Hello all! Your friendly neighborhood Kite here.

We’re brewing up something really fantastic, and we’ll actually be able to tease it a little bit next week. Make sure you don’t miss it!

This week might be slightly more boring. I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the performance optimizations that we’re doing for the next alpha!

If you all remember, the previous alpha event was not optimized in any way, shape, or form. People with even pretty solid GPUs were reporting some pretty poor performance under certain circumstances.

While I’ve been working on new content for the game, my main man Birdm’n has been tasked with making sure the game runs better on lower end hardware.

More than that, we’ve also optimized the bandwidth usage of the game pretty significantly. The first weekend of Alpha 2 at the end of March was plagued by some pretty serious disconnect bugs, which we tracked down to be a result of sending too much data over the network.

Stuff that didn’t need to be synced got synced, and if there was any packet loss on this massive chunk of unnecessary data, the host would declare that this newly joined player has an outdated version of the game and got booted.

We were talking to some Unreal Engine folks and we determined that the problem wasn’t necessarily our code, but just the sheer amount of replicated data that could fix it. So Birdm’n and I found a way to reduce the amount of data sent to each new player joining a server by 80% or more.

On top of just the initial join sync, we’ve also improved the amount of networked data being sent by our physics objects by 50% or more, with no noticeable loss in quality.

This, in combination with our new dedicated server setup I outlined a few weeks ago, means for a more stable multiplayer game for next alpha.

SWEET!