1443 replies to this topic

[Tekadept]

The starcitizen forum has ask a dev section, somebody asked the network programmer this

Starcitizen User said:

I'm speaking from the background of beta-testing Mechwarrior Online which also uses the CryEngine3... Have you been made aware that one of the biggest issues that was presented to the PGI team was the interfacing of the network code to the CryEngine3. Rubber banding and hit-box recognition were big stumbling blocks in the progression of the beta.

Has the CryEngine team made you aware of these issues that were/are present in the PGI development of MWO? If not a big emphasis should be placed upon this issue as it really was a big problem for the team at PGI.

and his reponse was

Starcitizen Dev said:

I'll make it a point to jump into MWO. I'll run wireshark to get an idea of what sort of data they are transmitting up/down. Does the game still have a lot of banding taking place? (i.e. you move around, but the server stalled, so you warp back to a pervious location).

My personal preference is to use a distributed physics model with a global timebase - and hook up with a physics programmer and get broadcast schedulers finely tuned based on player count. But out of the box the CryNetwork behaves slightly different for this. More on this later.

Wouldn't it be funny if he can look at MWO analytics and somehow figure out what some of the still current problems are

Edited by Tekadept, 09 July 2013 - 08:03 PM.

[Archon Adam Steiner]

That's exactly it.

I'm all for being excited at the idea of Star Citizen, but the wanton and baseless hype that people are chewing up like candy is amusing, given how many times this plot line has played out before; "Game X isn't living up to expectations, but here comes Game Y! It has this! It has that! It will give me a massage while cooing into my ear like a love bird!".

Next thing you know, all those fancy videos turn out to be buggy graphics when put into actual motion, the gameplay isn't what it's supposed to be, the content is more shallow than one was led to believe, and even if the game is pretty decent, the failure to meet wildly heightened expectations leads people to start rambling out the usual "this sucks", "this is taking too long", "where is feature X", and then another game dies.

People have no patience any longer - not genuine patience. We're in a pretty stable Beta, here, with good ideas and a solid community, but people want to point at the twinkle-in-daddy's-eye down the street, convinced he'll be the new bad-*** on the block. This has happened dozens of times before, and it will happen again.

[Mystere]

Thread reported for having nothing to do with gameplay balance.

[KuruptU4Fun]

Lonestar1771, on 09 July 2013 - 07:53 PM, said:

They have shown several times ships in game. Is it fully featured gameplay? Not by a long shot, but by that standard neither is MWO. Can i play it? No, but at least they are keeping us in the loop. I don't see how the lack of a playable demo diminishes the fact that they are keeping the community involved on a daily basis. Hell most games in SC's state lose a lot of interest because there is no gameplay. Even MWO went through a long lull.

They've shown a lot of in engine vehicle renders and concept art, in MW:O I can go into the media section, see what the design of the mechs was, go into the beta and see what the ingame design is and play around with it.

The lack of having something to play with simply shows that their optimism hasn't met the real world of computer gaming yet. People (we) cannot go into the game and find the glitches and the cracks that we have here in MWO. Will the lasers in SC have balanced drawbacks and advantages compared to missiles? We don't know, and we can't tell SC how they need to fix it yet. More so they can't tell us how long it's going to take them to look for the info in the data to support our claims, make balanced fixes, test those fixes and then go thru their QA to release it to us so we can break it again. That is happening here, it WILL happen in SC too.

[Sephlock]

I want to know how many ships you have, and what rare ship you have .

Tekadept, on 09 July 2013 - 08:01 PM, said:

The starcitizen forum has ask a dev section, somebody asked the network programmer this



and his reponse was


Wouldn't it be funny if he can look at MWO analytics and somehow figure out what some of the still current problems are

Keep us updated, please .

[Belorion]

Jasen, on 09 July 2013 - 07:56 PM, said:

Actually its not. Save the courtroom reasonable doubt BS and answer this simple questions:

Do you honestly think Chris Roberts could possibly perform as badly as PGI has to date if he even wanted to?

I don't personally thing that PGI has performed badly. Do I think some people will think he has performed as badly as some people think PGI has?

Absolutely.

