Posted on December 11, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 3
Posted on December 11, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 3
I noticed that unrelated text subtitles flicker briefly onto the screen occasionally, as if the guy is continually in telepathic conversation with NPCs all over the ‘Verse. This isn’t the first 3.0 video where I’ve seen this phenomenon. Just a couple of instances below:
Someone in the verse is probably interacting with the shop at the same time, and this thing broadcasts every action of every player to every client regardless of range and sublevel.
More likely is that everything is broadcast to everyone but the decision to show the dialogue is client-authoritative, and said client is chugging hard enough that it shows up for a split second before the client manages to figure out that it shouldn’t be shown. The alternative was probably “if we default to not showing the dialogue, sometimes it doesn’t show up at all”.
Naturally this opens new and exciting future avenues for griefing. Competitive PvP games like Counterstrike, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft have a lot of special code server side to make sure things like “positional data for people that your client shouldn’t be able to see behind a wall” aren’t broadcast in the first place, to prevent client hacks like “making the walls invisible” from actually doing anything for you.
Sarsapariller
Derek Smart
We make fun of them for the lols, but we’re now down to the point where we have to start taking this shit seriously because, you know, lives and bank accounts are at a risk.
Explain to me how lives are at risk, though? Bank accounts I’ll grant you, but really even if Star Citizen were to disappear tomorrow I kind of feel like the dudes who’d invest their family’s life savings into scam video games in pursuit of community and meaning are gonna find some way to lose that money.
I do think there will eventually be something that they declare as the final game. Years late, tens of millions over budget, and with mechanics that range from passable to holy-crap-how-did-that-ever-get-released. It’ll be billed as an MMO but be largely played as a single player wandering-and-trading game, because they forgot to balance any of the economics to make piracy or bounty hunting worthwhile other than as griefing professions. It will be swiftly forgotten about within months as it is laughably far behind other games of the same period. The idiots who sunk 50,000 dollars into it will still feel justified because it came out, after all, and the amount they spent was so long ago that they’re no longer feeling buyer’s remorse.
Only two questions remain for me at this point- how can they possibly put out all of the ships they’ve sold, with all of the mechanics they’ve promised, without going broke? And if they don’t release them how can they cut and run having sold people stuff they didn’t deliver?
Ben he is just background Wing Commander noise on Twitter these days. And not much of that even. He could probably vanish at this point and only weirdos like us would notice.
It’s kinda funny how CIG will be in full crisis management mode over something and Ben’s Twitter just has something like “They’re not printing any Star Trek books this month. :( “
Like, according to twitter Ben has been playing Animal Crossing.
No way that low fidelity console bullshit is more fun than alpha 3.0
Sarsapariller
Man you should see the rage going on over the Constellation Phoenix right now. They sold this thing as a super up-gunned version of the Constellation with better shields, better guns, better missiles, a “Point defense turret” in addition to the two regular turrets, better armor… it was supposed to be some kind of luxury VIP transport. Then they released the hangar version 2 years ago, and it was just a white version with a hot tub inside.
Now they’re doing the inevitable “Refactoring” and literally all of the stuff I just mentioned has been dropped except for the hot tub. It’s just a mangled version of the regular Constellation with less missiles and a fatter midsection to accommodate your frat parties. There’s not even any gameplay reason for it to exist. But it still costs like $125 more than the regular versions- fuck you if you don’t like it!
I would argue that this is not really a new kind of scam at all. It is a cult and a con. It turns out that cults have always been especially seductive to exactly the kind of people Star Citizen routinely preys on- loners with inferiority complexes who don’t really have a lot of experience of what a healthy community should be. They get told that no they really are special, and here’s a place for people just like them- give a little more, and you can enter at a higher rank- because if you can throw that kind of money around you’ve obviously already earned the respect! The only thing they don’t really have is a good messianic leader because Chris is kind of a fuckup and Sandi is a transparently evil grasper. I guess you could say that’s the unique part- it’s kind of a crowdsourced cult, where they all take turns “Inspiring the faithful” and nobody gets to sleep with the groupies because women are 100% repelled by this thing.
You can pay $50 to $100 for a claim to a plot of virtual land in a game that isn’t out yet thanks to Star Citizen’s land purchasing system that lets you secure a 4km x 4km “lot” or an 8km x 8km “estate” for your outlay. You don’t need a land license to build in Star Citizen, but owning the land offers you protection against vandals, who will be committing an in-game crime for messing around with your private property. You can’t choose where your plot goes yet, because Star Citizen’s planned universe doesn’t exist yet, but in the meantime you can look at a picture of a patch of Moon and dream.
Flashfire mount too difficult to implement, gets cut
Released with 1.3 in Oct of 2015
No longer operational as of 2.2 in March 2016
Removed from the store sometime around Dec 10 2017
“Want some bigger bang for your credit… literally? These carefully designed mounts will transform larger hardpoints on the Hornet and Cutlass-class platforms to allow them to attach large weaponry”
Basically take your [x] slots and turn them into a [x]+1 slots! You’d be an idiot not to upgrade. Was this sold before they even had the dogfighting module?
Imagine if Blizzard started selling the “Titan’s Grip” talent (lets your character hold 2-handed weapons with one hand) before they even finished the original game, lol.
And then decided that no actually that makes warriors overpowered. So we aren’t adding that talent anymore. If you bought that talent already, we’ll figure out how to compensate you at some point.
This is straight up P2W.
Pay money for a consumable (seven, twenty four hour uses) that gives +1 size on a hardpoint. I have to give CIG credit though, 80 cents is a steal for a item like this. In other P2W mobile games, you’re probably paying at least $5 for something that significantly subverts the game balance for a week.
It cost $8. To mount a gun. Not the gun. But a different way to put your gun on your ship.
