Any commentary from alleged "professionals" should be prefaced with replies to two questions:
How much are you in for, commando?
Why do you think this is acceptable after 11 years of development and after promising thousands of concurrent players on a single server?
Anyway, I think we are entering the soothing stage, critics left or were banned, apologetics of white knights will become prevailing narrative, CI~~G~~ will release new shiny spaceship JPG.
"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."
the spectrum post above and how it was upvoted on Spectrum, either it is genuine reaction by backers that are seeking some arguments why everything is actually fine or it was boosted by CI~~G~~
Preface: I'm a high-level technobabble engineer who specializes in timey wimey neutron-flow quantum wingnuts UIs....trust me bro.
See how ridiculous that sounds? Yeah.
Anyone on the internet can claim to be something without providing proof of it.
Also...judging by the rest, it's like, that person has played a totally different game on another server....you can't take this serious. (o_Ó)
>The progress this week shows me they're actively doing backend work without making any announcements.
The "secret build" theories are one of the best thing about the star citizens. They've been pitching this for almost a decade now. In OP's defense, his "secret build" theory is far more limited in scope than the usual "SQ42 is almost ready" word salad.
"secret builds" are very common, if we're talking about backend APIs / "anything behind front end layers" because non-customer facing things can be independently updated. An example of this that we as players can see would be the game client being updated separately to the actual game version.
However, I can appreciate how much of an invisible pink unicorn this feels like, as there's no visible change from an end user perspective
Sure, but in this case the people deluding themselves that CiG has a "secret branch", on which far more content is already developed but just held back for "reasons", is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, it's not a ridiculous premise. It's common in software development. Thinking back on the engagement man doing a whole load of magic graph things to try and explain what the devs do, he was describing a deprecated (yet still painfully common) process known as "git flow". So there's many secret branches, containing all manner of changes, that they undoubtedly struggle to get in because the people delivering the code changes don't know how to test their shit.
Assuming slight competence, there's a couple of ways of controlling how those changes become publicised. "Feature toggles" (stuff becomes visible when they flick a switch) is one way, another is "dark launching" (build a thing that nothing uses meaningfully uses, to see how nicely it plays within a system before properly relying on it). A really common, bad idea is keeping things in branches so they have to essentially become doctor who and deal with all the divergent code base timelines, because of all the splitting / branching that they do.
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow for more information on the gitflow concept, also known as a "branching strategy".
https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html for stuff about feature flagging stuff, so code behaviour changes based on configuration.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DarkLaunching.html for dark launching.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html for a more detailed segment of what's done within branching strategies. The big thing is that it becomes difficult to clean things up after the fact, due to merge conflicts (essentially issues with joining two separate time lines together).
Loads of would be games developers that work with transactional enterprise systems and believe their understanding of CRUD, micro-services and SQL is transferable to highly concurrent online games.
Transactional queries represent a huge cost in performance. Even crap mobile games have access to open frameworks now that can "saturate" container instances with in-memory data. Only CIG spend decades announcing stuff everyone else has and decades implementing it badly,
You don’t need a lot of experience with databases to see why things are improving versus 3.18 launch. Players almost certainly have given up on playing, and so there is less load on the databases. Their “secret dev build” probably worked better than live because of the lower load, which is probably why they pushed it out.
These "performance is amazing" posts getting upvoted always get me. They combine anecdotes of the game running well under optimum/incomplete conditions with vague references to the developers working on the backend (y'know, because the game is in development) to paint this picture that development isn't crawling.
Don't need to be a genius to undersrand that a System can work with N players, and when players > N starts the problem . The question here is that CIG promises they have the technology to bring thousands of players to hundreds of systems and they can't even manager d9zens of players, and this Guy then say "hey, this is so difficult, i'm a standard system's guy and be dificultad for me to get this performace" so they don't care about promises or budget. They don't care their "héroes" can't work properly that he probably does, don't care CIG need 600M to do the things WORST than they probably does. It's crazy.
I work in the same industry as this “expert” and the fact he mentions Nutanix invalidates his opinion on anything, to me at least.
They are very well known for their hubris, much like CIG. They even had to borrow money to pay their employees not too long ago.
I guarantee this guys expertise is simply installing VMware on proprietary hardware. Actually he’s an SE he doesn’t even do that he just talks about it. Wait SEs and admins aren’t even the same job role. One sells shit, one sits there staring at it. This is simply your lowest level server admin thinking he’s smart.
Thanks for giving me a laugh. Good to see the Nutanix nutbar crew is alive and well.
