The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Zyll Goliat]

It's pure and utter rubbish. So no, it's NOT going to work. For one thing, he's not the one developing it; and thus has absolutely NO idea HOW it's even supposed to work.

I've built and/or integrated all kinds of multiplayer game tech, what he described is i) not the way to do it ii) simply cannot be done iii) if they could do it, then the cloud instance costs alone would be prohibitive

Note that "networking" didn't appear in ANY of the CitizenCon slides. So they're probably not even going to touch that in 2017. Unless they've been working on tweaking it for 2.6.

Sure Derek I notice that they avoid to talk about netcode&networking on Citizen Con and very quietly they mention that "soon"we will be able to play 4vs4 and 12Vs12 in AC and Star Marine which is almost no improvement from the vanilla CE netcode.....but here they are on new episode of Reverse the Verse and the man himself was explaining this magical new tech and how SC is going to be able to handle this"crazy"numbers of players per instance....So I don´t know I need it to ask.....that really sounds all great&perfect almost as a dream but kind of possible in the future then yet it was never done before.....well who knows....I wish that this goes"live"not just for the sake of SC but for the sake of all future gaming......

 

[VidarSnipes]

And before anyone says "open development", note that they were forced to release this because of the outcry over the show, and the fact that their funding has flatlined as a result.

I wouldn't call 200 thousand dollars per day for a week after a disappointing show a "flatline". And that's even before the anniversary sale.

 

[dsmart]

Sure Derek I notice that they avoid to talk about netcode&networking on Citizen Con and very quietly they mention that "soon"we will be able to play 4vs4 and 12Vs12 in AC and Star Marine which is almost no improvement from the vanilla CE netcode.....but here they are on new episode of Reverse the Verse and the man himself was explaining this magical new tech and how SC is going to be able to handle this"crazy"numbers of players per instance....So I don´t know I need it to ask.....that really sounds all great and kind of possible in the future then yet it was never done before.....well who knows....I wish that this goes"live"not just for the sake of SC but for the sake of all future gaming......

Well, I invite you to ask yourself if you've seen or heard anything thus far from this development that gives you any confidence that anything they say is true, let alone possible.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Well, I invite you to ask yourself if you've seen or heard anything thus far from this development that gives you any confidence that anything they say is true, let alone possible.

Hmmm...well....you are correct they are very close to the zero....never the less I do find this tech very intriguing and"plausible"and when I am saying this I do not mean in case of the SC....i mean globally...maybe we are on the verge of new tech and revolution in multiplayer gaming........

 

[Winterwalker]

I wouldn't call 200 thousand dollars per day for a week after a disappointing show a "flatline". And that's even before the anniversary sale.

So that's a quick million, easy. Wonder if that income will maintain that level (and for how long?). Be interesting to guess how much the demo cost and if it broke even by earning ~ 1 million. Wonder if there's a market for selling demos (for a living) !?

 

[dsmart]

I wouldn't call 200 thousand dollars per day for a week after a disappointing show a "flatline". And that's even before the anniversary sale.

True. But I'm speaking from historical metrics and trends. Most of us would love for our games to make 200K per day; based purely on dreams and promises.

 

[dsmart]

Beer over at Goon enclave SA, summarizes the video quite nicely. I excerpt here in a comment on my blog (not SA )

 

[Slopey]

Hey dudes,

Been hiding for the last week in Center Parcs - so, am I right in thinking that the only thing they showed in CitizenCON was the on-rails planet thing video????

Really??????

*sigh*.

I thought the Enders Game rip-off was poor. So now they've gone after Herbert's stuff?

 

[dsmart]

Hey dudes,

Been hiding for the last week in Center Parcs - so, am I right in thinking that the only thing they showed in CitizenCON was the on-rails planet thing video????

Really??????

*sigh*.

I thought the Enders Game rip-off was poor. So now they've gone after Herbert's stuff?

Yes. Really. Here is a synopsis of what you missed.

 

[dsmart]

Yeah... I did think it a bit ironic when you started that post with something like "I'll probably get into trouble for this and any infractions will be your fault!... "

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Hey - If there's any credit going for your ban - I want it!

OK, I've notified them that you are demanding credit for it.

