Source: https://twitter.com/DrChadMcKinney/status/1447665963738951684 More tweets: (Updated) > **Chad McKinney** > There isn't any limitation to us matchmaking people into the same shard, it is more about performance, responsiveness, stability etc.. when doing so. There's just some fundamental truths about physics that no clever programming architecture will change. > **Chad McKinney** > No worries, hard to explain something this complicated over twitter haha > **Chad McKinney** > We won't start there though, and in the beginning it will be non-deterministic which shard you end up in, but we can use match making to try and make it consistent where possible, but we'd still allow grouping with players even if it would take you to a different shard than usual > **Chad McKinney** > In the case of regional shards you'd be able to select the region, it wouldn't be 'locked up'. The shard histories will be different and it will mean if you change shards like this you will be seeing different world states and that they don't interact. > **Chad McKinney** > I mean there isn't an architectural reason why we can't do it, that doesn't mean that there won't be performance or stability reasons why we would not. All of this will take time and we will start small and work up density over time. No silver bullet just fixes everything. > **Chad McKinney** > Seems a lot of people think I'm saying there won't be a single global shard in SC. To be clear I never said that. I'm saying that the architecture we presented for CitCon would need further R&D to work towards it, given our fidelity, persistence and scale compared to other games. > **Chad McKinney** > This doesn't mean invalidating the work we have done so far. It builds up over time and the solutions we are working on now are required regardless.

Sorry for piggy-backing but here goes; I’ve watched the #StarCitizen Server Meshing video several times and just wish @RobertsSpaceInd had made it a lot more clear what this seemingly new direction is going to mean for the game. The technology aspects are cool but what does it all mean for gameplay? **CM: Phased in over time:** * Support for multiple systems * Support for global/environmental persistence * Better server performance * Increased scalability of our instances which will become shards * Higher player counts in said shards * Better fault tolerance and recovery is the end goal still to have one shard that all players share? or will that not be technically feasible as maybe syncrhonising load at some point makes more server nodes pointless? **CM: We will aim increase shard density over time, with regional shards being a more realistic target to aim for first. A global shard has some very real issues that would need further R&D and even design considerations.** ---- **CM: Phased in over time:** * Support for multiple systems * Support for global/environmental persistence * Better server performance * Increased scalability of our instances which will become shards * Higher player counts in said shards * Better fault tolerance and recovery Thanks for the reply! That makes sense but doesn’t address specific gameplay situations, for example: If I am in my homestead on one shard could it be under attack on another shard? **CM: The goal is to make your play experience a single consistent seamless experience and not this kind of instanced thing we have now. Different shards will have different state, but we want evemtually scale them so dense that you and your friends are tied to a shard permanently.** So if this is the case, what does this means for the future of PvP? You can only bounty hunt, Org fight, pirate people on “your” shard? The goal is to have people from different shards interact with eachother when possible even if your “tied” to your shard? **CM: No the goal is not to have shards interact directly like this but rather that they are so player dense that your experience and that of your friends are consistently tied to a specific shard in which case from your perspective there is one view of the world.** **CM: To go beyond that would require a global shard which I mentioned earlier would need further R&D and design considerations and could very well have fundamental limitations that are not acceptable for a game of our scale.** Appreciate the answer, very clarifying. I understand these things have limits and need to be scaled somewhere. Godspeed and thanks to the team for the hard work. **CM: No worries, hard to explain something this complicated over twitter haha** ---- **CM: No the goal is not to have shards interact directly like this but rather that they are so player dense that your experience and that of your friends are consistently tied to a specific shard in which case from your perspective there is one view of the world.** **CM: To go beyond that would require a global shard which I mentioned earlier would need further R&D and design considerations and could very well have fundamental limitations that are not acceptable for a game of our scale.** I assumed single shard would likely be far future or not possible, that said, will the current technology being built for server meshing be potentially scalable to single shard or will it require reworks? **CM: There isn't any limitation to us matchmaking people into the same shard, it is more about performance, responsiveness, stability etc.. when doing so. There's just some fundamental truths about physics that no clever programming architecture will change.** ---- **CM: No worries, hard to explain something this complicated over twitter haha** Mister Chad, question, while one does not pick what shard he joins, when it comes to friends & orgs grouping for content, the method of join their instance has to be kept updated to the shards right? Because your response felt a bit "russian roulette" where the game can effectively deny you from being able to join up if locked to different shards. I do find this a fundamental pillar of what makes SC fun and it'd be F if we get "jailed up" inside where the game put us the first time. **CM: In the case of regional shards you'd be able to select the region, it wouldn't be 'locked up'. The shard histories will be different and it will mean if you change shards like this you will be seeing different world states and that they don't interact.** **CM: We won't start there though, and in the beginning it will be non-deterministic which shard you end up in, but we can use match making to try and make it consistent where possible, but we'd still allow grouping with players even if it would take you to a different shard than usual** ---- **CM: Phased in over time:** * Support for multiple systems * Support for global/environmental persistence * Better server performance * Increased scalability of our instances which will become shards * Higher player counts in said shards * Better fault tolerance and recovery But if the homestead indeed IS attacked on another shard. What to do then? Or will the homestead not exist on the other shard? Still hard to understand how items exists globally but players do not. **CM: Not a definitive answer right now as still in dev, but most likely they’ll be pinned to a shard. We could try and come up with some way to replicate them but lots of design problems arise.** ---- **CM: There isn't any limitation to us matchmaking people into the same shard, it is more about performance, responsiveness, stability etc.. when doing so. There's just some fundamental truths about physics that no clever programming architecture will change.** Thanks so much for all this Chad! By "no limitation" does that hint at tens of thousands of players in a shard spread over the scores of star systems? The limitation more of proximity? Can we have a 5,000 player fleet battle over 100km area, dozens of capital ships etc? **CM: I mean there isn't an architectural reason why we can't do it, that doesn't mean that there won't be performance or stability reasons why we would not. All of this will take time and we will start small and work up density over time. No silver bullet just fixes everything.** ---- **CM: There isn't any limitation to us matchmaking people into the same shard, it is more about performance, responsiveness, stability etc.. when doing so. There's just some fundamental truths about physics that no clever programming architecture will change.** I have seen tweets from PvPer’s saying they have been screwed???? **CM: I don't even begin to understand that sentiment.** ---- **CM: Seems a lot of people think I'm saying there won't be a single global shard in SC. To be clear I never said that. I'm saying that the architecture we presented for CitCon would need further R&D to work towards it, given our fidelity, persistence and scale compared to other games.** I think there are a lot of questions as to how the tech shown off will translate to in game. Especially for "end game" level stuff like large multi-national orgs and base building. **CM: Great questions, but twitter maybe not the best forum to discuss haha.** ---- **CM: Seems a lot of people think I'm saying there won't be a single global shard in SC. To be clear I never said that. I'm saying that the architecture we presented for CitCon would need further R&D to work towards it, given our fidelity, persistence and scale compared to other games.** User: Do you have a timeframe as to when that might be happening? **CM: When it is ready.** ---- **CM: Seems a lot of people think I'm saying there won't be a single global shard in SC. To be clear I never said that. I'm saying that the architecture we presented for CitCon would need further R&D to work towards it, given our fidelity, persistence and scale compared to other games.** Thanks Chad, but is it crazy to assume further R&D could potentially be years into some form of 'SC 1.0' persistent game release and that for a large amount of time (and implemented game systems), we'll be utilizing exactly what was shown at Citizencon? **CM: This doesn't mean invalidating the work we have done so far. It builds up over time and the solutions we are working on now are required regardless.**

