[FrikgFeek]

Yes, the server will have to constantly update the positions of all players at all times. It doesn't have to send it to everyone but that hardly fixes the problem. It saves some bandwidth and decreases what the end-user client has to receive but it doesn't do much to prevent server slowdown, something rather likely to happen with an engine not designed for 100+ players per instance.

[666maslo666]

Yes, the server will have to constantly update the positions of all players at all times. It doesn't have to send it to everyone but that hardly fixes the problem.

OK. Does anyone here know what exactly is the reason why we dont have 1000 players per instance action games? Bandwidth of the client? Bandwidth of the server? Computational power of the client, or server? What is the main bottleneck? Preferably with reliable sources. It is an interesting question, not even limited to SC.

I mean, I played games like Planetside and there were some massive battles but I dont actually know if there are thousands of players fighting at once in that game.

Quick googling failed me.

[Aesaar]

Haven't really followed the development, but one thing that strikes me is how bland this game looks. It's every sci-fi cliche from the last couple decades baked together. Art style, story, technology aesthetics, everything. Brown-looking environments, ISO standard spaceships.

I realize that, as a game trying to reach a mass audience, it can't be TOO artsy. But still, does Chris Roberts have any ideas in his head beyond "whiteboy power fantasy sci-fi war story"?

Not only is it derivative, it refuses to do anything with the stuff it takes as inspiration. 

For instance, it bases the UEE on the later Roman Empire, but doesn't even consider the more subtle aspects of that, like how Rome was an unstoppable cultural force that assimilated everything and everyone around it, even after it collapsed as a state. 

The Vanduul are supposed to be all the barbarian peoples Rome was beset by in the last century of its existence (like the Vandals.  Even the name is derivative), but the setting doesn't look at how the barbarians that destroyed the Roman state were allowed into the borders peacefully, were Romanized, and actually destroyed the state from within.  No, can't have any of that.  Gotta be as boring and superficial as possible.

[Det. Bullock]

I realize that, as a game trying to reach a mass audience, it can't be TOO artsy. But still, does Chris Roberts have any ideas in his head beyond "whiteboy power fantasy sci-fi war story"?

Nope, and I think anything that goes beyond that he doesn't like, otherwise I can't explain why the hell he decided that the only Kilrathi defector had to be a brainwashed double agent, also there is no word of kilrathi that are also earth citizens beyond Wing Commander II, which was an installment that had only minor input from him because he was working on Strike Commander.

[Spoon]

glad the paywall is finally down

[The E]

OK. Does anyone here know what exactly is the reason why we dont have 1000 players per instance action games? Bandwidth of the client? Bandwidth of the server? Computational power of the client, or server? What is the main bottleneck? Preferably with reliable sources. It is an interesting question, not even limited to SC.

I mean, I played games like Planetside and there were some massive battles but I dont actually know if there are thousands of players fighting at once in that game.

Quick googling failed me.

You need to do some math.

Say you wish to have a hundred players in an instance. All they share is position, orientation, and a movement vector. That's 9 floats, or 36 bytes per player. Because you're making a game for the 60FPS crowd, you will need to send out an update 60 times a second.
This means that each client needs to receive 36 * 100 * 60 = 216000 bytes each second. Conversely, that means that a server will need to send out 21.6 million bytes per second, just to keep track of all that information. This would require that the server have a 170 MBPS upload speed, which while not impossible to achieve is still pretty costly (Especially for games that are expected to scale into tens of thousands of concurrent players).

Of course, that's a naive calculation: On one hand, you generally neither want nor need to maintain such a high resolution stream to each client; on the other, the actual amount of data to be sent out per update packet is much higher (because you need to communicate status flags and the like), and a 100 players can easily translate into thousands of entities that need to be kept in sync (think bullets etc). Then there's all the processing that needs to happen in order to maintain a coherent view of the game space on the server, as packets from players will arrive at varying degrees of latency (and I have not factored in the frame overhead for each packet).

Games like Planetside (or Elite) get around this by using a peer-to-peer network model, but that carries its own sets of pitfalls: Chief among them that the quality of the worst connection in any given p2p group determines the quality of the connection for all players, and the cheating that is enabled by treating the game clients as reliable sources of data.

[FrikgFeek]

Usually MMOs get those massive instances done by using assignable proxy servers. Depending on how many players you have in an instance you can dynamically assign servers for that instance. For 95% of all raids a single server will suffice, only the 200-300 player stuff is where you need to get creative. The servers try their best to communicate with eachother and act as 1 "realm".

