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StarCitizen Server Meshing Architecture

103 points by password-234 3y ago

nicechianti 3y ago
[dead]
danpalmer 3y ago
How does this relate to the technology that Improbable[^0] have built? I gather that their core tech is a massively distributed object graph designed to support the sort of interactions necessary for an MMO game to operate a global instance rather than shard worlds. Improbable seem to have gone a bit... off the rails(?) in recent years, diving into Web3, metaverse, and defence contracting, but I assume the core tech is still there. [^0]: https://www.improbable.io/ https://www.improbable.io/
- Negitivefrags 3y ago
  Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry. I’m not exactly an expert in them or anything, but the last time I looked at them at all (admittedly many years ago) the whole concept of what they do seemed both very expensive and mostly useless for real games.
  - Thaxll 3y ago
    It's not useless tech but they ran out of steam and most likely missed the train.
  - floren 3y ago
    > Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry. More so than Star Citizen?
- postexitus 3y ago
  As someone who glimpsed inside for a little bit during the first days - it's a curse of having too many resources, or too few pressure points. They were well funded from the beginning (read their founding history) and got a lot of additional money throughout the way (well, including but not limited to SoftBank) - so they were free to explore their vision, and gosh did they take their time to do it. They had good ideas coupled with a great engineering team, but the problems they were trying to solve did not exist in the real world - or at the very least - the problems were not important enough that game companies wanted to throw money at it. 1M concurrent online players looks good on paper - but who really cares to play such a game? Or who wants to pay exuberant prices for it when you can have the same amount of fun through sharded servers. So, although their vision materialized to an extent (they had the means to do it), and they had the foresight to know they had to support the engine with enough tooling and partnerships and what not and they built that as well, they were not able to make money out of it. If they set out to set problems that really existed in the world (gaming or otherwise) they could have been profitable by now. Instead, they panicked, restructured and pivoted into the latest hype(s) - they still have the means to go on, but with that culture and "baggage" (they are not nimble like a startup anymore) I give them less than 10% chance to turn a profit ever.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Ah. Lack of Product-Market fit. Classic. Thanks!
    - pjc50 3y ago
      They had an incredible pmf - they could sell virtual spaceships in a game that didn't exist! People were hurling money at what they thought the product was going to be. It's just a question of how well they actually delivered on that promise.
      - danpalmer 3y ago
        My comment was referring to Improbable, not Star Citizen. I'd agree that SC seems to have reasonable product-market fit, but Improbable clearly doesn't if the parent comment is to be believed.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        That's not an example of product market fit, as the actual product: the game, never existed. The "product" in this case is a dream. "Star Citizen" means something very different to pretty much anyone who has thrown money at them.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  Unity ECS, which should really be called Unity “2”, sort of obsoleted Improbable’s approach. It is a base on which massive MMOs can be built correctly without the R&D cost of, well, inventing your own ECS architecture. I don’t know if their Unreal offering is comparable to what they were doing with unreal.
tgtweak 3y ago
The fact this is not done by members of the dev team is pretty impressive both from the fact that they share this much information freely (on their youtube dev vlog?) and that someone was able to recreate the architecture semi-faithfully with that same info, including over-time.
neals 3y ago
I'm vaguely familiar with these topics. StarCitizen is a controversial game, if I'm not mistaken? What's this website about?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Back-end server technology, they want to make it a persistent MMO with thousands of concurrent players and effectively infinite objects in space. But this MMO is the most expensive video game of all time (although there's others that have had more invested in them over time, I'm thinking of World of Warcraft or GTA 5, possibly upcoming titles like GTA 6), therefore the server technology also looks like some of the fanciest of all time. They have 1100 employees working on a game that's been in development for over 10 years now, funded to the tune of $600 million so far, with about 50-60 million still coming in every year just from pre-orders / donations / in-game purchases / ships for a possible game that may come out at some point.
  - TheRoque 3y ago
