NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
If I am understanding the scheduling correctly, I think last night was the last full night of having SoO running? It went fairly decently on the server I was on, fell in with a small group, was slow arriving to the first island so that LT got snagged by other groups, but then we apparently managed to vanguard the second and third islands and got those LT kills in. I actually got to solo Hartmoore's LT, I'd split off from the group to find a medbed because I got a head injury and god the head injury effects are garbage, and he ended up being in the building with the medbed. Under the assumption that SoO will be gone by the time I'm clear of work to be able to run more of it, I did not have a terrible final tally, looted the helmets off of three different LTs.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Figure I'll post about it in here in case there's any extra sets of eyes to see it beyond the folks hanging out in the Discord: I am planning some group shenanigans for tomorrow night! It's something I've pondered the viability of back when they were alternating days of running Siege of Orison and Jumptown. The shuttles to the SoO islands were still running when the event wasn't running, so you could roam around with no Ninetails spawning in to bother you. With the scale of the islands and the fact that the ammo boxes still spawn in, they felt like they'd make for an excellent PvP playground. So we are hopefully gonna get around to testing that.
Orison Manhunt When: Wednesday the 12th of October, exact time not set beyond evening in American timezones. Where: Orison What we doing: Playing live-fire cat&mouse games on Solanki platform and possibly the farther-in ones as well. Why we doing: To see if it makes for an engaging form of player-driven gameplay, and also if there are any existing gameplay mechanics preventing it from being done. What to bring: Medguns, armor, guns. There is some amount of lootable gear on the SoO islands, but if you want specific stuff you will need to bring your own. Spare sets are encouraged, the planned rules of engagement ideally mean we just medgun people that get incapped, but I assume deaths will manage to happen. What to not do: At this point I have no practical knowledge on how things will play out, so it's hard to have a fleshed out set of ground rules, but there are a few things that seem sufficiently obvious from the start. 1) No camping of shuttles/elevators. It is absolutely tactically sound to sit with your gun out waiting for the doors on the only access point to your location to pop open with targets, but it is also boring as shit for everyone involved. 2) No executions. I haven't done any PvP, I have no clue how easy it is to bullet someone straight to death, and I assume shit will happen during firefights, but once a fight is over, it's gonna save time getting set up for the next round if we can just medgun people to get them back up rather than whoops someone's regen point was still out at New Babbage. 3) No pressing charges. Based on what I saw the time there was a griefer GLing the approach shuttle during a cycle of SoO, getting shot gives you the option to crimestat someone, rather than it being automatic. While amusing, getting someone yeeted to Klescher means they're no longer able to participate in the shenanigans until they get out and back to Orison. 4) Given that grenade launchers can spawn in the ammo boxes, I am not banning explosives, but I am putting them in the same category as pistol-whipping during a NERF fight.
Depending on how many people we have, we'll probably be trying a blend of one person vs the rest, FFA, and small groups. My thought on starting at least the initial round is that the target goes over alone on one transit shuttle, then the hunters on the next, with the time between shuttles hopefully serving as enough of a head start to get into the island proper. Assuming we don't discover that whoops CIG has prevented these shenanigans from being viable, the details can be tweaked as we discover how the plans go as they interact with reality.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
This year's IAE is underway right now. Ship sales on the website, and in-game they're doing free fly for all the various ships on display in the convention hall.
But more importantly than that, they released a straight-to-flyable Pisces variant. The C8R Medical Pisces.
It's a runabout ambulance, and I am absolutely in love.
It's Anvil day, so time to see what happens if you bed log in a rented Carrack with your spawn point set to the med bay and let the rental expire.
50% chance you respawn at your home planet.
50% chance you respawn naked at the center of the sun.
The C8R is pretty cool. Losing two hardpoints sucks, but it's not supposed to be a combat vehicle so I get it. It's still got room for mission crates so it has definitely supplanted the Pisces Expedition as the premier ship for doing bunker Fedex runs (as long as the bunkers don't have bugged out turrets). Being able to heal (and refill hydration/hunger) in just a few seconds while inside your ship is nice. Having a cheap ship available for doing medical rescues is nice as well. I only wish I could turn on the weewoo lights without having to turn on the main ship lights as well, since half the time when you're flying around on Microtech the main ship lights are a safety hazard due to how blinding the planet's snowstorms can be.
