Recently the CEO of Star Atlas revealed their version of the hangar module, some people were not impressed.
Four guys, four days and a better hangar module than Star Atlas.
- Thread starter Montoya
- Start date
Hundreds of years in the future and still there are **fluorescent lights ** in the ship cargo bay..... Will I ever stop laughing?
No Struts in the cockpit???? I can't fly that!
Also, has anyone else noticed that all space graphics are mainly pale Blue & White??? Just look at all the new ship interiors in SC.....boring!
(They look like hospital operating rooms)
Oh look, outside there is ACTUALLY some Colors like Green, Brown, Red, Yellow.....So get out of the hangar as fast as possible.
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Since CIG hires the BEST programmers in the World....these 4 guys have a job waiting....
I will Pledge for a ship just to pay their salary....
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No Struts in the cockpit???? I can't fly that!
Also, has anyone else noticed that all space graphics are mainly pale Blue & White??? Just look at all the new ship interiors in SC.....boring!
(They look like hospital operating rooms)
Oh look, outside there is ACTUALLY some Colors like Green, Brown, Red, Yellow.....So get out of the hangar as fast as possible.
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Since CIG hires the BEST programmers in the World....these 4 guys have a job waiting....
I will Pledge for a ship just to pay their salary....
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The things the Unreal Engine is capable of doing really goes to highlight the shortcomings of lumberyard and how much time and effort CIG has had to put into it to try and make it sort of comparable.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew
yes and no. While unreal 5 does not currently have the asset streaming service as facilitated by CIG (they do allow for streaming assets as does Unity, games like Minecraft stream in the game world as you move around), and hopefully soon a realized server mesh both of these are not new technologies, both Everquest and World of Warcraft have done something similar for years with zones and instances.
Lumberyard has an advantage in being owned by the people who own Amazon Web Services. Amazon. When you have such an industrial force and presence on the web at your disposal, and one not afraid to attempt new systems, services and methods working for the benefit of what essentially is their own product portfolio integration, it might be harder than one thinks considering the amount of time it has already taken and how long it may still take. This is creating new ways of doing things, it's not picking the best picks from the options on the shelf...
Without looking at the backend code I cannot answer to what they are attempting to accomplish and what the roadblocks are and if its issues with the game engine they acquired, not having the technical staff or just not having the time to dedicate to the problem. But as to the problem it has been solved in multiple ways all with their advantages and disadvantages and while unique issues arise when doing things at scale, what CIG is attempting to do is not at a massive scale and much has already been solved by others. It's easy to think oh millions of player accounts so massive, but in reality, when you break it down at any given time there are only a few thousand players playing and each server will handle ~100 players and while there is a lot of data exchanged between the server and its players the server doesn't need to update the game state or backend server storage often as most of the activity is location updates with a high level of data loss on server crash being acceptable.
Amazon has added some AWS support into Lumberyard but when you look at gamelift for UR4 it has also added the same support which makes AWS solutions an attractive option for multiplayer games. I had hoped to have seen Amazon with Lumberyard making waves in the game dev community but so far its not happening
Amazon has added some AWS support into Lumberyard but when you look at gamelift for UR4 it has also added the same support which makes AWS solutions an attractive option for multiplayer games. I had hoped to have seen Amazon with Lumberyard making waves in the game dev community but so far its not happening
SQ42 will have to be that game that makes the waves.
Well, let's face it. CR, the guy micromanaging a hostile work environment, has been out of game development for a long long time. Hopefully, with the nearly half a BILLION dollars and decade we gave him we will be able to upload our consciousness and live out our dream in an amazing real time Metaverse.
I bet 4 guys in 4 days can't do that
I bet 4 guys in 4 days can't do that
UE5 is so easy and intuitive to use on the basic surface level, making a demo like this is truly no big deal. You don't need to program anything, you don't need to really know anything special, a very basic surface level understanding of how a map is mad eis enough. If you payed attention to the Cig technical videos of how they build locations, you already have enough knowledge.
You load up a template (UE5 has quiet a few out of the box and you can import community made ones as well) , let's say a first person shooter template for this demo, load in your models which if exported from your 3d modeling software with the correct setting (using the UE exporter plug in) should work fine. But even easier if you just use models from the Megascans library like they did. It's really just some time and no effort.
If you dear leader @Montoya could dedicate a week or two to mess around with UE5, even you could do better then these guys did. It is really that simple, just like these guys proven it is.