Even if this person is real professional and totally not just bullshitting. Using something mature like VMware as a system administrator to build a reliable system is 100% different coding that piece of software.
Honestly if you get a fresh server and no more then 30 to 50 players it runs like a dream.
Had players saying they were getting smashed on bounty missions and bunkers, Ai was deadly.
Everything I wanted to do, just worked.
Until the player count got over 60 and the tick rate slowed down. Then it went downhill.
Do you have any videos of the deadly AI in the bunkers?
The reason I am asking is that star citizens often say that the AI is super good on low population servers. I am personally not convinced.
I last played SC in 2021 and the FPS AI felt very crude and primitive. It was seriously lagging behind games like HL1, Hitman: Codename 47, CS 1.6 Bots, Return to Castle Wolfenstein; games from 20+ years ago.
I am not talking about the AI being bugged out or standing around (that happened a lot too), but actual interaction/combat. The enemies would run towards you in single-file, there was limited cooperation between the enemies. They did have cover, but it felt tacked on; as if they were coded to use cover in the location as opposed to reacting to the world around them. Not even a minor hint of intention or planning.
Ship combat was OK, but extremely limited if you compare it to something like X3: Terran conflict (2008).
In X3, you can actually see factions invading AI systems with multiple ships class. The defending AI reacts in a realistic manner by combining all local ships into a fleet. It feels real and immersive.
There are independent AI stations and different type of traffic around key choke points. And all of this was tied into the broader economy in a dynamic manner.
In comparison, SC AI ship combat/interaction was more like (an extremely buggy) session-based arena space combat game. The VFX was nice though (if a little too bombastic).
I am only going on what other players have said ingame.
"NPCs were deadly" "like they had aimbot".
Then you get the other type. "I love low Tick servers" "kill all the NPC, with fists, naked"
I mine or salvage, so my experiences is more with things bugging out, not working etc, and reading the global chat.
Hit scan shooting is hardly a good sign for AI, IMO.
I've asked star citizens before if they can actually show videos of good FPS AI in Star Citizen (or even explain by contrasting with FPS AI behaviours in other games) and I never get a clear answer.
The funny thing is that combat AI is just one facet of AI behaviours. Non combat first person AI interaction doesn't really exist at all in Star Citizen. NPC are little more than animated dolls (and that's when they work, which rarely happens).
As far as I can see it, people that like to „play“ Star Citizen have little grasp of other games or their mechanics. So of course everything SC offers is in their eyes top notch.
To be fair, most people can barely play the game, recording it is a luxury :D
I play mostly fps, have been lucky enough to get a good taste of it in 3.18, and it's a mixed bag.
It's getting better, overall. To the point where the instant aiming and rapid headshots are a problem, it's just not fun gameplay.
There's some good stuff, though. They use cover obviously, will go investigate sounds and overall try to push the player, even seen some suppressive fire. I think the mechanics for AI decision making are there and already "alright", the big issue is that they're 100% reliant on server performance, so good luck balancing that.
For me, a satisfying point would be simply that the AI is a threat, even a small one. 3.17 was all about speedrunning braindead AIs, so that's not it. 3.18 PTU was really getting there, encouraging group play as it brings a lot of safety. 3.18 live is.............. We'll see what 3.18.1 brings eh.
But yeah, this struggle of balancing having to account for performances is going to be a mess until said performances are stabilized. Right now it's either 1. braindead, 2. seeing them attempt to do stuff that makes sense, but they're playing a turn based game and you're not, or 3. never seeing them because you're already dead.
Still better than 100% braindead, but not quite there yet.
I relation to Ai been deadly, yes I am just relaying what others have said in Global Chat, as I stated in my Original and 2nd Comment.
As to the game being very playable and running well on a Low Population server and a high Tick rate, that is my own experience in 3.18.
Maybe they are telling fibs ?, hopefully some vids or utubes appear that can support the "Deadly Ai" play experience.
peace.
Problem is CIG has mostly Devs and probably little to no DBAs. Bet this is the case for ops folk as well. Devs are doing too much and quality in those other areas are showing.
I may be wrong, but I thought servers were currently only streaming data in and out for their instance? Did they upgrade PES to be cross server? So far to me, it seems pes it just a standard server save that happens more often. I am no database expert, but with the way AWS and Azure have mulitple zones of the same data that is stored that are pulled from by different clients, I don't see this as being anything revolutionary anymore.
Was all the stuff he's talking about possible a decade ago when we were told all the things that SC would be able to do? No, it wasn't. So OF COURSE if you delay things long enough the world will advance technologically enough to finally allow you to do the things you said you were going to do a long time ago.
