General Changeable Instancing - Concourses/Settlements

[LiveWeyer]

It would be nice to see which instance you are in, and be able to change that instance. Specifically in the concourse, or other social areas. This would really help when getting groups of CMDR's together.

Maybe show your Instance number in the comms social tab, and then a way to change it. That way people can "meet up" with their CMDR's easier in game.

Potentially there could be a cap in max number of players per instance to prevent performance drops.

 

[zikolach]

I don't think it is possible in many cases to "switch" instance. But maybe it could be useful to see an instance identifier (e.g. on network bandwidth overlay).

 

[GroG79]

CMDRs should fix their networks so p2p works and not blame the interwebz or the game

 

[LiveWeyer]

I don't think it is possible in many cases to "switch" instance. But maybe it could be useful to see an instance identifier (e.g. on network bandwidth overlay).

That would be a bummer if it wasn't technically possible. I haven't investigated the full technical side of how it's currently handled either.

The group get together we had, most of us got into the same instance together. We thought this would be a nice thing, if possible, but then hey it's just a suggestion.

 

[DemiserofD]

Stuff like this has existed in the past. You would just give it the target IP address and it would attempt to connect.

 

[GroG79]

That IS what the ED client is doing...

 

[Ian Doncaster]

By and large, assuming same mode and no blocklists, the game does try to get everyone into the same instance if it can. Obviously individual people's network configs can cause all sorts of issues in practice.

From back when I was going on exploration expeditions, we sometimes had 70-person meetups on planets. Some things we found then:
- there's a soft cap - not a particularly high one - to avoid performance issues, but that's a lower priority than keeping wings together. So once you get much above 10 people in the instance, every new joiner has to come in as part of a wing, but that'll get you well past the point where the performance issues are saying you should stop
- the first person to the instance has a much heavier network burden than everyone else; try to arrange that to be someone with a good network and a high-spec PC
- it's way easier to get big instances in empty space / planets than in inhabited systems with NPCs around; we had trouble getting above 15 with NPCs when we were easily getting 75 without.
- it'll even proactively merge instances if it can; we had one case where we had two 20-ish instances at the same meetup site. No matter what we did, we couldn't get our usual single 40-player instance. Then someone logged out for the night, and almost instantly the game merged the two instances together (leading to relatively few cases of overlapping ships) - never had that problem before or since so what weirdness was going on with that one person's network that time we'll never know.

With concourses - if people have their ships with them - you might also have the issue that there's not actually room for the ships. Say it's an outpost, so 2 small pads and 1 medium pad. If two people try to instance together at that station and both have medium ships docked and active there, it'll never work because it needs to create a new instance for the ship. Bigger stations have less of a problem but it doesn't necessarily take that busy an instance to have most of the pads - and all of the larger ones - either taken up by player ships or temporarily reserved by NPC traffic once the instance has been going a while.

In general if you're wanting to get people together I'd pick a nearby uninhabited system with a landable planet, and have people meet up at a recognisable spot there, for most reliable instancing.

 

[LiveWeyer]

By and large, assuming same mode and no blocklists, the game does try to get everyone into the same instance if it can. Obviously individual people's network configs can cause all sorts of issues in practice.

From back when I was going on exploration expeditions, we sometimes had 70-person meetups on planets. Some things we found then:
- there's a soft cap - not a particularly high one - to avoid performance issues, but that's a lower priority than keeping wings together. So once you get much above 10 people in the instance, every new joiner has to come in as part of a wing, but that'll get you well past the point where the performance issues are saying you should stop
- the first person to the instance has a much heavier network burden than everyone else; try to arrange that to be someone with a good network and a high-spec PC
- it's way easier to get big instances in empty space / planets than in inhabited systems with NPCs around; we had trouble getting above 15 with NPCs when we were easily getting 75 without.
- it'll even proactively merge instances if it can; we had one case where we had two 20-ish instances at the same meetup site. No matter what we did, we couldn't get our usual single 40-player instance. Then someone logged out for the night, and almost instantly the game merged the two instances together (leading to relatively few cases of overlapping ships) - never had that problem before or since so what weirdness was going on with that one person's network that time we'll never know.

With concourses - if people have their ships with them - you might also have the issue that there's not actually room for the ships. Say it's an outpost, so 2 small pads and 1 medium pad. If two people try to instance together at that station and both have medium ships docked and active there, it'll never work because it needs to create a new instance for the ship. Bigger stations have less of a problem but it doesn't necessarily take that busy an instance to have most of the pads - and all of the larger ones - either taken up by player ships or temporarily reserved by NPC traffic once the instance has been going a while.

In general if you're wanting to get people together I'd pick a nearby uninhabited system with a landable planet, and have people meet up at a recognisable spot there, for most reliable instancing.

This is really good information.

We were at a large starport, and it was just a couple people with the issue. We did try winging up with relogs, worked for most that didn't get in immediately.

Our plan was to go planetside next time since we'd heard there were less issues there. I still wanted to throw the idea out here.