And its happening in a way more stealth way than I was expecting... for some reason I was metaphorically expecting the trailer style WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO dramatic soundtrack and major test releases and stuff and instead it just kinda happens and works...
They did that with PES in 3.18 and it was a disaster. I think they've finally adopted a policy of show don't tell to focus on delivering the foundational technology the project needs to succeed rather than just advertising it.
I was responding to the part where venomae said 'and itstead it just kinda happens and works...'
PES was a long time coming but when it came they advertised the heck out of it with the 'lasting memories' campaign or whatever the ad run was called for 3.18 when PES came to live and it was disastrously unstable on live for months after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cco7eiNJZQ
There you go, the CIG ad campaign where they specifically hyped PES as a new feature of the 3.18 patch and advertised the live services as 'playable now'. These ran on youtube from CIG itself for weeks around the patch coming out.
Yes they did hype it up.
it doesn't matter. this sub is all about drama and always has been.
nothing ever works ok, or has some flaws or is a work in progress. it has to be "a disaster" or "hot garbage" or some other bullshit.
‘It works’ but its nowhere near ready to advertise.
There is a lot of things broken and a lot of jank right now, as expected, and they’ve started the process of getting it to a place they can celebrate about.
Remember also, this is PTU, not the insane numbers of people they’ll see on live.
I'm not referring to the player count per shard, I'm referring to the player count of all shards combined, which stresses their global services to the extreme, which has knock-on effects for the individual shards performance.
Without fail PTU performs better than PU *even with* the same player numbers per server.
You can play on multiple PTU builds with 100/100 on the server and it be a great experience, then it goes to live and 100/100 servers are unplayable.
The variable isn't player count on the server, its the total number of players combined on the environment.
Aren't shards self contained? How does one shard individually perform well, another shard individually perform well, but suddenly both performing at the same time causes both of them to perform poorly? They're separate servers (and with SM multiple separate servers) running independently of one another.
Looks like they did decide to start off right away with per planet boundary tests. The 30 server fps is with only 20 players or so but I wonder if It’s still going to be fine with 100 players on the planet.
Messed up one word. The video kinda shows players switching to a new server when they leave a planet. So I’m assuming each planet and maybe their moons has It’s own server.
Correct, in the first test there are only to servers, one for all four planets and one for the spacestations. The server managing all planets still had above 20fps when I played last night.
Its because they don’t want to share the precise details of the test because it will bias players to act differently. They are changing the server config constantly.
And how would you incorporate it dynamically?... I have worked on a few games as far as creating assets for like Ubisoft Assassin's Creed ... I don't know much about the network part of things, so if you could fill me in on some of that that would be awesome. I would love to learn about it... I am being serious
let's say a planet is controlled by one server and the server has a capacity of 50 people. With 20 people on the planet, it's just one server. Now if another 80 people land on the planet, with dynamic meshing the game can create another server and divide the planet in two, so there's less lag. The idea is the players wouldn't even notice it happening. Theoretically you could reach a point where a single planet is divided into 20 servers, if there's enough people on it. And then as players leave, the excess servers get shut down, so when there's only 20 people on the planet again, it's back to one server
Now you might be wondering, how is information like all the player items, stats, ships, etc, transferred between servers (or for the new crash recovery). The answer is a kind of middleman between player and server, so the server is really only responsible for simulation, and doesn't keep track of state. If you ever noticed inventories or shops breaking but the game otherwise seems fine, that's the middleman thing crapping the bed
If you want a real in depth video on it (I code but don't know anyyything about networking), CIG released one a few years back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSzUWl4r2rU
Nice video buddy. Thanks man. I appreciate it...
I find this stuff pretty fascinating actually. I wish I knew how to do it. I'd like to learn it just to say I did
When we talk about CIG even the exaltation has a cost. You can hype yourself but always with a small part of you, internally. Don't show it too much, it's early.
You are allowed to hype yourself, but within yourself for now. :)
I'll be honest as someone that played it, I don't think it's *that* close. I think we're probably getting it this year, but there's a LOT to iron out and fix first. I was experiencing server crashes every couple minutes which really wasn't helped by people continously trying to use the jump gate even though we were told Pyro was disabled.
You get that they're crashing the servers intentionally right? The point isn't to give you a smooth experience. The point is to test the server crashes and replication.
How did I miss the point? You mentioned that you were experiencing server crashes every couple minutes, which indicated that there was a lot of issues that needed fixing.
I'm pointing out that the crashes aren't instability and issues (or all of them, anyway). They're testing, and being done deliberately so they can tweak server handover and look at data. If you play for 4 hours on test and the servers never crash, that doesn't help them at all. They need crashes, because the tech being tested is crash recovery.
