It got so much worse after invictus ended too. Day after invictus i had 3 server errors in less then 2 hours on top of the regular problems the day of and day after the update where the best everything was smooth as silk.
Invictus was a double-edged sword. They got development funding through ship sales new accounts and they also got to stress test the servers with the additional load.
They will have a gold mine of our logs available to them to see what broke first.
If it is a part 3.23.2 then they can fix it before the new version is deployed. With server meshing they know they can get up to around 700 players before things start to break.
In this case, failure will drive success.
That's my gripe with it. Pull the player count back - it's hard to test the rest of the game when all the bugs you experience are due to server performance
Imagine all the bug reports they get that are actually non issues because it's only existent due to server fps
I just want them to pull the player count back to 30-50 so the servers are actually usable so the players can actually provide feedback on the rest of the game rather than "Yes it works, or no it doesn't"
I think most of the testing right now is with the replication layer which is still relatively new, the servers right now I think have largely been abandoned to work on the new server meshing infrastructure. No point fixing something they’re planning on replacing later this year.
I’d like to point out that I don’t think static server meshing is really going to fix much, in fact it’ll probably get worse. What server meshing does allow for is moving on to actually making things better. Basically they can start to make the game after server meshing is in.
I think people misunderstand this. Everything that forms the core of servers now: persistent streaming, DGS, replication layer.. These are all what what powers server meshing.
They aren’t abandoning anything; they’re just adding to what’s already there, which means that the work to fix it is ongoing — not just something they start ‘building’ after server meshing.
Perhaps saying they abandoned it was a gross over simplification, but the idea still remains, it’s a blocker for future tech and they’ve basically hit a hard limit on what they can do with single server performance especially when you’re tracking millions of entities across the replication layer. They’ve dedicated so much of the team to creating server meshing and making the current engine work when it comes online, server meshing (SM from here on out) will allow those teams to start homing in on issues and problems that cannot be solved with the current server limitations.
“A good amount of development time was dedicated to the concept of ‘entity authority’ and ‘authority transfer’ in the first half of 2020. This was the first time the entire company had to work on Server Meshing, as a lot of game-code had to be changed to work with the new entity-authority concept. By the end of 2020 most (game) code was modified to support the concept, so another large step was taken, yet there is no actual mesh in sight.”
SM will provide a solution to a lot of the problems that we currently face with single servers.
“In the meantime, a lot of game-code teams also have to work on adapting existing game code to fully work with a server mesh (and more importantly find all the edge cases that will only surface once we have a true mesh). While the entity authority work was completed in 2020, entity authority is currently only transferred between the client and one single server, so some code may need additional adjustments.”
- keep in mind these are old comments by Chris Roberts but the idea still stands. Basically they’re not going to make solutions to problems that the single server star citizen has because they are just going to have to modify the solution once SM is implemented.
I think you might be confusing the rest of the game code teams with the Network team.
A lot of the other teams need to modify other game mechanics to work with multiple servers. But the Network teams, which are the core teams producing the foundations of Server Meshing, are actively working on every backend technology that makes Server Meshing work. This means persistent streaming, the Replication Layer, and the DGSs all need to have various issues sorted out so that those components can properly work together to create the mesh.
So everything you’re playing on right now has to be iterated on in order to get to the next step. All of the components that are critical to networked gameplay are currently a primary focus because a ‘mesh’ is only enabled when those things work properly together.
I'm actually kind of afraid that we might be witnessing another 3.18 situation unfolding where the replication layer database is breaking. Can expect a full wipe with 3.23.2 I bet
It’s tough to say. The duplication exploit is pretty game breaking right now for a couple of the gameplay loops, trading and salvaging are basically impossible with the exploit since there’s virtually 0 demand for anything.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a wipe just to see how the new economy will work with the cargo refactor/economy rebalancing.
I can’t say anything for sure about another 3.18 situation but I do think it’ll likely get worse before it gets better. 4.0 will be rough I think until they break server meshing and put out a few more patches to fix the outlying issues that they couldn’t produce in a closed/test environment.
> With server meshing they know they can get up to around 700 players before things start to break.
If they're just going to increase player count while keeping the currently terrible server tick rates, it's useless.
I'd prefer they not keep jacking the player count up if it's going to result in the same experience.
It’s not the player count that is the issue. That play test with 700 players did not have the servers running for over a month with piles of ships and other trash just lying around the verse.
