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L. Ron Hoover
Nov 9, 2009
I love the idea that the size of the Idris with just one pilot can't even be dealt with, let alone three servers of players pinging around inside of it. Like most star citizen things, even a barest fraction of the original goal is inconceivable.

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Scruffpuff
Dec 23, 2015

Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?
There's almost an idea for a game here. Are there any space games on PC where the entire plot takes place on a capital vessel, in the manner of Dead Space or Alien Isolation? I like the idea of a ship so big it's basically its own city, except 1000x more complex. There almost too much content in that concept for a single game, but of course in Star Citizen all that content is going to be just one small part of one ship in an entire universe of thousands of ships! Because that's the next step once they get a spaceman to walk straight without crashing the server. Or even with crashing the server.

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
Space Hulk Deathwing, or really just read any Warhammer 40k lore.

Spiderdrake
May 12, 2001



Agony Aunt posted:

Release is always current_year + 2 away. You should know this by now.
And jesus patch is always +2 patches from the current one.

BiggestOrangeTree
May 19, 2008
Warhammer pay 40k for these jpegs

no_recall
Aug 17, 2015

Lipstick Apathy

Scruffpuff posted:

There's almost an idea for a game here. Are there any space games on PC where the entire plot takes place on a capital vessel, in the manner of Dead Space or Alien Isolation? I like the idea of a ship so big it's basically its own city, except 1000x more complex. There almost too much content in that concept for a single game, but of course in Star Citizen all that content is going to be just one small part of one ship in an entire universe of thousands of ships! Because that's the next step once they get a spaceman to walk straight without crashing the server. Or even with crashing the server.

Star Citizen has issues because they think they can just "layer on the fidelity". Game System design (or fun design) is intricately tied to level design, where level designers can stage or have good control over what the user will play through / experience.

I'm not saying the ship designs are bad or whatever (they are). Its just that they're shooting themselves in the foot by designing ships in such a way without any tools to help them author a good experience as to what gameplay experiences can be had. From what I can see, the game is basically levels of mazes (ships) layered into an open world without any game systems to tie the whole experience together. Looking at the videos, a lot of stuff has to be thrown away just to craft a decent experience.

Like example, going down a turret, then needing to run to the bridge is pointless. Disengage from the turret, play the animation and do a subtle fade to black then respawn the dude at the bridge / common area, where they can immediately hop on the next fun thing to do (shoot torpedoes ffs). There's so much of the ship level that you can throw out and not even notice.

I don't know anything about game development.

Buy an Idris.

Pixelate
Jan 6, 2018

"You win by having fun"

Blue On Blue posted:

PS: How's development coming on that massive cargo carrier they sold? The one that can attach/detach cargo pods as needed and folds out to expand?

That should be fun to watch contort itself in their physics engine

The Vehicle Pipeline Director - December 2019 posted:

What's happening with the Hull C?

So we are one step closer now, to do it on the tech side. So we got rid of one of the blockers that we had. So now we're down to, we really need docking. Which is a step closer since we fixed the last blocker. Um which is actually CR's big physics refactor that he's been working on, and is now in the game. So docking is now a lot, lot simpler to do. Which *really* helps, because it was it was a big pain before that physics refactor.

We need the super-sized cargo doing. So we don't want to spawn a Hull C with 4,000 individual SCU boxes, because that's just going to tank the framerate in the server. So we need cargo to come in bigger than 1 SCU boxes, which benefits the game as a whole.

And then the last bit which the engine team will be working on soon, is allowing physics grids and viz areas to be transformable at runtime. So obviously the Hull C goes like that [WAVES HANDS] we need that central spine area to have its physics grid go with it, because otherwise you're gonna go half way down it and then you're gonna fall out into space.

So again, those those three big tech hurdles need to be overcome. And then we need a few months on the art side just to finish off. So we've got it essentially to final art which is, the 100% pristine version of the ship is done. Squadron use that for their scenarios that they have, that need it. So you'll see on the squadron roadmap the Hull C's there, but I'm not sure it's on the PU one now, or they're on like different progression amounts. Because squadron don't need the docking, they don't need the super-sized cargo, they don't need to see it land, they can just get by with what we have. But the PU needs everything for it to function well.

Dwesa
Jul 19, 2016

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars

:reddit: posted:

All I could think of while watching the new free fly event trailer /s



Currently almost six hundred upvotes. Thankfully it's marked as sarcasm, penalty for criticizing SC deflected and everything is fine with SC.