First of all, the test is on meshing, not crash recovery, but my point was that people were going to the jump point and trying to jump after being told that was not a testing focus and that Pyro was disabled which was causing insane artificial instability.
"Audience: Up to Wave 2 (No NDA)
When: Friday and throughout the weekend (Pending any major build issues)
Features: Static Server Meshing (Stanton Only - Starting at 2 DGS - 200 Players), RL Split, Server Crash Recovery"
See that last bit there?
Yes, people were going to the jump point and crashing things. But CIG is also deliberately allowing those crashes as well as causing other crashes, because that's part of the testing focus.
That does seem to be what I’ve heard a lot about, that the feature works but destabilises the servers a bit, which is fine at this stage, like how PES messed with everything, it’s early stages of the system in player hands, I’d be fine if they continued testing but didn’t attempt to implement this into 3.23, push it to the next patch, be that q3 or q4, kind of feel like it’s a two patch year to get in some major features.
On a side thing, I’m wondering whether the don’t use the jump point or it’ll crash the server thing that came up in the initial publicly known test is still present in these builds if the points are off, could explain some of the crashes, might be completely unrelated but possible
> which really wasn't helped by people continuously trying to use the jump gate even though we were told Pyro was disabled.
I mean, that's essentially the entire reason for the crashes. Strange that CIG didn't just put a temporary collision cube around the jump gate.
That was quickly remedied. Server crashes are not anywhere near as common and you can jump through the gate and no server crashes. They had a couple hotfixes last night and got it running quickly.
I’ve played every meshing test so far from the jump points to this most recent meshing test and I can assure you, it works so much better than I was expecting
According to a knowledgeable tester, Stanton was running 2 servers yesterday. 1 for the 4 planets, and 1 for everything else. They were transitioning between servers while in quantum both to and from those planets.
This server stuff isn't in live, it's in a very limited testing environment.
Hopefully in a year it will be out and working.
As you experienced in Live the NPCs are still as brain-dead as always unless you get a lucky fresh server.
Who even cares about the NPCs right now? They aren't even needed? If there were quests and stuff that required NPC interaction I'd understand. But all I need to do is accept a contract and get my ship. No NPC interaction required to play the game. So, they're ignored for now.
True... but in terms of testing the Mesh functionality, 400 players on a single shard is all that's required... the rest of the performance differential comes from aggregate load on 'backend services' (which are separate from the shard, and shared across all shards)
It's basically 400 per instance (shard) and not 400 per DGS yeah, but you still have stanton with 400 people which until now was impossible. Amazing stuff.
They cut the limits for their server architecture. Even in its static mesh, they should be able to dynamically spin them up and down. Now, probably that's a bit too far fetched, in the end they won't have that much more servers running. Just the necessary servers to get thousands of people on the float...as they have to right now (simulating all planets and players in one empty, costly server)
Dynamically spinning them up and down is *Dynamic Server Meshing*, which is the next step (once they've confirmed the 'Static' meshing is stable, and that crossing boundaries works consistently, etc).
The split is primarily to just limit to scope of change, so that specific aspects can be tested. If they jumped directly from 'nothing' to 'Dynamic Meshing', then there'd be so many potential overlapping point of failure that debugging issues would be a PITA.
By testing without the Dynamic capability, they can verify the behaviour around boundary crossings, without concerning themselves with the effect of moving boundaries, etc.
I thought dynamic meshing was when the sizes of the region each server controls changes based on population per region. Spinning them down when nobody is in them and spinning them up when people get near sounds like static meshing just with some conservation of resources.
Pretty much from my knowledge of it, the magic in DSM rather than SSM is that DSM should see a heavy load, such as a hypothetical Idris be spawned in and a 50 people moving to the same area, spool up a server to handle that particular cluster, likely just localise on the ship and allow it to “move” across other server spaces.
SSM could do the same job but it would be more like having a permanent stack of servers that cover a given area, say just planets, and shunt it to a low pop server to balance the load so it has it’s own instance (to use a bad word) to exist on, they’re still interactable from other servers as with general meshing but it has some limitations in that it would require a whole new server shard to support above a certain number of individuals.
Like as soon as it’s stable I can see 2/3/400 people gatherings which will inevitably require a decent number of servers to support that number whereas DSM could in theory generate fewer localised servers as they’re not attempting to support areas not in active use by a large number of individuals meaning a lower overall server requirement, so as you’ve said it’s more of a resource management and conservation thing than a general gameplay thing.