    The majority of the team is actually said to be working on the "solo" project which is Squadron 42. So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace. Funny thing is, there hasn't been a single footage of SQ42 in 5 years, and you can't even buy the game anymore. There's a roadmap that says that the game is nearly done, but well, they seem to say this all the time.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      >So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace. Except it shouldn't take almost 1000 people more than ten years to make a single player space game.
      - TheRoque 3y ago
        I would say it can take an infinite amount of time, if you have bad management, scope creep (or no defined scope at all), high turnover, obsoleted core technologies, and if people give you money even if you don't do anything anyways
swarnie 3y ago
$600M buys you a lot of TBDs apparently. If this game ever actually comes out and doesn't cure at least one type of cancer the weirdest online people are going to be furious.
- ojkelly 3y ago
  Sure not everyone who bought the game or a ship at this stage has enjoyed it, but a lot of us have. Even in its unfinished state there’s a lot of fun to be had. And, part of the game at this stage is watching it develop. The amount raised/sold so far is massive, but people keep buying because they’re getting something out of it.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    What features are built and playable at this point? By its nature, it's hard for me to disentangle the aspirational marketing from the actually-available content, and there's so much critical content about SC over the last decade that it's hard to know which criticisms still apply. What can you actually do in-game?
    - BowBun 3y ago
      There are nearly a dozen mission types that net you money and gear that you use to build your inventory + fleet. There are bounty systems that interact with your ability to pirate others and commit crime. There is mining, cave exploration to track down bad guys, literally hundreds of custom-designed ships that are fun to discover and drive for their various missions. And then a whole layer of social emergent gameplay on top of it. I know I left a few comments like this on this thread already, but I'm a big fan of the game. As a game dev, I have a lot of respect for their ambition, tech, and recent transparency. I'm not sure why people always fixate on the money - people invest and donate to worse things. RSI isn't predatory about it, they're very honest about the progress and expectations (especially recently)
    - sickofparadox 3y ago
      There's a fully simulated solar system (Stanton) in game right now with 5 (I think?) populated planets that have cities and towns to visit and more space stations and moons to explore in first person. As for missions, there is fully functional economy with trade or smuggling, salvage, bounty hunting, and piracy. There is also a single player mode focused on dogfighting, and a basically unpopulated pvp FPS mode. There are upwards of 60 ships and 10ish ground vehicles to use in game alongside a small arsenal of small arms and pretty much all of them can be bought with in game currency or obtained in game through other means, though the servers do occasionally wipe when major updates happen (things you bought IRL are not wiped).
yuppiepuppie 3y ago
I know the words on this site. But I dont know what they mean. "Quantum Economy Scaling", "Subsumption AI", "pCache". Can someone ELI5? ~Im assuming this has to do with a service mesh and kubernetes of some sort. But I'm a bit lost.~ Edit: Ah! Seems like this is a game. But I still have no idea what any of this means :)
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Star Citizen is a big planned online MMO. This page is about their current and planned back-end server architecture, where they want to have thousands of players online in a single virtual world, along with all of the random items - from ships to bits of trash - that float around in space visible to everyone. Ambitious and such; the only other game I know of that tried it was Eve Online, which has tens of thousands of players in the same world, but which is limited to hundreds of players that can actually see each other.
  - causi 3y ago
    You sure about that? There are several EVE battles that involved multiple thousands of players at once.
    - sickofparadox 3y ago
      Those battles all take place under .25 or lower time dilation so that the servers can handle the load. Star Citizen plans on having a massive player count per shard under full normal time.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - causi 3y ago
        RSI's "plans" are less reliable than a politician's campaign promises.
      - Guvante 3y ago
RNAlfons 3y ago
Judging from the games performance, this looks probably better than what their dev team has.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  The game was always built for "future computers", but then, that was ten years ago. They're really putting a lot of money and effort into reporting on their progress, after a few years of radio silence. But then, they have a lot of money to burn.
