Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

[Stinja]

... then click left mouse button ...

Mouse button?

They do seem to assume a certain control type too often. So for me it's "C" then trackpad and wobbly move the pointer to the last option, hover and click to use, and hope your character model breathing doesnt make you click the wrong thing, or the trackpad pseudo-button doesnt detect a finger movement, either of which makes you select a different option.

I mean it's fine once you know, but basically an out-of-combat option for me.


Another thing i'm really liking is the seamless transition from space to orbit to ground, it doesnt feel like you're switching instances like cough other space-ship games. Then there's shooting ground targets from your ship, jump out the seat and you can launch thru the door and continue on foot, again all really seamlessly.
I do wish you could open the doors and keep them open, mine seem to self-close which slows an emergency departure.

* I realise i'm not playing the game properly with a controller&KB, so not a complaint per se

 

[Mole HD]

Mouse button?

They do seem to assume a certain control type too often. So for me it's "C" then trackpad and wobbly move the pointer to the last option, hover and click to use, and hope your character model breathing doesnt make you click the wrong thing, or the trackpad pseudo-button doesnt detect a finger movement, either of which makes you select a different option.

I mean it's fine once you know, but basically an out-of-combat option for me.


Another thing i'm really liking is the seamless transition from space to orbit to ground, it doesnt feel like you're switching instances like cough other space-ship games. Then there's shooting ground targets from your ship, jump out the seat and you can launch thru the door and continue on foot, again all really seamlessly.
I do wish you could open the doors and keep them open, mine seem to self-close which slows an emergency departure.

The self closing doors and ladders only happens on certain ships, usually the smaller ones like the Aurora or the fighters...the rear ramps if the ship has them, stay down until you close them, side doors too on the likes of the Cutlass.

 

[Ronzer]

CR blowing clouds out of his rear end again...

Yes Chris, 1/10 the scale of what MSFS has, and less realistic, and not based on real weather data. Even Crusader, a gas "giant" is probably no bigger than Earth. If you ever do implement Earth, its going to be the size of Italy.

What's even funnier is, the faithful eat comments like this up and then regurgitate it or get defensive when someone points out what a load of tosh it is.

Anyway, how many games has CR now compared SC favourably against?

CoD, ED, NMS, Skyrim, GTA, RDR2... any others? Oh, of course, the time around 2014 where he said he would put SQ42 up against any AAA game out there... yeah, how did that one work out?

His whole MO is basically to say how his unreleased buggy game is better than released quality games.

Part of that old time mentality of having to put other things down, to suggest how great their stuff is.

And again confusing the game. MSFS is a flight simulator, and need not be said, for the Earth. It probably doesn't have getting in and out of the cockpit. But, that's the scope they said they'd do, and took about a year and half to do that and are essentially just improving it as time goes on, which they dont have to do. SC, I think, promised something around 100 star systems and haven't made one yet. A big part of SC is being able to go to different systems. How can aliens attack if they cant jump yet?

I loaded up SC and walked around a bit. I noticed the AI security walking between check points. I went in the elevator, came back, and they had different outfits on. Is it randomly generated, like GTA, where different sets of stuff can be loaded to fill environments? Thats fidelity? I'd almost suspect some rng happening then.

 

[LittleAnt]

Some detail does seem extraneous, like using a Medpen being a convoluted multistep process, and no "let me just inject some heal-feels right now plz!" action

The second step, you can choose to heal someone else instead of yourself. Never tried. Don't know if it is already in game.

 

[cigwatch]

Part of that old time mentality of having to put other things down, to suggest how great their stuff is.

And again confusing the game. MSFS is a flight simulator, and need not be said, for the Earth. It probably doesn't have getting in and out of the cockpit. But, that's the scope they said they'd do, and took about a year and half to do that and are essentially just improving it as time goes on, which they dont have to do. SC, I think, promised something around 100 star systems and haven't made one yet. A big part of SC is being able to go to different systems. How can aliens attack if they cant jump yet?

I loaded up SC and walked around a bit. I noticed the AI security walking between check points. I went in the elevator, came back, and they had different outfits on. Is it randomly generated, like GTA, where different sets of stuff can be loaded to fill environments? Thats fidelity? I'd almost suspect some rng happening then.

I think this is kind of a given. What is usually omitted in the player cap discussion is that for persistent, fully tracked NPCs, the cap would not be about player counts but about player + NPC counts. If an NPC goes through the motions of their behaviour and is fully modelled all the time (like CIG said they would), each of them eats as many server resources as a player character. The only difference is that their controlling signals come not from a game client but from subroutines responsible for NPC behaviour.