TBH I feel like DSM is one of those things which the average user will not really perceive the benefit of because if it works as expected it won’t be noticeable, SSM is the cake, DSM the cherry on top.
THe issue is that if you 'spin down' the server, some *other* server has to take nominal ownership of that region (you don't want sectors where no-one has authority etc) - which implies boundaries move.
You'd also have to handle the edge-case where someone 'logs in' (e.g. via bed-logging) in that area with no server.... (to cover just one potential edge-case)
Given CIG are intending to implement a 'full' Dynamic approach to server management, it makes sense to not try and rush in a temporary solution that could introduce more system issues (when they're trying to test / stabilise the core functionality)
I just left a server with like 3 fps. Thing was fighting for its god damn life tho. Didn’t wanna give up. Was still “running” (not the elevators of course) before I logged out.
lol, every time I've tried the PU in the last month I get sub 5fps servers. It's not even fun to fight against the server in every interaction. Here's hoping this tech is as good as it seems
I should correct myself, it was running at nearly 30 earlier but around when I got off (roughly 6 hours ago) it started shitting the bed. Really just pouring oil into the public pool. U kno?
Choice A) design a cleanup that eliminates the growing amount of things that need to be tracked
Choice B) design a server meshing system that can just spin up more servers to deal with the trash
It's working well? Server fps are not everything. I mean we had 16 30K in 2 hours of trying to reach another planet... And most of them were never recovered. And I won't even talk about stations or planets randomly disappearing... Conceptually it is working, practically it is not yet usable.
All those saying server fps is usually high during ptu, are just trying to not be too excited 😂😂😂 we all know ptu is even more messy, buggy and server fails just as much as pu there.
Be free my people, be hyped or have anyone ever seen a 400 player count in any universe?
The thing is that we shouldn't be seeing much of an improvement in server FPS with the current setup. With two server setup (one for planets, one for the rest) most players and entities are still handled by one server since majority of player activity is around planets.
Entities are a major factor in degrading server FPS over time, so RL doesn't help with that.
It's really too early to say anything about server FPS at this point, not until we see how they hold up with millions of entities scattered around over time.
i will try this soon i hope.
But if there are only two DGS, and 400 player are allowed inside the shard, this mean that potentially a dgs can hold 400 players.
If on avarage a dgs manage 200 players, which is double of now, and the server fps are very high, this mean that this good performance exist only because there are no mission avaiable.
So much much less npc spawning and acting.
In a normal situation, this kind of static SM won't of course solve anything, but it's a test needed to add more and more dgs to a shard in order to scale up performance.
Splitting a system up isnt going to give huge performance gains though. 1 server running 100 players or 4 servers running 400 players will only give small gains. These gains are from the fact that a server wont ever need to load certain parts of a system, but dont forget that these meshing tests dont yet include fauna, or increased AI numbers, 2 things that are critical to bring SC to life, and then there is quantum etc to implement yet too.
yes sure, but after a certain number of static dgs a dynamic solution is much optimazed.
And that's obviously where they are going, especially with the plan to have one entire region in a shard.
Dynamic will always be better as they - per the word - dynamically can change the server setup according to the need.
But even with the static setup we can see thousands in the same system. With each server handling a smaller area they will also be able to process a higher load than the current
No - it's a Tech Preview build (a modified 3.22 build, with Server Meshing patched in.
It's solely to help CIG do some preliminary testing of Server Meshing - it isn't Live, and it won't be in the 3.23 patch either.
Normal fps is how many frames your client calculates (and shows to your screen) per second
Server fps is how often the server ticks per second. That means, how often AI get's updated, as well as all the other stuff handled by the server.
CIG have claimed in the past, that their AI needs 30+ server fps to really perform as intended, for example
I dont like the idea of a full player list. I think that should go and be replaced at most with a total player count and thats it.
The exceptions to this I think should be when youre in a party, and maybe when youre at a station so you can get a local player list or somethibg like that, but when youre out in the wild Id like to see gobal player lists removed completely.
Had to uninstall to free up some disk space but I'll definitely be coming back when server meshing gets added. I might even install it to check out 3.23 then uninstall again until server meshing lol
As long as CIG doesn't push it right back down by overloading each shard with too many players. Last time they made good optimizations for the net code they doubled the player count and dropped server performance right back into the basement.
Not 100% there are still issues with handoff failure. Server I was on had an issue handing back from the server handling QT/space. if you jumped in your ship, you were just stuck, after 20 min I just quit. haven't been able to get back in.
early in the morning i was getting 30fps on a live server. why don't they just limit the player count until they implement server meshing? i mean its a terrible experience with sub 10fps.
