How long have some of the performance-increasing features and fixes been in development? Did we start optimizing with 3.0, or have we been working on these things for longer than just the 3.0 branch?
TL;DRNetwork optimization discussion began about three years earlier and has continued steadily since, with conversion of game code to the new network backend taking months because hundreds of code pieces must be changed and checked.
The first time we started discussing network optimization was the day I joined the company, about three years ago, and we've been working on it steadily ever since, trying to unravel the pieces bit by bit so that we can make these changes. We're getting there, aren't we?
Yeah. There's a lot of the work involved, say, for example, Clive putting in the new network backend and then game code taking Clive's API and using that in the game code to replace some of the older stuff that we originally took when we got the engine. So a lot of the time it can just take several months sometimes to convert over what may be literally hundreds of pieces of code that we've got to make sure that they still work, and make sure that they then use the new code, which can then be more optimal because Clive's done such a good job on it.