hi does anyone know how these are going to work because look at EVE online they havent got a capped server(so to speak) thats one of the reasons EVE has came so far, buut what if SC is capped at say 50 players, surely that has already made having corps pointless because there wouldnt be any fleets for mining or whatever it would juust be one or two people at any one time, does anybody have any feedback on this.
Instances???
- Thread starter Viper123
- Start date
Eventually they want handoff servers. Where each area within systems, (planets, space stations, asteroid fields), are each done on separate processes of servers so the maximum number of players can be held.
Each time a player moves to a new location they are sent to a new server, presumably with no load time, and now register all players/ships in that area. From what I understand they could have multiple servers even running a single area so an unlimited number of ships/players can be tracked and rendered. Of course at this point it's going to be a limitation of our own personal computers unable to render everything.
From what I can gather is if you're on a Capital ship like an Idris then you will only see what's inside and not need to render the outside battle, unless you're in a turret and then you wouldn't render the inside of ship and its crew.
I'm sure someone could explain better or in more technical terms, but this is just what I've gathered from watching 10 for the Chairman.
Think of it like a Megaserver like GW2 or ESO but with no instance limit.
Each time a player moves to a new location they are sent to a new server, presumably with no load time, and now register all players/ships in that area. From what I understand they could have multiple servers even running a single area so an unlimited number of ships/players can be tracked and rendered. Of course at this point it's going to be a limitation of our own personal computers unable to render everything.
From what I can gather is if you're on a Capital ship like an Idris then you will only see what's inside and not need to render the outside battle, unless you're in a turret and then you wouldn't render the inside of ship and its crew.
I'm sure someone could explain better or in more technical terms, but this is just what I've gathered from watching 10 for the Chairman.
Think of it like a Megaserver like GW2 or ESO but with no instance limit.
CrudeSasquatch
Space Marshal
What I understand is.... limited, and possibly people will explain it better later. (Like how @Grimbli typed his explanation out while I was typing mine out... :D )
It's gonna be interesting to see how they manage it and how many players they can fit in. If they are using dedicated servers then it should be possible to scale up those servers and using optimal/clever/forward thinking hardware and software configuration (like Eve) they could potentially get lots of players into one instance.
If done wrong it has the capability of completely ruining the game.
The cheapskates at Frontier decided to cheap out to the max and rely on player to player instancing, sometimes in elite dangerous, it can take half an hour just to get 5 friends into the same instance. It runins the game..
The server infrastructure is gonna be the most important thing they need to get right in star citizen. Based on the current performance and attitude I see from CIG, I think they already know this and will do good job.
If done wrong it has the capability of completely ruining the game.
The cheapskates at Frontier decided to cheap out to the max and rely on player to player instancing, sometimes in elite dangerous, it can take half an hour just to get 5 friends into the same instance. It runins the game..
The server infrastructure is gonna be the most important thing they need to get right in star citizen. Based on the current performance and attitude I see from CIG, I think they already know this and will do good job.
The truth is... no-one really knows at this point.
I suggest reading this article:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing
It's an oldy, but a goody, and covers more things than just the instancing (like the Galaxy Server, Points of Intrest, the PvP slider, and more).
CIG is, as we speak, undergoing a complete rework of the CryEngine server code. We won't know if they'll be able to implement their full instancing plan until they're done with that major rework project. They have their work cut out for them, because CryEngine was never designed with what they have in mind. CryEngine is built for small fps style arena maps... not some crazy dynamic instancing system.
They also have a long ways to go with optimization to get the player count per instance up. I think 50 ships per instance is a realistic goal, unless they are able to pull a miracle off with CryEngine code.
I will say this though: It's hard to think of SC instancing in the traditional sense... Instances won't be set geographical areas like they are in most MMO. They'll be little bubbles in space that get created and destroyed when they are needed. They'll scale to whatever size they're needed to be, whether that's the orbit around a planet, or just the inside of a large ship. It will be possible for them to 'overlap', but because of their fluid nature it will be much less noticeable than traditional MMO.
Busy space stations may end up with multiple overlapping instances all the time, but beyond that, the instances will be more like a series of balloons that squish up next to each other. If done right, even large 100+ player battles should feel seamless. You'll be warping in and out of different instances, without the need for loading screens, and while you'll only see maybe 50-75 players at one time, you'll know there's a much larger battle going on in the space around you.
It will never be the same as EVE (one mega server), but with a little ingenuity, I'm sure CIG will develop a system that doesn't hinder our imershun.
I suggest reading this article:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing
It's an oldy, but a goody, and covers more things than just the instancing (like the Galaxy Server, Points of Intrest, the PvP slider, and more).
CIG is, as we speak, undergoing a complete rework of the CryEngine server code. We won't know if they'll be able to implement their full instancing plan until they're done with that major rework project. They have their work cut out for them, because CryEngine was never designed with what they have in mind. CryEngine is built for small fps style arena maps... not some crazy dynamic instancing system.