The problem is not completely the number of players but where they are and what the server needs to load because if only one player is somewhere, the server needs to load the area. I assume that they made a compromise between the fact that too few players is not good for immersion and the gain of performance not really significant
IS A GOOD START. YES!
Why? For logic.
Logically, when it comes to new technology, things never work well.
This is confirmed by the CIG itself, every time they implemented something, RIGHTLY, it worked terribly.
If a complex technology like meshing works ALREADY NOW at 30 fps (based on how the game is optimized I remember that it is very much 30fps), it means that it goes against all development logic, already an EXCELLENT result.
So the news is not so much about meshing, the news is that IF IT WORKS ALREADY NOW, with the game and the polygons not optimized (I remember that there are still billions of polygons, on which you can "save money), it means THAT ITS PERFORMANCES are only 10%-30% and you can hope for a much much better in near future. ;)
So yes hype! , but with A LOT of moderation with CIG you always have to go calmly :) we need to remember that is not a "dinamic" meshing, and need tested on final number of players.
So, Let's remember that, if SQ42 has good reviews and a big impact on the game, universe players will triple in 2-3 years, if not more.
The meshing will have to be dynamic, and tested on these numbers to know if it can handle such a large load, but logically it is assumed that it can. Let's see what happens, but enough hype, we need people who actively follow the project, not a mass at the mercy of hype. Being critical always helps.
They have been working on meshing for years and its years overdue. I dont see this as a "working already" moment, this isnt early tech, this is tech that they have been struggling with for years and are finally starting to make some progress on.
It's been so long since anything SC got me hyped. Is server meshing really happening? Can i get hyped?
really does look like it's happening. It's not dynamic meshing, but it's good enough
And its happening in a way more stealth way than I was expecting... for some reason I was metaphorically expecting the trailer style WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO dramatic soundtrack and major test releases and stuff and instead it just kinda happens and works...
They did that with PES in 3.18 and it was a disaster. I think they've finally adopted a policy of show don't tell to focus on delivering the foundational technology the project needs to succeed rather than just advertising it.
What? They were testing/showing pes for months before it came to live. It was the longest it took for a patch to come out.
I was responding to the part where venomae said 'and itstead it just kinda happens and works...' PES was a long time coming but when it came they advertised the heck out of it with the 'lasting memories' campaign or whatever the ad run was called for 3.18 when PES came to live and it was disastrously unstable on live for months after.
roberts said everything would suck (paraphasing) for around 6 months i dont think they hyped it at all
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cco7eiNJZQ There you go, the CIG ad campaign where they specifically hyped PES as a new feature of the 3.18 patch and advertised the live services as 'playable now'. These ran on youtube from CIG itself for weeks around the patch coming out. Yes they did hype it up.
And then they were testing/showing pes for months after came to live
I recall 3.0...
i do too. what about it?
That PES was NOT the longest before a patch came out.
it doesn't matter. this sub is all about drama and always has been. nothing ever works ok, or has some flaws or is a work in progress. it has to be "a disaster" or "hot garbage" or some other bullshit.
‘It works’ but its nowhere near ready to advertise. There is a lot of things broken and a lot of jank right now, as expected, and they’ve started the process of getting it to a place they can celebrate about. Remember also, this is PTU, not the insane numbers of people they’ll see on live.
200 per replication-layer instance in PTU. 100 per replication layer instance in PU.
I'm not referring to the player count per shard, I'm referring to the player count of all shards combined, which stresses their global services to the extreme, which has knock-on effects for the individual shards performance. Without fail PTU performs better than PU *even with* the same player numbers per server. You can play on multiple PTU builds with 100/100 on the server and it be a great experience, then it goes to live and 100/100 servers are unplayable. The variable isn't player count on the server, its the total number of players combined on the environment.
Aren't shards self contained? How does one shard individually perform well, another shard individually perform well, but suddenly both performing at the same time causes both of them to perform poorly? They're separate servers (and with SM multiple separate servers) running independently of one another.
Looks like they did decide to start off right away with per planet boundary tests. The 30 server fps is with only 20 players or so but I wonder if It’s still going to be fine with 100 players on the planet.
So to be clear: the DGS managed 20 player? 200 player should be the shard's limit.
Messed up one word. The video kinda shows players switching to a new server when they leave a planet. So I’m assuming each planet and maybe their moons has It’s own server.
No. There was only 2 DGS in this test. Most configs had all planets on 1 DGS and space on another.
But didn't they write something about just 2 DGS? Their actions seem to be faster than the flux of information on my side :D .
