Hi Pilots,
The last few weeks we have been busy adding support for Linux and improving the overall stability of the game.
We always wanted to support Linux, since we think that Linux users are still a very relevant user group and should be able to play this game. We did test our Linux build quite extensively, but there could be issues regarding Linux that wouldn't occur on a Windows environment, please report them on our bug report forum if you encounter any!
During playtesting we noticed some big issues for users with mediocre internet connections, hence we tried to improve the network performance of the game. For technical enthousiasts it might be interesting how we actually did that, otherwise simply skip the next alinea.
We first started using a network lag simulation tool which can easily simulate high latency situations or situations where a lot of packets are dropped. This enabled us to simulate clients that have mediocre internet connections without much trouble and easily see how far we could push it. In the end we managed to bring down our network use by about 50% by using a networking profiler to trace which communications used the most bandwidth. Afterwards we went further, since we noticed that in case of high packet loss situations some data was not send correctly between host and clients. In the current state we can easily deal with 5% packet loss in combination with a ping of about 200, although it is of course noticable during gameplay. The game starts to react slower and the position of your enemies is not completely up to date in those situations.
We also noticed that our controller support was not completely stable. We improved this and we now really have 100% controller support. If you still find issues regarding this, please let us know on our forums!
Kind regards and happy flying!
Jacob Kooijman
On behalf of the HyperReuts team