Are New World’s Woes Also Star Citizen’s?
Welcome to the Star Citizen News… we have new 3.15.0 PTU Patches… we have a date for the IAE and a dev response about the networking woes that Lumberyard based New World has (that was causing a bit of drama) and how that shouldn’t be an issue for Star Citizen.
The IAE 2951 is confirmed to start on the 19th of November running until the 1st of December with ship sales, the expo and SC will be free to play during that period too.
The main event is at Tobin Convention Center at New Babbage on microTech.
You can expect at least 3 new ships / vehicles in addition to the Redeemer and Ares Starfighter.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15 is out on the Open PTU and it’s had a couple of updates in the last few days with a p & q Patch.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15.0p PTU
They made further improvements to Inventory including making sure items were of appropriate size and SCU.
The Medical mechanics also saw updates allowing placement of players into beds more easily and tweaking the medi-gun.
They Made multiple fixes to help Quantum Drive engage more consistently. This should greatly help with issues related to aligning and spooling to a quantum target such as it not triggering when fully spooled and hitting B. You also shouldn’t QT directly into some of the Restricted areas, you’ll come out close to them.
They largely fixed the unresponsive and teleporting FPS NPCs. Spawn closets in UGF missions will now randomize which closets spawn friendly and hostile AI and cannot spawn the opposite faction.
More to that in the 3.15.0q PTU Patch
They also Increased distance at which FPS AI will fire upon players as well as Making hit prediction performance improvements to also help with ship AI.
There is now a limit to how many corpses each player can have which is capped to 3. At once.
Between the patches they fixed dozens of bugs including major fixes for NPCs and the UGF/B Missions.
This Week’s Sneak Peek appears to be some form of rather large ship based laser at Cousin Crows Custom Craft.
There was a Reddit Thread:
I was reading the recent Twitter post from an ex Amazon Games dev about just how bad CryEngine and Lumberyard have been to work with.
I’m curious if any lurking CIG devs might be able to answer or even relay the question to be answered by one of your dev team. It seems like a lot of the issues New World is having stems from Client-Side Resolution, which as the tweet mentions, is crazy to see in 2021 for an online game. I’m curious now as to how this may have affected Star Citizen’s development cycle, and am also curious to know if CIG also saw the issues in the engine (described as a dumpster fire in the tweet) and fixed a lot of them or plan to do so.
(Basically the dev explains that there were 2 engines built on top of each other competing, cryengine was terrible to work with code wise and they had to make do with a poor solution that gave client authoritative bugs and issues for their networking)
I don’t want to be alarmist about the New World issues, but having CIG explain some of the stuff they’ve done to curb the Engine issues would probably reassure many backers who are now also dealing with New World. Not everyone is a programmer, so shedding a bit of light on this would be pretty cool.
CI’s Chad Mckinney Responded
We have long replaced the components of both the network layer and game code implementations that have these legacy problems.
I haven’t kept up entirely with their development but from reading the twitter thread this seems more like they were dealing with co-developing the game while iterating on the engine (I get it, we have the same problems) which led to slower than ideal progress and trade offs to quality and delivery. That said the big news I read about with the issues around New World’s limitation in shard size etc. I would imagine are not related to those particular client authoritative issues and from what I can surmise given their game are more likely are a reality of the scalability of their service and persistence architecture much of which they must’ve written themselves as CryEngine does not give you a solution for those kinds of problems. But if they are having some networking bugs with state replication or hacking (I don’t know, again I haven’t really kept up with the game in the news) then the thread’s concerns I can definitely see contributing to those kinds of problems, or otherwise just constraining resources from polishing elsewhere.
A little later Chad also adds:
OK just saw from the twitter sphere all the recent networking related bugs with New World and yes, that twitter thread makes sense as to why they are having these issues. As I mentioned though, this is not a concern for Star Citizen.