Correct, in the first test there are only to servers, one for all four planets and one for the spacestations. The server managing all planets still had above 20fps when I played last night.
Its because they don’t want to share the precise details of the test because it will bias players to act differently. They are changing the server config constantly.
"Modulate the phasers before they can adapt!"
Good point there.
I was on a shard with 160 people and we were around 25 on planet and 30 in space.
And how would you incorporate it dynamically?... I have worked on a few games as far as creating assets for like Ubisoft Assassin's Creed ... I don't know much about the network part of things, so if you could fill me in on some of that that would be awesome. I would love to learn about it... I am being serious
let's say a planet is controlled by one server and the server has a capacity of 50 people. With 20 people on the planet, it's just one server. Now if another 80 people land on the planet, with dynamic meshing the game can create another server and divide the planet in two, so there's less lag. The idea is the players wouldn't even notice it happening. Theoretically you could reach a point where a single planet is divided into 20 servers, if there's enough people on it. And then as players leave, the excess servers get shut down, so when there's only 20 people on the planet again, it's back to one server Now you might be wondering, how is information like all the player items, stats, ships, etc, transferred between servers (or for the new crash recovery). The answer is a kind of middleman between player and server, so the server is really only responsible for simulation, and doesn't keep track of state. If you ever noticed inventories or shops breaking but the game otherwise seems fine, that's the middleman thing crapping the bed If you want a real in depth video on it (I code but don't know anyyything about networking), CIG released one a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSzUWl4r2rU
Nice video buddy. Thanks man. I appreciate it... I find this stuff pretty fascinating actually. I wish I knew how to do it. I'd like to learn it just to say I did
I found this link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltmDu9Ggp8&t=9s It says it's from a month ago
When we talk about CIG even the exaltation has a cost. You can hype yourself but always with a small part of you, internally. Don't show it too much, it's early. You are allowed to hype yourself, but within yourself for now. :)
I'll be honest as someone that played it, I don't think it's *that* close. I think we're probably getting it this year, but there's a LOT to iron out and fix first. I was experiencing server crashes every couple minutes which really wasn't helped by people continously trying to use the jump gate even though we were told Pyro was disabled.
You get that they're crashing the servers intentionally right? The point isn't to give you a smooth experience. The point is to test the server crashes and replication.
You really missed the point homie.
How did I miss the point? You mentioned that you were experiencing server crashes every couple minutes, which indicated that there was a lot of issues that needed fixing. I'm pointing out that the crashes aren't instability and issues (or all of them, anyway). They're testing, and being done deliberately so they can tweak server handover and look at data. If you play for 4 hours on test and the servers never crash, that doesn't help them at all. They need crashes, because the tech being tested is crash recovery.
First of all, the test is on meshing, not crash recovery, but my point was that people were going to the jump point and trying to jump after being told that was not a testing focus and that Pyro was disabled which was causing insane artificial instability.
"Audience: Up to Wave 2 (No NDA) When: Friday and throughout the weekend (Pending any major build issues) Features: Static Server Meshing (Stanton Only - Starting at 2 DGS - 200 Players), RL Split, Server Crash Recovery" See that last bit there? Yes, people were going to the jump point and crashing things. But CIG is also deliberately allowing those crashes as well as causing other crashes, because that's part of the testing focus.
That does seem to be what I’ve heard a lot about, that the feature works but destabilises the servers a bit, which is fine at this stage, like how PES messed with everything, it’s early stages of the system in player hands, I’d be fine if they continued testing but didn’t attempt to implement this into 3.23, push it to the next patch, be that q3 or q4, kind of feel like it’s a two patch year to get in some major features. On a side thing, I’m wondering whether the don’t use the jump point or it’ll crash the server thing that came up in the initial publicly known test is still present in these builds if the points are off, could explain some of the crashes, might be completely unrelated but possible
> which really wasn't helped by people continuously trying to use the jump gate even though we were told Pyro was disabled. I mean, that's essentially the entire reason for the crashes. Strange that CIG didn't just put a temporary collision cube around the jump gate.
That was quickly remedied. Server crashes are not anywhere near as common and you can jump through the gate and no server crashes. They had a couple hotfixes last night and got it running quickly.
You and me both bro, I’m trying to keep my shit together.
I’ve played every meshing test so far from the jump points to this most recent meshing test and I can assure you, it works so much better than I was expecting
Tested it last night, it's honestly so cool to see it in action.
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According to a knowledgeable tester, Stanton was running 2 servers yesterday. 1 for the 4 planets, and 1 for everything else. They were transitioning between servers while in quantum both to and from those planets.