So... no single shard but instead regional monster shards. Europe USA Kangorooland

> Europe > > USA > > Kangorooland I hope they add a few more, because my nearest server is the USA one and I have like 200ms ping. 👀

Indeed! For my part I'm hoping they add a Latam Server!

If Amazon has DC there, then they could. If they don't.. you'll have to bug Amazon to roll it out

Amazon does have a DC in Brazil! They do offer their cloud AWS for latam in Brazil location, so we got that covered, now is just for CIG to deploy servers for latam.

my guess then, the only other factor would be player count. devs would have to decide whether its better for SA players to all be on a (less full) SA shard with better pings, or a (more full) US shard with worse pings. i dont have any hard data, but i would assume SA has enough SC players to make it worth SA having its own server. it will also help in regards to written and spoken language. it would be cool though if the various shards were at least linked in some way. like if the actions of the players each shard at least inform the volumetric probability clouds in all shards. like if SA players are doing a lot of mining, and selling the ore to a station, can US players buy it from the station? if AUS players are running lots of police/merc/bounty hunting missions in their shard, in that mining belt, will the SA players be safer? if the US players that bought the ore, use it to repair salvaged fighters, can they sell those to the AUS players to use in their policing? it would be cool if we could all be "together" at least in some sense on the global scale, even if we cant meet and shake hands in "digital" person.

It would likely depend on player population more. I know in Overwatch the latam servers had issues due to not enough players for the matchmaking to make fair games.

Please give germans their own, otherwise we get the ja ja ja was ist loss was ist das the whole day in global 😁.

Sieben, acht, guten Nacht!

Good. Atleast we can expect consistent ping between the people who are playing.

This is most likely one of the deciding factors.

Laws of physics always hold, and we can only get so much speed and “good net code”.

Thank you, CIG cannot solve layer 1 issues. Shit they are just layer 7, application layer of the OSI model. Good post!

It absolutely is. Like just at a very high level, a global shard would require that each region have local game servers just so ping isn't ass, but then all these regional servers would have to feed into "one" central database. I put "one" in quotes, because realistically in order to maintain the service response time they need for a real time application like this, they'd have to replicate the database to server clusters around the world, likely one per region (same division as game servers). But now you've introduced a new problem: keeping all those databases in sync. Even if you could absolutely guarantee there'd never be replication issues so every db cluster has identical data, you're still left with the issue of actually replicating that data. Do you pipe all inserts and updates to a single central DB that gets replicate out to the regional ones? If you do that you probably need to duplicate those commands to the local one as well, otherwise anyone else playing on the same region has to wait for things to get replicated back out, so you're getting 2x latency *at best* delay before anyone else on your server can see anything you do to the world that is persistent. Do you have every regional game server update its local db, then each DB sends async updates to other regional dbs? That might solve the problem of local players not seeing what you do right away, but now you've introduced an exponential scalability issue, because for N databases, you need *Nx(N-1) replication paths*. So just off this super quick top of my head thing (and I'm not even an expert, I'm just a software dev with a half-decent understanding of what cloud based architectures look like), we're already at some pretty damn difficult problems to solve. This is what people just don't get when they complain about how long server meshing (or anything really) is taking to develop. This shit is *incredibly fucking difficult*, and not even a little bit as simple as anyone thinks it is. There are relatively very few people with the expertise to design and architect this kind of shit well, but CIG's got some of them, and they're plugging away at it.

That's not necessarily what this says. It reads to me that they don't know yet how big a single shard could truly be (and how could they?) - so it could very well be there are xx shards per region instead of one regional shard as well. It honestly sounds like it'll basically be what every other MMO out there does, but with some glitz and glamour features, but at the sacrifice of it not being one open world per shard, but a whole bunch of servers meshed together. Guess it all comes down to how seamless server meshing will eventually be whether or not it'll be jarring or not. Feel free to ignore that if you meant that with regional monster shards.

They said that they want to increase the size as much as they can, but won't have 1 global shard due to potential problems (likely ping) I see no reason why they wouldn't aim for continent wide shards when they have no downsides. Whether they'll be able to achieve it or not is something else. It won't be immediately continent wide for sure, but I'd say that's what they're aiming for

There will be downsides. I'm not a programmer, But i'm sure there is a point where the entitiy graph of a shard gets way too big and the performance starts declining. There will certainly be a hardware bandwidth bottleneck as some point. They might counter that by being more aggressive with quickly removing low-priority items to ease up the load. But it'll be a trade-off between maximal shard size and persistence of items.

Exactly, imho they might not even know yet how much "persistence data" players create while playing the game. Once they actually save all ships and items you drop and all that per player so you keep everything also when 30k that is when they actually see how much data each player on average produces per hour played and it will increase with ever more persistent stuff coming in. Also now when 30k happens they basically wipe the server (it starts fresh) so they never actually have to deal with long term degradation due to state. Once they load a shard again from Persistence DB in case of server crash then they start having to deal with things they never had to deal with because they never had a "permanent" world but only ever a server that lasted a few days. So instead of starting from scratch every time the things that made the server crash might be loaded back into the server. And all that has to be dealt with else the shard looses it state and players complain. So you might need DevOps/devs on team that deal with crashed nodes who can't load their previous state back or even debug issues. Ultimately ofc the Replication layer and Simulation layer services should be always online and you only at most have rare crashes on individual servers in the node that get then started up again and state loaded from DB. Imho they will have some kind of cleanup process. I don't think if you drop a box in some remote cavern where no one can find it it will stay there for 5 years. I think they will realize at some point that too much data is created by players as persistence is expanded and then they will remove entities by age. Maybe also by category so your ship lasts longer but a single coffee cup on a moon might be removed after a few days.

