[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I mean I guess it’s at least something

I really wish they would just focus on getting features they have announced ready

It's really disappointing. On top of CIG not even being able to deliver on key stuff like salvage or creatures or NPC crewmembers, they can't even deliver on the little stuff. Towns built out of crash sites isn't something new or resource intensive (remember, CIG has an army of 700+ developers, slated to soon have over 1,000+ in house employees in a few months, and yet they can't set aside a few artists to work on sprucing up the Stanton system's samey outposts). They showed off examples of crash sites turned into bases in 2016. That was six years ago. And yet, they're still not ingame yet. Not even the small ones shown above.

And the derelicts we are getting in the upcoming patch? Barebones. It's just a jumping puzzle (in a high latency first person shooter) with some laser trip mines. What about immersive salvaging gameplay, like blow torching doors to open them, or hacking into computers to search their cargo manifests, or trying to pick the locks of a safe? What about trying to delicately extract parts from an engine compartment, trying to avoid damaging fuel lines and causing an explosion? What about retrieving a ship's blackbox and reading through the log entries and analyzing the data, and then deciding whether or not to turn it in to the cargo ship's parent shipping company, or the authorities, or selling it on the black market, or hanging on to it yourself?

Instead, we're just getting more of the same barren derelicts we've been diving into for the past half decade, except with a little more variety than just freelancers and caterpillars. And they have trip mines for some reason (if someone came and planted a trip mine at a crash site, wouldn't all of the valuable stuff have been looted already?).

[Jastall]

Yes, it is indeed a complex task.



That's why they are going with multiple servers meshed toguether instead of just having one aka server meshing. To spread the server load accordingly when needed.

Yeah, and that's why to get to the moon with a car you just need highway meshing. So that you can distribute the length of the journey accordingly. It just works, see.

[zysis]

The game is possible, there is already tech that can render 30000 players in the same area, the game doesnt need to be able to load every single player in the same area it just has to have enough capacity to load as much as it can, CiG are going to give us the experience as large as they possibly can while still having suitable performance, so you are just talking BS about thing being impossible when certain things can already be done with current tech available.

You are hilarious. No really.

So the biggest in the business, one of whom is well known for writing some of the cleanest code in the business can't do it, won't do it and certainly know the limitations of server hosting aren't able to do it despite pulling in BILLIONS a year. Yet some mom and pops setup can do it because they say they can. No, they are waiting for tech to catch up. lol

Let me explain this to you in terms that you'll understand, because you seemingly have an uncanny ability to totally ignore the reality of it. It doesn't matter about servers. That's only part of it. It's about the user-end. Your internet can only take so much data downloading, it can only UPLOAD so much data too. In order to render 3,000 objects isn't a huge feat. That was done 30 years ago. The problem is simple; each player uploads their location, known as TLoC and the server then sends every OTHER players' location back. The "rendering" is done client side, NOT server side. So while your PC is downloading and uploading at a rate that exceeds most hardware, you expect all those objects to render, shoot, move AND report their own data every .05 seconds or less.

I don't think you understand how much data that is, and the stress it places on even the very best systems available. Sure we could all have T-1 connections and would come close, but the home PC would be throttled at 60 ships, let alone 3,000. I know you don't understand this, because you are blabbing on about things that ONLY the company itself has told you and not general knowledge of both hardware and baud rates while understanding their general limitations.

Dream on, my grandkids would be able to play it. Maybe. I didn't mention the all-consuming beast that is packet loss, nor even mention the small details like draw rate vs. ping and the snowball effect that occurs once it starts to lose pace. Even 3,000 people TALKING will lag ANY server. Not because the server can't handle it, no. Because the home users get throttled by the massive amounts of information being downloaded and none of it is queued up, it's all just shoved down the throat of the receiver.

