PvP Massive battles

Well, very good game, very well polished, with a huge space galaxy map, with a fantastic ideea of The New Era DLC, where we can do almost everything from piracy to land on planets, base building, etc, my question is: 1. will exist massive pvp battles where squadrons can conquer a whole system or only a planet? 2. Space legs: will be pvp on planets too? coz these two ideeas can be combined and result a very interesting game and 3. at this moment of the game exist massive pvp battles with dozens, why not hundreds, of players? If this game will be land pvp and space pvp simultaneous i can call the game a masterpiece.
 
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1. will exist massive pvp battles where squadrons can conquer a whole system or only a planet?

The networking model and code does not support anything massive. The game relies on p2p network and it exchanges data in quite massive amounts
So i'd say that at most tens of ships could participate in a so called "massive" combat event, but even that is rare.

Compare that with Dark Age of Camelot, a game that in 2003 supported pvp events that would oppose hundreds versus hundreds versus hundreds - yes, no mistake there
There were 3 Realms, forever at war. So it wasn't unusual to have Albion mounting a huge raid against Hibernia while the Midgard would come to pick on both sides. Totaling numbers close to one thousand players in the same zone.
 
Well, that's bad. Why i upgrqde my ship?, why i make base on planets?, to play a No Man's Sky simulator? :(
 
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PvP between 30 ships is possible and is great fun in Elite Dangerous..... when it works. It requires a bit of coordination though.
 
The networking model and code does not support anything massive. The game relies on p2p network and it exchanges data in quite massive amounts
So i'd say that at most tens of ships could participate in a so called "massive" combat event, but even that is rare.
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Despite the fact that the ip protocol version 6 is not yet very widespread, but I believe that the P2P version is more correct. It allows you not to depend on one server.
And ultimately, the number of players can be unlimited.
 
space is big. velocities are large ...this makes physics (collision detection) very hard and thus take a long time per frame. This amounts to a not so easy problem with hit detection across multiple clients all sending updates to eachother every frame - a transmission which also adds to the time it takes per frame - a time that is extremely small when you want at least 60fps. You can't compare it to games with much smaller collision meshes per unit - smaller actual environments and lower velocities of things that can lead to interactions between units. So lets look at space games somewhat in the same ballpark. Vendetta-online is basically a pvp-centric space combat game with twitch flight characteristics and it can have largish battles (if you manage to be on when more than a handful of players are actually playing given that most of what you see on it are bots and alt accounts). But that game has small environments and will suffer hit detection issues when not in close proximity to the center of the sectors and eachother. Spread out and it gets bad. Ship meshes are also much simlper and smaller...as are weapons much simpler.

That game works via a central server based setup that acts as a referee for hit detection. That method is actually better for larger battles than p2p in most games because everyone in the same instance in a p2p game must send and receive data from as many players that are in the shared instance, and this can include failures to send/receive packets and lead to timing sync issues between clients that must be resolved by each client. A server based setup means each client only sends and receives from 1 (though it receives more data than it sends depending on how many clients are in the instance but still far less than what is possible via p2p since the server can trim data it sends to each client based on the game state it's tracking). The clients dont have to worry about time sync issues between eachother since the server referees all of that much easier than forcing each client to do their own. This makes hit detection more reliable and fairer and reduces the time for each frame update assuming the server isn't maxed out or behind a slow connection itself.

It's cheaper to utilize a p2p setup than a central server based one, which is why we have it. The benefits of p2p aren't helpful to twitch style real-time space combat games. and it can never scale to large battles while achieving any hope of 60fps unless you enjoy apparently random hit detection.
 
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Well, im disappointed coz ED its a very good quality game but limited gameplay style, powerplay its a good ideea, but the galaxy its huge and only aprox. 20% are affected by powerplays, squadrons can't control, conquer nothing in that vast galaxy, only influence it, at such a galaxy scale it was cool if was out there large scale battles where we can conquer planets, defense planets, conquer or defence a whole system or strategic systems :(
 
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Well, its a cool ideea with space legs, base building. There are a vast galaxy only for explore? Just jump/scan/jump/scan and sell the data to a nearby station?:) and again from the beggining... "frame shift drive activate... 4, 3, 2, 1, jump"...I tought this game is different, didn't know its p2p, imagine space legs, space flight, base building, these 3 things combined in one game, in a large scale pvp where the squadrons can conquer planets, systems, planets or systems full of resources, strategic systems, or can defence them, a squadron land on a planet for defence, in the same time another allied squadron defence in space the planet or system... Landing on an unexplored, unvisited planet where environment can be full of surprise, full of fun things. The galaxy map is vast and only 20% are controled by powerplay, the squadrons can only influence it, well, in my opinion its a cool ideea for a squadron to conquer a planet or a whole system to be their own, but this cool things can not be implemented in this beautifull game, its getting me bored transporting manifests from a station to another almost to infinity only to INFLUENCE the respective powerplay...The modules ship can be upgraded but for who... to fight 80% of the time only with npcs...?that's not challenge:(. Well..."frame shift drive activate...4, 3, 2, 1, jump :)
 
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The networking model and code does not support anything massive. The game relies on p2p network and it exchanges data in quite massive amounts
So i'd say that at most tens of ships could participate in a so called "massive" combat event, but even that is rare.