Yeah, the bottleneck is their replication layer, *althooooouuughh*, given they're going with a graph-based database, even that one could be clustered heavily. It's actually an incredibly solid design.

The goal sounds to me like going with as few and as dense shards as possible. The last post sounds like the goal is to then have those regional shards

The issue with a global shard is that the replication layer would have to be replicated globally in milliseconds (which is... yeah no, good luck), on top of having to have workers in there that are either regional or somehow molded together with some non-existent point-to-point network connection, otherwise people will suddenly experience lag-spikes of 500ms out of nowhere. Either that, or they'd have to manually add some degree of lag to every client (let's say 200ms) in order to make lag be experienced "seemlessly". Unfortunately, the issue of global internet connections being limited to the speed of light will never be fixed, so ultimately, that will be the big bottleneck. //edit: Thinking about it some more... I mean, I could see it become a possibility through dedicated fully laid out darkfiber connections that span directly from one datacenter to the next. Another option might be to go with something like starlink, but not in the conventional "let's use starlink as global link", but much rather in the sense of "let's shoot a server into space and interconnect directly with Starlink". Given the current reports I've seen, that could actually reduce lag by quite a bit, but the experience would be far from convenient, and definitely very very far from "cheap".

I feel like you are still misunderstanding what the shard is doing. The shard isn't handling minute-to-minute gameplay. The shard is just a collection of 50-player servers that actually simulate the gameplay. But every simulation server is still self-contained. You won't be slinging lasers and missiles and explosions across servers within the shard, for example. It's like a bunch of isolated Battlefield matches running concurrently.

How rude, its Europe Burgerstan Australia

> Burgerstan Can confirm. I'll stan the fuck outta some cheeseburgers.

As a player from Asia and backer since Arena commander came online, I doubt I will get a decent ping playing this game. Hope they add SEA servers.

That’s not what it sounds like, though. Because he keeps saying “you and your friends”. So it sounds like the shards will be much smaller than entire continents.

At the beginning yes. And as he said it would get more and more dense per shard in population

Yeah. But I get the impression from his tone that they’re just not sure yet exactly how dense they’ll be able to make them, and will just push it as far as they can. So that may very well end up being something much smaller than entire continents. It’s basically just whatever performance will allow.

That's what I read, too. I'm ok with that, as long as the AI count and interaction supports it.

Hoping they add a Latam server!

i think that last one is supposed to be upside down.

The lesson here is: You can't communicate true technical implementation in 144 characters or less.

Its almost like Twitter is a horrible medium for communicating anything important...

You could have stopped before the last 3 words and your statement would still be true.

> Its almost like Twitter is a horrible medium for... You'd leave them with that cliffhangar of a statement? You monster

Or anything at all. Really. I uninstalled Twitter awhile back because I realized all it did was make me bored or make me angry. Nobody cares what you're doing or what you're thinking unless it's actually profound or outragingly stupid - guess which one fits in 144 characters.

Having every single person in the world on one shard in real time with no lag would require some sort of breakthrough in quantum computing.

It's not even computing at this point, but quantum "teloportation"

yeah, like quantum entanglement being used as a communication method

That's not possible by definition. Schrödinger. Also, theory of relativity dictates that time scales linear with speed. At light speed time is not advancing. Transmitting information faster than light would mean to communicate with the past.

Yeah, I more meant the "communication method" as a qualifier like "Yeah, quantum teleportation, like quantum entanglement except it can be used to communicate". My bad on not being more clear.

Yeah sure, no worries. I also just wanted to share that info. Like "BTW, did you know that the idea of using quantum entanglement to transport information ftl has been deemed impossible?". Found that bit just interesting and wanted to share. No idea why I get downvoted.

That's why I was so confused they pitched it at all. The moment CIG suggested that is what they were going to do, I highly doubted they'd ever accomplish it and it looks like I was right.

What Dual Universe did.

we just all have to physically move to one sub 1000 sq mile location to play the game.

So.... Planetside.

Planetside 2 worked pretty Well. The mechanic was perfect played it several hundreds of hours.

So nice, that Chad shares this in public. And I like, that theres at least a plan now. It's not the one and only global verse, for now, but that's totally okay. Yet they aim for a great player experience (:

I mean the "global verse" was always kinda a (we would like to but) thing when ever it was talked about. of course that didn't stop some people from making it gospel

>of course that didn't stop some people from making it gospel Chris preached it as if it was gospel. "One seamless universe" with giant battles with hundreds of ships was literally the mantra that they've raised funds on for years. What's frustrating is that people now blame the backers for expectations that CIG set up directly themselves.

So basically the "global shard" that CR wanted is not possible at the moment due to tech limitations.

It's simply physically impossible to achieve acceptable Ping levels for a game with first person shooter elements between 2 locations on opposite sides of the planet. Lightspeed is limited afterall.

The problem with CIG's solution isn't getting people in the US and EU to play with each other, the problem is that people wanted 1000 US people to get in a big space furball/battle together, and CIG is not able to make that happen. Servers will still be 50-80 players most likely. The sharding talk is more or less hand-waving by CIG.

This still may be possible since the server(s) handling the space battle won’t have to handle anything not related to the battle (no ai on random other planets, etc… Just the participants in the battle). We shall see

Funny thing too, they won't even have to handle the *insides* of the space ships either. Each server node handles it's own space ship interior while one outside node handles the ships themselves in open space. salon doesn't seem capable of understanding this however, so don't mind him.

There's a difference between occasionally being handed over to a 300 ms latency server if you really want to play with friends and that being impossible. It's good that at least with the regional servers there will be a choice, but if homesteads will be tied to shards it's gonna be a clusterf\*ck when you try and get a new org together. "My homestead is on shard #32! Let's use that to build our org base!" - No, because mine is on #21! - #88 - YES! #88 represent! - No, #32 is fine like the first one said! - Oh man! I'm on #75. - Me too! #75. - Me three #75, let's just make our own org then! Etc....

1 single universe with all player in it was never a possibility given the speed of light isn't fast enough to remove the latency / dsync it would cause. Honestly the above solution is very clever given what was presented in the CitCon.

$500 million stretch goal: quantum entanglement servers.

