)

Good evening everyone,
Yeah, it's me again. Today, I would like to propose a few optimizations that would benefit mainly the BIG BIG players. Those changes would impact all players minimally, but they would help big players to play the game without their game running at like 1-2 fps if even that.

First optimization (Visiting a friend - Server)
Visiting a friend's airport takes ages to load, mostly when they are a really big player. Some people might think it's because of the size of their airport (the buildings), but not really. The biggest bottleneck is the fact that when you are visiting a friend's airport, their whole user profile is being downloaded for you. This includes even their whole fleet. This increases the file size by quite a bit, and for what? The only reason why the planes are even being sent to the player who is visiting is to display the planes that are currently at the airport (to my understanding). I really like this feature but it's not really useful, is it? So I believe that it wouldn't be that harmful to just return an empty array. (perhaps if statement that would first of all count the rows of owned planes for the player and if it's above let's say realistically like 1000-2000, return empty array instead of all the planes, I know that this would mean one more database call, but just an idea.)

I wouldn't even talk about this one, but some high level players have reported that they experience TFs when people visit them, so as a "side-effect" I believe that this could potentially help.

Second optimization (Flight Paths - Client)
What is a flight path?


Big players are unable to open the world map while they have thousands of planes on their radar. The lag is quite noticeable even with hundreds of planes, which is quite common even for medium-sized players and it's all caused by the flight paths. They are a pretty visualization of the inbound & outbound planes but each red dot represents 1 plane and all of them are being redrawn each second. I guess that you don't need to understand much code to realize that it might be quite resource-heavy to draw 2000+ dots on a line every second. The dots are redrawn even when the position doesn't change at all. My suggestion is as lazy + simple as possible, limit the number of dots that can be shown. I would just make a hard cap of 100-200 dots and ignore the rest of the planes. Is it a shame? Yes, it is, but this would keep the feature itself and make the world map at least usable with a lot of planes on the radar. From my tests, the flight paths are the only thing that really kills the performance in the world map.

Third optimization (The mini-radar?)
Big players experience hugeee FPS spikes when there is a lot of OWN planes ready to land. (they can be clicked to land) It's really quite a weird condition, but this is the only situation that I managed to reproduce according to their steps. I'm not gonna pretend that I understood this issue perfectly, but I believe that I found the biggest culprit.

Showcase of the stutters with 3000 planes ready to land:
- Red lines mean that the game froze


Firstly, I thought that the plane queue was handled ineffectively, as that sounded pretty obvious, but that didn't prove to be the case, or at least I didn't manage to improve the performance in that way.

After that, I remembered that there is quite an often forgotten feature in Skyrama, and that is "Radar".


It consists of 3 rings and it actually batches the planes by how many minutes/hours they are from your airport. I'm quite sure it's less than 5 minutes for the inner ring, 5min < medium ring < 2 hours and 2+ hours for the outer ring.

I believe the issue may be how the radar handles our planes that are ready to land. It needs to remove them from some radar list but that causes huge performance issues.

Completely "nuking" this radar (not in a clean way), led to the FPS stutters completely disappearing:


Thanks for reading this post, I hope that this post falls under the message that someone from the skyrama team directed through FlightAttendant:

"If there is anyone in the community with strong programming skills, a solid understanding of the Skyrama code, and the motivation to contribute to its future, we would be happy to hear from you."

Yet again, I don't want to end up banned or worse, so I'm yet again saying that during my experiments, no packet manipulations were used, I gained no advantage in the game, and I didn't do anything that would cause even hypothetically any damage to the game server itself. I did all of my findings just to contribute to the game and potentially improve the experience of other players. If anyone from Skyrama Team is interested in some more info then please contact me here on the forum. I really enjoyed learning how Skyrama as the game itself works and this is officially most likely my last technical related post that I will ever post here as I'm busy with other stuff in my life and I cannot spend much more time with researching stuff, so I hope it's gonna have positive impact. ^^

I'm sure my favourite person on this forum Blondi is gonna read this as well, so I hope that you appreciate this time that those suggestions are aimed at the game's performance and big players as yourself.

Thanks a lot everyone and I wish everyone a great rest of the day!
bulva2