******Official Star Citizen / Squadron 42 Thread******

mid_gen said:
Well I'm just going to have to bow out to you two experts :)
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I mean people might engage to actually discuss the difference and why one is doing something the other not and why there are more interesting technical limitations. However you've actually not explained anything on why Spiderman is anything special at all with what they do considering the map size and detail level relative in a single player game compared to having 100 people in a server with a full star system being managed and streamed with about the same amount of detail and density to locations of similar size all whilst having movement happening multiple times faster per player instance.

There is some interesting stuff sure, there is some more detail in some elements and yes the AI for the most part actually works but that doesn't take away from the multiple physics grids, persistent states and player count all within a highly detailed space of similar size to Spiderman even if you only focused on one landing zone then.

Edit: Should state I am not a developer in this area, however have many friends whom work at Playground games where we discuss a lot of this and the ones there whom work on their open world system for Forza Horizon 5 and working on Fable are rather impressed with what CIG on a technical level have done.
 
Curlyriff said:
I mean people might engage to actually discuss the difference and why one is doing something the other not and why there are more interesting technical limitations. However you've actually not explained anything on why Spiderman is anything special at all with what they do considering the map size and detail level relative in a single player game compared to having 100 people in a server with a full star system being managed and streamed with about the same amount of detail and density to locations of similar size all whilst having movement happening multiple times faster per player instance.

There is some interesting stuff sure, there is some more detail in some elements and yes the AI for the most part actually works but that doesn't take away from the multiple physics grids, persistent states and player count all within a highly detailed space of similar size to Spiderman even if you only focused on one landing zone then.
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The major difference is that Spiderman is running on a PlayStation 4 with an ancient spinning-rust storage system.

That may not matter to you if you're ignorant to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to stream in an open world at high speed on that hardware, but as someone that has worked on such titles, it is incredibly impressive what Insomniac achieved. Even more so that it's a single-player title and all the AI and other logic/state that's typically offloaded onto the server in MP is running locally at the same time.

As a game dev, seeing shiny videos of unfinished games running on modern PC hardware.....it's just not that exciting. Especially when it's a game you'd really like to play but it's perpetually delayed because they're not capable of hitting a milestone.
 
mid_gen said:
The major difference is that Spiderman is running on a PlayStation 4 with an ancient spinning-rust storage system.

That may not matter to you if you're ignorant to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to stream in an open world at high speed on that hardware, but as someone that has worked on such titles, it is incredibly impressive what Insomniac achieved. Even more so that it's a single-player title and all the AI and other logic/state that's typically offloaded onto the server in MP is running locally at the same time.

As a game dev, seeing shiny videos of unfinished games running on modern PC hardware.....it's just not that exciting. Especially when it's a game you'd really like to play but it's perpetually delayed because they're not capable of hitting a milestone.
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Quite a lot of us here are enthusiasts, we quite often perhaps know less than we think we do, no doubt, but we are also not complete normies.

This whole thing started as someone, in the other thread, pointed out the high load Spiderman was putting on the CPU, quite good CPU's like the 9900K and even the 10900K, the latter is a pretty serious CPU by right here and now standards.

I made the point that its probably due to the game streaming data in and out constantly on the fly, that this is a new direction for the development of game worlds, new as in not original but different to the norm, i pointed out the benefits of this new way is larger and more complex game worlds than we have been, up to now, used to.
I made the point that its greatly improving hardware that's these things possible, its progress and its a rather good thing.

As a game developer you will know exactly what i'm talking about when i make the point that due to fixed hardware games can be better optimised on consoles than they can on PC, a PC runs through middleware to make it run smoothly on the infinite number of hardware configurations the home PC has, that has a cost.
To give you one example: Nvidia use software based thread scheduling, its using CPU cycles just to run the driver, up to about 30%, that is up to 30% of CPU cycles the game does not have available to it and its putting that much more load on it.
The consoles don't have that problem, not least because they run AMD hardware which has dedicated thread scheduling hardware on the GPU.
That's possibly one reason, among many others, for the high CPU load on the PC version of Spiderman.

