Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

That’s pretty much the gist of it @BrianRubin. The gameplay may be different, but the verities of developing MMOs - dealing with lag, fast data storage and retrieval, communication between nodes in the server network, the CPU and memory requirements per player etc. - are pretty much universal engineering problems which do not apply only to videogames.

I am not sure what is exactly being promised at the moment, but reading the above I would be surprised that they could support PvP engagements the size War Thunder does, for instance. Of course, the scale multi-player interactions in those games come at a price in fidelity. Something that SC seems to be obsessed about.

PS: I haven’t been still able to log into the 3.0 thing… seems that those Australian Amazon Cloud servers don’t like connections coming from the particular corner of Australia I live.

That’s the classic list of challenges @Perky_Goth, good post!

Yeah, I can definitely blush to a couple of those over the years.

This is great, I will add a super old, but a fantastic read on a game I loved dearly X-Wing vs Tie Fighter:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_sucks_or_what_i_.php

That one was a classic! I remember it well :)

I think @dsmart will love this video. :)

Yeah, I saw that yesterday actually. :)

Peter Lincroft: unsung early 3D engine god.

Backers got yet more bad news last night. Shortly after this Tweet:

Clive Johnson came out with an official statement.

"We decided it was necessary to push Bind Culling back for the following reasons:

  1. Progress has been slower than we had hoped, partly due to taking longer than anticipated to convert the last few places in the code that were using old-style Aspects and RMIs to Serialized Variables and Remote Methods, and then completely strip those legacy systems from the network code. That was a necessary step because we didn’t want to have to implement Bind Culling for both the old and new systems. I’m not embarrassed to tell you there was some dancing and a few air-punches on my part when the last line of that old code was deleted.

  2. There wouldn’t have been enough time left before 3.1 for the network and gameplay programmers to deal with the issues we’re expecting the introduction of Bind Culling to cause.

  3. Bind Culling would result in clients streaming entities in and out based on distance, but without asynchronous Object Container Streaming it was always a gamble whether the resulting synchronous loading stalls would be worse or better than what players experience now. The plan was to get Bind Culling working, see what the impact on player experience was and then make the call whether to turn it on for 3.1.

  4. Range-based Serialized Variable Culling was our backup plan in case Bind Culling didn’t make it into 3.1. You may remember that we were working on SV Culling for 3.0 but that it wasn’t quite ready in time. Well, it was the first thing we tackled when we came back at the start of the year, and has been working in our development branch for several weeks now (not the branch 3.0.1 was taken from). SV Culling already gives us a lot of the performance gain we would expect from Bind Culling so the urgency for the later has dropped significantly.

  5. The network team is needed for other tasks that have increased in priority since they were first added to our schedule."

I have written about this particular issue for MONTHS now. I have updated my recent article with links to those, as well as this recent development.

It seems @dsmart has posted some news on Twitter.

Part II

In case you missed this.

The spaceship Tetris is absolutely insane near the end there.

It really is. And it’s even more astonishing when you consider that it is 100% accurate. That’s precisely what has been happening, and is how they raised all this money without ever shipping a game - of any kind.

We know that Crytek created the early tech demos. They said so. Curiously, CIG/RSI didn’t make any moves to deny this in their court filings. Gee, I wonder why.

CIG filed a protective order yesterday. They know what’s coming. My take.

Protective Order motion

Memo in support of motion

Proposed order

Attorney Declaration

Well, one reason not to do so is so that it doesn’t crash before they get their due. Allegedly.

True. But I don’t think that matters, seeing as crash or not, there will still be recoverable assets to satisfy any judgement.

such as?

Not a snark question, I’m genuinely curious.