The Cutter I'm a little more eh on. It's nice that there is a cheap starter ship that is so fully featured (bed, bathroom, food prep area, cargo area big enough to store crates/SCU boxes/very small vehicles), but it flies like absolute dogshit and also has an incredibly anemic weapons loadout (which means you're hosed if you run into trouble since you won't be able to outrun or outmaneuver anything). Outside of guns, maneuverability, and looks, it might render the Mustang Beta obsolete though, since it has the same hobo space camper amenity package but also has significantly more cargo room (as well as more quantum fuel storage) at the expense of being butt ugly.
With the living area and its long range capability I could see it being a poor man's exploration ship, and with the cargo space and big ramp I could see it being a poor man's salvage vessel (fly out to the site, EVA out to the wreck, cut out any valuable weapons or components with the multitool, then load them into the rear of your ship... preferably before the actual salvage crews in Vultures show up). Honestly though I think that unless you really, really liked the Cutter it would be better to pick a different starter and do missions until you could buy a Cutlass Black in game. Other than not having a bathroom the Cutlass does everything the Cutter does, but ten times better, and then some.
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
i mean the game is in alpha, the actual game isn't going to be out for years. A major wipe can happen at any time so if you want this to be your primary game but won't do it due to wipes you've got a long road ahead
i mean the game is in alpha, the actual game isn't going to be out for years. A major wipe can happen at any time so if you want this to be your primary game but won't do it due to wipes you've got a long road ahead
Holy shit this game is still in alpha?
They call it an Alpha, but it's kinda not. You could, with patience, play it as a game right now and get a mostly complete, if limited, experience.
I could see players doing different community challenges with the various starter ships. Zero to hero type things, but with different rules based on which ship you start with.
Anyway, the Cutter's not a bad ship. It fills a new niche -- that of a dedicated solo cargo hauler. It doesn't have a lot of guns, but that's kind of the point. This is a ship for space truckers. If they stay in safe space and stick to UEE patrolled space sectors, it will be a perfectly fine ship. It's not designed to go into dubious territory. And that's okay. It's a starter. Stick to safe shipping routes and earn your way to a bigger/better ship. This is basically a starter for players who want to take a purely pacifist / non-combat route through the game.
I think small scale solo cargo hauling won't really be viable until we get cargo contracting jobs. Currently, hauling and selling even the most valuable commodities earns you basically fuckall when you're only doing 3-6SCU worth at a time in small ships. Bunker delivery missions can earn you 45k aUEC at max rep, but they just use standard hand sized shipping crates so you don't need any significant cargo space to do those (you can stack three crates in the cabin of an Aurora if you're careful).
A mission like "I've got 2SCU of tools that need to be taken to an outpost on [Planet], I'll give you X dollars to deliver them" seems like the sort of thing where a small cargo ship would be more useful. Tractor them into your ship from a landing pad, fly them there, tractor them out into a designated area on a landing pad, collect your fee.
I could see players doing different community challenges with the various starter ships. Zero to hero type things, but with different rules based on which ship you start with.
Anyway, the Cutter's not a bad ship. It fills a new niche -- that of a dedicated solo cargo hauler. It doesn't have a lot of guns, but that's kind of the point. This is a ship for space truckers. If they stay in safe space and stick to UEE patrolled space sectors, it will be a perfectly fine ship. It's not designed to go into dubious territory. And that's okay. It's a starter. Stick to safe shipping routes and earn your way to a bigger/better ship. This is basically a starter for players who want to take a purely pacifist / non-combat route through the game.
I've seen several YouTubers do exactly that; create a new account and start over with just a $45 starter ship, and see how long it takes them to build back up to something approaching their usual fleet just using the starting resources a basic entry-level backer would get.
I'll definitely be interested to try 3.18 out when it drops, hopefully this side of the Christmas break, since there's a whole bunch of new stuff coming. Not just the big-ticket items like Persistent Entity Streaming and Salvage T0 finally being listed as "committed", but also things they've mentioned but not explicitly put on the roadmap like "soft death". For those who don't know, its eventually planned to have "physicalized damage", whereby a ship doesn't just explode at 0hp, but instead takes damage to specific systems and is crippled or explodes based on what parts specifically are hit. Take out the engines? You'll just drift until you die or are rescued. Hit the ammo magazine or quantanium storage? That's going to be a big boom. But like so many things in Star Citizen, that all relies on tech that's been "coming soon" for years, so they've finally decided to put in a temporary placeholder feature; "soft death". Now when your ship hits 0hp there will be a high chance (60-70%) for it to just be crippled instead of going boom, knocking out all power, weapons e.t.c but leaving the actual hull and cargo intact. Which naturally leads to lots of new opportunities RE: boarding, stealing cargo, stripping the hull of crippled ships now that that's going to be a thing, or for "good guys", rescuing the stranded crew.
