Sanya Thomas Interview

Mistwolf from Classes of Camelot was able to take a tour of Mythic Entertainment and conduct an interview with Sanya herself. Here’s an interesting bit about the graphics problems that plague us all:

Mistwolf: “What steps are being taken to resolve the memory leak issue?”

Sanya: “Well, they fixed the system resource issue. I play on an underpowered system, and it used to be that I’d check my system performance before the game started, and it said 91% system resources free, and then 70% afterwards. Now it says 91% before and after, so that’s fixed.”

Mistwolf: “I think the problem the reader is referring to, is that after 6 hours of playing, you’ll just randomly get huge multi-colored polygons across the screen, and your system will crawl to a halt and eventually die.”

Sanya: “The Disco effect.”

Mistwolf: “Yeah.”

Sanya: “I don’t have the technical knowledge to really make sense of it, but I think it has to do with the video memory.”

Mistwolf: “Yes, we pretty much figured it had something to do with video memory management and garbage collection.”

Sanya: “Well, the programmers have fixed everything they know about, and continue to make things better each patch, but in the end there’s nothing we can really do about problems with people’s video cards. We can optimize our system as best we can – the thing is not everyone has the problem. We even have one guy who leaves his system running Camelot 24/7, he doesn’t even turn it off when he goes home, and he has no problems at all. I know it’s a real problem, but I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to fix the whole thing. It makes me sad because I have the same problem sometimes, but…”