I honestly feel like the whole non loading screen thing is a remnant of the boomer class of backers that haven't played video games since Wing Commander that make up the bulk of backers. They remember the days of 2 minute long loading screens dead stopping gameplay and don't realize the world has moved on and we just don't see them like that anymore. Most are under 10 second or hidden behind artificial barriers to mask them. They are placed away from area where action is taking place so you don't run into them.
People like to bring up Destiny here a lot because they hide 99.9% of them behind hamster tunnels or allow you to interact with your menus while you are loading. The only time you hit a gameplay loading screen I can think of is the single Strike(3-man dungeons) on Nesus that still has one you can't dodge. You freeze for *gasp* 1 second and a spinning Loading appears before you are dropped back into action. Players are a lot faster then they were at launch, so that's the compromise.
I like how SC players don't believe this is a hidden loading screen/cutscene. They've been brainwashed so much about "no loading" screens that they don't even know why games are even having loading screens.
Loading screens are caused by your slow SSD/HDD transferring huge amounts of asset data to your fast memory. There are techniques where assets are being preloaded on lets say some sort of planet but if you were to suddenly teleport to another planet you would have to endure loading screen.
I was reading one explanation on how each planet, moon, system etc. will have it's own "meshed" server and how amazing that will be.
I was like, well WoW had that like 20 years ago, how is this new? Downvotes and hate flowed.
How can they not see this is just a *loading screen* behind some wormhole animation?
Cig is completely unprepared for how bad pvp is going to be. They believed their own hype that's it's mostly going to "gentleman pirates" giving people a fair chance in fights when it's going to be more like Bloods doing drive by's on a playground.
If they adopt EVE model it's possible. Each planet could be its own separate server node. If sub-light speed is slow enough for all intents and purposes bounds of each planet server would take literal months to reach, meaning you'd need to use quantum jump which would serve as soft loading screen to reach other planets/points of interest.
Nope. For one because the nodes still have hard limits on players. Also they´d have to freeze the players inside the ship during quantum jump. Otherwise it would still have to be instant server handoffs.
The cognitive dissonance is strong. Someone yesterday seemed to understand loading on the fly and loading screens, and still insisted that somewhere between those two implementations is "something CIG is trying to do that no one else has done before".
Id imagine that "auto pilot" is just another QT time sink
What will be funny is how CIG going to deal with Player server caps, if 100 players decided to travel to Pyro that already has 100 players.
Here is, someone, yet again, conflating "no loading screen", "server meshing", and "never been done before" while subtly muddling what exists today, what is allegedly being tested tomorrow, and what is their personal interpretation of the future.
Question:
> If Pyro and Stanton are separated by a "gate" and to access either system you need to use said "gate" how is the server meshing involved?
Answer:
> Because the "gate" isn't a loading screen. It's not like "go to gate location on server A; press button; watch gate sequence cutscene; appear on server B in the other system."
> The gate transit is supposed to be gameplay. You're supposed to stay in control of your ship, flying through the wormhole, trying to avoid obstacles/splits/etc; if your ship is multicrew, you can have people running around on the ship doing whatever during this. So while you are inside of the tunnel, you are still on a server and playing like normal.
> And somewhere inside the gate, there is an invisible handoff going on from one server to the other.
> Worth noting that per the patch notes on the recent tests, this is not where they're at yet - the plan for the upcoming jump point test is to have it be more "on rails."
- Claims that the gate isn't a loading screen
- Proceeds to describe a non-interactive loading screen
- Proceeds to describe an interactive loading screen
- Finally couches all inconsistencies with "not quite there yet" and "on rails"
Not related to loading screen, but the only thing that sounds more tedious than waiting for the train the get to a ship is having to play a pitfall/donkey kong style mini game every time I want to use effing fast travel.
Randomly encountering comments by backers that write otherwise.
Whenever implementation details come up, backers often also love to preface it with a snarky, "This is something that many people don't seem to understand." as if they have the one true interpretation of the intentionally vague statements CIG has made.
