What type of work is being done to increase the server population capacity? Should we expect to see 24 or 32 player instances in the near future?asked by SP3CTREnyc

The answer to that is absolutely and I think if you've been watching some of the chatter on the recent PTU and releases and what's going to be in 2.2 it is going to be 24 players. So we've been working hard on optimising the areas so we can scale I think I mentioned before, the biggest issue we have is just the overhead that the ships have because they're very complicated they have multiple items that have all this functionality, they need to talk to each other over the network, they're attached to ships. So a ship isn't just one entity, in the case of a Hornet it can be fifty or sixty in the case of a bigger ship it's a lot more than fifty or sixtySo they're very heavy processing wise in the server in terms of just simulation and network traffic. So in general that's more of the limiting factor which we've been working on. So we're refactoring a lot of things to make it much more smart about when it has to update, and all the other things. And that ties into the work we've done in the past on this other system. We've been doing a whatever you want to call it; a network LOD and an update LOD that scopes depending on whether you can see things, how far away they are, whether they're acting, whether it's another player, whether it's relevant to you.So hopefully all that stuff, helps increase the load that we can do and we're doing things, we're pushing more and more into multiple cores and multi-threading to be able to do more physics processing at the same time as we're doing more entity updates in the simulation. Part of the result of that is moving to more players in Crusader and we'll continue and we're expecting to continue to push that over time to get more and more.We're actually working on some backend server mesh tech that will allow us to mesh a lot more players, in essentially what would be kind of sort of the same instance. But that's a little further along but I think it's exciting so I think we'll be able to deliver probably more players than we were originally thinking in concurrent areas. I think actually there's a question later about that. We'll talk about it then!