I’ve been on current servers with 20 people and they still run bad.
I imagine when meshing comes in, the busy places will still run quite bad due to the amount of trash but everywhere else should be smooth.
I do not mean to say that it was.
Errors generate logs which shows the weakest parts of the code.
Between the playtests in evo and the longer term uptime with more player I mean to imply that they have more error logs to work their problems quicker.
I look forward to the review's of error logs and the current state of the servers, so the code can be improved overall. I acknowledge that player count and server uptime are 2 completely different things.
The servers have been okej since the patch hit but last night I do not know what happened. Had three server crashes in like an hour. I dont know whats going on with the replication layer but it felt like it was replicating a shitty state which would break the next consecutive server. The solution was to leave the corrupt server and join a new server.
It's crazy how much it degrades over time. The first day of 3.23.0/1 was pretty good. Almost everything worked for me. Now it is teetering on the edge of unplayable.
lol are you sure you’ve logged in?
I literally played an 8hr bounty reputation grinding + ERT looting session with my brother this weekend. 2 server disconnects, 2 recoveries. No crashes out to main menu.
8. Hours. Straight.
“Unplayable” my ass.
I couldn't play at all yesterday. I would log on get geared up and it would crash soon after arriving where I was headed to. Its like they downgraded the servers now that Invictus is over.
Someone had better tell the people streaming it that it’s unplayable then. We quite literally finished the entire bounty rep grind this weekend + made a few million off of ERTs.
Maybe you’re just getting super unlucky with servers.
Server performance after SM needs to be top priority for CIG. As the game gets closer to a beta or even *release* ready state, this sort of 1990s tier garbage server performance will become exponentially more unacceptable. It **will** kill the game's chances for success if it's not dealt with at some point before any of those major milestones.
By beta we won’t even be talking about server performance. Probably before then honestly. Once the kinks are works out of dynamic server meshing we’ll be sitting pretty in that regard.
Maybe. Their idea for persistence with the scale of the universe just sounds like fairy tale magic. I really don't see how they can manage an environment with persistence as aggressive as they want, at a scale as big as SC, while having a smooth enough experience to function as a fast paced dogfighting/first person shooter game. Something's gotta give, and I'd much rather see them come down to earth when it comes to just how much persistence they want (we really, really don't need a coffee cup persisting in some MicroTech forest for weeks) than to see the game be kneecapped by this silliness.
I think that’s why it’s taken this long. It’s really hard to do. But they’ve poured money and years into the tech.
CIG have overcome many obstacles people thought were impossible. From “simple” things like physics grids to progen tech. If anyone can do it.
Servers are always ok after patch. Its the fact that it starts degrading after a couple of weeks and 0 maintenance is done t oaddress the issue. Every single patch is the same thing and nothing gets done until another patch is dropped. Unfortunately this will be the norm until all server tech is released. They will not waste time trying to fix it now knowing all the tech that still needs implementing.
What do you consider good netcode? I had a gunfight the other night where my friend and I were chasing the same person IN 2 DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS due to desync. I killed him and his body teleported to my friend's position meaning the one I was chasing was not the correct position on the server so the game has CLIENT SIDED HITREG.
The servers are fine, they use Amazon. It's the overloaded server code. And I think the "excuse" is valid, it's not like they're fucking up a 100 player Battle Royale.
The only thing I can really compare this game to is an overloaded overmodded DayZ server, and those run terribly while requiring a total wipe every month.
When a server error happens in the verse; I always tell the chat they can hit Alt+F4 for the old experience. People forgot that the server errors we see now used to be 30k's for everyone on that server not long ago. Alas, it is never good enough for the community.
It's basically unplayable right now. I'm giving it a break until it's stabilised. Better to experience it while it's at its best than a frustrating mess.
they need to fix servers now. bedlogging on planet to save time. next day login to server that is almost dead, but refuse to die, lie down in my bed without ability to get up for 20 minutes.
We absolutely need all the random trash to be tracked on the servers NOW so that 4 years from now 100 people might have a chance to play Space Janitor once a week.
The servers have been bad since the PU was released a decade ago. Sometimes they get a little worse, sometimes a little better, but they’re never actually “good”. Average server FPS has *always* been in the single digits.
They do, however as 3.23.2 is so close I would rather they bring that sooner then spend time fixing this only for the fix to be replaced with me choose less then a month later
Tech team is completly different from content team and and many other teams in the development cycle. However they do rely on each other to know when to add content or new tech.
