Star Citizen: Death of a Space Thread?

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iospace: Jan 19, 2038

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:32

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 23:45

Beexoffel: Oct 4, 2015; Herald of the Stimpire

Beexoffel fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Sep 9, 2018

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:32

Tokamak: Dec 22, 2004

THIS POST IS DEDICATED
TO THE BRAVE MUJAHIDEEN FIGHTERS
OF AFGHANISTAN

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:32

iospace: Jan 19, 2038

No, I'm not paying my taxes. :colbert:

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:33

IcarusUpHigh: Dec 20, 2016

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:33

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Look, if you're going to snipe, at least put some more effort into it than a smuggo :colbert:

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:33

Tokamak: Dec 22, 2004

iospace posted:

No, I'm not paying my taxes.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:33

Daztek: Jun 2, 2006

Tippis posted:

Look, if you're going to snipe, at least put some more effort into it than a smuggo

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:33

Dogeh: Aug 30, 2017; ShitMeter: -------------|- 99%

iospace posted:

No, I'm not paying my taxes.

PAY YOUR TAXXES

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:34

MedicineHut: Feb 25, 2016

Agony Aunt posted:

If i see one more Stimpire post i'm going to spite pledge Star Citizen!

In the last 5000 years, the Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire has origins from the Ten Empire War in which 10 of the United Stimpires revolted against each rules. All empires except for the fourth swore freedom upon their citizens. There is no free speech in the Fourth Stimpire, and all self-controlled transportation has been made illegal without undergoing painful medical verification methods, in which arteries are severed without pain resistant, operated entirely by machines. The way they work claim to be the most hygenic and healthy way possible, but these machines often rub against pain points, causing great deals of pain to patients. The heart is then extracted from the body and placed into a glass grinding machine. Various energy centers are also dissected and replaced with dangerous transplants. After the painful, 52 hour surgical procedure, patients will then have to use a fused guidance tool, which pumps painful resistors into the body every 2 hours. The pain they have caused is so bad, the victim would freeze in a tense position. They would then collapse afterwards.

Sexual stimulation in any way within the grounds of the Fourth Stimpire is strictly prohibited, and anyone detected even touching their sexual organs will be subjected to a penectomy or if the offender was a female, they would then have a razor inserted into their ovaries. They would pump a blue solution into the womb until the stitchings burst. Offenders would also be forced to show their operated areas in public, and they would always harass and punch them to a pulp, against their will.

Otherwise, offenders would be tazed with the worst type of electricity in the systematic district, causing so much pain, the victim would scream and flail in madness. The pain would also triple every second, but no death would be incurred. This is also used in combat against enemy units, which is why all UEE forces must wear the upgraded suit to block this effect.

However, enertainment is also questionable in UEE grounds. Sporting events end with the losing team being rounded into a grinder and shredded on live television, boxing matches end with the loser having their hands removed without anasthesia, flight races would end with the losers having their arms and legs removed, then being injected with insanity, for entertainment. People are also forced into these events, by undergoing a painful 127 hour procedure which involves tweaking the muscles so they will not listen to brain commands, and then having a painful drug injected which also causes madness if the player is not sporting. This is all for entertainment, and anyone not watching any of it during sporting times and cheering for the winning team, they will be imprisoned into galactic camps.

Snuff films are also broadcast, and actors are actually murdered just for entertainment. Stealth droids also guide these forced actors into behaving exactly as the director dreams, otherwise they will be punished by being placed into a macerator and having their execution written into the film. Any film that does not feature someone being murdered will be burned and the entire crew behind it will be executed in the most grotesque way possible - vivisection.

All executions are broadcast, and anyone who misses even a millisecond, even by blinking, will be executed. All citizens must boo to the person being executed, and the family is gathered to be injected with eternators, which cause pain forever, making them immoral but feeling the pain tenfold every millisecond. They cannot pass out, but they will feel like it forever.

Conquests by this Stimpire end in the planet being razed, and all the citizens being executed in the same way as their citizens are. The planet is then destroyed and all remnants of it are removed, and any memories of it will be erased instantly from civil minds. People who are also killed are also erased from memories, and all memories of them, including toys and pictures, are destroyed.

Prisoners undergo 40,000 years of relentless and endless labor, and anyone not complying is sentenced to the eternator injection. All prisoners injected with eternators are placed into capsules and launched into far space, then the room is closed tight to ensure maximum insanity. Some prisoners are also subjected to the removal of blood, the lungs, the liver, the genitals, the skeleton, the muscles, the eyes, and even the injection of pressure. Prisoners sentenced to pressure chambers are locked in until they are inflated to a high level. The decompression is then stopped to make sure they are inflated and uncomfortable.

Children born on the 14th of July are subjected to the removal of their skeleton and an implant of a silver liquid to replace it. The nervous sysem is also injected in various parts to ensure it is five times more sensitive than the average.