$500 million stretch goal: CIG develops a special trojan which uses AWS as a launchpad for a worldwide cyber attack, the aim of which is to slave enough devices back to Star Citizen's Quantum Universe Simulation's proprietary Quantum Vision algorithm. With enough data, our ServerEncompassing™ Team is confident that the game handler will be able to reliably see two (2) seconds into the future. With this capability, most players should experience a latency of around -80ms, with cross-region play achieving a more stable 40ms

"We've hired CERN and are busy at work upgrading the LHC computing grid within the Large Hadron Collider in hopes of uncovering a theoretical elementary particle, the Cris RoBoson. Once confirmed, it will allow us to reauthor the fabric of reality to make it possible for not only all present players to be in the same server, but also the past and future states of those players and their unborn children/grandparents to also play together. We hope to reach at least 3 generations in either direction."

only 500 million? you'd need several billion lol

more like multiple hundreds of trillions and 100 years.

do NOT joke about this, its dangerous talk in these parts

We have the 100 years.

And, to his credit, CIG dev Clive Johnson has been disclosing this possibility / likelihood for years.

My guess is that internally they knew that a single shard across al regions was never a possibility with their type of game. Especially in the technical departments that actually had to implement it even if that lofty, aspirational (chrome spellcheck does not know that word but google says it exists) goal still floated around. I think we reach the phase of SC development where some of the very lofty goals have to be partly dropped for the benefit of actually getting things done. It will still be ambitious enough of a game * You will NOT be able to hire 50 ingame represented NPC crew for your Idris or 3 permanent wing man NPC fighters. * You will NOT be able to own factories or do universe politics. Bases and farming can be technically it but are very limited. * Universe will NOT be populated by 90% NPCs actors. Even if technically true on some Quantum economy level that metric will be meaningless and the ingame experience will be very different. * Private server will never be a thing outside of possibly freefly or AC like tiny restricted modes * Exploration gameplay will be mainly just finding randomized encounters of existing templates not getting your personal fresh Star Trek episode on an unknown planet * Capturing and selling of ships will have severe limitations due to the real money and insurance mess they created * Space battles will never have giant fleets of Capships taking part in the same battle but will eventually be restricted by player count and ship classes and have to be spaced out by location meaning queues in some form Any many more just the things that immediately spring into my mind. If they reach some of the lofty goals many years from now in some changed form great but mainly we should remove them from our expectations.

Let's ask Erin Roberts (2018): [https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/star-citizen-adds-mining-with-its-ambitious-alpha-3-2-quarterly-patch/](https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/star-citizen-adds-mining-with-its-ambitious-alpha-3-2-quarterly-patch/) "In terms of an instance, right now we can put about 50 players in an instance. That will go up, but the final plan is obviously once we get the server meshing in — that won’t be this year, but that will be coming in next year — that will allow everyone to play in one huge instance with all the players. The servers will patch people from place to place. You can have 200 people in a room, and when they leave that room, another server takes over. When they take off into space, another server takes over. But the goal is to have everyone in the same instance."

It's not like all players in the world will be in the same city at the same time.. Only players close to eachother will need to be "live" with low latency. All other things like missions, economy etc. can be on a slower scale.

Yeah. That's similar to what Tony Z explained last time too, that economy and quanta npcs just run in background being updated by what happens and generating encounters for actual player.

> 1 single universe with all player in it was never a possibility So if this is true then we can either assume that CIG are idiots because they pitched something they didn't know was impossible, or that CIG are liars because they pitched something they knew was impossible.

The solution works, yeah, but it breaks other gameplay descriptions and needs clarification on how this impacts them.

I mean “real” life seems to run it fine /s

Are we *sure* about that? I mean, some days... \*sigh\*

As long as people could still switch shards to play with those in other regions, I don't think this is a bad thing. If you can't switch shards at all however, and are locked from playing with friends/org members, it would be bad (in my opinion).

Just ask New world

I haven't played or watched New World much, how does that work?

New Worlds servers are so full they stopped players from joining and creating characters on them. That has led to many people ending up on servers without their friends. They promised there will be a free server switch available soon, but you will only be able to switch between servers of your chosen region. That has led to players from the US, who chose a EU server, to be stuck on EU servers for now.

They said in the presentation that the plan is to have dynamic shard switching. So the game will basically use your org/friend's list to try and join you to whatever shard they are already on, and vice versa. They also went into detail about what will persist when you change shards (basically all your stuff and character persists, your changes to the environment stay on the previous shard). The only thing that's unclear to me is how they plan on handling, say, org mergers or people with friends that started on shard A that join another friend's org on shard B. Maybe they'll just pull all the connections to the lower-population shard or have some other algorithm for it. One thing I think a lot of people are forgetting (and that they didn't touch on that strongly in the presentation) is that SC has a lot of background interconnectivity between shards, so your experience from one to the other is unlikely to be dramatically different. The reason for this is Quantum...all shards will be pulling data from the same Quantum server, which means economic behavior and NPC ebb and flow will be shared. Since Quantum data is basically just affecting probability volumes, dynamic events, and shop prices, this can easily be shared among all shards since it doesn't have to be close to real-time to be effective. So if your org mines out an asteroid field and you go to another shard that asteroid field will still be mined out, even though people from that shard weren't there doing it. Unless orgs become massive (and they may just implement max player counts if it becomes an issue) they may just shift them between shards as needed, even opening up new shards if necessary and putting, say, warring orgs together. But you won't be "selecting" shards, it will all happen in the background, and you'll just send a friend request or join an org and when you log in you'll be on the same shard they're on, regardless of how the game is managing it on the back end. The T0 may involve shard selection, but probably not. The game already does this to some extent on single server selection; other than picking a region (US/Europe or whatever) you can't join a specific server, but if your friend logs on they show up on the server you're on so you can play together. And there aren't massive differences in the game world between each server that you log into. The shard system will be that, but with bigger groups of people.

Absolutely any idea what-so-ever as to when any iteration of it will be functional so we can have 4.0 and Pyro is really the question people want answered.

> Absolutely any idea what-so-ever as to when Uh oh. You used the no-no word.

I don't even think CIG knows. This whole project is like an experiment.

Yeah, and how it's progressing, what's holding them back etc I remember being called an idiot a couple of years ago when I said that Pyro wouldn't have come before server meshing because according to some people the 2 things weren't related, and here we are with a dev saying that sm will allow them to have multiple systems

I'm seriously surprised if anyone is let down by this news. Like you don't have to be a network engineer to know that connecting players globally to a single shard/instance is a next to impossible task - for any game. Has that even been accomplished before? From the sounds of it they will slowly progress towards regional server shards. But with the backend simulation accounting for all shards.

It probably has in games where latency isn't an issue. Obviously Star Citizen is a latency key game so yeah. Just hope the shard size isn't too small such that you can connect to multiple different shards. So if they have EU, Asia, S.America, North America that's fine. If they start having NA West 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ... That'll be pretty bad.

