Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Creating flashy videos which depict potential gameplay is what Star Citizen is built on, the original kickstarter pitch is case in point.

If the income stopped, if Citizens actually voted with their wallets and pledged no more, would the game(s) get completed ?

I personally think not.

It won't be completed as long as the cash flows in neither.

It's what you'd call a win-win situation for CR & company and a lose-lose situation for everyone else. Except those who are happy with SC as it is now and don't care if it's ever improved.
 
Some good news :
Servers are pretty stable now. Not one 30K since 3.15 for me.
I don't know what CIG have done but it is very pleasant.

Also far less NPC standing on chairs and responsive AI is more frequent.
 
Some good news :
Servers are pretty stable now. Not one 30K since 3.15 for me.
Counted 5 30K in my 3.15 sessions. Also a few servers where lifts were not appearing, and a few where mission objectives would get stuck indefinitely.

I don't know what CIG have done but it is very pleasant.
Nothing really: it's just luck.

I'll try 3.16 to see if there's really any improvement but I'm not holding my breath.
 
Counted 5 30K in my 3.15 sessions. Also a few servers where lifts were not appearing, and a few where mission objectives would get stuck indefinitely.


Nothing really: it's just luck.
Well then I must be the luckiest man alive! 0 30ks since 3.16 went live and i've been playing a couple hours every day since it went live, lol. CIG can't improve the game! No! They can't! It's just luck! 100%!
 
Well then I must be the luckiest man alive! 0 30ks since 3.16 went live and i've been playing a couple hours every day since it went live, lol. CIG can't improve the game! No! They can't! It's just luck! 100%!
So you get the NPC standing on chairs, too? I thought they had gotten rid of that. Ah, well, maybe next year. They probably need to build the pipeline for that first and build up a company to take that task.
 
92 weeks, lol. Other devs develop whole games in that time. That's what you get when you engage devs who can't figure out how to use a simple door.
Rather have a 10 week task that gets delayed a bunch? Or would you like to join the CIG meshing team to finally show those incompetent devs how to make a game?
 
So you get the NPC standing on chairs, too? I thought they had gotten rid of that. Ah, well, maybe next year. They probably need to build the pipeline for that first and build up a company to take that task.
Yeah I get that aswell. They've explained that thats is caused by the NPC state not being updated after you've left an area because of bad server performance.
 
Some good news :
Servers are pretty stable now. Not one 30K since 3.15 for me.
I don't know what CIG have done but it is very pleasant.

Also far less NPC standing on chairs and responsive AI is more frequent.

Yes, it does appear CIG have finally got that problem under control.

Don't worry, there will be more fun with new patches breaking things in the coming year! ;)
 
Rather have a 10 week task that gets delayed a bunch? Or would you like to join the CIG meshing team to finally show those incompetent devs how to make a game?

Join a team whose project is already running 3 years+ late, tasked with impossible design goals (a single shard featuring 1000s of players in the same place, facilitating enormous capital ship battles etc)?

A team rumoured to be hit by churn, and which has recently scrapped one delayed plan and started on a completely new design approach?

A team which is inevitably going to disappoint a wide swathe of players when it breaks existing functionality repeatedly during deployment, downgrades existing features such as total seamlessness, but ultimately still fails to get anywhere near the above oversold goals? Even if they actually deliver something which SC desperately needs: a somewhat robust networking system which can actually scale to support more than two solar systems at once etc. In a few years time…

Nah. Forget that ;)
 
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Join a team whose project is already running 3 years+ late, tasked with impossible design goals (a single shard featuring 1000s of players in the same place, facilitating enormous capital ship battles etc)?
That team you're describing no longer exists. Of course you know this but mention Crobber's outlandish dreams anyway.
A team rumoured to be hit by churn, and which has recently scrapped one delayed plan and started on a completely new design approach?
Welcome to game development. Things that dont work get scrapped and redone.
A team which is inevitably going to disappoint a wide swathe of players when it breaks existing functionality repeatedly during deployment, downgrades existing features such as total seamlessness, but ultimately still fails to get anywhere near the above oversold goals? Even if they actually deliver something which SC desperately needs: a somewhat robust networking system which can actually scale to support more than two solar systems at once etc. In a few years time…
And now you're just dooming left and right. "Existing features" when did Server Meshing ever exist in the game? :). And no this team is not going to "disappoint". Crobbers is the one that oversold dreams.txt, the team was merely the people in charge of realising the impossible, and they're no longer doing that.

Seriously, first you go: "This one shard thing will never work!"
Then when it doesn't work: "Why don't they do the one shard thing?! Disappointment!"
 
Well then I must be the luckiest man alive! 0 30ks since 3.16 went live and i've been playing a couple hours every day since it went live, lol. CIG can't improve the game! No! They can't! It's just luck! 100%!