That said, I'm expecting a lot of jank around PES, and game's janky enough as-is. We already get big piles of hospital gown boxes lying around in landing zones, I don't see that finally enabling the "make everything persist" tech is going to improve that. I know there's supposed to be some "cleanup" code built-in, but I think CIG may be underestimating what huge litterbugs their players are. When I checked out 3.17 the thing that turned me off was the unresponsiveness of the new inventory system, hopefully they've put some work into that given how often you'll be interacting with it.
I think PES is gonna be mega-huge giganta-jank. The game already struggles under the load of running the Stanton system on a single game server. Adding a whole bunch of persistent crap and it's going to get much worse. Even ignoring litter items like hospital gowns, water bottles, and such, just remembering the state of every player's ship, location, items inside the ship, and all of that is going to add a lot of extra load to already overloaded servers.
My completely un-expert opinion is that 3.18 thru 4.0 is going to be nigh unplayable. Once they get in tier 1 server meshing and lighten the load, then it will become playable again. That's just my hunch. I hope I am wrong.
The fact that individual servers don't regularly melt down from each one having to handle the entirety of the Stanton system currently is a miracle on its own. Server Meshing is absolutely crucial, especially once you have stuff like PES and derelict ships and more outposts and player habs. They can prototype all the features they like, but individual server performance is going to be an absolute hard cap for features until server meshing works.
That said, the fact that as is the game supports walking around inside of a building on a planet, leaving the building, getting into a ship, flying into orbit, then quantum traveling to another planet on the other side of the star system millions of kilometers away, going from orbit to that planet's surface, landing, leaving your ship, and entering another building all on a single server with 99 other players and zero loading screens is pretty fucking bananas.
I think PES is gonna be mega-huge giganta-jank. The game already struggles under the load of running the Stanton system on a single game server. Adding a whole bunch of persistent crap and it's going to get much worse. Even ignoring litter items like hospital gowns, water bottles, and such, just remembering the state of every player's ship, location, items inside the ship, and all of that is going to add a lot of extra load to already overloaded servers.
My completely un-expert opinion is that 3.18 thru 4.0 is going to be nigh unplayable. Once they get in tier 1 server meshing and lighten the load, then it will become playable again. That's just my hunch. I hope I am wrong.
In theory, if they do it right, it shouldn't be too bad. The idea is that there's a separate back-end service tracking where everyone's stuff is, and it gets loaded in and out when a player logs on or off of a particular shard. So if DudeBro420 leaves a coffee cup on a mountainside (which is the example Chris keeps using) and comes back in a week, it'll still be there, but your server won't have to worry about tracking DudeBro420's coffee cup unless you're both actually playing on the same server. So in theory the servers won't have to keep track of any more stuff than usual, as they'll have the same number of active players as before and just load their stuff in and out as needed.
However, those are some very load-bearing "in theory"s.
Haven't tried it just yet, but it seems like it would be a really bad time to be a minor or a trader with "soft death" now being a thing. 60% of ships that would otherwise blow up will instead become lifeless wrecks that can be salvaged or be boarded and have their cargo stolen... so in addition to not being super profitable, people will be out to steal your stuff.
I'm going to give it a couple of weeks before I jump in since it sounds like the stability isn't so great just yet.
Yeah I still follow the news cycle for the game, and it sounds as if they released the update knowing it had some stability issues and technical issues.
They have already stated that 3.19 will be built out of the 3.18 code base and will be more of an extension than a new number.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
I've been too busy in other games to really sit down and try and get into the new patch, but I did try firing it up after getting the patch down loaded and I had like a seven digits worth of seconds ETA on getting through the login queue, which was in fact total fabrication, but then I got to the front of the line and the authentication stuff failed so it kicked me out. Unclear how much is jank coding and how much is servers melting from everybody trying to get in on the first weekend.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Yeaaaah, having read around a bit more, maybe don't bother trying to play this particular patch for the time being. It sounds like a complete shitshow. Which is a shame because some of the new features seem kind of neat, but I have a day job and a wedding coming up and I simply do not have the free time to deal with alpha/beta jank right now.
