Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Tippis

Tippis
LittleAnt said:
The quantum is missing in this list. It's a big one and we haven't heard about it for a long time.
A more complete list of what have been done/wip.
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Too bad "quantum" is a bunch of technobabble junk with no clear benefit compared to doing it in a more streamlined and high-performance way.

And too bad tall they've been able to show off so far is the most laughably dumb developer tool ever, as if it that was the game rather than the unseen DB updates that it would actually generate.
 

LittleAnt

L
If you want detailled infos about the quantum system

It's only a backend system, nothing to really see from the playerside.
And I don't think this system is connected yet to the PU. It's of no use for 50 players and without server meshing.
 

Deleted member 257907

D
Ive watched about 10 minutes and seen likw 10 red flags. pre recorded footage, scripted user interaction, technobabble obfuscation, blatant lies say this can simulate millions of npcs "quanta" yet his developer tool has a slider setting at 1000 and it's in the middle so suggesting 2000 would be the maximum.
ugh
 

VR Mr Teatime

VR Mr Teatime
Agony_Aunt said:
Intent is a tricky one. Was Billy from Fyre festival a scammer? He was apparently trying to make it a good event.

Was Elizabeth from Theranos a scammer? She was apparently trying to make a product.

Neither was apparently capable of delivering on what they promised, but it didn't stop them trying.
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It might be worth playing back some history here and looking at "intent" from a development perspective.

Back in 2012/13 CryEngine was a fairly decent FPS engine that allowed linked levels, had a good SDK with decent enough tools, a great rendering engine and was being actively worked on and improved as new features were being added to DirectX e.g. tessellation in DX11 and POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping).
The levels you could produce with CryEngine were pretty large compared to most FPS engines (IDx, the COD versions of IDx, Unreal etc.), but it had major limitations, which a few days worth of serious investigation should uncover. Namely texture streaming going very funky away from the grid origin, plus positional rounding errors and ergo physics. Most of these were due to the 32bit coord system being used at the time.

It's also worth bearing in mind that a 32bit coord system doesn't give you a lot of room in the simulation arena, as the map area let's say for modern jet combat will have you detecting targets at say 60miles, using BVR weapons tactics (Beyond Visual Range) from detection down to visual range (<10 miles) and dogfighting from then on. The most you can stretch CryEngine to out of the box is about 20miles. Merging will happen very quickly in a box that size. Also if you want very high levels of detail you can "fool" the coord system by making everything oversized, but in scale with each other, but you shrink the world coord system even further by doing that (to say the same sort of size as the Arena Commander).

Now you could say a developer, who is unfamiliar with CryEngine and looking for an engine to develop a new game that has small arenas (<5mile cube), could and probably would come across the SDK, download it for free and without actually trying that hard, think "yeah this has all the shiny stuff gamers like and I can make a product with it". In fact if you look at the CryEngine development forums, it is littered with folks who do exactly that and some of the demos and creations look fantastic, but 99.9% don't end up as products.

If you were looking at said CryEngine as a flight or space sim developer then you might try and load in some terrain and try a few hacks to get a decent sized map, but ultimately you end up looking at coding a great deal i.e. you need a 64bit (double float) world coords plus all the dependant baggage in the rest of the engine that will have to be "fixed" as a result. What will be needed therefore is almost a new engine with retention of some areas like rendering, light and shading routines, POM etc. This is where I was personally when looking at a possible successor to a commercially and technically successful modern combat flight sim in 2012/13.

Here's the stinger though:

If you were say embedded or involved with CryTek/CryEngine at a corporate/professional development level during 2012/13, then you would either have to be a complete idiot or wilfully negligent in believing you could produce a large scale flight or space sim, without a ground up re-write of CryEngine.
A day's worth of due diligence with the SDK would easily give you a list of project workstreams that would need completion just to get a decent BVR to merge play arena going, let alone one where you want GTA meets Elite Dangerous meets Eve Online.

The sad thing is the folk who have invested $300million+ in this fantasy, have probably given enough funding to develop such an engine, provided they could sit on their impatience for a decade or so and have no playable demo or product. It appears however that rather than getting the engine and hence the product, they have invested in, they have instead had delivered one of the most successful "investment" generation schemes since Madoff's i.e. a large proportion of the $300million+ looks like it has been generating the $300million+ and not the actual product.

Full disclosure: I nearly kickstarted SC at the same time as I kickstarted Elite Dangerous and off of the back of videos back then by Jingles and Jester814. Then I learned it was based on CryEngine and backed immediately out of there, knowing that SC would need a new engine as complex as COBRA/Stellarforge or VU2 (the engine in the product I produced), both of which had/have been in development since the early 1990's and you could say arguably still don't realise their full potential, but are the best there is currently.
 