Sanya Juutilainen
Jun 19, 2019

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Blue On Blue posted:

Someone post that picture with all the ships crossed off they have delivered

I'm always down for a good laugh

PS: How's development coming on that massive cargo carrier they sold? The one that can attach/detach cargo pods as needed and folds out to expand?

That should be fun to watch contort itself in their physics engine

Crosschecked with , hopefully caught the few that came out since (Carrack, Prowler):

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

Crosschecked with , hopefully caught the few that came out since (Carrack, Prowler):



Basically, the bigger it is, the more of a problem it is.

Just imagine the trouble they are going to have making the biggest ships, the ones they sold for thousands. Oh my.

Sanya Juutilainen
Jun 19, 2019

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Agony Aunt posted:

Basically, the bigger it is, the more of a problem it is.

Just imagine the trouble they are going to have making the biggest ships, the ones they sold for thousands. Oh my.

Considering this, it will be fun to see Elite's fleet carrier on that list - jump-capable, usable (albeit with controversies, but well, can't have everything), over 1 km long (based on the pad sizes), with purchasable skins.

Guess the Citizen defense will be "You can't fly it around, destroy it or walk around it, muh fidels"

The Rabbi T. White
Jul 17, 2008





I demand a Plinkett Wing Commander movie review.

And Rich Evans to screech at RonsQuads 37 when it is released (it is never being released).

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

can't have everything

Buggeration

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

with purchasable skins.

Not just that, different appearances apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7cPCJWtMzE

Mr Fronts
Jan 31, 2016

Yo! The Mafia supports you. But don't tell no one. Spread the word.

I love this.

AbstractNapper
Jun 5, 2011

I can help
Just a kind reminder.

The sold land on their "planets"

jarlywarly
Aug 31, 2018

Scruffpuff posted:

There's almost an idea for a game here. Are there any space games on PC where the entire plot takes place on a capital vessel, in the manner of Dead Space or Alien Isolation? I like the idea of a ship so big it's basically its own city, except 1000x more complex. There almost too much content in that concept for a single game, but of course in Star Citizen all that content is going to be just one small part of one ship in an entire universe of thousands of ships! Because that's the next step once they get a spaceman to walk straight without crashing the server. Or even with crashing the server.

There's the in development Colony Ship RPG, Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic adventure game, Prey was on a space station but similar themes.

Dooguk
Oct 11, 2016

Pillbug

AbstractNapper posted:

Just a kind reminder.

The sold land on their "planets"

There is a discussion on Reddit about having 1:1 scale planets. It is quite clear reading the comments, that lots of backers know very little about the thing they are so invested in.

They are also trying very hard to ignore the fact that Elite:Dangerous has this, in a 1:1 scale galaxy.

Sanya Juutilainen
Jun 19, 2019

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Agony Aunt posted:

Not just that, different appearances apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7cPCJWtMzE

Ahhh, missed that, thanks for the link!

Sankis
Mar 8, 2004

But I remember the fella who told me. Big lad. Arms as thick as oak trees, a stunning collection of scars, nice eye patch. A REAL therapist he was. Er wait. Maybe it was rapist?


AbstractNapper posted:

Just a kind reminder.

The sold land on their "planets"

what haven't they tried to sell yet? Didn't they sell modding and server stuff early on

MedicineHut
Feb 25, 2016

Clive Johnson CIG@cjohnson
Today at
There's quite a lot to answer in your question. I'll try to cover the major points but apologies if you feel I have left out something important.

When will the servers be stable? At the end of beta. Why not before? Because we need to finish making the rest of the game first.

When a game is being worked on as a closed alpha the focus is on feature and content development. Stability and bug fixing take a back seat and only issues that would hinder further development are addressed. This may sound an unprofessional way of doing things but the idea behind it is to try out ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible. That allows the developers to find out which parts of the game's design work and which need revisiting. There is no point spending time bug fixing a feature that may change or even be completely pulled from the game at any time. Development will continue with the game in this semi-broken state at least until all features and content have been locked down. The game then enters the beta phase of development where bug fixing, optimisation, balance and polish are at the forefront. Ideally no feature work happens during beta but there's almost always some last minute changes pushed in.

SC of course is open development, so while the focus in alpha is still on trying out different ideas, we need the game to be stable and functional enough for backers to test it and give their feedback. The key word there is "enough" which of course does not mean perfect. It is important that we strike the right balance between bug fixing and further development: too much bug fixing and development slows, too little and we don't get enough feedback or the bugs hinder further development.

Has CIG got the right balance between bug fixing and development?

