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Star Citizen costs exceed Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 5, and RDR2 combined
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It's nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it's sharded, so it's not even synced between shards/servers. It's literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where's the novel technology? They don't even have server meshing yet.
It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.
The level of depth with persistence they are going for hasn't really been done anywhere. It's difficult to really explain in a comment because it's explanations they have made throughout 1000s of hours of videos and demonstrations. EVE never really had to deal with full ship interiors being seamlessly integrated into the universe. Most MMOs deal with purely static assets that can't be affected where Star Citizen is planning everything is dynamic.
Ultimately, though, these articles about how much money has been spent on Star Citizen development are kind of inaccurate. CIG is making 2 games. Star Citizen and the single player Squadron 42. The engine work translates a lot between the 2, but the narrative work doesn't and the single player campaign has been the primary focus for a couple of years now.
Servers that run the MMO with dynamic persistence would likely need GPUs for keeping track and computing vectors/matrices for each player/asset.
I always theorized that if Eve Online developers actually bothered, they could utilize their GPU on the servers to track all of the activity in space and they would easily support 10,000+ players on the same system without issue or time dilation (considering the capability of GPU today.)
Assuming you have for an example, a GPU Server with 8 slots for GPU, and each GPU is a 7900 XTX and you use Vulkan Compute for it. You got 192 GB of vRAM and absurd amount of computation capability with ~1 PFlops on FP16 and 528 TFlops on FP32. Assuming you have 100,000 players on the same system, that GPU Server would be able to handle it with ease even with theoretical complication that can results from programming on GPU. You could store ~2MB worth of data about each player's ship for 100,000 players on that GPU Server alone.
Dynamic Persistence in MMO is basically Server with GPU that keep track of everything. (You can't just defer GPU operations to the end-user, server have to be the one to do it.)
They are targeting a dynamically scaling mesh that will transfer ownership of players as they move across the universe.
One server could end up handling a single planet or a single small patch of space depending on how much activity is happening in the area at the time.
Regardless of people's feelings, CIG is definitely moving game tech forward with a lot of this stuff.
The persistence in Star Citizen is stuff like the rifle in your weapon rack staying after turning your ship into the garage. The soda can you dropped on the floor will still be there tomorrow. The cargo in your hold will be there too.
It's a small thing but the way they implemented it just made it so fuckin complicated and buggy.
Man, I love cleaning in real life, I wish I had to clean up after myself in video games too!
Nah, but ain't that the story of Star Citizen though? Making things needlessly complicated and inevitably broken, sending them on increasingly long tangents into developing tech to solve problems that they themselves invented.