The effects of this could be seen when you had a save with a lot of things - every extra player would put a massive amount of extra load on the server, causing desync and failed connections. We started to push the limits of what HLAPI could cope with. However, as time went on and Stationeers grew beyond what we initially thought it would be, we found that the HLAPI became a bottleneck. Rebuilt Multiplayer from Scratch Stationeers was originally built using Unity’s High-Level Multiplayer API (HLAPI), a perfectly reasonable choice when the game was first made.
This involved us rebuilding the way we handle multiplayer from scratch, adding a very efficient batched rendering approach for graphics optimization, and a massive cleanup of how memory is managed. We are on the road to completing the biggest changes in the project since it began. This work will be a major milestone on our path towards Stationeers 1.0.
#Stationeers game engine update#
While we don’t have a game update today, we can share what we’ve been working on and the results. Once we started refactoring the multiplayer we realised there was more work than anticipated, but it also created the opportunity to tackle other key systems and go more in-depth than originally planned. This decision did not come lightly but we felt it was best investment for the long-term success of Stationeers. However, it meant we paused our monthly updates while we replaced some fundamental systems (such as networking). In October last year we did a strategic review, and identified key areas of technical debt that if we took the time to redo would lead to big gains. While we’ve been quiet for a while, this isn’t because we haven’t been working on Stationeers.
We’ve made some big decisions and big improvements which we believe set Stationeers up for a great year in 2022.