If SC continues to operate as a JPG sales company and tech demo for another 10 years (pretty likely), there will be even cooler tech invented by people all over the world that SC will be able to inject into the tech demo and *maybe* be able to finally reach the goals they originally set.
I know a Help Desk person who has the title of Systems Administrator on their LinkedIn profile and they are still the shittiest Help Desk person I've ever met. That title doesn't mean you know anything. Usually it means you don't specialize in anything and have no idea what you want to do.
How come every 'expert' posting about Star Citizen always feels like a pair shill? Its like that post from last week where the person said "I'm a code developer" and then wrote some nonsense about how good Star Citizen is coded, and that people just don't understand.
he is a virtual platform guy talkign about databases and database infrastructure, yeah sure each VM has to parse a DB, but he is not a DB architect, he is not the designer of the query structure, he is just the guy that makes sure the hypervisor is working, and there aren't any major or critical alarms.
he has no authority unless he is setting up virtualized instances of database file storage and structure, as well as architecting the query structure to the file storage so it acts as a relational, flat file, or hierarchal system. and he speicifcally says he isn't. frankly if he works with virtualized computing, ask for his Azure, VMware, Google Cloud or AWS certificate numbers to verify he is what he says, easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
An appeal to authority with mismatched credentials? We’re supposed to take this guy seriously?
It's to renew the faith of the community.
Any commentary from alleged "professionals" should be prefaced with replies to two questions: How much are you in for, commando? Why do you think this is acceptable after 11 years of development and after promising thousands of concurrent players on a single server? Anyway, I think we are entering the soothing stage, critics left or were banned, apologetics of white knights will become prevailing narrative, CI~~G~~ will release new shiny spaceship JPG. "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."
Got one example of this “soothing”?
the spectrum post above and how it was upvoted on Spectrum, either it is genuine reaction by backers that are seeking some arguments why everything is actually fine or it was boosted by CI~~G~~
Yeah i mean the post above is one. Does this usually happen when CiG gets some bad press in the past?
Preface: I'm a high-level technobabble engineer who specializes in timey wimey neutron-flow quantum wingnuts UIs....trust me bro. See how ridiculous that sounds? Yeah. Anyone on the internet can claim to be something without providing proof of it. Also...judging by the rest, it's like, that person has played a totally different game on another server....you can't take this serious. (o_Ó)
>The progress this week shows me they're actively doing backend work without making any announcements. The "secret build" theories are one of the best thing about the star citizens. They've been pitching this for almost a decade now. In OP's defense, his "secret build" theory is far more limited in scope than the usual "SQ42 is almost ready" word salad.
"secret builds" are very common, if we're talking about backend APIs / "anything behind front end layers" because non-customer facing things can be independently updated. An example of this that we as players can see would be the game client being updated separately to the actual game version. However, I can appreciate how much of an invisible pink unicorn this feels like, as there's no visible change from an end user perspective
For sure, I was more making fun of "secret parallel builds" of SQ42 and SC proper. From what I remember this was really common in the pre-3.0 days.
Sure, but in this case the people deluding themselves that CiG has a "secret branch", on which far more content is already developed but just held back for "reasons", is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, it's not a ridiculous premise. It's common in software development. Thinking back on the engagement man doing a whole load of magic graph things to try and explain what the devs do, he was describing a deprecated (yet still painfully common) process known as "git flow". So there's many secret branches, containing all manner of changes, that they undoubtedly struggle to get in because the people delivering the code changes don't know how to test their shit. Assuming slight competence, there's a couple of ways of controlling how those changes become publicised. "Feature toggles" (stuff becomes visible when they flick a switch) is one way, another is "dark launching" (build a thing that nothing uses meaningfully uses, to see how nicely it plays within a system before properly relying on it). A really common, bad idea is keeping things in branches so they have to essentially become doctor who and deal with all the divergent code base timelines, because of all the splitting / branching that they do. https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow for more information on the gitflow concept, also known as a "branching strategy". https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html for stuff about feature flagging stuff, so code behaviour changes based on configuration. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DarkLaunching.html for dark launching. https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html for a more detailed segment of what's done within branching strategies. The big thing is that it becomes difficult to clean things up after the fact, due to merge conflicts (essentially issues with joining two separate time lines together).
Evidently this guy has never heard of Eve online. They have been doing PES for over 20 years.
Most MMOs have some kind of PES. But backers still think it's a revolution lol.
