Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay Director

Yeah, so I could take that one. Obviously the networking side of things is something that we're constantly looking to improve. This particular case was way back when, probably about five or six years ago. There was a piece of code that was entered in that essentially added a hard 250 milliseconds, well, actually, originally it was 500 milliseconds, onto your connection. And it didn't matter whether you had the best internet connection in the world. It was just whatever you had plus 500. And it was to do with the general smoothness of the locomotion, to make it all look nice and look correct. And obviously, as we've developed the tech, we reduced that. It was reduced, I think, a few years back to 250 milliseconds. And then last year, as part of some of the downstream work that we released, we made it variable. I think it was around 3.7, 3.8, something like that. And that was actually a really significant change, because it meant if you had a really good connection, this buffer was variable, as low as 40, 50 milliseconds. So it meant that we were competitive with other games out there. But obviously, if you had a poor connection, there's nothing we can do about that. But fundamentally, that fix got squashed in one of the patches that got released, and nobody noticed. So we were like, oh, what's going on? Why is this happening? We were spending all this time, and then we actually found out, and it was like, oh, hold on, something's gone wrong here. So this round of work is actually just re-enabling the work that got broken. I think there was a bug or something that caused it to revert back to this default 250 milliseconds. So in terms of that specific one, that's happened to me several times throughout my career, where somebody's gone, oh, hold on, this tick box, we've just done a release build, but we did it in debug. And you're like, oh, why is the game running at 10 frames a second? And it's like, oh no, I just didn't click it. So that's a huge positive. But that doesn't mean to say that we're anywhere close to being done. I sat down with the guys the other week. CR is obviously wanting us to push on it, and rightly so. We're making a massively multiplayer game, and the networking is an absolute key focus for us. So we have dedicated resources working on it every single patch. We might not release something every single patch, because networking is a bit of a dark art to get right, especially with all the other tech that's coming online in terms of server meshing and so on and so forth. So yes, we will definitely be seeing more improvements in the future. When those come, I can't promise. But hopefully we can find some easy wins that give us some big benefits.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Clive Johnson just broke out into a sweat.

Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay Director

It actually wasn't Clive. It was Gordon. So it was on the actor side. Whereas Clive covers the main networking, this was on the actor networking.