10 For The Chairman: Episode 77

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFkTG9YungQ

Feb 29, 2016 @ 02:29

'''Q: What type of work is being done to increase the server population capacity? Should we expect to see 24 or 32 player instances in the near future?'''

The answer to that is ABSOLUTELY, I think, ah, if you've been watching some of the chatter on the recent, ah, PTU RELEASES, and, ah, you know, what's gonna be in 2.2... eh, it is, ah, gonna be 24 players, so we've been working, ah, ah, HARD on sort of optimizing areas so we can sort of scale more, I think I've mentioned before that the, you know, the biggest issue that we have is uhm, uh, just the overhead that the ships have because they're very complicated, they have multiple... items that have all this functionality, they need to talk to each other over the network... they're attached to SHIPS, a ship isn't just one entity you know, in the case of a HORNET it can be fifty or sixty, in the case of a BIGGER ship it's a lot more than... fifty or sixty, so they're very heavy, ah, sort of PROCESSING WISE and the SERVER in terms of just SIMULATION and also in... in network, um, sort of TRAFFIC... So, in general, that's, em, you know, more the limiting... FACTOR which... we've been WORKING ON, so we're... we're REFACTORING a lot of things to... make it much more, ah, SMART about when it has to UPDATE, ah, and all the other things and that sort of ties into the work that we've done in the past on the ZONE SYSTEM, we're doing sort of a, uh, whatever you wanna call it, a NETWORK LOD and an UPDATE LOD that sort of scopes depending on, you know, whether you can SEE THINGS, how FAR AWAY they are, whether they are ACTIVE, whether it's another PLAYER, whether it's relevant to YOU and... so hopefully all that stuff em, you know, helps... increase the load that we can do and we're doing things like we're... we're... you know, pushing more and more into MULTIPLE CORES, more... MULTI-THREADING to, you know, be able to do more... you know... PHYSICS PROCESSING at the same time as we're doing more sort of entity updating and simulation. So ehm you know, part of the benef... part of the result of that is moving to more players in, eh, CRUSADER, we'll continue and we're expecting to continue to sort of push that over time, eh, to get more and more and uh, you know we're actually working on... some ah, BACK END SERVER MESH TECH uhm, that will allow us to ah, sort of MESH A LOT MORE... players all in essentially what will be kind of sort of the same, ah, INSTANCE, uhm so but that's sort of ah, you know a LITTLE further along, but, eh, it's ahh... yeah, I think EXCITING so I think we'll be able to DELIVER probably more players than we were thinking originally... in concurrent areas... ah... so... when I think, actually there's a question about that so... I maybe talk a bit more about it then...

'''Q: In the new Jump Point there is mention of an update that will bring the ability to lower your wanted level by hacking a console. There will also be a need to defend it while that hack completes. What portions of FPS will need to be finalised and implemented for that update?'''

A: Well nothing really it's ah, that's all in 2.2... so I mean what we're doing I think I've mentioned this quite a few times is on the FPS side, we... have a whole bunch of ah... FEATURES and WEAPONS ah that, we're just sort of methodically going through and ENABLING and, you know, a lot of it is CONTENT related so getting the animations polished before we feel like they're ready for everyone to SEE or USE or... the same on the assets... and some of it is sort of making some of the MECHANICS sort of WORK as... uh... uh... MOVE a little better but, eh, you know, so we've got things like VAULTING, you know, like GOING VAULTING over objec... obstacles and stuff... and that, ah, isn't going to be in 2.2 but it'll be in... 2.3 for instance, ah, and so what we've been doing is just sort of knocking off sort of (mumble) COVER MECHANICS... ah... things like... PRONE or CROUCHING... eh, and, ah, you know, various things in 2.2 we have PHYSICALISED EVA which... ah, is actually REALLY COOL, you get a real sense of INERTIA, you have to be a bit more... WARY like in TIGHT AREAS because, you know, we're actually properly physically simulating so it's like you know, flying around a spaceship in a tight area, you don't really want to like, just bang up against things cos, it will sort of, you know, give you a bit of an IMPULSE, but... ah... when you get it down it's, I think... it's COOLER and more EXHILARATING and... we'll be adding more and more THINGS that will make that... COOLER, ahm, so... that's... just our plan, is we're just continually adding... more and more functionality to FPS... I mean our GOAL is the FPS, is going to be... very comparative to other FPSs out there that are... ahm... you know, have a whole bunch of ah, you know... COOL DETAIL and ACCURACY so, ah, you know we're not really aiming to be a simplified run and gun shooter, we're actually aiming to be much more sort of TACTICAL and CONSIDERED and... and... have that sort of reflect on a lot of the FPS mechanics so... there'll be... you know a lot of OPTIONS and kind of THINGS YOU CAN DO and STANCES and ACTIONS and... you know... ultimul... ultimately it'll... you know it'll have the equivalent of being able to do PARKOUR with SLIDING and VAULTING OVER STUFF and LEDGE GRABBING and all the rest of the stuff.

So that's all on the ROADMAP and we've... ah... you know... captured animations for all of it and we're slowly churning through the thousands of animations and hooking it up, making sure the animation blending works and all the various sort of like... THINGS you have to worry about... ah... to make it... ahm... WORK WELL. But I'm... I'm... I'm pretty confident that... when it's all said and done it'll be actually all pretty damn cool.