Annoucing our next major focus: Significant performance improvements

Hello everyone!

Recently we held a two week long survey to help determine our next major development priority for Resonite. We were unsure whether to prioritize IK rework or Performance improvement first, as we received messages, comments and anecdotes about both. Our goal was to gather more solid data and let you, the community, be the deciding factor.

What's the next priority?

Based on the results from the survey, our next major development priority will be SIGNIFICANT PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS!

Survey Data

The support for performance was overwhelming. We have received 2579 responses in total.

For 72 % of users, performance is the hardest thing preventing them from enjoying Resonite, while IK is 12 %.

67 % of responses indicated that improving performance alone would make them play Resonite more, while 11 % would play more with IK being improved alone.

You can see more of the data on our Wiki here: https://wiki.resonite.com/May_2024_survey 
We also went over these results in our latest recap stream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg2TgK6wUb0&t=1010s

Next Steps

Following this, we started organizing performance related issues into a project board on our GitHub here: https://github.com/orgs/Yellow-Dog-Man/projects/29 

This is not an exhaustive list! In the first part, we'll be doing some research and benchmarking, to figure the best way forward. We'll keep you updated on the progress on our socials and in the ⁠🎥devlog channel and we'll release any incremental improvements when we can.

FAQ

• Does this mean work on IK is cancelled?

   - No. It just means we're not doing it right now, but we'll pick it up later

• Will all the work be performance only?

   - No. Performance will be our major focus - the biggest task we're currently working on, but we'll still make smaller updates, improvements and additions along the way.

• How will the performance improvements be measured?

   - Our primary goal is to increase the overall framerate and reduce stutters and lag spikes as much as possible. Our broad goal is to make Resonite feel better and smoother to use, rather than focus on any specific metric - that said we'll be using a range of tools to profile and benchmark as we work.

• How will performance be optimized?

  - We'll determine that based on the research and benchmarking. Currently based on past tests we are most strongly leaning towards switch to process based architecture and use of modern .NET runtime, which has much higher quality codegen, high performance features and much better garbage collector, but this is subject to change.

• Will there be test builds?

   - For major changes yes, we'll announce and run public testing.

• Why not just do both at same time?

   - Splitting our focus between two major tasks makes both of them take longer as a result. We get things done faster if we focus on one first, then the other.

• Where can I ask more questions?

   - Here: https://github.com/Yellow-Dog-Man/Resonite-Issues/discussions/2346 or at our office hours!

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Anyway, that is all for now! I'd like to thank you all for filling out the survey and helping us decide!

For everyone who would've preferred IK rework first, I know this decision is painful. There's no decision we could've made that would've made everyone happy, but I do hope that the performance improvement will make Resonite more enjoyable as well and make the wait for better IK easier.

And to everyone supporting us - thank you! Thanks to your support we remain independent and focused on community. Majority of you even indicates in the survey you'd support us regardless of what next priority we choose, which we appreciated a lot.

We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but thanks to you, we can continue to grow this platform together!