The problem with determining whether a build is stable "enough" is that we can only look at how stability affects the playerbase as a whole, i.e. the average. There will therefore be some lucky backers who experience far fewer crashes or other problems than average while there will be some poor souls for whom the build appears a bug-ridden crash fest. Ask the lucky players if we have the balance right and they might say, no the game is stable enough and we need to focus more on expanding the game. Ask the unlucky ones and they might still say no but want us to stop working on new features until all the current bugs are fixed. Very few people are going to say yes.

As a rule of thumb, before releasing a patch to Live, we try to make sure it is at least as stable as the previous Live release. Some patches may be more or less stable for particular play styles than previous ones but, overall, stability should get better from patch to patch. Of course sometimes things don't work out how we'd like and average stability will end up not as good as it was on the previous version.

Why aren't we fixing the server crashes causing 30000 disconnection errors?

We are. It only seems like we aren't because, regardless of the cause, all server crashes result in clients getting the same 30000 disconnect. This disconnect happens because once the server has crashed the clients suddenly stop receiving network traffic from it. They then wait for 30 seconds to see if traffic will resume (incase the server was stuck on a temporary stall or there was a short network outage) before giving up, returning to the front end menus and showing the disconnection error. During these 30 seconds clients will see doors fail to open as well as AI, terminals and other entities become non-responsive. Backers sometimes mistake these symptoms as a sign that the server is about to crash, and you might see in-game chat saying a server crash is incoming, but the truth is that the server is already dead. It is an ex-server. It has ceased to be. If we hadn't nailed it to its perch it would be pushing up the daisies. (In-game chat only continues to work because that is handled by a different server.)

When a new patch is being prepared on PTU, new builds are available for download almost daily. Once DevOps in ATX has pushed the new build up to the servers and made it available for download they then monitor the build for the first few hours, often working late to do so, looking for anything to indicate a problem that needs dealing with immediately. For the next few hours people play the game, uploading their crash reports, submitting to the Issue Council, responding to feedback forums, etc. Server crashes are all automatically recorded to a database. When the EU studios wake up, Technical QA look through the uploaded client crashes and recorded server crashes and make an initial assessment of which are the worst offenders, based on how often they happen and how soon after joining a game. Server crashes almost always go to the top of the pile, purely because they affect more people than individual client crashes. Jiras get created and passed on to Production. Production do three things here: first they send the crash Jiras to the Leads for triage, second they confirm priorities and which crashes QA should try to reproduce or otherwise assist with, third they flag any particularly bad crashes with Directors for priority calls incase additional people need to be reassigned to try and ensure a speedy resolution. Meanwhile the Leads triage the crashes making sure they go to the right Programmers on the right teams. Then the Programmers investigate the bugs, often working with QA to find as much info on the bug as possible. Most of the time Programmers can commit a fix the same day but sometimes it might take a day or two longer. In rare cases it can take a couple of weeks to track down the problem and come up with a fix. In very rare cases the bug is a symptom of some deeper flaw that will require restructuring some system to work a different way, can't be done in time or without significant risk for the current patch, and needs to be added to a backlog to be scheduled for a future release. As ATX comes online Community and DevOps publish their reports on the previous build from information gathered over the past day. Production kicks a build with all the latest fixes and meet with QA, Community and DevOps to make an assessment on whether the new build is likely to be better than the last or whether additional fixes are needed first. Production pass their recommendation onto the Executives who make a go/no-go decision on the trying to push the new build to PTU that day. If yes ATX QA and DevOps start working their way through a pre-release checklist that takes several hours to complete. When LA comes online EU Programmers may hand over any issues that were specifically for LA teams or that EU teams were working on but are unresolved and would benefit from continued investigation after EU has finished for the day. When ATX have completed the pre-release checklist, and if the build has passed, the cycle starts again.

If we are fixing the crashes why do 30000 disconnections keep happening?

Between every quarterly release we change a lot of code. Some of it completely new and some of it merely modifications to existing code. Each change we make has a chance that it may contain bugs. We're only human and all make mistakes from time to time so each quarter there is the potential for having added a lot of new bugs. There are processes in place to reduce the chances of that happening but some always slip through. Once a bug is discovered it needs fixing. Sometimes a fix doesn't work. Sometimes it only fixes the crash in some cases but not all. Sometimes the fix itself has a bug in it that can cause other problems. One of the things we see quite a lot is that once a frequent crash is fixed one or more other crashes will start appearing more often. That happens because the crash that was just fixed was blocking the other crashes from occuring as much as they otherwise would have. As mentioned above there are also crashes that can't be fixed immediately and need to wait until there is more time to fix them properly or until some other planned work is completed. Eventually though the majority of the most frequent crashes get fixed. What we are then left with are the really rare crashes, the ones that only occur once every month and we don't yet have enough information to fix or reproduce them. One of these rare bugs isn't going to make much difference on its own but a hundred such bugs would be enough for at least three server crashes a day.

