I don't think it is failing though. And people are applying criteria to ED that they wouldn't apply to any other MMO because of the false comparison with EVE's single shard game which has completely different networking criteria.
Instancing Like This Isn't Working
- Thread starter Dweezle
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I don't think it is failing though. And people are applying criteria to ED that they wouldn't apply to any other MMO because of the false comparison with EVE's single shard game which has completely different networking criteria.
I say what I've said many times before:
I've been playing since release, and I've been in Open the entire time.
I spend all my time these days hanging around near Sol, near lots of famous landmarks in the depths of Fed space... and I have still had a grand total of two conversations with other players (and those both took place in the Pleiades nebula), and played with/fought against a grand total of zero. That is not even remotely the experience of playing an MMO, by any definition.
There is nothing wrong on my end; when I'm not playing Elite, I'm playing Dark Souls 1 and 2, in which I can't go ten minutes without encountering another player... and that game has much more of a singleplayer focus, and yet far more complexity in its p2p usage and connection rules (requiring specific player states, locations, stats etc). Similarly, I've spent a lot of time playing Warframe, a p2p-driven coop shooter, with absolutely no connection issues.
Elite's multiplayer problems are multifaceted:
* there are clearly limitations and issues with the networking. Those few systems I've encountered with more than one other player in supercruise, grind to a halt; the framerate plummets, and everything rubber bands.
* The actual probability of me seeing so much as a single hollow contact seems far lower than it should be, even when we take into account the vastness of the galaxy; even in "core" systems, visible human traffic seems very, very low, which rather suggests that I may be missing potential connections.
* On this note, the ambitious scale of the galaxy is almost anathema to the p2p model of small-scale player interactions; populated systems are like grains of sand on a beach, and yet there is very little to differentiate between them in terms of content. As such, leaving aside specific "community events" and the like, there is nothing to cause players to gravitate towards certain areas, beyond the novelty of visiting [insert famous system from science fiction].
* Similarly, the current system of travel (the lack of jumpgates) means that the geography is unique to everyone, further splitting people apart - someone with a low-range drive will be traveling through systems that players with high-range drives will skip over entirely, without even noticing, essentially dividing the population by frameshift drive quality.
I've been playing since release, and I've been in Open the entire time.
I spend all my time these days hanging around near Sol, near lots of famous landmarks in the depths of Fed space... and I have still had a grand total of two conversations with other players (and those both took place in the Pleiades nebula), and played with/fought against a grand total of zero. That is not even remotely the experience of playing an MMO, by any definition.
There is nothing wrong on my end; when I'm not playing Elite, I'm playing Dark Souls 1 and 2, in which I can't go ten minutes without encountering another player... and that game has much more of a singleplayer focus, and yet far more complexity in its p2p usage and connection rules (requiring specific player states, locations, stats etc). Similarly, I've spent a lot of time playing Warframe, a p2p-driven coop shooter, with absolutely no connection issues.
Elite's multiplayer problems are multifaceted:
* there are clearly limitations and issues with the networking. Those few systems I've encountered with more than one other player in supercruise, grind to a halt; the framerate plummets, and everything rubber bands.
* The actual probability of me seeing so much as a single hollow contact seems far lower than it should be, even when we take into account the vastness of the galaxy; even in "core" systems, visible human traffic seems very, very low, which rather suggests that I may be missing potential connections.
* On this note, the ambitious scale of the galaxy is almost anathema to the p2p model of small-scale player interactions; populated systems are like grains of sand on a beach, and yet there is very little to differentiate between them in terms of content. As such, leaving aside specific "community events" and the like, there is nothing to cause players to gravitate towards certain areas, beyond the novelty of visiting [insert famous system from science fiction].
* Similarly, the current system of travel (the lack of jumpgates) means that the geography is unique to everyone, further splitting people apart - someone with a low-range drive will be traveling through systems that players with high-range drives will skip over entirely, without even noticing, essentially dividing the population by frameshift drive quality.
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Yip.
About the worst thing to create is a space shooter.
No walls or hills to hide player behind. Not much room for optimisation.
p2p has nothing to do with your lag directly.
The current "instancing" rules are much looser than they were in beta, which means you have a much greater change of seeing other players, but they might be from the other side of the world.
If they tighten it up again you will see less players, its a difficult balance for them to get right.
Allowing players to specify their "laggyness" might help.
You could indicate what ping of players you would accept. Everyone with a better ping to you than your minimum number (and you to their min number) could be instanced together.
Brakespear: Strange. I saw about 11 CMDRs in Diso today, and a fair number even around USZAA and en route to George Pantaztis. Maybe you do have some kind of network glitch then? Some of the nice rammers even chatted to me. Awww, the nice.
In general: If you play MMOs like driving game which require a full instance for a race, e.g. the amazing Forza Horizon 2, it spends about a minute setting everything up from traffic, skins etc. before the race event even is displayed. What Fdev have attempted is more ad hoc. I've chatted to dozens of CMDRs in Open, had some fun races for the slot (you know who you are!
) and really, really enjoyed it. The rammers and idiots have made the game a bit deeper for me, and honing your fleeing skills against a real-life psycho is great practice for NPCs.