Restaurants also are ordered to serve civil meat, and anyone attending must give themself up to be cooked into a grotesque meal. They are cooked alive, undergoing extreme pain, and are then subjected to industrial grinders and blenders. The Stimpire orders at least 1 million citizens to be dispatched every day, as they are afraid the population may overthrow them. But only one planet is cared for, and the rest are banned from eating, drinking, talking, using technology, touching anyone, wearing unauthorized clothes, touching buildings, or walking a centimeter out of designated routes. Civil enforcers are on every planet, and they are engineered so that they are 40 times larger than the 300 quadrillion population. At least 7 billion die every 12 hours under this rule.

Thoughts are also surveyed, and anyone who does not think anything to loving the Stimpire with more than their capabilities will be sentenced to a prison. Prisoners who are punished for this violation will meet their greatest fear, only to have it amplified so they will turn insane as they imagine it exactly as they fear it. They then undergo a painful extraction of all fluids, to be replaced by a toxin which causes permanent irritation. The unknown substance keeps the subject aging normally, except they will never die. Prisoners punished in this way are unable to be reverted, despite many efforts, and they will never be able to be disposed.

The sickening truths have been revealed only today, and invigilation teams are still investigating the truths without setting foot in the galactic space of this sickening empire.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:34

iospace: Jan 19, 2038

Tippis posted:

Look, if you're going to snipe, at least put some more effort into it than a smuggo

No. Also it was a smug, not a smuggo.

Dogeh posted:

PAY YOUR TAXXES

No.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:35

Dogeh: Aug 30, 2017; ShitMeter: -------------|- 99%

The Elite Dangerous thread only goes to 84.

Obviously Store Citizer is the better of the two games.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:36

Dogeh: Aug 30, 2017; ShitMeter: -------------|- 99%

iospace posted:

No.

No.

I looked for pictures of 5000 cats to celebrate, but all I got was RayBans

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:36

pun pundit: Nov 11, 2008; I feel the same way about the company bearing the same name.

5000 pages and still no signs of game development.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:42

Dark Off: Aug 14, 2015

Performance Theory posted:

EFFORTPOST

Right off the bat - 2015 is when OCS was originally started development. This will be important later.

9:00 - "we're not reinventing the wheel, we're adapting the wheel to a scale previously unheard of"

So after miss characterizing most multiplayer games as not requiring streaming we hear this gem. But in modern engines, it's pretty much mandatory simply because there is so much detail now that is constantly loaded and unloaded - his statement was true for Goldeneye 64, not so much for the latest FPS. We can argue semantics all day as to what exactly counts as an "object" and "streaming" so let's address the crux of the matter, characterizing what SC is doing as "previously unheard of". I suppose they've never heard of a little game called Elite: Dangerous. Or No Man's Sky. Or the original Elite, even. That's the beauty of streaming systems - something like Skyrim doesn't actually care how big the entire playable area of the game is, because it only cares about the chunks that are currently loaded. It's only relevant in the context of coordinates - if that was properly designed (which we've established is not), then the streaming system simply would not care what the maximal bounds of the total playable game area are, in any way.

10:00 - And they're not even working on it yet? WHAT? And the mention of "server-side object container streaming". As discussed, this is stupid: It doesn't make sense in the context of their description because it was all "we're streaming content FROM our SERVERS to YOUR PC", which makes sense. Then they just casually drop "oh ya and we're doing it on the servers too lol", so where the gently caress is that data coming from? Other servers? If so, what's their intra-server architecture look like? Are they just streaming it from disk? Where will the data be processed, is this the magical server meshing that will enable 100k players??
11:00 - We can't make any promises about performance because there's so many variations of CPUs and motherboards

Massive cop out. Technically correct, but imagine how unsure of yourself that you'd have to be to be pre-emptively blaming players' motherboards for performance variations rather than stating "yeah, performance will be way better, though obviously people on i9s will probably perform better than on i3s".

11:30 - Currently, everything is loaded into memory from yella to port olisar

We knew this. And it's just as surreal hearing them fully admit it for the first (?) time as it should be. I cannot overstate how backwards this design is. It's been repeated ad nauseum but it encapsulates CIG's design process as a whole: they want to develop a motorcycle, so they start out with a car, then they try hacking apart the frame, engine, and suspension while it's running into something vaguely motorcycle-shaped.

14:00 - Different classes of ship will be streamed in at different distances

Contemplate, for a moment, the enormous level of griefing that this will enable. Just think about it. I'll wait. I'll help: start by imagining the shenanigans made possible by E:D's P2P architecture.
14:30 - Wait, now they ARE working on OCS? Which is it??