Not sure who lives in a fantasy more, the creators of the pipe dream or the people who believe in it. Ask yourself this most basic of questions; If the big kids on the block aren't doing it, then what makes you think that CIG can? Because they want to? Because they say they can? Why aren't the big kids not only beating them to the punch, but also raking in the tens of billions over the past 10 year development cycle of the game? I'll answer for you; because it's impossible to do. The big game houses aren't going to create something that doesn't exist. They aren't selling dreams, they sell GAMES. When you are selling dreams, anything is possible.

EDIT: I could mention many games that suffer from RAM stacking and thus have very clear limitations based on the end-user. Factorio comes to mind, with users being reduced to 4fps once their base becomes massive. No internet at that point; it's purely GPU lag which you declare CIG have solved. Then, at the other end you have server side lag. I'll offer Atlas as a good example; even 30 ships battling it out on the high seas results in either a server crash, or the game plays like a powerpoint presentation because GETTING the location information to each player in a live setting places massive demand on the server while packets are being lost by user and server. Thus resulting in less than desirable gameplay within the playfield. Each user must get play location on the ship, the ship itself, both are moving. Cannons firing, damage to objects AND report and receive that all under the user expectation of AT LEAST 0.015 seconds of time loss. 30 ships. Best engine in the business. 30. Use your brain you dulllard. Someone is trying to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and you are lined up behind the last buyer, looking over their shoulder thinking it will all be yours...

[MrAnderson]

Yeah, and that's why to get to the moon with a car you just need highway meshing. So that you can distribute the length of the journey accordingly. It just works, see.

Well I don't get the analogy or relation besides that people once doubted about flying airplanes just like they doubted about going to space and many other technological feats.

I mean it's not exactly rocket science and mmorpgs like Elder Scrolls Online already use the same principles with their megaserver and sharding albeit not without hiccups and even WoW I think, with the way they used shards.

This graph shows the pathway to reach that:https://prezi.com/view/l5DorjAy1dUz8BoDnuoF/

- - - Updated - - -

I'll offer Atlas as a good example; even 30 ships battling it out on the high seas results in either a server crash, or the game plays like a powerpoint presentation because GETTING the location information to each player in a live setting places massive demand on the server while packets are being lost by user and server. Thus resulting in less than desirable gameplay within the playfield. Each user must get play location on the ship, the ship itself, both are moving. Cannons firing, damage to objects AND report and receive that all under the user expectation of AT LEAST 0.015 seconds of time loss. 30 ships. Best engine in the business. 30.

Not doubting your network knowledge or experience but in one Star Citizen server players already have 50 player battles with ships/missiles/lasers going way faster than anything in Atlas. And that's while also dealing with the strain of the rest of a big ass universe.
Sure there can be the ocasional lag spike, dsync and fps drops but the server holds and there's still a ton of room for optimization along the way.

But then again, Ark/Atlas, and Unreal Engine in general aren't known for their network profiency out of the box so most online games that go for massive maps and entities need to craft their own solution from scratch which they did for Ark and I assume then expanded for Atlas.

[Yelmurc]

Yesterday we got a video showing off concept art for crash sites, and cool towns built out of crash sites, the latter of which we probably won't get to see until 2026 or something.

According to a well sourced leaker, the Reclaimer derelicts are already in production at the Montreal studio. We should see them in 3.17 or 3.18. Also once the hospitals shown in that ISC are complete, the Montreal team working on Hospitals will then focus on expanding out the Stanton landing zones. So you’ll see a lot of those currently locked and unused doors expanded out.

[kenn9530]

snip

And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing. If it couldnt be done they wouldnt be doing it, the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

[Edge-]

So finally checkin out the 'verse.

First blush is...holy shit performance. Running a respectable and recent rig - i5-10600k, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM, running it off a SSD. I've dropped to "low", and the resolution to 1080p down from 2K (windowed mode, because neither borderless nor fullscreen actually work, it just displays on part of my main monitor rather than filling it), grabbed the latest drivers just in case that was the issue and...still getting fps in the 20's in my room. Load times are extremely long as well, which is a minor issue but whatever.

