Hey Everyone!
Today we’re releasing one of the last major planned features for the networking stack: Spatial Physics Culling. What this means practically is that other players and the objects they interact with no longer simulate physics when far away to save performance. Until today, if you and your friend were standing at opposite ends of New Park City, you would still be simulating their player. That’s all of their bones, muscle forces, and resulting poses - which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering you won’t be interacting with them from that distance and most likely can’t even see them. Now with the new Spatial Physics Culling, we’re finally saving performance on those far away objects and players, and seamlessly transition them back to a simulated state when you approach them or begin interacting with them. All of this results in allowing Quest lobbies to scale further in terms of player and object counts, and you shouldn’t even notice a difference in synchronization quality!
Alongside this major networking improvement, we’re also shipping the final original map rework. Warehouse has been a long standing performance challenge on Quest due to its structure and design, so we had to take it back to the drawing board. This new iteration of Warehouse leverages the new Physics Culling to push objects counts further than ever before while maintaining its open battle-arena layout. It’s not the final iteration by any means and we expect to keep dialing in the layout based on your feedback, so please let us know what you think!
Finally, we’re also shipping an Empty World facelift to bring it more inline with the new graphical standards we’re setting with the reworked maps alongside some new props, and an assortment of bug fixes. I’d also like to mention that work on Map 3 (Labs) is now well underway and we can’t wait to show you what we’re cooking. Speaking of cooking, does anyone feel like the new Warehouse is getting a little uncomfortably warm? ;)
Be sure to check the roadmap to see what’s next: https://trello.com/b/EZ9qQMyu/nervbox-roadmap. If you have any feedback, feature requests, bug reports, or just want to chat with the community, be sure to join our discord: https://discord.gg/EkRXj9YxXD
Enjoy the update!
-Quantum Lion Labs
Here’s what’s changed and been added:
Networking Core:
- Added the new spatial physics culling system.
- Physics objects now sync with less intense forces, resulting in softer, smoother object sync.
- Roughly 4 frames of latency have been removed from the time it takes a synced object to reach its synced position. Objects will now reach their synced locations in a single frame.
- Object interpolation and extrapolation have been completely rewritten to perform better at lower send rates.
- All together these changes provide major improvements to object sync smoothness, bandwidth usage, and performance. They may introduce small edge case bugs so please submit a bug report (ideally with a video clip) to our Discord if you run into any issues or weirdness!
Player:
- Improved player sync, players will no longer jitter over time and should be more stable overall.
- Held objects now have improved collision detection
- Improved foot placement (no longer slightly floating off the ground).
- Fixed a hole in the shoes of the player.
- Fixed an inconsistency with the collision between held objects and players.
Maps:
- The warehouse has been rebuilt, it is now more open and should allow for more interesting gameplay.
- Empty World has received some visual adjustments and new ambience audio to improve the overall vibes.
- Added start/finish line to New Park City.
Props:
- Added a traffic cone.
- Added a pallet.
- Added a start/finish line gate.
- Updated barrel model.
Sandbox Gun:
- Fixed sandbox guns being able to be respawned when welded to.
- Fixed spawn menu closing when other players switch sandbox gun modes.
Weapons:
- Fixed magazines being able to be reused when welded to.
Audio:
- Spear now has multi-material sounds, metal
- Axe now has multi-material
- Collision sound consistency improvements
- Empty world now has background music.