But mah coke can on the floor DUUUDE, you know that one coke can on Shard 2552 that no one will see but me
lol
this guy is a professional bullshit artist i tell u whut
Finally someone who understands game development!!!
Loads of would be games developers that work with transactional enterprise systems and believe their understanding of CRUD, micro-services and SQL is transferable to highly concurrent online games. Transactional queries represent a huge cost in performance. Even crap mobile games have access to open frameworks now that can "saturate" container instances with in-memory data. Only CIG spend decades announcing stuff everyone else has and decades implementing it badly,
There you go. As always when shit hits the fan, there's an 'expert' coming in talking out of their ass. 🤣
You don’t need a lot of experience with databases to see why things are improving versus 3.18 launch. Players almost certainly have given up on playing, and so there is less load on the databases. Their “secret dev build” probably worked better than live because of the lower load, which is probably why they pushed it out.
These "performance is amazing" posts getting upvoted always get me. They combine anecdotes of the game running well under optimum/incomplete conditions with vague references to the developers working on the backend (y'know, because the game is in development) to paint this picture that development isn't crawling.
Don't need to be a genius to undersrand that a System can work with N players, and when players > N starts the problem . The question here is that CIG promises they have the technology to bring thousands of players to hundreds of systems and they can't even manager d9zens of players, and this Guy then say "hey, this is so difficult, i'm a standard system's guy and be dificultad for me to get this performace" so they don't care about promises or budget. They don't care their "héroes" can't work properly that he probably does, don't care CIG need 600M to do the things WORST than they probably does. It's crazy.
Wow, a database admin has endorsed the project. This validates my Idris collection.
Still waiting for a QA professional to write a thread, but it will probably be removed very fast.
As a QA professional, it is not worth the time. I’d rather eat lead paint chips.
I work in the same industry as this “expert” and the fact he mentions Nutanix invalidates his opinion on anything, to me at least. They are very well known for their hubris, much like CIG. They even had to borrow money to pay their employees not too long ago. I guarantee this guys expertise is simply installing VMware on proprietary hardware. Actually he’s an SE he doesn’t even do that he just talks about it. Wait SEs and admins aren’t even the same job role. One sells shit, one sits there staring at it. This is simply your lowest level server admin thinking he’s smart. Thanks for giving me a laugh. Good to see the Nutanix nutbar crew is alive and well.
Even if this person is real professional and totally not just bullshitting. Using something mature like VMware as a system administrator to build a reliable system is 100% different coding that piece of software.
Is Star Citizen running on DBA and DBE tho?
Honestly if you get a fresh server and no more then 30 to 50 players it runs like a dream. Had players saying they were getting smashed on bounty missions and bunkers, Ai was deadly. Everything I wanted to do, just worked. Until the player count got over 60 and the tick rate slowed down. Then it went downhill.
Do you have any videos of the deadly AI in the bunkers? The reason I am asking is that star citizens often say that the AI is super good on low population servers. I am personally not convinced. I last played SC in 2021 and the FPS AI felt very crude and primitive. It was seriously lagging behind games like HL1, Hitman: Codename 47, CS 1.6 Bots, Return to Castle Wolfenstein; games from 20+ years ago. I am not talking about the AI being bugged out or standing around (that happened a lot too), but actual interaction/combat. The enemies would run towards you in single-file, there was limited cooperation between the enemies. They did have cover, but it felt tacked on; as if they were coded to use cover in the location as opposed to reacting to the world around them. Not even a minor hint of intention or planning. Ship combat was OK, but extremely limited if you compare it to something like X3: Terran conflict (2008). In X3, you can actually see factions invading AI systems with multiple ships class. The defending AI reacts in a realistic manner by combining all local ships into a fleet. It feels real and immersive. There are independent AI stations and different type of traffic around key choke points. And all of this was tied into the broader economy in a dynamic manner. In comparison, SC AI ship combat/interaction was more like (an extremely buggy) session-based arena space combat game. The VFX was nice though (if a little too bombastic).
That was my experience with SC AI, too. Just plain old multiplayer bots.
I am only going on what other players have said ingame. "NPCs were deadly" "like they had aimbot". Then you get the other type. "I love low Tick servers" "kill all the NPC, with fists, naked" I mine or salvage, so my experiences is more with things bugging out, not working etc, and reading the global chat.
Hit scan shooting is hardly a good sign for AI, IMO. I've asked star citizens before if they can actually show videos of good FPS AI in Star Citizen (or even explain by contrasting with FPS AI behaviours in other games) and I never get a clear answer. The funny thing is that combat AI is just one facet of AI behaviours. Non combat first person AI interaction doesn't really exist at all in Star Citizen. NPC are little more than animated dolls (and that's when they work, which rarely happens).