I bought x4 instead, but I'm down to try this out next free flight.
It’s a good game, but like all X games the combat is … shitty. There’s no sense of taking hits at all, so you’re likely to just go from completely fine to dead without realizing you’re even taking damage.
Ed: Ooh - analogy time! The combat can be very much like a low time-to-kill shooter but without the nigh-instant respawns!
I bought x4 instead, but I'm down to try this out next free flight.
It’s a good game, but like all X games the combat is … shitty. There’s no sense of taking hits at all, so you’re likely to just go from completely fine to dead without realizing you’re even taking damage.
Ed: Ooh - analogy time! The combat can be very much like a low time-to-kill shooter but without the nigh-instant respawns!
I don't even care. I just want to walk into a ship, mine asteroid fields, and sell scrap. I played Elite(and its very good) but it just doesn't feel "fun" enough.
i mean the game is in alpha, the actual game isn't going to be out for years. A major wipe can happen at any time so if you want this to be your primary game but won't do it due to wipes you've got a long road ahead
i mean the game is in alpha, the actual game isn't going to be out for years. A major wipe can happen at any time so if you want this to be your primary game but won't do it due to wipes you've got a long road ahead
Yeah, it's more of an Early Access situation at this point. Has been since the 3.0 release when they put the Persistent Universe up online. It's nothing like the Duke Nukem Forever situation. (Or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has surpassed DNF.)
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
I can't say I am on the pulse of game development news, are there any other Early Access boondoggles out there, or is Star Citizen basically the only example of a game demonstrating zeno's paradox?
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Yeah, it's more of an Early Access situation at this point. Has been since the 3.0 release when they put the Persistent Universe up online. It's nothing like the Duke Nukem Forever situation. (Or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has surpassed DNF.)
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
Do they have a plan for Server Meshing?
I never heard anything after their first architecture design seemed to be a non-starter.
This piece needs to be solved before anything else at this point.
Yeah, it's more of an Early Access situation at this point. Has been since the 3.0 release when they put the Persistent Universe up online. It's nothing like the Duke Nukem Forever situation. (Or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has surpassed DNF.)
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
Do they have a plan for Server Meshing?
I never heard anything after their first architecture design of seemed to be a non-starter.
This piece needs to be solved before anything else at this point.
Of course they have a plan for server meshing. Haven't you seen their 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 promises that it'll be in the very next alpha release?
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Yeah, it's more of an Early Access situation at this point. Has been since the 3.0 release when they put the Persistent Universe up online. It's nothing like the Duke Nukem Forever situation. (Or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has surpassed DNF.)
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
Do they have a plan for Server Meshing?
I never heard anything after their first architecture design seemed to be a non-starter.
This piece needs to be solved before anything else at this point.
The most recent game plan I am aware of is that the item persistent stuff introduced in this patch was going to be the new foundation to build server meshing off of, the initial time frame given we've already blown well past, but I don't think anybody was seriously expecting them to have kept to that time frame.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I can't say I am on the pulse of game development news, are there any other Early Access boondoggles out there, or is Star Citizen basically the only example of a game demonstrating zeno's paradox?
Star citizen is by far the largest. There's been plenty of games that weren't completed, or were shipped incomplete, but Star citizen is by far the largest in terms of promises made and deadlines missed.
They actually have laid out a plan for server meshing. The plan could obviously change again because it has already changed many times already.
But from my understanding, as someone who does follow the news cycle fairly closely, they are planning a 3 phase rollout of server meshing...
Phase 1: Adding the Pyro star system, which will be a second server running the new star system. What this means is that when they release Pyro, the "mesh" will be two servers. The Stanton server, and the Pyro server. And because they have decided to do it this way, we won't see much of a performance upgrade in this first phase, because it will still be one server hosting an entire star system's worth of game content. But now there will be two star systems and two servers. And when you take the jump gate to travel from Stanton to Pyro, they will do a server transition and hand you off from one server to another. This is sort of their proof of concept phase.
Phase 2: Full static server meshing. Stanton and Pyro will be broken up into multiple static sub-servers, where each server will host an undefined amount of playable game space. Maybe one server per planet. Maybe one server per station. We really don't know. They haven't defined the size or intended capacity of each static server. What we do know is that this is the phase in which we should begin to see some (hopeful) improvements to server performance. Things like AI tick rates. Position data. Kiosk load speeds. Anything that is handled server-side should be improved in performance once they split the load up between multiple static servers.