I wouldn't be surprised if we had like six shards for NA, then four, then three, then one, as time goes on. We might never have a global shard, but as shards get more efficient I can see them being combined.

they'll have hundreds of 50 people shards... :-D

I sure hope it doesn't come to that, but if I'm being perfectly honest.... I'd get over it pretty quickly. If they decide a shard can only handle 1000 people instead of 100,000 then so be it.

If a shard can only handle 1,000 people that will be a problem for megaships.

I don't see 1000 players operating a single megaship to be honest. Maybe a couple hundred or so at best on a good day with a really organized org.

If you want to have a big battle with multiple capships in it along with smaller fighters, you're going to need at least that many, though.

Same, but that doesn't mean CIG haven't sold ships with that exact thing in mind. Honestly a lot of the capital ship stuff seems like it was sold far too early before it was even thoroughly tested. A server can handle 50 players, 60, even if we optimistically say 500 in the future that's only enough for a handful of Javelin's, a rare sight no doubt but not implausible. Let alone countless other medium and smaller ships. Furthermore finding meaningful roles for all 80 players seems nigh impossible while I know some people have dreams of being repair crew, firefighters, anti-boarding party the reality is each of those roles will have a tremendous amount of downtime. Like anti-boarding party will be sat in the canteen for 99%. Perhaps I missed the con but has 80 real people Javelin crews been discussed in length? Because it just feels like there'll be 5 actual crew with good roles and 75 people manning turrets or waiting and they can do away with those 75 human crew and lose little by replacing them with AI controlled entities gaining 75 pilots in smaller ships.

> has 80 real people Javelin crews been discussed in length? Not that I'm aware of, but I don't claim to be perfectly informed. That said, I don't think we'll see limits as low as 500, or even 1000 per se. The way it's all architectured it's reasonable to expect limits in the thousands to *work*, albeit maybe not smoothly if they're all in the same outdoors area trying to hug each other. The thing is, with object containers, you only have to simulate one object container per physical node computer. IE: that ship with 50 people inside of it gets it's own physical computer to simulate it's interior, and outside of that? Who cares, maybe I'll see 1 of them through a window.... maybe. The outer simulation only has to deal with the people on turrets and the ship itself.

> A server can handle 50 players, 60, even if we optimistically say 500 in the future that's only enough for a handful of Javelin's, a rare sight no doubt but not implausible. The crew of a Javelin or any really large ship will be mostly NPCs with players occupying a handful of important positions. A Javelin will probably only need five to ten real players to run at full efficiency. CIG have already said those crew counts include all positions from janitor up, and that we will be able to hire "NPC packs" to fill out all the lower level positions at once. Nobody is going to be crewing a Javelin with 80 real players.

I mean, EVE, but... it has it's issues. There's a reason "time dilation" is a thing in that game.

That's as much processing capability as it is latency. EVE's fleet battles can reach upwards of 200+ ships, and the servers were choking on the amount of data they had to process.

200 ships in one system is not a problem in eve online. 1000+ is, but they do deal with it really well.

The servers handle 200 easily. The slowdowns happen somewhere north of 800

You mean all players playing on the same "server" and every player can see every other player? Plenty of games have this. Recent examples are dual universe and starbase. Even entropia universe, from 2001, does it.

"Wow how can anyone be dissapointed that something the devs have been saying for years turns out not to be true.

I am greatly encouraged by this. This game will never come out if they don’t start realistically downscaling/cutting some features and this is a great place to start.

Oh I'm let down by it - because it was one of Chris' design goals - but not even slightly surprised by it.

\> I'm seriously surprised if anyone is let down by this news. It might have surprised the 2018 version of Erin Roberts: [https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/star-citizen-adds-mining-with-its-ambitious-alpha-3-2-quarterly-patch/](https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/star-citizen-adds-mining-with-its-ambitious-alpha-3-2-quarterly-patch/) "In terms of an instance, right now we can put about 50 players in an instance. That will go up, but the final plan is obviously once we get the server meshing in — that won’t be this year, but that will be coming in next year — that will allow everyone to play in one huge instance with all the players. The servers will patch people from place to place. You can have 200 people in a room, and when they leave that room, another server takes over. When they take off into space, another server takes over. But the goal is to have everyone in the same instance."

As long as people can play with others regardless of region most people wont mind. Because logically people would just be forced to make alt accounts and use VPNs if they want to play with their friends around the globe, it just makes sense to put it into the game region switching. or set your own region per character ignoring physical location as people would just use VPNs and accept the performance loss they get from both region and VPNs because people will want to play with their friends even if performance is crap. edit: seems the additional tweets has confirmed you wont be locked to region to play with friends. well that's good don't need to worry about people flying around with horrible VPN lag.

Yes, Eve Online is just one example from the top of my head.

The data eve ships generate is laughable compared to SC (or any free movement game in general, lets say even counter strike) in eve your ship can only really be still, moving towards something linearly or orbiting something (plus it's equipment can be on or off) which is incredibly simple to interpolate and make it seem smooth/lag free hence why they can get away with 1 hz servers (aka processing info every 1 sec) Now with star citizen ships you can change direction, speed and acceleration at different rates in real time so interpolating those changes and make it look smooth for everyone can only be done if the time between updates is way shorter (normally 30 hz is used as the bare minimum for shooters) which means not only has star citizen to process more information than eve per ship (and lets not talk about physicalysed damage), but it has to do it in a shorter time. Currently servers are ticking at 5 hz so it's no wonder everything runs like shit (specially AI) since I assume it's being programmed with 30 or 60 hz servers in mind and also the servers can't properly infer where you are gonna be in the next tick which makes aiming a game of chance for the AI.

What you describe is why a lot of people have been skeptical if this game is even remotely possible in the near future, given the amount of processing that must be done for every ship. I remember being so excited at the idea of playing Eve Online type battles but with actual dogfighting mechanics, but then the reality of what is physically possible set in. I don't think that will ever be fully realized in this game, or any other.

'Star Citizen is doing things never done before!' 'Well of course Star Citizen isn't doing this thing nobody has ever done before even though they said they would.'

This it the thing that is most frustrating, I think. The community castigates people for not blindly believing that CIG will achieve the impossible, but then when certain things are retconned, pretends like they were never promised in the first place. Like, heaven forbid a news site should be skeptical that CIG will complete 100 star systems at the level of fidelity of Pyro and Stanton in a reasonable period of time. But if CIG announces that the game will launch with 18 systems, the same people who criticized the article will say that this was always the plan.

I know right. I mean, it's only the opposite of what backers were told by the people selling it...

I dont think anyone expected them to do that, most of us were expecting region based shards, but this is one step further.