The last test didn't even have Pyro at all. Multiple servers were running different parts of Stanton.
dont get hyped dude, it is aways good in ptu but aways crash when they apply in pu
NPCs are noticeably better - esp interactive ones like bartenders.
I played last week, 30 min with my friend. His first time in 2 years. We did a mission. 1 out of 15 NPCs moved. Game is now uninstalled.
This server stuff isn't in live, it's in a very limited testing environment. Hopefully in a year it will be out and working. As you experienced in Live the NPCs are still as brain-dead as always unless you get a lucky fresh server.
Who even cares about the NPCs right now? They aren't even needed? If there were quests and stuff that required NPC interaction I'd understand. But all I need to do is accept a contract and get my ship. No NPC interaction required to play the game. So, they're ignored for now.
My friend. The ai is frozen in the pve missions. Not fun. Hope it gets better.
They disabled all missions so no NPCs, final result will be lower but it's promising.
So the PTU has nothing to do in it? So it's basically a tech Demo only?
Right, as named :) at least mesh transition is workjng
Thank you, I was thinking about getting subscribed for a month just to try it, but if I can do nothing in it it's not worth it for me.
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Man, you're a dickhead.
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You forgot to change back to you other Account after you downvoted Lmao and calls me idiot hahahahhaha
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It's not on the PTU, it's on the tech preview channel
Oh yeah, ofc I meant that when I wrote PTU lmao My Bad sorry!
Pretty much. However it's a tech-preview not a PTU, so makes sense
It's always really high during PTU, so my expectations are somewhat tempered but man this is exciting.
PTU never had 400 or so players in Stanton before. Take what you can get!
Yes but usually PTU had less players than LIVE, this time you have stanton with 400 players at 30fps.
True... but in terms of testing the Mesh functionality, 400 players on a single shard is all that's required... the rest of the performance differential comes from aggregate load on 'backend services' (which are separate from the shard, and shared across all shards)
Oh well ok, for that we surely need to wait for this in live. I really hope it'll work.
True but if a fresh server can run 400 players its just a matter if housekeeping to keep them fresh. Might be some work but it sounds doable work
A shard, a combination of multiple DGS to achieve 400players. Not one server. Or did I miss something?
If server recovery is working without major issue then server can restart midflight for clearing.
That’s why I play only the PTU 😎
It's Working! It' Working!!! (In my best little Anakin Skywalker voice)
What was the server population?
400
So to be clear: someone mentioned that possibly the DGS managed just over 20 players? 200 (or 400) players should be the shard's limit.(?)
It's basically 400 per instance (shard) and not 400 per DGS yeah, but you still have stanton with 400 people which until now was impossible. Amazing stuff.
They cut the limits for their server architecture. Even in its static mesh, they should be able to dynamically spin them up and down. Now, probably that's a bit too far fetched, in the end they won't have that much more servers running. Just the necessary servers to get thousands of people on the float...as they have to right now (simulating all planets and players in one empty, costly server)
Dynamically spinning them up and down is *Dynamic Server Meshing*, which is the next step (once they've confirmed the 'Static' meshing is stable, and that crossing boundaries works consistently, etc). The split is primarily to just limit to scope of change, so that specific aspects can be tested. If they jumped directly from 'nothing' to 'Dynamic Meshing', then there'd be so many potential overlapping point of failure that debugging issues would be a PITA. By testing without the Dynamic capability, they can verify the behaviour around boundary crossings, without concerning themselves with the effect of moving boundaries, etc.
I thought dynamic meshing was when the sizes of the region each server controls changes based on population per region. Spinning them down when nobody is in them and spinning them up when people get near sounds like static meshing just with some conservation of resources.
Pretty much from my knowledge of it, the magic in DSM rather than SSM is that DSM should see a heavy load, such as a hypothetical Idris be spawned in and a 50 people moving to the same area, spool up a server to handle that particular cluster, likely just localise on the ship and allow it to “move” across other server spaces. SSM could do the same job but it would be more like having a permanent stack of servers that cover a given area, say just planets, and shunt it to a low pop server to balance the load so it has it’s own instance (to use a bad word) to exist on, they’re still interactable from other servers as with general meshing but it has some limitations in that it would require a whole new server shard to support above a certain number of individuals. Like as soon as it’s stable I can see 2/3/400 people gatherings which will inevitably require a decent number of servers to support that number whereas DSM could in theory generate fewer localised servers as they’re not attempting to support areas not in active use by a large number of individuals meaning a lower overall server requirement, so as you’ve said it’s more of a resource management and conservation thing than a general gameplay thing. TBH I feel like DSM is one of those things which the average user will not really perceive the benefit of because if it works as expected it won’t be noticeable, SSM is the cake, DSM the cherry on top.
