#56 - Feb. 28, 2013, 1:58 p.m.
Culling is absolutely a fixable problem, and as Habib mentioned in his MMORPG interview, we are planning to completely remove it from the game in march.
Why is it taking so long? Well, I think the best way I can describe how we’ve had to approach this problem is that it’s almost like changing a flat tire on a car that’s still moving. That’s a really rough analogy, but hopefully it helps illustrate just how difficult this would be in terms that are easier for everyone to understand.
Something like the way players render is extremely core to the engine and any change to that sort of thing could cause all kinds of other issues throughout the game. There are a lot of really complex technical problems that we needed to solve, then make sure that our changes don’t actually cause any of those odd side effects.
That being said, we’re confident that been able to solve those problems on the technical side. We still have a bit more testing to do, but we’re not expecting any major issues to pop up at this point, so we’re really looking forward to flipping that switch and getting rid of culling for good!
We’ll have a blog post coming up sometime in the next month to go into more details about the culling fixes and what you can expect.