So, i used Star Citizen as a prime example of what's possible in terms of scale and complexity with this type of game development technology, you may disagree, as you do given the point of contention here is your blanket dismissal of that argument, but there is nothing, literally nothing that comes close to Star Citizen in scale and complexity.

This game is a controversial subject, a small number of people very loudly have an irrational hate of it, they are recognised as such by the way they make broad sweeping statements without ever explaining their reasoning, this is the impression we all get from your postings here.
If you actually want to engage in an interesting and meaningful debate, please do so, you may have to come down a bit to our level, but as i said, we aren't completely clueless on this stuff.
 
Spiderman is impressive because of the streaming tech, but not because it's the first game to do it. Any game of any scale going back decades will make heavy use of streaming, you have to if you can't load every single asset into physical memory at once, you gotta be constantly swapping assets in and out as you move around.

What is really badass with spiderman is the speed at which you can traverse the world, seeing the cars and pedestrians zipping by as you swing through the city....when you consider a lot of those assets are coming off that ancient hard disk, which takes aeons to load anything. If you think about what happens, when you're moving across the city, it's having to look ahead at the way you're travelling and try to make sure all the necessary assets are loaded ready to render in time...it might take literal seconds for that to happen. The ragging of the CPU you see (and why your PS4 tries to take off) is down to Insomniac having really well designed multi-threaded systems making optimal usage of the available cores to make sure this all happens without the game thread exceeding 33ms and causing a hitch. Forza Horizon has equally impressive streaming chops although the world is a fair bit simpler.

Streaming is a lot easier now though with modern hardware, there's a reason why the PS5 and XBSX went to town on the storage systems, because it removes one of the massive pain points that limit developers (without just adding more power hungry cpu/gpu cores). So I'm just less blown away by demos that show off this kind of streaming now, it's kinda like yeah, ace, it's great we can do this with modern hardware much easier.

Same with 64-bit world co-ordinates....it's not really a technological breakthrough. If you're doing any game beyond a few KM you'll start running into precision issues. There's a bunch of different solutions, often it's just breaking up the world into chunks with 32-bit coords inside each one. Going full 64-bit is perhaps the simplest method (and certainly the way I'd have gone from day 1 if I was making a game with the ambitions of SC), but not really cutting edge.

There's also an element of having seen a lot of impressive tech stuff that's never made it to the light of day. I'm very much a delivery focused engineer and for me, actually getting something out the door on time is the #1 priority, and 'cool tech' made by enthusiastic engineers is quite often the enemy of actually shipping something!

I'm also just perpetually frustrated by the delays to SC, I backed it....8 years ago now? They gotta put a line in the sand soon or they will never launch....it's not like post-launch content and live service is an alien concept.....just get a v1.0 out!
 
looks like the one thing we can agree on is yes it is time CIG proved they can deliver on the next critical milestone.

iCache failed, we only know that because they only admitted it after they think they are close to getting the alternative working, that being Persistent Entity Streaming.

The silence on iCache does worry me, because testing for that was supposed to start at the end of June, here we are nearing the end of august still faffing about with 3.17.2.
 
humbug said:
looks like the one thing we can agree on is yes it is time CIG proved they can deliver on the next critical milestone.

iCache failed, we only know that because they only admitted it after they think they are close to getting the alternative working, that being Persistent Entity Streaming.

The silence on iCache does worry me, because testing for that was supposed to start at the end of June, here we are nearing the end of august still faffing about with 3.17.2.
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I think the delay is because they are working on a game design flaw with the Pes tech, that is, what if I leave my custodian smg next to the mining outpost in daymar? How long does it stay in the servers? Because with Pes it persists across all servers that then spun up after that item is added in a location. What happens if you're in server 2 and u see my custodian smg and u take it? But in server 1 I am standing next to it? Does is just right move magically lol.

