cmdrk posted:

I'm no John Videogames, but I'd love to do some packet/network analysis of SC to see just how bad it is. I think what you _could_ learn is things like:
- just how hosed is their wire protocol? I assume they either completely reimplemented TCP from scratch but with FIDELITY or they've purchased some really miserable JSON RPC middleware for it. or both. or its just generic cryengine networking with absolutely nothing done to it and server meshing and uint42 is a scam (surprise!)
- how much information is leaked to the client? again I assume there is MUCH extraneous fidelitous information sent to the client that someone could use to get the very personal inner feelings about the T-posed AI bartender standing on the bench over there.
- how many servers are they actually running? given some of the CIG's comments about AWS/EC2 from earlier in the thread, i'd be really surprised if they've actually tried to scale anything. my guess is everything jammed into is ONE BIG rear end X1 instance with no firewall whatsoever.

okay i'm interested. what's the bare rear end minimum i need to pay for a greymarket game account?

Experimental Skin posted:

Asp Explorer on the Frontier forum in the SC thread has done much of this already. It's just as hilarious as you imagine.

shrach posted:

The real answer is funnier than any joke answers. They believe the Bartender AI is going to be so sentient it will become self-aware and want to better itself and leave its job as a bartender and fulfil all the other AI roles in the game. They will become the traders and the pirates once they have earned enough bartending to venture out into the 'Verse. Then they will just spawn more bartenders until the game is rich with a diverse population of sentient AI that populates the 'Verse in a 10:1 AI:Human ratio.

Thoatse posted:

Here's some more doing their best Chris Roberts impersonations, hopes the bilge pump goes brrrrrr and you're back to shipshape soon


https://i.imgur.com/UFAv96k.mp4



https://i.imgur.com/yNjduNR.mp4



https://i.imgur.com/8vCpFuH.mp4



...some general ferret cuteness


https://i.imgur.com/8hdi1IP.gifv



https://i.imgur.com/BuZSexN.gifv





and a flying ferret to lift your spirits

https://i.imgur.com/kiaLdmV.mp4

Rugganovich posted:

I vote for Thoatse to be made "Morale Officer, First Class"

Rugganovich posted:

I vote for Thoatse to be made "Morale Officer, First Class"

Kosumo posted:

I second this motion.

HorseBodyInspector posted:

I am lost, WTF is "subsumption architecture" in networking solutions ?

Experimental Skin posted:

Asp Explorer on the Frontier forum in the SC thread has done much of this already. It's just as hilarious as you imagine.

Popete posted:

9 years in and they can't even get their NPCs to not t-pose and we are being told they are working on ground breaking life like AI, lol.

Anticheese posted:

Can we please get a link?

Anticheese posted:

Can we please get a link?

ASP Explorer posted:

Unfortunately, the networking is the single most important thing they can be working on. Far cleverer people than I can explain it in far greater detail, but until you have a working communications platform that can tell Instance Alpha Clients 2-99 that Client 1 is performing action such-and-such in container 0x11, which has a movement vector D along axis X,Y,Z, in object (a(a-1-99)) which translates as a Aurora with loadout (a(a(b(1-99))) and constructs (a(b(c(1-99))) with the pilot wearing a Space Rabbit Costume and is emoting ((lulzbucket)) in real-time, to all other entities in Instance Alpha - and receiving the reciprocating data from them in real-time, in a scalable dataset that doesn't have to be re-written every time they change a coordinate system or purchasable items in their shop, or they decide Hats are no longer visible over 1Km.

Without that - it's not a blocker, it's not a bug, it's not a "we hope to" - it's a stone dead project. Forever.

Khanstant posted:

Remember before Oblivion came out and they were like "our AI is going to be so good... actually it's TOO GOOD because we had NPCs murdering each other if they wanted to sweep while someone else had a broom"

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

The "Foundation Festival"?

OooOOooo... someone saw that Foundation trailer a couple of weeks ago...

Lammasu posted:

poo poo they're making a Foundation movie? How did I miss that?

