Got called a “hater” and a “Luddite” when I made a joke about the game being in beta while doing shit with the org I was in, and a bunch of my org mates (who have spent $$$$) started to get super salty because “RDR2 and GTA V took a gajillion years to make and they turned out great” and “you just don’t know how the game development process works”
Meanwhile we were having to reload the game constantly due to 30k’s, falling through surfaces, and random bugs.
Yeah, pre-release games have heaps of weird bugs.
Most of them aren't because you decided to use the most difficult (arguably impossible) and complicated way of making a multiplayer server backend for no reason, meaning your game can't have too many doors open or the spaceship AI will break system-wide.
your game can’t have too many doors open or the spaceship AI will break system-wide.
How does that even happen?
Because, very roughly, the one server is handling every action that happens and every object that spawns at once, and as the server ages those things build up in memory because they're being actively managed (until quite recently they'd be loaded as objects even if no one was anywhere near them) and clog the server, meaning that after a few hours AI and other cycles like trade begin to bug out and switch off as the server tries not to crash.
This is supposed to be solved by "Server meshing" which in fairyland will allow thousands of players to dynamically play together as multiple servers shift the loads. As of last year they were still trying to get two servers to connect to each other. They've been trying to do this for about 5 years now
Server meshing is possible because thats how eve online has operated. The star system is divided up by a bunch of servers so hopping from one area to another effectively disconnects you from one and connects to another when going through the space gates.
However eve online only manages to achieve large player numbers on a single server cos the game itself is super simplistic and operates at a tick rate of 1 (lul) and even then it struggles to handle large numbers of player is single zones during big fights.
Star citizen trying to do the same thing with i assume 64 ticks and much more complex interactions with the game world is most likely impossible.
Why do multiplayer servers still suck shit when handling more than like 100 players at a time? What's the bottleneck exactly? The network?
Cost mostly. Its a constant struggle between balancing performance and cost of running the servers. As we all know companies dont like cost only profit which is why any game that uses dedicated servers should allow community run servers.
Also the server needs to distribute each players interaction with all other players.
And handling serverside logic over clientside to prevent hacking.
Many things but mostly just cost. Having worked briefly even in simple games the servers are always more underpowered than they should be even for crappy games i made where it was just single users interacting with the server.
What's the biggest cost though? The bandwidth or the actual CPU calculations that need to be done server-side?
Cpu and ram. Bandwidth comes pretty cheap and games dont need much.
Modern game servers will do lots of validation to see if the client is doing something "legal" before shipping that out to others. Lots of processing work needs to happen for every tick in the simulation which means the more players you have the more validation and processing per simulation cycle. Then there's various lag compensation and other faff.
Bandwidth wise though not much data is being sent at any one time. Most data centers can handle massive file transfers whereas games use very little data in comparison.
Also limitation in the possibilities of netcode itself. Networking for games is hard. And the limitation of physical distance and speed packets can transmit over a network.
Some problems can never really be solved.
Planetside 2 could handle hundreds of players. Idk why no one else has tried it. That was back in 2013.
probably exponential complexity when they start interacting with each other
eve has built in server lag as a feature, super cool but hilarious at the same time
Its pretty clever as well. The entire game is built around the feasibility of players all over the globe being able to connect to a single server cluster. But unlike star citizen i imagine they actually thought about the architecture first instead of running on a kickstarter pipe dream like sc.
what is it with games like Star Citizen and Cyberpunk 2077 failing at basic shit that games from like 2000 could do, like spawning pedestrians and vehicles in the right place. Must be capitalism rotting from the inside.
in the case of Cyberpunk, it was an issue with being way too ambitious for the development time that they had - they were trying to make a GTA-style open world game, except the studio had no prior experience with that (Witcher 3 was open world, but the urban setting here makes things a lot more complicated), they restarted development at some point, they were throwing a ton of shit in (cars! owning and decorating your own apartments!), and as a result the game just wasn't ready when the execs decided to push it out
Star Citizen on the other hand is mostly a grift, but it also has a similar thing going on, with the scope being expanded further and further despite there not even being a proper, stable base to build on, leading to jank like this
And the thing is a lot of the linear sequences of the game was pretty good, the game should've been just like that from the start. Perhaps with some sort of hub system.
But in that reality people would likely complain about how the game is "limited" instead and ask for the game to be open world.
Yeah, this whole drive towards open worlds is one of the trends in modern gaming I really don't like. I'd take an immersive sim with a bunch of smaller, but rich in interesting content levels over a massive bloated open world any day. The Prague exploration in Deux Ex: Mankind Divided was far more interesting than any open-world game I've played (not that I've played that many, I don't really keep up with most modern games since my PC's pretty old), it took me like 3 hours to even get to the main quest.
Yea open world push has made a lot of great games kinda meh, even though Metro exodus was fun I much preferred the immersion you got in 2033 and last light being much more confined, and it felt like the plot flowed much more successfully.