- mattanimation 3y ago
  indeed, haven't been able to finish a mission yet due to crash after bug after crash.
  - madsmith 3y ago
    I’m running and finishing missions daily. There are bugs, yes, but it is imminently playable.
    - password-234 3y ago
      I also do missions daily without much disruptions. As long as the servers aren't overwhelmed its fine
- BowBun 3y ago
  Have you built anything comparable? It's in alpha, making performance/presentation comments seems really out of place. If you were well-informed on the project, you would know that they intentionally put performance optimizations on the backburner, because optimizing tech they intended to replace is not a good use of time. Besides, in the last 6 months performance has drastically improved, as anyone that actually plays will tell you. I play regularly, do a variety of delivery/bounty/mining/recovery missions, explore planets/stations, have funny interactions surrounding all of that with other players, etc. Rome wasn't built in a day.
hotdogscout 3y ago
What is the state of the art for MMO servers?
jalino23 3y ago
got addicted to SC this year, spent an embarrasing amount on it. this Server Meshing they're planning is impressive if implemented
- tiledjinn 3y ago
  "impressive if implemented" is a nice nutshell for star citizen, which on the whole isn't terribly impressive.
  - password-234 3y ago
    Its pretty impressive if you go in with an unbiased outlook IF you have the hardware to run it and you're a scifi nerd its mindblowing the first time around, even after 3000 hours i still have moments when i'm mindblown. (Recently had a tank that shot my friends ship from the sky during an ingame event)
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      > (Recently had a tank that shot my friends ship from the sky during an ingame event) Except this isn't actually impressive if you've been playing games. Supreme Commander lets you block artillery shells with your planes if you are lucky, with zero scripted event, and that game released in 2007, is single threaded, is an RTS, and allows you to play 8 vs 8 games where EACH PLAYER can control 1000 units and play on a 50km by 50km map. Now that is impressive IMO. Of course, if you attempted those things with a 2007 computer, you get about 2fps, but it works great nowadays. Also, that company was never handed half a billion on a silver platter before releasing anything. More to your point, here are a bunch of other games that let you shoot a plane out of the sky with a tank, from before star citizen, that show just how mundane of a situation that is: Arma 2, Battlefield (all of them), Planetside 2, Damn Halo!, Various airplane and helicopter wargames from before the millennium, various tank games from before the millennium etc etc etc. Hell, Atari's Battlezone from 1980s had helicopters as a target for your tank!
      - password-234 3y ago
JJMalina 3y ago
Over the past two years I've played maybe 10-20 hours of SC. I paid $45 for the starter ship and then made some money moving boxes and doing bounties to upgrade my ship and then have enough to buy a bigger one. The game is pretty fun if you're used to MMO style grinding. The only problem is that during the past two years there have been many server state wipes so you lose everything except for the starter ship you purchased. On top of that there have been intermittent stability issues which would cause you to disconnect in the middle of doing something. It seems that it's become much more stable. So yeah, you're at minimum paying $45 for a game that's alpha, which is questionable value. My justification for this was that there isn't really any other game on the market that gives you the same experience. Starfield is releasing soon, but that's all single player, and I don't think it has space flight sim combat like SC does. Despite this, it's still a fun game with a lot of things to do, however it will not be everyone's cup of tea. Check out https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainBerks https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainBerks and https://www.youtube.com/@Morphologis https://www.youtube.com/@Morphologis for a better idea. I really hope server meshing pans out, but I'm skeptical that RSI has the chops to pull it off. The number of objects in SC is huge and the world is seamless. This not something that's entirely new though. EVE Online has meshed servers for persistence of tens of thousands of concurrent players in a single universe successfully for decades now.
- mattmanser 3y ago
  There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for. All have their faults, but there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    > There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for. None of those offer all the things as SC even at it's current state. Elite Dangerous is closest and even then they're just different games inherently. > there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware. You can download and play Star Citizen right now. It is, by definition, not vaporware.
Thaxll 3y ago