Lets take for example the ephemeral weapon balance issue. The weapon balance in MWO isn't all that bad. Its better now than it has ever been, yet to here some people on here talk the balance of weapons you would think that mechs are getting one shot left and right, with their only hope to run XXX overpowered weapon in response. Its not that dire, and PGI is actively balancing the weapons. Will such dire accusation be made against SC. You better believe it.

If all the SC players sit around campfires singing and praising the game once it has been in beta for a year I will admit I am wrong, but so far the only thing I have seem come out of game forums is an endless supply of complains coming from players that would rather the game bend to their inability to adapt to a certain situation than try to become better at the game themselves.

[Belorion]

Tekadept, on 09 July 2013 - 08:01 PM, said:

The starcitizen forum has ask a dev section, somebody asked the network programmer this



and his reponse was


Wouldn't it be funny if he can look at MWO analytics and somehow figure out what some of the still current problems are

Wouldn't it be funny if they run into the same problem and shoot an email over to the PGI guys to see what they did. Then possibly feed back any adjustments that they find helpful. Also this doesn't take into account three things. 1. The nature movement in space will be different than that across terrain. 2. PGI completely rewrote the networking code... twice. 3. PGI did a lot of things so that the game is Server Authoritative rather than Client Authoritative which could have had an effect on the rubber-banding issue.

[Archon Adam Steiner]

In terms of balance, the weapons are fine, it's boating that's the problem; PPCs aren't over-powered, but the ability to fire two or three of them with little-to-no-regard for heat (and a gauss rifle!) is a bit obscene, particularly with pin-point accuracy. That needs adjusting. Overall, though, weapons are actually in a good place for the most part.

I agree that discontent is mostly (as it always is with any game) disenfranchised players frustrated with developers for not doing things 'their way', or people who are frustrated, but cannot (or will not) iterate why in a constructive way. One of the only communities that I've seen that is largely constructive is EVE: Online, which has tonnes of balance issues even though it's over a decade old! Nonetheless, people who care invest time to give good feedback and are patient.

[Tekadept]

Belorion, on 09 July 2013 - 08:32 PM, said:

Wouldn't it be funny if they run into the same problem and shoot an email over to the PGI guys to see what they did. Then possibly feed back any adjustments that they find helpful. Also this doesn't take into account three things. 1. The nature movement in space will be different than that across terrain. 2. PGI completely rewrote the networking code... twice. 3. PGI did a lot of things so that the game is Server Authoritative rather than Client Authoritative which could have had an effect on the rubber-banding issue.

I'll concede point 1 to you, , not going to post the whole SC thing, but yeah 2 & 3 SC will be doing rewrite and hybrid authorative so yeh. their hybrid solution sounds quite elegant actually.

Edited by Tekadept, 09 July 2013 - 08:39 PM.

[Zordicron]

Ralgas, on 09 July 2013 - 04:38 PM, said:

No. Completely new IP from the ground up. Bad guys are not closet furries and look a lot more badass this time........ although there is slight kilrathi influence in some of the design

Where is the other half of that Dralthi?

[Zyllos]

*shaking in a dark corner holding onto a ShadowHawk*

"I want this to work...I want this to work...I want this to work..."

That is how I feel about this game now. I am just so frustrated at this point.

I understand missing deadlines, or making decisions to do/not to do some things. But many of the decisions that have been made so far are not a *must* decision but they have really hurt the overall game.

But, it's freaking MechWarrior...it has to work, right?...Right?

Maybe that is what PGI is counting on...

[Jonnara]

Arrachtas, on 09 July 2013 - 07:45 PM, said:

Star Wars: The Old Republic had:

1. It's freakin' Star Wars
2. BioWare, god of RPG makers
3. Anywhere from two hundred to three hundred million dollars (Roberts would pee himself with that much cash).

What happened?

It tanked.

People need to stop looking at how much money a game has as if it is an indicator of how successful it will be.

Tell you exactly what happened. EA happened.

You forgot to mention SWTOR also had EA riding its back.

edit -Oh forgot to mention Forbes website shows EA spent $100 Million dollars out of the development budget on marketing and advertising..... Go EA!

2nd edit - oh by the way if people didn't know EA also destroyed the company that made the Wingcommander and Ultima games, Chris Roberts old development studio Origin.

Edited by Jonnara, 09 July 2013 - 09:01 PM.

