Can you please link to the schedule that shows this? Is this in the weekly update regular or the one that goes beyond 3.0?
You really have to dig through stuff, so sorry I don't have a short answer. I'm actually missing something, which is a specific quote from Erin Roberts about the networking. I'll post it if I can dig it out. Anyway here you go, enjoy
10 FTC Episode 77
Feb 29, 2016
Chris Roberts (excerpt)
"The biggest issue that we have is 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.
We're refactoring a lot of things to make it much more smart about when it has to update 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 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"
June 2016
Star Citizen 2.4 drops. FPS is worse than previous release. Networking is the problem, they need a new item system to reduce networking overhead and they need to rebuild the networking. So Chris addresses in the very next 10FTC:
10 FTC Episode 85
June 20 2016
Q: What is the biggest development challenge preventing preventing rudimentary versions of exploration, cargo, mining and economy mechanics being implemented into the PU?
(NOTE - focus on SQ42 had previously been given officially as the 'reason' for the delay in getting these mechanics into the PU)
Chris Roberts (excerpt)
"So you probably would have noticed that performance from 2.3 to 2.4 has degraded a little bit. And that has been an ongoing trend because we’ve been adding more things in: more AI; more things, so like if you go to Port Olisar you can buy items in the shops and you also have various pick up. So essentially the core of CryEngine was never built to simulate this many items and objects, and we’ve had a long term refactor that we’ve been working on, the Item 2.0 that keeps on getting mentioned is one of the core ones … part of it, but we’re basically refactoring the way the whole entity system updates."
"We’ve done a lot of top level changes on top of the CryNetwork but it’s just not going to be good enough handle systems this big and this much data going back and forth. So we’ve long had a full rewrite of everything in CryNetwork on the table. So the Engineering team on the overall project, across all the studios, have a good portion of it being what we call “ring fenced”. And so rather than spending a lot of time iterating, fixing issues or bugs on 2.4 or 2.4.1 or 2.5, we’ve been working towards getting everything in place for when we bring out the bigger system and procedural planets. Which
internally in our release schedule that will be 2.7 but I’m not giving you an exact date on that."
The community chatter reflected the new networking as being part of the 2.7 release. You can google this of course. The latest development update on anything networking related is the 'serialised variables' stuff from March this year, which I believe is actually part of Item 2.0 and not indicative of the networking overhaul they had been talking about.
Erin Roberts,
Mar 20 2017:
"The team is finishing off the serialized variable which will reduce network bandwidth for the PU"
Jumping back to Feb 2016, Chris Roberts said they were already working on the networking backend:
"We're actually working on BACK END SERVER MESH TECH that will allow us to mesh a lot more players all in essentially what will be kind of sort of the same instance. But that's sort of you know a little further along but I think it's exciting so I think we'll be able to deliver probably more players than we were thinking originally"
tl;dr
The networking is fundamental tech to the entire project, it was talked about as a known issue back in Feb 2016, a complete re-write of the networking was "on the table" in Jun 2016, engineering teams were 'ring-fenced' to do it. Chris says it's part of the bigger systems coming in 2.7, community reacts to news of new networking in 2.7, and nothing has appeared (that I know of) since then either in dev updates, studio reports or marketing videos.
If anyone can give a better account of what's going on with the networking, or show anywhere I am wrong please go ahead!
