[yuppiepuppie]

I know the words on this site. But I dont know what they mean. "Quantum Economy Scaling", "Subsumption AI", "pCache". Can someone ELI5?

~Im assuming this has to do with a service mesh and kubernetes of some sort. But I'm a bit lost.~

Edit: Ah! Seems like this is a game. But I still have no idea what any of this means :)

[AlexandrB]

These are basically marketing terms meant to try to explain why after 10 years and $600 million dollars in "crowdfunding" the game is still in alpha.

[gumballindie]

I too wish to find such gullible investors to fund me for 10 years of alpha building.

[chii]

you just need to sell the vision well enough. The so-called investors are not buying for financial gain, but for that vision.

It's a pretty cool vision, but it's just unlikely to succeed in my eyes, and that's why i didn't buy in.

[mrguyorama]

It's impossible to please the people who have bought in, because they bought into something impossible to make. They don't want a fully featured MMO space opera, or a new Wing Commander, but rather some vague dream they can't get away from. It's probably just nostalgia for most of them, chasing the high of childhood that they misattribute to Wing Commander, which was a fun series of games but in no way justifies the support Chris Roberts has had.

[dfc]

Wow! I thought $600M was an exaggeration, it's not: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

[Cthulhu_]

Star Citizen is a big planned online MMO. This page is about their current and planned back-end server architecture, where they want to have thousands of players online in a single virtual world, along with all of the random items - from ships to bits of trash - that float around in space visible to everyone.

Ambitious and such; the only other game I know of that tried it was Eve Online, which has tens of thousands of players in the same world, but which is limited to hundreds of players that can actually see each other.

[Goronmon]

This page is about their current and planned back-end server architecture, where they want to have thousands of players online in a single virtual world, along with all of the random items - from ships to bits of trash - that float around in space visible to everyone.

I would be surprised if they reached "hundreds" of players in a single instance. I don't think thousands is ever going to be attainable for them. Unless they are somehow able to make some sudden breakthrough that's alluded them in the last decade plus of development.

[password-234]

They've already exceeded the 100 player limit (previously 50). Theres rumours they're going to increase this to 200+.

[monlockandkey]

I have been in 1000 player battles in Eve Online. It is possible because the game operates in ticks (increments) of 1 second.

[beowulfey]

And doesn’t time dilation occur with lots of concurrent events?

[causi]

You sure about that? There are several EVE battles that involved multiple thousands of players at once.

[bluescrn]

In large EVE battles you don't really see ships, you see lots of little boxes on the HUD and a list of hostile targets on the overview window.

Combat is all about range, and if you're close enough to actually see the enemy ship models, you're probably about to explode.

I'll be amazed if Star Citizen ever comes close to the scale of EVE battles, though. There's so many technical challenges in making an MMO scale, especially when a game is so focused on graphical fidelity.

(Then again, EVE is a 20-year-old game at this point, and was designed for the limited PCs and bandwidth of the time. But I'm assuming that they're using modern top-end hardware for the servers, and they still struggle with the biggest battles)

[sickofparadox]

Those battles all take place under .25 or lower time dilation so that the servers can handle the load. Star Citizen plans on having a massive player count per shard under full normal time.

[Guvante]

O(n^2) is a pain. Just updating everyone with what happened in a tick requires 4,000,000 data points a tick at 2,000 players.

At 10 Hz that is 40 million updates a second.

There are caches and prediction that can help but I ignore all gameplay in that number, it is just flying around.

[empath-nirvana]

How do they plan on doing that though. There are like fundamental computer science problems to be solved, and it's not just like a problem you can throw a faster computer at.

[mrguyorama]

"Trust us, we picked cryengine, a game engine with near zero multiplayer tech, for a game that is literally trying to break new ground in computer science. We definitely know what we are doing, and Chris Roberts is totally a great project manager that hasn't come close to killing nearly every project he has been in charge of, including several space games."

That's how.

[causi]

RSI's "plans" are less reliable than a politician's campaign promises.

[droopyEyelids]

It's a game that will never be completed, almost a kickstarter as performance art.

The words they choose must serve the goal of their performance first, conveying technical meaning is a optional secondary requirement

[BowBun]

There's a massive set of articles pertaining to the topics. You won't be able to grok all the terms from a simple graphic, it's a massive project.

[m0llusk]

Star Citizen is a space simulation game in a large and persistent simulated universe.

Quantum is a system for simulating activity with economic impacts and determines how much of raw material or assembled products are available and where, how much things cost, how busy and how dangerous or safe space travel lanes are, and other such aspects of economic scaling.

Subsumption AI is used to drive NPC behavior up close. The game is supposed to have a population that is 90% AI NPCs that drive economic variation and action in general. This makes the game world seem alive even if there are no players currently with you in game. The NPCs have the ability to decide what to do, how to move around, make jokes and idle banter, and can use various equipment in the game as well as fight either in person or as spaceship pilots.

Not totally sure about pCache but it appears to be used on the server to capture changes to state in the universe that should be stored persistently. This is part of the server container streaming feature which allows servers to stream in areas and sets of objects as players approach and then stream them out when they are left empty for a time.

[infosecSnowman]

they're looking to use AI to simulate an economy, the "quantum" is just what they're calling their tech.

They have several youtube videos on their channel where their game director has come out to talk about these projects in a technical manner. It's pretty neat.

[I say these things as a backer patiently waiting for more game]

[m3kw9]

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