16:00 - What are C++ pointers? This is literally basic entry-level C++ programming practices he's describing - when you null an object, all pointers to that object are no longer valid. Obviously, you have to handle that. The fact that they're struggling with this concept is 1) baffling and 2) indicative that they're continuing to bolt one ugly hack job onto another instead of having a coherent, well-designed engine architecture from the beginning.

17:30 - "going to be a big one for server FPS" - in the context of marker streaming on player's clients. How on earth would that improve server performance? Unless servers are exclusively bottlenecked by upload bandwidth (which should never, ever happen in the context of a true client/server architecture run on a not-completely-incompetent datacenter). They also contradict this later on.

18:00 - Wait, but they're also undoing all of those performance optimization gains for radar lol

20:00 - Serialized variables are indeed what I had described ages ago. Search the channel for them. I had to implement something similiar a year or so ago, it took me an afternoon. This was not for a tiny project. There is no reason that this should be a multi-year endeavour for them.

21:00 - "like save games"

What?? No, that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. Are they trying to describe converting to a binary format? If so, that sort-of makes sense, if we disregard the fact that a true save game will require a ton more data about the overall context of objects and state, and can safely disregard a ton of data about the current game session (e.g. it would be super important to sync the current cooldown timer for reloading the player's handgun in a network session, but there is no need to clutter up a save game with weird state data like that - it will just add even more edge cases to test for later).
21:50 - "converts from the game's format to a normal format"

I have no idea what they're talking about unless this is the most painful way ever of describing "we take objects in memory and convert them to a binary format that's easier to read and write with file I/O". Boom, I just saved you three of the most painful minutes of my life with this one weird sentence, interviewers hate me.

22:58 - Serialized variables track which have changed and don't need to be re-sent.

DEAR GOD
WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME

This means that currently, every single frame, every single flag and counter and variable and absolutely any field whatsoever having to do with players is sent over the wire. Instead of doing the not-completely-batshit-insane thing and only sending them when they change, like pretty much every other game has done forever.

They're just now fixing this though, woo. I can't wrap my poor little brain around this one.

26:20 - "When you want to spawn an entity, it happens on the main thread"

Ah yes, multithreading. Search the channel for my meltdown on the last time multithreading entity spawning came up and why it's ridiculous that they're having this discussion in year eight of development.

27:10 - "bind culling comes in by replicating those server side decisions"... "and controlling OCS on the player's client".

This almost makes sense if you forget, for a moment, that the player client does not have access to all of the information that the server does. Or at least, shouldn't in any sane design - otherwise, what's the point of having a server if you have access to all data all the time on every client? Ignoring the security implications for a moment (or not, and recall Star Marine getting hacked to pieces within days of release), this means that naively 'replicating' server decisions is impossible.

Unless, once again, they're just trying to describe "the server sends the data the client needs", but that would just be too pedestrian for the BDSSEWTFBBQ.

28:00 - "Q: What's the time sink if we have bind culling?" "A: We have them working, but now we have to fit them together"

So they're not actually working, gotcha.

All of those things are useless because they are bespoke solutions to problems specific to SC. Unless and until they are functioning in SC, they have zero value and effectively do not exist. "Fitting them together" is almost always the biggest challenge in any nontrivial project, because it's very easy to make things work fine and dandy in isolated silos, and significantly less easy to make things work fine and dandy in the lumbering monolith of an existing codebase.

30:00 -

I lost the plot of what they were talking about, this sounds like a list of dreams because you can't do any of that ingame right now AFAIK?
32:50 - Claim to be using headless clients for stress testing

33:21 - Player limit is 50, good times for the 100k player single shard persistent MMO

35:00 - Everything has to be converted for OCS?

36:00 - Oh, that's because the entirety of their codebase was apparently not designed with multithreading in mind. WELP

38:30 - More dreams about what the gameplay experience will be like, "amazing!"

40:30 "OCS is not the answer to everything, it's the foundation" what

41:40 - "If you go to Lorville your framerate will still be really low" okay lol

42:50 - "Hedge bets" - OCS won't increase player counts, server load is actually going to be heavier?

43:40 - "The load on our server side is going to increase pretty dramatically when this comes online"

46:20 - "Some of us can't even load the maps because the format is too big" What lol
Okay so zooming back out to look at all of this -

They're 100% turbofucked. They just admitted what we all called to varying degrees (mostly Derek ) years ago. They originally designed the game for small session and small maps. Around 2015 they decided "yeah throw that all out and buckle yourselves in, we're making an MMO now baby". Except instead of doing the only sane thing and re-architecting everything to support an MMO, they started bolting one shoddy hack on top of another. OCS is a fancy name for map streaming, which ANY open-world game needs. Bind culling is a fancy word for "only send stuff that clients need", which every single online internet multiplayer video game has done in some form. And by crobberts' wavy hands, why on earth did anyone architect their game for single-threaded, non-asynchronus content loading and object spawning in this decade? They should never have done that, even for Freelancer 2 or whatever the initial pitch was for, it was bad then, it's terrible now.