And yet there is nothing really impressive imo in Star Citizen tech wise, the server is still slow, fps are low, not many people on screen and a lot of issues. You should do tech improvment to enhance the gameplay, and currently I don't see many gameplay improvements that have real value. Starfield maybe the first space opera fantasty that will deliver.
- tiledjinn 3y ago
  Escape Velocity delivered on the fantasy just fine.
  - exo-pla-net 3y ago
    There's an open source successor to Escape Velocity that's fun and continues to grow: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky
crooked-v 3y ago
I'm still waiting for the single-player Wing Commander-alike game that was supposed to be the whole reason to bother buying into this Star Citizen thing in the first place.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- netule 3y ago
  It's the reason I insta-backed in October of 2012 but I haven't heard a status update in years.
  - password-234 3y ago
    There will be news about it next month during the annual citizencon. Whether its good news I cannot say though.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Did you watch the kickstarter video? It was so clear that they did not have a good plan to achieve their goals, and very obvious Chris was obsessed with extremely minor technical details that didn't matter. I loved the Wing Commander games, but they had people in charge who could actually direct a project. Chris Roberts can't get out of his own head. The video was a clear indication that he was going to ruin it.
    - netule 3y ago
      I backed via RSI before the Kickstarter went live.
VohuMana 3y ago
This is really cool, I play Star Citizen a bit every time they release a new version just to see what they are up to. Persistent Entity Streaming was tech they were working on for a long time, it had a bit of a rocky launch but seems to be pretty smooth now. Crazy to see how much went into shipping that. For anyone curious what PES does, when a player places an object somewhere or for example their ship explodes, that object will remain on the server in the same place even if you disconnect. Seems fairly simple from a user perspective but required a lot of changes to make work apparently.
jmyeet 3y ago
I'm honestly stunned how often I see the pattern repeat of telling the users they are wrong [1], particularly in this MMO space that I'd dearly love to see more games in. World of Warcraft ("WoW") is the elephant in the room. It killed the previous elephant (Everquest aka EQ) but has reigned supreme in a shrinking space for 18 years. It partially shrank because it used to have a social component that has mostly been replaced by social media but there are other factors too. But what I scratch my head at is all the bad competitors that came afterwards and predictably failed because they made product decisions. The most common one is focusing on PvP. MMO is an interesting genre because only something like 10% of the population at best cares about PvP. So right off the bat you've reduced your potential market by 90% without doing a thing. But no, you get assured that "our PvP is so good, casuals will want to PvP". There's another factor here too: in a persistent world where your power increases, PvP players fundamentally want an unfair fight. They want to be rewarded for various grinds. Contrast this with deathmatch and battle royale games where everyone is basically equal other than player skill. Anyway, Star Citizen has now raised (and spent) over half a billion dollars on the same bad premise of PvP. Server meshing aims to create a single persistent universe but PvP, which most will want to avoid, is fundamentally unfair because the people with the best ships, paid for with real money, will win. This is such a fundamentally bad and limiting design, it's hard to comprehend. Imagine instead SC had defined a small core game loop and gone for a Sea of Thieves like world, both PvP and non-PvP. SoT has like 8-12 players on a server and they can PvP. Interestingly, a lot of players don't want this so they monopolize a server and agree not to PvP. Even in WoW, which has faction PvP, the players have basically voted out world PvP by concentrating a single faction on each server with very few exceptions. But SC is doing things like server meshing when after a decade they still don't have a core game loop. I occasionally check in on the SC roadmap and progress. Not because I'm interested in playing but because I like watching a car wreck in super slow motion. Constant missed deadlines, new (incomplete) features being promised (and a few added), more promised features to fix the bad previous features and so on. It's a disaster. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik
- kcb 3y ago
  Only the biggest MMOs, really just WoW and FF14, can deliver PvE content at a pace even close to satisfying players. It's expensive to develop and players can only play the same content PvE for a limited amount of time. It's just not possible for anyone but the largest dev teams. I would like to see an MMO that really focused on a wide range of gameplay systems rather than content. It's been attempted before, one example I think is Archeage, but unfortunately ruined by monetization.

