With 3.9, we're focusing now on quality of life with this release[. What does that mean]?
TL;DRQuality of life in 3.9 means removing player frustrations and improving build stability, with the build held longer before release if needed, plus reduced latency for FPS rewind so Star Marine feels snappier and the PU benefits a bit less.
Quality of life can mean a lot of things as far as the player is concerned. So from my standpoint, a big focus has been, and it's mandated from Chris and Erin, the player experience, the quality of life of playing the game. So there's no frustrations, there's no annoyances. They can do the things, they can play the way they want to play when they want to do it, basically. In an intuitive way. But I think it also goes down to a more technical level, which is sort of build stability.
We're definitely trying to have a stable build and try to at least be as stable as the previous build or even more stable. And we're willing to hold the build before it goes live for a little longer to get to that stage. So we'd rather not push it out and say, oh, we've made exactly this date, but it's crashing all the time.
There's always the balance between, obviously you can't spend too much time on it because that takes away development time. But it also needs to be enough time so people can actually enjoy the game and start playing the game.
Sometimes it sort of goes up and down a little bit because, for instance, server OCS, that actually was a massive fundamental change in the back end because parts of the universe just would not exist in the server anymore and they used to. And so we would see issues with that that we would never see before. And so I think when server OCS came in at the beginning, we took a little hit on the stability, but we've been fixing and moving those things on. In general, we're doing lots of little things. I think also, by the way, in this 3.9, we've reduced the latency, the rewind time for the FPS stuff. So Star Marine will be much better. It's going to be way snappier. And so will the PU.
And the PU, but the PU benefits a little, and I think, when did I talk about this last on ISC? I can't remember when, but the PU benefits a tiny bit less than Arena Commander because it's really good when the server performance is perfect, right?
30 frames a second on Arena Commander, great. Everything's great.
Once it gets a little cratery, to the fives or so, I guess it does still happen sometimes when the players get all spread out, but anyways. Yes, it's in there, and yes, there is an improvement, especially for a fresh server when it's running really fast.