Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
To the secret fighting spot!

(I have a feeling this is going to be a great time to be a bug connoisseur 😁)

Genuinely interested to see how the testing zerg rush at the planetary poles / stable meeting points between servers plays out though.

Some preliminary stuff it'd be good to see right now would just be a side-by-side analysis of shots fired etc. IE do they correlate etc.

Would also be good to see what 'multicrew' behaviour is like at server transitions. (Berk's one attempt to date was inconclusive ;))

The cross-server combat really isn't supposed to be the benefit of 'SSM' though. And will probably just remain a novelty side product for the mean time. (If it even works reliably). It's a great opportunity for janky ship fights and cries of 'gaming changed forever!' though ;)

(So many questions for down the pipe though. Can they stabilise it on the 30k front and get the core game functions working again re missions / player lists etc etc. Will server tick benefits emerge conclusively. Will higher player densities be a possibilty, but hit client-side limitations at 'multi Idrises with interiors' scale etc. Tons of core stability and edge case mountain climbing to come...)

And bugs... delicious bugs :)
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
This is all kinda indicative of the issues this project has. In any sensible project the priorities for meshing would be:

  • System-wide friends & text chat - required
  • System-wide voice-chat - required
  • Reliable transitions between servers - required
  • Being able to fight on transitions - nice to have

And so we have:
  • System-wide friends & text chat ❌
  • System-wide voice-chat - ❌
  • Reliable transitions between servers ❌
  • Being able to fight on transitions ✅

They concentrate on the 'ohh' factor and ignore the 'game' part. And it wouldn't even have any 'ohh' factor if they'd put it in from the start like a sensible dev studio.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Factabulous said:
Being able to fight on transitions ✅
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We dont have that one either though (see above clips from Mike and that with the missile awesome zigzags) Or, better put, we have it but extremely broken so far. Thing is a sensible developer would not even try that.

Given all the desync etc issues we are seeing already a sensible developer would simply develop around those borders somehow to hide them or make them non accessible somehow just so to avoid having to design for edge cases that may never actually work properly anyways. Too much effort for little benefit. But CIG does not care that the end result be crap and the gameplay broken, all they want is to say "we have done this".
 
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Factabulous

Factabulous
Viajero said:
We dont have that one either though (see above clips from Mike and that with missile awesome zigzags) Or, better put, we have it but extremely broken so far. Thing is a sensible developer would not even try that.

Given all the desync etc issues we are seeing already a sensible developer would simply develop around those borders somehow to hide them or make them non accessible somehow just so to avoid having to design for edge cases. Too much effort for little benefit. But CIG does not care the end result is crap and the gameplay is broken, all they want is the right to say "we have done this".
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Yup - but you could see from the Citcon demo for meshing it was all about 'ohh, look at the transitions! Look at the edges!'. Any sensible dev would just not let people near. So here we are :)
 

Intrepid3D

Intrepid3D
Server Mesh testing...
Seeing and shooting across the server boundaries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n/going_from_one_server_to_another_is_super_smooth/?share_id=eM-96zBSY--FtOJBAZYtw&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

I went to the edge between two DGS (Digital Game Servers) . The Archimedes is on the DGS handling Microtech, the Constellation is on another DGS. I am flyling smoothly between them and can shoot at each other just like in the demo showed at citizencon. I havent seen a good demonstration yet, so i recorded this.

Maybe you noticed, that the Constellation DGS changed identifier in between cuts. Thats because the Constellation one crashed during recording and booted up a new one without kicking me :)

As far as I know this can only be demonstrated at the south and north poles of each planets physics grid.

So to replicate this, i had to:

  • Fly to OM-1 (Northpole)
  • face the ship directly towards the microtec marker
  • Fly backbards for 15 minutes, so you are 2300 km away from the microtec marker and exactly above microtecs north pole
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ECity

ECity
Why would they put all planets in one server, and space in the other? Trying to reduce the number of servers? I had expected each server to cover a continuous region.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Fun post run by one of the MMO devs knocking around the refunds sub:

Most MMOs with a seamless/stream-loaded world do this. WoW, BDO, and New World are examples. The only difference here is that those devs don’t publicly jerk themselves off about how the tech works.
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Yes they do. You can stand between Ashenvale and the Barrens and do combat just like this.
There are multiple places in BDO and New World where you can do the same. This is not new technology and I’m so annoyed that CIG has suckered people into thinking it is.
Phasing is a different kind of meshing that lets people transfer to different virtual machines (what laymen call “servers”) that are simulating the same geographic space in the game world. Wow uses it to handle players on quest steps that change the composition of the area in a different way.
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I don’t [have videos], but I’m currently working on a project that is building similar tech and I’ve had to run all over those damn games looking for instances where this occurs (at the suggestion of engineers on my team that have worked on games that do this stuff). We’ve been ing around with it for a couple hours a week and we’ll be looking at its implementation in SC when one of us gets access to it.
NW probably handles it the best. You can shoot an arrow “across servers” and it seamlessly crosses over while still being a physical projectile. We found the server edges by waiting for a war to happen and seeing where the game world places a wall that prevents you from crossing into the area (and we knew to look there because one of our devs worked on the game).
WoW is probably the jankiest but not in the gameplay sense. We were hucking fireballs at each other and you could target and get hits, but our positions sometimes weren’t consistent. Given the simplicity of WoW combat (tab target) it’s pretty non disruptive.
BDO handles it pretty well but their seams were the hardest to find and to be honest we’re not sure we’ve found them or if that game’s general positional jank just gets worse the further you are from some central location, but there is a point at which the badness peaks that we’ve been using as a reference for how they handle positional replication to multiple connected clients.
So New World is probably the most modern example of the tech being used in a game (next to SC). CIG’s innovation in this area has less to do with crossing between servers and more to do with how their vehicles and the players aboard them work when crossing over. Based on what I’ve learned on my current project, that is what they’re doing that adds complexity because the vehicle and its contents must transition with its passengers intact.
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StuartGT

StuartGT
Intrepid3D said:
Server Mesh testing...
Seeing and shooting across the server boundaries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n/going_from_one_server_to_another_is_super_smooth/?share_id=eM-96zBSY--FtOJBAZYtw&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
Click to expand...
StuartGT said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1blj83n/going_from_one_server_to_another_is_super_smooth/

Video shows interactions across servers, just like what was demo'd at citcon
Click to expand...
 

Intrepid3D

Intrepid3D
ECity said:
Why would they put all planets in one server, and space in the other? Trying to reduce the number of servers? I had expected each server to cover a continuous region.
Click to expand...

The first test was transitioning between Stanton to Pyro, that was a success, so they simply moved it up to the next level, i think it was one server per planet in the Stanton system, the server boundaries are in space, they joined them up at the north OM points so you knew where they were. they also had 400 players in the shard.

The server performance was very good, quite often locked to 30 FPS.

I stood at the space port at A18 for about 10 minutes watching each tram load from the Plaza brining 10 to 20 players, just a mass of people about, large queues forming at the ASOP's, nice to see....
 
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Intrepid3D

Intrepid3D
I should add they were also testing the replication layer crash recovery, again like in the citizencon demo, about an hour in they started shutting down servers where people were massing.

I don't know exactly what they were doing there but sometimes the server would only take 30 seconds to recover, sometimes it was a few minutes, sometimes it didn't revover at all and sometimes we got a 30K.

when they started doing this the server was down every 5 minutes, sometimes less, it was hell, but we stuck with it so they could gather data.
 
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