103 points by password-234 3y ago

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How does this relate to the technology that Improbable[^0] have built? I gather that their core tech is a massively distributed object graph designed to support the sort of interactions necessary for an MMO game to operate a global instance rather than shard worlds. Improbable seem to have gone a bit... off the rails(?) in recent years, diving into Web3, metaverse, and defence contracting, but I assume the core tech is still there. [^0]: https://www.improbable.io/ https://www.improbable.io/

Negitivefrags 3y ago
Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry. I’m not exactly an expert in them or anything, but the last time I looked at them at all (admittedly many years ago) the whole concept of what they do seemed both very expensive and mostly useless for real games.
- Thaxll 3y ago
  It's not useless tech but they ran out of steam and most likely missed the train.
- floren 3y ago
  > Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry. More so than Star Citizen?
postexitus 3y ago
As someone who glimpsed inside for a little bit during the first days - it's a curse of having too many resources, or too few pressure points. They were well funded from the beginning (read their founding history) and got a lot of additional money throughout the way (well, including but not limited to SoftBank) - so they were free to explore their vision, and gosh did they take their time to do it. They had good ideas coupled with a great engineering team, but the problems they were trying to solve did not exist in the real world - or at the very least - the problems were not important enough that game companies wanted to throw money at it. 1M concurrent online players looks good on paper - but who really cares to play such a game? Or who wants to pay exuberant prices for it when you can have the same amount of fun through sharded servers. So, although their vision materialized to an extent (they had the means to do it), and they had the foresight to know they had to support the engine with enough tooling and partnerships and what not and they built that as well, they were not able to make money out of it. If they set out to set problems that really existed in the world (gaming or otherwise) they could have been profitable by now. Instead, they panicked, restructured and pivoted into the latest hype(s) - they still have the means to go on, but with that culture and "baggage" (they are not nimble like a startup anymore) I give them less than 10% chance to turn a profit ever.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Ah. Lack of Product-Market fit. Classic. Thanks!
  - pjc50 3y ago
    They had an incredible pmf - they could sell virtual spaceships in a game that didn't exist! People were hurling money at what they thought the product was going to be. It's just a question of how well they actually delivered on that promise.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      My comment was referring to Improbable, not Star Citizen. I'd agree that SC seems to have reasonable product-market fit, but Improbable clearly doesn't if the parent comment is to be believed.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      That's not an example of product market fit, as the actual product: the game, never existed. The "product" in this case is a dream. "Star Citizen" means something very different to pretty much anyone who has thrown money at them.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
Unity ECS, which should really be called Unity “2”, sort of obsoleted Improbable’s approach. It is a base on which massive MMOs can be built correctly without the R&D cost of, well, inventing your own ECS architecture. I don’t know if their Unreal offering is comparable to what they were doing with unreal.

tgtweak 3y ago

The fact this is not done by members of the dev team is pretty impressive both from the fact that they share this much information freely (on their youtube dev vlog?) and that someone was able to recreate the architecture semi-faithfully with that same info, including over-time.

neals 3y ago

I'm vaguely familiar with these topics. StarCitizen is a controversial game, if I'm not mistaken? What's this website about?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Back-end server technology, they want to make it a persistent MMO with thousands of concurrent players and effectively infinite objects in space. But this MMO is the most expensive video game of all time (although there's others that have had more invested in them over time, I'm thinking of World of Warcraft or GTA 5, possibly upcoming titles like GTA 6), therefore the server technology also looks like some of the fanciest of all time. They have 1100 employees working on a game that's been in development for over 10 years now, funded to the tune of $600 million so far, with about 50-60 million still coming in every year just from pre-orders / donations / in-game purchases / ships for a possible game that may come out at some point.
- TheRoque 3y ago
  The majority of the team is actually said to be working on the "solo" project which is Squadron 42. So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace. Funny thing is, there hasn't been a single footage of SQ42 in 5 years, and you can't even buy the game anymore. There's a roadmap that says that the game is nearly done, but well, they seem to say this all the time.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace. Except it shouldn't take almost 1000 people more than ten years to make a single player space game.
    - TheRoque 3y ago
      I would say it can take an infinite amount of time, if you have bad management, scope creep (or no defined scope at all), high turnover, obsoleted core technologies, and if people give you money even if you don't do anything anyways

swarnie 3y ago

$600M buys you a lot of TBDs apparently. If this game ever actually comes out and doesn't cure at least one type of cancer the weirdest online people are going to be furious.