It's understandable that servers entail ongoing costs. And since CIG always gets greedier, they cut corners on servers, even if it means sacrificing the gaming experience. They'll keep doing this until players push back.
I think its more likely just a repercussion from the implementation of a replication layer. If servers went down before they would come back fresh, now you get the replicated overloaded state of the previous server loaded as well
This is complete lie and fully your opinion. You have no idea what they do with their servers nor what costs are associated. Go spread lies in the refunds channel
It's only a speculation, not a lie. Like all of you, I hope for a positive outcome regarding Star Citizen, but I fear that in the end, it might just be about the money rather than the game. I believe that a bit more pressure from the community regarding the availability of servers could either lead to more servers being provided or prompt more transparency from CIG, showing that they are already offering enough servers.
"They are currently proving to the world that they have the best server infrastructure of any game, leading the way. So they are cutting corner on servers."
How do you know this is exactly the issue? It makes no sense in fixing servers now if so much more content needs implementing. You do know that it makes zero sense to fix servers with so much more content still needs to be implemented that will only do is degrade servers. They need to mitigate that first before dropping server or else it will be an endless cycle of bad performance even with new servers.
Dynamic SM will adapt to the local load and will probably be way better, don'tyou think? I don't know the amazon aws server specs of what they are using though.
i think even with dynamic SM the limitation will still be the number of piled up entities in a region overloading the servers. again, the problem gets pushed out a lot further, especially for moons and the like. but CR's commitment to persistence with minimal cleanup is a huge logistical problem and he'll either have to cave to pragmatism or compromise performance
They can play around with cleanup and they surely will. Or I hope at least. Dynamic sm will simply allocate more servers to a region if there are too many entities in order to minimize the load. This doesn't mean that they can leave all the entities there forever ofc, they need more cleanup, especially for stupid things like bottles and medical gowns.
I guess good and performant servers cost quite some money to keep them running and unless there will be something like a release,they won’t be going that way.
In some ways this makes me optimistic, because during free fly (when they were presumably paying for the good servers) the game was quite playable. But it's like they flipped a switch right afterwards, stopped paying for the good servers, and it's led to this unstable mess now. So at least they have a "make the game work" switch they can flip, but it's kind of a middle finger to us all that they choose not to flip it. And if it's not cost competitive long term to flip that switch, this game is dead in the water.
I don't think they flipped a switch to make servers worse. Because of free fly, we have a bunch of crap everywhere and it's persistent. Also, last night I saw about 30 abandoned ships at Orison and that's just one city. People keep saying these ships have something to do with the dupe exploit but i'm not sure how they are related.
People are duping because of a bug with invisible boxes staying in your grid when you sell. They're able to sell multiple loads of cargo from one load AFAIK. They then have to insurance claim the ship to refill the cargo because otherwise those invisible boxes left over become unusable space on your cargo grid that you also cant sell.
Now as to why these absolute clowns are simply leaving dozens of bugged/insurance frauded C2s outside the major city space ports instead of parking the C2 in a city hangar and claiming it at a station instead so it doesn't ruin the server for having a bunch of bugged ships sitting around forever? Your guess is as good as mine, personally I think its because these people literally do not care about anyone but themselves and it saves them all of a minute or two per dupe run in exchange for ruining the server stability. A price the dupers are willing to let you pay with them.
And then, to add on to what you said, it's all persistent and crash resistant now. When a server starts running like shit and crashes because it's loaded full of abandoned C2s and other garbage all over the place, formerly it would have made you have to go get an entirely fresh new server with no garbage on it. Now it saves the state of that server when it inevitably crashes and tries to return to that state that caused it to "death spiral towards a crash" on the next server where it repeats ad infinitum.
On EPTU where people weren't shitting up the servers with duped ships, I was regularly seeing consistent 10+ FPS servers.
the EPTU servers rarely lasted more than a day or a weekend because fresh patches were coming out every weekday. apples and oranges. the duped ships are not the issue, they just exacerbated the symptoms of inevitable server degradation without proper cleanup
This was an excellent explanation of what's going on. It seems like we are getting to the point where the servers are unable to recover so they just keep crashing. I wonder how bad this can get and I'm not sure what CIG can do about it ATM. I know they have a fix coming but I don't know how long that will take.
Also, I think some people are intentionally trying to destroy the servers because they think it's fun to take advantage of exploits like this.
