What is being done about desync issues?asked by Glith

Well, when we reviewed the questions, we saw a lot of questions related to desync. Recently, we have done some testing on our Tech Preview for some desync changes. This is kind of a result of the work that we've been doing in writing the desync post that I got coerced into writing. And so that is still ongoing. I know this is the underlying question. There were also some notes about this. And so we are about done with writing this desync post, which has a lot of information trying to explain where desync comes from. It's big. It's 45 pages.

It's big, but it's good. It's very good. A lot of detail from a lot of different angles.

And so one of the things with this is that we didn't want to just come out with some additional post or information without some level of action as well. And so we've been looking at improving some of the netsync elements. And so what we've been testing recently was a targeted change to how we simulate rigid body entities with the physics engine.

That went on Tech Preview. It was very well received.

Well, as a first drop, it was great. That's why we wanted to move it to Tech Preview rapidly, because we wanted to gauge the actual impact of this change, which seems to be positive. Now, there's a couple of fallouts from it that we're going to fix, but that's an example of how we start to look at more of the desync from different angles. Obviously, our post will go into details about all the sources. Because unfortunately, it's a bit like the flu: there's a symptom and then there's the cause. And so there's many causes for desync.

It's also an umbrella term, right?

Yes, correct. And so we'll talk about that in the deeper post. Plus, I'm hoping that some of these changes are going to yield good results, which I think this first Tech Preview at least showed us some promise of. We're going to do more of those targeted changes so that we can measure that and see the impact on players. That's really what we wanted to navigate: when we see improvements locally, we see improvements with our development setup, internal testing, there's nothing like bringing it to you guys to see if there is an actual effect when you're trying to do something with it, whether it's a Jenga tower or, in this case, since we're doing rigid bodies, that was really the test. And so that change was really targeted at how we synchronize these objects, and especially revisiting a decade-old system that's been in the engine forever. And so I'm happy with the first pass result. I think this is really promising. And then if that scheme does hold up, then we're going to roll it out to more elements in the game. Currently, for example, ships and vehicles are not targeted by that. There's also a bunch of different types of entities that are not targeted by that. So there's a lot more things to roll out there. But I think the approach is looking sound, so I'm happy about it. That's what's coming down the pipe: I think the desync post will answer a lot of questions, I'm hoping. And then we're going to do more Tech Previews for these tech changes.

I mean, it's really cool to see these changes coming in. It's really exciting. I think it's the start of some really, really great changes. So the team's done awesome on that.