One of the big issues that players talk about are PU framerates. There's been a lot of talk about network code refactoring, regional servers coming online with 2.6.1, number of player limitations etc, what's happening here?asked by Adrian Ip
TL;DRErin Roberts says Persistent Universe framerate is poor mainly because of unoptimised AI and loading too much at once, and the next big release's object containers should improve it significantly but not completely.
Regional servers doesn't tie into this so much and of course is about lag. If you look at Star Marine for example, frame rate is fine and there is no reason why we will not have the PU to that kind of frame rate. The reason is because in Star Marine, we only load in what we need.
In the PU there are several things going on. Some of the mission givers are obviously run by AI and that AI isn't optimised at all and a lot of what we're working through now is making stuff a lot faster in the AI.
Secondly, we're basically loading a huge amount into memory so there's no real streaming in. Lumberyard will stream textures but the reason we have these object containers, right now you can turn the object containers on or off, but when you're in the PU, you can be over here and your friend can be 100,000 miles away and some stuff which happens at one location is affecting the frame rate at the other. There is some extremely basic culling right now but we can do more in this space. We're not massively render bound right now, the PU is much more CPU bound and we have all these draw calls we're still drawing even though we don't need to.
The next big release improves things significantly because of the new object containers which turn stuff on and off, not just turn it off but everything else which is going on in there so people should see a dramatic improvement in performance, not necessarily the finished article, there are still other things to come but this should make things a lot better.