Which makes it possible to experiment with maximisation of a server load - take 50 players, make a plan for each of them to spread to dispersed locations around Stanton that are full of NPCs and make them follow a single (or a group) of NPCs all the time, so that the engine cannot do the randomisation / (de)spawning fakery.

 

[LittleAnt]

...so that the engine cannot do the randomisation / (de)spawning fakery.

CIG want to use spawn closets to regulate the NPC population. You already see in each city/station some restricted areas with doors that will be used for spawn/despawn of NPC.

 

[VR Golgot]

Another thing i'm really liking is the seamless transition from space to orbit to ground, it doesnt feel like you're switching instances like cough other space-ship games.

Wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that gets lost as they revamp the networking. Currently there is no handover stall between instances, because there are no instances... The whole solar system is on one 50 player server. (Which is a big reason why the servers are so horribly overloaded, and perform poorly )

Their plan is to split the solar systems up into server regions. Chris of course claims that any handover between the servers would be seamless, but Chris claims a lot of things

They might put the transition point further out into space than ED, possibly disguise it during fixed QT flight. Guess we’ll see. But they’ll have to deal with the handshake pause somehow.

(On the plus side it should mean higher player counts and/or better server stability. On the downside, they’ll probably keep talking nonsense about thousands of players in a single server-meshed shard coming one day. And that just ain’t happening )

 

[ZeeWolf]

Wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that gets lost as they revamp the networking. Currently there is no handover stall between instances, because there are no instances... The whole solar system is on one 50 player server. (Which is a big reason why the servers are so horribly overloaded, and perform poorly )

Their plan is to split the solar systems up into server regions. Chris of course claims that any handover between the servers would be seamless, but Chris claims a lot of things

They might put the transition point further out into space than ED, possibly disguise it during fixed QT flight. Guess we’ll see. But they’ll have to deal with the handshake pause somehow.

(On the plus side it should mean higher player counts and/or better server stability. On the downside, they’ll probably keep talking nonsense about thousands of players in a single server-meshed shard coming one day. And that just ain’t happening )

The problem is the internet is fundimentally broken as a network and software doesn't fix that.

Connection speeds are variable depending on many factors such as region. Even if you play with people in the same country, some people may have faster connection to an AWS data center in Ireland than one in Western Europe for example.

If your trying to 'instance' with other players in a server that's reached capacity, you have even worse problems than ED.

If any developer claims to have a snake oil fix for the internet that allows a player in Singapore to share reliable instant real time joystick motions with 999 players in London and then move them between servers, then they are surely saying that they've "fixed" the internet. We should be able to have real time uninterupted zoom calls around the world with no lag ever, it will all be thanks to to code Chris and Sandi are working on right now on the plane as they move their family a bit closer to work to really care about making it happen guys.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

CIG want to

Basically a summary of 99% of the stuff you talk about in relation to SC.

spawn closets

Ooooh, the NPCs are coming out of the closet! Fabulous!

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that gets lost as they revamp the networking. Currently there is no handover stall between instances, because there are no instances... The whole solar system is on one 50 player server. (Which is a big reason why the servers are so horribly overloaded, and perform poorly )

Their plan is to split the solar systems up into server regions. Chris of course claims that any handover between the servers would be seamless, but Chris claims a lot of things

They might put the transition point further out into space than ED, possibly disguise it during fixed QT flight. Guess we’ll see. But they’ll have to deal with the handshake pause somehow.

(On the plus side it should mean higher player counts and/or better server stability. On the downside, they’ll probably keep talking nonsense about thousands of players in a single server-meshed shard coming one day. And that just ain’t happening )

Its a tad more complicated than that. You're basically talking about what CIG are calling static server meshing, which is their "tier 0" server meshing. My guess is they will indeed put the transitions in space and hide it behind QT.

What they say is their tier 1, 2, ,3, whatever, is dynamic server meshing, where the instances move around based on need. Which is basically what ED has done since launch, except it would be client/server based instead of P2P, with the associated advantages/disadvantages of the two types of connectivity.

 

[VR Golgot]

If any developer claims to have a snake oil fix for the internet that allows a player in Singapore to share instant real time joystick motions with 999 players in London then they are surely saying that they've "fixed" the internet. We should be able to have real time uninterupted zoom calls around the world with no lag, it will all be thanks to to code Chris and Sandi are working on right now on the plane as they move their family a bit closer to work to really care about making it happen guys.

