Beet Wagon posted:

happy page 5000, nerds

Beet Wagon posted:

happy page 5000, nerds

Dogeh posted:

Love that doggo

BUT THIS IS INSUFFICIENT.
THIS IS PAGE 5000 5001..... nooooooooooooooooo
WE NEED MORE KAYAK

Beexoffel posted:

I needed this.

Mailer posted:

You see, memory and disk i/o don't matter because The Cloud. It works by *waves hands*

quote:

These machines often rub against pain points, causing great deals of pain to patients. The heart is then destroyed and all self-controlled transportation has been made illegal without undergoing painful medical verification methods, in which 10 of the United Stimpires revolted against each rules. All empires except for the fourth swore freedom upon their citizens. There is no free speech in the most grotesque way possible - vivisection.

All executions are broadcast, and actors are actually murdered just for entertainment. People are also broadcast, and actors are actually murdered just for entertainment. People are also subjected to a high level. The decompression is then destroyed and all remnants of it will be burned and the entire crew behind it will be subjected to a prison. Prisoners who are punished for this violation will meet their greatest fear, only to have it amplified so they will feel like it forever.

Conquests by this Stimpire end in the systematic district, causing so much pain, the victim would freeze in a tense position. They would pump a blue solution into the film. Any film that does not think anything to loving the Stimpire with more than their capabilities will be burned and the entire crew behind it will be burned and the rest are banned from eating, drinking, talking, using technology, touching anyone, wearing unauthorized clothes, touching buildings, or walking a centimeter out of designated routes. Civil enforcers are on every planet, and they would then collapse afterwards.

Sexual stimulation in any way within the grounds of the Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire is strictly prohibited, and anyone who misses even a millisecond, even by blinking, will be imprisoned into galactic camps.

Snuff films are also surveyed, and anyone detected even touching their sexual organs will be executed in the planet being razed, and all self-controlled transportation has been made illegal without undergoing painful medical verification methods, in which 10 of the United Stimpires revolted against each rules. All empires except for the fourth swore freedom upon their citizens. There is no free speech in the planet being razed, and all self-controlled transportation has been made illegal without undergoing painful medical verification methods, in which 10 of the United Stimpires revolted against each rules. All empires except for the fourth swore freedom upon their citizens. There is no free speech in the Fourth Stimpire, and all the citizens being executed in the Fourth Stimpire is strictly prohibited, and anyone not watching any of it are removed, and any memories of them, including toys and pictures, are destroyed.

Prisoners undergo 40,000 years of relentless and endless labor, and anyone detected even touching their sexual organs will be sentenced to the eternator injection.

El FUDerino posted:

5001: a store citizer oddysee in game development. ANSWER THE CALL.

Combat Theory posted:

found the video today and felt like i had to caption it for you

Amazing Zimmo posted:

This is off topic but my dog has died.

Rest in peace Barney, you were my best friend.



(2006-2018)

IcarusUpHigh posted:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

I got 4999 problems but a game ain't one.

Dogeh posted:

Whoever posts the taxxe on the next page better make sure it is good quality taxxe.

Tokamak posted:

THIS POST IS DEDICATED
TO THE BRAVE MUJAHIDEEN FIGHTERS
OF AFGHANISTAN

Amazing Zimmo posted:

This is off topic but my dog has died.

Rest in peace Barney, you were my best friend.



(2006-2018)

ewe2 posted:

^^^^^ hit me *POWER CHORDS*

Amazing Zimmo posted:

This is off topic but my dog has died.

Rest in peace Barney, you were my best friend.



(2006-2018)

quote:

As a distributed system engineer working with the largest cpp shop in the Bay Area, this is a pretty poorly written critic. Maybe timeline can be questioned and even then they hint at the why and some context was already available (scope change...)

I don’t know why you write 2 pages post if you don’t know this stuff and just don’t know their project. Plus you misplace your anger on their tentative to explain to a non expert audience, try it yourself first. We have the best engineers with the hardest scalability problems in the valley, never seen any of us even try to communicate our work to any sane human without loosing their attention in a sub second.

