Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Erronius · Oct 13, 2015

Variise_sl said:
Yeah this my worry as well. You need people to do their jobs but some people just shouldn't be allowed near leadership roles. I'll put my hand up and I'm one of those people. I'll happily man any station on a cap ship knowing that my contributions will lead to victory or defeat but yeah leadership is fucking hard. No thanks.

Some people are really good at leading, and some of my friends in that group probably are. The problem I have is that when you have group activities (PnP RPGs, stuff like this, some group online games) and the same people constantly run the show, you aren't really playing the game WITH them as much as you are showing up to help them play the game for themselves.

I'll still say that for MMOs, a single strong leader with everyone falling in behind is preferred. And I'm willing to do that in an MMO, but you need to have the right people or it all falls apart. But with friends I know IRL, it's just 100 times harder. And the weird thing is, I don't necessarily WANT to be in charge, but I at least like being given the opportunity instead of it being assumed that Friend #3 is running the show yet again.

Tauro · Oct 13, 2015

Having played EVE for years (and being in a lot of low/0.0 corps/alliances) i can tell you that if a ship exists that needs 50 people to fly effectively it will be done. As long as the ship is really good for what it was designed (really good at mining / very good to have in a battle) there will even be corps that specialize on flying those ships.

Im sure the instancing/matchmaking will work on a technical level once they get to beta, but will it be any good/fun/predictable for the players? If you look at EVE you can see that 64 players in a battle are reached very fast with the professional organization structure alliances have today. I dont see that changing at all for SC. If anything, players seen even more fanatical and crazy than todays EVE-players.

Edit: I 100% sure there will be well known organizations like old BoB / Goons / Pandemic Legion who will build a professional alliance structure. Money generating corps to get the resources for buying and outfitting ships. Corps specializing on the big ships, scout corps, spy/infiltration organizations, etc. It wont surprise me if whales with big ships having a lifetime insurance are sought after members of those corps if only for their cheap access to the big ships.

Skanda · Oct 13, 2015

Abefroman_sl said:
It isn't slowing down if anything it really picked up. They are simply drilling new wells.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=1694467207

Haven't had time to look it over properly yet but it looks like it really is slowing down. Especially in the last couple of months.

ZProtoss · Oct 13, 2015

Reading up on all the recent controversies is pretty entertaining. One thing people should never underestimate is the ability for self proclaimed creative minds to waste ungodly amounts of money. Nothing in Chris Roberts background really leads one to believe he's actually good at dealing with business at the 100 million dollar + level. Which means he should have delegated that responsibility to someone who knew what they were doing far earlier in the process.

Personally, I see shades of Curt Schilling and Mark Kern (Founder of Firefall who by some accounts wasted anywhere between 150-300 million) in the recent reports. Seems likely to me that Roberts is going to join those names in the future.

Awanka · Oct 13, 2015

Here's a pic of Chris Roberts' wife, Sandi Gardiner.

She looks a little like a Filipino transexual hooker to me. Don't get me wrong, she's several orders of magnitude more attractive than Chris Roberts, which is what this is all about. The story goes she was an intern that Roberts met as a producer back when he was tooling around in Hollywood trying to make it big. This is pertinent because she was appointed marketing VP of Cloud Imperium Games by Roberts with 0 qualifications, and he tried to keep their marriage a secret while they drew in millions of dollars from their salaries.

It might not be a scam, but goddamn, they seem like some shady characters.

ZProtoss · Oct 13, 2015

The secret marriage thing is super weird. People cover up relationships in their early stages all the time, but covering up a marriage is truly bizarre. It raises way more questions than if they just straight up owned the nepotism in the first place.

Running Dog_sl · Oct 13, 2015

Itzena_sl said:
It doesn't help that they're using the CryEngine, which isshit. The whole "player's PCs couldn't handle it" might not actually be that much of a stretch.

On the Star Citizen thread in the ED forums there are occasional posts from one of the developers who jumped ship from Frontier to (I think) the company making Squadron 42. He made a couple of posts about working with the engines used for each game, the gist of it was that Elite was using a mature, solid graphics engine they were hacking to do stuff it wasn't designed to do, while the CryEngine was capable of much more visually but was a mess internally and he had to restrain himself from jumping in and re-writing chunks of it (presumably that wasn't his job).

Tuco · Oct 13, 2015

Re: the player caps, instancing, manning ships etc. It'll all work out in alpha when people actually get to enjoy the game and as long as CiG is open to changing whatever napkin design they have now they'll tweak it just fine.

