Er, no. There might be other ships in the instance you are about to join. You have to establish contact with each of those other ships so that when you pop out of SC your ship is instantly aware of all the other ships, and the other ships are all aware of you. That must be seamless. It is that that takes the time, much more than loading up a few resources about the spaceport.
What if SuperCruise transitioned seamlessly - wow!
- Thread starter X-Terminator
- Start date
Well, I thought it was a bit of a stupid comment, to be frank. If in Solo mode, I can see that the matchmaking server shouldn't need to do a whole lot, and the transition could be a bit quicker/smoother. However in Group or Open you need to either start a new instance (that others might choose to join) or join an existing one each time you drop out of SC.
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I suppose the game could always cheat and load in just enough data to fill the instance, eg if 2 players end up in a system together it jumps unengaged npcs out and adds a few back in to ensure commonality between what the players see. Maybe a bit of a clunky solution but it may be "good enough" for gameplay purposes
You mean like minecraft loads chunks at a time around the player. Because that works so seamlessly in minecraft where the things its loading are mostly blocks that don't move and certainly don't shoot lasers or orbit other bodies....
You'd also require a constant stream, at the moment you can play the game using a phone internet connection in solo and send a few packets at a time. With this it would be constantly updating to see who's around you and what they are doing so anyone with a capped internet is toast after 2 hours play.
It already loads local areas in supercruise to a certain extent, only loading planet graphics when you are close enough etc (Which is why some appear as white dots if you look closely from a distance). But It does not load all the system data when you enter it a system. It only loads the data of whoever is in supercruise and where the orbital bodies are, it doesn't look at who is in the stations/RES sites etc. So initial loading would be significantly longer.
As I say its possible but would require major re-design and I think it would kill the game for all those not running top of the line pc's and internet connections.
Edit: One thing I forgot is that the server cost for running this would probably jump by about 10,000% since at the moment they can run all instances separately with packet data meaning one server can control many many systems, with the entire system as a fluid instance depending on how much you can see they'd have to have a single server per system.
One thing that would be possible is to minimise loading time by having it background load all stations within say 10Mm so it loads as you approach not as you press the supercruise drop button. Like Skyrim loads ahead of the characters walking direction. Wouldn't be seamless but would have a 1 sec load screen time instead of 5 seconds. The obvious downside is that everytime you pass a USS or SSS or Station your wasting internet and energy loading it if you don't enter it.
Final Edit: Yes its a great idea, yes it would be amazing if it could be done. But no It can't be done easily, and no it's probably not the best thing for Elite in it's current online and instancing format.
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X-Terminator
Banned
Seriously all it requires is each ships coords. What you can not see you do not need loaded. We have radar and little real use for changing range. This would make it so much better.
Our eyes perform in a similar way. Our brain choses what to leave out (no cheeky comments lol).
Our eyes perform in a similar way. Our brain choses what to leave out (no cheeky comments lol).
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No, that is not all it requires. Please read the posts that give more details than you very high level simplistic assumptions.
You seem to think that each complete system has an independent existence on a single server, and that the server constantly has up-to-date knowledge of every player in that system.
That's not how it works at all.
Each instanced location within a system exists entirely independently - every station, every supercruise instance, every spontaneously-generated instance of a Signal Source or a Resource Extraction Zone or a simple random unlocked drop-out from spurercruise, all existing independently, spread across the various servers running the game, never needing to interact directly with each other.
The only time they interact is when a player transitions to an instanced location that may already have players in it. At that point, the game checks the matchmaking servers to see whether there's an already-existing instance which has a sufficiently low player count to accommodate more, and if so, it loads the player into one of them, rather than going to the trouble of spawning a new instance.
For each new island (an instance centred around a particular location in a system) you need to receive a list of IP/port combos from the matchmaking server, coupled to a set of ship hulls/skins/loadouts and other ship-related stats.
The matchmaking server needs to maintain connection data for each player, and consult that data in order to determine a suitable list of co-inhabitants for you. It needs to refer to blocklists, wing membership, group membership, and probably many other stats that we don't have any idea about. That work is not going to get done within the time it takes to draw a few buffered frames, so there will have to be some kind of pause and transition, and that delay will be variable based upon the matchmaking server load, your connection speed and ping time. Then you have to connect to each of the inhabitants of your island in a P2P fashion before an instance can be joined.
Creating instances could be a bit quicker, but there's the setting up of a new island to consider, so maybe not.
There's more to it than a set of coordinates.
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X-Terminator
Banned
That is the way it works right now. It can be made more efficient and potentially drop a load screen by the use of Slipstreaming between the 2 within Viewing Distance.
Fine. Put together a prototype, diagrams, pseudocode etc. and pass it on to FDEV or get a job with them. There have been many layman's "solutions" posted here since Beta (and probably before). I recall one relating to a Newtonian flight model being particularly opaque.
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