Update on Tech Issues

Hello! My name is Ismael, and I’m the Technical Director for Star Stable Online.

As some of you may know, certain players are experiencing technical issues on Windows and Android, including frequent crashes and low performance. I understand those are serious problems that break the experience for the affected users, and I’m here to explain what is happening and what we are currently doing about it.

To do this, I have to go back to the beginning of July. At that time, we detected a crash after some Android devices updated to Android 15. This fix had a drawback: the need to use a slower function. While we are still working on improvements for our graphical pipeline, the optimizations to balance this slow function were not in place, resulting in a negative impact on performance, especially on low-end Android devices and Windows devices using integrated graphics cards.

Our next focus was to improve this situation for the affected players. As we are working on improving our graphics pipeline anyway, this was already part of the upcoming planned work. We decided to prioritize it in order to address the current situation. This partially alleviated the problem for some devices, but I am aware that others are still affected by this issue, and more information will be provided later on this topic. Unfortunately, this caused other problems, such as glitches, freezes in the wardrobe, and freezes in random parts of the world.

Even if this seems to originate from the same source, it was actually a combination of different problems, some caused by the implementation and others that are more challenging to identify.

We were able to figure out that part of the glitches and the wardrobe freeze was caused by a bug in our implementation of that optimization. However, there are other graphical glitches and a current freeze related to the specific driver implementation of the integrated graphics card. What does this mean? This means that even if there is a standard on how the drivers of all graphics cards should implement OpenGL, there might be bugs or things that are not implemented directly. This makes things really hard for us, since those drivers are black boxes where we can’t see what is going on or why they run in an infinite loop, making the game freeze.

So now what? We have been working for several weeks to find a clear, reproducible setup to resolve these freezes and glitches. However, at the moment, we have only been able to reproduce the issue on one computer, with a specific setup, and still in a non-deterministic way. This is, as you understand, slowing us down in the process of solving this problem, but we are not stopping. We will continue working on it until we find the root cause and determine how to set our system to work with those faulty drivers.

For the last point, I want to discuss the performance issues affecting Android devices especially. Even if our current effort is focused on resolving the problems that cause the game to freeze, we will address those performance issues as soon as possible.

In the meantime, if you are a Windows user affected by these problems, I recommend checking that you have the latest drivers for your graphics card installed, as these can include fixes for bugs on their end.

Hopefully, I'll be back to you with good news soon!

Ismael Serrano
Technical Director