Have there been any major improvements to server-side OCS?
TL;DRNo major player-facing server-side OCS improvements; the work has been on internal editing tools that let designers and artists open nested containers more easily and iterate faster.
No. And in fact, I talked to Rob Johnson, our lead programmer in the UK, about this, and not player facing. Now, there's been a lot of work done that's on basically how we edit and how we work on things. Think of it as you work on a file, you export it, and then now you have an OC. Now, a lot of times, let's say a space station is made up of multiple OCs, planets are made up of multiple OCs. What we've been doing is trying to allow the designers and the artists to go into a high-level OC, crack it open and then be able to edit and adjust things. And so it increases the workflow versus having to go: okay, I have my big OC that has everything, and then I go to one of those smaller OCs and open up a different editor window, and then basically just keep on stacking editor windows open until I find the one that I want. So this is a way for us to kind of crack things open and almost Russian doll it down to what we need to do to fix it. So we're working on things that increase our workflow and increase our iteration time.
Definitely. On ISC this week, we showcased the particle layer separation tool that was made for VFX. Oftentimes, it's just as important to be developing internal-facing tools to help us track these things down and isolate where the issues are, like with the Russian nesting doll thing you were talking about.
So equivalent: if something takes 20, 30 minutes to check on and see if you got it right, you can only do that so many times in a day. But obviously if we can get that down to a minute to check on it, then you're going to be able to get more iterations on it, make sure it's right and then basically move on to the next task. We want to tighten that loop as much as possible.