Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Intrepid3D said:
I don't understand networking well enough to know what the ______ is really being said here!
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CIG is simply aiming to create parallel instances/shards out of smaller/partitioned regions of solar systems, with a goal to trade less system entities needed to be tracked for larger players numbers. Same as pretty much any other mmo out there. They just promised that you won’t notice it… “trust us”. Although for example blockaders and other pvp interested players will definitely notice it. Rings a bell?

Intrepid3D said:
When i join a game and there are 10,000 others playing the game, total, will i see / feel the effects of those players around me?
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You won’t see all the players, impossible with the new proposed regular instancing system. As for feeling their effects that is not clear yet. CIG details on how their main galaxy and aggregated player impact works is almost nil unless you think Tony Z ramblings are a done deal. Suspect they may end up with something like ED‘s galaxy server and something equivalent to bgs persistence if they are competent enough.

Intrepid3D said:
If my mate has a ship parked on planet 3 in system 17 and i go from planet 1 in system 3 to his ship will it be there for me to use? Even if i randomly joined and am not in his party?
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Not guaranteed, same as in ED. To start with success there will be dependent on density. If your friend or friends or their ships are in a instance/shard that is at max player capacity then you will be placed in a separate instance/shard obviously. Even if the instance is not at full cap matchmaking success will also depend on how efficient the matchmaking logic is and how tolerant to vagaries such as ping differences, friends list etc the logic is.
 
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fzfq3m

F
Agony_Aunt said:
Oh dear.... there goes a whole bunch of theorycrafting and part of the reason some PvPers switched over to SC from ED.

The more CIG implements, the more they firm up their plans, the more dreams.txt are destroyed to be replaced with reality.txt
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I feel compelled to go to spectrum an poke the PvP crowd…

matchmaking and instancing back? Mobius!!! Assemble

but then I remember the fate of my beloved pvp slider and the pts kicks in again
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
FelixReynolds as usual bringing the goods and holding to account:

But in all cases there are always more players than any one server instance can handle. For a persistent multiplayer world like WoW the solution is to split up the player base into more manageable groups called “shards”, which are a permanent instance of the universe that look after a certain amount of players.
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One thing I don’t like about most MMO structures is the fragmentation of the player base between these “shards”. If you had joined much later than a friend of yours, there may not be room on his world instance anymore and you have to join another parallel one and so cannot play together. This is one of the nice things about the Eve Online design – everyone plays in the same universe.
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In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on.

Chris Roberts
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robertsspaceindustries.com

Chris Roberts on Multiplayer, Single Player and Instancing - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
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I mean, lol. How much more of a failed promise can that get?
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
cigwatch said:
This literally does not make any sense. What does it even mean, "scale them so dense". They are already dancing the dance of "we will have regular instances but we cannot admit it just yet".
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I think he just means they’ll try and amp the number of clients per shard as high as possible. So lots of places to fit all your buddies on one shard ideally.

(He does seem to be avoiding mentioning the downsides re actual player density though ;))
 

sovapid

sovapid
Even with what they are talking about now, you can still play with your friends if you want. You aren't locked to a shard.

And the rest of the paragraph.....

In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So you will never be separated from your friends, and if you want you’ll be able to join up and adventure together, you can. Due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation we can’t however handle thousands of players in the same area of space.
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Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
sovapid said:
Even with what they are talking about now, you can still play with your friends if you want. You aren't locked to a shard.

And the rest of the paragraph.....
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Density and server load are still an issue. As far as I can tell, and I may be wrong, any shard will have a player cap. Said cap may be a hard fixed one or dynamic based on server load or other factors, etc. Either way if a friend wants to join you in your shard after the cap is reached he won’t be able to. He will be placed in a separate instance/shard. Same as in any other mmo, with the exception of EVE probably.
 
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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
sovapid said:
Even with what they are talking about now, you can still play with your friends if you want. You aren't locked to a shard.

And the rest of the paragraph.....