If we can't make the servers stable why don't we provide some kind of recovery?

It has been suggested that providing some kind of cargo insurance could prevent players losing large sums of aUEC when their server crashes mid cargo run. I believe this has been considered but the potential for it to be abused as an exploit is clear. Until that problem is solved cargo insurance is unlikely to appear in-game.

Another suggestion is to add some kind of server crash recovery. The idea here is that when a server crashes, all the clients would be kicked back to the menus with a 30000 as they are now but would then be given the option to join a newly spun-up server that has restored the state of the original from persistence. This is actually something we're hoping to do but it requires more work to be done on SOCS and full persistence before it can happen so is still a long way off.

There have also been other suggestions such as clients or servers saving out the game's state in local files but these aren't secure or it would be a temporary solution and a waste of work to implement and maintain that could be spent working on the proper solution instead.

For now the best option is for us to continue to fix crashes as we find them and hope that servers are stable enough for most players to be able to test the game.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Dr. Honked posted:

If I hated SC, I wouldn't post about it, because hate is extremely unhealthy. I absolutely love the bizarre hubris and blatant pantomime of the whole thing. It's so, so irretrievably broken, but fans keep huffing Crobbler's farts and throwing money into his pot despite everything. I've derived more entertainment from SC than I have from actual released games that I've paid for, and I've never actually played it, and never will.

this is me too, i mean if it's a good game eventually then I'll buy it! until then: lol

Spiderdrake
May 12, 2001



Star Citizen is not something to hate. I don't even hate that those people are pouring money into it. It's a community that has made horrendous sexist, rapist, racist and everything else comments. They come off as a nexus of unpleasant people. All their money and energy are being directed away from games I might play and into a game only the lost and the damned play. All that motivation in the market is just gone. And Roberts is a hack-fraud, sure, but he's off doing something harmless. Imagine Chris Roberts as a politician or something. He'd probably be waving his hands while loudly declaring they've fixed the corvid-19 problem with new vaccine meshing technology.

Bofast
Feb 21, 2011

Grimey Drawer

Sankis posted:

what haven't they tried to sell yet? Didn't they sell modding and server stuff early on

Outside of ships and land claim thingies, purchasable items in their store includes things like
  • Handle Change Pass
  • Game universe map
  • Squadron 42 Manual (Digital)
  • Engineering Manual for Modders (Digital)
  • 42 page book “The Making of Star Citizen” (Digital)

Colostomy Bag
Jan 11, 2016

:lesnick: C-Bangin' it :lesnick:

MedicineHut posted:



For now the best option is for us to continue to fix crashes as we find them and hope that servers are stable enough for most players to be able to test the game.

lmao

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Dooguk posted:

There is a discussion on Reddit about having 1:1 scale planets. It is quite clear reading the comments, that lots of backers know very little about the thing they are so invested in.

They are also trying very hard to ignore the fact that Elite:Dangerous has this, in a 1:1 scale galaxy.

They don't know they don't have 1:1 scale planets and systems or they are trying to memory hole it? Or are they trying to justify it by saying its not needed and pointing ot ED's barren planets as justification while trying not to point at NMS as being not 1:1 scale.

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

MedicineHut posted:

and hope that servers are stable enough for most players to be able to test the game.

Thoughts and prayers

no_recall
Aug 17, 2015

Lipstick Apathy

The best response to a ticket I never read.

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Dwesa posted:

Currently almost six hundred upvotes. Thankfully it's marked as sarcasm, penalty for criticizing SC deflected and everything is fine with SC.

Also appropriate to CIG

Tarquinn
Jul 3, 2007

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you
my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.
Hell Gem

Inacio posted:

loving hell, that's legitimately an ugly ship.

You will like it more once you have paid a thousand bucks for it.

Buy an Idris.

Dwesa
Jul 19, 2016

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars

Agony Aunt posted:

They don't know they don't have 1:1 scale planets and systems or they are trying to memory hole it? Or are they trying to justify it by saying its not needed and pointing ot ED's barren planets as justification while trying not to point at NMS as being not 1:1 scale.
I doubt they are knowledgeable about other games that were released past 90s. They might believe that development of X took longer than SC's development and required more employees and that might be extent of their knowledge.

