Ashes of Star Citizen

hey what up boys so today I have a special one for you ashes of creation have just announced the subject for their upcoming technical Showcase in a couple of days and old boy was it unexpected server meshing the latest buzzword used to promote Perpetual alphas and the primary subject of our copium for this month hey remember when I said this a few videos ago I had never heard about server meshing until very recently mate what do you want about server meshing server meshing server meshing now let's see how server meshing feels was in another year's time when people start to realize that oh sh this server missing stuff ain't working out too well well I guess I'll just go [ __ ] myself because now I've got to go study it so I can convince you guys it's actually exciting and not just a bunch of vapor wear [ __ ] but before we get into that our beautiful patrons and coped out the wazu twitch subs and I would love for you to grab yourselfa because today I want to set some expectations for our live stream this month therefore I'll break this video into three chapters and attempt to give you guys a simple explanation of what server meshing actually is a discussion about what I hope Intrepid focus on specifically and some copium inhaling as I'm pretty convinced this month's showcase will come with some pretty big announcements nudge nudge wink wink now with all that bollocks out of the way let's begin sh okay okay so server meshing a buzzword that's been thrown around by Star Citizen for quite some time now with it only just recently showing some proof of its concept working in real time when we see the memes about Star Citizen glitching out the wazu these bugs are generally caused by performance issues on the server side as a single server trying to manage all the persistent objects and players tends to [ __ ] a brick no matter how powerful it is when a server chugs on its performance trying to send data back and forth to the client this causes frames to drop and thus allows objects and players to phase through solid walls and cause some of the hilarious clips that we've seen throughout the years server mhing fixes this problem by splitting the world into separate servers all seamlessly stitched together to create one cohesive space but server meshing isn't a brand new technology primitive versions of server meshing Tech has existed throughout the years even as far back as world of warcraft's launch in 2004 in an inter with John stats one of world of warcraft's original designers he speaks about how wow tackled a few of the persistent open world design problems was there ever a thought to maybe instancing or layering the open world zones where you know let's say we have a th people do we really want a thousand people in Iron Forge or do we want to split it up 100 at a time um yeah that was a big Tech achievement Joe Rumsey the guy who designed uh all our server architecture he needed to prove that the seamless transition from server to server wow is divided into different servers and when you go from one server to the other you don't realize it and no one had ever done that before and that was honestly probably Wow's biggest achievement right there and what that did is it allowed us to not have choke points and load zones uh or or uh bottlenecks where you'd go from one zone to another modern wow has all but forsaken such impressive Tech in favor of a more story-based instance approach through the excessive use of phas and layers however Wow's transition between servers isn't as seamless as John makes it out to be although the transition is pretty great there are some clear transitional artifacts that occur when many players are present during the crossing of a border Star Citizen and now evidently ashes of Creations focus is to evolve the tech in a way that maintains that online persistence that makes MMOs feel like MMOs a massive amount of players in one location one player who is managed by one server can see an interact with players being managed by another server because the data that's being sent by the two servers are managed by a server mesh however this is just step one and is known as static server meshing what Star Citizen are trying to do and what many people would label as impossible or a myth is something known as Dynamic server meshing technology that stretches and shrinks server clusters depending on player density and because of the way ashes of Creations World Works Intrepid could utilize this Tech in some very interesting ways first of all ashes of Creations world is governed by nodes with very clear zones of influence I suspect Intrepid plan to pair a form of dynamic server meshing with zones of influence as players progress a node from Village to town to City Steven has stated that Alpha 2 will launch with up to citystage notes and the reason for that is like to test the concept of this pseudo dnamic server meic the larger a node grows the more story arc locations expand unlocking more desirable materials and progression which will of course increase the player density in the area what remains to be announce though is the size of the Alpha 2 map and how far Intrepid can push this Tech during its initial testing phases with only one biome and five nodes it would be pretty difficult to see how a server can adapt to player density however with up to three biomes and over 15 nodes we could probably start to utilize server meshing to its fullest what makes ashes of creation a unique case when it comes to networking is how Vera is a world that has very minimal instances we got a glimpse of this during the alpha 1 where dungeons Wars and World bosses were all persistent in the open world but despite that their servers handled everything very smoothly it was quite impressive and this is likely due to the amount of Planet Side two developers Intrepid have acquired over the years Planet Side 2 is renowned for its high quality net coding and Mass open world fights and now we might just be seeing the fruits of their efforts finally come to light you want to know about servertech how do you expect to handle many people at once in certain zones some MMOs do layering or different you know so player density is a very important aspect of our custom Network layer Zach and his team have been doing an incredible job of creating a unique Network layer that we utilize in ashes of creation to facilitate not just the player density goals but also the open world and seamless travel across that world there's a number of different strategies that we employ when architecting the network layer some of those things have to do with the significance of replicated data that the player is receiving as the density gets higher we mitigate call and reduce uh the significance distance the net relevancy distance you know we keep things specifically that need to be uh known for the player directionality which which direction they're facing those are the most pertinent data that we we transmit to the to the player character so there's a lot of different strategies it's a it's a relatively complex system but our goal is to is to satisfy hundreds of players available within a given area and certain events especially Castle sieges Caravans are one of those types of events as well and our architecture facilitates that now with all that said I just need to clarify that I am by no means an expert on server meshing and I've only just begun studying its impact on the gaming space a couple of days ago let's hope this month's live stream shines some more light on this tech for us because I'm sure this month's live stream is going to give us more than just a tech demonstration I think this showcase would be a perfect time to announce some pretty exciting dates first of all because this is a tech showcase not a systems one that warrants important feedback they could use this opportunity to officially announce the Alpha 2 date as well as an announcement of alpha 1 keyh holders finally getting their hands on the client after all getting the thousands of alpha 1 keyh holders into a server would be a perfect opportunity to test out this upcoming server mesh technology Phoenix initiatives and developers appear to be less than 100 total but we know for a fact that there are thousands of alpha 1 keyh holders in addition to this the Character Creator would also be perfect to release this month so people who are not particularly interested in this Tech talk can finally have something to play around with they did tell us on multiple occasions that we'd get to try it before the Alpha 2 officially launches and we're now in quarter 3 so time is kind of running out overall this month's live stream is likely going to be very Tech heavy and if you're not really into that I would set your expectations somewhere around okay however if you're a fiend for the copium and love to listen to Steven and his team talk about how they're pushing the genre forward with buzzword and Concepts this live stream is likely going to be very exciting and I'm excited to see what Intrepid have in store for us but as usual I am I'm just one nerd desperate for a good MMO and hey I've taken a break from streaming the last few weeks but we're back tonight deep diving all things server meshy with a bunch of reaction videos explaining what the hell it is so come join us over at twitch.tv/ because you're high on copium

Channel: Narc

Views: 13,105

Keywords: Ashes of Creation, Asmongold, Guides, Alpha 2, How To, MMORPG, MMO, Runescape, World of Warcraft, Open World, Ashes, Creation, Upcoming MMO, New Releases, Throne and Liberty, Guild Wars 2, ESO, GW2, AoC, Narc, Asmon, Steven, Intrepid, A2, in 2024, Star Citizen, SC, Star, Citizen, Chris Roberts

Id: r0v-8uhRLi0

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2024