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here? Because I want to start exploring but this is unplayable. I assume I'm doing something wrong since folks are playing at higher resolutions with higher settings/good framerates, so hoping someone here can help me out. I get it, it's alpha, but clearly others are making it work somehow.

Just tested and even at 720p I'm not able to hit 30. Can't tell what outside really looks like on this tiny window and low settings, but the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult. I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with. I'm listening to a computer tell me about August Dunlow (subtitles don't work, just placeholder text) now but have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

Man, I guess I'm gonna have to look up those new player guides first. But it's not gonna matter much if I can't figure out how to get the game to play at least at 30fps.

Edit: These NPC's are both hilarious and kinda legit freakin me out now. They just stand/sit there, a few seem to have some sitting animations but the standing ones just like...occasionally turn their head to look at you, otherwise they stare ahead blankly. Toss some horror music behind this and this is a freakin horror game.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here?

No. When the servers went up at the end of 2015 and it was just one planet, the game ran at a buttery smooth 60 FPS. Then as the patches went on and they threw in more and more stuff, the framerate began to drop massively. Nowadays, you will only ever get 50 or 60 FPS if you fly your ship to the middle of nowhere (ie, quantum travelling to another planet and then shutting off your engines to drop out of warp half way to your destination).

- - - Updated - - -

the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult.

Yes, the interactive panels and the mobiglass have been bugged for years.

I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with.

They worked early on (ie didn't walk in place or T-pose in chairs and actually did their patrol routes), but when the first city of Hurston was added, they broke.

The only NPCs you can really interact with are a handful of custom questgivers.

- - - Updated - - -

have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

You start the game in a hab apartment in a city on a planet. To find your ship, you have to walk out of your hab (hold F to press the button to open the door), find the elevator (again hold F to press the buttons), go down to the bottom floor of the apartment, walk out of the building, wander around until you find the train/bus/taxi ride to the city's spaceport. At the spaceport, there are monitors/consoles you can walk up to and spawn your spaceship on a hangar pad. The monitor will tell you which hangar your spaceship is now in. Then you go into the spaceport's elevators and go to your hangar. In the hangar bay, you need to walk around your ship and hold F and see if anything glows, and eventually you will find a button or a ladder you can interact with that lets you enter your spaceship. Then you get in the pilot seat, press "R" to turn your ship on. You then need to hold F to look around your cockpit and interact with the monitors. On one of the monitors, select "menu" then select "comms", then scroll through the list and find the spaceport tower. Click the button to hail the tower. The tower will then open the hangar doors. Then you press spacebar to lift off, and then hold W to go forward. And now you're flying.

- - - Updated - - -

To quantum travel/warp to other planets, you need to fly out of a planet's atmosphere. Press "B" to turn on your ship's quantum computer. Align your ship towards your destination, and the ship will begin charging its drive. Once it's charge, hold "B" and the ship will begin the warp. If multiple different QT destinations are overlapping each other, you can press F1 to open your mobiglass, click on the star map, click on your target destination, and click "set destination" so that you can target that one.

[Edge-]

Thanks dude. I got outside but that's as far as I'm willing to venture until I can get performance sorted. I don't mind playing in a lowered resolution in windowed mode on low settings (but at least 1080p pls), but it's at least gotta be hitting 30fps. Lower that that just feels dreadful : (

[Rennadrel]

Are you running the game off an old SSD or NVMe? I've found it runs a lot better on the NVMe drive, personally. It definitely loads a ton quicker.

[Ausr]

And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing. If it couldnt be done they wouldnt be doing it, the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

So all you can respond with is nothing technical, just feelings and more bullshit?

I'll happily take the infraction just to prove that the mods on this board infract people who debate versus actual fucking shills promoting a fucking scam.

Prove me right by reporting me, by the way.

[Rennadrel]

Being a shill is not against the rules, and so long as the game keeps getting patches, one can consider it to still be in development, despite its snail pace. If the project were actually abandoned, that would be the point when it would actually be considered a scam and everyone would be lining up to sue CIG.

