Sean Tracy · Senior Director of Tools and Technology Content

Well, I guess this is kind of a performance question, really. It's a question of networking and performance overall. And it's a great question because this is the bread and butter to what the challenges to making this game always are and always have been. I do want to mention that it was recent. Duncan had actually sent me a streamer at one point that was beside himself with the frame rate that he had. Who was the streamer, Duncan? I can't remember.

Duncan Bunting · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Arena Commander feature team

Leric. He just got off from playing the PU, went to Star Marine, and he was like, "Why is the FPS so high?"

Sean Tracy · Senior Director of Tools and Technology Content

Right. And it was The Good Doctor, which is typically the heavier of all the maps anyways. But yeah, he was running at like 120 frames, 140. It's just a ridiculous frame rate in comparison to what a lot of people will report from the game. To answer the actual question, though, it's already improved. One of the big things that has actually changed was that we've been experimenting with these 144 hertz servers, just at a way, way faster update rate. There's been a couple other tests that Duncan's actually done just himself. Do you want to talk about some of those, the large-scale player tests?

Duncan Bunting · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Arena Commander feature team

Yeah, so we noticed that players were paying more attention to networking and looking at Star Marine for how the networking handles on that, because you'd see that clip, for example, of Leric, and the game is running really smooth and great, but then he encounters other players, and they're desyncing, they're jumping back and forth, they're doing all this weird network-related stuff, and that kind of caught our attention as well as the player posts about it. And we're like, what can we do to improve this? So I literally just jumped in to our servers because I noticed that our servers always run at their max FPS. I've never seen it drop below. So I was like, hmm, I wonder what we can do here.

Sean Tracy · Senior Director of Tools and Technology Content

The Arena Commander servers.

Duncan Bunting · Lead Gameplay Programmer, Arena Commander feature team

The Arena Commander and Star Marine servers. Anything I talk about is Arena Commander; that's all I know. But yeah, so I jumped in and I spawned 300 Vanduul. And the client obviously died, but the servers, totally fine. I think they were running at 60 FPS in the end after all 300 had spawned. Our servers in Arena Commander are really robust and that's led to some experimentation like Sean hinted at there. We're experimenting with 144 hertz servers now and seeing where we can go with that. There's a bunch of refactors associated with it. It's sadly not a case, as I was hoping, to just unlock that cap and see a performance increase. There's a couple of refactors which we need to do to accommodate that increase. But I'm hoping that we see some network improvements, because I think that's our last, well not last, but the major hurdle that we've got now in terms of Star Marine performance, and the game runs amazing. Like we were saying, 120 FPS is average now, but the network issues are glaring because of that.