Phase 3: Dynamic server meshing. The goal with this final phase is to make a "smart" server system that can spin up and spin down additional server capacity on an as-needed basis. If Hurston the planet gets too overcrowded, the game would spin up an additional server or two, which one might cover Lorville, and the other would cover Everus Harbor. Or something like that. The specifics of size and capacity, again, are a bit undefined. What we do know is that this is their ultimate end goal. It might take another 10 years to achieve this. Who knows. /shrug. But this is what they say is the goal.
I bought x4 instead, but I'm down to try this out next free flight.
In all my decades of gaming, there are only two games that frustrated me enough that I went and wrote a negative review. X4 is one of them.
I still say you made the right choice. Right now X4 is just the more interesting and playable game.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Decided to try firing this up again while waiting for daily rollover in ff14, I successfully created a character, bought some gear, flew to a bunker, and shot mans in said bunker. Clearly this means everything is fixed forever. Or, more likely, it's just lower server load because it's a workday so things are less melty.
Need to figure out which stations are chonky enough to service a Reclaimer, unless they've overhauled its flight profile that shit is not fit for atmospheric flight, you might be able to get it out of a top-loading hangar but good fucking luck getting it back in one intact.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Yeah, it's more of an Early Access situation at this point. Has been since the 3.0 release when they put the Persistent Universe up online. It's nothing like the Duke Nukem Forever situation. (Or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which has surpassed DNF.)
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
Do they have a plan for Server Meshing?
I never heard anything after their first architecture design seemed to be a non-starter.
This piece needs to be solved before anything else at this point.
Heh, there was a bit of a brouhaha about that a while back actually. Basically there was a very highly anticipated two-part episode of Inside Star Citizen where they would finally spill the beans about their plans for Server Meshing... and then proceeded to just repeat everything we already knew about Server Meshing and talked about how they were going to have a summit where all of the teams got together to plan how they're going to handle Server Meshing.
This was... not well-received, particularly because its pretty easy to interpret that as "We still don't know how we're doing this, but we're going to have a meeting about it". A lot of frantic dev communication later it was made clear that no, that's not what it meant at all, and the summit is more like making sure all of the teams involved are on the same page before they begin the work proper, since a lot of different teams are going to have to work together to pull it off.
Part of the reason 3.18 has been unstable is this is the first time they're using the "Shard" architecture that will allow Server Meshing to be a thing; eventually a "Shard" will be a collection of servers working together to provide one continuous instance of the game. For now each shard is only one actual game server, but there's still a lot of back-end stuff that's had to change in preparation for the work ahead. The good news is that this means that persistence should be a lot better moving forwards; in theory you should be able to place objects arbitrarily in the world and have them show up again when you log back in, in the same way that they already do in your ships. But more crucially things like missions will persist since they're now handled by a back-end service rather than the game server itself.
I haven't even patched yet. I'm content to continue playing the side game, which is called News Citizen.
I probably won't play again until 4.0.
This is basically where I'm at; I've had fun with the game, but I'm very aware that stability can vary wildly between patches, and I don't have time to deal with alpha jank when I currently only have a couple of hours a night to commit to gaming. I might give it a look after a couple of hotfixes if it seems like people are really liking it, since the lure of actually being able to disable a ship, board them and steal their cargo is hard to resist...
Posts
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Conquest:Frontier Wars is for sale on steam for 2.99.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/578670/Conquest_Frontier_Wars/
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Orison Manhunt
When: Wednesday the 12th of October, exact time not set beyond evening in American timezones.
Where: Orison
What we doing: Playing live-fire cat&mouse games on Solanki platform and possibly the farther-in ones as well.
Why we doing: To see if it makes for an engaging form of player-driven gameplay, and also if there are any existing gameplay mechanics preventing it from being done.
What to bring: Medguns, armor, guns. There is some amount of lootable gear on the SoO islands, but if you want specific stuff you will need to bring your own. Spare sets are encouraged, the planned rules of engagement ideally mean we just medgun people that get incapped, but I assume deaths will manage to happen.
What to not do: At this point I have no practical knowledge on how things will play out, so it's hard to have a fleshed out set of ground rules, but there are a few things that seem sufficiently obvious from the start.
1) No camping of shuttles/elevators. It is absolutely tactically sound to sit with your gun out waiting for the doors on the only access point to your location to pop open with targets, but it is also boring as shit for everyone involved.
