Offline mode

[Comandante]

If you weren't handling data for more than one player, weren't processing the BGS at all, etc. the "offline" version of the game wouldn't be noticeably bigger on disk than the current online version.


Incorrect - it's much more abstract than that. It would take that much to store the entire galaxy in a conventional database, but they don't - one of the most impressive Frontier achievements is that generation as needed from a tiny amount of "seed" data is fast enough to look like it's all there already.

Set your bandwidth monitor on and try doing a 20kLY route plot. The bandwidth use will be in the routine bytes/sec of "just playing the game" (assuming there's no other players about), the route will plot in a matter of seconds having passed through millions of stars worth of space, and you can even do things like apply a star-class filter to it to make it have to generate more than just "a system exists at this position" without really slowing it down.

No data transferred from servers, no gigabytes cached and retrieved from disk, and all with fairly low CPU and memory usage, too. Really impressive.


Remember that Terabytes are huge. If you're just storing text-style data, mostly numbers, the occasional string of words, even getting into gigabytes is tricky.

A complete EDDB data dump for inhabited space - and that's provided in a fairly inefficient uncompressed format for ease of use - takes less than a single gigabyte. Even accounting for various hidden variables and the markets for all the new Odyssey settlements EDDB doesn't know about yet, "non-player" data isn't going to be more than a couple of gigabytes total.

Once you add in players it gets a bit bigger - >12 million accounts potentially generate quite a bit of data, but they'd still be able to have 100kb each before the data got to a terabyte - a very active account probably has something like that or even more from exploration data, but the majority won't. Of course, for an offline version, you only need your own data and a couple of megabytes won't matter much. They might be up to a terabyte or two by now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot less.

Splendid point about seed generation - it's what made the original 8 bit versions work the way they did. Storing that planet data in memory alone just wasn't possible. Truly an amazing feet given the memory those poor little beasties had. Anyone interested should check youtube and look for the John Snow video named "The Making of ELITE (Computer Videogame)". It's a really, really good watch.

Completely 100% agree about what an offline mode would require - in that, from our side, it's little data. The only thing I doubt is de-coupling the current code base. Whether FD decided they didn't want offline mode because they wanted to 'guard' their code/server data, or that technically it didn't fit in with how they were developing - is irrelevant (for us). It's just that we're stuck with what we've got. I suppose what I am saying is it's less about the TB involved here and more about the wrapping of code that manages that data - it's been built for that in mind, if you see what I am saying.

Worse: let's assume that, on paper, a team could sort this out in a very short (== cost effective) way - it's really down to FD. Which is why it didn't happen from the start, and even less likely to happen now.

So, theoretical ease will never be trumped by the practicalities involved and at the top we have the locked gate that is the decisions of FD. And I want it known that this breaks my heart because, heck, I would love an offline mode!

 

[Pralines]

Incorrect - it's much more abstract than that. It would take that much to store the entire galaxy in a conventional database, but they don't - one of the most impressive Frontier achievements is that generation as needed from a tiny amount of "seed" data is fast enough to look like it's all there already.

Set your bandwidth monitor on and try doing a 20kLY route plot. The bandwidth use will be in the routine bytes/sec of "just playing the game" (assuming there's no other players about), the route will plot in a matter of seconds having passed through millions of stars worth of space, and you can even do things like apply a star-class filter to it to make it have to generate more than just "a system exists at this position" without really slowing it down.

No data transferred from servers, no gigabytes cached and retrieved from disk, and all with fairly low CPU and memory usage, too. Really impressive.

ok, so you mean that even the X,Y,Z coordinates of a system are dynamically calculated only when a cmdr enter the system (ou plan a route through this system) ?

and these coordinates (among other data) are then stored on disk (when i visited the system) for future usage ?

so if i plan a 22 ly route, the system (local or server) only has to generate a few hundreds of coordinates ?

at the moment, with only 0.05% of the galaxy explored, an offline mode seems much more feasible

 

[DrinkyBird]

ok, so you mean that even the X,Y,Z coordinates of a system are dynamically calculated only when a cmdr enter the system (ou plan a route through this system) ?

and these coordinates (among other data) are then stored on disk (when i visited the system) for future usage ?

so if i plan a 22 ly route, the system (local or server) only has to generate a few hundreds of coordinates ?

at the moment, with only 0.05% of the galaxy explored, an offline mode seems much more feasible

The system's main star and coordinates are generated when you see it in the galaxy map. Then the system is generated in much more detail (bodies, stations) when you jump there.
None of this is stored on disk, except for preset systems (like real-world stars), bodies, and PoIs, which are part of the game's files, or spawned by the server.

