Repped, this needed to be said.
Saying something with a snarl does not make it true. I don't know why the mods don't come down on this poster (singular because there are certainly some sock-puppets agreeing with each other here) for trolling.
Patch Notes Update Update 1.1.05 incoming (19.02.15)
- Thread starter Edward Lewis
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Repped, this needed to be said.
Saying something with a snarl does not make it true. I don't know why the mods don't come down on this poster (singular because there are certainly some sock-puppets agreeing with each other here) for trolling.
I can only say what they fixed for me. Some explored systems were missing the "DETAILED SURFACE SCAN" note under certain bodies that I had actually done a detailed scan on, so the "first explorer" bonus/tagging didn't happen when selling (made a bug post here). After 1.1.05 those bodies were tagged correctly and I got the bonus/tag when I sold them.
The few systems I sold before noticing the bug didn't retroactively get the tag applied, though.
For example no intervention from outside to trigger colonization of a new star system as it was done for HIP101110.
IMO that has to be executed by the game engine based on evaluation of real game data ... not by a forum survey or community goal.
I also would expect progression on building the station at New Yembo to happen BETWEEN patches and/or server restarts.
But anyway ... may i suggest to stop this discussion now?
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I'll zip it right after this post, honest - but I have an interesting data point for it before I do so.
Eventually, I'm sure new station construction will be able to be automated. What FD are doing at the moment is learning to fly the contraption they have built and launched, with very small manual movements of the stick and pedals and lots of observation between. Here's an example:
During Kate Russell's fundraiser today, I asked why there wasn't a special Rare Commodity (Vesperian Nectar) at Vesper-M4 for the event (as I had misread the Galnet news item about the event). Kate was very clear; she had approached Frontier about this last week and there was not enough lead time to get this into the game, but more importantly, even adding a new Rare will have significant knock-on effects on the background sim, and they are not willing to simply poke one into the server and see what happens. If one commodity sold for 24 hours at one station can cause significant ripples in the bg sim, imagine what a kink a whole new station with zero stocks and effectively infinite demand could do to it. There's a good reason New Yembo station is right out on the edge of populated space...
I'm pretty sure that once FD understand how the system responds to the addition of new markets and are sure that they have the right feedback mechanisms that lead to more-or-less equilibrium across the economic simulation, they will feel comfortable about allowing the simulation to pick new systems to expand into.
MB said in the 1.1 beta forum (regarding Jaques' station move) that stations are currently fixed components of the galaxy model, so that explains the need to change their states (or position) during Galactic Downtime. But in any case, to do it live, you'd want construction traffic, transitional animations, and a shedload of sanity checking to make sure nobody's T9 gets trashed if they happen to be going through the slot as the Stage 1 Model is replaced by the Stage 2 model or the spin-up drives engage. That's a ton of work for a transition that happens what, once a week for 5 minutes and I'm sure everyone will agree FD are right to put their resources on other gaps.
So specific features then rather than blanket statements like this:
There is without question a background simulation going on that is capable of adding and changing things dynamically which makes that statement false. This is what I commented on. That there might be specific aspects of the gameworld that isn't handled the way you want it (at least not yet) is another question. I too want to see as much as possible automated based on the background sim, but I rather have them take it slowly when trying out new features like this so that a bug doesn't suddenly populate the entire galaxy with stations all over the place forcing them to start doing rollbacks of the entire gameworld.
I think we all want to see that and it's still to early to judge if this will or will not happen. Placing the station into position into the gameworld needed a update to the server for now, but seeing the station itself switch between models over time might still happen without reboots. We just don't know this yet and even if it can't be done at the moment I'm sure they are aiming to get that up and running eventually.
Sure, but then I'm not the one who brought it up in the first place either.
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I appreciate the advancement of the game dynamics and how it keeps people interested in playing the game, but what is completely putting me off playing is the graphic stutter, especially in a dog fight. Rather than expanding the game, shouldn't the focus be on making sure the game works as it should do. I have a High end system but the gameplay is diabolical and no matter how much I reduced the level of quality, that stutter is still there.
Actually, I don't complain about the Stations being added manually, as they are not part of the procedural generated content, so it does make sense.
Yet, I strongly disagree that I and others "lost their minds" about the regular server down times. Some people might have a wild guess how Frontier "built" their background simulation, yet these "critics" seem to be IT professionals, knowing how to design clustered high availability cloud application environments! And yes, a downtime for a multi node cluster (and trust me, they have more than one server) in the year 2014/2015 is a good indicator of a bad design and usually unnecessary if you do it right.
Or did you ever hear about "regular" downtimes for Google or Amazon, or ebay? Mind, we're not talking about unexpected maintenance, but solely every day regular downtimes...
Mostly people complain, that the "regular downtimes" regularly hit them in the middle of their playing time, as the world is round and "in the morning" in Europe is "in the late evening/night" in the US for example. So these customers have a daily interruption of their usual playing time!
The stations, or other specific objects in the Elite Universe may be added through an update for a long time, but if this happens once a month and they manage to do it in a 30 minutes downtime I guess people can live with that... troublesome are highly frequent every day downtimes, even if they are just 5-10 minutes, as they really break immersion, kill the fun or outright, mess up a highly valuable mission and leave you with stolen cargo and a fine...
i had to instant LOL here....but yeah as sad as it is ......you are right
now we know why the expansion is so slow.... the universe is so big.. think about realistic expansion on multiple systems..... they would have to hire a full team just to programm and patch the station changes....
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But they stopped doing daily downtime, right? And those sites you mentioned revenue, what, billions of dollars a year? And I was one of those people having their play time interrupted daily, and it was always back up in minutes.
