6 ms·

As a software project, Star Citizen seems like a complete debacle — a project promising the basically impossible (tens of thousands of players on a single serve

• prox 5y ago
  All the while, I have been enjoying Elite Dangerous, which ticks a lot of boxes. Frontier Development is building from the ground up, and even though it’s not without problems (they just had a year of fixing their bodged Odyssey release) , they seem to have a running space simulation. I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
  • fartcannon 5y ago
    Elite is, without a doubt, the best spaceship parking simulator ever made.
    • pkilgore 5y ago
      X4 would like a word, fartcannon. (I love both games, but yes).
    • adamrezich 5y ago
      my first experience with Elite: Dangerous was playing it in VR and parking my ship on a station was a legitimately awesome experience.
      • ssully 5y ago
        I've never touched the game nor own any VR devices, but my friends basically treat it as the defacto VR game. It sounds really cool.
    • mrtranscendence 5y ago
      I have dreams where I'm alone on a spaceship hauling cargo, so I was really hopeful when I started playing Elite. But it just bored the stuffing out of me. I guess it's a temperament thing.
      • prox 5y ago
        It has problems with events, although they are reworking the event system so it can branch more. The problem with Elite is that they tend to make a great functionality, but then stop developing the content for it.
    • dylan-m 5y ago
      Playing it in VR, I get a ton of enjoyment from the ship interfaces. (I wish it supported hands for pretty much that reason). It's a beautiful exploration of how this kind of sci-fi FTL travel would work from a UX perspective. Assuming, of course, ships are the equivalent of racing cars and will gleefully sail into the nearest sun if you look away from the controls. The way your ship warns you if you're doing something foolish, and you need to plot your route in advance and filter through mountains of data in order to park your ship, is extremely neat to me. It's a perfect "tinkering with toys I don't fully understand" game.
      • shostack 5y ago
        I want a game like Elite with the depth of MSFS. Aviation is decade upon decade of old systems built on the shoulders of the previous ones. Aviation is _hard_. Space travel should be similar, with the appropriate help of computers.
  • mrguyorama 5y ago
    I adore flying in Elite Dangerous, but holy shit it's such a grindfest I feel like I'm playing a free to play game. I shouldn't have to minmax some community derived mining plan just to get a ship worth playing in. It seems like they developed the grindyness of the economy back when there was very little content in the game in order to artificially increase playtime, and haven't fixed it now that there is a lot more content.
• georgeecollins 5y ago
  Or its genius as a software project because if they finished people would just be disappointed.
• wlesieutre 5y ago
  If anyone’s curious what they’re actually promising for servers/shards, here’s a Q&A about it https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18397-Server-Meshing-And-Persistent-Streaming-Q-A https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18...
• TillE 5y ago
  Their goals were ambitious, but hardly impossible. It's not realistic to handle an arbitrary number of players interacting within a small space, sure. That limit is probably in the hundreds. But a zillion players all within the same game world? Yeah, why not? That's really easy if you're talking about a big universe that doesn't have the entire population congregating in the same place.
  • aeternum 5y ago
    Especially in a unicast environment. There are ways to handle it though, like let only a limited number of people land or enter a given stations. The real world has capacity limits, both physical and rule-based (fire-codes). Implementing these shouldn't be very hard and wouldn't necessarily break immersion. Lots of ships congregating at a random point in space could be a bigger issue though.
  • YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    It's impossible with cryengine.
    • Tostino 5y ago
      Why? The networking code is entirely on them to get right. What does Cryengine have to do with efficiently updating a giant number of players with movement / action information?
  • Tostino 5y ago
    It's higher than hundreds. I had 150+ player raids on a private L2 server I hosted back in the day on an Athlon X2 with 4gb of ram. I had 50 player raids when that server was hosted on a spare P3 800mhz 512mb ram box I had in the closet. This was not efficient software, l2j had so many issues I recognize now that I've worked a decade in the software industry, but it worked!
• speeder 5y ago
  To be honest I understand perfectly well why it exists. These days I played "Everspace 2" and it felt great, controls-wise, the physics are not that good though. And I wanted a more simulator thing. I then tired up all space simulators I could, played a little, tried to see if any scratch a specific itch, and found out the only ones that DOES scratch that itch, are ancient games, some that had Roberts involved. The reason people is plunking money in Star Citizen is that people want a game that basically doesn't exist, and Star Citizen promises to be that game. (if it will actually pull that off is another story...). Elite could have done it, but they didn't, their controls aren't that interesting and the entire series has the same repeating issues (of course, open source clones have the same issues). X series are basically an RTS with first person controls, another genre entirely. Evochron I didn't tried, but heard the controls are batshit insane and the interface is bizarre, the game is good but hard to understand. Among open source stuff, the one that came closest to what I want is clones of Chris Roberts games (for example games using Vega Strike engine). Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky, I couldn't get used to it or make it work with my mouse, and I don't own a joystick. Now if you are willing to go 2D there are more options, sadly some of them are trying to screw themselves too (looking at you "Celestial Command" that started as a 2D realistic physics game and is now a 3D game with crap physics because they couldn't make the AI work properly).
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    Check out Astrox Imperium. Don't expect Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen... but it's made by just one developer. For that it's amazing, and honestly, for me it's come closest to capturing what I want out of an Elite-style game, even though it's still got a long way to go to meeting its potential.
    • airstrike 5y ago
      Very interesting! One reviewer on Steam summed it up as "Eve Offline" which is a great moniker
    • paulluuk 5y ago
      I really like the basic concepts of Astrox Imperium, but the fact that almost the entire game revolves around getting from station to station in a desperate attempt not to run out of air was a big turndown for me. It eventually made the game unplayable for me, as I found myself in a savegame where no matter which direction I went, there simply wasn't a single station closeby enough that provided air, so I was essentially stuck and had to start a new campaign.
• e4e78a06 5y ago
  Planetside 2 was able to handle hundreds of players in the same location as a first person shooter without issues. That was almost a decade ago. No reason to believe with new advances in CPU single core perf, lockfree concurrency techniques, vectorization, etc. that 1k players wouldn't be possible.
  • CodeGlitch 5y ago
    Totally underrated game. I stopped playing awhile ago but it's still running.
    • syntheweave 5y ago
      They added a new continent and changed up the spawn rules again, so it's a good time to jump back into PS2.