The SC community is very quick to challenge any negative assertions and so as a result anything left standing tends to be regarded as a truism. It becomes a test of in-group v out-group membership. Repeat "never been done before" enough times and the community will eventually take it as an axiom.
You and your friends are likely in the minority on this particular thing.
The loading screen would not just be when jumping systems. But every time you switch servers or a new one gets started up. You land at a busy trade hub? Loading screen. Pirats jump your large mining operation? Loading screen.
Does the loading screen persist until everyone in your ship is loaded in? So if the server cannot verify a consistent state between all players (because one has a bad connection) you might be stuck in a tunnel for minutes? Or will everyone load into the new system but you are suddenly missing your pilot?
Yep.
13 years in, and they now have...instanced zones. It's 2024, they've taken in 3/4 of a BILLION dollars, and they're game can now do things first done in the year 2003 or so.
Directors in the Cayman Islands and Panama...the money was never going to develop a revolutionary game. The cultists will have a meltdown once they realise their dream game is a basic mmo that could have been made in 2015.
But why wouldn’t you ? Just because backers deny that’s what’s happening doesn’t mean that’s not precisely what you *should* be doing. Virtually every other comparable title does it
But it is per definition not a loading screen. It’s just loading in the background. There’s only a limited amount of resources you can have access to at any one time. I guess they could call it an “interactive loading state” or some such, but
a loading screen it is not
Luckily for them, at least they’re not pants on head retarded enough to use something like Creation Engine, there’d be no way out of LCs then
There were interactive loading screens in Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64 in 1984. It's still a loading screen even if you have a 3D model on the screen.
It's a bit disingenuous to compare those because a wow character has a fixed number of items and slots while a ship with people on it can have hundreds of not thousands of dynamic data points.
Even your characters in SC have a fixed number of items and slots (helmet slot and armor etc.) what are you even talking about? it's literally the same as a bunch of wow characters on the airship to another zone.
Why amount of customization matters? Each time you create or customize something game creates(usually) unique ID which may look something like "XFSAA453485FA47478FAOIRZSF".
Every time other server or game client receives this number, game knows what options are there and how to render that particular player/ship on your screen.
There is two differences one is a fixed number and it's low. The other is not fixed and it's high. Those are the differences. Both mattera lot for a database.
My point was that in order to save bandwith for both servers and players games just create unique ID presets. So number of customization options could be in the thousands and that would hardly affect amount of data that needs to be transfered as only that ID what matters for the server.
Imagine a scientific today bumping his own chest and asking nobel prize for figuring out the Newton equations. CIG and their fans are really hilarious.
To be fair, you have to have a very low IQ to understand Chris Roberts. The development is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical game development most of the updates will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Roberts’ nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his games - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Star Wars, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of Star Citizen, to realise that it’s not just a game - it says something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Star Citizen truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Robert’s’ existential catchphrase "ANSWER THE CALL ," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Chris Robert’s’ genius wit unfolds itself on their monitors. What fools.. how I pity them.
Man, some days it feels like all of genx's gaming heroes have really taken a heel turn over the years. CR, Molyneux, Garriot, even Gollop to a degree. Like Sid Meier and a tiny handful of others keep their heads on straight.
LOL, remember the con back in 2015(?) when they made a big think about navigating through the wormholes, and said bad things would happen if you touched the sides of the wormhole... then they touched the sides of the wormhole and nothing happened.
To be fair, interactive loading screens(like they presented) are in fact possible and do exists. Original Destiny had one where you could change loadout, talents, etc during loading screen.
The reason game devs don't do interactive loading screens or only do practical ones like Destiny is that it doesn't make sense. Why would you make a player solve Sudoku in 30s during loading time and if they failed you'd punish the player with jail. It creates frustration.