Finally, EVE has daily downtime for a half hour. No one bats an eye. Elite server goes down for two minutes a day, and everyone loses their mind.
And, trust me, people were losing their mind. Anything FD does is heresy around here.
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The differene may be, that nobody cares if two server instances of google have a different version of the software running during deployment for several minutes as two clients almost never write the same data in thos examples. With elite, multiple players would influence the same data making out of sync servers with different version a real problem for the consistent galaxy.
It is just a guess, as no matter how good anyone is at software development, you can not make assumptions about a software system you do not know implementation details about.
I actually think the background simulation is one of the best pieces of coding in the game. When you consider the scale of the galaxy and the complexity involved it hangs together fairly well with the different minor factions gaining power, losing power, having wars, lockdowns, expansion and so on. Sure there's a lot of things it could do, building its own stations etc. It looks to me like they're being prepared with the current system of games-master creation. But consider that this would have to be done very slowly or every planet/moon would have several stations spinning round them - and you would also need a mechanic for stations to be closed down.
Overall I think the background sim one of the most foolish things to criticise FD about.
(Before you accuse me of being a partisan in your silly polarised war, please refer to my previous postings for a variety of critiques.)
Overall I think the background sim one of the most foolish things to criticise FD about.
(Before you accuse me of being a partisan in your silly polarised war, please refer to my previous postings for a variety of critiques.)
Is there any reason why today, Elite keeps DDOS'ing my connection?
Tracked the DDOS from the Elite Servers themselves. Please prevent these attacks, it spoils the game. thank you.
Tracked the DDOS from the Elite Servers themselves. Please prevent these attacks, it spoils the game. thank you.
Yes, they stopped that, it seems, and I was simply explaining why daily downtimes at the same time of the day are bad for some people. No wonder they did go haywire...
The technical issue is not about millions of invest, but about design and planning. The big ones were simply an example.
The requirement of an uninterrupted service is standard these days. It is not dependent on the company size, nor extremely "expensive" (in fact you save costs). What you would need is simply enough ressources to have a single node replaced with a spare during maintenance of each server and move on to the next (usually you use virtualized servers anyway). Actually it is common to setup the "new patch version" on the spare, let sessions migrate to the new server from one "old" node, delete the "old" server and clone a new one... rinse and repeat. only the management database / session broker needs to trackthe connected clients and sessions. (Databases use methods of high availability since the 90ies, so that shouldn't be too diffcult to operate).
This is somewhat simplified, and there are other methods available depending on the server OS for example, but in general it is no rocket science.
It is not so much about heresy, as about people from Frontier, were "bragging" how professional and experienced they are in the business. I give it to them, it is a complex project and not easy to build, but they had an advantage most companies or providers don't have: they could plan, design and build everything to their own ideas. No stakeholders, BUs or customers telling them which application, database, or third party middleware to integrate.
So, sorry I sound a bit harsh, I wonder why they didn't take an approach that does not require downtimes, to update or add something. Just my oppinion and you may be happy with it. I'm just pretty certain it should not be necessary...
,,,and by the way, what is EVE???
As I explained above, I don't make assumptions about the software, I talk about the underlying infrastructure standards in a datacenter / cloud service of the 21st century.
Let me explain that, if you want a Taxi service to bring people from A to B without "downtimes", all you need is at least one operational Taxi more than rides required at all times... no need to know what car model they are, if they are automatic or shift gear, etc.
With today's virtualization technologies unlike Taxis you can get a new virtual server node cloned and running in minutes.
A good high availability design makes sure you can simply add or replace an instance without impact and have a spare (or multiple spares) available at all times. Before you shut down an instance simply have all players moved to a spare, prevent new players from entering the server flagged for maintenance and then shut it down/replace it with the new version. It's usually faster to clone a new server, than to upgrade/install it, yet there are some aspects where unique IDs, certificates etc. are involved, so you may need to upgrade. To my experience, still no need to shut down all servers at once... unless you have a basic design flaw.
By the way the basic design concept for this High Avalability approach is from the late 90ies...
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Influence of minor faction in a system seems to be impossible to change.
In some earlier patch, you changed the amount of missions in a system. The factions that do not have a station, there seems to be no mission offered either. Now there are also places that offer missions very rarely. I did not do universal study of this, so I am not saying that there could not be a place that actually offers. But at least I have not seen one.
In some earlier patch, you changed the amount of missions in a system. The factions that do not have a station, there seems to be no mission offered either. Now there are also places that offer missions very rarely. I did not do universal study of this, so I am not saying that there could not be a place that actually offers. But at least I have not seen one.
Yeah and if a CMDR moves into your LOF you still get instabounty and the system security focuses on you, with the 350 CR bounty instead of the 20,000 CR bounty pirate you're actually trying to shoot down...
Dear, F.D, again you never cease to amaze me.
THANK YOU, I am pretty sure you may not reply to all ticket submissions with regards to bugs and such but this proves to me you are definitely listening. I am very grateful!
I wish all game companies would have such quality service such as this. But most of them are just talk and no do.
You have my full support, now and always!
Thank you for such great game support and high consumer satisfaction!
THANK YOU, I am pretty sure you may not reply to all ticket submissions with regards to bugs and such but this proves to me you are definitely listening. I am very grateful!
I wish all game companies would have such quality service such as this. But most of them are just talk and no do.
You have my full support, now and always!
Thank you for such great game support and high consumer satisfaction!
mine is still open aswell. but then again, as i understand it, the support department is somewhat under staffed atm. so not a big suprise it takes a while for then to respond.
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