Caltrops - Star Citizen





	[quote name="skip"]<a href="http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/26/the-24-year-feud-that-has-dogged-star-citizen">The 24-Year Feud That Has Dogged Star Citizen</a> If Kotaku (UK's) new direction under Univision is more articles like these, I approve. This is translated from a Swedish report though. QT3 gets a mention: [quote]If someone as much as mentioned his name on sites like Gamers With Jobs, Blues News or Quarter to Three, he made a point of stopping by in person — always highly eloquent, usually blisteringly mean.[/quote] There's some more about SC's customer support problems including how it handled Smart's refund and a community manager (Lesnick) whose ego has run amok. Also a lot about Smart's own obsession although the report wisely stays away from the GG tie-in. They point out he's tweeting 10x a day about this and "He is what a compulsive investigative reporter would look like without an editor, and with twice the ego." Let's focus on something more substantial though: [quote]When asked to point out his single biggest problem with Star Citizen, he replies: “The entire game. I am serious. The scope is completely out of whack. But if you insist on me picking one thing I’ll tell you it is the world. It is the way that they’ve designed the world and the technology. “These kinds of games, because of the way Chris has pitched it, they will never ever, ever, ever, be able to build the world they’ve designed because the underlying architecture is based on instancing. Instancing, which is what World of Warcraft and a lot of games do, is by its very nature restrictive in the amount of things you can put in the game world. It’s also restrictive in the size of the world, in the minds of players. As you know, [CIG] have problems getting even 16 people on one instance. If you are struggling with 16 people in an instance, when you only have one one-hundredth of the world built, what do you think is going to happen when you finally get around to building a world with 100 systems?” Obviously, this is a problem for a game with the stated goal of having its entire audience “playing in the same universe”, as Chris Roberts has wanted since the early days. It seems unimaginable that Roberts or his staff would be unaware of these limitations, and are not addressing them.[/quote] Someone educate me on instancing. Does he mean it's impossible because of all the stuff Roberts has promised in the game world? Or that it won't happen because they're still struggling to get >16 players on an instance? I looked at reddit and neogaf but it was the standard argument if this was a hitpiece against the almighty Roberts or exposure of snake-oil salesman Roberts. I did find this though from their <a href="https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/338712/instancing-so-which-is-it">own forums</a>. Highlights: [quote]How is CIG going to smoothly represent capital ships kilometers long with hundreds of people on them? Ships that can carry a hundred fighters in battles involving dozens such ships? I suspect even CIG doesn't know. Portraying it in Squadron 42 will be one thing, but doing it in the PU shall be quite another.[/quote] [quote]The clients can only render so much. There will never be infinite players/ships in an 'instance'. The limits of technology will force a separation beyond some limit. It is just a Fact that cannot be avoided.[/quote] [quote]That will still happen, given that CIG have already said that they're intending to allow ships to shoot across instances (and see across instances).[/quote] [quote]There is no such thing as "exceeds server capacity", that is the point of a cloud system.. they can throw as many server instances to maintaining any given high traffic area as it needs, in real time on the fly, automatically.. It's called virtual servers running in a cloud formation. This is a pretty new technology in the datacenter world. Look into it, it's pretty neat.[/quote] [quote]The Mesh Network will have much higher scalability values (and should be more tolerant of network latency etc) allowing it to support more players in the same area. Yes, it will have limits on how many nodes you can add to the mesh before it starts to bog down - but those limits are sufficiently high that we're unlikely to see them except in the most extreme situations.... at which point CIG can fall back on 'Mesh of Meshes' :D[/quote] Is a cloud-based mesh network able to do this or is it just fancy-sounding jargon to keep the whales excited? [/quote]