
Originally Posted by
Val the Moofia Boss
The MMO servers have been online for four years, having launched in December 2015. The problem is that we don't have full persistence, which means you can't make any long lasting progress right now.
A lot of content has been developed for Star Citizen, but cannot be implemented all at once because the servers cannot handle them. For example, Levski is supposed to be in another star system, but because the servers can't support another star system, it was placed in the Stanton system. The original plan was to remove Levski and replace it with Microtech (a Stanton planet) when the later released, but that won't be necessary due to OBCS. Another example: racing missions were in the game for several patches, but were removed to make room for other content for players to test.
OBCS is coming in the next patch, which will allow for better performance and more things to be added and the things that were removed to be added back in, but the main thing we're waiting on is server meshing. Until then, the servers will capped at fifty players and we won't have full persistence, which means wipes every patch.
Doesn't matter whether or not the art team stops working on helmets. It won't make server meshing come out faster.
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Clarification on OBCS and Server Meshing
So right now, the extent of the playable universe in Star Citizen is the Stanton System. There is a lot of stuff going on in just this one system. There are four planets. On the planet Hurston alone, you have a large city with hundreds of NPCs walking about, twenty-one HSDF outposts with NPCs in them, huge cavern systems with NPCs inside them, bunkers with NPC bands inside them, automated turret systems. Inside the caves and on the surface of the planet, there a ton of objects being tracked, such as ore veins and fruits from bushes which you can harvest. That's just one planet alone, and there are four planets and eight moons, all with a ton of stuff on them. Furthermore, there are fifteen space stations populated by NPCs in the Stanton System. Further straining calculations is the fact that the Stanton System is rendered at a realistic solar system scale. SC was built in the Crisis engine, which was designed for FPS games with maps a few square kilometers in size at the most, not for star systems with thousands of NPCs and crap in it. The servers are stretched enough as it is.
So two things are needed: object container streaming (OBCS), and server meshing.
OBCS means that the server will only calculate areas that are in use by the players. As of right now, the servers runs the entire Stanton System simulation. It's still calculating all of those NPCs in some HSDF outpost, all of the rocks and bushes nearby, all of the cargo containers inside it, all of the turrets outside of it, etc, even if there are no players nearby. For obvious reasons, this is ludicrously inefficient. What OBCS will do is that the server will only begin running parts of the simulation that players visit. If no one is at Levski, the server won't bother with Levski. The SC devs have already been preparing for this by cordoning off areas of SC into rooms, which leads us to...
Server meshing. This is built on top of OBCS. This will allow servers to dynamically spin up and manage an area of players. For example, let's say there are a hundred players having a party in the ArcCorp bar. Rather than one server trying to maintain the entire star system, the game will instead have a new server spool up and run just that one bar with the hundred players in it, and players will be able to seamlessly walk in and out of the bar, crossing servers. Thus, there will no longer be a server cap. There will just be the one universe. This will enable CIG to put everything back in. They will be able to up the NPC count so that the cities don't feel so underpopulated. They will be able to add NPC ships traveling around the system so that it doesn't feel like the players are the only spacefarers in the verse. CIG won't have to worry about their servers running out of ram and crashing.
CIG got a basic version of OBCS running earlier this year, and it's set to be integrated into the game in the next patch, 3.8. Server meshing is slated to be coming mid 2020 and the SC devs seem to be pretty confident about that. We can't get the next star system, Pyro, until server meshing is implemented, after all.