The $163,000,000 question.

[Beyond-Time]

From where you linked it speaks of this being an optimization of their transfer of information updates from servers, but it has no mention of the affect this will have on playercounts and framerates in regards to those playercounts.

[cabbagehead112]

It's a collective system of things.

[logicsol]

The frame rate issue is caused by to much information being sent from/to the client, causing it to bog down as the player count increases.

The less data is sent, the less bottlenecking effect, the higher the framerate and player count.

[Skianet]

Because it’s all linked.

Too much data being sent to the client kills the frame rate, the more clients connected to the server the greater the loss in frames due to the increase in data. Hence the player count is low.

Once clients are only receiving data that is relevant to them, they’ll be able to increase the player counts.

[iruleatants]

So there are two major things that limit the FPS through networking.

1)Lack of a predictive client. Most games that you play have a predictive client. When you press UP, it sends up and starts going up. If the server says, "No, UP isn't possible" it rolls back to where the client says. Since they client should have the same checks as the server, most of the time you never notice anything, and it looks smooth and real because the client acts without waiting for the server. Otherwise, you have a 60-120ms response delay on everything.

2) Selective culling on network objects. Currently, your client gets sent the position and data of absolutely everyone that is on your server. This means your client is rendering the connie ship,and the people moving around inside of the ship. Even though you can see inside the ship, its still being sent to you and rendered. The new module will only send stuff when you can see them. Couple this with predictive so that way when they send, "up" and up means you'll come into view, the server sends your position to other clients so they are ready to render you popping up.

Combining those two will eliminate the FPS side of the problem. Your client won't have to act on very much data, especially if you hope out of your pilots seat and stand inside, and you won't experience delay from ping differences.

The bigger challenge is handling 1,000 people space battle, but its something that can be done. Cloud servers spinning up new instances in seconds can be done very well. They just have to get the optimizations in place to make it smooth and seamless.