I'm hopelessly behind on the thread (again) and unable to test until my new hardware comes later today anyway (hard to justify £300+ in upgrades, plus the cost of Horizons, just to play a single game, but I finally bit the bullet), but this makes perfect sense:
When you are in open or a group with other people in the instance, the matchmaking server does two things that help:
- It matches YOU with the best instance "owner".
- It sets the instance owner to the best possible candidate (sticky, only updates when "owner" leaves instance).
Depending on how FDev have done the networking code, there are two possible options for why this helps with the Barnacles. Either you now get the list of objects in the instance from the instance owner or there is a built-in check to make sure everyone in the instance has the same object list.
It would be enormously helpful to know if the people experiencing problems getting the barnacles to show in solo have a dodgy connection to the transaction server. Without snooping on my ethernet traffic, I don't know if FDev use a static server for these things or if it's a random Amazon EC2 instance. Anyone know?
Here's some fun for you: the other day myself, Kyp Shard and Clarion_Z all logged on to the Canonn PG.
Kyp and I were on a planet surface at a barnacle. I'd winged with Kyp first, who, at some point
switched instance while he was driving around in his buggeh with me. I then winged with Clarion who was on his way, and I'd sent another wing req to Kyp - which he never received.
As Clarion approached the planet, he could see targets in his HUD for both me and Kyp (who I couldn't see at all).
He landed, and we started exploring the Barnacle site together, after a few minutes I said 'shall we harvest the MAs' and he said 'they've already been harvested'. I stared at the pristine site in front of me thinking: 'he's mad'!
So I shot one of MA stalks, out popped an MA - and he said 'where did that come from!?' - to him, it looked like I'd just shot into thin air, because from his point of view, the stalk was gone. In fact, all the stalks had been broken from his POV!
To make matters even more strange - you'd think that meant Kyp's version of the same Barnacle would also have been destroyed right? Since Clarion had originally seen him too? Nope - Kyp's version of the Barnacle was also pristine. Clarion had somehow inherited a completely different version of the Barnacle while sharing the same instance as me.
So the state tracking for these things has some issues for sure; and that might also be affecting whether they show in certain environments in the first place.
Clarion and I shared the MAs from our little inception moment - and it's the strangest instancing bug I've ever seen!
), so I expect a fix SOON Tm.
