I’m impressed that most people here chose to fight about the definition of the word plagiarism instead of discussing how Star Citizen’s server meshing technology differs from what WorldQL and GrieferGames do. Have fun, but that wasn’t the point of my post.
Plagiarism is obviously a word with very strong negative connotations. If you want to discuss the technology and it’s differences between a different solution that tries to solve the same problem and not accuse someone of stealing, it’s usually best not to use this type of language in general.
Due process is a fun alternative to rainbow six siege. Unlike siege you actually have to coordinate and play tactically but unfortunately it’s pretty much dead at this point.
Maybe I am just getting old but I’ve started to spend a lot more time with older games and titles that may be rough around the edges but have some unique ideas and actually take some risks with their game mechanics.
One of these games is Outward which has a lot of walking (quick travel is almost non existent) and serviceable combat system that leaves a lot to be desired. However both of these do give the game some flavor that is missing from many modern games now combine this with interesting “death” mechanic where instead of respawning you’re thrown in to random scenarios related to the area where you died. Another mechanic is backpack which you’ll need to carry any meaningful amount of items and which will limit your movement in battle if you do not drop it with all your items. The way palyer needs to sacrifice health to receive mana is also interesting and how different each mastery tree is is also nice. I do have to admit that I’d like the game a lot more without time limits on quests as they stress really me out.
Another one is Incredible adventures of Van Helsing which is diablo-style ARPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It took me awhile to understand the games mechanics which lead to bad time initially but once I understood the power-up system, focus on flat elemental damage bonuses instead of percentage based ones and how silly some skills where with power-up the game got me hooked. The dialogue and story is also pretty good for ARPG and fully voice acted.
Third one is Wurm: Unlimited which is basically special version of MMORPG Wurm: Online where players can host their own servers with their own tweaks and mods. While Wurm Online is substriction based mmorpg with very very slow progression most Wurm Unlimited servers are free to play and have quadruple experience modifiers making the game a lot more enjoyable. The game is basically medival fantasy sandbox where players can terraform the world, build all sorts of structures, hunt, farm and even do pvp on pvp servers. While a lot of the game is just pressing buttons and waiting for action timers to pass there’s a lot of depth in the game and it can get suprisingly immersive. I do however recommend joining to one of the long lasting servers like Sklotopolis instead of playing the game solo on self-hosted server as the experience is a lot better with small community even if you prefer to do things solo as the world will feel a lot more interactive and a lot less empty.
Nobody owns ideas, and therefore they cannot be plagiarised. Thus, two companies having similar ideas about how to solve similar problems can never be plagiarism. Do you have proof that actual code has been copied? Or are you just assuming that the use of a similar idea means one must have directly plagiarised the other?
I've been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I've found to be actually good.
I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:
Foreign (Non-American)
Indie
Small studio
Basically all of the good games that I've liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I'm sure if you think about it, the great games you've played have also been this way.
Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won't have fun, and it'll be expensive.
Go play EDF5 with some friends. It's jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.
Raft is great, too.
Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.
And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.
Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it's been solid.
But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.
It's like the loss of a union, except it's industry wide.
There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don't have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.
Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn't that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you're voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.
It's ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn't be supportable.
Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn't be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.
Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they'd: "be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all."
But remember:
Foreign
Indie
Small Studio
These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.
I have wasted a significant part of my life on two amazing games from (I’m pretty sure) indie developers: Factorio (Wube) and Satisfactory.(Coffee Stain) Both of these games have a lot of depth, and both are stable which is interesting becuase Satisfactory is still Early Access.
Larian (baldurs gate 3) is massive for being indie. I think where your misconception comes from is the term indie. The term comes with a lot of predetermined expectations and definitions, but in spite of this fact very large studios can be indie.
Of course it feels weird to label a studio as large as larian indie when compared to the likes of supergiant(hades) or two brothers of bay 12 who created dwarf fortress. None of the three are technically any less indie, but one certainly feels more indie, doesn’t it?
oh, i guess most of the times of heard indie, it was refering to small studios, where as i have never heard anyone call a large studio indie even if they are. thanks for the correction.
I feel like I can speak a little about this as I’ve been studying how CIG is implementing server meshing for the past, well a while, but in depth since the demo. For reference until they post the panel: youtu.be/xKWa4WoTkV4?t=4500
What CIG’s way of dynamic server meshing is the revolutionary thing. Currently, AFAIK, all games performing server meshing is built on a static zone mapping. Whereas CIG is using dynamic server meshing zones that will actually map to the interior limits of a room of a capital ship as an example. And this can scale out to planetary objects if only one player is on that planet. If no one is on that planet then it will only run in their tool Quantum, a non rendering backend game simulation.
