Clive Johnson · Lead Network Programmer, Foundry 42

Well, I think the thing we need to do is diagnose exactly why those spikes are occurring. Without that information, you can't really tell what the optimisation is going to be.

Rob Johnson · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Foundry 42 Wilmslow

We need to find the problems and fix them. We've got plans in place to do that, though. There's been new telemetry systems added recently. It was talked about on Around the Verse by Bolte in Frankfurt. He's been putting stuff in that will do things like automatically capture performance telemetry when the frame rate dips below a certain threshold. So whether it's in our internal playtests, or potentially we have plans to take telemetry from backers playing the game on live as well. Basically, we should be able to get telemetry for these drops in performance, and then we can analyze it and say, it might be, oh, it's the game code, oh, it's the physics, oh, it's network. And so it's a bit like catching fish. We just need to cast the line out and hopefully, if there are any whoppers out there, we're just hoping to reel them in sooner rather than later, get them fixed up. But we've got much better systems in place for 3.1 to catch those things. And also those new telemetry frameworks, the idea with them as well is to constantly pull in data. So it's not just about the frame rate drops. It's about the baseline performance as well. So we should have much more accessible ways for your average engineer in the company to look at the performance of the game and go, these 10 functions are the slowest in the game. Oh, look, one of them is something that I know about. I can fix that. So it'll be a lot more transparent as to where the issues are, and then that should lead to them being fixed up a lot faster. We're kind of hopeful that the tools we're getting in place are much better. It is a gradual process. Some days you can get some good wins. Other days you're scratching around, and you feel like you go to places where you'd love to be able to optimize it, but it's much more tricky. Going off on a bit of a tangent there, but we've got plans to get these frame rate drops and get them sorted as soon as possible.