 

[BL1P]

I belive even rings are gernerated each time you enter them.
Its just that the gereration is so perfect all the roids are in the same place everytime. For that ring seed.

Cool

 

[Pralines]

The system's main star and coordinates are generated when you see it in the galaxy map. Then the system is generated in much more detail (bodies, stations) when you jump there.
None of this is stored on disk, except for preset systems (like real-world stars), bodies, and PoIs, which are part of the game's files, or spawned by the server.

presets systems or sectors (with variable densities of systems) to give the in game galaxy the same double helix (spiral ?) shape as the real one (supposedly)

 

[DrinkyBird]

presets systems or sectors (with variable densities of systems) to give the in game galaxy the same double helix (spiral ?) shape as the real one (supposedly)

The shape and density of the galaxy is formed from various texture maps, not preset systems.
This old Discovery Scanner stream is still an accurate overview of how the galaxy, systems, non-landable bodies, and the old pre-4.0 landables are generated:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz3nhCykZNw

 

[Ian Doncaster]

ok, so you mean that even the X,Y,Z coordinates of a system are dynamically calculated only when a cmdr enter the system (ou plan a route through this system) ?

Yes

and these coordinates (among other data) are then stored on disk (when i visited the system) for future usage ?

Coordinates, no, almost certainly not. They've been generated once when they were needed, they can do it again every time they're needed.

They will need to store server-side which bodies in the system you've detected, scanned, mapped, footed, etc. but that can be against the ID64. Still, even with maximum efficiency that's three bytes per body for every commander which knows about it at all. That particular dataset is probably bigger than everything else put together by a huge margin.

at the moment, with only 0.05% of the galaxy explored, an offline mode seems much more feasible

No need for an offline mode to have the "first discovery" data at all - after all, who's going to discover it second?

That's presumably the sort of thing they were getting at pre-release when they announced they weren't having the offline mode: ED offline isn't just ED online but with a static dataset instead of the servers - or if it was, lots of it wouldn't work very well - the entire design of large parts of it relies on other players being around (though rarely seen) to keep the simulation moving.

 

[Comandante]

the entire design of large parts of it relies on other players being around (though rarely seen) to keep the simulation moving.

Please don't - this is a recent raw (and negative) memory for me.

I flew to Shinrarta for the first time since Odyssey landed and went in in Mobius group on Saturday night (possibly one of the busier times in the game).

For the first time (for myself) - EVER - Jameson Memorial was empty of hollow squares/triangles. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.

 

[Dash]

I vaguely remember them saying that it wouldn't be feasible to make available after they abandon it. Certainly in terms of an offline copy.

I guess the most feasible thing would be to strip back the online content aspects, make the markets static and then donate the running of the stellarforge bit to a community funded group. That in itself would take a lot of dev work, which I'm unconvinced a company (now publicly traded) would expend the resource on something they're abandoning.

 

[Walter2]

The entire design of large parts of [the game] relies on other players being around (though rarely seen) to keep the simulation moving.

Wouldn't a huge amount of code have to be written just to effectively handle a dynamic human-focused galaxy? If no player visits a system, nothing changes - no expansions, wars, elections, public holidays . . .

Any simple bias built into a randomly-processed BGS to produce faction States would be so obvious it wouldn't be worth playing; an unsophisticated RNG effect would end up with all factions regressing to the mean, as happens now with itinerant traders and bounty hunters who aren't interacting with the BGS to change a system's story.

A software-driven BGS would have to create changes in every inhabited system on a daily basis, not just react programmatically to the relatively few human-driven effects.

Without a functioning BGS, what is there left to do in the long term on a stand-alone galaxy?
Given the current state of home hardware - and the wide differences in capabilities - is a functioning and meaningful offline galaxy even possible?

 

[Old Duck]

I flew to Shinrarta for the first time since Odyssey landed and went in in Mobius group on Saturday night (possibly one of the busier times in the game).

For the first time (for myself) - EVER - Jameson Memorial was empty of hollow squares/triangles. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.

I was just there this Monday morning, and there were four other CMDRs beside myself at the station. Not in Mobius, mind you, but rather in Horizons 3.8 in Open.

I guess Horizons 3.8 isn't as dead as we were all led to believe.

Given the current state of home hardware - and the wide differences in capabilities - is a functioning and meaningful offline galaxy even possible?

Personally I'd prefer an open-source private server over a strict offline mode, with the caveat that you could run the server on the same machine as the client if your computer had the horsepower (something I used to do back in the day when I toyed around with Minecraft). Give me access to a private BGS database, and I could write my own simulated traffic and trade AI. I could also reboot the Bubble entirely - it would be awesome IMO to start with just Sol and a few core worlds being populated, especially if I were playing "offline", but with the ability for factions to branch out and colonize new systems over time. There's a whole lot of untapped potential on the server-side, if such a server were made available to players and was moddable (either that or give us the API so we can write our own BGS server).

