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.
All have their faults, but there are obvious alternatives to StarCitizen out there that's not vaporware.
I suppose Elite's one saving grace is that it doesn't claim to be in alpha.
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.
I bought the game based on what I see people doing in it already, and it was fun enough for me. That definitely won't be the case for everyone and I recognize that. So to me it's not vaporware and there are lots of other people still enjoying the game today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tB3cark5lA
But I'm in a similar boat now, backed on Kickstarter almost eleven years ago now, and playing the game is just too much of a job.
In its current state, you spend 20 minutes riding elevators and trains around to get off a planet, and then crash into an invisible asteroid and explode, respawn and start over. And add a bunch of errands flying around the system to replace all your gear that blew up.
When it works it's very cool. But unless you have a lot of free time, not worth all the times when it doesn't work.
I hope they finish it, once it stops wiping progress and is possible to slowly accumulate longer term progress I'd be more willing to put in the effort. As-is, I'm not putting in any more money. They need some pressure to actually finish the damn thing (especially Squadron 42), and the bottomless fountain of crowdfunding with no publisher calling the shots clearly isn't working.
EVE uses a different, simpler model where each system is a process, and players connect to proxy servers that keep track of which system they're on (and therefore which server they need to connect to) [0]. I'm sure there are layers of caching and other optimizations built on top of that basic structure, but that's just Gall's Law in action: a working complex system invariably evolved from a working simple system.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the architecture that I can describe in a single sentence is the one powering the legendary 20-year-old game, while no one seems to be quite able to explain what "server meshing" will look like except that it seems to have a lot of moving parts and still hasn't been finished.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2008-09-28-eve-evolved-eve-onlines-...
Note that I don't play or follow either game, but I think you're making an unreasonable comparison.
As do we all, but CIG doesn't make it easy to hold on to that hope when their transparency has all but disappeared. Squadron 42's store page has been removed from their website for months now, where any links to "pledge" lead to a 404 error. The only acknowledgement of it from them was buried as a reply to a days-old, user-posted forum thread where they claim it was removed for a price change. That was months ago. Meanwhile, multiple ships' prices have been updated.
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.
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.
I don’t know if their Unreal offering is comparable to what they were doing with unreal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For those unfamiliar, WoW came out in late 2004 and has had some ~8 expansions since. Each expansions adds new lands, new cosmetics, new dungeons, new raids and new systems. Additionally, these expansions changed existing systems. So much so that what is now refered to as "retail WoW" is considered too complex with too big of a barrier to entry by many. It's partially why the player base has shrunk as the game has increasingly catered to the top 1% to 5% ta the expense of the casual player base.
There has been a rich history of so-called private servers. These are privately run WoW servers that stick to older versions of the game, particularly the vanilla game and each of the first two expansions. These are illegal and never last long.
At Blizzard's annual conference, famously this came up when an audience member asked about it and the head of the game said "You think you do but you don't" [1]. This one guy probably did more to move this cause forward than anyone as it galvanized the community behind this idea.
Then 4-5 years ago Blizzard announced they were releasing "classic WoW". This is basically (but not entirely) the original game with some changes. Some were understandable, some less so. But it was basically the original game.
This has been massively popular and continues to be, so much so that Blizzard just released "hardcore classic WoW", servers where your character is over when you die. Lots of games have hardcore modes but it's interesting in WoW that it may takes ~6 days played to get to max level and a lot of people still want hardcore mode.
But my point is that this 18 year old game with about the same graphics continues to be massively in demand. You don't need to constantly churn out new content to a large scale like you suggest.
Also, SC has over a half a billion dollars and continues to somehow raise a lot through ship sales (which, to me, is bizarre). They very much could afford to continually pump out new content. But there's still only one system with the second years delayed.
Studios like PvP because it falls into user-generated content. The players entertain themselves and that costs almost nothing. But they fail to acknowledge that they're, at best, catering to 5-10% of the potential market.
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.
Do I have to accept all those excuses, which like those pictures of ships never run low in this company, to comment on the performance? I don't think so.
They promise a lot. They don't deliver. They break things which were already working and I'm still waiting. Those are clear signs of terrible Project Management and I think, I don't have to know all those cool insiders-excuses to be able to comment on this failure.
So please. Spare me your epigrams. They won't change anything about the facts.
This is a ridiculous statement. They've collected half a billion dollars from customers and have been in alpha for over 10 years.
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.
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)
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.
~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 :)
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.
I would be surprised if they reached "hundreds" of players in a single instance. I don't think thousands is ever going to be attainable for them. Unless they are somehow able to make some sudden breakthrough that's alluded them in the last decade plus of development.
The words they choose must serve the goal of their performance first, conveying technical meaning is a optional secondary requirement
Quantum is a system for simulating activity with economic impacts and determines how much of raw material or assembled products are available and where, how much things cost, how busy and how dangerous or safe space travel lanes are, and other such aspects of economic scaling.
Subsumption AI is used to drive NPC behavior up close. The game is supposed to have a population that is 90% AI NPCs that drive economic variation and action in general. This makes the game world seem alive even if there are no players currently with you in game. The NPCs have the ability to decide what to do, how to move around, make jokes and idle banter, and can use various equipment in the game as well as fight either in person or as spaceship pilots.
Not totally sure about pCache but it appears to be used on the server to capture changes to state in the universe that should be stored persistently. This is part of the server container streaming feature which allows servers to stream in areas and sets of objects as players approach and then stream them out when they are left empty for a time.
They have several youtube videos on their channel where their game director has come out to talk about these projects in a technical manner. It's pretty neat.
[I say these things as a backer patiently waiting for more game]
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.