ojkelly 3y ago
Sure not everyone who bought the game or a ship at this stage has enjoyed it, but a lot of us have. Even in its unfinished state there’s a lot of fun to be had. And, part of the game at this stage is watching it develop. The amount raised/sold so far is massive, but people keep buying because they’re getting something out of it.
- lolinder 3y ago
  What features are built and playable at this point? By its nature, it's hard for me to disentangle the aspirational marketing from the actually-available content, and there's so much critical content about SC over the last decade that it's hard to know which criticisms still apply. What can you actually do in-game?
  - BowBun 3y ago
    There are nearly a dozen mission types that net you money and gear that you use to build your inventory + fleet. There are bounty systems that interact with your ability to pirate others and commit crime. There is mining, cave exploration to track down bad guys, literally hundreds of custom-designed ships that are fun to discover and drive for their various missions. And then a whole layer of social emergent gameplay on top of it. I know I left a few comments like this on this thread already, but I'm a big fan of the game. As a game dev, I have a lot of respect for their ambition, tech, and recent transparency. I'm not sure why people always fixate on the money - people invest and donate to worse things. RSI isn't predatory about it, they're very honest about the progress and expectations (especially recently)
  - sickofparadox 3y ago
    There's a fully simulated solar system (Stanton) in game right now with 5 (I think?) populated planets that have cities and towns to visit and more space stations and moons to explore in first person. As for missions, there is fully functional economy with trade or smuggling, salvage, bounty hunting, and piracy. There is also a single player mode focused on dogfighting, and a basically unpopulated pvp FPS mode. There are upwards of 60 ships and 10ish ground vehicles to use in game alongside a small arsenal of small arms and pretty much all of them can be bought with in game currency or obtained in game through other means, though the servers do occasionally wipe when major updates happen (things you bought IRL are not wiped).

yuppiepuppie 3y ago

I know the words on this site. But I dont know what they mean. "Quantum Economy Scaling", "Subsumption AI", "pCache". Can someone ELI5? ~Im assuming this has to do with a service mesh and kubernetes of some sort. But I'm a bit lost.~ Edit: Ah! Seems like this is a game. But I still have no idea what any of this means :)

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Star Citizen is a big planned online MMO. This page is about their current and planned back-end server architecture, where they want to have thousands of players online in a single virtual world, along with all of the random items - from ships to bits of trash - that float around in space visible to everyone. Ambitious and such; the only other game I know of that tried it was Eve Online, which has tens of thousands of players in the same world, but which is limited to hundreds of players that can actually see each other.
- causi 3y ago
  You sure about that? There are several EVE battles that involved multiple thousands of players at once.
  - sickofparadox 3y ago
    Those battles all take place under .25 or lower time dilation so that the servers can handle the load. Star Citizen plans on having a massive player count per shard under full normal time.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - causi 3y ago
      RSI's "plans" are less reliable than a politician's campaign promises.
    - Guvante 3y ago