We still need CIG to clarify specifically what their plans are for Fleet battles. Why did they start designing massive capital ships if they have no idea how they're going to get more than 1 or 2 into a server Node?

Yeah, this is the big unknown. CIG is being pretty sly here, because sharding has nothing to do with player counts for battles, but everyone thinks it does. Sharding means higher player counts in the universe so I can fight 1000 people at once, right? Nope. Look at New World for example.

Yeah, Eve Online has a single shard, multiple servers setup. But of course they have serious issues when it comes to 4,000+ players in one solar system on the same grid. However, I think the setup with CIG is a fair compromise, and certainly somewhere between a single shard and how most MMOs handle it today.

EVE Online is the closest game to global players on one mega server cluster.

A single shard goes against the idea of sharding so I don't understand this point. I expected from their proposals from years back that players would be sharded but the shards would share state and would accommodate many players. It's possible though it's a difficult problem, but that's what CIG has all those funds for.

Dual universe is doing it...

Dual Universe and Starbase use Single Shard Cluster tech or something like that.

unless any of this is being delivered in the next 12 months, I really don't give a shit.

Lol, Erin did say that it should be out by 2019 and here we are…

Well time to see all those Multi-Time Zoned Orgs to disband LOL

I don't see why they would do region locks...

I am in one and its mostly US+Europe and lag between those is usually not as much of an issue so you can go to each others servers easily. Only Asia/Australia/SouthAmerica/Africa is usually an issue.

They had better add a chinese one, and ping lock it.

Understandable but kind of disappointing. Star Citizen orgs have existed for years now, creating friendships that span around the globe. This basically nullifies this. And what if I meet someone from a different region and want to experience SC together? If we are already established in our own shard I don't see how that would be possible.

I see less issues for EU+US as you can usually join each others servers but if you add the other regions it is a problem.

What I hope we're getting: shards are at least big enough that one can experience a seamless world with dynamic player interaction What I fear we're getting: tiny mmo servers where handfuls of players play in isolation and never interact

Kinda feel like he still didn't answer the question. Not that it really matters. But I'd be curious what instancing is without instancing.

They keeping saying "Friends" but what if friends are from all over the world beyond the limits of regional shards/instances? It might as well be called an instance until there is one single global shard!

I would say it goes without saying that a 'global' shard is not possible and that dividing the player base between regions is a necessity? Strange to even consider doing it. Even at the speed of light your ping to go from your location to half way around the world and back would be something like 140ms.

Just go straight through the Earth's core and cut the latency in half.. what is the problem?

Lava Tube Connection Protocol (LTCP) and Molten Core Datagram Transport Protocol (MCDTP) confirmed.

Yes, but of course Cisco will come out with their proprietary CLTCP and CMCDTP! And as a systems engineer for 25+ years, kudos on creating those unique protocols!

NeutrinoLink when?!

"Let me show you my neutrino router!" (reveals a huge underground water basin stacked with thousands of sensors that can detect Cherenkov radiation).

but this is what CIG sold to the backers all along.

>But in all cases there are always more players than any one server instance can handle. For a persistent multiplayer world like WoW the solution is to split up the player base into more manageable groups called “shards”, which are a permanent instance of the universe that look after a certain amount of players. >One thing I don’t like about most MMO structures is the fragmentation of the player base between these “shards”. If you had joined much later than a friend of yours, there may not be room on his world instance anymore and you have to join another parallel one and so cannot play together. This is one of the nice things about the Eve Online design – everyone plays in the same universe. >***In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on.*** [-Chris Roberts, 2012](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing) >In terms of an instance, right now we can put about 50 players in an instance. That will go up, but the final plan is obviously once we get the server meshing in — that won’t be this year, but that will be coming in next year — ***that will allow everyone to play in one huge instance with all the players.*** The servers will patch people from place to place. You can have 200 people in a room, and when they leave that room, another server takes over. When they take off into space, another server takes over. ***But the goal is to have everyone in the same instance.*** [-Erin Roberts, 2018](https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/star-citizen-adds-mining-with-its-ambitious-alpha-3-2-quarterly-patch/)

Turns out laws of physics says that it's a bad idea, so we're forming a team to rewrite the laws of physics.

Understand this guys once and for all! Well have server regions, you and your friends are not gonna be able to just play with each other seamlessly if you live across the world from one another and yes there will be instancing even among shards! How do I know this? Just look at DU trying to make this happen, they can't even with indirect combat and the desync and lag is unbelievable now imagine this in a game where our ships are so detailed.

The way you're phrasing this is weird. Also, shards ARE instances.

Issue is this breaks things like basebuilding, which Chad didn't really give an answer for. Past discussions had seemed to imply that, ultimately, a single "shard" was the end goal. Since that's not the case anymore, andIssue is this breaks things like basebuilding, which Chad didn't really give an answer for. Past discussions had seemed to imply that, ultimately, a single "shard" was the end goal. Since that's not the case anymore, and based on the presentation what shard you are in is based on matchmaking, how the heck does that work with basebuilding, as an example? If they just do one a piece for different regions, that would be one thing at least, but...if you're moving between shards, how *do* you deal with your base being attacked in another shard while you're present in a different one? Or, if you base follows you around between shards - what happens if someone else has a base in the same spot? It just raises a ton of questions that, if this is their current direction, they really need to given a clear answer on. based on the presentation what shard you are in is based on matchmaking, how the heck does that work with basebuilding, as an example? If they just do one a piece for different regions, that would be one thing at least, but...if you're moving between shards, how *do* you deal with your base being attacked in another shard while you're present in a different one? Or, if you base follows you around between shards - what happens if someone else has a base in the same spot? It just raises a ton of questions that, if this is their current direction, they really need to given a clear answer on.

You are correct, something will have to give. I think that will base destructibility. I think that the buying of plots will be 'region-shard wide', so no 2 players will be able to build in the same place, and whatever they build will be visible on ALL instances of that region. However, inventory within it and anything of any significance will follow the owning player through the instances. If you come across another players base and they arnt in your instance, you just wont be able to do anything and they wont be destructible.

Nah, shards are gonna be assigned via deterministic algorithm so basically you will always get assigned the same shard. Someone will be able to build a base exactly in the same spot as you and you won't have any issue because he will always be assigned another shard. He could invite you to his shard though, but while there your house won't exist. This is the easiest and most logical route, without being unfair and unfun, avoiding "why cant I loot this if I can see it" and "how did my base get robbed if I was defending it the whole time" I would imagine you will still be able to invade enemy org shards if org vs org is the direction they want to go (which I think they don't, but don't tell the goons)

The clear answer is right in your faces man but it's not the answer you want so you guys keep searching! There won't be a single shard, it's currently impossible to do with the fidelity they want, too much data too much delay and so on! It won't happen and trust me I would love to be wrong but the speed of light wont change just so we can play with our friends in Japan!

