What are some of the benefits that we can draw a direct line from server meshing that we've experienced in the last year?

Well, if you walk back to the Star Citizen experience before 4.0, so before server meshing got introduced, a server crashing, that was the end of your session. You would lose your ship. You would lose your cargo. Everything would disappear. You'd have to reconnect, restart the client, start over. Anybody who's lived through the first years of development of the project knows how intense this was. So the first thing that server meshing brought us is server recovery. And so because of the fact that the replication is separated from the simulation, when a game server crashes, which is where most of the crash risk exists, the state of the replication is still good. So we just tell you, hey, we're getting another server. You stay there. And when it comes back, we can recover exactly where you were. You don't lose your ship. You don't lose your cargo. You don't lose your materials. And I think that's been a very, very big, it's kind of the unsung hero feature of server meshing. It helps with engagement, playing longer sessions, finishing missions. And so for me, that's one of the big, big pluses that was brought in with server meshing.

On top of that, and we did have some crash isolation, to be clear, in 3.24 and before, right? But what server meshing really brings also on top of that is crash isolation. So if a server is in charge of the Crusader area and he's the one running into issues, then only that area is affected. And so the player who's bounty hunting in Pyro or something like that, he's completely safe from his crash. And the perceived stability has increased a lot based on that. On top of all the work we've done to prevent servers from crashing in the first place, this whole setup has made the game a lot more stable in that sense.

So that's just the kind of meat and potatoes of what meshing has brought us, but the key bit it brought us also is much larger player counts. And so we used to be limited to 100 players per server, which had the whole universe to simulate. Now we've got a series of servers simulating the universe. And so we oscillate between caps of 600, 700, 800. We're still experimenting going higher with this; depending on multiple factors, that cap changes for the moment. But just the fact of having more players in the same shard means you can have an event where 200 people show up at one area. Surprisingly enough, we've also discovered things through this: sometimes game servers actually perform better with more players in one area than one server simulating the whole universe would, because he has less entities streamed in and now it's all about updating the components in that area. So we've seen certain events, because players always find a way to organize something that should be a problem, but there was a 400-player party in one of the bars in New Babbage, and we looked at the server performance through that, and it was actually very, very decent. So we expected the full meltdown, but it was actually good. And so that enables that experience, right? Obviously, there's a million other problems to solve for this to be a really good experience, but from a server meshing point of view, that was a big win. You've got a 500-player meetup coming, I just saw something. It's like that becomes a kind of common thing. And we love it because that's exactly what the tech is meant to enable.

And then obviously the two other things that meshing has brought us this year is two new solar systems. And so for years we've been stuck in Stanton, expanding the Stanton system, more POIs, more planets, more things. And now suddenly we were able to branch into Pyro, which everybody at CIG was really looking forward to. There was internal tension: when are we going to launch this thing? I've been working on this for a long time. And so that was really a relief to be able to get players to cross the jump gate. So the jump gate technology obviously comes with meshing. And so expanding into two systems in one year.

There's one more thing that server meshing brought us that's not negligible: a very substantial gain of performance on the game servers in general. So when 3.24 game servers were running, we had a very low bar for acceptance on FPS for game servers because we just had to deal with so much. Nowadays, server FPS is magnitudes higher. So that actually allowed some of the content we've already produced to actually shine because it was working properly. And so that's because servers have less to simulate. We can optimize their workload. We've also reduced, I mean, we've talked about this before, the size of the game servers because they just have to simulate one area. And so overall, meshing has improved server performance by big magnitudes.