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The EPTU currently has issues with input delay, desync, lag, whatever you want to call it, performance issues. What's the deal there? What's causing it, and what are we doing to fix it?

TL;DRThe interaction lag appears tied to network throttling from the replication layer and server split, worsened when server performance dips; engineers made many small fixes and hope it's resolved, but only time will tell.

Richard TyrerSenior Game Director, Star Citizen and Squadron 42

Well, first off, we're evaluating all of the analytics that we get back. There's obviously the Issue Council reports that are very useful for us, that people go out of their way and spend their free time testing the game and working on the game for us and giving us the Issue Council reports that we take in. We also obviously have our own internal teams evaluating that. And the interaction lag itself seems to be linked to the network side of things, where the network is getting throttled, and it's essentially related to the RL and the server separation. So it's something that obviously we haven't experienced before in 3.22, but it's been very tricky to try and find out what is causing that problem. And one of the biggest things that we've seen that exacerbates that problem is when the server performance dips below a certain value; that's when it starts to back up. So there wasn't really any silver bullet. There never really is when it gets to things like performance. It's always death by a thousand cuts. So when we're looking at the interaction lag, we've had pretty much a lot of our top engineers from both the Core Technology Group and the gameplay side looking at performance improvements that we can do to basically mitigate the interaction lag as much as possible. And I think in the last EPTU or PTU that we went to previously, it was very minimal. Because obviously we catch all these reports; we have debugging in there that captures all of the data, and that debug actually creates performance problems for us because it slows down the performance. We don't get that debug in live. So we think we've got it, and we think we've done enough to make it so that we're not seeing it anymore in the PTU reports. There are obviously still certain bugs and things that might appear as interaction lag and are not interaction lag. And when you come to performance, it's never black and white, unless you find something like, oh, this ship is intercolliding with a wall and it's causing massive amounts of stalling. But the interaction lag was just one of those ones that was very difficult to track down. And fingers crossed, we think we have done that, but only time will tell.

Star Citizen Live›Q&A: Alpha 3.23 and Beyond·
Published on this date.3 May 2024