Why finish a game when you’ve already got the in game purchases working for you?
A finished game means legal liability for bugs and performance issues. a perpetual alpha is legalese for we don’t have to do shit and people still buy expensive ships in the game."
Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.
I wish I could market my passion projects with 1% of their abilities
They made some ground breaking tech. There’s simply nothing else like it. It’s not smoke and mirrors, people do have a game to play. Server meshing and fidelity is still unmatched, especially in space sim area.
The game is marketing itself for a long while now.
Server meshing being “unmatched” is mostly marketing BS.
You have examples of MMO games leveraging server meshing (with Pentium CPUs) from 20+ years ago.
I mean, that really depends on how you define server meshing.
Star Citizen is the only MMO I’ve seen where you can be standing in one server, look at players/objects in a different server (a few feet away) and actually shoot/interact with those objects without noticing any difference.
The only way you can even tell they’re in a different server is by keeping an eye on a server identifier using some console commands, and walking/flying over the boundary.
In every other MMO the servers are either completely separate, or there’s some sort of loading screen between areas.
This is from an article on Dark Age of Camelot from 2003:
The heart of Camelot, it turns out, isn’t in the English countryside but in Fairfax, Virginia. There Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running linux. Each group of six servers runs what mythic calls a gamespace—a virtual world inhabited by thousands of players. The idea is to create different gamespaces for different types of players.
Design decisions also reflect the need to keep players happy. While each gamespace could conceivably handle 20,000 simultaneous players, Mythic limits them to about 4,000 players each, adding new gamespaces when necessary instead of increasing the load on the ones already up. “If you have too many people, the worlds get too crowded,” says Denton. “The last thing you want is to be bumping into thousands of people.”
We also have multiple example of CIG trying to market common tech (serialized variable!) as some of milestone.
That doesn’t sound like server meshing, that just sounds like 6 servers sharing the work load for one area. Most likely a case where one server handles all AI/NPC logic, another handles trading/transactions, another handles health/damage/combat, another handles chat, etc.
Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.
I stand by what I say. It is clear that CIG are being dishonest in terms of what they have achieved.
Server meshing is mostly a marketing project to maintain confidence in cash shop spend. Not saying people haven’t worked on it, but the main aim is to keep selling JPEGs.
Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.
So a single dual core Pentium Pro CPU handles a shard of 4K players, with a comparable server CPU being limited exclusively to trading/transactions and another high end Pentium Pro being limited to (as per your description) a high traffic IRC server?
Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious. I am happy to learn more about Dark Age of Camelot’s architecture (even if I am wrong), but I also won’t take CIG marketing/propaganda at face value.
Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious.
I’d ask the same of you. I tried looking into it a bit more, but I couldn’t find much information on how they actually split up resources among those 6 servers. I was just listing out some examples of how they could separate the workload between them.
I’m not familiar with Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) beyond what I can find scanning through some twitch streams. The maps seem tiny (big for its time, but tiny compared to Star Citizen). I am much more familiar with other games that are more comparable to Star Citizen’s scale (like No Man’s Sky, Eve Online, or Elite Dangerous).
In DAoC, I see that there are 4 different “Realms” that make up a gamespace. https://camelotinsider.github.io/albion.html
I’m not sure what’s required to go from realm to realm. Looking at the map from that link it looks like there is some sort of separation between them.
I see loading screens for players jumping into caves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt5lbZIdt50&t=70s
Which means that those are most likely handled by a different server.I also see players being teleported when going into/out of some sort of fort:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOPy3WAlNFk&t=600sFor instance, the player walks up to the door and they can’t see any of the players that are outside of the door/fort. Once they teleport outside of the fort, they look back and can’t see any players that were inside (player tags/names). I’m certain that if anyone tried to peak in through the windows of the fort they wouldn’t see players either.
Server meshing overcomes limitations like that.
So, it seems more likely that some of these 6 servers are dedicated to running different parts of the world and any interaction between those parts are handled with teleporting/loading screens. And then maybe 1 or 2 servers are dedicated to some universal backend database/services that brings everything together.
Most games work hard to disguise loading screens and these separation of boundaries. That’s why we’re seeing a lot more quick cutscenes between areas, or even animations where you crawl through a tight space and conveniently can’t see what was on the other side before doing so. It’s the easy way to handle things and that’s totally fine.