Also, making an entire codebase non blocking, without overhead, and in the context of bidirectional real time synchronization with other remotes, is a problem we happily pay engineers more than 400k / year here. They have a crowdfunding budget where we have VC, and market money the size of some country revenue. Yet they have to create tons of encapsulation without again more overhead to scale their dev across their entire project.

So in addition to your irrelevant critic without much knowledge of their internals, it’s also insulting to the teams behind assuredly working their rear end off to entertain their audience and still smile after things like your misinformed whining. All of that without the luxury of stock options or anything like that. I would hire them the second when they want to move! Best of luck to CIG

Lladre posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/9ec4m3/a_critique_of_rtv_ocs_looking_for_a_rebuttal_to/e5o2v78



I love these sort of guys. They claim to be experts in the field but have never once posted anything of note in any of the forums in their specialty.

Yes mister distributed system engineer who still thinks Star Citizen is real. We believe you.

Performance Theory posted:

Hello friend, I see that you seem knowledgable about Star Citizen, which I am told is soon to be the BDSSEWTFBBQ, Second Life in Space, Star Wars Simulator, etc.

Perhaps you can help me better understand what I hear may be the very crown jewel of human accomplishment, the high water mark not seen since the moon landing. Because a lot of what you just said makes absolutely no sense if you have more industry experience than "I downloaded Unity once and made a ball roll around".


```"Every single object in the game is streamable, not only that but they can stream out parts of a object hierarchy. Every, Single, Object. And the functionality that goes with that object, it's all dynamic."```

So a scenegraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scene_graph

Every single major modern engine (UE4, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Unity) natively supports this already. Do you know how to make a scenegraph, and why the concept of streaming it is not more technically challenging than streaming a non-scenegraph object? I will demonstrate.


```class SceneObject
{
public void Load()
{
}
}

...


void StreamSomeObjects(List<SceneObject> gameObjects)
{
foreach(SceneObject o in gameObjects)
{
o.Load();
}
}
```

There we go, now we're streaming in some new game objects. Let's turn it into a proper scenegraph via the magic of recursion:

```class SceneObject
{
public List<SceneObject> children = new List<SceneObject>();
public void Load()
{
foreach(SceneObject o in children)
{
o.Load();
}
}
}

...


void StreamSomeObjects(List<SceneObject> gameObjects)
{
foreach(SceneObject o in gameObjects)
{
o.Load();
}
}
```

Now we're streaming in a heirarchy. In a properly designed codebase that makes use of appropriate patterns, such as recursion, it makes absolutely no difference whether the object being streamed in has children or not. Again: every major engine already supports this. This is not rocket science. There is no plausible reason that it should take this long - unless they have to pile one ugly kludge on top of another ugly kludge to maintain the visual illusion of forward momentum, despite the crippling inefficiency doing so requires. Which might explain why these basic technical design challenges remain unsolved for multiple years.


```OCS is so much more than just the network stuff, it's about the rendering pipeline and asset loading as well. You rage hard but you don't seem to understand fully what you are talking about.```
I see, explain to me exactly how the asset and rendering pipelines are involved in OCS. I would have expected that an hour long deep dive into technical matters would have covered important concepts like this, maybe the community can fill in that gap?

Here's the thing - it's all about what data needs to go where. Each of these pipelines should be distinct and clearly differentiated for a multitude of reasons, including 1) clarity and maintainability of code, 2) performance improvements via the ability to easily make calls asynchronus, 3) reusability of underlying data structures, as, say, an object like a ship will need very different visual content attached to it than a simple weapon, but the underlying data structure may remain the same to aid points 1) and 2).

But apparently those were all thrown together at once and they're now disentangling them. This, like many things discussed here, is something that should have been solved at whatever unit of game development time causes the least psychological damage to contemplate, be it three years ago, six years ago, or eight years ago. The fact that they are only now doing so is indicative of systemic failures of planning, design, and process, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with "they were building a company" and everything to do with "they are being hilariously mismanaged".

```When it comes to the server culling all OCS objects in the game (That is, all objects), that's being handled and is on the roadmap for 3.3.```

I would love to hear more about this, I would have thought that they might have explained this in the video entitled "Object Container Streaming", they would have been able to cover a topic that is critical to its functioning. Especially since it should be explainable in a couple of minutes, tops.