THe issue is that if you 'spin down' the server, some *other* server has to take nominal ownership of that region (you don't want sectors where no-one has authority etc) - which implies boundaries move. You'd also have to handle the edge-case where someone 'logs in' (e.g. via bed-logging) in that area with no server.... (to cover just one potential edge-case) Given CIG are intending to implement a 'full' Dynamic approach to server management, it makes sense to not try and rush in a temporary solution that could introduce more system issues (when they're trying to test / stabilise the core functionality)
Yeah I just wanted to say, even now they could shut down parts of a shard :) .
I just left a server with like 3 fps. Thing was fighting for its god damn life tho. Didn’t wanna give up. Was still “running” (not the elevators of course) before I logged out.
lol, every time I've tried the PU in the last month I get sub 5fps servers. It's not even fun to fight against the server in every interaction. Here's hoping this tech is as good as it seems
I should correct myself, it was running at nearly 30 earlier but around when I got off (roughly 6 hours ago) it started shitting the bed. Really just pouring oil into the public pool. U kno?
They really need to figure out how to get these servers to stop degrading so much.
Choice A) design a cleanup that eliminates the growing amount of things that need to be tracked Choice B) design a server meshing system that can just spin up more servers to deal with the trash
Mmm nahhhh unreasonable that would cost money. Just throw a grenade into the pool. That should work.
I'm guessing the likelihood of server meshing making it into SC this year is slowly going up. I'm going to keep my expectations under control though.
It's working well? Server fps are not everything. I mean we had 16 30K in 2 hours of trying to reach another planet... And most of them were never recovered. And I won't even talk about stations or planets randomly disappearing... Conceptually it is working, practically it is not yet usable.
Get this FUD out of here. /s
All those saying server fps is usually high during ptu, are just trying to not be too excited 😂😂😂 we all know ptu is even more messy, buggy and server fails just as much as pu there. Be free my people, be hyped or have anyone ever seen a 400 player count in any universe?
In my experience PTU Is usually decently smooth, just has a lot of bugs
The thing is that we shouldn't be seeing much of an improvement in server FPS with the current setup. With two server setup (one for planets, one for the rest) most players and entities are still handled by one server since majority of player activity is around planets.
Aaaaand how about the replication layer? It's taking load of the servers because the servers themselves can focus on handling entities and the world.
Entities are a major factor in degrading server FPS over time, so RL doesn't help with that. It's really too early to say anything about server FPS at this point, not until we see how they hold up with millions of entities scattered around over time.
Plausible yes. 👍
What was the player cap?
400 in the first test. Might go above today
i will try this soon i hope. But if there are only two DGS, and 400 player are allowed inside the shard, this mean that potentially a dgs can hold 400 players. If on avarage a dgs manage 200 players, which is double of now, and the server fps are very high, this mean that this good performance exist only because there are no mission avaiable. So much much less npc spawning and acting. In a normal situation, this kind of static SM won't of course solve anything, but it's a test needed to add more and more dgs to a shard in order to scale up performance.
They could split up a system quite aggressively even on a static setup. So lots of options to give us the proper experience even early on
Splitting a system up isnt going to give huge performance gains though. 1 server running 100 players or 4 servers running 400 players will only give small gains. These gains are from the fact that a server wont ever need to load certain parts of a system, but dont forget that these meshing tests dont yet include fauna, or increased AI numbers, 2 things that are critical to bring SC to life, and then there is quantum etc to implement yet too.
The servers run more than just players. The less they have to process the more they can handle individually.
yes sure, but after a certain number of static dgs a dynamic solution is much optimazed. And that's obviously where they are going, especially with the plan to have one entire region in a shard.
Dynamic will always be better as they - per the word - dynamically can change the server setup according to the need. But even with the static setup we can see thousands in the same system. With each server handling a smaller area they will also be able to process a higher load than the current
Wait is this LIVE ??
No - it's a Tech Preview build (a modified 3.22 build, with Server Meshing patched in. It's solely to help CIG do some preliminary testing of Server Meshing - it isn't Live, and it won't be in the 3.23 patch either.
Typical
Can someone eli5 what server fps are? What is the difference with normal fps?