ArcheAge has similarly sized ship encounters and it's pretty fun. Beyond the daily random PvP there is an even called Sea of Graves where 150+ people participate on a dozen war ships.

For each boat you usually have a captain, 4 dudes manning cannons, one or two dudes manning the sails, one guy manning the anchor and then several just being muscle (that was usually my job). It worked out okay because the dude who was a captain spent a fortune on his ship and had the most baller ride and then took the financial burden of repairs (which we helped with collectvively) so there wasn't a big competition where everyone wanted to whip their dicks out and be the captain.

Erronius_sl said:
Some people are really good at leading, and some of my friends in that group probably are. The problem I have is that when you have group activities (PnP RPGs, stuff like this, some group online games) and the same people constantly run the show, you aren't really playing the game WITH them as much as you are showing up to help them play the game for themselves.

I'll still say that for MMOs, a single strong leader with everyone falling in behind is preferred. And I'm willing to do that in an MMO, but you need to have the right people or it all falls apart. But with friends I know IRL, it's just 100 times harder. And the weird thing is, I don't necessarily WANT to be in charge, but I at least like being given the opportunity instead of it being assumed that Friend #3 is running the show yet again.

Leading 100 people over the internet to capture and defend 5+ objectives on a map simultaneously while working with multiple other 100+ groups of people? That's my jam, let's get it done.

Trying to play an FPS with a coworker and get him in line and stop friendly firing his team? No thanks.

Tuco · Oct 13, 2015

Awanka_sl said:
Here's a pic of Chris Roberts' wife, Sandi Gardiner.

She looks a little like a Filipino transexual hooker to me. Don't get me wrong, she's several orders of magnitude more attractive than Chris Roberts, which is what this is all about. The story goes she was an intern that Roberts met as a producer back when he was tooling around in Hollywood trying to make it big. This is pertinent because she was appointed marketing VP of Cloud Imperium Games by Roberts with 0 qualifications, and he tried to keep their marriage a secret while they drew in millions of dollars from their salaries.

It might not be a scam, but goddamn, they seem like some shady characters.

She's decent for a nerd producer, but I always felt like she has the right kind of face for a sci fi chick. She's like Miranda Lawson's less attractive sister.

Ukerric · Oct 13, 2015

Skanda_sl said:
Jumping into the pile Elite dwarfs all that. Supercruise flight (Inter Solar System) uses Light Seconds (1 ls = 299,792,458 meters) as a measurement. There are systems with objects tens of thousands of light seconds away from the star.

For reference, Pluto is 5.5 light hour from the sun, i.e. 20k light seconds (*edit* which is less than 200k). 2 million km is about 7 light seconds.

2million km still gives you plenty of stuff to do, the average distance between asteroids larger than 100m in the solar system's belt is around 180km.

Phelps McManus · Oct 13, 2015

Ukerric_sl said:
For reference, Pluto is 5.5 light hour from the sun, i.e. 200k light seconds.

ie 20,000 light seconds.

Denaut · Oct 13, 2015

Tuco_sl said:
The small size per zone is a bunch of bullshit. Their reasoning was that their shit rendered so hot people's PCs couldn't handle it, but I call shenanigans on it. It's probably server-side pussy-footing. Personally I think massive space battles are awesome, but I can respect Chris Roberts for not attempting it.

I've talked about this before, but it seems relevant here as well.

Technically speaking, for an online game there are 3 main bottlenecks:

Server Performance
Network Traffic
Client Performance

Massive space battles fall partially into #1 but mostly into number #2. Network traffic is essentially the main "unsolvable" (technically speaking) problem with large space battles. Network traffic increases at about the square of the number of interacting (or players capable of interacting at any given moment) since every player you add has to send and receive messages from every other player.

This is made much worse for action games because the rate of input, and therefore the rate of messages is also significantly higher. The server has to then process these messaged and send them back. All of this takes time and even with perfect fiber and powerful servers you hit massive bottlenecks extremely quickly.

There are sort of hacky ways around this design wise that mostly work, such as what Planetside 2 does. You can carve up a large battle up into smaller local "battles" by dividing up the population using shortest split lines and then phasing those groups into logical sub-group that cannot interact with each other.

As an area gets more densely populated your player you'll see fewer and fewer people further away, and depending on where you fall in the shortest splint line zone you may be phased away from someone right next to you. This tends to work out alright because you are more concerned about people near you than those further away, and as you deal with those nearby people the little box expands outwards.