This is a major issue that cig need to get designed right.
 
jonneymendoza said:
I think the delay is because they are working on a game design flaw with the Pes tech, that is, what if I leave my custodian smg next to the mining outpost in daymar? How long does it stay in the servers? Because with Pes it persists across all servers that then spun up after that item is added in a location. What happens if you're in server 2 and u see my custodian smg and u take it? But in server 1 I am standing next to it? Does is just right move magically lol.

This is a major issue that cig need to get designed right.
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You can hear a faint "uh... look what i found" and then see it pick its self up and move away in a walking motion...... :D
 
I actually think guildwars2 shard system would work well in SC. If you can't have one server (EU/US etc.) for everyone, then having a selection menu and allowing players to switch while in game is a excellent compromise. Put an item down and it's persistent in shard #3. Want to do things with a group, be on the same shard. No disappearing items as someone you can't see picked it up. No crashing and never finding your stuff again on relog. etc.

Jumptown is back from Thursday to Sunday.

Shipshow down is still on this week. The end result one ship will get some cool new skins I think. I will say some of the things people have submitted are very cool. There's also a lot of very bodged together 3d prints.

robertsspaceindustries.com

Star Citizen - Ship Showdown 2952 - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
 
Cantankerous said:
I actually think guildwars2 shard system would work well in SC. If you can't have one server (EU/US etc.) for everyone, then having a selection menu and allowing players to switch while in game is a excellent compromise. Put an item down and it's persistent in shard #3. Want to do things with a group, be on the same shard. No disappearing items as someone you can't see picked it up. No crashing and never finding your stuff again on relog. etc.

Jumptown is back from Thursday to Sunday.

Shipshow down is still on this week. The end result one ship will get some cool new skins I think. I will say some of the things people have submitted are very cool. There's also a lot of very bodged together 3d prints.

robertsspaceindustries.com

Star Citizen - Ship Showdown 2952 - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
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Yea. I mean the “problem” i described wouldn’t be a issue if there was one shard per global territory. Ie one in eu, one in North America, another for south, one for oceanic, another for Africa and followed by Asia.

The meshed server nodes could be spread out in places like the uK, Germany etc etc to spread the load
 
Hey everyone!

During the post-launch period of Alpha 3.17.2, we identified several issues with how in-game transactions are both made and completed, thanks to the enthusiastic expenditures players made at the start of the patch cycle. The high amount of player activity at launch, alongside the Siege of Orison event, was a perfect recipe to rile up our backend. For those who really want to see under the hood: To try to avoid any major in-game outages during peak concurrency and keep some of the old legacy systems available, we had to favor availability over durability by accelerating the writes to SPC (super pcache) and allowing a lag between SPC and the game state database to build up. This came at the degradation of data consistency and durability, especially considering SPC wasn't built to work in these conditions. As a part of the collateral damage, some of the records committed to LTP became inconsistent over time but we believe this issue affected a random minority of character LTP records.

That said, the state in which these complex caching systems got into allowed us to focus on analyzing some of the data patterns of where bottlenecks occur. This knowledge is already being re-used in stress testing scenarios for Persistent Entity Streaming. We’ve received an immense amount of Issue Council reports for these issues too (especially the most egregious ones such as logging in with an empty wallet), which has given us a wealth of data to be able to tackle them. Thank you to all of you bug-hunters!

As a result, we have been steadily deploying fixes for these issues over the past few weeks on the PTU, and we are now prepared to roll out some of those fixes to the Live servers, with even more (and larger/long-term) fixes coming in our next major update. The short-term goal is to make sure that the SPC service doesn't enter this state again until those larger fixes are deployed in Alpha 3.18.