This usually works for MMOs since their gameplay is more stat than twitch based and the large instances are PvE raids so lag compensation works pretty well when your client can predict what the AI monster is going to do.
Planetside 2 had huge battles, yes, but they were also known to be very laggy when a lot of players were in the same area at once.

[Grizzly]

The Vanduul are supposed to be all the barbarian peoples Rome was beset by in the last century of its existence (like the Vandals.  Even the name is derivative), but the setting doesn't look at how the barbarians that destroyed the Roman state were allowed into the borders peacefully, were Romanized, and actually destroyed the state from within.  No, can't have any of that.  Gotta be as boring and superficial as possible.

Things is, although the barbarians were romanized (and I dislike those terms as they leave out a lot of nuance), the romans were also barbarized: The military arm of the western roman empire was basically entirely germanized, and the barbarian kingdoms that sprung up after the WRE were roman in their organization. Subtle stuff like that makes the fall of the WRE one my favorite historical eras and it's sad that it's so underappreciated

[Blue Lion]

Eve Online has to slow time to as low as 10% to get the game to function properly and their server stacks are amazing. That one system in the game got up to 5700 players.

https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/introducing-time-dilation-tidi/

https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-tech-3/

Now granted this is mostly because everyone is on one server but it can show you how quickly popular games with lots of people in one places can get super crazy. It's why most games put hard limits on instances.

[Mikes]

Eve Online has to slow time to as low as 10% to get the game to function properly and their server stacks are amazing. That one system in the game got up to 5700 players.

https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/introducing-time-dilation-tidi/

https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-tech-3/

Now granted this is mostly because everyone is on one server but it can show you how quickly popular games with lots of people in one places can get super crazy. It's why most games put hard limits on instances.

There is also quite a difference between a more or less "point and click" game like Eve and a full fledged real time space sim with manual flying and aiming.

What works in Eve due to point and click (slowing down time and the more mundane "simply having to deal with lag) would utterly destroy any kind of gameplay in a game with manual aiming and shooting.

Hilariously ... Chris Roberts is also advocating a non trivial death penalty ... which probably means, that lots of keyboards will get eaten when the game ever seens the light of the day.

[Cobra]

Hilariously ... Chris Roberts is also advocating a non trivial death penalty ... which probably means, that lots of keyboards will get eaten when the game ever seens the light of the day.

Wasn't the original idea supposed to be that if you died, you got a prosthetic or something, but if you died too many times the character would simply die and the character you'd have to create would be a sort of "next of kin" that got everything the old character had?

[StarSlayer]

At this rate I'm sure they will sell a form of Life Insurance policy for real world money at some point.

Citizenship means Save Games 

[Aesaar]

The Vanduul are supposed to be all the barbarian peoples Rome was beset by in the last century of its existence (like the Vandals.  Even the name is derivative), but the setting doesn't look at how the barbarians that destroyed the Roman state were allowed into the borders peacefully, were Romanized, and actually destroyed the state from within.  No, can't have any of that.  Gotta be as boring and superficial as possible.

Things is, although the barbarians were romanized (and I dislike those terms as they leave out a lot of nuance), the romans were also barbarized: The military arm of the western roman empire was basically entirely germanized, and the barbarian kingdoms that sprung up after the WRE were roman in their organization. Subtle stuff like that makes the fall of the WRE one my favorite historical eras and it's sad that it's so underappreciated

I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity, but yeah.  There's so much interesting stuff you could do with the end of the WRE and no one ever does anything with it.

SC's actually worse than most because they're intentionally making the barbarian expy one dimensional scary-looking, knife-obsessed aliens who can't be negotiated with.  There's no depth at all to any of SC's fiction.  It's just a generic SF setting with mildly roman overtones.

[Mikes]

Hilariously ... Chris Roberts is also advocating a non trivial death penalty ... which probably means, that lots of keyboards will get eaten when the game ever seens the light of the day.

Wasn't the original idea supposed to be that if you died, you got a prosthetic or something, but if you died too many times the character would simply die and the character you'd have to create would be a sort of "next of kin" that got everything the old character had?

Basically yes ... and then there is the ongoing debate on how this will effect all the "reputation" that you were grinding for before.

But, like most Star Citizen gameplay systems, right now there is only a lot of talk and little facts so who knows.

CR however did state that he specifically liked Dark Souls for how it made death mean something and he'd like that to carry over to Star Citizen.
So you probably will lose "something" and/or maybe even have to incur a "death tax" when your "next of kin" "inherits".

Still again, that's all speculation around the fact that CR wants to make death mean something. /shrugs

[Cobra]

In a game where you can easily die by other players ****ing you over, death needs to "mean" something. Brilliant.