And now they've been trying to fix all of these systemic design flaws and antipatterns over the last 3 years as the scope has continued to increase and no apparent progress has been made. Three YEARS, by their own admission, and they are still at what is effectively negative progress for MMO networking, in their MMO.
Also, who were these people they that were being interviewed? Why did they sound like they were struggling with simple concepts (lol @ nullptrs in their content unloading system designed to null out pointers being a surprising thing)? Are there really only like 5 interns trying to write networking code? Because I can't come up with any plausible reason as to why some of the things are taking so long, like serialized variables, which almost anyone, not even a great programmer should have been able to bang out in a week, tops.
And yeah, most programmers are bad at talking to people and being interviewed, but usually the problem is getting them to shut up about inane trivialties that no one else will understand, not having them stumble around from a cheat sheet.

reposting this as its easy to find in page 5000

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:44

G0RF: Mar 19, 2015; Some galactic defender you are, Space Cadet.

YOUTUBE: Rebel Galaxy Outlaw as Privateer reboot was hiding in plain sight

An April Fool�s joke from last year pointed to this week�s reveal as a Privateer reboot.

Thank the stars they didn�t stick with the cockpit view, otherwise you�d miss seeing most of them.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:44

History Comes Inside!: Nov 20, 2004

Is Rebel Galaxy good?

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:46

kordansk: Sep 12, 2011

is game parp?

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:48

MarcusSA: Sep 23, 2007

Star Citizen was an ARG all along.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:50

Jobbo_Fett: Mar 7, 2014; Slava Ukrayini; Clapping Larry

Ive posted more than 5000 times

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:51

Aqua Seafoam Shame: Aug 20, 2018; by astral

So in the Rebel Galaxy Outlaw universe, did other alien races also coincidentally invent pool? Loremasters, we need answers here.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:52

Neltharak: Jun 7, 2013

Securing my spot in the 5000th page in-between warmups.
Here's to another great 5000 pages of this train wreck.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:55

BluesShaman: Apr 25, 2016; She wore Blue Velvet.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:56

TheLastRoboKy: May 2, 2009; Finishing the game with everyone else's continues

This really is the debacle that never ends.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:58

Lladre: Jun 28, 2011; Soiled Meat

Good page this one. excellent snype.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 15:59

CubicalSucrose: Jan 1, 2013; Phantom my Opera and call me South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut

Fidelity.

# ? Sep 9, 2018 16:03

Foo Diddley: Oct 29, 2011; cat

Posting on page 5000 :toot:

# ? Sep 9, 2018 16:07

Tippis: Mar 21, 2008; It's yet another day in the wasteland.

iospace posted:

No. Also it was a smug, not a smuggo.

Even more reason!

# ? Sep 9, 2018 16:12

Grubby Hobo: Feb 13, 2018; There's something else about bears not many people know. If a bear gets hooked on the taste of crowdfunding, it becomes a man-killer. He'll go on a rampage and has to be destroyed. And that's why you should never hug a bear.

Dark Off posted:

reposting this as its easy to find in page 5000

It is a very good and worthy post.

Dark Off posted:

10:00 - And they're not even working on it yet? WHAT? And the mention of "server-side object container streaming". As discussed, this is stupid: It doesn't make sense in the context of their description because it was all "we're streaming content FROM our SERVERS to YOUR PC", which makes sense. Then they just casually drop "oh ya and we're doing it on the servers too lol", so where the gently caress is that data coming from? Other servers? If so, what's their intra-server architecture look like? Are they just streaming it from disk? Where will the data be processed, is this the magical server meshing that will enable 100k players??

I had to listen to that part twice, because I couldn't quite believe my ears. Seems straightforward enough what they are saying.

Sensible single-player game developers can stream content to the client, and from disk to the server, because you only have one player so you know that no one needs something that the (1) player can't engage with.

Sensible MMO developers keep their maps small enough that they can fit the entire map in the server memory, so they stream to the client, but the server has everything.

CIG disdains such compromises, so they're doing an MMO with a map so big it won't fit on the server. AWS' largest instance type has 384G of memory.

So the server is going to stream from disk whenever some player needs something it doesn't have in memory, which means that your server thrashes and slows to a crawl if enough different players are in enough different places that all those places won't fit into server memory.

Almost seems as though Chris fired all the people who said "yeah, that won't work, not smart" and finally kept the guy who said "that's the challenge."

# ? Sep 9, 2018 16:20

Combat Theory: Jul 16, 2017

Posting on Page 5000 to say that this thread is cool and good and i hope Citizen Con stream will be a tasty mess.

also condolences to Amazing Zimmo, my dog passed away at the age of 12 last week as well. Hang in there buddy!

E: