Tag: gaming log

Observability: How to Boost Gaming Performance in 5 Ways

Posted on by eugene evdokimov

For a game to provide the best user experience, certain elements come into play. These factors can be hardware components in the user’s computer, like the CPU and GPU, operating system settings, or specific game settings. 

In fact, if there’s misalignment between these components and a game’s intensity, performance issues can crop up. The most common performance issues in gaming include frame rate drops, input lag, stuttering, rendering issues and network latency. 

In this article, we’ll look at the root causes of these gaming performance problems and how having a strong observability platform can help resolve them.

Gaming performance issues

1. Frame rate drops 

Frame rate drops occur when the frame rate of the game drops below an ideal level, usually below 30-60 frames per second (FPS). Low frame rate results in a choppy or jittery gameplay experience, making actions seem less responsive.

Frame rate drops can happen due to GPU limitations, CPU bottlenecks, or high resource demands from certain game parts. 

2. Input lag 

Input lag is the delay between when a user executes an input command and when the action occurs on the screen. A higher input lag makes gameplay less responsive.

This input lag comes from latency within different hardware components, such as the display, controller, and CPU/GPU processing time. 

3. Stuttering 

Stuttering is when you experience very brief yet noticeable drops in frame rate during gameplay. Stuttering results in inconsistent frame times that cause the graphics to freeze briefly or hitch during gaming.

This is often due to limited video memory, CPU bottlenecks, or streaming assets while running the game. 

4. Rendering issues

Sometimes complex scenes or levels fail to render properly, resulting in visual glitches, pop-ins, and missing textures. These are rendering issues, which usually happen due to GPU limitations and insufficient video memory. They can also stem from optimization issues within the game itself. 

5. Network latency

Network latency in online or multiplayer games is the delay between sending and receiving information online. Higher network latency reduces responsiveness, making actions seem out of sync and quick reactions difficult. Network latency depends on connection speeds, traffic, and the server infrastructure. 

Digging deeper into gaming performance issues 

All of the gaming performance issues mentioned above stem from common root causes. These include:

1. CPU bottlenecks

If you have a modern game, you’ll likely have a lot of game logic and physics simulations. These intensive operations can cause the CPU to be stretched to its capacity, resulting in performance issues.

For instance, AI characters, complex player animations, and realistic physics interactions can bottleneck the CPU, making smooth and lag-free gameplay difficult.

2. Memory constraints

Many games require a lot of memory for storing graphics assets, level and world data, and gameplay data—to name a few. Memory constraints and the resulting issues like memory leaks can reduce frame rates, increase hitches and stutters, and even cause game crashes.

3. Poor game optimization

Sometimes games are just poorly optimized, with unoptimized graphics rendering, AI, physics, or memory usage. Improving game optimization is an ongoing challenge for game developers.

4. Software bugs 

Performance issues are often caused by actual software bugs. For instance, memory leaks, infinite loops, and other bugs can cause the game to slow down or crash.

These issues can be resolved by identifying and fixing the game code bugs and releasing regular patches.

5. Graphic rendering constraints

Many games are graphically intensive, pushing the limits of GPUs and graphics cards. Using high-resolution textures, complex 3D models, advanced lighting and shadow effects, and similar elements can result in a slower graphics rendering process.

Consequently, the frame rates can drop, leading to a less smooth and enjoyable gaming experience.

How to boost gaming performance with observability

Observability tools provide quantitative and qualitative data that helps identify, debug and optimize performance issues. Here’s how observability can help resolve performance issues in gaming:

1. Optimized graphics rendering

Observability can improve graphics rendering in games by providing insights into your rendering systems’ performance. Logging and metrics can capture detailed frame rate data — average, minimum and maximum frame rates, percentage of frames below a threshold, and more.

This data will help you pinpoint trends in performance degradations and outliers. Additionally, tracing can help identify the specific code paths that are causing rendering issues, allowing your developers to optimize or fix them.

2. Improved memory management

Observability tools like Coralogix can help monitor memory usage patterns and provide metrics on memory usage. Detailed memory usage logging — current usage, allocation sizes, allocation counts — over time reveals memory leak patterns and areas of high consumption. 

3. Real-time issue detection

With observability, you can also get insight into the runtime behavior of your game code. Logs, traces, metrics, and crash reporting capture data on performance, errors, and other issues as they occur.

Through this data, your developers get the context to understand complex bugs, actively identify issues, and resolve problems that impact player experience. With better visibility into how the code is actually behaving in production, you can identify and fix issues you may have never discovered otherwise. Further, Coralogix’s Dynamic Alerts feature allows you to detect issues in real time by setting up dynamic thresholds and automatic alerts.

4. Optimized CPU usage

You can measure CPU usage in real-time and pinpoint hotspots and bottlenecks by applying a combination of metrics, traces, and logs. For instance, metrics monitor live CPU usage to reveal spikes and show which parts of the code consume the most resources.

Similarly, tracing the game requests will uncover where CPU optimizations would have the greatest impact and logs can indicate issues causing excess CPU load. Coralogix’s observability dashboard allows you to visualize all these CPU dependencies in one centralized dashboard.

5. Better game optimization

With observability tools, you can gain valuable insights into your game’s performance and optimize the player experience. For instance, with Coralogix’s DataMap, you can visualize the game’s overall health and identify areas for further optimization.

