Hi everyone!

The trade and multiplayer update is progressing really well, and I’ve made a number of significant steps forward over the past week, mostly around optimizations and stability.

Initially, we had a lot of server lag as the world grew. Sapiens would stand around a lot waiting for CPU time, or rubber band, snapping back to previous positions over and over. There was also sometimes a lot of lag between when you queued things up, and when they actually displayed, making it difficult to build or queue orders.

BUT, all of these issues are now resolved! It involved a lot of work tracking down issues and figuring out how to fix them, but in summary I moved a few things over to new threads, and fixed some bugs in a few loops and queues, making sure the CPU is better utilized. It’s been quite transformative. As a bonus, these changes also significantly improve performance in single player too.

So what all of this means is that not only is multiplayer a nice smooth and stable experience now, but the game can support a huge amount more sapiens before performance will start to degrade. We have had 600 sapiens being simulated in fast forward without any real issue, and we should be able to get quite a lot higher too. I haven’t even got to actually optimizing the sapien AI yet, so there is plenty of room to improve it further from here.

If I can get it to play well with 5000 sapiens, that’s 50 players with 100 sapiens each. I don’t want to make any promises, but it does seem achievable. I guess we will soon find out!