It is a little more complex than that, but that is the gist of it. If they are hitting a client bottleneck before even hitting a network bottleneck it makes me wonder how they are building the game.

Draegan_sl · Oct 13, 2015

ED is/was a terrible game. Looked good, felt good but like hodj said there was nothing to the game. It felt like you were playing WOW where the only content was daily quests and when you went to turn in/get quests you had to land each time in true ED fashion. Got tedious as fuck.

I haven't played since release, nice to hear they are adding content over time. I'll probably take another look at it around the 2nd expansion.

Ukerric · Oct 13, 2015

Phelps McManus_sl said:
ie 20,000 light seconds.

Woups.

Furry · Oct 13, 2015

Denaut_sl said:
Technically speaking, for an online game there are 3 main bottlenecks:

The bottleneck for eve was the servers, always was the servers, and never was anything but the servers. Network traffic was always a non-existent part of their issue. Is there any other game in the universe that has massive space battles other than eve? Because if not, that makes your comment pretty stupid.

Skanda · Oct 13, 2015

Denaut - In the game developing business.
Furry - Pops a boner when goofy walks by and thinks he knows better that the entire body of theoretical physics.

I'll go with Denaut 's explanation.

hodj · Oct 13, 2015

Skanda_sl said:
Denaut - In the game developing business.
Furry - Pops a boner when goofy walks by and thinks he knows better that the entire body of theoretical physics.

I'll go with Denaut 's explanation.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Skanda again.

A+ iceburn, will read again.

Sylas · Oct 13, 2015

Furry_sl said:
The bottleneck for eve was the servers, always was the servers, and never was anything but the servers. Network traffic was always a non-existent part of their issue. Is there any other game in the universe that has massive space battles other than eve? Because if not, that makes your comment pretty stupid.

iceburn or not he's not wrong, Eve's always been limited by server CPU. They have the most powerful gaming servers in the world and they are still limited by cpu.

But then again eve is built unlike any other online game and it's not a good compass to judge by.

Eve is a simulation more than it is a game. It does dumb shit like track the angular velocity of every missile in space, the flight path and orbit corrections of every drone, every ship, etc. There's comparatively very little client/server interaction and very little player input. issue a flight command (like orbit or follow or fly in this direction), hit F1 to activate your guns and then go smoke a cigarette while the server does physics calculations on everything that happens from there. The server does all the calculations and just tells the client to draw whatever it wants, server doesn't give a shit if it matches what is actually happening, server never trusts the client for shit.

They've made a lot of improvements not only constantly upgrading hardware but also code changes like weapon grouping, drone upgrades, time dilation, etc to lessen the strain on the servers but the thing is no matter what they do to make the game lag free for N players on screen, the players immediately take it as a greenlight to just bring N x 2.

Tuco · Oct 13, 2015

Denaut_sl said:
I've talked about this before, but it seems relevant here as well.

Technically speaking, for an online game there are 3 main bottlenecks:

Server Performance

Network Traffic

Client Performance

agree 100% with everything you said. I don't follow it closely but everytime I hear of player caps the reasoning CiG peddles to the koolaid drinkers is, "Our models are so incredible you'd need a $2000 machine to have more than 45 ships on your screen at once.". I call shenanigans on that because if I'm in a huge space battle most of those ships are not only outside my FOV, but those that are are likely reduced to about 50 pixels on my screen because they are 10+ km away.

Compare that to say, GW2 where combat mechanics and lack of clipping cause players to clump up like a huge bunny fuck fest, forcing your PC to render all the things.

Eve sort of has this problem too, I remember seeing a video where a massive number of ships warped in and start playing bumper cars. I never played it so I don't know how common that is in large fights vs a somewhat spread out fight like this:

And if that kind of fight doesn't give a space combat sim fan a boner then I don't know what to say to them.

Mist · Oct 13, 2015

GW2 is massively CPU bound and has to cull a ton off shit in WvW.

Star Citizen can't do any more client optimizations until they finish redoing the existing models. The redone models render a lot faster than the originals, use less memory AND have the localized damage states. The original Arena Commander 1.0 models were literally just shit they imported from the high detail models they made for the marketing art, not designed for gameplay at all. All the new ships are just being done with the new system from the ground up.

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Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Erronius

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Tauro

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Skanda

I'm Amod too!

ZProtoss

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Awanka

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ZProtoss

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Running Dog_sl

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Tuco

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Tuco

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Ukerric

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Denaut

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Draegan_sl

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Ukerric

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Furry

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Skanda

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hodj

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Tuco

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Mist

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