[Roland]

I still have faith in mechwarrior. I play it every day, and it is fun.
But it is all gonna hinge on community warfare. That is where the rubber hits the road and defines the longevity of this game.

I'll play mechwarrior and star citizen. I don't think either one is gonna require me to sign a contract saying I will only play one.

[Archon Adam Steiner]

Jonnara, on 09 July 2013 - 08:56 PM, said:

Tell you exactly what happened. EA happened.

You forgot to mention SWTOR also had EA riding its back.

edit -Oh forgot to mention Forbes website shows EA spent $100 Million dollars out of the development budget on marketing and advertising..... Go EA!

As bad as EA is, it exculpates everything and everyone else too much to blame EA alone for the problem. BioWare didn't know how to make an MMO, they used a terrible combat/graphics engine, Beta for ToR was far worse than anything MWO has ever done, and money was squandered.

This game isn't even close to being in that kind of sad-sack hole. That game had everything going for it, and it tanked. This game had practically no funding, is being done by a small-time Canadian company, and is still doing a pretty decent job. Give this game a year, assess it then.

[Hammerhai]

Lot of believers running on promises in here.
Including me, I might add.
I pledged as well. Mainly because I want to be able to use my joystick in a game designed for it, and not what PGI did.
But let us not forget that we are not buying content atm but RISK. That is the tradeoff. Founders packages offer moderate benefits at a risk factor, and packages are discounted to incentivise us to take that risk. Plain and simple.

As a concept it works, lets just hope the reality keeps up with things. But ...
There will be compromises whether we like it or not in SC

[Lootee]

Arrachtas, on 09 July 2013 - 09:00 PM, said:

Give this game a year, assess it then.

I figure in 12 months they'll finally get around to fixing it so when you stub your toe on a pebble your speed won't be set to 0kph, and they might increase PPC heat by +2.

It took them 6 months to get rid of the invincible Raven flocks that resulted from garbage netcode + ECM. So fixing 2 glaring game issues/bugs in 12 months seems about right.

[Hammerfinn]

Come 2015, your list of "sad parts" will likely be applicable to SC as well. Just sayin. Devs start with big ideas, then reality steps in and bitchslaps them, then people get mad.

[Archon Adam Steiner]

PanchoTortilla, on 09 July 2013 - 09:05 PM, said:

I figure in 12 months they'll finally get around to fixing it so when you stub your toe on a pebble your speed won't be set to 0kph, and they might increase PPC heat by +2.

It took them 6 months to get rid of the invincible Raven flocks that resulted from garbage netcode + ECM. So fixing 2 glaring game issues/bugs in 12 months seems about right.

This is exactly the kind of sarcastic and exaggerated feedback that does nothing constructive... it's also exaggerated. The stubbing toe thing? Not nearly as prevalent as you make it out to be, and it's a brand new feature; 100-tonne Atlas 'mechs running up seventy degree inclines was ridiculous. The system needs tuning. Star Citizen will have similar problems. With regards to invincible Ravens, they died just fine, though the old 'lag shooting' mandate did indeed have to be enacted; unfortunate yes, poor netcode, yes. Fixed? Yes. Didn't take them six months, either.

Edited by Arrachtas, 09 July 2013 - 09:16 PM.

[hammerreborn]

GroovYChickeN, on 09 July 2013 - 04:28 PM, said:

Star Citizen is a brand new IP made by a company with no publisher. This means they can do whatever, whenever as long as they have the money.

Whats the difference between having a bunch of private investors essentially doubling what is crowdfunded, and having a publisher? Seems like no matter what someones going to want to be sucking as much profit out of the system as possible, no matter what the costs to the players.

I won't be putting a cent towards SC until you can play something, like I did with MWO.

[MischiefSC]

Know what's funny? I'm a huge BT fan - yet I've dropped an order of magnitude more money on SC than I have MWO and SC isn't even in alpha yet. For all the reasons listed. The MWO business model is based on trying to force people to pay for things they don't want but have to in order to get what they do. SC, conversely, just offers the best possible product and charges a fair price for it.

MWO has the only BT option. They'd have my money regardless. The business model though motivates me to resist any sort of purchase - it's not voluntary it's obligatory. I pay bills because I have to but spend money on games because I want to. If it's a bill or an obligation I am inherently going to look for better deals. It prevents loyalty instead of engendering it.