They sell different versions of this for $3 and $5 I believe. Per mount. So about $20 to make it so all of the guns on your Hornet track with your mouse. Roughly.
Lead Network Engineer slips difficulty with engine
There are a few myths that seem to get repeated quite a lot - please allow me to dispel some of them for you:
The graphics pipeline does not wait for server updates.
Server FPS does not affect client FPS.
*** Netcode does not make clients run slowly, and never has.**
*** Netcode does not make servers run slowly, anymore, even though we’ve added more clients.**
You get better performance on newer servers because there are fewer players on them so your client has to do less work - like physics, animation, IFCS, and entity updates.
*** Players hacking the game to play PU in “offline mode” get better performance than they do online because their clients don’t have to deal with all the load generated by 49 other players.**
What is so hard about fixing the performance problems is that the game is pushing the engine way beyond what it was designed to handle. Fixing that means fundamentally changing how systems work while simultaneously trying not to break everything in the game that uses them. Big performance gains that require making big changes take time. Sometimes we have to do a lot of restructuring before we can even start working on an optimisation. Making all these changes can introduce a lot of bugs, and fixing those takes even more time. Let’s also not forget that performance is not the only goal here - we’re also trying to achieve fidelity levels not seen before. Fidelity is often the enemy of performance, so we find ourselves having to optimize even further than we otherwise would have had to.
Important clarifications from CIG! It’s not the net code that makes the game choke and die, it’s the number of players on the server that makes the game choke and die!
A very important distinction because they might improve the netcode some day, but the number of players running around is only ever going to get worse. And there’s no real fix in sight, and probably never will be! Thanks CIG!
How in the fuck can anybody read this bullshit and think that the project is in good hands
some are coping the usual way: “It could be thread contention that is blocking the CPU from being 100% utilized”
some inch a little bit closer towards the realization that not all is well in the state of croberts: “Me thinks you opened a can of worms with your response…”.
Oh thank god for a second there I thought Star Citizen was fucked beyond all recovery, but it’s an issue with player numbers that’ll sort itself out when they all get sick of playing at 5fps and quit.
Look, stop over-reacting. All the CIG dev said was,
“What is so hard about fixing the performance problems is that the game is pushing the engine way beyond what it was designed to handle. Fixing that means fundamentally changing how systems work while simultaneously trying not to break everything in the game that uses them.”
December 2017. A hundred and seventy eleventy million billion dollars. The solution is to fundamentally change how an inadequate engine does things in a way that doesn’t break everything.
Once again, CIG shows those stupid AAA publishers how it’s meant to be done.
Half a motherfucking decade into development and they are just now realizing that their FPS engine can’t do an MMO. And they can’t just scrap and rewrite everything that they need to, because people are playing the game already. They have to completely overhaul the engine, but do it bit by bit without breaking anything too badly, so that they can show constant progress to the backers. Good luck with that, CIG
Maybe the incompetent dickhead in charge should have looked at more than screenshots when he was deciding what engine to use
Virtual Captain
“netcode” packs so much of SC’s problems into a tiny neat ignorable box. All CIG had to do is say “don’t worry we’ll improve the netcode when all the major features are complete” and they would be fine.
I imagine there is a lot of ass covering and throwing other departments under the bus in CIG’s company culture, this guy was just doing what Chris taught him to do.
Derek Smart
What Clive wrote is absolutely and patently insane. If I didn’t read that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. wow.
It clearly shows - yet another example of why this project is FUBAR.
Suddenly we’re all really excited for a 40 minute episode about latency and packet size.
HAHAHA holy shit. That guy has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. That’s written like your Michael Scott level manager or customer service rep that hears the engineers say words and thinks if he re-uses the words that means he’s an expert on the subject.
Jesus what a fiasco.
LOL
“Netcode isn’t fucked guys, its just that all the other players being around you (on an entirely different moon/planet/station) is making YOUR client have to work harder” are they serious? The fact that you client has to process any of that information at all means your netcode is fucked
This cig response has me genuinely concerned. My concern has always been ‘netcode’ and how the amount of players effects fps, to a point where the game is not playable. If they have to reduce the amount of players to single digits then it isnt an mmo. Probably the first time I’de had serious doubts about the game, i’ve always just had faith that they would be able to make it work.
Server FPS does not affect client FPS.
Server frames-per-second? Huh? Is the server rendering stuff? Best case he’s trying to use terms the players understand - worst case the server is just a modified client acting as a “scene/level/map host”. If that’s the case the current server tech is a dead end, and needs to be ditched for an actual server implementation. From his tone, he’s annoyed that the servers and netcode is being blamed for architectural issues. But even if the servers are not currently heavily loaded, they are not going to scale if they are frankenclients hosting “maps”. I don’t believe such an architecture can be incrementally reworked to do what they want.
Did they really not consider writing server-side software to run this? Bugs and instability when running an alpha with an active and demanding player base (not to mention the not quite feature-locked person in charge) is not entirely unreasonable. Ignoring the most important aspect of making an MMO - server tech - is not reasonable. And reading that post, I get a feeling there is no real server. If that’s the case, I expect a Server 2.0 being announced at some point.
I still can’t get over the fact that the CLIENT has to run every single player’s fucking physics simulation. I mean jesus christ. Each client is ALREADY doing their own physics simulation locally, Just send the position updates to the server, what kind of broke ass shit is this.
You know what this means right? If my client is running your physics simulation, you are sending me the hardware inputs for your mouse, keyboard, joystic, pedals, etc. How else would I run your physics simulation without inputs?
Now just multiply that by number_of_players_in_server. That sounds scalable right? Insane.
Either he’s lying, he’s wrong because he doesn’t understand game development, or he’s telling the truth. None of those are a good look.