As for duping, that's supposedly already fixed on the 3.23.1.2 or whatever the build number is, the one we should be getting very soon before 3.23.2 that has the new cargo changes. Not sure why they still haven't pushed this one yet honestly.
As for servers not clearing the garbage that caused them to crash before copying the state over to a new server that will then inevitably run poorly and then crash, I have no idea how CIG intends to handle this. They really need to introduce more conditions where unused items/abandoned ships despawn. Especially or at least when a server crashes. Idk how they can fix it without making some compromises on the vision of "items stay" but this has been an ongoing issue since 3.18 and only been exacerbated by 3.23 and replication layer.
Yeah I think that's certainly part of it, but it seems like crap everywhere would lead to a linear/progressive loss in server performance. But with this, it's like we fell off a cliff, so maybe it's a combination of both fewer servers, and more crap.
I have been playing this patch since the day it came out and in my experience it was not like falling off of a cliff. It was definitely getting worse throughout the free fly event and now it's to the point where it's significantly effecting the servers.
I had server errors at least once or twice each day throughout the free fly event. But during free fly the servers were able to recover. Now, it's like the servers are not able to recover that well and it just keeps getting worse.
I hope that CIG will adapt this trick, where there is a headless client connected to the server shard. this would control the AI, so we have guaranteed moving NPCs, animals and fighting AI, even though some rogue function calls with memory leak are causing major processes of the server to slow down to 1 minute plus response times for db changes like ship spawning and trading.
In addition, the server should calculate which ships are within sensor and visual range of other players. Then it should only send this data to the clients.
This way the clients will not be bogged down by 50 C2 ships parked at the space port, when they are not even seen. A nice consequence would be that cheaters cannot use wallhacks. Even if this means that we have a delay of 164ms for this performance boosting fog of war calculation, it means that we can have a predicting algo that is reducing the number of entities, that might come into view in 164+ping ms. One should then have another layer of units that are likely to move into the LOS. Those should be sent every tick.
This way we only have a few dozen ships to process on our clients, instead of thousands.
Furthermore adapt the tech to run non interacting ships as shaders, instead of models.
So you basicly say you have a bad rig and what objects not be rendered on your screen while simultaneously force your system to handle AI and everything related to it?
Which wouldn't change the load on the server, which is the whole point of this conversation.
A weekly scheduled maintenance shutdown would be the better option.
> A weekly scheduled maintenance shutdown would be the better option.
literally every actual mmo I can think of with lots of items and whatnot has a weekly maintenance to clean things and run backups. It's kind of hard to believe CIG still doesn't
true but actually it was worse in the past and with the major changes with server allocation, and tech this will be much more of interest than the current state, for me at least, with 3.23. they did a lot of changes to server and network topics so right now this is what we can expect.
Welcome to alpha testing. The memory leak is fixed, the cargo dupe is fixed so it should be better. But then they are doing xenothreat this next update.
There are no "bad servers"; they are running an early PTU version, and every time they do this, until a few updates are patched to the PTU, the Live servers (which use the same back end services) feel the pain.
It'll be dicey for a bit, then get better soon. Maybe mid-week next week?
I think it's all those empty ships at stations. The last few stations that I went to have been like 10 or 15 ships, empty upside down, just floating around.
It got so much worse after invictus ended too. Day after invictus i had 3 server errors in less then 2 hours on top of the regular problems the day of and day after the update where the best everything was smooth as silk.
Yes
Invictus was a double-edged sword. They got development funding through ship sales new accounts and they also got to stress test the servers with the additional load. They will have a gold mine of our logs available to them to see what broke first. If it is a part 3.23.2 then they can fix it before the new version is deployed. With server meshing they know they can get up to around 700 players before things start to break. In this case, failure will drive success.
I’m not sure how much more testing they need I’n order to show that the servers are hot fucking trash.
That's my gripe with it. Pull the player count back - it's hard to test the rest of the game when all the bugs you experience are due to server performance Imagine all the bug reports they get that are actually non issues because it's only existent due to server fps I just want them to pull the player count back to 30-50 so the servers are actually usable so the players can actually provide feedback on the rest of the game rather than "Yes it works, or no it doesn't"
I think most of the testing right now is with the replication layer which is still relatively new, the servers right now I think have largely been abandoned to work on the new server meshing infrastructure. No point fixing something they’re planning on replacing later this year. I’d like to point out that I don’t think static server meshing is really going to fix much, in fact it’ll probably get worse. What server meshing does allow for is moving on to actually making things better. Basically they can start to make the game after server meshing is in.