On the question of how much better UE5 is to what Cig is having trouble with, no it isn't. They'd run into the same problems with scale, physics, and all the graphical issues they had to solve and so on. They'd have to do it differently, and we might have better performance at the same graphical quality level thanks to systems like nanite and the very well faked GI lighting, but by how much we will never know.
Unless CR wants to rebuild the game again in UE5 lol
(@CR, please don't!)
The net code issues would still be there with UE5, it doesn't have any more or better for what CIG is building.
The current issues with lumberyard stem from not having much to start with and trying to push things like physics grids down its throat. It's vastly more complicated then WoW with its entirely static world and few lines in a database that define everything about the player. Wow had single dedicated servers per x hundred players for a very long time until they switched on the cross server stuff. It clearly takes effort to develop something like this, even when it's rather simple and a huge company like Blizz does it. Now imagine the two net code guys at CIG trying to crack this with no load screens to hide transitions and moving planets with their own gravity and full persistence of every single pice of crap you throw on the ground and such nonsense, all wrapped in a spaghetti code. I imagine 2/3 of the time is just spent migrating everything in the PU into a readable database so they can grab the data from somewhere for all this to happen...
Tldr, you start making a mountain of crap, you gonna have a hard time digging through it later. Thus no true persistence or server meshing for us yet.
You load up a template (UE5 has quiet a few out of the box and you can import community made ones as well) , let's say a first person shooter template for this demo, load in your models which if exported from your 3d modeling software with the correct setting (using the UE exporter plug in) should work fine. But even easier if you just use models from the Megascans library like they did. It's really just some time and no effort.
If you dear leader @Montoya could dedicate a week or two to mess around with UE5, even you could do better then these guys did. It is really that simple, just like these guys proven it is.
On the question of how much better UE5 is to what Cig is having trouble with, no it isn't. They'd run into the same problems with scale, physics, and all the graphical issues they had to solve and so on. They'd have to do it differently, and we might have better performance at the same graphical quality level thanks to systems like nanite and the very well faked GI lighting, but by how much we will never know.
Unless CR wants to rebuild the game again in UE5 lol
(@CR, please don't!)
The net code issues would still be there with UE5, it doesn't have any more or better for what CIG is building.
The current issues with lumberyard stem from not having much to start with and trying to push things like physics grids down its throat. It's vastly more complicated then WoW with its entirely static world and few lines in a database that define everything about the player. Wow had single dedicated servers per x hundred players for a very long time until they switched on the cross server stuff. It clearly takes effort to develop something like this, even when it's rather simple and a huge company like Blizz does it. Now imagine the two net code guys at CIG trying to crack this with no load screens to hide transitions and moving planets with their own gravity and full persistence of every single pice of crap you throw on the ground and such nonsense, all wrapped in a spaghetti code. I imagine 2/3 of the time is just spent migrating everything in the PU into a readable database so they can grab the data from somewhere for all this to happen...
Tldr, you start making a mountain of crap, you gonna have a hard time digging through it later. Thus no true persistence or server meshing for us yet.
Richard Bong
Space Marshal
Lumberyard is no more. Its base has been branched and released as O3DE. That is the version that has all the cool features. That is also not the version CIG is using.
Even with that, I don't think O3DE is up to the same tasks as either Unreal or Unity.
While I'm not saying these 4 guys could produce an entire game their demo definitely shows that CIG should be capable of more than they have given us.
There is a reason that MMO's generally go from concept to release in 5 years. Anything more than that and the technology advances make your game an also ran and appear dated.
Even with that, I don't think O3DE is up to the same tasks as either Unreal or Unity.
While I'm not saying these 4 guys could produce an entire game their demo definitely shows that CIG should be capable of more than they have given us.
There is a reason that MMO's generally go from concept to release in 5 years. Anything more than that and the technology advances make your game an also ran and appear dated.
Hopefuly for good reasons and not the Duke Nukem Forever kind of waves. But still the waves I am talking about are what the engine itself can do and not what was created in the engine.
It's true, another engine that is relatively easy to create things in is Unity. Lumberyard is not there yet but I have hope Amazon is going in that direction with it. While I do hope the tools and technologies CIG is crafting on top of Lumberyard will be added to the engine I have a feeling CIG is not going to add all of the modifications and so their codebase is really no longer Lumberyard but a derivative.