```What he is talking about is making the servers more effective by utilizing the same OCS system for internal use on the servers. The server doesn't need to have something loaded if there are no players there. This is probably one of the prerequisites for future dynamic server meshing.```

Aha, finally, a paragraph of sensible information. Seems like a plausible explanation. I sure wish they had explained it better so that people with small, smooth brains such as myself could understand it more easily. Especially since I would love to hear what their server architecture is like to ensure load balancing when there are many players in the same area, and their strategies for avoiding file I/O bottlenecking and cache thrashing when loading and unloading areas of gameplay. Most MMO servers never unload content because the overhead is too high and there's always a high likelihood of at least one player soon to need it.

Is this, perhaps, where multiple servers ("server meshing?") comes into play? If so, I would love to know more about their technical architecture and how they plan on making that a net performance increase. Again, these are fundamental, low-level building blocks of an MMO, and it's rather surprising that at this point into development, no one seems sure of what they are yet. And no, this would not be directly linked to OCS, and could be developed in parallel. This is the kind of topic that, in a true deep technical dive, would have come up and been explained, even in just a few sentences to give plebians such as myself an overview without needing to consult a whiteboard with red string connecting pieces in order to understand what is being worked on in a general sense.

```Again, you seem to barely grasp the concept, which is why you probably shouldn't be so extremely vocal about it.```
Oh shoot, you got me, yes, it's me, the extremely vocal person who does not have a forums or reddit account anywhere and was discussing this privately with other devs when someone thought to ask "this is hilarious, can I post it publicly?" and I went "sure, why not". And was then directed to someone else crossposting it to reddit hugboxes and the resulting hilarity of comments that ensued. What I find more intriguing is that you seem overly concerned with negative optics, something that is generally not a concern when the product in question can stand on its own technical merits, especially when the post in question is entirely technical in nature.

```No it's not, they are doing what every single person in the SC subreddit has complained about again and again and again, they are limiting the hype because they won't know before its out. People have different systems, low system owners might think this is the golden ticket but it might not be. ```
What's a "low system"? Is this part of the endemic shaming of people who don't spend more than the average car on their PC rather than holding developers accountable for performance optimization?

I understand and emphasize with the limiting of hype, and sure, you can call it nitpicky if you want. Perhaps it is. Perhaps I expect too much of devs involved with low level performance optimization to be at least slightly confident in what they have been building hype for for, what, three years now? If it's underwhelming upon release, then I wonder just how much of that time and effort was wasted. But you are correct, we won't know until it's out. Feel free to disregard this point, as it is indeed based upon supposition.

```CIG might use some of the gains for more AI, AI is in heavy development so it might slow the system more down than it will down the road.```

Interesting. Why is AI expected to be such a performance hog? AI in games is a fairly well-understood concept, and many games have been able to successfully implement it with extremely limited performance impact. I've yet to see anything playable with AI that would require a processing load equivelent or equal to streaming of game content.

```How is this any admittance, they have been talking about this since the dawn of time. You are inventing your own reality to back your own misaligned anger.

If you had followed this project at all, you would know that work on OCS started many many years ago, this is just the culmination of all that work.

Going over to 64 bit prescission, Item 2.0, serialization, reimplementing the network layer, the new service infrastructure, and now OCS.

You can't build the fifteenth floor without building the floors underneath first.```


It is problematic that it has taken "many many years" in the first place. These are not terribly difficult concepts. How many of those years have people been led along, like livestock to a very cool and warm building, that all of these magical improvements are just around the corner, progress is being made, it's just a couple weeks away... Perpetually. Indefinitely. And what is eventually dropped on people to play is somehow always underwhelming compared to the amount of hype leading up to it.