But as someone else said earlier, I don't see this happening as long as the game is hosted on official servers, because Frontier isn't going to want to lose players to private servers. All I can hope for is that someday, when Frontier pulls the plug on the servers, they release one last update to the client that allows players to choose their own server. That and the server APIs, of course.

 

[LaveRadio]

Oh My Goodness, It's ages since we had an Offline thread. It's quite a painful subject for some of the old kickstarter backers because one of the reasons they backed was because there would be an offline mode. I think the plan was for the offline mode would be updated occasionally from the servers for things like factions names and states but like has been mentioned before, it was pulled not long before launch and there followed a lot of accusations of Bait and Switch, with DB-OBE apologising saying they should have announced the drop of offline mode earlier when it was apparent that it couldn't be done.

They said that after Elite: Dangerous was considered done and they were going to switch the servers off, they were going to make the server side code available for people to create their own servers, which I guess could be run privately or even shared out to other players. However, I personally think the game still has legs (Obvious Odyssey Pun) and there are still some obvious places they could take the game for quite some time, So I don't think we have to worry about Sunsetting the servers just yet!

Colin (who doesn't have access to his account at the moment).

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Anything is theoretically possible; the last statements Frontier made about the possibility were a very long time ago and can roughly be summarised as:
- not while the online version is running
- it'd be nice to make available after that but no guarantees

hmmmm i could be wrong but that is not how i remember it..... I thought DB specifically said if the servers went dark the code WOULD be released to allow players to play offline or set up private servers BUT it was possible the shear amount of data would mean it may not be practical for players to be able to use it in any meaningful way.

 

[Arioch]

This is what David Braben said in Newsletter #50 regarding offline being dropped:

“What is Frontier's plan for when the servers shut down?
We do not plan to shut the servers down, but understand it is a reasonable question. We are at the beginning of the game not the end and are focused on creating a game that we hope will be played for many years in the future. We do plan to take regular archives of the game and the servers, to preserve the game for the future.

Could the server code be released publicly some day when the servers are shut down?
Yes. This is something we would do if for whatever reason we cannot keep the game going.”

 

[Walter2]

I could also reboot the Bubble entirely - it would be awesome IMO to start with just Sol and a few core worlds being populated, especially if I were playing "offline", but with the ability for factions to branch out and colonize new systems over time.

Elite: Beginning

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Wouldn't a huge amount of code have to be written just to effectively handle a dynamic human-focused galaxy? If no player visits a system, nothing changes - no expansions, wars, elections, public holidays . . .

Sure. But I don't think it's that difficult a problem in principle or in hardware requirements - it's something lots of turn-based strategy / civ-builder / politics sim games do and have been doing for a long time. I handle a substantial amount of data and processing - certainly enough in terms of magnitude to cover a single-player BGS - for my Census project, and that's running on a cheap server with far less power available than my desktop PC.

That's not the same as "it would be anyone's priority to code it as opposed to leaving it at 'last recorded state'" in those circumstances, of course.

hmmmm i could be wrong but that is not how i remember it..... I thought DB specifically said if the servers went dark the code WOULD be released to allow players to play offline or set up private servers BUT it was possible the shear amount of data would mean it may not be practical for players to be able to use it in any meaningful way.

The exact wording varies - the quote in https://www.eurogamer.net/david-braben-responds-to-outcry-over-elite-dangerous-ditched-offline-mode is the one I was paraphrasing and is somewhat less committal than the one in Newsletter 50 - but regardless, even with the best intentions at the time there are many ways, some outside Frontier's control, that it won't happen, so I think it's fair to summarise as "no guarantees" regardless.

 

[imski]

I belive even rings are gernerated each time you enter them.
Its just that the gereration is so perfect all the roids are in the same place everytime. For that ring seed.

Cool

That's why relogging for mining was a thing. The regeneration would respawn all the valuable roids

 

[Koen]

Here is Braben's 2014 post on the matter: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ons-at-4pm-gmt-utc.60284/page-11#post-1024593.

 

[Ettanin]

Here is Braben's 2014 post on the matter: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ons-at-4pm-gmt-utc.60284/page-11#post-1024593.

'Plan to'. Would be nice if they confirm or deny whether such archiving is actually happening. I doubt it, since quite a number of core developers had rotated elsewhere by now.

 

[Rubbernuke]

When 3.8 is eventually killed off maybe FD could use its carcass for offline mode?