 

[Backer42]

Sure Derek I notice that they avoid to talk about netcode&networking on Citizen Con and very quietly they mention that "soon"we will be able to play 4vs4 and 12Vs12 in AC and Star Marine which is almost no improvement from the vanilla CE netcode.....but here they are on new episode of Reverse the Verse and the man himself was explaining this magical new tech and how SC is going to be able to handle this"crazy"numbers of players per instance....So I don´t know I need it to ask.....that really sounds all great&perfect almost as a dream but kind of possible in the future then yet it was never done before.....well who knows....I wish that this goes"live"not just for the sake of SC but for the sake of all future gaming......

Today, the video game industry isn't really the place where technological breakthroughs happen. Improvements in video games can mostly be credited to the hardware industry making stuff possible. But hardware development has pretty much stalled compared to the previous decades, so they don't get those for free anymore.

Nevertheless even in the rare occurrence that some game developer makes some impressive breakthrough, I can assure you it is pretty much impossible, that he or she will be anywhere near Chris Roberts, when it happens. This project manager still stuck in the 1990s is pretty much the arch nemesis of innovation.

 

[Tippis]

b) they are not con, at least willingly (I am not that convinced about Chris himself, but I see him just sleasy); They however clearly lack solid management skill to make any of these games work. Artists and asset creators are awesome, their work is what SC keeps over water; But not being able to fit things together when putting things together....it happens, but it seems to be happening with CIG so much that it is clearly management issue;

Here's the thing, though. While Hanlon's razor is generally a sensible position to adopt — don't attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence — at some stage, you're going to have to ask at what point continued, almost wilful, incompetence transform into some kind if implicit malice. Doubly so when there is so much obvious actual competence involved, if perhaps not among the people who make the decisions. If what you're doing is not working, and you stupidly keep doing it and it still keeps not working, it eventually stops being just stupid and starts being almost spiteful to those who are trying to help you.

Beyond that, we've also arrived at the point where there's enough money in this, but no oversight and some very obvious and overt overspending on pointless frippery, that there's pretty much bound to be some outright siphoning of funds somewhere in the whole thing. The question mainly becomes one of where and how much…


Oh and another thing, as far as the whole cloud goes.

Remember, “the cloud” is just someone else's computer(s). There is no magic that will suddenly make it work differently or solve any kind of otherwise unsolvable problem. All it does is let you be imprecise with exactly how much processing you need at both an intermittent and a continuous basis, since the cluster of servers at your disposal can be added or subtracted from fairly dynamically.

 

[SuperG]

So that's a quick million, easy. Wonder if that income will maintain that level (and for how long?). Be interesting to guess how much the demo cost and if it broke even by earning ~ 1 million. Wonder if there's a market for selling demos (for a living) !?

A demo is often just a short game.
Often the beginning part.
Or limited amount of assets used.

But it often needs the full engine.
Demo are costly to produce often done after full release.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Remember, “the cloud” is just someone else's computer(s). There is no magic that will suddenly make it work differently or solve any kind of otherwise unsolvable problem. All it does is let you be imprecise with exactly how much processing you need at both an intermittent and a continuous basis, since the cluster of servers at your disposal can be added or subtracted from fairly dynamically.

Exactly this. The "cloud" has been around for a long, long time. They are simply server farms with a marketable name - and there is a shared/virtual element so multiple physical servers can become a more powerful "single" server. I've had people come up to me at a small business that didn't need more than 1 server for a file server and ask me how we can leverage the "cloud" and I said point blank, you can't. We already had off-site backup, and local file storage and they did nothing that required more than a laptop's worth of processing power.

 

[Marak]

OK, I've notified them that you are demanding credit for it.

Heh.. Cheers Derek, that was funny

Watching the last ATV episode, I saw what stress some of the Devs are under, losing sleep and lots of overtime. When it comes down to it, this is just a game and if work is affecting workers health - someone really needs to rethink the underlying working culture.

 

[ZeeWolf]

In that ATV video the guy says:

"it's not a tech demo, we're showing off what they system we built is going to support".

I'm actually not sure what a tech demo is if that isn't exactly what one is.

Call me old fashioned, but isn't a demo when you show a part of a product that your trying to sell? If your just showing the components of the technology your using to make the product, that's the perfect definition of a tech demo.

Unless anyone else can correct me on what a tech demo is, I'm baffled that they think it's something else.

Looked like a whole lot of hard work and a real shame that sort of crunch isn't being directed at the actual product directly rather than trying to appease citizencon, those guys looked exhausted.

From that video my overall feeling is we'll eventually see that SQ42 presentation, looks like it could be impressive, but to actually crunch a complete game? Can't see that happening for 2017, those guys were loosing "eight weeks" sleep trying to put that one level presentation directed at known hardware together, one linear pre-selected route of defined "game-play". I'm thinking they'll kill themselves trying to put a release out.