In general: If you play MMOs like driving game which require a full instance for a race, e.g. the amazing Forza Horizon 2, it spends about a minute setting everything up from traffic, skins etc. before the race event even is displayed. What Fdev have attempted is more ad hoc. I've chatted to dozens of CMDRs in Open, had some fun races for the slot (you know who you are!
) and really, really enjoyed it. The rammers and idiots have made the game a bit deeper for me, and honing your fleeing skills against a real-life psycho is great practice for NPCs.
If you're hanging around the inhabited bubble then the core is about 25,000 ly away. It is there though and it is pretty massive. Sag A* is even super-massive.
I will have to counter claim that offline mode was canceled (one week before launch) purely for financial reasons. The Elite series has worked excellently without online capabilities before, and could easily do so again. Even with the P2P model.
A prime example is Dark Souls 2. Online and Offline P2P gaming at its finest.
Talk about timing. This indeed. FD could learn a thing or two from From Software.
Having an Offline mode isn't hard, it's just not very profitable... But let's not go off topic.
Fly safe.
With the core i mean the core of the populated area, not the other core
You get the idea. Even in popular places like Sol or Lave there is way less traffic than in an average MMO in a populated city.
Its actually possible to improve the network quality. But then you have to play with people only from your region (max ping 30-40, i see 50+ ping as too much for a real time combat game of any sort) and you should be matched only with people from your region that have the bandwith for your current instance. Right now i can grab someone from Canada and someone from Australia, invite them to my wing (i`m from Germany) and create a really laggy instance for anyone. With the pure server=client connection only people with high ping, packet loss and other issues like bad routing would suffer, not the whole instance. So they have to change it anyway.
I will have to counter claim that offline mode was canceled (one week before launch) purely for financial reasons. The Elite series has worked excellently without online capabilities before, and could easily do so again. Even with the P2P model.
A prime example is Dark Souls 2. Online and Offline P2P gaming at its finest.
Talk about timing. This indeed. FD could learn a thing or two from From Software.
Having an Offline mode isn't hard, it's just not very profitable... But let's not go off topic.
Fly safe.
You already did...
Any of you guys figure that, perhaps later on, P2P could be dropped in favor of a better solution ?
As far as i understand, P2P was chosen because it was the cheapest solution, or at least because that was a main factor.
It would seem that ED has so far exceeded expectations with regard to sales, and we still have the Mac release and (more importantly) console releases to come...and on top of that the expansions.
Is a scenario thinkable where FD decide, with the longterm economic future of the game possibly secured, to change the networking model ?
Would that even be technically possible ?
As far as i understand, P2P was chosen because it was the cheapest solution, or at least because that was a main factor.
It would seem that ED has so far exceeded expectations with regard to sales, and we still have the Mac release and (more importantly) console releases to come...and on top of that the expansions.
Is a scenario thinkable where FD decide, with the longterm economic future of the game possibly secured, to change the networking model ?
Would that even be technically possible ?
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Don't know how hard it would be to change the entire netcode. If it would be possible you would either need to pay monthly subscriptions or some rich people need to donate a bunch of servers.
Refine it yes, change it no. There's about a 0% chance of them ever going to a server based infrastructure. All your posts display an abnormal amount of ignorance to the amount of work it would take to change the games p2p nature at this point.
If they'd gone for Windows/XboxOne only, they could have moved to Xbox Live for almost zero cost, for example, but to have Mac and PS4 users, they need their own server model. The cheapest way to extend the model slightly would be to continue to use p2p as the core model for networking, but every player in every instance would ALSO connect to a p2p "ghost" on the FD servers. The ghost would be the arbiter, could monitor chat, ship speed, damage etc. It would be FAR less onerous than a full client/server model, as the server would merely be a listener, and with neat coding it could do everything from detecting cheats, removing/relocating very laggy players from instances and detect some types of "logging".
Is this the model Dark Souls uses, do you know?
Technically there's no reason not to, but it would involve rewriting some, and potentially quite a lot, of the code.
Also whilst all these sales are good for the game and encouraging for the future if paid expansions sell similarly well, they're still not going to pay the ongoing maintenance of all the server side hardware for a full on client-server model that is able to facilitate the kind of real time action that Elite entails on the scale of hundred or thousands of players in a system for very long at all. P2P is here to stay unless FD decide they can get away with moving to a subscription based game (in my case they can't...)
The P2P matchmaking works excellently for myself; meanwhile here's a vid of CMDRs fighting with CODE and it's working well for them too:
[video]https://youtu.be/d7HtYqM8ac4[/video]
Worth looking at your broadband routers and their UPNP connectivity support. Many CMDRs had problems during Beta & Gamma when FDev were still optimising their netcode.
[video]https://youtu.be/d7HtYqM8ac4[/video]
Worth looking at your broadband routers and their UPNP connectivity support. Many CMDRs had problems during Beta & Gamma when FDev were still optimising their netcode.
Because a majority of people on my friends list are explorers, when i log in sometimes, it looks like there are more people at the core that in civilized space