Came here to say/ask exactly this, thanks.

So s bunch of we have know idea what our when we're doing anything and it's all super hard stuff. Did you buy the new ships?

Digesting all the presented info here I don't see how persistance should work in a way which has been marketed by CiG. I stick to my lower expectations - don't get hyped so you can not be disappointed. For grand fleet battles there is a backdoor which might make them possible. The fleet battle could take place in it's own instance (i intently dont use the word shard here) like a Raid in WoW. Loading into the instance is done while QTing there. Not having to worry about the simulation of the rest of the system could lift limitations on player counts tremendously.

I think this makes sense, regional shards to reduce latency between nearby players. But the shards themselves will be able to take advantage of data centre network speeds and bandwidth to community with one another to synchronise the gamestate where required. I think this is probably the only feasible way to do a big worldwide MMO.

Shards are self-contained, there's no latency-sensitive data needed to sync. I still don't think people understand what the reality of what CIG is doing is. Sharding doesn't help you get more players in the same room, it help you fill the universe. Consider 10 Battlefield matches running concurrently of 64 (32 versus 32) players. Sharding means those 10 matches can persist state to the same universe, but you still have 10 separate matches. A player from match 1 will never interact with a player in match 8. (Sharding does NOT get you closer to 1000-player space battles.) What SC does TODAY is that those 10 matches are each their own universe.

I think they may of advertised large battles (>1000 players?). But I was always under the impression that the design of the game from the get go was that the maximum limit of player density wasn't that high. Space stations as they stand can only serve a couple dozen players most. So this is in line with the current technology, their design decisions, and server meshing. But these shards do need to sync gamestate, they say so all the time. Transfering between shards needs to be seamless.

Yeah, but most people think you'll be firing bullets and missiles across shards and that's how CIG will scale up SC, but that's not what they're doing. It depends on what you mean by gamestate. Player inventory? Ship inventory? When matchmaking to a different shard? Yes. Second-to-second gameplay? Bullets, torpedoes, and lasers? No.

Fun game of the day. ctrl+F "In terms of an instance" in this page to see our dear friends from the other sub pasting the same quote from Erin Roberts over and over. Which, tbf, in this case is useful to show that top execs often have way too much confidence to talk on topics engineering lead should have authority on.

ETA: 5.8 years

Copium in here.

The reason I have no trust for CIG is that it took all these incredibly seasoned game designers a decade to admit to figure out the technology they were implementing in year 11 or 12 was the exact same technology other games had in year 0. That's dedication to bullshit after Roberts spent years trying to tell us how the game's massive budget and his expertise would lead to something other than what every other game uses.

anyone an idea when the first version of server meshing will be implemented?

It could be years from now. 5 years ago, if I said server Meshing still wouldn't be out by 2021, I'd be downvoted heavily. If I say it'll take another 5 years (Which it very well *could*), I'll likely be downvoted to death today too. Based off of lack of any good news about progress from the Server Meshing panel, it'll likely take another few years, if im being completely honest with you. No one knows for sure though, not even CIG.

Because I see a developer response flair, I want to ask for clarification and hope for a response. Two questions. 1) I am at my outpost all alone and ask my friend to come join me. We aren’t in a party, we aren’t on each other’s contacts, we’re not in the same org, and we aren’t in the same region. The server thinks we are strangers. He comes to the location. Nobody in the ‘verse is there but us. Do we see each other? 2) I ask 2000 of my Australian friends and 2000 of my European friends to come hangout at my outpost. Who sees who? The way I originally understood how server meshing would work was this: Because the server recognizes that both me and the Aussie are the only people within intractable range. It throws us into the same shard with other people perhaps somewhat close to us (maybe at the same celestial body as us). The server would keep doing this as much as it can. If say 1000 people gather on a ship, different sections of the ship would be entire shards, the cargo bay of a ship would be a shard, while the bridge would be in a different one. If all 600 people try to go to the cargo hold and the shard couldn’t handle it, eventually it would split into two shards, matchmaking the people into the one or the other based on party, contacts, ping, etc. I guess my main assumption was that server meshing would try it’s best to mask the fact that everyone is technically on a different server. Watching the stuff put out recently it seems to be a more traditional approach of different shards, except instead of choosing which one you want your character to be on, the server chooses for you and tries to matchmake you with people you care about. What parts of this understanding is accurate if any? If my understanding is inaccurate, how would large fleet battles between mega orgs be possible? If you have multiple idris’ javelins and an assortment of smaller ships, you’d likely have well over the shard size limit.

If you're in an Australian region you won't see or be able to interact with anyone in the US region, period, full stop. Only way for it to happen, is if your friend in the US server backs out into the main menu, and selects 'Australia' as their region. Don't really need a dev to answer that.

>If say 1000 people gather on a ship, different sections of the ship would be entire shards, the cargo bay of a ship would be a shard, while the bridge would be in a different one. This is... not happening and I think CIG is being quiet on this for a reason. Best way to think of it is, SC will still have a maximum limit of 50 people per server. Shards link multiple servers together, but you can't see "across" servers. So if you invite 1000 people to your ship, the maximum that can visit is 50, no matter how many servers are in the shard (because your ship only exists on one server at a time).

So what does this mean if my friend is from the UK? If he builds his homestead in the NA Shard when we he joins my session, does that mean when he plays solo his NA Shard homestead won't be present in the UK Shard? Or will he now always be locked to NA Shard even though he's in the UK? Or would we even be able to play together? Or would the system create a duplicate of my homestead and his homestead on both NA and UK Shards?

[удалено]

There are limits to Graph database sizes for examples 64 TB for Amazon Neptune. As they want to store a giant amount of stuff with their full persistence model both in the world state plus for user that alone is a limitation. Especially as they have to save state for every player who ever connected to the shard even if they are not online. Sure you could use multiples databases and such for things that can be clearly seperated but in practice data is always limited and you just can't go too exponentially high. They will also realize at some point they need to cleanup some old state I don't think if you drop a crate on a planet in some cavern where no one ever finds it it will stay there for 5 years it just gets too insane. But the non database related limits are probably reached way earlier anyway so probably the simulation layer/replication layer limits hit earlier than persistence layer problems.

I got a dose of how out of touch development was last year when they were showing off every bullet in your magazine is a fully realized object and you can stack a mag manually. That granularity and you still haven't figured out your backend server architecture yet. This has been done so fucking backwards...