 

[Whipley]

OK guys, for the layman. How does Planetside 2 get so many players on a map at one time.

Oh to keep on topic. Go melt something.

As a former PS2 player of a few years, the correct answer is "not well."

When you get into the larger battles, several hundred players all fighting, then you get issues of infantry or vehicles not rendering or popping randomly into and out of existence. You get hitreg crap going on. We had a "RecordSmash" battle where the PS2 devs unlocked the player cap on a server so that we could get the Guinness record for the most players in an online battle. That was an absolute mess. In the main battle it was just people spamming grenades/rez grenades.

The main issue with PS2 was "clientside" where each player would have the instance on his machine, including the locations of other players and all weapons fired or movement made would be calculated from your computer and uploaded to the server, and then sent on to other players. So in a fight, from your perspective, you might make it behind cover but on an enemy's screen it still looks like you are in the open. So you get shot and killed even though there's no way a bullet could have hit you. For me this is the biggest issue with mmos like SC and PS2. There needs to be an excellent networking foundation that isn't cludged together (ahem, I love ED, but c'mon, really?? fix your network code!). In PS2s case it was even worse, because they released the game before it was fully optimized. So the mixture of lag, frame drops, warping and so on made a lot of people's first experiences in the game very poor. I think this has mostly doomed it to being a low-pop game when it could have been very good and more popular.

So, anyway, the whole network angle is the part that I am interested in the most. If SC or Dual Universe can get something working that minimizes "clientside" and makes for a mostly bug free mmo fps space experience, I will be amazed.

 

[FuriousMeow]

I'm going to say that networking is one of the most difficult things to build out. Things do have to be clientside, the amount of network traffic to make everything server side would be ridiculous plus you have people on a variety of networks ranging from 128Kb/s to 10+Mb/s. There isn't a best way to do it either. If everyone was on Google Fiber, then network base could be done like LAN style but we aren't so there will always be issues. Expecting a perfect solution is not going to happen, not with the current infrastructure. Good enough is what we get because the platform the networking is going over - the internet - is almost good enough.

 

[Dooguk]

As a former PS2 player of a few years, the correct answer is "not well."

When you get into the larger battles, several hundred players all fighting, then you get issues of infantry or vehicles not rendering or popping randomly into and out of existence. You get hitreg crap going on. We had a "RecordSmash" battle where the PS2 devs unlocked the player cap on a server so that we could get the Guinness record for the most players in an online battle. That was an absolute mess. In the main battle it was just people spamming grenades/rez grenades.

The main issue with PS2 was "clientside" where each player would have the instance on his machine, including the locations of other players and all weapons fired or movement made would be calculated from your computer and uploaded to the server, and then sent on to other players. So in a fight, from your perspective, you might make it behind cover but on an enemy's screen it still looks like you are in the open. So you get shot and killed even though there's no way a bullet could have hit you. For me this is the biggest issue with mmos like SC and PS2. There needs to be an excellent networking foundation that isn't cludged together (ahem, I love ED, but c'mon, really?? fix your network code!). In PS2s case it was even worse, because they released the game before it was fully optimized. So the mixture of lag, frame drops, warping and so on made a lot of people's first experiences in the game very poor. I think this has mostly doomed it to being a low-pop game when it could have been very good and more popular.

So, anyway, the whole network angle is the part that I am interested in the most. If SC or Dual Universe can get something working that minimizes "clientside" and makes for a mostly bug free mmo fps space experience, I will be amazed.

Thanks very much for the explanation. I have suffered that in Battlefield 3, where you think you are behind cover but still get shot. Think they fixed it eventually.
I did watch some of that Guinness world record on youtube and also watch Ross Scott (he of Freeman's Mind fame) play it once a month. I seem to get more enjoyment watching people play this stuff than doing it myself. Day Z is another example. Thanks again.

To stay on topic. Go melt all your ships.

 

[Iskariot]

In that ATV video the guy says:

"it's not a tech demo, we're showing off what they system we built is going to support".

I'm actually not sure what a tech demo is if that isn't exactly what one is.

Completely agree. That is what a techdemo is.
They are still building tech demos and they are viewing this as being "a big challenge" (in their own words).
They have difficulty getting the techdemo "to look good", "to make it work".. Again in their own words.

This techdemo is a separate entity that apparently has very little to do with the game itself, except that it shows what they would like to be able to do in the game but still can't.