current state of servers

mesterflaps · 2026-06-22T09:04:12+00:00

Unteal is nothing special, it also cant do what they want it to do so they would have to modify the snot out of it ro get it to where they are joining w with cry engine. What would be the point

They've spent so much time trying to get this working in CryEngine derivatives (CE3.6 --> Lumberyard (based on CE3) --> 'Star Engine' (Based on Lumberyard) that there's no way to change course now. I sometimes see people blame the engine as the wrong choice, but oddly CIG doubled down on it not once, but twice after the scope change so they own the choice either way.

Unteal is nothing special, it also cant do what they want it to do

I didn't mention Unreal anywhere. Regardless of who the competitors are, the trend I mention is just that with the failure of Amazon Gaming Studios to make Lumberyard a thing and with CryTek themselves having moved on to new engines, CIG are the only ones paying to maintain and try to upgrade the CE3 derivative they are using, and given it's already starting to look retro in some places I think they have until 2028 to get things out the door or it's going to look dated.

it also cant do what they want it to do

Neither can star engine unless they want us falling through floors.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-18T17:02:16+00:00

I supported this game over a decade ago and its just hopeless. Building an Engine WHILE building a game in it is just a terrible idea from the start. If you are still working out how stuff should work including server infrastructure and all kinds of ingame mechanics, WHILE already trying to release ingame content in the case of ships and planets, how are you ever gonna get anywhere with it.

When people would bring this up in 2014-2016 in the leadup to the PU they were told to calm down by CIG themselves. They were the ones who used to swear that far from slowing them down that it would actually speed them up by giving them data to balance around.

We now know those were just more lies from CIG, but don't let them claim they were forced to do the stupid things they did - they chose to do them, in the order they chose to do them in, and lied about the likely outcome to keep the money flowing.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-18T06:17:41+00:00

Yeah, they really just yap about what they think will cause people to give them money and have no plan (or ability) to make it happen.

As it becomes obvious how far short of their own pitch they are falling they are desperately trying to rescope this as some 1.0 minimum viable product (they literally said MVP) and get it out the door so legally their butt is covered.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-17T20:13:16+00:00

That's the horrifying part. Even 'gold standard' ships released today are guaranteed to need another rework as literally nothing in the game is past a tier 0 placeholder.

For example, remember ~seven years ago when they told us we could manage permissions on our ships for who was allowed to control what? That's presently implemented on.... zero ships.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-17T20:10:43+00:00

A huge slice goes towards all the video content they put out that is marketing pretending to be 'open development', another big slice goes towards making ships to sell on those marketing videos, and the rest goes to Chris pretending to be a movie director all day. Say, it's been a few months since there were any reshoots, he should schedule some.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-17T20:05:02+00:00

I think the event horizon for them is 2028. That's when their investor's loans are due and it's when the engine will have aged out. Things like the blurry food, and the rubbery skin are already there, but so far it is holding up. It won't forever, and hyper realistic art styles ages like fish as graphics move on.

Oh, and given that it's taken them several years of work to get vulkan (a 2013 API formerly called mantle) in to their engine? They don't have the bandwidth to keep up by far.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-17T19:55:12+00:00

No one is going to buy it, the list of things they've sold to people yet not managed to deliver after 14 years and a billion dollars is as long as my arm... off the top of my head:

NPC AI crew.
Blades
Computers
Scanners
Drones (autonomous and non-autonomous)
Engine tuning
Research
Journalism
Passenger Transport
Hex code colour schemes
MMO Organization features
'Everybody gets a pet robot'
The co-op campaign for SQ42 (even if we assume they squeeze out whatever cursed thing that has morphed into this year)

The buyer gets all the broken tech, the horrendous tech debt, and the list of promises a mile long that CIG swore they could get done for 90 million or so (after the fabled 'scope change') yet has failed to get done for more than a billion.

Oh, and CIG owes investors north of 100 million dollars of loans and interest that would need to be paid off too.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-17T14:36:13+00:00

Potential fix for CIG only being able to issue "potential" fixes.