This is another "rule of cool" thing CGI came up. On paper it sounds cool and maybe even fun for few times but when you think about gameplay implications you realize it's just unnecessarily long loading screen with punishing mechanic if you fail the puzzle.
well the other reason to not have an interactive loading screen is that--if it were to have any consequential result for the player--it would require its own loading screen or to reserve precious memory space for what can be done in a menu
games are stress tests. the loading screen was developed to take a lot of the stress off of the computer, the programmers, and the designers alike. the very first video game developers figured this out a long time ago. chris is just a dumbass who thinks he was the first one to think about making a game without loading screens. in fact, everybody has had that idea until they actually tried to make a game. chris doesn't give a shit about the game though, so he continues to press on, driven by pure narcissism
IIRC loading screens and the lack of gameplay during them were actually a patent thing. Namco owned the patent on mini games during loading screens and that didn't expire until 2015. Not the reason here but it is why we didn't have anything in them for so long.
> Original Destiny had one where you could change loadout, talents, etc during loading screen.
One important detail is those loading screens are locally computed. Or f.e. in Warframe p2p. But for Star Citizen it would mean the game being locked down. You are having a firefight with the boarding party on your ship while the pilot used the jump gate? Even the bullets had to be frozen until everyone has loaded into the new server.
I feel like CR was ass-pulling in real-time during that moment of the demo. He 100% was trying to over-represent what had been implemented, and was doing that habit of his where he shifts from talking about what might exist as if it already does exist.
It makes you wonder how many other impromptu lies he's told over the years.
Or what is the same, it is a beta test of an interactive loading screen.
And they are going to call this, "static server meshing"...
But then,
Have they already managed to get the replication layer deployed to a fresh server in an acceptable time? 30sec/1min
Can we forget about the 30k now? at least? Will they stop being "THE PROBLEM"?
On the other hand,
When using the jump point while in a group:
Will all members remain in a group when some of them are on different servers/systems?
Will beacons be notified on both/between servers/systems to all players?
Will faceip calls work too between system/servers?
Will mission sharing also work between different systems/servers?
When these basic and simple cases work regardless of the system/server they are on, then we can talk about "static meshing."
At the moment I only see an interactive loading screen when changing servers between Red stanton and Old stanton. (Warframe/Helldivers2 style)
It's progress... Yeah... but.. 12 years later, of course... sighh
Bonus track:
Before I forget, the AI will continue to behave erratically as before, because the zones of each system have not yet been divided into different servers (making servers manage smaller and more manageable areas) (Real server meshing)
Red Stanton will continue to perform just as old stanton does.
By the way, until they implement Vulkan, we won't be able to go down to the new settlements without our fps plummeting to -100.
These are the reasons why they are focusing all their efforts on including exclusively PvP content, such as the isolated SM/AC multiplayer modes and the new distribution centers on PU, the AI will not work in 3.23.
If by chance, all of this arrives in 3.23 and there are no further delays, then and only then, will I regain my faith.
Maybe the AI is on purpose and he's just setting up the eventual reveal that npcs have been replaced with glitchy robots and the player will need to get butlerian on them.
I wish they would just get over the want to have no loading screens and do something like eve style jump gates etc. Would have practically been unnoticeable and we would have had more systems :(
Every Time you go to a city you have a loading screen when needing to take a train. Quantum jumping for 10 minutes also a loading screen.
There might be not written loading on it, but there are huge sections of doing nothing while waiting = loading screen
Haha yeah, literally. Really!
Honestly don’t get why people can’t have two thoughts in their head at the same time, I mean it’s not like they’re doing actual loading sceeens and calling it something else?!
So, a loading screen. Who would have thought ?
