Have you guys started to work on optimizing any part of Squadron 42 yet, or are you still figuring out the best practices now to apply to Squadron 42 later?
TL;DRSquadron 42 shares the code base, so many optimizations (range, visibility, time-slicing, level-of-detail updates) already benefit it, though network optimizations only apply to Star Citizen and some are specific to single-player.
Well, the way we build the game, Star Citizen and Squadron 42, we're sharing the code base. So really a lot of the optimizations we're applying already will benefit Squadron 42. Anything that's maybe range-based optimizations, visibility-based optimizations, i.e. what can you turn off at range or when you can't see it. Also putting in systems to make it easier to time-slice updates. So you might only need to update certain objects once every second as opposed to 60 times a second, or in some cases you might only need to update things once every five minutes. Really, those kinds of systems that we're putting in will apply to both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. The goal that Chris wants is to move towards more systems that, what we call LOD updates, where LOD is level of detail. So the idea might be you can have an AI character loaded in memory very far away, but for the client, they don't need to run such a detailed update function for him in that situation as opposed to when they get closer. There will be certain optimizations that are specific to Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. For example, the network optimizations will just apply to Star Citizen. There'll likely be a bunch of stuff we can optimize in Squadron 42 that we maybe can't optimize in Star Citizen, because it's a single-player title. So yeah, we're thinking about it. We're getting optimizations in already that will benefit it. So it's in our minds, and we've got guys upstairs all working on it now. So when the performance gets not so good in certain areas up there, we know about it down here on the PU floor, and we're there trying to work with them and help improve things.