Have about 12 hours on it. Last played in April. I did enjoy the quarks of this with the combat built in with the city builder. The economy was interesting with the interchange of regions. My biggest gripe is the way you have to figure out the marketplace adjacent to the residents to help level up the housing.
I haven’t played with the new patch but looking forward to jump back into it.
The combat takes me bad to red alert 2 days which feels nostalgic.
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.
I’m not a CIG white knight by any means. Infact I’m very open on the piss poor upper management and very shady marketing practices. But with that said a lot of people just don’t realize that CIG is building 4 games, 3 single player (sq42) and one multiplayer. All under a billion and creating new technologies and art assets along the way. Compare to the rumor of GTA VI being over double in cost.