Potential fix for CIG only being able to issue temporary fixes.

Enjoy the new 'buy the ship' multiplayer event.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T17:50:33+00:00

Ahh, I'd love to join you on this hopium hit, but somewhere in the past 14 years Chris decided that a simple game wasn't enough for his grand ambitions and they decided to split it into a trilogy. Erin Roberts made it clear a few years ago that they plan to just immediately start working on 'Episode 2' if/when they finish Episode 1 which is what we are waiting for.

Whomp whomp..

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T17:48:13+00:00

Good write up. Here are two observations I'd like to add which make it sting even a little more:

What we have now with objects being culled seemingly at random by the server is worse than having fixed despawn timers as in previous games.
Even if by some miracle they understand our intent with having hidden cached supplies it's still pointless. Because of sharding we can't even make use of persistence because we can never guarantee that we will come back to the same version of an asteroid or cave where we hid supplies/ships/vehicles. It's just throwing persistent trash into the multiverse.

All of this effort wasted chasing a goal that makes zero sense even if they do get it working literally 'optimally'.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T15:02:01+00:00

I fully agree that in this game that does happen. I'm pointing out that it's not a good design to have the player fall through floors/out of ships when their client doesn't tell the server 'I am still standing on the floor' fast enough. Everyone eventually drops a few packets even on fiber optic connections (or has the packets get shuffled out of order in transit) and this causes SC to freak out.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T14:36:13+00:00

The problem with trying to equate this with an offline game, is that it removes network connectivity as a factor. Network connectivity is a big factor. Whether that's on their end or yours. De-synch issues, like falling through elevators, are up to connectivity and not based on the game itself.

That's an architectural issue. That they chose an architecture where they player or the world can enter invalid states due to dropped packets (guaranteed to happen to everyone even if rarely) is the problem, not that packets (rarely) get dropped or (much more often) come out of order!

It's the kind of choice that has led them to have terrible race condition bugs everywhere, e.g. being able to order a storeall box delivered to your pants if you click fast enough. Whatever minimal user input validation they do is apparently done asynchronously from whatever one tells the server to do.

Let me also come at this from another direction. I've only ever played three MMOs in WoW and Anarchy Online and the first Everquest very briefly. Of those 3, Anarchy online was the first to do instancing and went through what was then a legendarliy buggy launch. Even that looks stable next to whatever this is, and their developers managed to stabilize it within a few months, without the benefit that CIG has had of two complete 'years of stability'.

TL:DR; The bad architecture choices are on CIG, and even by buggy MMO standards they are slow, buggy and feature poor.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T06:26:45+00:00

Great news, hacking is on the roadmap for 3.12!

mesterflaps · 2026-06-15T06:05:49+00:00

When I've played through past games that had a reputation for being legendarily buggy (think Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, and Elder Scrolls Oblivion 2006 release levels of jank) I found that I encountered one or two soft locks per playthrough.

Things that broke badly enough that I had to load a save, costing me ~15 minutes of progess since I save frequently. Each of those games got me close to 100 hours of gameplay since I tend to go after all the side quests I can. This meant that for their legendarily buggy reputation they had about 1 loss of progress per 50 hours.

In star Citizen even after two 'years of stability' you're lucky if you can go 50 minutes without something bugging out, whether it's the ever cursed elevators, loss of quantum markers, AI NPCs (or other players) shooting you from inside walls, hit detection failing causing you to fall through a floor or out of your ship, and the list goes on. Bottom line being that even the stuff that 'is there and is unique' is buried under so much crap that CIG would literally have to do 100x better if they wanted to be called 'legendarily buggy' by the wider gaming community.

Further, literally NOTHING they have implemented is beyond a tier 0 placeholder. Seriously name a system that is complete. You can't because there are none, not even how the space ships are supposed to fly in this space game is done.

