Star Citizen – General Discussions

[MDrake SC]

The 24 players in Crusader didn’t last long. It has been dropped back down to 16.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/314572/2-1-1a-published-to-ptu

Persistent Universe: Additions:

Gameplay

The max player count for Crusader has been returned to 16.

The desperation is tangible.

[dsmart]

Hardly surprising. And this is supposed to be an MMO.

[MDrake SC]

Alpha 2.1.1 patch has hit Live. Uh oh, still stuck at 16 players. So much for a MMO.

To celebrate Gillian Anderson’s return to X-Files, the Xian Khartu is back on sale. Nothing to do with Star Citizen, but hey, more money is needed.

Of course, the Xian Scout has had nearly zero progress since its initial sale back in Nov 26, 2013. Whatever footage of it that existed back in June 20, 2014, was during its 2nd concept sale. CIG may be attempting to treat the Xian ship as new, or not worked-on stuff. Ha ha ha.

As a re-reminder, the previous Aegis sale was Alpha 2.1 patch on Jan 15. Just one week goes by, and CIG starts to sell one of their more “rare” JPEGs.

At this rate, they may try to get in one sale per patch to Live. Gotta keep the dream (ponzi scheme) alive as long as possible. I feel slightly sad there are so many idiots in this world.

[dsmart]

Apparently someone has already been put on probation for crying foul over this ship sale. Apparently the ship was hangar ready and almost ready to fly as of the 2.1 patch. But instead of making it available to backers, now it’s a ship sale.

[dsmart]

Since a bunch of morons are spreading all sorts of false information on the Internet, yesterday I wrote a Twitter post related to the issues with Sandi. I already discussed the Beer email exchange over here.

Since everyone keeps bringing this up, let me address it in clear detail for the record and archiving purposes.

My issue with Sandi boils down to this:

===
1. she led the charge against me in July based on my blog and for which I was banned, my account refunded etc. I know this to be a fact. 

twitlonger.com/show/n_1sniofq

2. The way she treats contractors/employees on the project. this was also on clear display in the email exchange with Beer. aside from what was mentioned in The Escapist articles.

3. The fact that she continues to distort the facts about this project, while taking credit for it’s “success” (so far, it’s only financially successful, the project is a mess and in shambles) at every opportunity.

4. The fact that, as head of management, she has the authority to grant no-questions-asked refunds to those who ask for it and who want OUT of this project due to the FAILED promises and LIES they have been telling. Instead, they have refused to do this, despite the fact that they have FAILED to deliver the project on Nov 2014 as promised.
===

That’s the gist of it and I have made it clear on numerous occasions.

She is an exec (credited as co-founder) of a $105M crowd-funded project and as a PUBLIC FIGURE is 100% held to the same standards of accountability as Chris Roberts, and their partner Ortwin. If she were a guy, not married to Chris etc, NONE of this would have changed my actions.

Beer’s email exchange with her opened up the issue of her credentials again due to her claiming to be the most formerly qualified than anyone else at the company.

http://imgur.com/a/BIlWu

I was very vocal about this in a recent Open House stream because I was pissed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znR3JvQJPMc&feature=youtu.be&t=3h5m

As far as we now know, not only does she NOT possess one MBA, let alone two, it’s highly unlikely that she even has an undergraduate degree in business management. Prior to Star Citizen, she was an aspiring actress and intern at Chris’s failed Ascendant Pictures studio where they met, married, divorced, re-married. Nothing to do with business management, let alone the videogame business. There are NO records of her ANYWHERE on planet Earth, as having held ANY management position, let alone one in business that is befitting someone with an MBA.

And when someone else decided to confirm that she was in fact married to Chris Roberts – something they not only actively denied but kept hidden until I made it public, Chris wrote a lengthy diatribe that they had been doxed. Which was just another attempt at obfuscating the truth and drawing attention away from on-going questions about their handling of this project.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1snimul

As I noted in my blogs, since my investigations into the project started in July, she has been caught posting bogus credentials in LinkedIn. Leading to her subsequently removing no less than FOUR such profiles. Each time she updated it and added lies, I write about it. She then removes it. We have all the archived images. As of today, she still doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. But she still has Facebook, Twitter and IMDb profile pages.

In August, she posted this image purported to be from her graduation. Problem is, neither of the two Australian colleges have any records of her. So the speculation is that, since she is a model/actress, that these may very well be stock images. Nobody has seen it fit to actually ask her for details (name of university, date of graduation etc – all the contentious issues).

https://archive.is/ercCU

Prior to that she posted this Dean’s letter and also claims to have an MBA. Suspiciously enough, the whole thing wasn’t posted. So there is no way to see the header section of the top in order to determine authenticity.

http://archive.is/lvyUS

None of the Shitizens saw it fit to question any of this.