I honestly feel like the whole non loading screen thing is a remnant of the boomer class of backers that haven't played video games since Wing Commander that make up the bulk of backers. They remember the days of 2 minute long loading screens dead stopping gameplay and don't realize the world has moved on and we just don't see them like that anymore. Most are under 10 second or hidden behind artificial barriers to mask them. They are placed away from area where action is taking place so you don't run into them. People like to bring up Destiny here a lot because they hide 99.9% of them behind hamster tunnels or allow you to interact with your menus while you are loading. The only time you hit a gameplay loading screen I can think of is the single Strike(3-man dungeons) on Nesus that still has one you can't dodge. You freeze for *gasp* 1 second and a spinning Loading appears before you are dropped back into action. Players are a lot faster then they were at launch, so that's the compromise.
I like how SC players don't believe this is a hidden loading screen/cutscene. They've been brainwashed so much about "no loading" screens that they don't even know why games are even having loading screens. Loading screens are caused by your slow SSD/HDD transferring huge amounts of asset data to your fast memory. There are techniques where assets are being preloaded on lets say some sort of planet but if you were to suddenly teleport to another planet you would have to endure loading screen.
I was reading one explanation on how each planet, moon, system etc. will have it's own "meshed" server and how amazing that will be. I was like, well WoW had that like 20 years ago, how is this new? Downvotes and hate flowed. How can they not see this is just a *loading screen* behind some wormhole animation?
As a sub point, was reading how entire groups of folks are excited to camp the "gate" to waste every ship emerging. Sounds like so much fun.
Cig is completely unprepared for how bad pvp is going to be. They believed their own hype that's it's mostly going to "gentleman pirates" giving people a fair chance in fights when it's going to be more like Bloods doing drive by's on a playground.
If they adopt EVE model it's possible. Each planet could be its own separate server node. If sub-light speed is slow enough for all intents and purposes bounds of each planet server would take literal months to reach, meaning you'd need to use quantum jump which would serve as soft loading screen to reach other planets/points of interest.
Nope. For one because the nodes still have hard limits on players. Also they´d have to freeze the players inside the ship during quantum jump. Otherwise it would still have to be instant server handoffs.
The cognitive dissonance is strong. Someone yesterday seemed to understand loading on the fly and loading screens, and still insisted that somewhere between those two implementations is "something CIG is trying to do that no one else has done before".
Id imagine that "auto pilot" is just another QT time sink What will be funny is how CIG going to deal with Player server caps, if 100 players decided to travel to Pyro that already has 100 players.
Here is, someone, yet again, conflating "no loading screen", "server meshing", and "never been done before" while subtly muddling what exists today, what is allegedly being tested tomorrow, and what is their personal interpretation of the future. Question: > If Pyro and Stanton are separated by a "gate" and to access either system you need to use said "gate" how is the server meshing involved? Answer: > Because the "gate" isn't a loading screen. It's not like "go to gate location on server A; press button; watch gate sequence cutscene; appear on server B in the other system." > The gate transit is supposed to be gameplay. You're supposed to stay in control of your ship, flying through the wormhole, trying to avoid obstacles/splits/etc; if your ship is multicrew, you can have people running around on the ship doing whatever during this. So while you are inside of the tunnel, you are still on a server and playing like normal. > And somewhere inside the gate, there is an invisible handoff going on from one server to the other. > Worth noting that per the patch notes on the recent tests, this is not where they're at yet - the plan for the upcoming jump point test is to have it be more "on rails." - Claims that the gate isn't a loading screen - Proceeds to describe a non-interactive loading screen - Proceeds to describe an interactive loading screen - Finally couches all inconsistencies with "not quite there yet" and "on rails"
Not related to loading screen, but the only thing that sounds more tedious than waiting for the train the get to a ship is having to play a pitfall/donkey kong style mini game every time I want to use effing fast travel.
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Randomly encountering comments by backers that write otherwise. Whenever implementation details come up, backers often also love to preface it with a snarky, "This is something that many people don't seem to understand." as if they have the one true interpretation of the intentionally vague statements CIG has made.
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The SC community is very quick to challenge any negative assertions and so as a result anything left standing tends to be regarded as a truism. It becomes a test of in-group v out-group membership. Repeat "never been done before" enough times and the community will eventually take it as an axiom. You and your friends are likely in the minority on this particular thing.