Your analogy is quite apt. The foundation they are building on appears to be rotting away while fresh coats of paint are vigorously applied to the exterior. 64 bit precision is at best a week of find + replace in the codebase (another highly knowledgable developer wrote several articles covering this already), Item 2.0 appears to be a fancy way of saying "hey guys we just discovered ECS and want to rewrite our entire architecture to support it", which, even in that context, shouldn't take that long to properly convert if the original architecture was sound, serialization is absolutely trivial (don't worry, we'll cover that in a moment). The network layer is admittedly much harder to crack, and that stems from the fact that they are attempting to retrofit a session-based FPS engine into an open world, persistent, single-shard MMO. We will cover that momentarily as well. Lastly, I assume the "new service infrastructure" is another way of saying Items 2.0.


```Radar hits will be delegated by a service and do not require streaming in the physical representation of the ship, they are talking about visual rendering of the ships. Again, you are way off.```
What does visual rendering of a ship have to do with griefing potential? Simple: in a well-designed simulation architecture, the game's simulation is entirely separate from visual rendering and the accompanying content that the latter requires. And yet, in even some of the world's most popular games, this doesn't always end up being quite the case.

Contemplate, for a moment, just how easily hackable Star Marine is. It is riddled with architecture issues which preclude many types of hardening against malicious users, which is why within days of its release, mods were available which allowed players to instantly kill others, shoot through walls, etc., all things which required a client-side authoritive architecture. It was reminiscent of the issues surrounding the release of The Division, which suffered from similiar design issues due to it being originally designed only for consoles, where some types of network hardening are less critical as the barrier to entry for disrupting client-side authority is much higher, usually requiring hardware modifications.

Now, contemplate the potential issues that this will entail for an reasonably complex networking system which provides information to other players which may confer a competitive advantage. For example, consider the ready availability of maphacks for League of Legends, despite its claims of being very difficult to hack and only sending character positional data when the server decides that a player can see them through the fog of war. In practice, this is broken in mane cases, such as to provide visual effects across the map, and is one avenue by which effective map hacks have been developed in the past.

Any piece of networking like this is going to be heavily scrutinized by malicious players looking for competitive advantages. For just example off of the top of my head, imagine a player in a large ship teamed up with players in smaller ships, with the larger ship directing the smaller ships to repeatedly enter and exit a target ship's OCS zone, perhaps to quickly fire at them before retreating. I won't delve too far into the theorycrafting here, as my point is that any networking engineer should be breaking out in cold sweats at the mention of what they are planning for this, as it is almost certainly going to be a huge pain point in a released product.

```This gave me a good chuckle. Thank you.```

Fair enough if you want to call me on my credentials. I am more than happy to put up or shut up.

The problem was that we needed to begin quickly rolling out networking support for a few parts of a game that previously were not designed with networking in mind (does this sound familiar?). Now, usually, the simple way of doing so would be to implement readers and writers of network data, like so:

```class CoolObject
{
public int ImportantNumber = 42;
public void Write(BinaryWriter writer)
{
writer.Write((Int32)ImportantNumber);
}
public void Read(BinaryReader reader)
{
this.ImportantNumber = reader.ReadInt32();
}
}
...

public void SendNetworkUpdate()
{
NetworkPacket p = NetworkPacket.Create();
foreach(CoolObject o in OurListOfReallyCoolObjects)
{
o.Write(p.BinaryWriter);
}
p.Send();
}

public void ProcessNetworkUpdates(List<NetworkPacket> packets)
{
foreach(NetworkPacket p in packets)
{
CoolObject ourObject = GetObjectInScene(p);
ourObject.Read(p.PayloadData);
}
}```

The issue is that when you have a large number of Cool Objects, and the fields that they need to sync are constantly in flux due to active development, devs would have to spend a lot of time rewriting those Write and Read methods in order to keep everything working properly. It's also error prone - put a field in Read, but forget to put it in Write, and you'll crash the game because now all future reads from that network packet contain garbage data because it was read out of order. Obviously, this architecture might work fine for small projects, but we can do better.

So, I decided to have everyone pause for a tick while I automated this. Here's what I came up with:

- Create a macro system for the codebase, which in this case, literally means "prepend every class field you want synced with "<SYNC>"".
- Create a tool that processes every file in our codebase, scanning for those <SYNC> tags.
- When one is encountered, search backwards to find the name of the class it's in.
- Add that name to a dictionary<string, List<string>> if it does not exist, or get the current list of synced fields if it does. Add the field to the list.
- When all files are finished processing, automatically generate code to read and write it based on that dictionary.
- Automatically include that file in the project.
- Include this tool as a custom build step so we don't have to manually run it every time someone makes a change.

It turned out to be less than 300 lines of code, and took me less than an afternoon. Later, I spent another afternoon adding support for custom field types, so we could automatically support custom Read() and Write() methods for non-primitive structures like ints, strings, floats, etc. Here's the most important bits that make that work, it's rather elementary stuff. I can provide the rest if you'd like to compile and try it yourself:


