Is this related to the ship cleanup or lack thereof?

That's one of the things that we're looking at, how aggressive or not the ship cleanup is actually happening. That's one of the things we're looking at, yes.

Because you can watch a Twitch stream or look at an Issue Council report and you'll see dozens and dozens, I feel like it's even more, of bricked ships everywhere, with the insurance changes bricking these ships. Is this viably part of what it is?

In part, yeah. That for sure doesn't help, because the more entities are replicated, the more the server needs to do every frame, and so that contributes to this. So, yes.

You can usually find it when you look at how servers are performing. It usually has a larger vehicle population, certainly.

A server that is performing great has a larger...?

No, a server not performing so great tends to have a slightly larger vehicle population or a very large active population. That can also happen. In general, it's just a lot of everything. We're quite a heavy game, entity-wise. We want to avoid getting to the sort of size that we were in Stanton before we went into meshing, right? Because that was consistently difficult to manage.

I know that there's been some changes related to how we perform entity cleanup. So unattended vehicle cleanup used to be a separate system that ran on its own. That's been merged into what we call the density manager, which is basically an engine functionality that will look at overpopulation in clusters of areas that designers obviously have control over. For example, we want to make sure the exit routes for hangars are cleaned up. And so these have active cleanup zones configured, right? That's designer controlled. Now the engine will then apply the logic on the volume, determine, oh, there's too many of X in this area, and will start popping stuff out, right? Basically going to do the cleanup. Now for ships, the unattended vehicle cleanup system used to be separate. Now it's been brought into the density manager, I think end of last year, something like this. So it's been a while. And this one tracks whether there's player passengers on a vehicle and will, based on a certain timer configuration, and the values are different depending on the areas, either stow the ship back into the originating inventory or destroy it, depending on if it's a player-owned ship or if it's an AI ship. It does look like maybe there's a misconfiguration in key areas that are leaving ships there. So we don't think the system is incorrectly functioning. We think it might be inaccurately configured in some areas. And so that would allow a very popular area to just accumulate ships like crazy. And so that's what we're looking at right now.