Folks who are playing Evocati right now are noticing some noticeable improvements to desync. What can you tell us about what's currently happening, why it's happening, how it's happening?
TL;DRThe desync fix trades position accuracy for better time synchronization, so ships may jitter a bit more; it may not be the complete fix, and the team urges cautious optimism pending wider testing.
So I talked to Dave Colson about this today, and he wanted to make sure that I was very, very clear on this. The issue is a desync in time, not in position. So basically, right now, the way it works is the more you move, the more it's wrong. And this was really done to smooth out the movement of the ships and making sure that things aren't just jittering all over the place. What we've done is we've exchanged that: there will be more time synchronization, but the ships might jitter a little bit more. And what will happen is we'll need to see how bad the tradeoff is and see if this will really stick or if we need to think of a different way of going. No matter what, this will always be a continued effort for us as long as it's an issue, and we feel it's an issue and you guys feel it's an issue. This might not be the complete fix, but it's more in the right direction. So it might be that in the future it's kind of a mix between the position and the time, so you do get a little jitter, but that's something that Dave and the team will be looking at and seeing how they can fix it even better. But right now, this is the thing that they want to try out and see if it feels pretty good. And then we go from there.
We've all been pretty excited on this end since we first started seeing it in Evocati. It's hard because I'm talking with Tyler, I'm talking with Jake. We want to run up to the top of the mountains and scream, hey, how awesome this is. But at the same time, we know what the nature of game development is, and it may be good today, but then something happens tomorrow.
Yeah, and I think there's so many other factors that come into play. Obviously, speed of your actual machine, speed of your internet connection, the server frame rate, so on and so forth. So once we get into wider PTU, then that to me is really where the proof is in the pudding, once we see larger numbers on this. But yeah, I do think it's a step in the right direction.
Cautious optimism is what I recommend at the moment.