They also have a long ways to go with optimization to get the player count per instance up. I think 50 ships per instance is a realistic goal, unless they are able to pull a miracle off with CryEngine code.
I will say this though: It's hard to think of SC instancing in the traditional sense... Instances won't be set geographical areas like they are in most MMO. They'll be little bubbles in space that get created and destroyed when they are needed. They'll scale to whatever size they're needed to be, whether that's the orbit around a planet, or just the inside of a large ship. It will be possible for them to 'overlap', but because of their fluid nature it will be much less noticeable than traditional MMO.
Busy space stations may end up with multiple overlapping instances all the time, but beyond that, the instances will be more like a series of balloons that squish up next to each other. If done right, even large 100+ player battles should feel seamless. You'll be warping in and out of different instances, without the need for loading screens, and while you'll only see maybe 50-75 players at one time, you'll know there's a much larger battle going on in the space around you.
It will never be the same as EVE (one mega server), but with a little ingenuity, I'm sure CIG will develop a system that doesn't hinder our imershun.
the problem is in tracking and calculating position, velocity, etc. of each object relative to all the others. As the number of objects increases arithmetically, the number of calculations increases exponentially. A decade ago Second Life began lagging when more than forty avatars occupied an instance. Hardware has improved a lot since then, but not enough to raise that hard limit by much.
DontTouchMyHoHos
Space Marshal
what kind of numbers does a Planetside instance support?
Splicepoint
Captain
Yep. It will be super important to allow for large fleet battles. I think where E.D got it wrong is the fact that it always feels as though you can only interact with a few players at a time and there's little opportunity for massive-scale more *epic* encounters.
So what your saying is even though we have 9000 pilots, we will be lucky to get 50 pilots in a game together, and if all 50 are on your team there will be no one to fight or anything, you can just run that instance like a King! Mine it out without anyone bothering you. Or I could be reading it wrong.
Splicepoint
Captain
This is more or less my fear. If we can't all fly somewhere and, when we get there, see the person who radioed for help or encounter everyone who's there....I think we're going to have issues building a strong PvP meta.
I have seen posts that allege that the multi-server instancing thing just means multiple servers allowing for handoff that will make large battles possible. I think there's probably a lot still unanswered and still being discovered by CIG themselves, even.
In 10 for the Chairman I believe he stated that their current servers are able to run around 8(?) players per CPU thread. And that each server has 16 (?) physical cores which would make 32 threads. Even if they can't do the mega-combined instances using multiple servers he said that they'd be able to do 200+ people per instance, hopefully.
*I could be wrong on numbers. Watched it last week. It was one of the recent ones though.
From what he's said I'm very optimistic about the player limits. But you're right, it is still all uncharted waters, just as with almost every aspect of this game. I have faith though.
Splicepoint
Captain
I have faith too. There's a long way to go. Hard to play even a pre-boxed round of arena commander without rubberbanding and possible disconnects.
DontTouchMyHoHos
Space Marshal
Some of the largest battles carry up to 600 players no lag. In the same battlefield zone, that is not including the entire instance.
They also own the guinness world record for most in a single battle for fps.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/planetside-2-sets-guinness-world-record-after-1-15/1100-6424887/
I wouldnt use second life to gauge anything for capacity in an instance, its well outdated. Most games now a days can easily crush those numbers for server base.
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i hope ther instances get better otherwise the idris,starfairer and other (capital) ships will NEVER fly in a fleet and that is a shame especialy of how much they cost so my question wouuld be why make people pay HUNDREDS if theres never going to be a actual econamy.
CrudeSasquatch
Space Marshal
10TFC #81 - http://imperialnews.network/2016/04/10-for-the-chairman-episode-81/
8 dedicated game servers run on 1 physical machine in the cloud. Each physical machine has 32 logical cores, 16 physical cores and runs 8 instances, each with 4 logical cores and 2 physical cores. It’s a trade-off, as new features are implemented, performance varies.
Later on he adds to this:
A physical server has 32 logical cores, so it’s about 16 actual physical CPU cores, and each one of our game servers – DGS instances – runs 4 logical cores, so two physical cores, and so if you just decided now we’re not going to run 8 instances on this physical server, we’re just going to run instance, there are then, you’d be 8*24 so that’s a fairly decent number, right? Almost 200 players, and that’s without even scaling, better optimizations and performance and stuff.
So, right now each individual instance has 2 cores (4 threads), but that's something they'll be playing with in the future to find the sweet spot for each instance.
However, there are other considerations beyond how much the server can handle. The insane fidelity of all the ship models has a huge impact on client performance. Even at just 24 ships, if you spawn all the ships together, and you're causing your PC to render the high level-of-detail models for all the ships, your frame rates will chug down a lot. They've come a long way with optimizing the ships, and streamlining how their assets affect server performance, but this will always be a basic consideration for the max ship count.
