Back to the After-Holiday Grind

After all the excitement in December with the PU/AC2.0 launch (probably just “2.0” now… it’s all morphing into one game) the rest of the month and early January was somewhat of a wind-down.  2.1 was launched and with it comes the Freelancer (finally) in all it’s remodeled glory.  If I had one, I’d tell you how well it handles.

SOD has been pretty slow lately.  Aside from a podcast I was on with fellow Oddyseans Woodhaus and hosted by Voß, we’ve slowly slipped into that post-holiday hype-slump between big game conventions and events in the Star Citizen world.

One question that seems to be on everyone’s mind with Star Citizen though is how instancing will work and “how big will space battles get?”  I’ll tell you this, from what I know of what I’ve read about it, the instancing in Star Citizen is extremely fancy and technically hard to understand.  Servers have a limited number of “player-connections” that can be on any one machine at a time.  The more detailed data you have, the less that is.   If we were all flying around identical round spheres that did nothing but bounce off each other, we can fit an enormous amount of players on a server since he only data being passed around is “x,y,z position” and maybe velocity and acceleration to keep things smooth.  But a spaceship in Star Citizen has a huge amount of data with it…  what position are each of the thrusters in and are they on?  What guns, paint job, missiles, other customizations does the ship have?  What’s it’s heading?  Status of it’s landing gear, landing lights, how damaged is it?  Add on a few dozen more bits of data and you have a huge limitation.

Star Citizen attempts to remove some of those limitations by creating instances within ships and across sections of visible space.  There may be 15 people inside a ship, but the only data being sent to the area of space outside that ship is that of the ship overall.  This saves on data enormously since the server running the “ship” only has to send the server handling “space” the “external view and actions of the ship as a single entity.

Honestly, it’ll be amazing if they can pull it off.  I have a good deal of faith, but technically, I know it’s not going to be easy.   Anyways, I’ve rambled on enough.  Demonseed out.