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Can Star Citizen Solve it’s Desync Problems?

Welcome to a Star Citizen Alpha 3.14 state of the PTU so a few things…

It’s in Wave 2 now so that’s at least some more players on in and I’d expect it to go to Open PTU very shortly. The main problem with have in Alpha 3.14 at the moment tho beyond a huge amount of balance needing to be done is… desync and I want to talk a bit about that after looking at what’s new.

We just had an update with the  Star Citizen Alpha 3.14.0l Patch, here with the Ongoing Ship Capacitor, Balance, and Polish Pass they:

Fixed regen cost of some S5 energy cannons. Fixed bullet damage in KLWE laser repeater S1. Reduced delay on Warlock’s EMP. Adjusted Hornet variants rotation velocities. Adjusted power control for Starlifter, giving pilot higher access than the copilot.

There was a Polish pass on IFCS thruster Wind dust volumes on planet surfaces. 

AND a Legibility polish pass for new sliced ship HUD

There were some Major Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue causing player’s to twitch and jerk incorrectly when moving around inside ships
  • Players should no longer get a crimestat for killing legal bounty targets… this should also help with problems that were being had with XenoThreat testing.
  • Fixed an issue causing assisted gimbal to snap onto targets instead of a slower slew
  • Fixed 1 Client crash, 2 Main Thread Deadlocks, a 1 Backend Service Crash AND a log spam issue

There was also a Speculative fix for ship desync issues an a dedicated spectrum thread on the subject:

Severe Sync Issues Potential fix  – We discovered an issue related to quantum travel that caused players to become severely out of sync. We have put in a potential fix, but would like your help seeing which, if any, of the issues are addressed. Note, the fix is in the most recent build, 7651022, and sync issues will need to be evaluated form that build onward. We are specifically looking for these reports:

  • Stationary ship: Player’s ship appears stationary, when they are actually moving and flying in a completely different location. Sometimes the ship will snap to the new location, sometimes it will not. While in this state, the player can be attacked and destroyed.
  • Landing and snapping to a new location: Often seen from a crew seat, the view outside doesn’t sync with where the pilot and ship actually are and can be wildly out of sync.
  • Missing fire: Incoming or outgoing, crew or other player ship, players can encounter other players where their weapon fire is invisible.
  • Ships snapping to a new position: Happens with both player and AI ships, where they fly in a straight line briefly and then snap to a new location.
  • Players completely invisible to one another on foot and shown in a different location: Most often caught while in a party, players can be standing directly next to one another and be invisible, with party markers showing them in an entirely different location. Players can kill each other in this state.
  • Players out of sync when inside a ship together: Most often seen with the Constellation, players within the same ship will see each other as invisible or holding still, when they are moving and interacting. Players can kill each other in this state.

There’s also potential this could fix the ships exploding when entering or flying through atmosphere issue.

If you want to also help, play on the PTU with the command r_displaysessioninfo 1 in the console or your USER.cfg file and post feedback on the dedicated Spectrum thread (which I’ll link below).

Now from what I can tell this has not magically fixed all the desync problems and desync is still happening BUT it may have lessened it and it is steps towards getting something in place in the short term before we have a larger network overhaul for the game.

It’s great that it’s a problem they think they can address in the short term to be honest.

Star Citizen would massively benefit from having minimal desync as sometimes it’s pretty bad if you are in totally different locations on your and a friends screen… or even an enemies… that leaves dogfights somewhat pointless if your opponent is invisible OR stuck in time.

There are 12 other known issues that CI are trying to work thru with the patch as well, including various QT, Q Drive and Starmap problems… as well as optimizations for Orison and Crusader.

But if cloud imperium can get something together to help with the desync… then amazing!