What sorts of challenges has optimizing netcode for combat in true 3D space with six degrees of freedom presented? Are the issues presented by packet loss and high latency roughly comparable to a first-person shooter, or are you expecting this game to be more latency-dependent?asked by P. Kirkner

Obviously high latency affects any of this stuff, and with packet loss, we definitely will be going back and forth with a lot of data, because the ships are pretty heavy data-wise and have lots of moving parts, so that potentially could be an issue. But that's all the sort of stuff that we want to be working on and testing out, and that's the whole point of the Dogfighting Module, and also really why we would want to have the final back-end MMO, at least a rudimentary version of it, working for the dogfighting. There are advantages to the space sim part of Star Citizen or Squadron 42 in terms of multiplayer and netcode compared to an on-foot first-person shooter. Now, of course, we do have an on-foot first-person section, so that will have the same problems you have in a Call of Duty or something. But the problem with a first-person shooter is I can be here and I can step here and I can step here. So the movements of your avatar can be fairly random and not very easy to predict. Whereas in a ship you can't do that. You've got to turn. So essentially in the spaceship scenario, you can actually do a much better job of predicting where the player's ship is going to be.