So, dynamic server meshing: tomorrow, next week, what have you got?

Well, I'm not going to advance the date, but I can tell you that there's multiple things that compose dynamic server meshing. Obviously, the team is working on those aspects right now. The key aspect that dynamic server meshing will bring is a kind of arbitrary subdivision, meaning that we could assign a server to anything that's a streaming group. So inside this big tree, you've seen the PES discussions where we show how the data is laid out into one big giant scene tree. Any of those nodes that are deemed a streaming group can actually have a server having authority over that entire area. And so DSM will definitely bring us the ability to kind of arbitrarily subdivide, where we're no longer tied to these territories or this territory map. That's the first big thing we're going to gain from dynamic server meshing. And we're working on that part at the moment, which is basically how we can move these streaming groups from one server to the other. How authority is transferred. Who's managing it? What component is taking care of that? So that's under development right now. There's also a lot of, I want to say, parallels or similarities between dynamic server meshing and instancing. And so we've talked about that we're working on instancing. That's also part of this work. We technically already have the mechanics of instancing in the game in the form of the instanced hangars, which basically allow you to have multiple stacked areas on top of each other. But you get to see only one, and only one of them is bound to your client and replicated to your client. Historically, if we go back to the 3.x days when we put this in, initially, the instancing was actually not working from the networking side. And so you would replicate all the hangars that were at that location, even though you couldn't see them, which was even worse. Now you actually get assigned the proper tag on your character. And so when you actually take the elevator, it's bringing you to an actual instance, which is basically yours. So the instance tech that we're building on top of that will basically leverage some of the concepts we're putting into dynamic server meshing, because we want to be able to distribute those instances across the mesh. And so right now, they're location-bound. But we want to not just have them location-bound, but have any of the servers take those off so that we can share the load. Again, optimizing the distribution of the simulation, of the computing workload that we have, across what players are doing. And so that when you enter an instance, we can guarantee a certain level of performance without needing to have a little dude at the back going like, oh, we need to change the territory map for this, right? And so we're actively working on all this stuff right now to bring us to the dynamic part of server meshing. And obviously, with that, even though this is not our focus right now, we are still planning to go to higher player counts, but this is totally not our priority right now. Our priority is really on getting the functionality and the computing workload properly distributed.