Have they said how they did it? At the moment it seems like luck / an accident - even their roadmap update sounded that way:

Star Citizen Alpha 3.15 took longer to get out the door than we had initially planned, which has limited the amount of time we have to stabilize the 3.16 code base. For this reason, we've opted to branch from the 3.15 development stream to avoid risking overall stability (which has been the best we've had in years). Taking this approach means we'll be operating on the same code base that's currently on the live servers, while manually integrating 3.16 features (specifically those we deem low risk to integrate).

To me that sounds like they didn't expect the stability and are now trying to make sure it doesn't vanish as suddenly as it appeared. If it was deliberate I'd expect them to talk about it (like when they fixed Trade recently), but maybe they have and I missed it.
 
To me that sounds like they didn't expect the stability and are now trying to make sure it doesn't vanish as suddenly as it appeared. If it was deliberate I'd expect them to talk about it (like when they fixed Trade recently), but maybe they have and I missed it.
They're saying that they stayed in the 3.15 codebase which is the most stable they've had in years, not added any more features that could introduce bugs. So they do expect the stability as it's really 3.15.2
 
They're saying that they stayed in the 3.15 codebase which is the most stable they've had in years, not added any more features that could introduce bugs. So they do expect the stability as it's really 3.15.2
Yeah, I guess from code I've worked on if we fixed stability and knew how we did it then we would just check the code was the same in 3.16 and push it. We would have to be unsure where the fix was to merge backwards (and you can see that 3.16 has suffered as a result with all the missing expected updates).

Hopefully we'll hear more when they are more in the office (plus I guess with staggered dev 3.17 would have been based off 3.15 already, so it should all settle down).
 
That team you're describing no longer exists.

Evidence?

The Network Team are still running point on Server Meshing etc, with 9 engineers deployed on that roadmap task. Turbulent's Game Services Team are supplementary, and focused on the Entity Graph ('new iCache') database according to the recent presentation.

Of course you know this but mention Crobber's outlandish dreams anyway.

I quote Crobblers outlandish dreams because, the last time we heard from him (Oct 2020), they were still the plan:

Server Meshing is another big technical milestone ahead of us. It’s dependent on iCache, as that allows the various servers in the mesh to utilize a unified snapshot of the state of the universe, but 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.

And because in the latest Server Meshing Q&A they claimed several of those larger aims were still their objective IE:

Is the true end goal one single shard for all players?​

This is our ambition

And on dynamic server meshing and player counts:

As we refine the technology and move away from Static Server Meshing towards Dynamic Server Meshing, designers can use this tech to have larger, more interesting areas (such as larger settlements or large ship interiors) with denser numbers of AI and player characters. Server Meshing could open the doors to gameplay experiences that our designers have not even thought of yet!
But to make further expansion [of player counts] economically viable, we’ll need to look at making Server Meshing more dynamic as soon as possible.
The absolute [player count in one location] limit is hard to predict until some of the new technology comes online and we can start to measure performance.

Although it's obvious from context that they don't expect to get beyond 100 players in the same location, at best, CMs were quick to message that 100 players per location would be just the start...

And officially, the big boss still wants 1000s ;)

---

Welcome to game development. Things that dont work get scrapped and redone.

There is nothing normal about deciding on a completely different networking architecture 4 years into a project (2016's Server Meshing), failing to get it working for 4 years, then switching to a new approach, and hoping to have a 'Tier 0' version up and running 10 years deep into production.

Let alone selling a bunch of capital ships for over $1000, and still not knowing whether you'll be able to support them technically a decade later.

Nothing, normal, at all...

And now you're just dooming left and right. "Existing features" when did Server Meshing ever exist in the game? :).

The existing features I'm talking about include aspects like the ability to walk around you ships while travelling seamlessly through the solar system. As pointed out by the Zenimax dev, the new handover between servers as ships approach a new 'static server' location will almost certainly require players to be stuck in their seats, for example.

CIG then have to decide how to handle location overload if shard player caps are pushed beyond server player caps. The current obvious solutions are: To lock off a location if it hits the server player cap; to host smaller locations per server (very expensive, and makes it harder to hide the handover lag between servers via simple approaches like enforced seating etc); instancing locations. All of these are steps down from the current seamlessness.

Or you can hope for the still promised dynamic server meshing ;) (Which the Zenimax dev notes would have to 'mesh' in areas of low population/activity, and so wouldn't help much with the above, let alone capital ship battles and other complications ;))

Seriously, first you go: "This one shard thing will never work!"
Then when it doesn't work: "Why don't they do the one shard thing?! Disappointment!"

Oh dear, you haven't understood anything I've said. Nevermind :/
 
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