Performance issues with large collections

The size of my collection allows me to test the card hunter client’s ability to handle large numbers of items. Based on what I’ve seen I’ll share a few concerns.

I do what I consider to be an average level of maintenance on my non-treasure items. Once or twice a week I sell these items down to the minimum number needed for a hypothetical party. I keep the maximum number of items you would potentially need; 12 of each arcane item, 9 of each weapon, 6 of each staff, 3 of most items. I’ve been imitating Scrooge McDuck with my treasure collection, keeping all items until today.

Given the set design, a player can reasonably grow their collection well into the 1000’s even if they are continually selling items. For example, there are 46 marital skill items currently in the game, if a player keeps 3 of each they end up with upwards of 138 items. Other types of items can be worse, just keeping to rare, uncommon and common arcane items, collecting 12 of each results in 111 items X 12 for a total of 1332 items. I estimate my non-treasure item collection to be around 4000+ items at the moment.

My treasure collection had grown to what I estimate to be an additional 4000 items. And for the last month or two performance has not been great. Loading into adventures or trying to use the collection interface has been less than optimal. I’ve gotten used to dealing with lag times of multiple seconds, though I blame myself due to the size of my collection. That collection is being loaded very regularly.



Today I cleared up my treasure collection, clearing out around 2000+ items from my collection. This has made a noticeable improvement to the performance I’m seeing. Which matches to my experiences selling 1000s of items off in the beta, but it also concerns me.

Right now, I expect there are relatively few players with that many items, but I expect it will be more common when new content is released. With a theoretical level limit of 50, we could see item counts triple from what we are currently dealing with. With the potential release of additional classes, other substantial increases in the item count would occur. I’m curious to the performance of the client when item collections could contain 10,000+ items.

 

Issue was raised up last year. https://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/new-video-diary-intro-to-deck-building.314/#post-4470

And as your figure shows, client really doesn't need to show each gem. 1 item image, 1 count var, 1 item name and a sell form field with a single sell button in a row with all hoard shown in tabulated form would be a neat solution. No need to re-invent the wheel... imho...

 

That sounds ideal to me. Better organization, better visibility, better control, and less strain on the computer.

 

I see the same slowdown on my "Jarmo" test server account. I opened 2,000 Epic chests and a few hundred Magnificent chests on it. I've had to sell all excess items as in the opening post and the performance is still too slow by far. If you have a fullish collection even with the current amount of items, the game can't handle it. Something needs to be done. The proposed "show only one copy with count" solution sounds very good!

 

Farbs in the thread Phaselock linked:

Please start optimising!

Showing only one copy of an item has other benefits, though, so please start to use it even if you could get enough performance with the current item display. Less UI work for the player, less scrolling, less need for filtering, easier to get a comprehensive picture of your collection, more informative inventory screenshots etc.

As item storage space is not a gameplay issue in Card Hunter (no inventory Tetris or premium Bags of Holding or 20-slot belts) it makes no gameplay sense to display every copy, either. It just makes the item management interface simpler with no need to enter the number of copies to be sold. It can still be kept simple with the proposed model, e.g. just make drag- or ctrl-click-selling always sell a single copy.

I still advocate the "sell all excess items" button that is regularly proposed. That is the single best thing that would make playing the SP game more pleasant at the moment, followed by the performance enhancement.

 

+1

 

This would be on my Christmas wishlist too. For a frequent farmer, this issue really detracts from the game.

 

+1

 

Thanks for the console hint, Farbs! With its help I was able to determine the total number of items on my accounts. My live account currently has 4,454 total items and the test account I mention above in post #4 has exactly 6,000 items (a round number just by amazing coincidence!)

 

Just wanted to bump this again. I froze the game by dumping ~500 items into The Armory after a couple farming runs. My collection only has 2260 items (after the dump), but at the end I was seeing 4-5 second mouse input lags up until it froze.

 

Yes, it would be great to have a feature/interface where the number (of copies/duplicates) of an item you own is simply displayed/indicated by an number/value floating above or attached to the icon of the item-- it's cool/crazy to see every single icon of every single item lined up like that, but it's a mess to go through them...

Probably needs an overhaul of the interface-- User-Interface 2.0?

 

I just sold 1400 gp worth of commons & uncommons...



Not noticing performance improvements if any, though maybe that's because I'm still holding onto too many copies of items?

(To be clear, where performance is mediocre for me is when loading Keep, stores, and modules—any new view that calls on my inventory. The loading icon stalls for a good 15+ seconds after spinning and before letting me into the Keep/store/module. Everything else about the game is smooth for me.)

 

Have you tried checking how many items you have total? It's a bit tricky to do, but I've noticed the more you go over about 4,000 items the more you suffer. 6,000 is too slow to want to keep playing much. The loading times are the killjoy. Once you're in a battle there is no slowdown.

 

Looks like I've got about 3200 after that cleanup (which involved selling over 1000 items). I'm still getting lag as I said, though it might be slightly less than before—hard to tell.

 

Does this use item ID and count? Just curious.

 

Been there, got stuck.

 

Thank god for my pseudo-OCD to kick-in and say I need to clean my collection.