Cloud Imperium Games of Star Citizen has published a recap of their Theaters of War AMA which took place on June 3.
The AMA featured Sean Tracy – Technical Director, Jonny Jacevicius – Senior FPS Systems Designer, Tom Solaru – Senior Producer, and Milan Pejcic – Director of Development Operations. The AMA covered off several topics ranging from changes from CitizenCon 2019 Evocati tests, to a ToW game where emphasis is on space combat, and more.
One of the more insightful – and perhaps gameplay relevant – questions directly addressed how the team plans on fixing the current desync problem. Sean Tracy replied,
“Sometimes lack of responsiveness for certain systems or actions can be conflated into desync issues. This is then further exacerbated by low frame rate! So sometimes what might seem like a desync isn’t and is instead a different issue (be it responsiveness or lag). Quite a few actual desyncs were addressed for ToW and are much easier to track and fix comparatively to the PU. For example the 250ms injected delay was completely reworked (approximately 50 same as most other games) and adjusted to serve ToW as the server runs at a solid 30Hz. Short answer desyncs are addressed as they are discovered but often times responsiveness and low frame rate are the bigger culprits.”
In fact, performance and fps was a topic which was touched on several times. Another question asked if framerates were improved in Theaters of War compared to Star Marine. Sean Tracy again provided a response,
“No. We have basically 3 SM maps in one + a planet and we include vehicles (ground and ships) so compared to the current SM maps it runs slower but honestly to be expected and with the changes we’ve talked about we are getting closer and closer to SM performance.”
You can read the full, and quite extensive, AMA recap here.