Compare that with Dark Age of Camelot, a game that in 2003 supported pvp events that would oppose hundreds versus hundreds versus hundreds - yes, no mistake there
There were 3 Realms, forever at war. So it wasn't unusual to have Albion mounting a huge raid against Hibernia while the Midgard would come to pick on both sides. Totaling numbers close to one thousand players in the same zone.

P2P is not bad when its doing something uncomplicated, generally (bar SLFs) its alright (its wing based missions that mess up).

This was from Powerplay ages ago:

 
For a long time I played Elite1, then I played Frontier. This game is about spaceships for me and I don’t understand why legs are needed here. Even the appearance of cars in the game does not quite fit into the space game.

Have you seen a lot of airplane simulator games where you had to walk? Why do we need legs for the pilot of the F1 car? ;)
 
space legs are all about full vr immersion and nothing else. A good portion of the playerbase of games like this just want to live in a reality where you can fly your own spaceship and stand on other planets...be a captain and live in a world where that's possible. That's all it's about. It's not about gameplay.

It would be nice if they created the game's engine to allow factions to expand out on their own at least. Unfortunately, like many things in the game, such new system acquisitions are manual changes fdev has to make and they dont have the money to spend doing such things day to day or week to week. They wanted to control the narrative (on top of really stupid design decisions that require manual oversight). They mashed completely incompatible gametypes together and thought they could make it work and have so far failed. We get just enough of what we like to not totally jump ship ...but that's got as much to do with there not being much of an alternative yet as it does with the game being enjoyable enough.
 
Despite the fact that the ip protocol version 6 is not yet very widespread, but I believe that the P2P version is more correct. It allows you not to depend on one server.
And ultimately, the number of players can be unlimited.

p2p means peer to peer, not specifically related to ipv4 or ipv6.
And while indeed it allows you to not to depend on one server it is a serious limit because:

1) the player that is elected host will need to have a very big and very stable connection. Even if that happens, a single home use connection cant be as big and reliable a server farm with a multi gig connection. Ultimately it will be a limiting factor and it actually is.
In ED best session was holding up to 60 ships or so i heard. The actual number might be smaller. No combat involved tho (it was the launch sequence of DW2)
2) it puts the session control in the hand of a player system and that means it can be subject of manipulation

the only advantage of p2p is that it can be a dead cheap compared with regional server farms connected to multi-gig internet connections. Which for a game that has no subscription fee is desirable
 
P2P is not bad when its doing something uncomplicated

Indeed, it is not bad for a 8 vs 8 fight. It may work for 12 vs 12.
But OP was talking about massive fights. No such things in ED and as i said there is nothing massive in an instance with 20-30 ships.
 
Indeed, it is not bad for a 8 vs 8 fight. It may work for 12 vs 12.
But OP was talking about massive fights. No such things in ED and as i said there is nothing massive in an instance with 20-30 ships.

That depends on your perspective really. During a fight with Patreus for Kenna I remember the system swarming with ships, loads of wings in SC and fights all over. You will never see a Battle of Endor (not outside bugged CZs) but you'll get large fights when the moons align.
 
What i'm talking is load of wings in the same instance, not in SC.

those being said, i'd really like a Battle of Endor :)
 
p2p means peer to peer, not specifically related to ipv4 or ipv6.
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Sorry for the conversation is not quite the topic.
IP4 has exhausted itself for a long time and almost all end customers are at NAT, those are essentially not a direct connection.
In the case of the correct ip6, EVERYONE will have a white ip address and delays on instances from someone will be minimal.

About the benefits. If someone on the tractor breaks someone’s optics, then the game disappears only in this instance, others will re-enter, fall into other intsants and continue to play, the rest will not even notice anything.

In the case of one server, not only will there be a limit on the number of users, there is still huge traffic for this server. And in case of malfunctions of this game server, EVERYTHING is lost.
In general, I do not really understand mast-fighting. Is that uncontrollable mass?
Or do you need to introduce special command ships with the ability to coordinate your forces and where does the game ultimately turn into TOTAL WAR?
 
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There is no scenario where a P2P network structure would have less traffic imposed on the participants than in a server-based structure.

In P2P with n nodes, each node must have (n-1) upstream and downstream connections, and the nodes are end user devices so arbitrary hardware in arbitrary network conditions. Especially the upstream in home networks is typically around potato Mb/s.

In a server-based networking model, end user nodes have one upstream and one downstream connection each, which is more suitable for potato hardware sitting on potato network connections. The server still has to maintain n upstream and downstream connections, but the upside is that the server is a controlled environment; It's known hardware sitting in a known network, specified to meet the requirements of the game.

P2P host handovers are non-trivial even in a controlled scenario let alone when the host just unexpectedly goes offline. Don't try to convince me otherwise unless you have actually implemented a P2P networking system yourself.

From the perspective of someone who does this for a living, P2P vs server-based is not even a contest and IPv4 vs IPv6 is the least of the worries regarding game networking bottlenecks.
 
There is no scenario where a P2P network structure would have less traffic imposed on the participants than in a server-based structure.
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Traffic is not one person but the total traffic of ALL users simultaneously playing.
Will there be traffic in one place or 100 different.
 
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