Along the dynamic zone mapping is the authoritative way of transferring object containers. During the demo you can see the entity graph of the parent object (zone) and child object containers under an authoritative container (player). When a player transfers servers, you can see the movement of child objects from local to replication, and vice versa. This is a needed step as there are millions, and eventually billions of objects to be tracked of throughout the shard.
And last, CIG is building this as a global scale since they have servers in multiple regions where AWS is hosted. From the article and demo I believe this was all done locally with no latency. I do acknowledge that CIG’s demo was local as well so we will see how the net coding is affected when it goes to the EPTU,PTU and PU.
Me and group of nerds are trying to figure out how they are going to eliminate or minimize the latency and error correction or validating the transferring of the auth between the zones.
What I’ve got full respect for is the multi region problem. I didn’t know that Star Citizen aims to have one global world instead of American, European, Asian, etc. worlds with the ability to travel between them with a latency penalty. I’m curious how they plan to solve that without god-tier peering and an artificial minimum latency to balance combat between distant players.
But I’m struggling to understand static and dynamic zones, maybe you can shed a light on where my understanding went downhill. Static and dynamic zones feel like an implementation detail to me. Do I care whether the replication layer(?) changes the boundaries of a zone, or discards the zone and creates a new zone with the appropriate state? No, only the process is different.
Since static and dynamic zones feel identical to me, I don’t get why a static zone can’t be an authoritative way of transferring object containers. What prevents servers assigned to a static zone from exchanging object information with the replication layer? Nothing, I assume WorldQL also does that.
Okay, so why use dynamic zones? Perhaps the implementation is easier than static zones? Everything else is identical to me, so nothing but the implementation difficulty feels important to me. Or is there a difference between static and dynamic zones about server assignment/scheduling? I don’t know.
What I do know is that my understanding is flawed.
Dynamic zones help balance the processing of a particular zone across multiple servers based on usage.
In a static setup, an unlimited number of players could end up on the same server causing performance issues in a particular zone. While dynamic will cap the number of players on a server and split the single zone into many to preserve performance.
SC has been working on this problem since before 2021, but no they didn’t invent the concept. They are attempting to implement it at a scale that nobody has been able to do as flawlessly as SC requires. If they pull it off, it’ll be an incredible leap.
There are no game engines that do completely seamless server meshing at the moment. SC is trying to do that.
Don’t forget Cities Skylines and the recently released sequel. They’re both a lot of fun but for the sequel they really listened to the community. It’s a bit of a performance hog. There are performance patches coming but in the interim there area lot of settings one can change to make it run better on lower end hardware.
I’ve got a decently beefy machine but it’s not top of the line or anything (Radeon RX 6950 XT, Core i7, 16GB memory) and with a few tweaks it runs pretty well. Definitely looking forward to the performance updates, though, because it’s a truly beautiful game.
You acknowledged yourself that the idea is older than whatever Minecraft did, so how exactly did Star Citizen steal anything?
Did Minecraft steal the idea from EVE Online which only had “one” server since the beginning?
Besides, distributed computing is nothing new.
Or are you going to accuse Star Citizen of plagiarizing the idea of using Internet to connect to their servers since someone else also did that before?
There’s plenty of real issues to complain about regarding Start Citizen, you don’t need to invent made up ones. :/
I’m complaining that Star Citizen sells this technology as new and innovative even though it has been around for quite a while. Minecraft is just how I came into contact with this technology. I edited my post to reflect this.
Server meshing isn’t new at all. But how CIG is doing it, is. The dynamic nature of it is what makes it revolutionary. Servers can be spooled up and retired as needed. A certain area of the universe is under heavy load as there are thousands of players having a small fleet engagement? Add more servers to handle the load. There are some planets and even star systems that are not visited by players? Retire them and just let Quantum (CIGs universe simulation) run the simulation for those star systems.
But isn’t that exactly what the people at WorldQL accomplished already?
To actually solve the problem, something more robust was needed. I set the following goals:
Players must be able to see each other, even if on different server processes.
Players must be able to engage in combat across servers.
When a player places a block or updates a sign, it should be immediately visible to all other players.
If one server is down, the entire world should still be accessible.
If needed, servers can be added or removed at-will to adapt to the amount of players.
I think the last point specifically addresses your concern about dynamic server meshing. They can scale up or down depending on how many players are in an area.
I don’t think the base game, Minecraft, actually simulates chunks which aren’t loaded. IIRC they’re frozen until loaded into memory again. So no, but not because of WorldQL tech.
Fair point. Minecraft itself doesn’t simulate anything in unloaded chunks afaik, so I think the WorldQL PoC can’t change that as a server plugin. They probably could if they develop a Minecraft server from scratch tho.
bin.pol.social
Gorące