Reply To: Star Citizen – General Discussions
We’re in year five…and…
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So we’re constantly working on that. We’re working on optimizing code but we’re actually in the middle of a massive backend rewrite – completely changing the way the serialization works to a much more efficient, logical way. Which is the item port- the item 2.0 system we’ve talked about, which we’ve recently got going. It is a fundamental part of that, because we’re restructuring some of the way that entities are set up – so we’re changing it completely from the way it was done in the old CryEngine to be a very component-based setup, much more logical, and we’re only really serializing data that we need to serialize rather than big globs of data and it’s not nearly as, I guess, fixed as the old system was. Because the old system was really built for small, 16 player or 8 player, multiplayer games – deathmatch, FPS shooter-style whereas we’ve got something that we need to be up for long times, hours or days of time have the server up and have hundreds of people on it.
So our ability to scale has been much bigger, it’s something we’ve been working on for quite a long time, and we’re still working on it, we’re getting close to having some fruits of it being born in the near future. So this is very much analogous to us using, when we did the zone system and moving to 64-bit math instead of 32-bit math. All those things sort of paid off – what allowed us to be able to do Crusader and the local physical grids and all the cool stuff that you’ve seen from 2.0 onwards and a lot of this other backend stuff we’re working on is going to make the experience much better, much smoother for you and have a higher framerate on the server – one of the reasons why people see desync issues now, and maybe some precision issues is the actual server when it’s under load is running at actually quite a low framerate, even compared to clients.
You could be on a client running at 40 or 50 frames, yet the server is only running at 10 or 15 frames. Now the server running at 10 or 15 frames is simulating physics only at 10 or 15 frames, which means there are big steps between each frame, whereas on your local machine, you’ve got much smaller steps, so what can happen is, on the server, you could be here – which is something that happened in the EVA situation – and the next frame of what the server thinks you’re doing is, like you’re player is half-way in the wall of the ship – he’s moving outside. But on your local client, you haven’t – because you have all the fidelity whereas on the server, it goes, “oh look, he’s half way in the world, so I’ll give him a big impulse to try get him out” whereas the server isn’t in the same position which basically catapults your EVA person – could potentially kill him from the damage and that was one of the things that was creating, say, the deaths that you would see in an EVA-transition going in and out.
And partly that was because the server on the physics step was running at a much slower framerate than the client so we’re working on things to make all that better, it’s a work-in-progress, it will take a little while to get goingbut once it does, it will be better and there will be a lot more people in the instances and we’ll be moving smoothly. So these are all things that the network team is working on – I wish we had more members of the network team, we have essentially about 4 engineers that work on the game server network side and then we have another 3 that working in the backend services side. But if any of you out there are network engineers and wanna work on a really ambitious game, let us know, because we’ve had open positions for this for quite a while.We’re always looking for good people because the things that we need is networkers, there’s a big need for us on the engineering side, AI is a big need and physics – if there’s any physics geniuses out there but if you talk to anyone in the game business, those are all the areas that are it’s genuinely hard to find people. We’re moving along and it’s going to be pretty cool when it’s all said and done, cause it’s basically building a system, I’ve talked about it before, that the next generation of how you build these online cloud-driven systems, so we can distribute it across many servers and process more than you would in traditional single-server setups.
So anyway, probably a long answer for whether or not there will be spaces for more additional pilot players, but there you go.“