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Physics. How do we how do we get the server frame rate up? Is it just refining physics? Is it buying bigger servers or better servers and just increasing the cost of running the game to an unmanageable thing?

TL;DRServer meshing is expected to give the most immediate server frame-rate gain by reducing entities simulated per server, with metrics finding further optimizations, though crowded areas and cargo physics may still cause jitters.

Well, so so you're right. Like our our game servers do perform a lot of physics calculations and a lot of physics simulation. That's the nature of the game. Right. You know, thrusters, ship simulation. Like we we track so many types of geometries in the physics engine. It's it's it's crazy. Like we have a really great physics framework in the engine. For sure, like the the most immediate gain there is going to is server meshing for sure. Like we've seen in our play test significant frame rate increase across the board for areas because you have less physical entities. Right. In general, so that means less geometry, less allocations, less simulation. You know, think of the server frame rate as a as a bunch of phases. Right. And it's the engine is extremely well multi-threaded, meaning that we can do a lot of things in parallel. But the challenge there is always determining what we can do in parallel that doesn't have impact with other things. So what can we actually simulate that doesn't depend on anything else? And so that's true of entities. So when we do an entity pass or what we call an ECU update. So that's every frame. And it's true of physics. So and it's true of networking. So all these phases at some point need to wait at the end of a frame for everybody to be completed before. And so obviously this is all bound on entity count and also physical entity count. So server meshing is the from the top is going to reduce that count by a lot because you have way less areas to simulate. So less entities to simulate means, you know, that the overall wait time across the frame will be better. And so that's the first gain for sure. Right. And then we can control that granularity as our machine technology moves up. We can control the zones, the size of the zones that we want to simulate. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't have an area that's filled with something. And it's going to have a high, you know, either network or engine cost or physics time cost.

Oh, yeah, because you know, you know, when we increase the player counts to 800, all 800 are going to go and cram themselves into the same 890 jump.

Of course, of course. And so that's a bit why you're going to see some jitters, especially, you know, with cargo. We're putting a bit more on the gameplay side. We're putting a bit more of the physics on the spotlight because we're using them to move, you know, with tractor beams, moving boxes, things like that. And so, of course, we're looking at improvements. But the first one, well, metrics has actually already given us quite a bit of very interesting things to look at. And so that's, I'm very hopeful that our radar is talking about there is going to allow us to find even more optimizations there that we can do. There's always optimizations, guys, by the way, it's always a thing. But server meshing will definitely help quite a bit. We've seen that in the last test. Like, you know, even with the very large shards, servers were running on average much higher frame rate than our current game shards. So I'm really hopeful for those gains because that's going to be a game changer for the game. Like, obviously, performance for the game. You know, if we gain, you know, one millisecond on frame time, that's one millisecond directly to your gameplay. So for sure, like server optimization for Star Citizen is at the top of my mind when I synchronize with game teams.

Star Citizen Live›Q&A Tech Talk·
Published on this date.6 Sep 2024