In this interview, she claims to have gone to graduate school. Again, not mentioning which one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbF8cWOLwEI&feature=youtu.be&t=1m32s

Here, she claims that she a) went to UCLA and got a degree there b) she has two business degrees (one from UCLA and the other from Australia – both proven to be false.

FF to 18:45

http://goo.gl/gSL9Rx

They since removed the original link above when it appeared in my blog. But like everything else, we archived it. Here is a copy.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4497650/Sunnys_Diner_Show_3k13.mp3

Here she claimed to have a Masters degree. The video has since been pulled. We have it saved somewhere as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRJzUkj5ItQ&feature=youtu.be&t=51

Here is another UCLA claim to an MBA. It’s bollocks. We checked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRE2BBQR4tc&feature=youtu.be&t=30m23s

Here, even before my campaign started in July, people were already questioning her credentials.

https://m.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/22r2g5/a_letter_to_chris_roberts/?sort=controversial

So that’s basically the gist of it, in a nutshell.

[J HOW]

On the server side it would prove very difficult to scale up.  There are several problems when running instances on nodes – whilst a node may have many instances, an instance may only have one node. It’s a trade-off between the amount of instances on a node and the memory available to the instances.

i.e.
If an instance requires 2GB
6 instances, 10GB plus OS overhead would be 12GB per node
Data is not truly shared between instances or nodes (no replication) therefore it’s a architectural limitation

Without making architectural changes it would be very difficult to increase unless, you scale up the nodes (being virtual machines it is possible) but it would be prohibitively expensive.  If they require changes it will come at cost of changing the architecture server side, it’s not very easy to do and it may require code changes on both the server and the clients.

Looking at the problem what you’d do to overcome this would be to use a reverse proxy (if you’re pushed on time, money or resources) to interface between the server (the active node you’re connecting to) and the client. This way you could potentially create a pool of instances that would act as one – although data wouldn’t really be shared between instances. To overcome this a method would be to allow information to be shared via a service bus between instances, although that would be difficult to implement and potentially cause sync issues between instances (which one is master or are they all acting as master?).

The ideal solution is to re-engineer from the ground up to allow one instance across nodes – budget and time permitting.  At the time I was not aware of the 64bit implementation, depending on how it’s implemented it will probably add more than a couple of months to development time to re-engineer although I’ve never worked on 64bit specifically to comment on the impact.

At the time they were using Google Compute, there are methods of making it “appear” to be one large instance where information is saved between nodes by connecting at the backend with a permanent SQL cluster (where information is saved) and then loaded between instances.  Effectively making the SQL Server the single source of truth for both account information and character (ship, player identity, cache, items), from notes they only use SQL Server for account information and instances refer to flat files or SQL lite for configuration.  Now this being said using SQL in this way does have overhead, and would slow down calls from instances, too many instances then from the player perspective it would get slower and slower – unless it was clustered or over many SQL servers in a cluster however this massively increases OPEX costs.

It’s a tough one to solve, usually MMOs wouldn’t have this issue as this would generally be thought about and planned before implementation.  The risk here is when you are changing architecture mid development, it has risks and costs. Cost of redoing work, code refactoring, multiple levels of complexity, it rather compounds their current problems and amplifies them.

Personally interested to see how they handle it, no doubt they do have some smart people working for them so it’s an interesting one to watch.

[MDrake SC]

@ J HOW

Thank you for sharing. Unfortunately, this whole scaling up issue is a problem of feature creep from the original backer days. SC was specifically stated to NOT be a MMO (FAQ near bottom of KS page). So, many gamers (in my case an amateur modder) thought CryEngine defaults were just fine. CIG has smart people, like the folks from Crytek at the CIG Frankfurt office.

The problem is… those Frankfurt personnel joined the project really-really late, by July 6, 2015. I do not think it is a coincidence that Derek was forcefully refunded by July 14, 2015. 8 days or so… to reduce negative noise and buy lots of time for redoing the engine.

@ Derek

Something today, broke the date or chronological sorting of forum posts. You might want to find out the issue because reading stuff is extra difficult now. If your forum software can implement a “recent posts” feature, that would help too.

[Hotsauce ShoTYME]

Did they delete that thread?  That is pretty grimey to do if the ship is ready and they holding it back from backers for a sale.  Grimey as fuck.  This can’t sit right with all the employees that know.

[Author]

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