this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I will never understand why how much a company spends on their products is considered newsworthy. Blows my mind.
I think people kind of just like laughing at how ridiculous Star Citizen is, and kind of rightly so. Over half a billion dollars and a decade in development just for what they've got is pretty wild.
To be clear, what they've got right now with sharded persistance and asset streaming is extremely novel on a technical level, but there's no real substance to it yet as a game, just an impressive engine with an absurdly large scale and a tech demo running on it.
If they ever actually stop fiddling and make the damn game it'll be impressive, I'm sure, but so will the earthshattering cost and scale of waste getting there. Then 2 years later someone else will put out something 90% as impressive for 1/100th the cost.
Ya, I agree that what they have is promising. I really do hope they can finish the game as I'm really excited by the ideas they have.
People like to call the game a scam, but they've actually delivered something tangible. I personally don't think I'd enjoy the game in it's current state (and it kind of shocks me the amount of money people have put into Star Citizen), but the fundamentals seem to be there for a real game. They just have to "finish the owl," so to speak.
Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not "it takes a decade and half a billion dollars" hard.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It's nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it's sharded, so it's not even synced between shards/servers. It's literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where's the novel technology? They don't even have server meshing yet.
It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.
The level of depth with persistence they are going for hasn't really been done anywhere. It's difficult to really explain in a comment because it's explanations they have made throughout 1000s of hours of videos and demonstrations. EVE never really had to deal with full ship interiors being seamlessly integrated into the universe. Most MMOs deal with purely static assets that can't be affected where Star Citizen is planning everything is dynamic.
Ultimately, though, these articles about how much money has been spent on Star Citizen development are kind of inaccurate. CIG is making 2 games. Star Citizen and the single player Squadron 42. The engine work translates a lot between the 2, but the narrative work doesn't and the single player campaign has been the primary focus for a couple of years now.
Servers that run the MMO with dynamic persistence would likely need GPUs for keeping track and computing vectors/matrices for each player/asset.
I always theorized that if Eve Online developers actually bothered, they could utilize their GPU on the servers to track all of the activity in space and they would easily support 10,000+ players on the same system without issue or time dilation (considering the capability of GPU today.)
Assuming you have for an example, a GPU Server with 8 slots for GPU, and each GPU is a 7900 XTX and you use Vulkan Compute for it. You got 192 GB of vRAM and absurd amount of computation capability with ~1 PFlops on FP16 and 528 TFlops on FP32. Assuming you have 100,000 players on the same system, that GPU Server would be able to handle it with ease even with theoretical complication that can results from programming on GPU. You could store ~2MB worth of data about each player's ship for 100,000 players on that GPU Server alone.
Dynamic Persistence in MMO is basically Server with GPU that keep track of everything. (You can't just defer GPU operations to the end-user, server have to be the one to do it.)
They are targeting a dynamically scaling mesh that will transfer ownership of players as they move across the universe.
One server could end up handling a single planet or a single small patch of space depending on how much activity is happening in the area at the time.
Regardless of people's feelings, CIG is definitely moving game tech forward with a lot of this stuff.