Surprise, surprise, I can see it in your eyes....
Disappointed...but not surprised.
The trouble is....I don't think many backers understand how complicated CIG is making it.
Done properly, under competent management, NBC would have been part of the game engine right from the start. The developers would have had an idea of how the netcode was going to operate, they would have known how many players were going to be in an instance at any one time, the tools to create and build instances capable of supporting that numbers of players would be in place, the design and coding for network traffic would be known and more.
There is a good reason why you build games around engines and not engines around games. The former shows what you CAN do while the latter shows what you WANT to do...
And in any contest between the two, what the engine CAN do, what it CAN support will ALWAYS win.
Right now, Star Citizen has a form of netcode that is based on that originally found in CryEngine. Unfortunately, that netcode is totally inadequate for the MMO style game CIG wants to create.
But CIG haven't done what needs to be done. CIG haven't ripped out that old netcode and replaced it. Oh no.....they did something far, far worse.
They kept it.
You might not think this is a bad thing. After all, it allowed CIG to put up a tech demo capable of "supporting" about 50 players per instance.
I'll note ED has roughly the same player limit, with a peer to peer model and that alone should tell you how bad CIGs netcode is.
But...it is a bad thing. CIG have built their entire "game" around this netcode. BUT....they want to, need to replace it.
That tells me CIG has two sets of netcode.
Meaning either...
1. CIG have to replace the existing netcode with the new modules
Or
2. CIG have built the game with two netcodes in place, running side by side
Neither option is good. Both add to complexity and costs and will hamper development and both mean CIG is supporting two sets of netcode. The former just means that CIG will have to rework everything that touches the netcode (likely the entire game - and because this is only part of the netcode, they have to rework such systems each time) while the latter means that is already in place, but slowing development and adding extra complexity to the project.
Which....last year was it?....was the responsibility of a team of THREE netcode engineers. Three engineers to support and develop an existing netcode AND create a brand new netcode intended to replace it.
That NBC has been delayed yet again...if true....is far from surprising.
Unfortunately, it was the one thing in 3.2 that made 3.2 worthwhile.
Heck....if the only thing 3.x did was to put in place working netcode and get the server code in place, 3.x would have done its job.
Yes....such code is THAT important to the game. The game can get by without ships and guns and mining mechanics can wait....indeed, SHOULD wait. This, however, is a core piece of code that needed to be part of the engine on day one. And until the netcode is up and runnning, CIG are in the unenviable position of trying to create an MMO without knowing how many players the game can support.
Star Citizen can still be salvaged.....given enough time and money, anyway. Their development process...such as it is....won't make development impossible, but it will make it more complex, slower, more drawn out, more prone to bugs/glitches/errors and far far more expensive
Even without Chris Roberts famed micromanaging skills.
However.....that CIG still haven't put into play a simple distance calculator (ok...it is more complex than that) should tell you quite a bit about the state of their code.
As the super secret dev build that works doesn't appear to exist, I am still going to stand by my former recommendation.
Based upon personal knowledge and experience, taking into account evidence such as comments from CIGs own developers, having performed a (cursory) examination of various videos supplied to YT and other sites by other players (I ain't interested anymore) and taking into account supplementary information provided by CIGs backers....
This game is a dead game walking. There is no way the game promised can be delivered. I have no doubt CIG can supply A game but it won't be THE game.
Either CIG needs to fix the engine to support their vision, reduce their vision to one the engine can support or accept what would be an unacceptable level of bugs and glitches (but which SCs backers may plausibly accept as part of the games charm)
CIG, again in my opinion, has one feasible pathway open to it to create the game we all want to play.
To scrap every single line of code wriiten, and start again from scratch, with the FIRST and ONLY order of business being designing the game, followed by the creation of a 64bit engine capable of handling that game.
The alternative is to simply keep throwing money at it and hope that eventually everything will simply "evolve" into a semblence of a working game.
Now, I'll grant it is possible the engine may be in better shape than I gave it credit for. That CIGs devs might have over emphasised the problems for some reason. I don't think so, but it is a possibility.
Sadly, I suspect CIG will simply throw money at the project, more in the hope of getting a MVP released before the money is gone. I expect they'll be able to get a semblance of a game with enough band aid fixes in place to make it sorta playable.
And once they have an acceptable MVP in place, they're off the hook.
And right now I suspect getting the game to the MVP level and getting them off any legal hooks is the primary goal of 3.x.