2) No executions. I haven't done any PvP, I have no clue how easy it is to bullet someone straight to death, and I assume shit will happen during firefights, but once a fight is over, it's gonna save time getting set up for the next round if we can just medgun people to get them back up rather than whoops someone's regen point was still out at New Babbage.
3) No pressing charges. Based on what I saw the time there was a griefer GLing the approach shuttle during a cycle of SoO, getting shot gives you the option to crimestat someone, rather than it being automatic. While amusing, getting someone yeeted to Klescher means they're no longer able to participate in the shenanigans until they get out and back to Orison.
4) Given that grenade launchers can spawn in the ammo boxes, I am not banning explosives, but I am putting them in the same category as pistol-whipping during a NERF fight.
Depending on how many people we have, we'll probably be trying a blend of one person vs the rest, FFA, and small groups. My thought on starting at least the initial round is that the target goes over alone on one transit shuttle, then the hunters on the next, with the time between shuttles hopefully serving as enough of a head start to get into the island proper. Assuming we don't discover that whoops CIG has prevented these shenanigans from being viable, the details can be tweaked as we discover how the plans go as they interact with reality.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
But more importantly than that, they released a straight-to-flyable Pisces variant. The C8R Medical Pisces.
It's a runabout ambulance, and I am absolutely in love.
50% chance you respawn at your home planet.
50% chance you respawn naked at the center of the sun.
The C8R is pretty cool. Losing two hardpoints sucks, but it's not supposed to be a combat vehicle so I get it. It's still got room for mission crates so it has definitely supplanted the Pisces Expedition as the premier ship for doing bunker Fedex runs (as long as the bunkers don't have bugged out turrets). Being able to heal (and refill hydration/hunger) in just a few seconds while inside your ship is nice. Having a cheap ship available for doing medical rescues is nice as well. I only wish I could turn on the weewoo lights without having to turn on the main ship lights as well, since half the time when you're flying around on Microtech the main ship lights are a safety hazard due to how blinding the planet's snowstorms can be.
The Cutter I'm a little more eh on. It's nice that there is a cheap starter ship that is so fully featured (bed, bathroom, food prep area, cargo area big enough to store crates/SCU boxes/very small vehicles), but it flies like absolute dogshit and also has an incredibly anemic weapons loadout (which means you're hosed if you run into trouble since you won't be able to outrun or outmaneuver anything). Outside of guns, maneuverability, and looks, it might render the Mustang Beta obsolete though, since it has the same hobo space camper amenity package but also has significantly more cargo room (as well as more quantum fuel storage) at the expense of being butt ugly.
With the living area and its long range capability I could see it being a poor man's exploration ship, and with the cargo space and big ramp I could see it being a poor man's salvage vessel (fly out to the site, EVA out to the wreck, cut out any valuable weapons or components with the multitool, then load them into the rear of your ship... preferably before the actual salvage crews in Vultures show up). Honestly though I think that unless you really, really liked the Cutter it would be better to pick a different starter and do missions until you could buy a Cutlass Black in game. Other than not having a bathroom the Cutlass does everything the Cutter does, but ten times better, and then some.
Holy shit this game is still in alpha?
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
They call it an Alpha, but it's kinda not. You could, with patience, play it as a game right now and get a mostly complete, if limited, experience.
Anyway, the Cutter's not a bad ship. It fills a new niche -- that of a dedicated solo cargo hauler. It doesn't have a lot of guns, but that's kind of the point. This is a ship for space truckers. If they stay in safe space and stick to UEE patrolled space sectors, it will be a perfectly fine ship. It's not designed to go into dubious territory. And that's okay. It's a starter. Stick to safe shipping routes and earn your way to a bigger/better ship. This is basically a starter for players who want to take a purely pacifist / non-combat route through the game.
A mission like "I've got 2SCU of tools that need to be taken to an outpost on [Planet], I'll give you X dollars to deliver them" seems like the sort of thing where a small cargo ship would be more useful. Tractor them into your ship from a landing pad, fly them there, tractor them out into a designated area on a landing pad, collect your fee.
I've seen several YouTubers do exactly that; create a new account and start over with just a $45 starter ship, and see how long it takes them to build back up to something approaching their usual fleet just using the starting resources a basic entry-level backer would get.