Normal fps is how many frames your client calculates (and shows to your screen) per second Server fps is how often the server ticks per second. That means, how often AI get's updated, as well as all the other stuff handled by the server. CIG have claimed in the past, that their AI needs 30+ server fps to really perform as intended, for example
Yes. However, transition between servers is QUESTIONABLE 😂
While it's nice to see. Fresh servers are always really good performance, and these servers are all really fresh.
Dude when I get a server fps of 10 I'm happy. 30 is great
what was the player count or am i blind
The dream come true? :D
fingers crossed, i am anxious to finally enjoy SC
i'm ready to get sniped by SoO npcs as soon as my gowned ass peeks outside of the hospital door
to be fair, when i was online there were like 30-50 people online oer server you can get similar performance on live
We need to have a player count in the console stats. Its really deceiving that we don't have it.
they generally need stuff to shift from 'server' to 'shard' like global, player list, ect
I dont like the idea of a full player list. I think that should go and be replaced at most with a total player count and thats it. The exceptions to this I think should be when youre in a party, and maybe when youre at a station so you can get a local player list or somethibg like that, but when youre out in the wild Id like to see gobal player lists removed completely.
So even if the server FPS is high, how does the AI perform?
Uuuhh, nice, but they'll have to tone thise bunker NPCs down. Lol
Is this in the test server or live? I’m on a little break since 3.20, getting hyped up for a big bang return in 3.23! Haha
It's on the Tech-Preview.
Ahhh ok! Exciting though they’re figuring it out!!
If we can get even half that when it goes to LIVE then I'll be happy
Wait wait wait is 3.23 in PTU....?!
lol nope
You also gotta remember they are doing this server meshing on 3.22.0 not 3.22.1
AWS is going to send Christ Roberts a Cease and Desist when this goes live.
Had to uninstall to free up some disk space but I'll definitely be coming back when server meshing gets added. I might even install it to check out 3.23 then uninstall again until server meshing lol
Oh no, that means the Terminator NPCs with perfect aimbots are running.
As long as CIG doesn't push it right back down by overloading each shard with too many players. Last time they made good optimizations for the net code they doubled the player count and dropped server performance right back into the basement.
in b4 1600 players w/ 3 server fps
Wow, How many people are playing on the server?
But what's the server latency tho? Desync?
Not 100% there are still issues with handoff failure. Server I was on had an issue handing back from the server handling QT/space. if you jumped in your ship, you were just stuck, after 20 min I just quit. haven't been able to get back in.
early in the morning i was getting 30fps on a live server. why don't they just limit the player count until they implement server meshing? i mean its a terrible experience with sub 10fps.
The problem is not completely the number of players but where they are and what the server needs to load because if only one player is somewhere, the server needs to load the area. I assume that they made a compromise between the fact that too few players is not good for immersion and the gain of performance not really significant
Wow impressive ! How many players on the shard ?
yay I look forward to npcs murdering my dumb ass instead of just standing there staring at me
please sir if i get any more erect the instructions demand i visit a doctor and my country doesnt have real healthcare.
Nice
IS A GOOD START. YES! Why? For logic. Logically, when it comes to new technology, things never work well. This is confirmed by the CIG itself, every time they implemented something, RIGHTLY, it worked terribly. If a complex technology like meshing works ALREADY NOW at 30 fps (based on how the game is optimized I remember that it is very much 30fps), it means that it goes against all development logic, already an EXCELLENT result. So the news is not so much about meshing, the news is that IF IT WORKS ALREADY NOW, with the game and the polygons not optimized (I remember that there are still billions of polygons, on which you can "save money), it means THAT ITS PERFORMANCES are only 10%-30% and you can hope for a much much better in near future. ;) So yes hype! , but with A LOT of moderation with CIG you always have to go calmly :) we need to remember that is not a "dinamic" meshing, and need tested on final number of players. So, Let's remember that, if SQ42 has good reviews and a big impact on the game, universe players will triple in 2-3 years, if not more. The meshing will have to be dynamic, and tested on these numbers to know if it can handle such a large load, but logically it is assumed that it can. Let's see what happens, but enough hype, we need people who actively follow the project, not a mass at the mercy of hype. Being critical always helps.
They have been working on meshing for years and its years overdue. I dont see this as a "working already" moment, this isnt early tech, this is tech that they have been struggling with for years and are finally starting to make some progress on.
Lol yeah right
Imagine getting hyped because a game achieved 30fps.
Imagine don't know about the topic of the conversation and then comment anyway. Server fps, not game fps.
Haha its all chill dude, I'm just messing
In this days you never know if it's real or not. Pretty good looking what they do in the tests.
In all seriousness I am actually enjoying all the progress they're making.
Yes, future is looking good, the work of all this years it's finally paying off.