What's happening with server meshing?

Okay, well, server meshing we're working really hard on. We have put together probably our biggest engineering strike team. So we have a whole bunch of the engine team that's working on it as well as the networking team, led by Clive. So on the engineering team we have Chris Bolte leading up server meshing work and Steve Humphries is also contributing a whole bunch to it. And we have a whole backend setup that we're doing here internally, but also some of the backend services and connections are all being engineered partly up in Montreal as well with Turbulent. And there's about 20 people, mostly engineers, working on server meshing. So it's probably our biggest overall technical initiative. It's super critical. I mean, we've talked about it before. It's the bit of tech that will allow us to open up the number of players, but also just help a lot with our performance issues that we have. Because when you play right now in the game, you play in the live build and you're running around Stanton, if everybody's in one location, it's a lot better than if people are spread all over the system, and typically what happens is as a server stays up for a longer amount of time, people spread out. You'll have people in Area 18 and ArcCorp, you'll have people in New Babbage and microTech, you'll have people in Lorville, you'll have people flying around in space, you'll have people at space stations. And so the longer the servers stay up, the more you've got different actors and different entities that are all coming around the star system. And as we build out the star system, more and more entities and objects get created. So like, we're going to have Orison coming out, and that's hundreds of thousands of new objects and entities that just come in with that. So if someone goes there, now all of a sudden, that's hundreds of thousands more entities and objects that the server has to simulate. So the key with server meshing is that this is allowing multiple servers to handle different areas inside a star system. And even later stages of it, multiple servers working together to handle even one area, an Orison or a New Babbage or something like that. And allowing players to seamlessly travel around and be passed under the control of different servers. So the authority passes from one server to another server as one goes. And that allows us to have a much larger amount of players in the same space, in the same instance. It's also incredibly critical for transitioning to new star systems. So if you go through a jump point and you go to Pyro, for instance, we need to transfer you from the server that was handling you in the Stanton system to the server that will handle you as you enter. And so a lot of the core features of server meshing we've been working on for quite a long time. So the authority transfer, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's already been built, and we're building out the backend database, what we call the entity graph, that is going to persist and remember the state of every single entity and object in the world. So if you stream out an area, you completely remember the state, where everything is, whether you dropped a Coke can in the middle of a forest on a planet. And that aspect of it opens up, obviously, the persistence we talked about, which is great, but is also a fundamental building block for the server meshing. So we've been really working hard on that. We're making really good progress on it. I don't promise any dates because it's by far the most technically challenging thing. I will say probably by the end of this year, we should hopefully have the proper persistence in there that we talk about, the proper global persistence, which is this streaming entity graph thing that I've just discussed, which is the new version of what was being called the iCache before, if people are getting confused about that. But yeah, we're working really hard on it. This year we're not doing a physical CitizenCon because it just felt a bit too early coming back from the pandemic, whether everyone could travel or not travel. I mean, even now, we're going to go to the UK next month and we're all vaccinated, but still it's going to be a pain and we've got to quarantine and do all this other stuff. So we'll probably do a physical CitizenCon the following year, but this year we're going to do a virtual one, which we didn't do last year just because we were just overwhelmed with everyone moving to work from home and everything. But this year we will do one, and one of the panels is going to be on server meshing, which will drill down much more into the technical setup and details. But I'm actually quite looking forward to Virtual CitizenCon, and I think everyone making the game loves to share what they're working on with everyone. So it's actually quite a morale boost for the teams. And it's nice when you do it in person because you get to meet people in person and you can see how much people really love and enjoy the work that everyone's working on. But the next best thing is to do a virtual one. So that will be later this year in October. And I'm looking forward to that and hopefully you guys will like it.