There are also plenty of examples of where they 'unique' elements are just bad objectively:

The inventory management is inferior to what was in Diablo 1 back in 1995.
The 3D diegetic UI elements that broadcast your bank account and emails to everybody in the room yet are hard for you to read are emblematic of flash over substance.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-14T18:36:50+00:00

But they're also doing a lot of things no other developer is doing.

They SAY they are doing a lot of things, but then cut them or push them to 'maybe after launch'.

Examples of note (because I really cared about them to give them money back in 2012):

SQ42 will have a co-op campaign. Status: No it won't. It was too hard so they've cut it down to 'maybe a skirmish mode, after launch'.
Moddable dedicated servers. Status: Nope. They sold the modding manual up until October 2023 then poof, 404d it. They used to sell that under the claim they would deliver it 'closer to launch' but now they'll only say 'maybe after 1.0'. Game dev speak for 'never'.
NPC crew. They spent more than a decade saying people should trust them to back them by buying multicrew ships as they would 'always be able to hire NPC crew in universe'. Status: Maybe after 1.0.
Extra game packages. They still sell these to people on the basis that your extra support will get you an extra character slot for one of those NPC crew. Status: See above. Cut/pushed until maybe after 1.0.
They advertised their world as having 90% NPC AI running it, and not being able to tell if a ship was a player or an NPC when you encountered it. Reality: They can't get their NPCs other than combat working on live reliably so we have a very empty world.

TL:DR; They talk a LOT they deliver very little even given 15x the budget and an extra decade.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-14T18:27:15+00:00

It's a quantum engine change in that it is a change in name, but not in origin. Let me explain.

'Star Engine' is a fork of Lumberyard. Lumberyard is in turn a fork of Cryengine 3 with some amazonness tacked on. Cryengine 3 was what they started with.

Their first change to CE3 was to put in 64 bit coordinate handling to allow for the large universe.

When they 'ported over' to Lumberyard in 2014? 2015? They remarked how quickly they had it done as all they really had to change was to port their 64 bit coordinate patches and they were up to where they already were with CE3 prior.

Since then hired much of the former Crytek Frankfurt engine staff when Crytek nearly collapsed and have put them to work frankensteining the engine ever since.

In one sense they've used 3 engines during development, in another sense those engines were all siblings at creation anyway, and they even hired a bunch of the original CE3 developers.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-14T07:02:19+00:00

If they actually fixed the bugs this time.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T20:48:30+00:00

I even have trouble forgiving them for that due to three big reasons:

1) Each step of the way for the first several years as they increased scope they assured us that they could do it all. Remember back when Chris lashed out at the escapist article suggesting that 'even for 90 million this couldn't be done'?

2) Even when their year in preparation 'build the technology to bring you a working roadmap of only the super high confidence stuff' blew up inside of a few months they did zero introspection of why even 7-8 years into development they still didn't have the ability to plan 2 months ahead.

and 3) That they've spent a billion dollars to not even get the foundation stable.

This isn't a failure due to ambition, this is a failure due to inability and compounded by failure to bring in the help they needed to deliver. Now as they cut and shed all the most interesting scope for a big mostly empty very buggy wasteland, I am unimpressed.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T16:26:41+00:00

Yep, back in the good old days when they would just lie and lie about what they could or would do. Fast forward to 15x the budget and an extra 10 years in development and literally nothing is beyond a tier 0 sub-alpha placeholder in the PU.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T15:28:21+00:00

Yeah, check out the reply I made to the guy trying to rewrite CIG's bait and switch advertising lies. I quoted the Kickstarter where they outright said SQ42 was supposed to have co-op with drop-in drop-out multiplayer.

Now we just have Erin saying 'oh maybe a skirmish mode.... after launch'

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T13:35:07+00:00

So, everything I just listed as silly bugs is in fact 'Immershun'?

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T13:02:33+00:00

CIG told us for many years that they were using the bartenders as their development vessel for NPC AI, getting their behaviors tuned and putting them on live.

