Can you tell us a little about the plan for optimization? What's next on the list? What's the biggest challenge? How quickly do you think we'll be able to get the PU into shape?asked by Breebase1

Optimization is... We've just finished a full pass of all ships adding new level of detail meshes. You might see some ugly meshes out there. They switch a little too fast right now. That is in, so everything should LOD and be visible in game and be fairly optimal. Right now, there's further improvements we're going to make, which is material ID reduction and combining meshes at a distance so there's fewer meshes to draw. So we've done a lot of that already as well. The big thing is, again, the interior needs to be separate from the exterior in order to properly cull the entire thing out. Because what you have right now is these little joysticks. They're so dense. And then you're drawing it while you're still looking at the ship from the outside, because the joystick is interactive, and therefore, due to base CryEngine, we need to have it as part of the exterior. As soon as Item 2.0 [is in], then we can separate it, and then we'll have proper culling and a lot less to draw than we currently are.

Another big thing just to keep in mind with optimization in general is, while we're constantly making performance improvements, it's not really a one-shot solution to fix everything, especially while we're still building out all the game assets, because we can optimize for what we have now, but we're still adding more ships, we're going to be adding more landing sites, space stations, planets. Once planets, their surfaces and all the new objects that are associated with those go in, as you keep increasing that load, what you need to consider for optimization also keeps changing. So it's not something that we'll have a one-and-done solution for, but it's absolutely something that's worked on patch to patch.

And we're actually looking at having a section devoted to optimization in the 2.4 release post that we do. Every time we release a new patch, 2.3, 2.2, we do a big old post about what's involved and whatnot. And I know we've got some guys actually writing up a bit about the process of optimization. So no promises, but we're working on that, and hopefully that'll be in the post by the time 2.4 is ready to go live.