I would be curious as to how much time and effort it would take to port SC to UE5. All of the objects, models, and animations should port over quickly. They would be able to throw away all of the LOD's as they are no longer required. As for the planets, it might require some modifications to the engine to be able to read in the planet maps and craft the planets but the porting should be relatively straightforward. Client world streaming is already handled by the open-world partition (https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/world-partition-in-unreal-engine/)On the question of how much better UE5 is to what Cig is having trouble with, no it isn't. They'd run into the same problems with scale, physics, and all the graphical issues they had to solve and so on. They'd have to do it differently, and we might have better performance at the same graphical quality level thanks to systems like nanite and the very well faked GI lighting, but by how much we will never know.
Unless CR wants to rebuild the game again in UE5 lol
(@CR, please don't!)
I would like to echo @Lorddarthvik in that at this point in time it would be a terrible idea to port SC to UE5 and this is more just a thought exercises and nothing more.
CIG is still going to have dedicated servers per 100 players or thereabout. It's just the net code instead of being a fixed area will attempt to scale as needed. And honestly, the data is not stored in a database in a typical way as a lookup row/column as that is not efficient. Instead, they are using a tree structure, and that way you just need to grab the node as your parent traverse the tree and get all of the nodes (objects) that exist within. It also gives you the added benefit of being able to quickly add and remove objects from the tree and benefit from a NoSQL DB. I can go into far more detail on networking and data storage but idea is that they are not doing anything untested in regards to server meshing and object container streaming.
I am former Unity developer, the only reason I don't use it now is I don't have the time to work on that kind of project. I also have experience with Unreal and CryEngine. I have no experience with whatever Amazon is doing, I haven't had any time to keep up. The only other engine I saw was a seriously overhyped engine turned out to be a potato. Direct comparisons of those products is like comparing apples, oranges and peaches (and a potato). As a developer, your favorite is going to have very very little to do with anything else other than familiarity. Anyone who thinks there's a use case that isn't covered by one or the other has no idea about how things like inheritance works. Since that is basic to how OOP is written, you just failed the exam.
What I do not understand is some of CIG's internal terminology surrounding this nebulous concept of "server meshing" that has never once been described properly.
The unfortunate thing about that is that since it is obviously undeveloped, they should not be leaking it as if it's equivalent to shard and zone, if it's not shard and zone. Just way too much doublespeak for me to feel comfortable about it.
The servers (as in what is in most user's minds) is a single computer. That is wrong. It is software. In Shard and Zone, the Shard is a service network that allows a number of zones services to share data. If this is what CIG is referring to as "server meshing", then the number of users it is possible to connect to the game at any one time is directly related to the availability of hardware to run the services - and can't ever be infinite, but could be hundreds of thousands of users.
If this is not what "server meshing" is referring to, then CIG is re-inventing the wheel, but so be it.
What I do not understand is some of CIG's internal terminology surrounding this nebulous concept of "server meshing" that has never once been described properly.
The unfortunate thing about that is that since it is obviously undeveloped, they should not be leaking it as if it's equivalent to shard and zone, if it's not shard and zone. Just way too much doublespeak for me to feel comfortable about it.
The servers (as in what is in most user's minds) is a single computer. That is wrong. It is software. In Shard and Zone, the Shard is a service network that allows a number of zones services to share data. If this is what CIG is referring to as "server meshing", then the number of users it is possible to connect to the game at any one time is directly related to the availability of hardware to run the services - and can't ever be infinite, but could be hundreds of thousands of users.
If this is not what "server meshing" is referring to, then CIG is re-inventing the wheel, but so be it.
Each engine has its strengths and weaknesses, for the longest time Unity was unique in that I could start developing without paying hundreds of thousands for an engine license. I have to say Unreal has been really good for Unity development as well as unlocking a lot of the features that required purchasing to utilize. I really do like that both have opted to go with a percent cut of sales instead of requiring any upfront costs now.
I'll have to dig up the videos but the end result stated goal is dynamically sized zones (which is why they needed server-side object streaming so that it can stream in and out of memory objects as the game state expands and contracts). This should allow them to utilize the servers instead of just having lots of servers running for each zone, but from a player perspective, it really doesn't provide much beyond complexity and more breaking points. They also are not sure how small they will allow each zone to scale be it limited in area like Hurston/area 18 before they shard the game state and create another instance when the player population count causes slowdowns.
So we have had multiplayer games that have created instances, had seamless zoning and so the only thing that is unique is the dynamic scaling of the zone which does nothing for the player and is purely for optimizing server utilization.