Oh yeah for sure. Chris has always claimed SC would have the bestest of all things in one game, and that’s never been tenable. His "so we won't have to instance it" daydreams are pretty clearly just that. (Hell even Planetside works its miracles by insisting on regional servers at minimum). The claim of seamless server handovers is just part of that long tradition

That doesn’t mean that SC couldn’t end up with some pragmatic networking solution though. I think we’re almost inching towards that world now. (Just dedicated servers for solar system regions, instanced to accommodate player numbers in each area). It wouldn’t be groundbreaking. It wouldn’t be any of the exceptional things that Chris claimed they’d achieve. But at least it might work

 

[VR Golgot]

Its a tad more complicated than that. You're basically talking about what CIG are calling static server meshing, which is their "tier 0" server meshing. My guess is they will indeed put the transitions in space and hide it behind QT.

What they say is their tier 1, 2, ,3, whatever, is dynamic server meshing, where the instances move around based on need.

Yeah I’m just talking about the stuff they might actually achieve, rather than the pixie dust stuff

 

[cigwatch]

CIG want to use spawn closets to regulate the NPC population. You already see in each city/station some restricted areas with doors that will be used for spawn/despawn of NPC.

Sure, they need to come from somewhere, although when they are part of a crew of a ship, they have nowhere to run to despawn. The computation part still stands, though - if they are to be "indistinguishable from players" (not my words), a server player limit becomes a server character limit.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Sure, they need to come from somewhere, although when they are part of a crew of a ship, they have nowhere to run to despawn. The computation part still stands, though - if they are to be "indistinguishable from players" (not my words), a server player limit becomes a server character limit.

And remember, CIG want a 10 to 1 NPC to player ratio! If there are 10,000 players online then they need 100,000 NPCs!

This is how the fidelity magic happens!

 

[VR Golgot]

The computation part still stands, though - if they are to be "indistinguishable from players" (not my words), a server player limit becomes a server character limit.

This is the case with ED to a degree I believe. (Certainly on the ship front. IE the Distant Worlds guys stacking up 50+ player instances, in part, because there are no NPCs outside the bubble)

If it pans out like that for SC, it does beg the question of how the 80 crew Javelin is gonna work for sure

 

[Susanna]

After 4 Days of trying to get my throttle working in SC I'm stumped (and totally frustrated). If anyone is using a thrustmaster T16000M FCS hotas and has a working mapping profile they can send me - please do! I've tried an old profile from the Spectrum forum and the Warthog profile. Neither solve the problem. It is either 0% or 100% but nothing in between.

 

[TiberiusDuval]

The problem is the internet is fundimentally broken as a network and software doesn't fix that.

Connection speeds are variable depending on many factors such as region. Even if you play with people in the same country, some people may have faster connection to an AWS data center in Ireland than one in Western Europe for example.

If your trying to 'instance' with other players in a server that's reached capacity, you have even worse problems than ED.

If any developer claims to have a snake oil fix for the internet that allows a player in Singapore to share reliable instant real time joystick motions with 999 players in London and then move them between servers, then they are surely saying that they've "fixed" the internet. We should be able to have real time uninterupted zoom calls around the world with no lag ever, it will all be thanks to to code Chris and Sandi are working on right now on the plane as they move their family a bit closer to work to really care about making it happen guys.

Well lightspeed prevents certain type of situations, thats hard limit. Say one is on other side of globe, that means about at least 50 000 km via cable, and signal speed is sub-c, even if it was c, and no delays in between, you would get 333 ms ping. Situation gets worse if signal is routed through geo sync com sats....So basically that Singapore guy will always be handicapped against those local Londoners.

 

[Xink]

If by "broken" you mean has to obey laws of physics then sure. No technology can give you faster than light transfer of information, unless some new physics is discovered.

Inb4 Roberts makes "physics not yet advanced enough for what we're doing" his new excuse.

Yet some games manage to have thousands of players on the same server just fine. Must be magic.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

If by "broken" you mean has to obey laws of physics then sure. No technology can give you faster than light transfer of information, unless some new physics is discovered.

Inb4 Roberts makes "physics not yet advanced enough for what we're doing" his new excuse.

Yet some games manage to have thousands of players on the same server just fine. Must be magic.

Chris is going to refactor physics.

He just needs a few hundred million to make it happen!

 

[Agony_Aunt]

There was a reason CIG changed the TOS....

Only 5 years late. Early days.