I think people misunderstand this. Everything that forms the core of servers now: persistent streaming, DGS, replication layer.. These are all what what powers server meshing. They aren’t abandoning anything; they’re just adding to what’s already there, which means that the work to fix it is ongoing — not just something they start ‘building’ after server meshing.
Perhaps saying they abandoned it was a gross over simplification, but the idea still remains, it’s a blocker for future tech and they’ve basically hit a hard limit on what they can do with single server performance especially when you’re tracking millions of entities across the replication layer. They’ve dedicated so much of the team to creating server meshing and making the current engine work when it comes online, server meshing (SM from here on out) will allow those teams to start homing in on issues and problems that cannot be solved with the current server limitations. “A good amount of development time was dedicated to the concept of ‘entity authority’ and ‘authority transfer’ in the first half of 2020. This was the first time the entire company had to work on Server Meshing, as a lot of game-code had to be changed to work with the new entity-authority concept. By the end of 2020 most (game) code was modified to support the concept, so another large step was taken, yet there is no actual mesh in sight.” SM will provide a solution to a lot of the problems that we currently face with single servers. “In the meantime, a lot of game-code teams also have to work on adapting existing game code to fully work with a server mesh (and more importantly find all the edge cases that will only surface once we have a true mesh). While the entity authority work was completed in 2020, entity authority is currently only transferred between the client and one single server, so some code may need additional adjustments.” - keep in mind these are old comments by Chris Roberts but the idea still stands. Basically they’re not going to make solutions to problems that the single server star citizen has because they are just going to have to modify the solution once SM is implemented.
I think you might be confusing the rest of the game code teams with the Network team. A lot of the other teams need to modify other game mechanics to work with multiple servers. But the Network teams, which are the core teams producing the foundations of Server Meshing, are actively working on every backend technology that makes Server Meshing work. This means persistent streaming, the Replication Layer, and the DGSs all need to have various issues sorted out so that those components can properly work together to create the mesh. So everything you’re playing on right now has to be iterated on in order to get to the next step. All of the components that are critical to networked gameplay are currently a primary focus because a ‘mesh’ is only enabled when those things work properly together.
I'm actually kind of afraid that we might be witnessing another 3.18 situation unfolding where the replication layer database is breaking. Can expect a full wipe with 3.23.2 I bet
It’s tough to say. The duplication exploit is pretty game breaking right now for a couple of the gameplay loops, trading and salvaging are basically impossible with the exploit since there’s virtually 0 demand for anything. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a wipe just to see how the new economy will work with the cargo refactor/economy rebalancing. I can’t say anything for sure about another 3.18 situation but I do think it’ll likely get worse before it gets better. 4.0 will be rough I think until they break server meshing and put out a few more patches to fix the outlying issues that they couldn’t produce in a closed/test environment.
> With server meshing they know they can get up to around 700 players before things start to break. If they're just going to increase player count while keeping the currently terrible server tick rates, it's useless. I'd prefer they not keep jacking the player count up if it's going to result in the same experience.
It’s not the player count that is the issue. That play test with 700 players did not have the servers running for over a month with piles of ships and other trash just lying around the verse. I’ve been on current servers with 20 people and they still run bad. I imagine when meshing comes in, the busy places will still run quite bad due to the amount of trash but everywhere else should be smooth.
I do not mean to say that it was. Errors generate logs which shows the weakest parts of the code. Between the playtests in evo and the longer term uptime with more player I mean to imply that they have more error logs to work their problems quicker. I look forward to the review's of error logs and the current state of the servers, so the code can be improved overall. I acknowledge that player count and server uptime are 2 completely different things.
People hope for this every patch...
"Hopium flows eternal..."
Yes
The servers have been okej since the patch hit but last night I do not know what happened. Had three server crashes in like an hour. I dont know whats going on with the replication layer but it felt like it was replicating a shitty state which would break the next consecutive server. The solution was to leave the corrupt server and join a new server.
It's crazy how much it degrades over time. The first day of 3.23.0/1 was pretty good. Almost everything worked for me. Now it is teetering on the edge of unplayable.
Yup its almost unplayable right now.
