We obviously did some stuff for persistence in 3.8.2. So now what have we got for 3.9, and why? It's maybe a redundant question to ask what persistence does for us, but what is this?

I mean, I guess you can answer that question. I mean, we go to 3.9, the stuff that you've heard so far on 3.8.2.

Me, personally, I think it's a big step in the right direction. We can lose some in-game persistence, but we can't really lose people's earned UEC or their items they bought and the ship they bought in-game, right?

And hopefully we've cleaned up some of the initial glitches of it. I mean, of course, if there's an exploit and someone's figured out a way to get a couple billion credits, we reserve the right to either individually edit those people's accounts so we can just take the money or the items away from them.

Or apply a general cap.

Or just do a general cap, as Paul says, or even occasionally we may decide, well, we need to just reset the database and do a general wipe, which we're going to try not to do if possible, but you never know because we're constantly adding new structures. The next stage on the persistence, which Paul can probably talk about, is the iCache side of it, which is more fidelity in the persistence. So what we have right now is saying, well, these are the items you have, and we're storing those in a way that can survive the patches, but we're not necessarily storing every item. We need iCache for the foundational, that sort of micro persistence, to do the physical inventory, and that's a big thing. And the other thing that opens up, which is sort of the next stage, which is sort of bigger things, but it would be now because we can persist anything. You can be a player or an organization, you can go down onto a, like all those beautiful shots that people share of microTech and go, I'm going to set my homestead up here. Well, with that technology, that is what we need to be able to do there and that is our plan. So when that's online, we're working on the aspects that would include sort of what you would call base building. So you would go there, you'd have to bring in the right resources and sort of create your little homestead or your base. So organizations or players can create their own areas of interest and essentially will help sort of build out and populate the universe as much as we on the game design side. So as we get these things on, as we get closer to that, we get closer to this sort of completely dynamic universe that you can sort of go anywhere, leave things, build things, destroy things, pick things up. And I think when we get to that, it's going to be pretty amazing.

Exactly. And iCache is obviously one piece of the puzzle, which is our internal high-speed database to store all that data, because obviously that's a lot of data, right? Every single bottle can be persisted and restored. iCache is just one piece where server OCS is a big part of that too, right? So something needs to take the data and stream it in and stream it out and restore it properly. There's a lot of tech under the hood developed right now, which obviously people won't see, like all the features you talk about, they come eventually, people won't see them in 3.9 just yet, but we built a lot of the foundation. And like the server OCS on the server, for example, when we rolled it out in 3.8, which was a big win for us. I think people out there, they were like, oh, we expect it to be like better performance or whatever. But in reality, it is one giant building block to get to this full persistent universe. Right now, without other tech, which is not there yet, you don't really see the benefits yet. But for us internally, it's a real big milestone to get to exactly that vision where we can store every single object and we can stream that area out and we push all the changes the player did to that. We push that up into the database and then when someone else comes back to that area, we stream it all back and it comes back in the exact same state.

If you have the iCache and you have the server streaming, which we have, they work together. Those two are necessary for the server meshing. In the server meshing, because we can have tens, hundreds of servers all communicating with each other, we just need to be able to save out any arbitrary area with its full state, which means whatever items were there or not there or whatever, to some back end so that when we come in, we can stream it back in, whether we stream it out on this server or this server or this server, the state is the same between all of us. And then you also should get much more of the performance impact. So yes, like Paul says, while you don't see the front end feature yet, getting these things in are actually quite exciting for us technically because once they're in, we know, okay, now that enables this next stage. And once we get these several stages in, then all of a sudden all this great, sort of dynamic, tactile universe with state that you can go to with many, many players all together in the same areas becomes possible.

There's just so many layers of it. And we talked about it in the last Pillar Talk exactly, and it was all theoretical. But I did mention one other benefit during that last Pillar Talk that absolutely was in place. And Paul mentioned it, but the load times. Generally now, by default for a developer, it's about seven gigs when it loads up. It's so light in comparison to the 45 that it was.

Before, it was loading the entire universe. And now, as a developer, you usually have one server and one client, and I'm the only client. And I see a lot of benefits. The server starts immediately.

Big, big benefits behind the scenes for us.