MarcusSA posted:

It’s a series on Apple TV+

Khanstant posted:

Remember before Oblivion came out and they were like "our AI is going to be so good... actually it's TOO GOOD because we had NPCs murdering each other if they wanted to sweep while someone else had a broom"

For people who still don't understand why Bartender AI is so important posted:

Monthly report:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/17670-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-June-2020

quote:

They also began leveraging the usable system functionalities of the bartender in combat scenarios. In the social environment, they created the concept of usables that can produce and accept items:

“An ammo box is nothing else than an item provider. The item itself could produce magazines or it might have magazines attached, similar to how a beer fridge can contain beer bottles, but a mixing station can create the drinks from specific source items. This allows NPCs to search for places in the world that can provide them with magazines of a specific type, relocate to those objects, and refill their loadout. This gives opportunity for the player and forces NPCs to evaluate the environment to decide if and when it’s appropriate to use those refill spots.” Character Combat Team

I know people make jokes about Bartender AI but they often don't get that what is called "Bartender AI" is not just about that. CIG should rename it so people just encountering this poo poo will get that they don't work 3 years on bartenders aslone.

colonelwest posted:

The radiant AI in Oblivion was sort of cool for its time. NPCs would go about daily routines around the cities, so when you played the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests, you could follow them around and figure out the best time and place to kill/rob them. It all had the classic Bethesda bugs and clunkiness, but it worked from a gameplay perspective. I would like to see modern RPGs take that concept further.

Fargin Icehole posted:

Alright, maybe i'm just now noticing it, but the Wing Commander games had a bartender, or at least a bar. I don't think Starlancer had one, but Freelancer certainly did.

Why this fixation?

Fargin Icehole posted:

Alright, maybe i'm just now noticing it, but the Wing Commander games had a bartender, or at least a bar. I don't think Starlancer had one, but Freelancer certainly did.

Why this fixation?

Mirificus posted:

My Eyes Are Open posted:
I used to be apart of the crowd that hated this game and called it a scam. Tbh, part of me still thinks it is. But at least its more of a reality than Chronicles of Eleria sooooo...

Besides the point.

I was wrong. I started watching a few videos about the game here and there which grew a healthy curiosity.

colonelwest posted:

The radiant AI in Oblivion was sort of cool for its time. NPCs would go about daily routines around the cities, so when you played the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests, you could follow them around and figure out the best time and place to kill/rob them. It all had the classic Bethesda bugs and clunkiness, but it worked from a gameplay perspective. I would like to see modern RPGs take that concept further.

Spiderdrake posted:

Same reason a lot of fantasy roleplaying starts in an Inn: nerds not really knowing a whole lot about things. It's like a main menu for doing stuff.

Beet Wagon posted:

Nah, it's 100% because CR wanted to be a pilot more than anything. And not just any pilot, but a cool WW2 fighter pilot, who could almost always be found looking photogenic in pilots-only bars after their missions. The bar is a status thing. It's where Maverick and his buddies hang out. Its where commercial airline pilots look impossibly cool to guys like Chris. It's the kind of thing that's integral to an absolute dullard's idea of a pilot, just like sitting through moto briefings from your no-nonsense CO in the (pilots only!) ready-room and having a guy wave light-up cones at you to tell you to take off.

Nalin posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture

It is an architecture that has seen popularity in real-time AI and stuff in recent years, but I also can't figure out how they are using it as part of networking solutions. Maybe as a way to make automated decisions on how to dynamically route data or something? Or reconfigure the network to handle various failure situations? Those are my best guesses.

Making use of subsumption architecture for the AI is also why it has taken CIG a billion years just to make a bartender. One of the disadvantages of the architecture is how difficult it is to develop as you aren't just making the bartender NPC play a drink pouring animation; you have to develop all the lower level sensory functions first that the AI needs to know before it can plan out its higher level task.

I think CIG should have just done NPCs the traditional way and maybe left subsumption AI for like, future expansions or sequels. The game would have been in a much better place if it had working, acceptable AI for years now.

Khanstant posted:

Remember before Oblivion came out and they were like "our AI is going to be so good... actually it's TOO GOOD because we had NPCs murdering each other if they wanted to sweep while someone else had a broom"

Beet Wagon posted:

Nah, it's 100% because CR wanted to be a pilot more than anything. And not just any pilot, but a cool WW2 fighter pilot, who could almost always be found looking photogenic in pilots-only bars after their missions. The bar is a status thing. It's where Maverick and his buddies hang out. Its where commercial airline pilots look impossibly cool to guys like Chris. It's the kind of thing that's integral to an absolute dullard's idea of a pilot, just like sitting through moto briefings from your no-nonsense CO in the (pilots only!) ready-room and having a guy wave light-up cones at you to tell you to take off.

SpitefulHammer posted:

I remember reading this in a games magazine a year or two before Oblivion released and getting completely hyped for the game, because I was young and stupid.

At least Oblivion's 'Radiant AI' sounds cooler than 'Bartender AI', even if it was just canned animations and a schedule.

cmdrk posted:

As it turns out, its rather hard to search for "ASP Explorer" on the Frontier forums and get Star Citizen information. Really Google, I mean it!

quote:

The SC client is notorious for opening so many connections - your router throws a panic and shuts off as many connections as it can to avoid swamping. Even setting it's options to lower limits will not always result in the behavior you expect.

