Genuine remark, I'm not sure to really understand you on this one. The planet tech render down to small flowers on the actual planets of Stanton. But CIG can't add more planets than the ones we have now in Stanton without server meshing (the server can't handle more entities).
They don't need server meshing for that to work. They need instancing and not loading the entire system into every instance. They then need a session change/hand-off mechanism (no, that's still not server meshing — the server stays fixed, the player does not). Alternatively, it needs some kind of… oh… server-side streaming, where the instance
does follow the player, but where the entire system still isn't loaded onto the server.
The server doesn't care about flowers and about what is being rendered — it cares about actors and interactables, The problem is that CI¬G have not figured out that this is an MP game and still operate on a design concept that assumes that the whole thing will work like a massive SP map, where the solution is to glue a new massive SP map onto the edges of the last one when the first is full. They incompetently believe they're limited to expand outward when their actual problem is that they need to contract inwards and to drop the idiotic notion that different session need to know about each other in various pointless ways. The problem that “server meshing” tries to solve is a problem they've created themselves by deciding to cram far too much into the grid and not making a decision beforehand what kind of rendering and data budgets they need to stay inside with in each such grid. The solution is to decide on those budgets; to create grids at an appropriate size; to
shrink the grids if need be; and to figure out once and for all what, if any (hint: next to zero) data needs to be shared across grids that would necessitate any kind of “meshing” (again, hint: if it's not next to zero, no amount of meshing will help anyway).
But more to the point:
even if they were making such a colossal and laughable mistake as having more world space be contingent on the existence of server meshing, and
even if they were such complete idiots that they couldn't figure out hot to put an interim system in place (you know… a — GASP! — load screen), this should — indeed
must — not be an impediment for starting to use the tools to produce more content. You're saying that the (supposed) lack of server meshing is why they're (supposedly) not using their (supposed) tools to start spitting out more planets. This is very clearly false even if all the suppositions were true. There is nothing about the creation of a planetary asset that requires anything on the server side of things to work, other than maybe being able to load a planet into the game world, and even with the mountain of clownshoe implementation over at CI¬G they've actually already managed that. So the one single impediment to getting new planets out has already been overcome. We know this for a fact since the game world
already includes a stellar body that shouldn't be there. There is zero reason why they couldn't keep making more and swapping them out for tested as they came off the line. There's zero reason why the artists couldn't be put to work to actually expand the available game world that would, hopefully, end up being in the game.
So the entire line of reasoning that server meshing is somehow needed for them to start using the tools is pure, distilled bovine faeces.
They're not using the tools because either the tools don't exist or they don't work (which is pretty much the same thing). If they were, they'd have free reign to hook in exponential cash by showing off new world after new world and have whales burst every credit limit to “test this if [n months]” on a rolling schedule. But they aren't, and the only reason for that is that they can't, because they don't have the prerequisite tools and processes ready. “But server meshing” is just an excuse they can roll out to trick the backers who don't understand (or who refuse to process) how software works.
From SA
As one wit pointed out "they couldn't even finish a game of tic-tac-toe
Maybe the piece they're missing to getting a working schedule that they can actually follow is the missing ‘c’ in the word itself…
Oh well, early days, and all that. And once the word pipelines are done, the pipeline pipelines will surely soon be ready too.
robertsspaceindustries.com