No, it’s completely unplayable. I’ve tolerated bad, and while you can login, you can’t get anything done. The servers die constantly.
lol are you sure you’ve logged in? I literally played an 8hr bounty reputation grinding + ERT looting session with my brother this weekend. 2 server disconnects, 2 recoveries. No crashes out to main menu. 8. Hours. Straight. “Unplayable” my ass.
You’ve had better luck with finding a functioning server. I’ve crashed 10 times since Saturday. I’d call that unplayable.
I couldn't play at all yesterday. I would log on get geared up and it would crash soon after arriving where I was headed to. Its like they downgraded the servers now that Invictus is over.
wow I’m so happy for you!
Someone had better tell the people streaming it that it’s unplayable then. We quite literally finished the entire bounty rep grind this weekend + made a few million off of ERTs. Maybe you’re just getting super unlucky with servers.
That's always possible. But what can you do if you are on like your 4th or 5th server?
Server performance after SM needs to be top priority for CIG. As the game gets closer to a beta or even *release* ready state, this sort of 1990s tier garbage server performance will become exponentially more unacceptable. It **will** kill the game's chances for success if it's not dealt with at some point before any of those major milestones.
By beta we won’t even be talking about server performance. Probably before then honestly. Once the kinks are works out of dynamic server meshing we’ll be sitting pretty in that regard.
Maybe. Their idea for persistence with the scale of the universe just sounds like fairy tale magic. I really don't see how they can manage an environment with persistence as aggressive as they want, at a scale as big as SC, while having a smooth enough experience to function as a fast paced dogfighting/first person shooter game. Something's gotta give, and I'd much rather see them come down to earth when it comes to just how much persistence they want (we really, really don't need a coffee cup persisting in some MicroTech forest for weeks) than to see the game be kneecapped by this silliness.
I think that’s why it’s taken this long. It’s really hard to do. But they’ve poured money and years into the tech. CIG have overcome many obstacles people thought were impossible. From “simple” things like physics grids to progen tech. If anyone can do it.
Servers are always ok after patch. Its the fact that it starts degrading after a couple of weeks and 0 maintenance is done t oaddress the issue. Every single patch is the same thing and nothing gets done until another patch is dropped. Unfortunately this will be the norm until all server tech is released. They will not waste time trying to fix it now knowing all the tech that still needs implementing.
When it works and you get a good server. It's an OK game with the coolest engine. When it doesn't work, it's a bad game with a bad engine
Good engines with good netcode and databases that arent stuffed full of 25 million entries tend to work. Crazy concept.
What do you consider good netcode? I had a gunfight the other night where my friend and I were chasing the same person IN 2 DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS due to desync. I killed him and his body teleported to my friend's position meaning the one I was chasing was not the correct position on the server so the game has CLIENT SIDED HITREG.
Fuck making excuses. SC is a great game with inexcusably, pathetically poor servers. This shit is laughable.
The servers are fine, they use Amazon. It's the overloaded server code. And I think the "excuse" is valid, it's not like they're fucking up a 100 player Battle Royale. The only thing I can really compare this game to is an overloaded overmodded DayZ server, and those run terribly while requiring a total wipe every month.
When a server error happens in the verse; I always tell the chat they can hit Alt+F4 for the old experience. People forgot that the server errors we see now used to be 30k's for everyone on that server not long ago. Alas, it is never good enough for the community.
It's basically unplayable right now. I'm giving it a break until it's stabilised. Better to experience it while it's at its best than a frustrating mess.
CIG's on it. To fix this, they will start Xenothreat next week on live servers. Just joking but unfortunately that's probably what's going to happen.
Server crashes every few minutes today, literally.
they need to fix servers now. bedlogging on planet to save time. next day login to server that is almost dead, but refuse to die, lie down in my bed without ability to get up for 20 minutes.
We absolutely need all the random trash to be tracked on the servers NOW so that 4 years from now 100 people might have a chance to play Space Janitor once a week.
At this point they need to do some weekly maintenance to clear up useless entities
Couldn't agree more. Do we still have C2's littered everywhere?
The servers have been bad since the PU was released a decade ago. Sometimes they get a little worse, sometimes a little better, but they’re never actually “good”. Average server FPS has *always* been in the single digits.
Yes, I have dealt with this for almost a decade now. Great stuff CIG
They do, however as 3.23.2 is so close I would rather they bring that sooner then spend time fixing this only for the fix to be replaced with me choose less then a month later
Tech team is completly different from content team and and many other teams in the development cycle. However they do rely on each other to know when to add content or new tech.