I'll definitely be interested to try 3.18 out when it drops, hopefully this side of the Christmas break, since there's a whole bunch of new stuff coming. Not just the big-ticket items like Persistent Entity Streaming and Salvage T0 finally being listed as "committed", but also things they've mentioned but not explicitly put on the roadmap like "soft death". For those who don't know, its eventually planned to have "physicalized damage", whereby a ship doesn't just explode at 0hp, but instead takes damage to specific systems and is crippled or explodes based on what parts specifically are hit. Take out the engines? You'll just drift until you die or are rescued. Hit the ammo magazine or quantanium storage? That's going to be a big boom. But like so many things in Star Citizen, that all relies on tech that's been "coming soon" for years, so they've finally decided to put in a temporary placeholder feature; "soft death". Now when your ship hits 0hp there will be a high chance (60-70%) for it to just be crippled instead of going boom, knocking out all power, weapons e.t.c but leaving the actual hull and cargo intact. Which naturally leads to lots of new opportunities RE: boarding, stealing cargo, stripping the hull of crippled ships now that that's going to be a thing, or for "good guys", rescuing the stranded crew.
That said, I'm expecting a lot of jank around PES, and game's janky enough as-is. We already get big piles of hospital gown boxes lying around in landing zones, I don't see that finally enabling the "make everything persist" tech is going to improve that. I know there's supposed to be some "cleanup" code built-in, but I think CIG may be underestimating what huge litterbugs their players are. When I checked out 3.17 the thing that turned me off was the unresponsiveness of the new inventory system, hopefully they've put some work into that given how often you'll be interacting with it.
My completely un-expert opinion is that 3.18 thru 4.0 is going to be nigh unplayable. Once they get in tier 1 server meshing and lighten the load, then it will become playable again. That's just my hunch. I hope I am wrong.
That said, the fact that as is the game supports walking around inside of a building on a planet, leaving the building, getting into a ship, flying into orbit, then quantum traveling to another planet on the other side of the star system millions of kilometers away, going from orbit to that planet's surface, landing, leaving your ship, and entering another building all on a single server with 99 other players and zero loading screens is pretty fucking bananas.
In theory, if they do it right, it shouldn't be too bad. The idea is that there's a separate back-end service tracking where everyone's stuff is, and it gets loaded in and out when a player logs on or off of a particular shard. So if DudeBro420 leaves a coffee cup on a mountainside (which is the example Chris keeps using) and comes back in a week, it'll still be there, but your server won't have to worry about tracking DudeBro420's coffee cup unless you're both actually playing on the same server. So in theory the servers won't have to keep track of any more stuff than usual, as they'll have the same number of active players as before and just load their stuff in and out as needed.
However, those are some very load-bearing "in theory"s.
I didn’t crash though, so that’s a win!
Not at the moment. The game doesn’t really have an economy to speak of right now.
But in the future? Maybe. They supposedly have a very in-depth economic system designed which they are calling “quanta”.
Whenever they fully bring quanta online you should theoretically be able to play the role of an economic broker or something. Maybe.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
I'm going to give it a couple of weeks before I jump in since it sounds like the stability isn't so great just yet.
They have already stated that 3.19 will be built out of the 3.18 code base and will be more of an extension than a new number.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
It’s a good game, but like all X games the combat is … shitty. There’s no sense of taking hits at all, so you’re likely to just go from completely fine to dead without realizing you’re even taking damage.
Ed: Ooh - analogy time! The combat can be very much like a low time-to-kill shooter but without the nigh-instant respawns!
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I don't even care. I just want to walk into a ship, mine asteroid fields, and sell scrap. I played Elite(and its very good) but it just doesn't feel "fun" enough.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
Naw, DNF was never playable
(Including upon release *rimshot* )
The game is playable, there's fun to be had, and each quarter it grows just a little bit more.
There's really two major milestones left. Obviously there's still a ton of minor milestones and still a lot of content left to come. But in terms of the biggest of the big milestones, there are two:
1) Server Meshing
2) The release of Squadron 42
Server Meshing brings with it two major advances. One, it allows more players online at a time, turning it from a big server situation into a true MMO. The other is that it will alleviate the strain on the single server that is running the entire game world right now, which will improve server tick rates, improve the AI which is struggling to keep up right now, and a host of other performance improvements that will be gained just by relieving stress on the server.