In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So you will never be separated from your friends, and if you want you’ll be able to join up and adventure together, you can. Due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation we can’t however handle thousands of players in the same area of space.
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We’ll, it is sharded in a way he said it wouldn’t be. But that’s kinda small fry in some ways.

Because Chrissy did then go big in 2016, and say that they probably could get 1000s in the same region etc…

We're going to have this sort of mesh of servers, so we'll be able to have, hopefully, a large amount of players all in the same area, so we won't have to instance it, in the way that originally we were thinking we'd have to instance it. We have a kind of different server design now that could potentially have thousands of players all in the same sort of area at the same time, which would be really cool. Because that's something that again, it's not something that you could get a while, y'know, a year ago or ten years ago, but you know with sort of the newer tech, the power of the machines, kind of some of the stuff you can do in the cloud, the possibility is sort of opened up and you want to utilize it.
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And he was still saying it in 2020…

we have been working on this over the past few years and hope to have the first iteration in players’ hands by next year. This will allow us to greatly expand the number of the players beyond 50 to thousands concurrently in the same “instance” as the tech will spin up additional servers to handle the simulation load in an area as the player count increases. This is when Star Citizen becomes a true Massively Multiplayer Game.
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And that is not what this is delivering. Or is likely to deliver.

Norty Chrissy…
 

sovapid

sovapid
Viajero said:
Density and server load are still an issue. As far as I can tell, and I may be wrong, any shard will have a player cap. Said cap may be a hard fixed one or dynamic based on server load or other factors, etc. Either way if a friend wants to join you in your shard after the cap is reached he won’t be able to. He will be placed in a separate instance/shard. Same as in any other mmo, with the exception of EVE probably.
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We dont even know if there will be such a thing as a shard limit.

Kinda like instance limits in ED. You arent really gonna get an instance with more than 16 people in it (at least when I was playing), but if you game it you can get huge 100+ person instances.
 

Intrepid3D

Intrepid3D
sovapid said:
Even with what they are talking about now, you can still play with your friends if you want. You aren't locked to a shard.

And the rest of the paragraph.....
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I take it this is what we are looking at in this slide.

All Shards or Instances are linked to a global inventory system of which the shard contents can be called up on if a player moves between shards.

the limitation is each shard has a limited capacity so if its full you ain't getting in even if a friend is in said shard.

kEGXfgT.png
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
sovapid said:
We dont even know if there will be such a thing as a shard limit.

Kinda like instance limits in ED. You arent really gonna get an instance with more than 16 people in it (at least when I was playing), but if you game it you can get huge 100+ person instances.
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Indeed but even in ED there are limits to gaming the system. Frame rate drops and lag starts to kick in the higher the player count goes etc. The cap may not be a hard fixed one but rather dynamic based on actual load (10 players seating there doing nothing vs 10 players shooting at each other in an area full of npc plus all their ships) or, as mentioned, the instance may be simply naturally restricted by degrading quality if uncapped.
 
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sovapid

sovapid
Intrepid3D said:
I take it this is what we are looking at in this slide.

All Shards or Instances are linked to a global inventory system of which the shard contents can be called up on if a player moves between shards.

the limitation is each shard has a limited capacity so if its full you ain't getting in even if a friend is in said shard.

kEGXfgT.png
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Yeah, but as they have described it, each shard is still made up of multiple servers that handle users.

The end goal is still (at least it seems) to have dynamic servers so if a server is handling all of Crusader, and a ton of people show up in crusader, there could be a server spun up to handle yela, a server for celin etc.

and still doesnt really address what happens if everyone in the shard goes to port olisar. i mean unless shard player limits are tiny.
 

Intrepid3D

Intrepid3D
sovapid said:
Yeah, but as they have described it, each shard is still made up of multiple servers that handle users.

The end goal is still (at least it seems) to have dynamic servers so if a server is handling all of Crusader, and a ton of people show up in crusader, there could be a server spun up to handle yela, a server for celin etc.

and still doesnt really address what happens if everyone in the shard goes to port olisar. i mean unless shard player limits are tiny.
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Port Olisar Implodes.....

Ok, thanks for the effort, i understand it much better now :)
 
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