This juggling act of moving things in and out of memory has existed in video games for many years. What's the difference with Star Citizen? Why is this such a big thing for Star Citizen?
TL;DRMap streaming is more common in single-player games because most multiplayer games keep maps small enough to hold in memory, whereas Star Citizen's maps are vastly bigger so streaming must work online without stalls.
Well, map streaming is generally more common in single player games. A lot, not all, but a lot of multiplayer games will confine the maps to smaller sizes so that it can all fit in memory all at once. So once you've loaded in, all the data is resident on your client, no streaming's required, and that cuts down the chance of any stalls or any frame rate hits and makes for a smoother online experience. So the challenge is to do streaming during a multiplayer game and not have any stalls or performance hits. And it's also, as I say, about the scale that we're doing this on. Obviously, our maps are millions of times bigger than the maps of virtually any other game. So it's a question of scale and trying to do it while we're online as well.
So it's not that we're necessarily reinventing the wheel here, it's that we're adapting the wheel to a scale that's previously unheard of.
Yeah, we're probably one of the bigger games ever envisioned at this point. We've done quite a lot of stuff over the last couple of years where we've had snippets of gameplay, Star Marine, where it's been a small contained bubble of the game, and we're now going, right, it's now that, but it's in this big massive universe that's making everything bigger. And by going, well, if we only need to stream in this one bit where the FPS is happening, the performance should be the same as Star Marine, probably, on that point.