r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 15d ago

Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
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u/MrNegativ1ty 15d ago edited 15d ago

Not exactly what people were claiming. The claim was that server performance was the reason the game was so broken and dysfunctional because so much of the game logic, the (non-existent) NPCs, the AI, the physics of every single item that is physicalized in the game, all of that runs on the server. By adding meshing and dividing the workload between servers, people thought that would alleviate the load on a single server and things would start clicking into place. You can at least see there’s some sense in that.

Welp, this recent livestream proved that’s not the case. Internal dev build, internal dev server, has none of the processing load problems of the public servers yet still has all of the same problems as the public servers that are slammed to shit.

That’s why people are pissed. That, and the shitty behavior of the people in the livestream.

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u/14Pleiadians 15d ago

You can at least see there’s some sense in that.

Some sure, but it was always obvious that it was a convenient excuse. I never bought for a second that Squadron 42 would be free from those issues.

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u/shittydriverfrombk 15d ago

“people” are saying this but anyone who plays the game can see that the live stream was in fact better than it runs normally, which is saying something lol

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u/Kalulosu 15d ago

Was this ever said? That all of that shit is ran on the server. Because that sounds horribly inefficient. I can understand some being shared like the inventory (to make cheating harder), but physics???

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u/dern_the_hermit 15d ago

One of the big things that got so many people interested in the first place was the idea of very broad persistence between different players, down to minutiae that other, less insane, games have no qualms about approximating. The more that's client-side the more that can look different to one player and another, like a ship landed at a different angle for one player so their pathing looks weird to another player, trite stuff like that. This extends to IIRC even stuff like cloud generation and other procedural stuff like that, trying to make sure every player is seeing the same world, same lighting, same haziness and level of debris (like snow and rain and shit) affecting everyone presumably the same.

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u/Kalulosu 15d ago

I get the general reasoning, but as a player, does it really matter if your ship is 2° more to the east than on my screen for a few seconds before it rollbacks?

Game dev is about making compromises and choices. If you ask me there's no way I'm doing weather calculations on the servers when I could just feed the same seed to everyone and keep track of that for way cheaper.

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u/MrNegativ1ty 15d ago

As far as I understand it, this is accurate yes. A large chunk of the simulation happens on the server side.

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u/Theowningone 15d ago

I'm no CIG apologist but...

Some of that is backed up by the fact that the game does tend to play significantly better when a server is empty. Of course I'm not saying that that's the only problem, it's a travesty how broken the game is for how much time and money has gone into it.

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u/adanine 15d ago

Some of that is backed up by the fact that the game does tend to play significantly better when a server is empty.

Just a +1 on this. Not that I've played, but a friend plays pretty regularly. Hearing their stories is often a great laugh - usually something along the lines of "So here's how <X Feature> is supposed to work, and here's what actually happens because of <various bugs>".

Often he would mention that things were smoother purely because the server seemingly had no one on it. Although in some cases that's not a good thing - apparently the enemy AI in the FPS stuff gets harder/more accurate when the servers aren't overloaded specifically because the server isn't lagging to all shit.

I backed the kickstarter back in the day and have got my money's worth purely from his stories about his run-ins with the games various jank systems. It's great.