[img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//28842908/cfa3d7c03a96ab81144ae122ef6dac7c3dae398d.gif[/img] Dear Stormworkers, Thank you for the response last week to the flares! We love what you have been making and how you have been using the new flares, and were blown away to see almost record concurrent users just from a minor update! We have been working very hard this year on revising some old areas of the game code, and making some fundamental changes. The biggest area of work as been multiplayer. [b]The New Multiplayer![/b] Many of you have raised concerns about your multiplayer experience. The way the system currently works is that all players run at the speed of the slowest player - to stay in sync. This has had the unfortunate effect that if your friend has a PC far below the minimum requirements, your multiplayer game will be slowed down to their speed. If a player connects or a large creation loads in, the game also slows down for a few moments while someone catches back up. We have reworked this system to remove these slow downs, and the results are a huge improvement. Players now run at their own speed, while the server is responsible for the physics of the vehicles, and no longer waits for clients who have slower PCs. This means all players now get the same vehicle simulation speed as the server, removing the vast majority of the lag. We have also reworked the physics system to perform better when players are more spread out, and the server has more islands and vehicles loaded. We are seeing improvements of 20-40% increase in simulation speed in these situations. [b]More Players![/b] These improvements have meant that servers can now handle many, many more players. We have tested 12 players together playing the new multiplayer. We experienced very little overhead and we think the max player count is probably much higher. Stormworks is still bandwidth intensive and the server host does need good internet. We will carry on testing! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//28842908/ea181fd2cdfeceb1d8fe7d1a34b78eab523a8a61.jpg[/img] [b]More Possibilities![/b] With smoother, faster multiplayer with more players, this is opening up a lot of possibilities for what can happen in Stormworks multiplayer games. Within the closed testing group, we have been playing cooperative, competitive, and role-play game modes, with many players coordinating helicopters and ground vehicles, to perform search operations. Playing together is a huge amount of fun, with multiplayer being much smoother and more stable. The new multiplayer also provides a great framework to better test your vehicles, and aligns well with our current focus of building more point, more challenges, and more feedback to your vehicles, and a great way to apply and test your vehicle designs. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//28842908/f736121748abcaee7c48fd7610e6c4e5776366f3.png[/img] We are really excited to share these new changes and are looking at when we will be able to do that. There is a bit more we want to work on, but we will get these improvements to you as soon as possible! A special thanks to all our wonderful testers who have provided so much help in improving the quality of this upcoming update. MrNJersey who is one of our testers, has made [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTT5X8K62Yg]a short video with some moments from testing[/url]. As previously announced, we continue our work on missions and world narrative, to expand what you can do in the game, as we build more big updates to Stormworks. Much love <3, The Stormworks Developers