Boost game performance for improved user experience

Performance issues in games can be detrimental to user experience and the success of your game. However, with the help of observability, you can gain deeper insights into your game’s performance and identify and fix issues quickly. 

Observability enables your developers to monitor key metrics and detect anomalies, providing a holistic system view. Leverage observability tools like Coralogix and optimize your game app for a better user experience.

8 Tips for Better Logging in Games

Posted on by eugene evdokimov

Gaming apps are complex systems. They combine multi-function systems, like the game engine, to other resources such as server containers, proxies and CDNs in order to give users a real-time interactive experience. 

At the same time, managing cross-functional behavior also means that games could generate massive amounts of data, commonly known as logs. You’ll want to turn that data into useful information to help improve game performance.

This article will explore why effective log management in gaming apps is important and provide pro-tips for better logging in games.

Why is logging in games unique? 

Game data logs come from a large number of sources. First, the game engine generates logs on the game architecture. Game servers collect data across logins, in-game purchases, third-party integrations, and more.

Coralogix offers log management to boost overall performance, as observability platforms push the gaming industry into the next level. For example, logs generated from user-side interactions can help you spot in-game errors and identify user-specific bugs. That being said, logging in games can be tricky because game apps don’t operate like other apps, making them unique.

User behavior

Games are designed to provide an engaging and immersive experience that users can interact with for long periods. To improve the user experience, you can collect data on everything from location to device type, specification, through your game logging.

Game developers can gain valuable insights into user behaviors, preference, and technical challenges by logging and analyzing this type of data.

Complexity

Game apps have a lot of moving parts. Several functions need to integrate seamlessly to provide a smooth gaming experience for your users. You have to also monitor and collect data from all your game functions and integration layers to gain a complete picture of how your game works.

Latency

In gaming, high responsiveness and minimal latency are important for an easy and enjoyable experience. When there’s a noticeable delay between a user’s action and the app’s response, it can make the game virtually unplayable. The most common culprit behind latency issues is delayed server communications, thus making real-time monitoring of server interactions essential.

Third-party integrations

Games primarily make money through in-game purchases, which usually involves payment processing integrations that deal with sensitive user data. As a result, these logs need to be carefully handled.

Games might also have in-game ads for external products, which can impact gameplay. You’ll want to collect data on how your users interact with these ads as well.

Expert tips for logging in games 

1. Use a log-level system

Since games generate numerous logs, having a log-level system is essential. It provides a way of labeling encountered errors in order of severity.

Coralogix’s ML-powered alerting system can easily help your system distinguish the severity of errors and create appropriate alerts. In addition, the Dynamic Alerts feature helps you set up dynamic thresholds and detect anomalous behavior faster.

2. Establish a consistent logging format

Your game app is a complex system of different parts — servers, CDNs, the game engine, and more. Each of these parts generates its own data logs, formatted to its design specifications. Differences in the formatting of these logs can make it challenging to get a complete overview of your game app. 

Therefore, you need to establish a consistent formatting system for your logs. With Coralogix’s log monitoring, you can extract all your logs from multiple sources into a single location and convert them to a uniform format.

3. Collect contextual user gameplay data

User gameplay data like player levels can provide you information on gameplay errors that are encountered in-game. For example, if a player finds an error in the game, it could be due to a function not enabled for their game level. 

You can track these minute contextual data with Coralogix’s Log Aggregation Function. Coralogix clusters millions of logs into readable templates to help you extract useful insights for your needs.

4. Log key game events and functionality 

Major transition points like new levels usually have to load new resources and generate new interfaces. However, the time to load these screens can greatly impact gameplay. 

Similarly, the accuracy of information retained from previous levels is important. You’ll want to collect data when game functions, like saving gameplay progress, are triggered. If any failure occurs, parsing your real-time logs can help prevent the user from losing their game progress.

5. Include timestamps for logging in games 

Timestamps help you understand “when” an event — desired or undesirable — occurred in the game. Knowing the time separation between events can help you determine which game function might be responsible for the error. Further, logging response times can help you make data-backed decisions, refine game mechanics, and enhance the user game experience.

6. Avoid logging sensitive user data

Avoid collecting the wrong kind of data when logging in. You should avoid logging sensitive user data like card details and passwords. Coralogix’s auto-parsing feature can help you exclude these categories of data, allowing you to comply with industry regulations.

7. Log data from third-party integrations

Third-party integrations like payment processors deal with sensitive data, while integrations like ads can affect gameplay. You need to collect data on user interactions with these integrations and gauge their effectiveness. Coralogix helps you integrate data from any source into your own custom-built dashboard using our cross-vendor compatibility features.

8. Monitor the load time 

An essential game logging tip is to implement monitoring load times and startup routines. While players might be willing to wait longer than usual for a game to load, the faster your load times the better. You’ll need to monitor how long it takes your users to get access to their gameplay screen and improve wherever necessary.

The future of game logging

With immersive games like virtual reality games, the ability to log and render data values in real-time is invaluable. Invest in a log management solution for your organization. Your developers can effectively manage and analyze their game logs in the Coralogix platform,  ensuring a complete immersive gameplay environment. The future of gaming lies in data-driven designs; your data logs are the fuel for it.