[Aesaar]

But... death doesn't actually mean anything in Dark Souls.  That's the whole point of the game.  There are no costs to death in the game itself (save humanity, but you can recover it and it's easy to find).  The only consequence to death is its effect on the player's patience.

[Firesteel]

After having this pushed to the forefront of my mind again and looking at the horror, I'm finally going to ask for a refund. What I gave them money to do in 2013 (Squadron 42) seems to have been put on indefinite hold despite it  being something less technically difficult to make and being made by a different team. I was young and stupid 3 years ago. Time to fix my mistake.

[Spoon]

After having this pushed to the forefront of my mind again and looking at the horror, I'm finally going to ask for a refund. What I gave them money to do in 2013 (Squadron 42) seems to have been put on indefinite hold despite it  being something less technically difficult to make and being made by a different team. I was young and stupid 3 years ago. Time to fix my mistake.

Good decision imho

How much are you in for, commando?

[Mikes]

But... death doesn't actually mean anything in Dark Souls.  That's the whole point of the game.  There are no costs to death in the game itself (save humanity, but you can recover it and it's easy to find).  The only consequence to death is its effect on the player's patience.

Same here. Losing credits / reputation can all be easily grinded for "again" after all. The thought is that it "hurts" because you "lost" something.

Dark Souls is still on my "to play list" so I'm not sure how the mechanic really works, but I remember CR stating specifically that "losing things/souls/whatever" in Dark Souls was a good thing because it made the player feel that death meant something.

Personally mechanics that punish the player are kind of a red flag for me back from the Everquest days. Being conditioned to be risk averse and instead "work hard while staying as save as possible" in gaming is not really the best use of my free time imho. I was gonna make an exception and give Star Citizen at least a chance because of all the pent up Wing Commander / Freespace / Space Sim nostalgy ... but that was a few years ago before the project became this "neverending story".

After having this pushed to the forefront of my mind again and looking at the horror, I'm finally going to ask for a refund. What I gave them money to do in 2013 (Squadron 42) seems to have been put on indefinite hold despite it  being something less technically difficult to make and being made by a different team. I was young and stupid 3 years ago. Time to fix my mistake.

Good decision imho

It took me a while to see the light, but in the end ... yes, that refund felt like a relief.

Having spent too much money on a project you lost hope in is NOT a good feeling lol. ;-)

[Firesteel]

But... death doesn't actually mean anything in Dark Souls.  That's the whole point of the game.  There are no costs to death in the game itself (save humanity, but you can recover it and it's easy to find).  The only consequence to death is its effect on the player's patience.

Same here. Losing credits / reputation can all be easily grinded for "again" after all. The thought is that it "hurts" because you "lost" something.

Dark Souls is still on my "to play list" so I'm not sure how the mechanic really works, but I remember CR stating specifically that "losing things/souls/whatever" in Dark Souls was a good thing because it made the player feel that death meant something.

Personally mechanics that punish the player are kind of a red flag for me back from the Everquest days. Being conditioned to be risk averse and instead "work hard while staying as save as possible" in gaming is not really the best use of my free time imho. I was gonna make an exception and give Star Citizen at least a chance because of all the pent up Wing Commander / Freespace / Space Sim nostalgy ... but that was a few years ago before the project became this "neverending story".

Most things in Dark Souls seem a lot more punishing than they actually are. The whole upgrade/level up currency is lost upon a second death seems like a huge deal at first but it's more there to build tension and make you think about how you're playing. I vaguely remember some meaningful death thing in SC but it never felt well developed outside of the idea it would be in the game. That massive play on nostalgia was exactly why I gave them money. It was mainly for SQ42 and the SC stuff was going to be a bonus. Now it's officially flipped on its head and we may never see SQ42 even though they're still advertising it.

After having this pushed to the forefront of my mind again and looking at the horror, I'm finally going to ask for a refund. What I gave them money to do in 2013 (Squadron 42) seems to have been put on indefinite hold despite it  being something less technically difficult to make and being made by a different team. I was young and stupid 3 years ago. Time to fix my mistake.

Good decision imho


It took me a while to see the light, but in the end ... yes, that refund felt like a relief.

Having spent too much money on a project you lost hope in is NOT a good feeling lol. ;-)

I've thought about a refund for about a year now but what I've seen in the last few months has been horrifying. I don't care about the engine stuff that much but the fact that they're roughly where they were when I backed 3 years ago was the last straw. Yes, at this point anything I've spent on SC is too much. I remember even stopping considering giving them money as the stretch goals kept coming and in retrospect after $90 million I probably should have asked for a refund right then and there. Hindsight's 20/20...