[Edge-]

Are you running the game off an old SSD or NVMe? I've found it runs a lot better on the NVMe drive, personally. It definitely loads a ton quicker.

Sata SSD, don't have a NVMe in my rig.

Though it shouldn't require that just to run above like, 20fps when you load into your room. That's fuckin wild.

[Kyanion]

So all you can respond with is nothing technical, just feelings and more bullshit?

I'll happily take the infraction just to prove that the mods on this board infract people who debate versus actual fucking shills promoting a fucking scam.

Prove me right by reporting me, by the way.

Also kyanion to save you some time and pointless posting you dont need to reply to me because its a waste of time. I already gave up on your one sided ignorant views a long time ago.

I mean that is the response you'll get from that one anyways.

[Rennadrel]

Sata SSD, don't have a NVMe in my rig.

Though it shouldn't require that just to run above like, 20fps when you load into your room. That's fuckin wild.

How are you on 10th gen and don't have at least one or two slots on your board? Even my bottom end MSI Z490 Pro has two. It definitely helps with all games for loading times and performance though. I haven't booted the game up in a while, I'll have to see how it runs on my system but last time I did which was a few months ago I was still getting 30 FPS at 1440p.

It definitely does run like butt though, that's for sure.

[Valerossi]

And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing.If it couldn’t be done they wouldn’t be doing it,the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

They AREN’T doing it, because they can’t do it, that’s the whole point, ffs.

[Surfd]

The game is possible, there is already tech that can render 30000 players in the same area, the game doesnt need to be able to load every single player in the same area it just has to have enough capacity to load as much as it can, CiG are going to give us the experience as large as they possibly can while still having suitable performance, so you are just talking BS about thing being impossible when certain things can already be done with current tech available.

THIRTY THOUSAND PLAYERS "at the same time"? Doing what? Standing perfectly still and still lagging like hell? Lol. ROTFL. God man, I am dying here. I assume you have a source that can actually back this up, because otherwise that's the biggest ass pull I have ever heard.

The current "king" of "mass player engagement" in single events is EvE, which holds the Guinness World Records for both "Largest Multiplayer Videogame PVP Battle" and the "Most Concurrent Participants in a Multiplayer Videogame PvP Battle", with a grand total of a little over 6500 people in one "zone" simultaneously during the battle of FWST-8.

And if you know anything about large scale space engagements in EvE, you would know that the only reason they could even do that is because:
A - EvE's server structure for ingame resource allocation allows it to dynamically assign server load to "stressed" areas. During these kinds of engagements, almost ALL of the games server power is redirected to just a handful of zones to prevent the game from actively shitting itself.
B - EvE actually has a custom designed load balancing protocol that kicks in during high volume engagements (known in game as Time Dilation) that basically takes everything happening in the zone, and slows it down to as low as 10% relative speed, effectively turning your massive firefight into a slow-mo lag simulator. Which the game literally HAS to do to even have a hope of realistically resolving 5k+ people all doing shit at once without causing stuff to straight up implode. And even WITH TiDi actively slowing shit down, most people still experience crippling lag on top of it during any serious fleet action. Also, TiDi typically can kick in with as little as 1.5k people in one zone, at 6.5k+, that fight would have been running at max TiDi (time moves at 10% relative) for pretty much the entire duration of the engagement.

6500+ people in a fight that effectively plays out like watching paint dry in the middle of a bout of crippling lag is the current world record here, and that was set just a bit over a year ago on a server handled by a dev team that is arguably the leader in it's field at what it does, on the cutting edge of this kind of server/network balancing tech. And you expect me to believe that in the time since this record was set, someone else magically pulled tech that can handle 5x that amount without being basically a pretty slideshow out of their ass and just, for whatever reason, decided not to use it in something yet? Someone be blowing smoke up your ass.