There are a couple of options available to you to get around this - use bandwidth massaging software to limit the SC client to something sensible, use another computer and make sure it's got the worst wifi connection that won't bug out - and either download SC direct to that or use it as internet connection share. Some routers offer software with direct application limits, or you can go oldschool and save SC to the slowest 40Gb USB 1 drive you can cobble together.

All sorts of fun possible with this

quote:

Mega-map tries to load absolutely everything your PC can handle, then dumps 99% of it when CIG's server sends a "run now" message.

It loads assets you'll never use. It loads assets you will use, and then promptly dumps them. It then reloads them yet again - and again dumps everything when you are playing in a stable session - and has to load then yet again in that session.

It's all sorts of absolutely crazy. You can monitor this behavior in real-time using nothing more complicated than process monitor.

quote:

Have you seen the loading times?

Code:

[CSessionManager::OnClientConnected] Connected!
[CSessionManager::OnClientSpawned] Spawned!
Times - Lobby: 1.722s connect: 1.728s connected: 26.037s Spawned: 33.409s

quote:

Yup you are right - we exaggerate. Next time the PU goes wonky and devours itself in a RAM sink I won't be gentle and say it's a 70Gb hog, I'll be brutally honest and say it's the 90Gb RAM sink that it is.

I no longer have PTU access (oh I wonder why that is!) but my friend does - and some of our latest testing over a few afternoon beers led to some serious head scratching. The file handling and extraction / cache process seems fundamentally broken. RAM handling is fundamentally broken. Network socket handling and wait/response times are fundamentally broken. Some of the spawned network connections are unused or have responses in the dozens of seconds.

And there isn't even a game.

quote:

Amusingly - there are a lot of calls to an ad server that never get answered.

quote:

Much hilarity ensues when you try to run the client on low RAM systems - say 16-32 Gigs or so - and not only watch the client attempt to load and unload assets, but trash it's own cache, reload everything again, and force the OS to dump it's own caches. Ever watched a TCP/IP stack rebuild? Star Citizen makes it fun!

How are ordinary gaming machines supposed to deal with this monolithically?



Good luck being able to stuff that into memory and decompress and have a functional game and a working OS.

Of course, you can work it bitwise but then you have to fight both the filesystem and the OS. Maybe CI-G will refactor that?

It's not much better when you have more RAM - and it's been tested on multisocket enterprise gear with terabytes of RAM. Because CI-G still haven't managed to compartmentalize assets in a viable manner and untie their client from server-side dependency. SSOCS is what they claim will fix this. Urm, it won't. Ever.

Because they can't code it.

quote:

On a positive note - it appears they have started using ephemeral negotiation ports - although that might have been included from 3.6 (I didn't bother paying attention).

quote:

Interestingly - I was able to log in earlier and was able to select New Babbage as the spawn point and got to admire some elevator buttons and NPC's standing on chairs. Now I can only select Stanton and the pre-alpha in the very earliest stages of development hangs as soon as it hits 4836.8Mb RAM and a call to a session manager that keeps freezing.

The servers themselves are still responding and allowed a valid shutdown.

quote:

SC is notorious for leaving sessions open but unused, and that can leave to some routers simply running out of RAM. One test to try is close everything else that uses internet connectivity, reboot your router, then launch SC (and only SC) once you get connectivity back.

If that works, then you can troubleshoot it further into that your router is absolutely ancient and should have been replaced a decade ago - or far more likely CI-G cannot do networking and have absolutely no concept of session management.

Pixelate posted:

Pretty sure he sits in a Freelancer sometimes and does network trip reports. Couldn't find any of that though. Here's a random dip.

colonelwest posted:

The radiant AI in Oblivion was sort of cool for its time. NPCs would go about daily routines around the cities, so when you played the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests, you could follow them around and figure out the best time and place to kill/rob them. It all had the classic Bethesda bugs and clunkiness, but it worked from a gameplay perspective. I would like to see modern RPGs take that concept further.

ggangensis posted:

That D-Day clip is totally awesome. But why is it just 30 seconds long? Did he have to cut it because someone fell through the map? And what is this, even? Some people running towards nothing with some explosions going on. Great. Does anyone remember the Return to Castle Wolfenstein (rel. date: 2001) beach map? A match on this map doesn't look half as stupid as this video. And you know, the players have actual goals there instead LARPing towards nothing.

Pixelate posted:

Pretty sure he sits in a Freelancer sometimes and does network trip reports. Couldn't find any of that though. Here's a random dip.

Dwesa posted:

commando in tophat posted:

Is this from the roadmap update?

e. nevermind, I missed the text in the image...