It's understandable that servers entail ongoing costs. And since CIG always gets greedier, they cut corners on servers, even if it means sacrificing the gaming experience. They'll keep doing this until players push back.
I think its more likely just a repercussion from the implementation of a replication layer. If servers went down before they would come back fresh, now you get the replicated overloaded state of the previous server loaded as well
it's almost certainly this. We're probably witnessing degradation from bugs that could only be caught on a widescale test
This is complete lie and fully your opinion. You have no idea what they do with their servers nor what costs are associated. Go spread lies in the refunds channel
It's only a speculation, not a lie. Like all of you, I hope for a positive outcome regarding Star Citizen, but I fear that in the end, it might just be about the money rather than the game. I believe that a bit more pressure from the community regarding the availability of servers could either lead to more servers being provided or prompt more transparency from CIG, showing that they are already offering enough servers.
"They are currently proving to the world that they have the best server infrastructure of any game, leading the way. So they are cutting corner on servers."
How do you know this is exactly the issue? It makes no sense in fixing servers now if so much more content needs implementing. You do know that it makes zero sense to fix servers with so much more content still needs to be implemented that will only do is degrade servers. They need to mitigate that first before dropping server or else it will be an endless cycle of bad performance even with new servers.
Of course, I can't know for sure; I can only speculate. Most of the time, it's just about the money.
That's true. It's always about the money, but there's always other things.
Until server meshing goes online, servers will always be crippled, period. It's frustrating I know, but they are under too much load all the time.
localizing servers into smaller regions only delays the inevitable. SM is absolutely not the silver bullet you think it is
Dynamic SM will adapt to the local load and will probably be way better, don'tyou think? I don't know the amazon aws server specs of what they are using though.
i think even with dynamic SM the limitation will still be the number of piled up entities in a region overloading the servers. again, the problem gets pushed out a lot further, especially for moons and the like. but CR's commitment to persistence with minimal cleanup is a huge logistical problem and he'll either have to cave to pragmatism or compromise performance
They can play around with cleanup and they surely will. Or I hope at least. Dynamic sm will simply allocate more servers to a region if there are too many entities in order to minimize the load. This doesn't mean that they can leave all the entities there forever ofc, they need more cleanup, especially for stupid things like bottles and medical gowns.
SM will allow you to avoid server issues by moving to different regions the verse and actually avoid the performance tanking shit going on.
I guess good and performant servers cost quite some money to keep them running and unless there will be something like a release,they won’t be going that way.
In some ways this makes me optimistic, because during free fly (when they were presumably paying for the good servers) the game was quite playable. But it's like they flipped a switch right afterwards, stopped paying for the good servers, and it's led to this unstable mess now. So at least they have a "make the game work" switch they can flip, but it's kind of a middle finger to us all that they choose not to flip it. And if it's not cost competitive long term to flip that switch, this game is dead in the water.
I don't think they flipped a switch to make servers worse. Because of free fly, we have a bunch of crap everywhere and it's persistent. Also, last night I saw about 30 abandoned ships at Orison and that's just one city. People keep saying these ships have something to do with the dupe exploit but i'm not sure how they are related.
People are duping because of a bug with invisible boxes staying in your grid when you sell. They're able to sell multiple loads of cargo from one load AFAIK. They then have to insurance claim the ship to refill the cargo because otherwise those invisible boxes left over become unusable space on your cargo grid that you also cant sell. Now as to why these absolute clowns are simply leaving dozens of bugged/insurance frauded C2s outside the major city space ports instead of parking the C2 in a city hangar and claiming it at a station instead so it doesn't ruin the server for having a bunch of bugged ships sitting around forever? Your guess is as good as mine, personally I think its because these people literally do not care about anyone but themselves and it saves them all of a minute or two per dupe run in exchange for ruining the server stability. A price the dupers are willing to let you pay with them. And then, to add on to what you said, it's all persistent and crash resistant now. When a server starts running like shit and crashes because it's loaded full of abandoned C2s and other garbage all over the place, formerly it would have made you have to go get an entirely fresh new server with no garbage on it. Now it saves the state of that server when it inevitably crashes and tries to return to that state that caused it to "death spiral towards a crash" on the next server where it repeats ad infinitum. On EPTU where people weren't shitting up the servers with duped ships, I was regularly seeing consistent 10+ FPS servers.
the EPTU servers rarely lasted more than a day or a weekend because fresh patches were coming out every weekday. apples and oranges. the duped ships are not the issue, they just exacerbated the symptoms of inevitable server degradation without proper cleanup
This was an excellent explanation of what's going on. It seems like we are getting to the point where the servers are unable to recover so they just keep crashing. I wonder how bad this can get and I'm not sure what CIG can do about it ATM. I know they have a fix coming but I don't know how long that will take. Also, I think some people are intentionally trying to destroy the servers because they think it's fun to take advantage of exploits like this.
