Hm no, it just sucks. No point in getting all apologetic. He promised a persistent world and what not, yet the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of a Space *spoiler warning* combat simulation gets instanced. This instanced combat makes things like patrolling police craft or hiring bounty hunters when acutely needed completely pointless.
(12-26-2012, 03:02 PM)Xenosaga Wrote: Hm no, it just sucks. No point in getting all apologetic. He promised a persistent world and what not, yet the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of a Space *spoiler warning* combat simulation gets instanced. This instanced combat makes things like patrolling police craft or hiring bounty hunters when acutely needed completely pointless.
Persistent world=/=Freelancer like combat.
I've played a couple of space MMOs, and most of them are forced to use instancing. the Star Trek MMO comes to mind. He can't do it because it's a hardware limitation both on the server end and the client side. even EVE had trouble with that, and their combat systems are considerably different.
A major part of a MMO is keeping it accessible to normal people with average net connections. I have a feeling that anything beyond 100vs100 in one battle instance would just completely cause lag to go through the roof anyways.
Don't get me wrong, I'd have liked to see it as well...I just don't think it's doable.
(12-26-2012, 03:02 PM)Xenosaga Wrote: Hm no, it just sucks. No point in getting all apologetic. He promised a persistent world and what not, yet the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of a Space *spoiler warning* combat simulation gets instanced. This instanced combat makes things like patrolling police craft or hiring bounty hunters when acutely needed completely pointless.
Unfortunately bandwidth constraints put a significant limit, so either you sacrifice fidelity or limit amount of participants, hence a compromise for persistent universe in form of local instancing. By fidelity I mean the amount and frequency of data necessary to keep player clients synced to the environment. Increased precision of controls, movement and combat all increase network load as more data needs to be sent between client and server. Star Citizen focuses on combat fidelity while traditional MMOs are of latter category and make significant compromises and thus simplified combat model, most notably in area of collisions and projectile-based weapons. I'd say Star Citizen in this term is closer to Battlefield 3 and the likes rather than traditional WoW-like MMOs where projectiles home on target and characters lack collisions. Currently having best of both would make online game prohibitively inaccessible for majority.
From what I understand the universe in the game will be Persistent.. the Instanced part of the game is more closely related to sharding than a WoW style raid/PVP instance. IE there is one server and MANY shards to play one, each shard holding a limitation of the number of people. Also remember there could easily be instanced area's for specific type of PVP, such as Squad vs Squad (just speculation here but it makes sense). This will allow forced to name a time and date, and fight it out without interference from people not involved. I know I know.. some people just want to get involved and wreck other peoples parties.. well you can do that in the shard. So we are looking at a merger of instanced and persistent.. So you log on and switch over to the shard your buddies are on (if there is room) and go hunting.
If done right.. sharding is a great way to allow more people to play a good game; rather then requiring everyone to have high end PC. If your buddy is in a shard and a massive fight starts and there is room.. you just hop shards and goto the fight.. This actually makes the universe more diverse, and keeps mega squads from ruling the verse (something Eve has always had issues with). The games difficulty should be in the flying and tactics.. not the zerging and fur-balling.
Do not think of it like Freelancer Discovery.. where you only can have 200 people per server/Universe active at one time.. Think of it like this..
There can only be 200 people at ONE time in the New York system (but there are 5 New York Shards).. and 200 at the same time in the Texas system (while still having a completely different 200 people back in New York).. so on ... There might be 5000 people on a single "shard" but a max of 200 in your local system".. You could jump to the next system and there are another completely different 200 people to interact with.
Take into account they are launching the game with a mod-able Multi-player server that YOU can host and Mod the way YOU want...
Can one explain me a bit more about this instance thing.
As far as I get it it is like this. We take piece of space-NY for example and make it instance, it means everyone in NY can interact with each other. Freelancer is also instanced in systems, there is cut scene when you move from one system to other.
However the question is how big would be one piece of space. I hope it would be big enough to roam there and do what you can do in one disco system. I do indeed find gay that people would be able to teleport (read gank via emergency channel) instantly from one instance to other. I never played any of the new games with such instances so please do explain to the old time gamer like me if I got it or I am totally wrong.
Also second point: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/fo...-Squadrons http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/fo...-Squadrons
There is huge numbers of players organizing themselves in groups even now.
I am really curious if the numbers would be most important or the skill.
Would we make discovery tololo group?
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
Instancing in action:
-> system instance 1: LN outnumbers RM fleet and wins.
-> system instance 2: RM outnumbers LN fleet and wins.
question: what result could be if whole fleets were held inside single instance?
question: should I seek for proper instance to get into right battle instead of calm system with traders everywhere?
My question was more about the size of the said instances, would be big enough to enable proper fleet action or they would be as big as the space near training stations in conn?
If they are sized properly it should be ok. I also hope that there would be no reserved tickets for all parties, let say 100 slots and they are like 40 RM 40 LN and rest 20 various-this would be tragic. As long as they are made proper and allow proper group actions without much non-sense it should be ok, however how one pirate or trade or hunt in such conditions? I still cannot get the concept as it seems.
The closest thing that is logical to understand is that: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/fo...#post76527
so I guess using low-res models allowing proper big time fights would be a way better solution then 20 people on 5 ships in instance.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
I know it is too far away in future but what you people think about organized group to play Star Citizen?
I found out that many other groups are amusingly organized even around 1 year before alpha tests: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/fo...-Squadrons
It is interesting that most players are Zoner type- we trade with all we does not use guns at all unless attacked.
I personally am looking forward for the Pirat part of the show. I found smaller group that looks really interesting: http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/fo...e-Exchange
It have similar concept to old Disco ToP/TiP group but it uses its full potential due to game mechanics: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=63744
What do you think about the whole situation?
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
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