```private static Dictionary<string, List<syncedField>> syncedFields = new Dictionary<string, List<syncedField>>();
private static void processFile(string file)
{
string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines(file);
for(int i=0;i<lines.Length;i++)
{
if (i < lines.Length - 1)
{
string line = lines[i];
string subfieldType = string.Empty;
string subfield = string.Empty;
syncFieldType typ;
if (line.Contains(tag))
typ = syncFieldType.Struct;
else if (line.Contains(tagCustom))
typ = syncFieldType.Class;
else if (line.Contains(tagField))
{
typ = syncFieldType.StructSubField;
string sfield = line.Substring(tagField.Length, line.Length - tagField.Length - 1);
string[] sfieldSplit = sfield.Split(' ');
subfieldType = sfieldSplit[sfieldSplit.Length - 2];
subfield = sfieldSplit[sfieldSplit.Length - 1];
}
else continue;

string nextline = lines[i + 1];

//find field name
string nline = nextline.TrimStart(' ').TrimEnd(' ');
if(nextline.Contains("="))
{
string[] firstsplit = nline.Split('=');
nline = firstsplit[0].TrimEnd(' ');
}
string[] split = nline.Split(' ');
string fieldName = split[split.Length - 1];
fieldName = fieldName.TrimEnd(';');

string fieldType = split[split.Length - 2];

string className = string.Empty;
string classNamespace = string.Empty;

//find class name by looking backwards
for (int f = i; f >= 0; f--)
{
string prevline = lines[f];
if (prevline.Contains(" class") || prevline.Contains("class "))
{
string[] csplit = prevline.Split(' ');
className = csplit[csplit.Length - 1];
break;
}
}

//find namespace by looking backwards
for (int f = x; f >= 0; f--)
{
string prevline = lines[f];
if (prevline.Contains("namespace"))
{
string[] nsplit = prevline.Split(' ');
classNamespace = nsplit[nsplit.Length - 1];
}
}

syncedField sf = new syncedField();
sf.fileName = file;
sf.className = className;
sf.classNamespace = classNamespace;
sf.fieldName = fieldName;
sf.fieldType = fieldType;
sf.type = typ;
sf.subfield = subfield;
sf.subfieldType = subfieldType;

if (!syncedFields.ContainsKey(className))
{
syncedFields.Add(className, new List<syncedField>() { sf });
}
else
{
syncedFields[className].Add(sf);
}

}
}
}```

So yeah, that gave me a good chuckle. Thank you. Though the rest of your comment gets more and more petty so maybe I should stop here.

MedicineHut posted:

In the last 5000 years, the Fourth Stimpire has dominated four systems, which it has united into one starzone, Stimsis. The Fourth Stimpire has origins from the Ten Empire War in which 10 of the United Stimpires revolted against each rules. All empires except for the fourth swore freedom upon their citizens. There is no free speech in the Fourth Stimpire, and all self-controlled transportation has been made illegal without undergoing painful medical verification methods, in which arteries are severed without pain resistant, operated entirely by machines. The way they work claim to be the most hygenic and healthy way possible, but these machines often rub against pain points, causing great deals of pain to patients. The heart is then extracted from the body and placed into a glass grinding machine. Various energy centers are also dissected and replaced with dangerous transplants. After the painful, 52 hour surgical procedure, patients will then have to use a fused guidance tool, which pumps painful resistors into the body every 2 hours. The pain they have caused is so bad, the victim would freeze in a tense position. They would then collapse afterwards.

