Hey everyone!
The team wanted to give a huge shoutout to all our Wave 1, 2 and Evocati testers for diving into our first-ever Static Server Meshing technical preview! It's been fantastic seeing you all engage with the static mesh for the very first time.
Your involvement has been invaluable. Not only have we been able to see the mesh in action with many real players, but your testing, boundary-pushing, and bug-spotting have been incredibly insightful. It's been awesome watching you all experiment and explore, discover server boundaries (ok we made this easy to find ) and play around to see how the mesh would affect your gameplay...even when things didn't quite go as planned.
Massive thanks to all of you who joined in. We know it's not always easy, especially with instability and server hiccups. Every server crash recovery, every transition from one server to another, and every play session provides us with the data we need to stabilize, mature, and improve the system.
As we gear up for larger game shards, our priority is not just scaling up but also ensuring greater stability and adjusting game features to properly support the mesh and authority transitions (quantum, missions, etc). We will need your help regularly in the coming weeks as we test fixes and even more mesh configurations.
We've got our work cut out for us, both on the tech side, and in shaping the game itself to truly leverage the mesh. But with your ongoing support and optimism, I've got no doubt we will achieve!
Thank you for your time; your passion propels us forward.
Onwards!
o7!
Bault / Benoit
What is meshing in this context?
Right now each PU server is responsible for running everything that's happening in the Stanton system - every single NPC, mission, vehicle and player interaction. Meshing changes this so various locations are run on different servers (can be one for each planet/landing zone/whatever) to spread out and lessen the stress on each server.
All those servers are connected via the "replication layer" which manages which entities are controlled by which server and keeps their status in case of server crash (and then recovery).
This also means that players on different servers can interact with each other as if they were on the same server.
In the future the plan is to replace static servers with dynamically spun ones that can take over parts of the load for specific part of game (possibly even for singular ship in case of capital ones) when needed.