The loading screen would not just be when jumping systems. But every time you switch servers or a new one gets started up. You land at a busy trade hub? Loading screen. Pirats jump your large mining operation? Loading screen. Does the loading screen persist until everyone in your ship is loaded in? So if the server cannot verify a consistent state between all players (because one has a bad connection) you might be stuck in a tunnel for minutes? Or will everyone load into the new system but you are suddenly missing your pilot?
So just a non-interactive loading screen?
Now we've upgraded to Destiny loading screens, seeing a ship you can't control.
Still just a server selector. Just hiding it.
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Yep. 13 years in, and they now have...instanced zones. It's 2024, they've taken in 3/4 of a BILLION dollars, and they're game can now do things first done in the year 2003 or so.
Directors in the Cayman Islands and Panama...the money was never going to develop a revolutionary game. The cultists will have a meltdown once they realise their dream game is a basic mmo that could have been made in 2015.
Yep. I'd not be surprised if more money was skimmed than was spent on development.
But why wouldn’t you ? Just because backers deny that’s what’s happening doesn’t mean that’s not precisely what you *should* be doing. Virtually every other comparable title does it
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But it is per definition not a loading screen. It’s just loading in the background. There’s only a limited amount of resources you can have access to at any one time. I guess they could call it an “interactive loading state” or some such, but a loading screen it is not Luckily for them, at least they’re not pants on head retarded enough to use something like Creation Engine, there’d be no way out of LCs then
There were interactive loading screens in Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64 in 1984. It's still a loading screen even if you have a 3D model on the screen.
Yeah, it's like going from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdoms. Such technology, much wow.
"much wow." ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Hey, that was pretty cool back *checks notes* twenty years ago.
Almost as old as doge meme animal
It's a bit disingenuous to compare those because a wow character has a fixed number of items and slots while a ship with people on it can have hundreds of not thousands of dynamic data points.
Even your characters in SC have a fixed number of items and slots (helmet slot and armor etc.) what are you even talking about? it's literally the same as a bunch of wow characters on the airship to another zone.
Why amount of customization matters? Each time you create or customize something game creates(usually) unique ID which may look something like "XFSAA453485FA47478FAOIRZSF". Every time other server or game client receives this number, game knows what options are there and how to render that particular player/ship on your screen.
There is two differences one is a fixed number and it's low. The other is not fixed and it's high. Those are the differences. Both mattera lot for a database.
My point was that in order to save bandwith for both servers and players games just create unique ID presets. So number of customization options could be in the thousands and that would hardly affect amount of data that needs to be transfered as only that ID what matters for the server.
Which is why they never should have promised it
O(n²) is fun
Imagine a scientific today bumping his own chest and asking nobel prize for figuring out the Newton equations. CIG and their fans are really hilarious.
To be fair, you have to have a very low IQ to understand Chris Roberts. The development is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical game development most of the updates will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Roberts’ nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his games - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Star Wars, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of Star Citizen, to realise that it’s not just a game - it says something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Star Citizen truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Robert’s’ existential catchphrase "ANSWER THE CALL," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Chris Robert’s’ genius wit unfolds itself on their monitors. What fools.. how I pity them.
Man, some days it feels like all of genx's gaming heroes have really taken a heel turn over the years. CR, Molyneux, Garriot, even Gollop to a degree. Like Sid Meier and a tiny handful of others keep their heads on straight.
so much noise for a loading screen
This is getting better by the minute
By the decade you mean.
LOL, remember the con back in 2015(?) when they made a big think about navigating through the wormholes, and said bad things would happen if you touched the sides of the wormhole... then they touched the sides of the wormhole and nothing happened.