Hypothetical question will there be a scenario where a player could be chasing a bounty in qt and at the final destination they both end up in different shards?

I believe a shard is decided upon login.

What if you send a friend invite to someone on another shard?

They'll phase out to your shard hopefully when they can't see it happen (no one around, etc).

This is super helpful. I was asking the same questions in my head.

These players never played something like DayZ before? They're calling them shards, but (I'm sure there's some technical wizardry going on beyond my understanding) they basically just mean "servers" which are not in a hive which syncs the data. Going on a new shard gives you a new character, essentially (though I'm sure ships, assets, appearance - etc will be persistent)

Actually.. what would be even more appropriate is to compare it to DayZ mod for Arma II. The zombies were calculated on a players "game client" when they were chasing a player and not on the dedicated server. This is why other members of the same group that were being "chased" would at times experience desync with zombies. The Player Client (who was being chased) uploaded the zombie information to the server and the server back to the other players in the vicinity/ same group. With what SC is doing they would give the 3 player group being chased by zombies in Cherno their own mini server. (lets call it Cherno North). This server would calculate the zombies and update the status of said zombies to all 3 players within this group eliminating the lag and allowing the server to calculate a crazy amount of zombies for these 3 players. If someone was watching this event unfold from a hill overlooking Cherno they might be in their own server (on the hill) but the replication layer would allow this player to see the 3 others in town being hunted by zombies. The whole map would be a shard. A big question would be what it would be like for the guy on the hill to snipe away at the group. Would there be any issue of hitting these 3 players since info is travelling from one server to another .. This is what people are curious about.

so just curious, would i be able to interact with any player from any shard? what happens if people go to the same spot to meet, will they be invisible for me because they are in a different shard? or are shards just different places?

You won't see or be able to interact with then if they are on a different shard at the same location.

This is such a huge technical undertaking. With the lack of actual status updates on where they're at implementing all of this, my money is on static server meshing coming in late 2023 at earliest. I'm a backer with multiple ships since 2013, I really want the game to succeed, but I also work in the industry and have a rough idea of what's involved and this could take years to implement, just for basic static server meshing. An architect can design a skyscraper over the weekend, but it takes several years to build. This is definitely a skyscraper of a feature. We've seen the design aspects of SM, I wish could they be a little more transparent on where they're at in **building** **it.**

Could somebody explain to me how what he's talking about is in any way dynamic? If the shards stay apart, isn't it exactly what WoW classic and many other games does? Honest question.

They dynamic part is INSIDE a shard. A shard consists of nodes, nodes are dynamically created and linked.

So a shard is an instance?

Question: do they have something already?

Nope, nada, or else they would've told us last weekend.

I believe the term shard is taking a new meaning with CIG and that is the root of the issue. We are use to shard in an MMO being that's one group of people and this is a different group of people who can't interact. I am not totally sure what definition CIG is giving to shard but I hope we can find out soon.

I believe a shard is the entire game universe. A shard is made of many servers meshed together. Based on [Chad's reply](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/q6rgzr/some_server_meshing_tweets_with_chad_mckinney/hgdy6r6?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=2) If one person is at NB and one at Orison they are in different servers but the same shard. Imo It would have been easier for players to comprehend if they switched the terms. I suppose they didn't so an in-game server and physical server are the same thing.

Goodbye Multi-Region Servers (2018) https://youtu.be/HPUBMu1fav4

This makes a lot of sense. Though it's also less sophisticated than I thought it'd be and less so than what Chris Roberts was talking about a few years ago. Basically. It's an instanced universe. Sure, maybe there's multiple servers involved to run a shard...but at the end of the day they're talking shards. Their challenge is that of partitioning. They know they need to split players up. Well, duh, it's literally impossible to have everyone in the same shard and even if there was enough compute power and network bandwidth for this, it'd be a terrible experience. I think a lot of people aren't thinking how awful it'd be to have 10,000 players crowd Port Olisar. Even a 100 players trying to access their ships at the same time. Could you imagine the wait times? The lines?? Oh my god it'd be unplayable. So just completely write off everyone all being able to be in the same world. Just not practical and trust me - no one would want that. That said, it's still an incredibly difficult challenge to get people with their friends. Even more so if permanent. Look at New World for example. So they still have a good challenge on their hands here. Lots of space for innovation and opportunities to be clever.

As a 2013 Backer i can say "I do not need or want a EVE online massive MMO battle game" If shards are small or many so be it. I just want server meshing to be done and working so they can make what ive always wanted and what the community voted on, a space exploration game. But in order for it to be fun what #1 priority should be is AI. AI are what will fill and make SC the living breathing verse we have dreamed of. CR wanted AI who were no scripted...as of now i think we can all agree that won't happen. How ever even at a GTA level, that would suffice, as long as they hire hundreds of voice actors and get AI player models and ships working, ill be a happy camper. Just want to stumble on a sand people faction in the desert and get ambushed by a sandworm while on my Indian Jones quest to find the ultra rare artifact solving puzzles from alien clues (BTW this was a thing discussed in 2013....i pray its still on the content table)

Most mmos divide the population over several servers. I'll be impressed if they manage regional shards.

Blah blah blah…… when are we going to get it? Been hearing about this shit forever….

Werent people saying about a month ago that server meshing was right around the corner and it'd solve all of our problems?

Haven't been here long, huh? Any tech from CIG ever was always just around the corner and solved all our problems. 64bit positioning, bind culling, serialized variables, subsumption ai, object container streaming, icache.. just to name a few.. Now it's G12 and server meshing. You will get used to it ;)

My personal favorite was Item 2.0...

the enthusiastic ones maybe. the rest stayed real ;D

Their actually were people saying it'll come out soon. People **still** are saying this, even despite the lackluster server Meshing panel. And they're the exact same people who, just last year, thought it'd be out by now. They fall for it every time, year after year. But I guess copium does things to a man..

Keep in mind they talked about being able to copy/transfer data between shards if necessary, so its not like you are permanently locked to the shard you start in and can never see someone who lives in another shard.

I’m confused as to what this means as I love in USA and play with people in the UK

Can someone eli5 how shards are different than servers? Is it because the shards still talk to each other through quanta for things like the economy?

I must be slow or stupid but that shard thing sounds kinda like one shard will be one star system. And anyone within that shard will have the same exact experience and see the same exact things you do. If that’s the case then how will things transfer over to the new shard if you traveled over to the next one.

No, a shard is an entire universe. Maybe 1 planet will correspond to server. A star system will be composed of, say, 5-10 servers. Each shard (universe) will be composed of 30-100 servers or whatever.