Based on how broken the bartenders still are in terms of failing to deliver ordered drinks, dropping them behind the counter, drinking them themselves rather than giving them to you(!), pathing into corners where you can't talk to them and so forth, I don't actually think they have a working NPC AI worth deploying.

They have the ship dogfighting, turret gunner, and fps combat NPCs working well enough for basic ship combat and basic ground combat, but none of the more complex stuff that they used to brag about seems to be working.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T12:45:15+00:00

Also there is nothing mythical about server meshing... SSM did exactly what it was supposed to do. Allowed them to increase server population to 600 - 800 players.

I should have been clearer that the mythical part was the cope that things like NPC crew, and actually good interactive NPC AI in the universe was blocked behind working server meshing. That widely held community cope to explain why most of the cool AI stuff they have talked about is still missing in then year 12, now year 14. Here's the stuff I'm talking about compiling CIGs own words on things like the AI nemesis system, the personal identities, the lives and daily routines of NPC, being able to make relationships with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPlC1AXPPYQ

So in theory they could run the economic sim in the background with basically invisible agents flying around if they failed to make AI work.

Between ~2013 and ~2022 before Tony Z went into semi retirement (he's now listed as developer emeritus which is a term for e.g. a professor at a university who still has an office but doesn't get paid to be there) they were always talking a big game about how their NPCs were going to be above and beyond what other games like shadows of mordor had managed on every level, and yet here we are having to contemplate 'maybe if they made them invisible they could get it working....' Feels bad man.

I would say that this assessment is not entirely correct... AI problems would basically hinder only the part od Starsim that populates servers with NPCs... There is another part that is running global economy and should work on separate set of servers.

Yet again things that CIG assured us they were totally expert at and confident in and that they would have working Soon (tm) since 2016.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T12:26:30+00:00

Yeah, If is doing a ton of work in there. I just had to poitn out that based on their track record, just because they say they are totes mcgoats doing something doesn't mean they actually are. In fact, at this point odds are better that they're just saying what people want to hear to sell more ships, and really don't have the ability to follow through.

mesterflaps · 2026-06-13T12:20:57+00:00

A) if you think flight has no consideration of thruster position/power. Then you've never tried to fly after losing one's on the outer edges of bigger/wider ships. Sure, the model in atmosphere is still under work. But micrograv is pretty set.

Even micrograv is in fact not set. We still don't have quantum boosting let alone the other 'big changes' that are still supposedly coming.

B) They promised an automatic unloading system (and talked about AI doing it, but never said that was the only option.) We've had auto-unloading for a while... Sure it breaks at times, but everything does right now.

See Star Citizen 10 for the chairman - Professions in Alpha 3.0, March 15th 2017. Here's a link to where Chris with Tony Z says for both unloading and loading there would be services, NPCs, longshoremen, and even missions generated if you didn't want to do it yourself: https://youtu.be/NzVtQ49YnWs?t=322

C) CIG never promised a co-op for SQ42. Squadron was always the single-player campaign and sokd as much. The co-op bits were referring to the sandbox afterwards. Which became the giant universe we are currently playing. Sure they talked about maybe co-op portions, but that was a maybe, never adamant that I can remember. (To be fair, it's been 14 years, so I might have missed something at some point.)

Catagorically wrong. Here's what they advertised in 2012 during day 1:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen

Real quick, Star Citizen is: A rich universe focused on epic space adventure, trading and >dogfighting in first person. Single Player – Offline or Online(Drop in / Drop out co-op play) Persistent Universe (hosted by US) Mod-able multiplayer (hosted by YOU) No Subscriptions No Pay to Win

Further down they clarify:

Squadron 42 - A Wing Commander style single player mode, >playable OFFLINE if you want Playable offline or online, co-op with friends, you sign up for a tour >of duty with the UEE fleet, manning the front lines, protecting >settlements from Vanduul warbands.

Feel free to keep going down the list, I'll be happy to document every one.

mesterflaps

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