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Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
LittleAnt said:
If you want detailled infos about the quantum system

It's only a backend system, nothing to really see from the playerside.
And I don't think this system is connected yet to the PU. It's of no use for 50 players and without server meshing.
Click to expand...

As was just pointed out though, CIG did claim to have this all running on a box something like 6 years ago. They just didn't call it Quantum back then.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
LittleAnt said:
If you want detailled infos about the quantum system

It's only a backend system, nothing to really see from the playerside.
And I don't think this system is connected yet to the PU. It's of no use for 50 players and without server meshing.
Click to expand...
Agony_Aunt said:
As was just pointed out though, CIG did claim to have this all running on a box something like 6 years ago. They just didn't call it Quantum back then.
Click to expand...


Yep...

10 for the Chairman (August 2015)

(7:28) Materix, definition of awesome asks: How is the NPC population expected to function within the PU? Will all the NPC’s (90% of PU population) exist within the universe constantly with their movements and actions tracked in a limited fashion? Will they be randomly generated as players enter instances/zones? How will this calculate into the economy and mission system? [Erris]

We actually have a full Universe simulation that runs… we actually don’t need it to run on any particular bank of servers. It just actually runs on one server, and it simulates about 20 million AI agents. It simulates the AI agents in a very sort of high-level manner. Ok, you’ve got a mission, you’re going to go from here to here, so it’s not simulating it on the fidelity level that you would do when you’re actually connected to the game and flying around and doing combat maneuvers or flying from point to point, it’s simulating it more in the – here’s the jobs, here’s the missions, here’s the market demand, here’s the things that are happening – ok, you’ve taken a mission to take these goods from planet A to planet B, so you’ve now taken that job off the market. Now you’re going to go from planet A to planet B, so that’s just a line trace, that trip’s going to take, say, whatever it would be, a day of game time, and then along the way there’s a chance that you could fight or run into some pirates, and if they do we resolve that combat. If you’re not there, kind of more like a dice roll, but if you are there, in the area, this all gets sort of created, spawned in where you are – you will see the result, the actual combat will end up getting spawned in, and you’ll see it play out, and the result of it will be fed back to the Universe server simulation. So the Universe simulation keeps track of all the NPC’s. It’s the one that’s dealing with the goods and the markets, the economy nodes, so on various planets there’ll be things that produce, things that consume, so there’s sort of a very high-level meta AI that’s running on the economy simulation. And from that high-level simulation we can track the sort of movement, the populations, the progress of AI, in a sort of much higher-level, abstracted way, and of course since that doesn’t need to be real time, like you flying around, we can time slice it, which is why we can simulate so many agents. So, we’re not having to do 20 million agents at 30fps at all, so you can update every single agent maybe every 5 minutes, or every 10 minutes, and that’s how you can manage so many of them. In the time scale the Universe happens, it doesn’t need to be the same sort of fidelity that we do on the game server, which is, that’s the one where, in Arena Commander now, if you connect and dogfight with someone, the game server is what’s sort of running you and the other clients running, and it’s worrying about simulating where the bullets are, and all the ins and outs of the high fidelity flight and the combat. So, essentially the NPC population is mostly simulated. I think that, on some level, we don’t necessarily simulate every individual person on a planet, so like a planet would say, okay, here’s your general population, and that general population where missions have to happen could spawn certain number of bounty-hunters, or a certain number of traders or haulers or cargo folks. And then they will take their missions and then that particular ship… we sort of simulate the ships, and the missions that are happening on an individual basis, and then when you’re on the planet, there’ll be a setup of here’s the population going up and down, is it things going well on the planet, then if so, more people are arriving there, population’s getting bigger, it’s expanding, if things aren’t doing so well, it’d be the [opposite] one.

But it’s a pretty decent, high-level simulation, and that information is then fed to the system servers and the game servers, and that will help determine, when you’re flying around, whether or not you will encounter NPC’s or not, and whether those NPC’s are fighting each other, in conflict, or what’s happening. So, one of the cool things is, we’ll have a living breathing world happening, irrelevant of how many actual players are playing. So, there could be only one person playing in the Star Citizen Universe – I mean I hope to god not – but if there was, there would still be a living, breathing Universe, people going about their daily lives, trading, being Pirates, being bounty hunters, being miners, all of that sort of stuff. So I think when that all comes online and comes together, I think it’ll be very cool. We currently have the Universe Simulation happening on a server, and we have an interface where there’s the communication of kind of what you would, this is the kind of thing you would see if you’re in this area, and that’s all in progress so…

Yeah, I think it will work quite well.
Click to expand...


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt4r3ksHXng&t=7m28s
 
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