The reason why Squadron 42 is a major milestone for Star Citizen is because they are developing a lot of features and improvements for that game which will not be brought into SC until after SQ42 is released. Personal scanning radar and "pinging", the new HUD, new UI elements, "master modes" which is a ship/combat improvement, and a whole lot more that could be listed. Additionally, SQ42 takes place in a star system called Odyn. Once Odyn exists in the singleplayer campaign, they can bring it into SC and merge it in and connect it with the rest of the Persistent Universe, which will immediately add a ton more locations and space to explore.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Do they have a plan for Server Meshing?
I never heard anything after their first architecture design seemed to be a non-starter.
This piece needs to be solved before anything else at this point.
Of course they have a plan for server meshing. Haven't you seen their 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 promises that it'll be in the very next alpha release?
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Star citizen is by far the largest. There's been plenty of games that weren't completed, or were shipped incomplete, but Star citizen is by far the largest in terms of promises made and deadlines missed.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
But from my understanding, as someone who does follow the news cycle fairly closely, they are planning a 3 phase rollout of server meshing...
Phase 1: Adding the Pyro star system, which will be a second server running the new star system. What this means is that when they release Pyro, the "mesh" will be two servers. The Stanton server, and the Pyro server. And because they have decided to do it this way, we won't see much of a performance upgrade in this first phase, because it will still be one server hosting an entire star system's worth of game content. But now there will be two star systems and two servers. And when you take the jump gate to travel from Stanton to Pyro, they will do a server transition and hand you off from one server to another. This is sort of their proof of concept phase.
Phase 2: Full static server meshing. Stanton and Pyro will be broken up into multiple static sub-servers, where each server will host an undefined amount of playable game space. Maybe one server per planet. Maybe one server per station. We really don't know. They haven't defined the size or intended capacity of each static server. What we do know is that this is the phase in which we should begin to see some (hopeful) improvements to server performance. Things like AI tick rates. Position data. Kiosk load speeds. Anything that is handled server-side should be improved in performance once they split the load up between multiple static servers.
Phase 3: Dynamic server meshing. The goal with this final phase is to make a "smart" server system that can spin up and spin down additional server capacity on an as-needed basis. If Hurston the planet gets too overcrowded, the game would spin up an additional server or two, which one might cover Lorville, and the other would cover Everus Harbor. Or something like that. The specifics of size and capacity, again, are a bit undefined. What we do know is that this is their ultimate end goal. It might take another 10 years to achieve this. Who knows. /shrug. But this is what they say is the goal.
In all my decades of gaming, there are only two games that frustrated me enough that I went and wrote a negative review. X4 is one of them.
I still say you made the right choice. Right now X4 is just the more interesting and playable game.
Need to figure out which stations are chonky enough to service a Reclaimer, unless they've overhauled its flight profile that shit is not fit for atmospheric flight, you might be able to get it out of a top-loading hangar but good fucking luck getting it back in one intact.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
I will never be able to play 😔
I probably won't play again until 4.0.
Heh, there was a bit of a brouhaha about that a while back actually. Basically there was a very highly anticipated two-part episode of Inside Star Citizen where they would finally spill the beans about their plans for Server Meshing... and then proceeded to just repeat everything we already knew about Server Meshing and talked about how they were going to have a summit where all of the teams got together to plan how they're going to handle Server Meshing.
This was... not well-received, particularly because its pretty easy to interpret that as "We still don't know how we're doing this, but we're going to have a meeting about it". A lot of frantic dev communication later it was made clear that no, that's not what it meant at all, and the summit is more like making sure all of the teams involved are on the same page before they begin the work proper, since a lot of different teams are going to have to work together to pull it off.
Part of the reason 3.18 has been unstable is this is the first time they're using the "Shard" architecture that will allow Server Meshing to be a thing; eventually a "Shard" will be a collection of servers working together to provide one continuous instance of the game. For now each shard is only one actual game server, but there's still a lot of back-end stuff that's had to change in preparation for the work ahead. The good news is that this means that persistence should be a lot better moving forwards; in theory you should be able to place objects arbitrarily in the world and have them show up again when you log back in, in the same way that they already do in your ships. But more crucially things like missions will persist since they're now handled by a back-end service rather than the game server itself.
This is basically where I'm at; I've had fun with the game, but I'm very aware that stability can vary wildly between patches, and I don't have time to deal with alpha jank when I currently only have a couple of hours a night to commit to gaming. I might give it a look after a couple of hotfixes if it seems like people are really liking it, since the lure of actually being able to disable a ship, board them and steal their cargo is hard to resist...