RNAlfons 3y ago

Judging from the games performance, this looks probably better than what their dev team has.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
The game was always built for "future computers", but then, that was ten years ago. They're really putting a lot of money and effort into reporting on their progress, after a few years of radio silence. But then, they have a lot of money to burn.
mattanimation 3y ago
indeed, haven't been able to finish a mission yet due to crash after bug after crash.
- madsmith 3y ago
  I’m running and finishing missions daily. There are bugs, yes, but it is imminently playable.
  - password-234 3y ago
    I also do missions daily without much disruptions. As long as the servers aren't overwhelmed its fine
BowBun 3y ago
Have you built anything comparable? It's in alpha, making performance/presentation comments seems really out of place. If you were well-informed on the project, you would know that they intentionally put performance optimizations on the backburner, because optimizing tech they intended to replace is not a good use of time. Besides, in the last 6 months performance has drastically improved, as anyone that actually plays will tell you. I play regularly, do a variety of delivery/bounty/mining/recovery missions, explore planets/stations, have funny interactions surrounding all of that with other players, etc. Rome wasn't built in a day.

hotdogscout 3y ago

What is the state of the art for MMO servers?

jalino23 3y ago

got addicted to SC this year, spent an embarrasing amount on it. this Server Meshing they're planning is impressive if implemented

tiledjinn 3y ago
"impressive if implemented" is a nice nutshell for star citizen, which on the whole isn't terribly impressive.
- password-234 3y ago
  Its pretty impressive if you go in with an unbiased outlook IF you have the hardware to run it and you're a scifi nerd its mindblowing the first time around, even after 3000 hours i still have moments when i'm mindblown. (Recently had a tank that shot my friends ship from the sky during an ingame event)
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    > (Recently had a tank that shot my friends ship from the sky during an ingame event) Except this isn't actually impressive if you've been playing games. Supreme Commander lets you block artillery shells with your planes if you are lucky, with zero scripted event, and that game released in 2007, is single threaded, is an RTS, and allows you to play 8 vs 8 games where EACH PLAYER can control 1000 units and play on a 50km by 50km map. Now that is impressive IMO. Of course, if you attempted those things with a 2007 computer, you get about 2fps, but it works great nowadays. Also, that company was never handed half a billion on a silver platter before releasing anything. More to your point, here are a bunch of other games that let you shoot a plane out of the sky with a tank, from before star citizen, that show just how mundane of a situation that is: Arma 2, Battlefield (all of them), Planetside 2, Damn Halo!, Various airplane and helicopter wargames from before the millennium, various tank games from before the millennium etc etc etc. Hell, Atari's Battlezone from 1980s had helicopters as a target for your tank!
    - password-234 3y ago

JJMalina 3y ago

Over the past two years I've played maybe 10-20 hours of SC. I paid $45 for the starter ship and then made some money moving boxes and doing bounties to upgrade my ship and then have enough to buy a bigger one. The game is pretty fun if you're used to MMO style grinding. The only problem is that during the past two years there have been many server state wipes so you lose everything except for the starter ship you purchased. On top of that there have been intermittent stability issues which would cause you to disconnect in the middle of doing something. It seems that it's become much more stable. So yeah, you're at minimum paying $45 for a game that's alpha, which is questionable value. My justification for this was that there isn't really any other game on the market that gives you the same experience. Starfield is releasing soon, but that's all single player, and I don't think it has space flight sim combat like SC does. Despite this, it's still a fun game with a lot of things to do, however it will not be everyone's cup of tea. Check out https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainBerks https://www.youtube.com/@CaptainBerks and https://www.youtube.com/@Morphologis https://www.youtube.com/@Morphologis for a better idea. I really hope server meshing pans out, but I'm skeptical that RSI has the chops to pull it off. The number of objects in SC is huge and the world is seamless. This not something that's entirely new though. EVE Online has meshed servers for persistence of tens of thousands of concurrent players in a single universe successfully for decades now.

mattmanser 3y ago
There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for. All have their faults, but there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  > There's Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, as well as Eve online depending on what you're looking for. None of those offer all the things as SC even at it's current state. Elite Dangerous is closest and even then they're just different games inherently. > there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware. You can download and play Star Citizen right now. It is, by definition, not vaporware.