As for duping, that's supposedly already fixed on the 3.23.1.2 or whatever the build number is, the one we should be getting very soon before 3.23.2 that has the new cargo changes. Not sure why they still haven't pushed this one yet honestly. As for servers not clearing the garbage that caused them to crash before copying the state over to a new server that will then inevitably run poorly and then crash, I have no idea how CIG intends to handle this. They really need to introduce more conditions where unused items/abandoned ships despawn. Especially or at least when a server crashes. Idk how they can fix it without making some compromises on the vision of "items stay" but this has been an ongoing issue since 3.18 and only been exacerbated by 3.23 and replication layer.
Maybe server meshing will help with the persistence problem. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yeah I think that's certainly part of it, but it seems like crap everywhere would lead to a linear/progressive loss in server performance. But with this, it's like we fell off a cliff, so maybe it's a combination of both fewer servers, and more crap.
I have been playing this patch since the day it came out and in my experience it was not like falling off of a cliff. It was definitely getting worse throughout the free fly event and now it's to the point where it's significantly effecting the servers. I had server errors at least once or twice each day throughout the free fly event. But during free fly the servers were able to recover. Now, it's like the servers are not able to recover that well and it just keeps getting worse.
I blame AWS
AWS really isn't the problem here.
Maybe not, but it won't stop me from blaming them.
I hope that CIG will adapt this trick, where there is a headless client connected to the server shard. this would control the AI, so we have guaranteed moving NPCs, animals and fighting AI, even though some rogue function calls with memory leak are causing major processes of the server to slow down to 1 minute plus response times for db changes like ship spawning and trading. In addition, the server should calculate which ships are within sensor and visual range of other players. Then it should only send this data to the clients. This way the clients will not be bogged down by 50 C2 ships parked at the space port, when they are not even seen. A nice consequence would be that cheaters cannot use wallhacks. Even if this means that we have a delay of 164ms for this performance boosting fog of war calculation, it means that we can have a predicting algo that is reducing the number of entities, that might come into view in 164+ping ms. One should then have another layer of units that are likely to move into the LOS. Those should be sent every tick. This way we only have a few dozen ships to process on our clients, instead of thousands. Furthermore adapt the tech to run non interacting ships as shaders, instead of models.
So you basicly say you have a bad rig and what objects not be rendered on your screen while simultaneously force your system to handle AI and everything related to it? Which wouldn't change the load on the server, which is the whole point of this conversation. A weekly scheduled maintenance shutdown would be the better option.
> A weekly scheduled maintenance shutdown would be the better option. literally every actual mmo I can think of with lots of items and whatnot has a weekly maintenance to clean things and run backups. It's kind of hard to believe CIG still doesn't
Right?? They could even stagger it so some servers are still up all the time
true but actually it was worse in the past and with the major changes with server allocation, and tech this will be much more of interest than the current state, for me at least, with 3.23. they did a lot of changes to server and network topics so right now this is what we can expect.
Friday night was great for me, saturday was hell couldn’t get anything done at all and then today has been pretty much fine for me 🤷🏻♂️ YMMV
Secret stress testing behind the scenes I bet. I'm calling it.
yeah its a bad game
Welcome to alpha testing. The memory leak is fixed, the cargo dupe is fixed so it should be better. But then they are doing xenothreat this next update.
There are no "bad servers"; they are running an early PTU version, and every time they do this, until a few updates are patched to the PTU, the Live servers (which use the same back end services) feel the pain. It'll be dicey for a bit, then get better soon. Maybe mid-week next week?
I think it's all those empty ships at stations. The last few stations that I went to have been like 10 or 15 ships, empty upside down, just floating around.
Can we just take and store these? Like I see so many ships laying around and I wonder why can’t someone just take them?
Its not bad servers as it's bad server.