It’s something that Star Citizen doesn’t do, which is why you can be inside a space station and look out the window at players flying around, or be inside a massive ship locked in FPS combat while the pilot is taking you through the wormhole that connects one solar system to another.
It’s really crazy that people still have interest in this game.
Interest, I can understand. Trust and faith? Yeah, I’ll pass, thanks.
Stop having fun wrong!
Honestly they would solve the majority of pushback by just announcing the game as being released as live service instead of pretending it is still in early access as if there was a roadmap to a real release.
It’s not early access, you’re alpha testers and pay for it.
Once the game releases, if it ever releases, youll likely have long stopped playing.
Not saying people can’t like doing whatever they like doing. I guess maybe my wording should have been closer to that it’s crazy that people still believe this game is going to see a full release and/or giving money for it. It’s an insane amount of money that has been poured into this game at this point to still be saying there’s no full version available still.
11 years after release date. They apparently went to the vaporware school of Leon Umsk.
Such an incredible scam. I have friends that spent thousands on this shit. They are like cult members.
Sunk cost fallacy
I think the release for the single player game is clearly in sight with the 1 hour demo they showed last year.
All of this for what will end up just being a video game.
Nothing world changing, no lives will be saved, no problems solved, nothing will be different. There will just be another MMO on the market slowly dying off as people lose interest.
It will be amazing if its lifecycle lasts longer than its development.
Throwing away money isn’t evil when WE do it!
$220 invested since 2015 myself. I think I was just really depressed at the time…
I don’t recommend that anyone spend money on this without knowing what they’re actually getting into. $40-45 is all you need to access everything that the game has to offer.
There’s a “freefly” event coming up sometime next month if you want to try it out for yourself and see if you like it or not.
If you do decide to try it out, keep an eye out on the Bug Avoidance Thread that we posted over here: https://lemmy.world/post/27541360
The game can be very buggy, but knowing how to avoid the worst bugs can make a big difference. Even then, there are still bugs that will get you. It’s not for the faint of heart.
One thing to keep in mind about the “$40-$45 is all you need” statements that litter almost every Star Citizen thread is that the math doesn’t really work out.
As per CIG, you have around 2.5 million paying accounts (with many of them being alts). 2.5 M. * $45 gives us $112.5 M, so just 14% of their revenue.
It’s clear that they will put the overwhelming majority of their resources into something that gives them 86% of their revenues; milking whales, selling JPEGs and power creep cash items (with the vast majority of the older cash shop items being either outright non-functional or abandoned).
All you need to do is follow the money.
For me, I followed the development for about 1-2 years before buying into a starter package. Then, I didn’t spend anything else until I was confident that they would continue to deliver updates (about a year later).
I’ve continued to fund them here and there over the years when I feel like they’ve released some good content, but that’s because I’m comfortable supporting them.
No one actually needs to do that. With $45 you can just go out and do some FPS missions where, at the end, you’re rewarded with some of the higher end ships (Contested Zone gameplay).
Even easier is that you can just hijack an NPC/abandoned ship and, as long as you store it in your hangar at the end of each session, you can keep on using it for anything.
There’s really no need to actually pay for anything beyond the initial starter ship because almost everything else is earnable/hijackable in-game.
The game can be very buggy, but knowing how to avoid the worst bugs can make a big difference. Even then, there are still bugs that will get you. It’s not for the faint of heart.
If they pivot hard enough, sounds like that could be the game, lol
I bought the second cheapest package a decade ago. I’ve enjoyed more time watching videos going over new updates and covering development than I have playing the Alphas. Did I get my money’s worth? Probably not. Do I really care? No. I’ve wasted more money on bigger disappointments over the years.
Yeah, got the cheapest package around the same time. Hop on every few years to see what they been doing, see if my PC has been spec’d out of playing. Think I paid $25-30 Canadian? I’ve put more time into it than a couple other games I’ve spent the same or more on, and I stepped off the hype train. Sad, in a way, that it seems like it’s just going to carry on the way it’s going forever. It was a cool vision, but they’re just printing money so I doubt it will ever come to much more than what it is.
damn I forgot I backed this game like a decade ago. I will have to put my account details in my will so my children to play…maybe.
What will happen first, we make it to space or this game releasing?
I got this “game” for free back in 2014. I can’t recall the last time I logged into it. There was never anything to do. If they ever release anything they promised, I likely won’t be able to log in anymore 🤣.