AbstractNapper
Jun 5, 2011

I can help

Sankis posted:

what haven't they tried to sell yet? Didn't they sell modding and server stuff early on

At one point there was rumor about selling apartments on their cities. Thankfully, as far as I know, that never became an official thing.

Quavers
Feb 26, 2016

You clearly don't understand game development

Quavers
Feb 26, 2016

You clearly don't understand game development


ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Chris' Mod coming along great

Fidelitious
Apr 17, 2018

MY BIRTH CRY WILL BE THE SOUND OF EVERY WALLET ON THIS PLANET OPENING IN UNISON.
Man, good thing they aren't concentrating too much on making the game stable or development would really slow down.







That would be awful.

TheDeadlyShoe
Feb 14, 2014

Scruffpuff posted:

There's almost an idea for a game here. Are there any space games on PC where the entire plot takes place on a capital vessel, in the manner of Dead Space or Alien Isolation? I like the idea of a ship so big it's basically its own city, except 1000x more complex. There almost too much content in that concept for a single game, but of course in Star Citizen all that content is going to be just one small part of one ship in an entire universe of thousands of ships! Because that's the next step once they get a spaceman to walk straight without crashing the server. Or even with crashing the server.

System Shock 2 :D !

no_recall posted:

Star Citizen has issues because they think they can just "layer on the fidelity". Game System design (or fun design) is intricately tied to level design, where level designers can stage or have good control over what the user will play through / experience.

I'm not saying the ship designs are bad or whatever (they are). Its just that they're shooting themselves in the foot by designing ships in such a way without any tools to help them author a good experience as to what gameplay experiences can be had. From what I can see, the game is basically levels of mazes (ships) layered into an open world without any game systems to tie the whole experience together. Looking at the videos, a lot of stuff has to be thrown away just to craft a decent experience.

Like example, going down a turret, then needing to run to the bridge is pointless. Disengage from the turret, play the animation and do a subtle fade to black then respawn the dude at the bridge / common area, where they can immediately hop on the next fun thing to do (shoot torpedoes ffs). There's so much of the ship level that you can throw out and not even notice.
I think there's a lot to be said for the fidelitious approach in the abstract. Not the turrets, really - but the rest of it. Interacting with your environment is more compelling to me than interacting with menus, and the more the environment behaves logically and consistently the more you gain from it. I'd much rather run over to a console to interact with it then scroll through a menu, or flip three huge safety levers and mash a big red button to self destruct over hitting a keyboard combination. In part that's what's made VR compelling to people, but it is also pretty cool in normal PC gaming. Star Citizen has sold that vague dream to people, but they never - *never* - had any solid ideas about how to pull it off. Drink mixing minigames? What a loving joke.

Space-gamers have been pining for the 'ultimate space game', the one true game to bring it all together, for a long time. It's just that its, y'know, *really hard*,. The only other person dumb enough to think it would be easy was... Derek Smart.

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

AbstractNapper posted:

At one point there was rumor about selling apartments on their cities. Thankfully, as far as I know, that never became an official thing.

Give it time. Still eary days.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Agony Aunt posted:

To be fair, they go on and on and on about many things!

Also, offtopic, but you might appreciate it, listened to Solisbury Hill like 20 times in the last couple of days. Can't believe i haven't really appreicated how great this song is before.

All the early Gabriel is brilliant. Even Genesis.

Also I stan for the soundtrack to the Last Temptation of Christ - never seen the film, but the Peter Gabriel soundtrack is amazing.

Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

The Titanic posted:

Most likely it was specifically for Rexzilla and his method of marketing.

But alas, they lost Rexzilla.

Feels like a timing issue; as you said, it would have been a thing for Rexshilla to have a gameplay mode that fed into his schtick of the totally organic snowballing gaming phenom with sick camera angles.

But instead, someone waved a contract at him and he lit out of there like his rear end was on fire.

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Hav
Dec 11, 2009

Fun Shoe

Dooguk posted:

There is a discussion on Reddit about having 1:1 scale planets. It is quite clear reading the comments, that lots of backers know very little about the thing they are so invested in.

They are also trying very hard to ignore the fact that Elite:Dangerous has this, in a 1:1 scale galaxy.

Ci!G appears to be attempting to hide that their solar system bodies are 1:6 scale. It’s one of those enduring fidelity problems, like space having a top speed lower than aircraft.

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