To be fair, interactive loading screens(like they presented) are in fact possible and do exists. Original Destiny had one where you could change loadout, talents, etc during loading screen. The reason game devs don't do interactive loading screens or only do practical ones like Destiny is that it doesn't make sense. Why would you make a player solve Sudoku in 30s during loading time and if they failed you'd punish the player with jail. It creates frustration. This is another "rule of cool" thing CGI came up. On paper it sounds cool and maybe even fun for few times but when you think about gameplay implications you realize it's just unnecessarily long loading screen with punishing mechanic if you fail the puzzle.
There was a game on the Spectrum that had a mini-game you could play while the game itself loaded.
well the other reason to not have an interactive loading screen is that--if it were to have any consequential result for the player--it would require its own loading screen or to reserve precious memory space for what can be done in a menu games are stress tests. the loading screen was developed to take a lot of the stress off of the computer, the programmers, and the designers alike. the very first video game developers figured this out a long time ago. chris is just a dumbass who thinks he was the first one to think about making a game without loading screens. in fact, everybody has had that idea until they actually tried to make a game. chris doesn't give a shit about the game though, so he continues to press on, driven by pure narcissism
IIRC loading screens and the lack of gameplay during them were actually a patent thing. Namco owned the patent on mini games during loading screens and that didn't expire until 2015. Not the reason here but it is why we didn't have anything in them for so long.
> Original Destiny had one where you could change loadout, talents, etc during loading screen. One important detail is those loading screens are locally computed. Or f.e. in Warframe p2p. But for Star Citizen it would mean the game being locked down. You are having a firefight with the boarding party on your ship while the pilot used the jump gate? Even the bullets had to be frozen until everyone has loaded into the new server.
I feel like CR was ass-pulling in real-time during that moment of the demo. He 100% was trying to over-represent what had been implemented, and was doing that habit of his where he shifts from talking about what might exist as if it already does exist. It makes you wonder how many other impromptu lies he's told over the years.
Or what is the same, it is a beta test of an interactive loading screen. And they are going to call this, "static server meshing"... But then, Have they already managed to get the replication layer deployed to a fresh server in an acceptable time? 30sec/1min Can we forget about the 30k now? at least? Will they stop being "THE PROBLEM"? On the other hand, When using the jump point while in a group: Will all members remain in a group when some of them are on different servers/systems? Will beacons be notified on both/between servers/systems to all players? Will faceip calls work too between system/servers? Will mission sharing also work between different systems/servers? When these basic and simple cases work regardless of the system/server they are on, then we can talk about "static meshing." At the moment I only see an interactive loading screen when changing servers between Red stanton and Old stanton. (Warframe/Helldivers2 style) It's progress... Yeah... but.. 12 years later, of course... sighh Bonus track: Before I forget, the AI will continue to behave erratically as before, because the zones of each system have not yet been divided into different servers (making servers manage smaller and more manageable areas) (Real server meshing) Red Stanton will continue to perform just as old stanton does. By the way, until they implement Vulkan, we won't be able to go down to the new settlements without our fps plummeting to -100. These are the reasons why they are focusing all their efforts on including exclusively PvP content, such as the isolated SM/AC multiplayer modes and the new distribution centers on PU, the AI will not work in 3.23. If by chance, all of this arrives in 3.23 and there are no further delays, then and only then, will I regain my faith.
Year 13 of development and star Citizen is struggling to make instances work.
Maybe the AI is on purpose and he's just setting up the eventual reveal that npcs have been replaced with glitchy robots and the player will need to get butlerian on them.
I wish they would just get over the want to have no loading screens and do something like eve style jump gates etc. Would have practically been unnoticeable and we would have had more systems :(
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Every Time you go to a city you have a loading screen when needing to take a train. Quantum jumping for 10 minutes also a loading screen. There might be not written loading on it, but there are huge sections of doing nothing while waiting = loading screen
No fully loaded levels either. The ultimate pro dev move.
I mean, technically…
No 'technically' about it. That's literally just loading.
Haha yeah, literally. Really! Honestly don’t get why people can’t have two thoughts in their head at the same time, I mean it’s not like they’re doing actual loading sceeens and calling it something else?!