I do have high hopes that CIG will be able to pull off a good player count, but for now I'm keeping my estimates low. 50 is reasonable. 100 has been done in other games before, but the fidelity that SC has for both visuals and network traffic means that anything above 100 ships is kinda unrealistic.
Yes and no.
Here are the things you have to keep in mind about the instancing:
- The Galaxy Server will determine who gets into an instance.
- There will (most likely) be a max party size.
Here's an example:
100 TEST Ships
100 Enemy Ships
Max instance size: 100 ships
In this example, when the two huge groups of players encounter each other, the Galaxy Server will determine who gets into what instance. It would see that there are too many TEST pilots to put them all in one instance and still have empty slots of opponent players, so it would create two separate instances. These instances could be either stacked on top of each other, or they could be next to each other in space.
So, the Galaxy Server spins up two instances, and throws half of the TEST pilots into one, and half into the other. Two parties from each side would be put into each instance:
[Instance 1: 50 TEST vs 50 Enemy]
[Instance 2: 50 TEST vs 50 Enemy]
The reason this happens is to avoid the concept of 'area denial', where one group could use their player numbers to abuse the instancing system. The Galaxy Server will always keep you from completely filling up an instance with friendlies. You won't be able to abuse the system to safely mine a full instance; because there would always be room to spare for the Galaxy Server to drop some bandit NPCs in, or for some pirate players to drop by.
My hopes for SC are that CIG find a way to stream some data between instances, to help simulate the same kind of huge-scale battles that we see in EVE. Each instance handles the players that are inside that instance, but it could also generate a 'snapshot' of what's going on in the other instances nearby and generate a 'skybox' from that.
For the most part, this won't be necessary, because space is so vast. You'd never really have visual range far enough to see individual ships that are in another instance. However, large scale space battles, where you have massive capital ships, etc, you're going to need a bunch of instances very close together to handle 500+ players. If they can work out a system that would let you see a 'simulation' of what is going on in the instances around you (massive capital ships duking it out with each other), then it would be pretty amazing.
You'd only be able to interact with the 100, or so, ships that are in your current instance, but at least you'd be able to visualize the battle around you.
An important concept to remember is that instance limits will be based off of how many ships there are; not individual players. Ships are the most resource intensive assets, both in terms of GPU and bandwidth. The local physics grid inside each ship is responsible for handling and reporting the position of the players inside, and for larger ships, that can all be offloaded to a separate mini-instance.
CIG has talked about how optimized the larger ships (like the Idris) are. This is something that Disco Lando discussed on Captain Richards stream a few months ago: The Freelancer was actually more expensive, in terms of performance, than the Idris was. Each time the ships are reworked, they are streamlined and their overall polygon count is drastically reduced. Because Capital ships have a lot of large and flat surfaces, their total polygon counts are actually very similar to a small ship, and they don't cause any more of a performance hit than other ships.
So essentially, having a capital ship in an instance is the same as have a small ship (in terms of server/client performance).
1 ship = 1 ship = 1 ship
That's very very cool, because when you consider how many people it takes to man a capital ship, and you start to understand how large-scale battles will work.
For instance, lets look at that example from before. Say all 100 of the TEST ships are Idris:
[Instance 1: 50 TEST vs 50 Enemy]
Max crew of each Idris is 10 people.
If each Idris has the max crew, there could be 500 TESTies total in the battle!
We still don't know exactly how CIG is going to handle the crew of each ship (if capital ships will have instanced interiors, or if that will be reserved for only the largest ships like the Bengal and Retribution). And we don't know exactly how players vs ships will be calculated for the max instance size either. These are all conceptual ideas at this point, so take them with a grain of salt... but it's what CIG is striving for.
Here's a good video that explains how CIG wants the battle instances to work:
There are some things I disagree with in this video:
- I'm still skeptical players will be able to see what's going in other instances around them.
- I really don't think we'll be able to shoot at ships in other instances.
TL:eek:DR - Here's how I think instancing will work in SC:
Personally, I think that large fleets will be split up into a number of different instances near each other. Think about how you jump around the PU to different comm arrays, fighting small groups of enemies... That's what it's going to be like.
Fleet commanders will be requesting reinforcements as needed, and they'll create a point-of-interest beacon when they need another group of players to help out. When you get near a battle, and you open up your 'travel mode' (by pressing the B key), you'll see travel markers showing the different fleets going on, and you'll be able to quantum jump to them.
The distances between battle-instances will be large enough that you won't be able to visually see any ships outside your own instance (think about how far you've traveled from Port Olisar, and how small it gets when you're only a few thousand meters away). However, by looking at the different warp points via the 'travel mode' hud, you'll be able to get an idea of exactly how many players are engaged in battles, and how many instances are currently spun up for the battle.
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