A side effect of these fixes necessitates a potential slight loss of player progress. With this update to Live, all players will be reset to the LTP database, which is essentially the same as performing a Character Reset. For those unaware, LTP keeps track of your wallet as well as ships, components, weapons, and armor (both purchased in-game and looted), but doesn't retain any consumables (food, drink, ammunition, med-pens, etc.). The good news is, that any items that were able to successfully sync with LTP will be retained when the fix goes live, but please note that if any progress did not sync to LTP properly, you would discover this loss post-fix. We're eager to get this hotfix out later this week, which will hopefully stabilize the backend and ideally prevent further loss of progress/items ahead of 3.18’s launch.

Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding as we roll out these fixes, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. See you in the ‘verse!
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Small update from start week for those that missed it. Seems like 3.17.2 will be finished up on PTU and all in live by end this week or so which means 3.18 will finally be hitting Evocati at least in next few weeks.
 
jonneymendoza said:
I dont think 3.17.2 being in ptu delayed 3.18 going into evocadi because there has been two ptu's running in the past.
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They have stated they wouldn't put 3.18 in Evo till 3.17.2 was live and out of PTU. So could be a cost thing or the fact it fundamentally needs everything switching over on those test servers where 3.17.2 and 3.18 are completely different backend code etc for PES.
 
jonneymendoza said:
I think the delay is because they are working on a game design flaw with the Pes tech, that is, what if I leave my custodian smg next to the mining outpost in daymar? How long does it stay in the servers? Because with Pes it persists across all servers that then spun up after that item is added in a location. What happens if you're in server 2 and u see my custodian smg and u take it? But in server 1 I am standing next to it? Does is just right move magically lol.

This is a major issue that cig need to get designed right.
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sorry to jump in but...... does that really matter so much? if you are in different instances and one person picks something up, why not let them have it, but keep it in the other servers until there are no players within its vicinity and then despawn it? worst case scenario is multiple players get a shiny new "X Y Z bit of kit", but that is better than watching things vanish in front of you.

the whole notion that CR said about dropping a cup in a wood and then coming back 6 months later and it still being there is kind of silly imo if it is kept server side..... Sure i do want some persistence in my games and elite dangerous is bloody terrible at this........ but if it is equipment relevant to me then imo just store it on my account so that some of that stuff will spawn in my instance and no other, and then when i leave the instance it can despawn but then be tied back into my account again.. Maybe that is not as amazing as what CR announced years ago, but imo this kind of fidelity does little to the quality of the game but seems to me to be the main reason why the damn thing keeps getting delayed.

it boggles me that i bought a GTX980 in part to play star citizen, a level of card i was confident would be ok to play it on.............. that was 3 upgrades ago now!!!!
 
bigmike20vt said:
sorry to jump in but...... does that really matter so much? if you are in different instances and one person picks something up, why not let them have it, but keep it in the other servers until there are no players within its vicinity and then despawn it? worst case scenario is multiple players get a shiny new "X Y Z bit of kit", but that is better than watching things vanish in front of you.

the whole notion that CR said about dropping a cup in a wood and then coming back 6 months later and it still being there is kind of silly imo if it is kept server side..... Sure i do want some persistence in my games and elite dangerous is bloody terrible at this........ but if it is equipment relevant to me then imo just store it on my account so that some of that stuff will spawn in my instance and no other, and then when i leave the instance it can despawn but then be tied back into my account again.. Maybe that is not as amazing as what CR announced years ago, but imo this kind of fidelity does little to the quality of the game but seems to me to be the main reason why the damn thing keeps getting delayed.

it boggles me that i bought a GTX980 in part to play star citizen, a level of card i was confident would be ok to play it on.............. that was 3 upgrades ago now!!!!
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Yes. custodian SMG is a tiny item that in theory yea you dont care but what about a ship you just bought down and u are salvaging it and in another server that ship respawns there and someone sees it there and blows i for fun and poof the derelict ship you are trying to salvage its hull, components and cargo just goes poof gone?

The custodian smg is only one item that i mentioned but the same rule applied to ships, cargo, future player bases, dynamic events that leave derelicted ships etc etc
 
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