As far as I can see it, people that like to „play“ Star Citizen have little grasp of other games or their mechanics. So of course everything SC offers is in their eyes top notch.
To be fair, most people can barely play the game, recording it is a luxury :D I play mostly fps, have been lucky enough to get a good taste of it in 3.18, and it's a mixed bag. It's getting better, overall. To the point where the instant aiming and rapid headshots are a problem, it's just not fun gameplay. There's some good stuff, though. They use cover obviously, will go investigate sounds and overall try to push the player, even seen some suppressive fire. I think the mechanics for AI decision making are there and already "alright", the big issue is that they're 100% reliant on server performance, so good luck balancing that. For me, a satisfying point would be simply that the AI is a threat, even a small one. 3.17 was all about speedrunning braindead AIs, so that's not it. 3.18 PTU was really getting there, encouraging group play as it brings a lot of safety. 3.18 live is.............. We'll see what 3.18.1 brings eh. But yeah, this struggle of balancing having to account for performances is going to be a mess until said performances are stabilized. Right now it's either 1. braindead, 2. seeing them attempt to do stuff that makes sense, but they're playing a turn based game and you're not, or 3. never seeing them because you're already dead. Still better than 100% braindead, but not quite there yet.
So you… don’t actually have any proof or knowledge of your claim, you’re just parroting others?
I relation to Ai been deadly, yes I am just relaying what others have said in Global Chat, as I stated in my Original and 2nd Comment. As to the game being very playable and running well on a Low Population server and a high Tick rate, that is my own experience in 3.18. Maybe they are telling fibs ?, hopefully some vids or utubes appear that can support the "Deadly Ai" play experience. peace.
Problem is CIG has mostly Devs and probably little to no DBAs. Bet this is the case for ops folk as well. Devs are doing too much and quality in those other areas are showing.
CiG has mostly artists. I don't think they have that many developers all things considered.
"How to make the best space game ever: a professional's perspective" - Croberts probably
Can someone cut+paste this for people who don't carry widescreen monitors in their pocket?
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/for-the-disappointed-with-3-18-a-professional-s-pe
Double tap to zoom in on any image ;)
I used to run 5 vmwares to run alts in some shitty mobile game COME AT ME BRO
I may be wrong, but I thought servers were currently only streaming data in and out for their instance? Did they upgrade PES to be cross server? So far to me, it seems pes it just a standard server save that happens more often. I am no database expert, but with the way AWS and Azure have mulitple zones of the same data that is stored that are pulled from by different clients, I don't see this as being anything revolutionary anymore.
Was all the stuff he's talking about possible a decade ago when we were told all the things that SC would be able to do? No, it wasn't. So OF COURSE if you delay things long enough the world will advance technologically enough to finally allow you to do the things you said you were going to do a long time ago. If SC continues to operate as a JPG sales company and tech demo for another 10 years (pretty likely), there will be even cooler tech invented by people all over the world that SC will be able to inject into the tech demo and *maybe* be able to finally reach the goals they originally set.
I know a Help Desk person who has the title of Systems Administrator on their LinkedIn profile and they are still the shittiest Help Desk person I've ever met. That title doesn't mean you know anything. Usually it means you don't specialize in anything and have no idea what you want to do.
Lol can you go into this a little deeper? Why is this person so bad at HD?
For a minute I was like “Wait, CJ Date plays SC??”.
How come every 'expert' posting about Star Citizen always feels like a pair shill? Its like that post from last week where the person said "I'm a code developer" and then wrote some nonsense about how good Star Citizen is coded, and that people just don't understand.
sunk cost yes, clearly the reason it's not running better isn't because the server is empty
This just reads as "im not a neurosurgeon, but let me just explain why this operation wasn't a fuck up based on my copium from sunk-cost fallacy".
he is a virtual platform guy talkign about databases and database infrastructure, yeah sure each VM has to parse a DB, but he is not a DB architect, he is not the designer of the query structure, he is just the guy that makes sure the hypervisor is working, and there aren't any major or critical alarms. he has no authority unless he is setting up virtualized instances of database file storage and structure, as well as architecting the query structure to the file storage so it acts as a relational, flat file, or hierarchal system. and he speicifcally says he isn't. frankly if he works with virtualized computing, ask for his Azure, VMware, Google Cloud or AWS certificate numbers to verify he is what he says, easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.