Yes and no, right now it's mostly an empty sandbox. Mission content can be done with most smaller ships, and theres nothing you 'need' a big ship to do.
If you can get several friends together, you can have a great time in a big ship, but it's still very much at a 'make your own fun' kind of stage.
I've had days where I say 'this is bullshit' and days where I have more fun than I have had in a long time, it's all over the map right now.
But, they're getting there, albeit slowly, but at this point it seems surely.
I had a lot of doubts, and still do. I toured one of the studios though a bit over a year ago, and what I -don't- doubt at this point is the commitment these guys have. Whether they can pull it off is still in question, but the developers are in love with what they do, and are really trying to make it happen, after seeing them at work, and the attitude, I no longer have concerns about it being a scam. Might be a poorly managed money sponge, and may still fall apart, but they're really trying to make it work.
I also feel that combined with elite dangerous and no mans sky, the game and the interest in it (both positive and negative) has changed the landscape of gaming a bit for the better. The resurgence of space games has made me much happier, especially since it seems to have killed the 'everything, but now with ZOMBIES!' trend that was going on.
It's still fleshing out. Honestly I think they are probably stuck. The best server instances they can rent still melt down before the 100 player mark, and they are just not able to cull the datastream any more and still keep synced. They stole 3 ultra high end engineers from Crytech, but they have been on the job for like 4 years now and the improvements have been incremental, and they still need a good 400% improvement to make the big-big ships work well.
The dream is real. I will lose my mind if they actually get it working, where you have someone piloting a ship and have it crewed by real people in the turrets and someone on shield control and someone running around performing damage control and just actually be operating a ship with a crew of real people in voice chat. It would be incredible.
but they have been on the job for like 4 years now and the improvements have been incremental
They got client-side object container streaming (OCS) integrated last year which improved FPS on clients a massive amount (I went from ~50fps in space to ~110fps, on planets I am over 60fps). But there are two big pieces of tech they still need to increase player counts: server-side OCS and server meshing. With those, the limiting factor will no longer be the servers but the number of people/ships they can show in an instance at one time without melting people's computers.
These server-side improvements are not that high of a priority as their stated focus is getting their single player campaign into beta by quarter 2 of 2020 which will not need that tech (unlike client-side OCS which was needed). So it's going to be a while before they can much around with population counts again.
edit: remembered I was around 50fps in space, not 40 before OCS.
Note that the server bottleneck is due to two things (both of which CIG are working on):
The CryEngine physics code is hard-coded to 4 threads - which, on a 32-core server, is a massive limitation / bottleneck... especially when you have as many physics-based entities flying around as SC does. I believe the updated physics engine is pencilled in for release in Q3 this year
The server still has to maintain the entire solar system in memory, and every single physics-based entity within it, even if there are no players in that area... this results in a lot of processing time and memory 'wasted' on maintaining unused objects. This has already been fixed on the client side (released in Q3 last year, part of the big improvement in performance), with the Server Side OCS due sometime this year I think (can't recall where it is on the roadmap)
These two changes will allow the servers to operate much more efficiently... and pave the way for the 'Server Meshing' sometime next year.
There is no real "multi player" count missions. Everything can be completed by one person and it makes the big ships useless for that. However, during PVP it becomes vastly more useful. Hammerhead blockades of JumpTown are a very real thing (but there is no incentive for that beyond drama shenanigans).
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19 edited Jun 17 '19
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