Star Citizen

TL;DW for hour 2:

• They want to keep some more surprises in the future releases.
• The issue with world around the player despawning after flying the Wolf and it moving away was caused by ship's physics grid having no gravity mixed with how the server handles physics (huge simplification, watch the episode for full explanation).
• Server meshing:
  • Game is currently running at 10 servers per shard setup.
  • They've been using the time since launch of SM to learn how to function with it, how to distribute load etc.
  • They've been switching SM configuration with every patch (for example to provide more power for event specific locations).
  • Since content and tech teams don't always talk with each other they had to learn the hard way that event locations can't be bunched up to closely as it affects tech's ability to balance the load (this was an issue with Hathor areas for example).
  • They solved a bunch of performance issues related to static meshing. Still working on more.
  • Current focus of dynamic SM development is the ability to arbitrarily select which areas (streaming groups) should get additional resources and moved from one server to another (also how and which component takes care of that process).
  • Lots of parallels between dynamic SM and instancing, some of the work is shared between the two.
  • They are planning to increase the player counts but it's not a priority at the moment.
  • Difference between SC's server meshing and ones used in other games has to do with CIG splitting simulation and replication in their approach. Technically speaking, players aren't even connected to the server they're on but to the hybrid system which handles those things. It also works on 3D space rather than 2D grid of other games.
  • The original approach for SM was closer to how normal servers operate but that had some unintended consequences, hence the hybrid approach.
  • Dynamic server won't come as a one giant drop, they will slowly implement specific parts as the work progresses.
• "Big ticket items":
  • Freight elevators
    • They're a focus of one of the "hero squads", unfortunately this decision was made too late (the work was still being done on them though).
    • A lot of the issues had to do with how the elevators detect obstructions and contents. Also, a lot of items have incorrect bounds meaning they can clip through surfaces - this mixed with bad obstruction checks caused problems (still not completely fixed).
    • They're doing a system wide check on how the items are set up to avoid similar problems.
    • There was an issue where were destroyed items disappeared visually but left the entity and were still considered as obstructions.
    • Due to how FE were set up (kiosk and elevator platform being separate) sometimes one of them streamed out first which led to them being no longer connected, disabling the whole location. They introduced a self-healing approach to automatically fix the issue when it happens.
    • Another issue: UI and platform could get out of sync. This was fixed by the above approach combined with the UI re-querring the platform to make sure things are up to date.
    • Explanation about how FE and ship cargo elevators work, I ain't re-typing it though.
    • Error handling is now part of code reviews, wasn't before.
    • Proper multiplayer testing is now a core part of QA process for these open areas.
  • Most of the Wikelo issues are still being investigated.
  • Entity cleanup
    • They've unified multiple cleanup systems (abandoned vehicle tracking, physics intersection, density manager) into one since the initial implementation.
    • Items are grouped into density classes (no more than X number of this kind of items in the area at once). Designers now have the ability to vary these densities based on region/location.
    • There's also lifetime cleanup (time instead of density based).
    • At the moment cleanup timer for abandoned ships sits at 2 hours, regardless of size (for now). It's refreshed any time someone interacts with a ship. This will also vary by region.
    • Timers and density classes are regularly tuned, there are already less reports about issues with those.
    • If they spawned salvage contracts for every abandoned vehicle they would flood the mission list due to how often that happens. It will happen in the future though.
    • NPC spawn management (Serious Sam number of enemies) - some of these issues were caused by designers setting spawn limit to infinite but there are multiple other causes as well. A replacement system (population manager) for spawning is in development - this will handle both mission and social NPCs (mission ones are handled by the mission system for now, this sometimes triggers multiple times).
    • They created new debugging tools to check how many NPCs are in a location.