Thaxll 3y ago

And yet there is nothing really impressive imo in Star Citizen tech wise, the server is still slow, fps are low, not many people on screen and a lot of issues. You should do tech improvment to enhance the gameplay, and currently I don't see many gameplay improvements that have real value. Starfield maybe the first space opera fantasty that will deliver.

tiledjinn 3y ago
Escape Velocity delivered on the fantasy just fine.
- exo-pla-net 3y ago
  There's an open source successor to Escape Velocity that's fun and continues to grow: https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky

crooked-v 3y ago

I'm still waiting for the single-player Wing Commander-alike game that was supposed to be the whole reason to bother buying into this Star Citizen thing in the first place.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
netule 3y ago
It's the reason I insta-backed in October of 2012 but I haven't heard a status update in years.
- password-234 3y ago
  There will be news about it next month during the annual citizencon. Whether its good news I cannot say though.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Did you watch the kickstarter video? It was so clear that they did not have a good plan to achieve their goals, and very obvious Chris was obsessed with extremely minor technical details that didn't matter. I loved the Wing Commander games, but they had people in charge who could actually direct a project. Chris Roberts can't get out of his own head. The video was a clear indication that he was going to ruin it.
  - netule 3y ago
    I backed via RSI before the Kickstarter went live.

VohuMana 3y ago

This is really cool, I play Star Citizen a bit every time they release a new version just to see what they are up to. Persistent Entity Streaming was tech they were working on for a long time, it had a bit of a rocky launch but seems to be pretty smooth now. Crazy to see how much went into shipping that. For anyone curious what PES does, when a player places an object somewhere or for example their ship explodes, that object will remain on the server in the same place even if you disconnect. Seems fairly simple from a user perspective but required a lot of changes to make work apparently.

jmyeet 3y ago

I'm honestly stunned how often I see the pattern repeat of telling the users they are wrong [1], particularly in this MMO space that I'd dearly love to see more games in. World of Warcraft ("WoW") is the elephant in the room. It killed the previous elephant (Everquest aka EQ) but has reigned supreme in a shrinking space for 18 years. It partially shrank because it used to have a social component that has mostly been replaced by social media but there are other factors too. But what I scratch my head at is all the bad competitors that came afterwards and predictably failed because they made product decisions. The most common one is focusing on PvP. MMO is an interesting genre because only something like 10% of the population at best cares about PvP. So right off the bat you've reduced your potential market by 90% without doing a thing. But no, you get assured that "our PvP is so good, casuals will want to PvP". There's another factor here too: in a persistent world where your power increases, PvP players fundamentally want an unfair fight. They want to be rewarded for various grinds. Contrast this with deathmatch and battle royale games where everyone is basically equal other than player skill. Anyway, Star Citizen has now raised (and spent) over half a billion dollars on the same bad premise of PvP. Server meshing aims to create a single persistent universe but PvP, which most will want to avoid, is fundamentally unfair because the people with the best ships, paid for with real money, will win. This is such a fundamentally bad and limiting design, it's hard to comprehend. Imagine instead SC had defined a small core game loop and gone for a Sea of Thieves like world, both PvP and non-PvP. SoT has like 8-12 players on a server and they can PvP. Interestingly, a lot of players don't want this so they monopolize a server and agree not to PvP. Even in WoW, which has faction PvP, the players have basically voted out world PvP by concentrating a single faction on each server with very few exceptions. But SC is doing things like server meshing when after a decade they still don't have a core game loop. I occasionally check in on the SC roadmap and progress. Not because I'm interested in playing but because I like watching a car wreck in super slow motion. Constant missed deadlines, new (incomplete) features being promised (and a few added), more promised features to fix the bad previous features and so on. It's a disaster. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

kcb 3y ago
Only the biggest MMOs, really just WoW and FF14, can deliver PvE content at a pace even close to satisfying players. It's expensive to develop and players can only play the same content PvE for a limited amount of time. It's just not possible for anyone but the largest dev teams. I would like to see an MMO that really focused on a wide range of gameplay systems rather than content. It's been attempted before, one example I think is Archeage, but unfortunately ruined by monetization.