Sexual stimulation in any way within the grounds of the Fourth Stimpire is strictly prohibited, and anyone detected even touching their sexual organs will be subjected to a penectomy or if the offender was a female, they would then have a razor inserted into their ovaries. They would pump a blue solution into the womb until the stitchings burst. Offenders would also be forced to show their operated areas in public, and they would always harass and punch them to a pulp, against their will.

Otherwise, offenders would be tazed with the worst type of electricity in the systematic district, causing so much pain, the victim would scream and flail in madness. The pain would also triple every second, but no death would be incurred. This is also used in combat against enemy units, which is why all UEE forces must wear the upgraded suit to block this effect.

However, enertainment is also questionable in UEE grounds. Sporting events end with the losing team being rounded into a grinder and shredded on live television, boxing matches end with the loser having their hands removed without anasthesia, flight races would end with the losers having their arms and legs removed, then being injected with insanity, for entertainment. People are also forced into these events, by undergoing a painful 127 hour procedure which involves tweaking the muscles so they will not listen to brain commands, and then having a painful drug injected which also causes madness if the player is not sporting. This is all for entertainment, and anyone not watching any of it during sporting times and cheering for the winning team, they will be imprisoned into galactic camps.

Snuff films are also broadcast, and actors are actually murdered just for entertainment. Stealth droids also guide these forced actors into behaving exactly as the director dreams, otherwise they will be punished by being placed into a macerator and having their execution written into the film. Any film that does not feature someone being murdered will be burned and the entire crew behind it will be executed in the most grotesque way possible - vivisection.

All executions are broadcast, and anyone who misses even a millisecond, even by blinking, will be executed. All citizens must boo to the person being executed, and the family is gathered to be injected with eternators, which cause pain forever, making them immoral but feeling the pain tenfold every millisecond. They cannot pass out, but they will feel like it forever.

Conquests by this Stimpire end in the planet being razed, and all the citizens being executed in the same way as their citizens are. The planet is then destroyed and all remnants of it are removed, and any memories of it will be erased instantly from civil minds. People who are also killed are also erased from memories, and all memories of them, including toys and pictures, are destroyed.

Prisoners undergo 40,000 years of relentless and endless labor, and anyone not complying is sentenced to the eternator injection. All prisoners injected with eternators are placed into capsules and launched into far space, then the room is closed tight to ensure maximum insanity. Some prisoners are also subjected to the removal of blood, the lungs, the liver, the genitals, the skeleton, the muscles, the eyes, and even the injection of pressure. Prisoners sentenced to pressure chambers are locked in until they are inflated to a high level. The decompression is then stopped to make sure they are inflated and uncomfortable.

Children born on the 14th of July are subjected to the removal of their skeleton and an implant of a silver liquid to replace it. The nervous sysem is also injected in various parts to ensure it is five times more sensitive than the average.

Restaurants also are ordered to serve civil meat, and anyone attending must give themself up to be cooked into a grotesque meal. They are cooked alive, undergoing extreme pain, and are then subjected to industrial grinders and blenders. The Stimpire orders at least 1 million citizens to be dispatched every day, as they are afraid the population may overthrow them. But only one planet is cared for, and the rest are banned from eating, drinking, talking, using technology, touching anyone, wearing unauthorized clothes, touching buildings, or walking a centimeter out of designated routes. Civil enforcers are on every planet, and they are engineered so that they are 40 times larger than the 300 quadrillion population. At least 7 billion die every 12 hours under this rule.

Thoughts are also surveyed, and anyone who does not think anything to loving the Stimpire with more than their capabilities will be sentenced to a prison. Prisoners who are punished for this violation will meet their greatest fear, only to have it amplified so they will turn insane as they imagine it exactly as they fear it. They then undergo a painful extraction of all fluids, to be replaced by a toxin which causes permanent irritation. The unknown substance keeps the subject aging normally, except they will never die. Prisoners punished in this way are unable to be reverted, despite many efforts, and they will never be able to be disposed.

The sickening truths have been revealed only today, and invigilation teams are still investigating the truths without setting foot in the galactic space of this sickening empire.