If you had access to functional tech that allowed you to put 30k players in the same relative space without causing your game to effectively implode, you wouldn't need to make your own game. You would be set for life simply by licensing the the tech to the rest of the game dev world at large.

I mean, shit, I remember the good old days of the AQ Gates event in WoW, where simply sticking ~300-400 people in Duskwood while someone was raiding the Demon Boss there had about a 70% chance of straight up crashing the entire Eastern Kingdoms shard on the server I played on, and that is literal peanuts compared to the sheer amount of shit going on in even a mid sized EvE fleet engagement. And sure, we have come leaps and bounds in the years since then, but we are nowhere near close to 30k.

The fact that you think CIG somehow might have access to magical tech that would allow them to put 30k people in the same space and have them actually be something more than just pretty decorations when the company apparently hasn't even figured out how to properly do collision detection yet is goddamned hilarious.

[MrAnderson]

So finally checkin out the 'verse.

First blush is...holy shit performance. Running a respectable and recent rig - i5-10600k, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM, running it off a SSD. I've dropped to "low", and the resolution to 1080p down from 2K (windowed mode, because neither borderless nor fullscreen actually work, it just displays on part of my main monitor rather than filling it), grabbed the latest drivers just in case that was the issue and...still getting fps in the 20's in my room. Load times are extremely long as well, which is a minor issue but whatever.

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here? Because I want to start exploring but this is unplayable. I assume I'm doing something wrong since folks are playing at higher resolutions with higher settings/good framerates, so hoping someone here can help me out. I get it, it's alpha, but clearly others are making it work somehow.

Just tested and even at 720p I'm not able to hit 30. Can't tell what outside really looks like on this tiny window and low settings, but the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult. I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with. I'm listening to a computer tell me about August Dunlow (subtitles don't work, just placeholder text) now but have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

Man, I guess I'm gonna have to look up those new player guides first. But it's not gonna matter much if I can't figure out how to get the game to play at least at 30fps.

Edit: These NPC's are both hilarious and kinda legit freakin me out now. They just stand/sit there, a few seem to have some sitting animations but the standing ones just like...occasionally turn their head to look at you, otherwise they stare ahead blankly. Toss some horror music behind this and this is a freakin horror game.

First things first. Welcome to the Verse

Performance will suck in the very first log in for 2 main reasons. First is because the first time we enter the game it will be loading in all the shaders of the respective area into our computer. 2nd is because cities are the most taxing areas in the game and run bad for anyone. With your specs you'll have better fps everywhere else.

3rd one, and this is very important, put your Gfx settings always on HIGH as that will tax your GPU more and alleviate your CPU load, putting settings on LOW gives worse performance (yes counter-intuitive) because the load will shift more to the CPU. Also disable all the visual effects: Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Sharpening, Film Grain.

Star Citizen is very CPU intensive and benefits immensely from fast SSD and RAM.

4th: You can try this tricks bellow as they've been proven to work well for some players:





Starting out is highly recommended to watch ask for help ingame chat, or watch a Tutorial to get the basics:

That's the best and recent one I could find.

[Proskill]

two questions: why am i getting only group bounty contracts in 3.16? i got cert up to MRT, then completed the pro-term contract allowing me to do group missions, but i get ONLY them, not a single solo MRT mission. it actually bothers me since i tend to die sometimes with my avenger titan and instead of dropping 8k aUEC or whatever it is for solo target i drop 26k.

also, how to prevent switching between waypoint/point of interest/whatever u call it? i mean, i got a contract for some bounty target at a certain place. when i mouse over it in order to QT it switched between TARGETS LOCATION and the place it is in, say SHUBIN MINE or whatever, preventing me from QTing, cuz it resets the spool each time. it drives me crazy

[Beefhammer]

It's really disappointing. On top of CIG not even being able to deliver on key stuff like salvage or creatures or NPC crewmembers, they can't even deliver on the little stuff.

I mean that's the point. Chris Roberts has always been a liar and a grifter. Why does anyone think this time he would be any different. He's just raking in millions for himself.