Looking ahead to the new year.
For 2020 along with the regular updates I completed three big refactors that had been on the to-do list for a long time: foliage streaming, network transport layers, and support for uGUI. This has me feeling optimistic (aside from Unity frustrations...) for refactoring in 2021 with one particular goal in mind: eliminating multiplayer "lag lines".
Currently in multiplayer the game has awful lag spikes / hitches / stutters when loading large bases on the client. A lot of players refer to this as "lag lines" because there is no hysteresis - walking back and forth across a grid cell boundary repeatedly destroys and reloads bases.
The core problem is that all barricades and structures in a region are synced in a single frame. The server has to send a lot of data all at once, and the client stalls the game thread to process it and instantiate all of the objects. This is currently necessary becaus...
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