I humbly think that g*mers should not be allowed to feel pleasure
It's probably related to something Hbomberguy talks about in his recent Deus Ex video. Basically: it boils down to the fact that games in the 90s or 2000s had a lot less shit to manage, a lot less corporate oversight, and therefore a ton more flexibility. One of the interesting things about Deus Ex Human Revolution is that it actually fell prey to a number of miststeps and mistakes the developers talked about in their post mortem that the early builds of the first Deus Ex game did as well.
The thing is: with the first Deus Ex they had the flexbility to completely redesign huge parts of the game and completely reshift and redesign entire sequences. In Human revolution there are so many more moving components and corporate deadlines to meet that they couldn't get to the 11th hour and go "this all isn't working....let's rebuild all of it". From the way Warren Spector talks about it....Deus Ex didn't become what it was until right up to its final release.
I think Cyberpunk unfortunately fell into a similar trap. The Developer reached for the moon and tried to have Cyberpunk be absolutely everything....but by year 8 or something all these systems and plans just weren't integrating cohesively. So then they started ripping shit out trying to streamline and redesign shit into something that was at least semi stable aaaaaaaaaaand it broke a ton of shit in the process.
I mean, we've got Minecraft and Stardew Valley and a zillion isometrics like Disco Elysium that are both fun and pretty. And its not like prior generations haven't pushed out a few turds. Pretty much every MMO was a shit-show before World of Warcraft, simply because the system requirements for an always-on massive multiplayer game - both from the client and server side - exceeded the tech capacity of the era.
indies have always been great, and triple A studios have always been cash-grabbing corner-cutters, but it feels like the tripe As have gotten even worse and are incapable of things that were considered basic decades ago. The turd has gotten simultaneously stinkier, yet more polished.
I'm having fun with Elden Ring.
There are plenty of good games of ever variety. But there's also a lot of overhyped shit
hell, No Man's Sky had a complete turnaround from the joke it initially was and is now very fun to my dumb brain
I like nms as a relaxing game. After the first 2 hrs or so the survival is very low stakes.
Yeah, I found the opening of it really tense - like "wait what where do i go oh SHIT THIS ISN'T OXYGEN AND THE STORM IS RADIOACTIVE"
and then it becomes peaceful spore creature scanning simulator
And Elite Dangerous if you're into trucking simulators (if your truck traveled at multiples of the speed of light and was armed with 4 chainguns and heat seeking missiles)
I want to go around stomping Thargoids, but I just can't get past the learning curve of the game. Space sims really arent my jam. I like my space games arcade-y and full of pew pew pew lasers and explosions
Rebel Galaxy is pretty fun and straightforward in execution (also cheap especially when on sale), the sequel Rebel Galaxy Outlaw still needs some fixes though
Not easy to combine space travel with the concept of the dark ages but goddamn they pull it off
Are they still bring in new players? Can't imagine new players not scared away by its reputation and prices. Also can't image existing players paying even more to have very little delivered year after year. JPEG factory has halted production, yes?
Yep lots of big youtubers love occasionally dropping a highly cherry picked video to advertise the game. Pisses me off to no end cos not a single viewer will get that cherry picked experience.
Wait, wait. CitizenCon? There's a fucking convention devoted to ONE GAME? That doesn't even exist yet?
Why didn't the usual outrage crowd goes after Space Citizen? Is it because the game is "apolitical" so it's okay for it to grift millions of dollars?
Well then, critical support to crissy rob in separating g*mers from their money
A ton of chuds see Star Citizen as the return of “real gaming” for vague self-conjured reasons
Ironically more truth in this than anyone would care to admit. Vaporware has a long and storied legacy, even if Star Citizen is a high water mark in scams.
I'm old enough to remember the Horizons MMO, Duke Nukem Forever, the appropriately-named Phantom game console... You're not a Real Gamer unless you've been suckered by at least one of these.
Why do people keep throwing money at this obvious boondoggle when Elite Dangerous AND No Man's Sky already exist and are both quite good?
No Man's Sky is a cute early tier deployment of procedural generation, but not what I would call "good" in terms of gameplay.
Elite Dangerous is Mechwarrior In Space and cool as hell and I love it.
But hell, Eve Online has been a thing for nearly two decades. Star Wars and Star Trek have had multiple online multiplayer games. Then there's Warframe and Skyforge and Planetside and Destiny. Just take your pick. They all actually exist and are varying degrees of a good time.
You don't need to keep pining for Duke Nukem Forever In Space.
I agree that this is actually pretty creepy as someone who knows nothing about Star Citizen lol
The best contribution of SC was getting everyone hyped over deferred decals. Now almost everyone uses them. You can also thank that Alien game since it also used them and was actually released as a finished game.
um, im watching the first video and the animation is hilarious
