Bit of an update on our UI issues for the sake of transparency. It's really frustrating not to be able to help people with issues, but specially people with crashes. Normally if there's a crash going on that can be reproduced then it's maximum priority and nothing else is worked on until that's fixed, but this is assuming it's in our control to do so.

Crash when loading maps/leaving games

There is a crash on Gameface happening around the time a game starts or ends. Gameface is the HTML engine we use for rendering the menu interface, made by Coherent. It happens more consistently for some users for w/e reason we haven't been able to surmise and it's most likely the crash you are experiencing. Supposedly they fixed this crash about a month ago but their update with that crash fix introduced a severe performance regression that slows the game too much, and this regression has been present in the 5 new versions released since, so we've been waiting until they fix that so we can update and are stuck on an older version with that crash. They told me yesterday that they think they may have finally found the performance issue and should be releasing a new version anytime soon that would take performance back to normal and then we should be able to update it and get rid of that crash. We have also long-term plans to reduce the dependency on Gameface and isolate the game a bit more from its instability (potentially get rid of it altogether, which would depend on how much progress we make with our current woes).

Look for a patch note soon saying that a crash has been fixed when starting a game. If that still happens afterwards please DM me on Discord, I'm always available for this sort of thing and if any crash that you can repro we can fix or we can locate and contact the corresponding 3rd party.

Stutters

While we are on the subject of UI issues, Gameface is also causing stutters while playing for some people. A while ago we did a big revamp to get rid of usage of Gameface on the HUD to reduce instability while in game (we created our own UI layout engine called snafu optimized for real-time in-game usage with our own scripting language) and we migrated about 90% of our HUD elements. This improved things massively, but there were unfortunately a few special things left that still used Gameface for one reason or another. We recently moved over the kill feed element and other informational elements. The crosshair and chat buffer are the last two things rendered with Gameface. Soon we'll have a pure Gameface-free experience while playing (except if you bring down the console or enable your chat prompt but you wouldn't mind a micro-stutter while typing most likely, but we'll probably migrate that eventually too) and we won't have to tick this HTML engine while playing and this should give people on lower end pcs a smoothness boost and also slightly reduce the FPS when CPU-bottlenecked. Like I said above regarding the crashes, for people experiencing stutters while playing, look for an update mentioning this, if they still happen after that point feel free to contact us on Discord.

Massive memory leaks

We had a serious memory leak in Gameface that we struggled with for a few months that we finally isolated to their video playback (for the different videos that we have on the UI). We recently implemented a workaround they suggested while they figure out how to plug the leak (some complex refactoring is required for them to do so). (Note that this is a leak that only happens if you use their product the way that we use it, by suspending/resuming views as needed for performance reasons, which most likely very few projects would do. I don't want to give the impression Gameface has these severe leaks with video playback always). Recently it came to our attention that this workaround doesn't do it for some users. We believe we may have found a more thorough workaround and we'll push this in a few hours. Again, if you still experience massive memory leaks after the next patch, please do let me know on Discord. This issue is easy to recognize, it starts leaking a lot of memory, about 10-20 MB a second, and eventually the game will be using more than 10GB.

About our UI engine going forward

Unfortunately there's not a lot of choice in this area. We have been talking to the author of Ultralig.ht (similar product), he's been very helpful and very forthcoming to special requests regarding the ability to completely free the whole UI engine while games are in progress (normally you would just let it run but we do care about those hundred-nanosecond-range workloads). But he needs to implement a few things before we can switch to their product (video support and live views, for the HUD editor). To devs reading this, I strongly recommend considering ultralig.ht for your project if it fits your requirements, the author is on Discord, very available and very understanding of performance/stability concerns. There are other solutions that we discarded for some reason or another (we used to use CEF for example, which we dropped), we do have some special requirements in order to keep things smooth. For the time being we are still trying to make it work with Gameface. Wouldn't be pointing fingers here if transparency wasn't very important for us, and we are way past the point with regards to this issue where I would cover for a partner, and the player-base is a more important partner. I'd like to give them kudos on one aspect, their support is great (the tech people that address the tickets and their customer reps). Unfortunately we just have these technical issues with their product, but it may easily fit your requirements. It seems lots of projects are very happy with them, and we do abuse it quite a bit after all.

I do say "DM me on Discord" quite a bit and it may get annoying, ideally things should just work and people shouldn't have to take the extra effort. But I'd like to stress how productive this usually is. I've had probably over a hundred troubleshooting conversations with people since the first alpha and I believe that as long as a player had a well defined issue that could be reproduced consistently, and the issue was on our end and not due to something in the player system or a 3rd party dependency, we've always been able to fix it eventually.