{"data":{"id":14005,"title":"Update: Improving Multiplayer","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/14005-Update-Improving-Multiplayer","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/14005","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/14005","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":1926,"name":"Missile_Hit_01.JPG","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/nbmvi99uenslvr\/source\/Missile_Hit_01.JPG","alt":"","size":145784,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2014-06-27T17:28:11+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1926","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1926\/similar"},{"id":1948,"name":"Gun_EYE_Zoom.JPG","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/psp4rtzltrs1xr\/source\/Gun_EYE_Zoom.JPG","alt":"","size":91084,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2014-06-27T17:28:06+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1948","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1948\/similar"},{"id":1949,"name":"Bank_2.JPG","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/1l80svfsqwo1fr\/source\/Bank_2.JPG","alt":"","size":87132,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2014-06-27T17:27:44+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1949","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1949\/similar"},{"id":1950,"name":"Simulation_Boundry.JPG","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/u3mj2nu6obtm2r\/source\/Simulation_Boundry.JPG","alt":"","size":204518,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2014-06-27T17:28:13+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1950","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/1950\/similar"}],"images_count":4,"translations":{"en_EN":"Greetings Citizens,\nOn Thursday, we opened Arena Commander\u2019s multiplayer modes to a much larger segment of backers. Over the holiday weekend, our engineers kept careful track of server stats: number of successful connections, number of failed attempts, number of competed games, average latency and the like. We also spent time watching your Twitch feeds, which have proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for helping compare the real world experience to what we test in-house.\n\nBy releasing a new version of the game with many changes and also upping the number of simultaneous players, we exposed a variety of load cases and bugs we hadn\u2019t seen before: ship movement and prediction issues, matchmaking bugs that include assigning excessive player counts to game servers and other tracking edge cases, and existing unused engine features causing problems.\n\nThe result is that with Patch 12.4, there is an unacceptable amount of lag and occurrence of rubber-banding (the effect when ships seem to \u2018jump back\u2019 in space.) While all of you know that Arena Commander is a pre-alpha module and that our aim is to determine and fix exactly these problems, they seem significant enough with this patch that we should take a moment to talk about how we\u2019re aiming to repair them in the upcoming weeks.\n\nI want to stress that this is part of our shared process, and it\u2019s one of the things that makes Star Citizen\u2019s development so unique. We hear about games that launch with dismal multiplayer issues every day. Unlike a traditionally published game, which launches fully formed into the wild, Arena Commander is letting us do real load balancing tests with the help of the community to flush out multiplayer and connectivity issues at this early stage. Getting this right now means having it right going forward; you\u2019re helping ensure that future updates and modules improve on something that works instead of publish to a complete unknown.\n\nThe team was already preparing patch 12.5 for launch, which will add both fixes and a new surprise or two. With the rise of the new latency and rubber-banding issues, though, we knew we needed to up our focus. We had not seen these issues with the 60,000 players who had access to the previous patch, so our immediate thought was that one of our server-side changes may have caused them. On Monday morning, production sat down and developed a \u2018to investigate\u2019 checklist of possible causes of (and improvements for) for the issues we were seeing. Here\u2019s a short sampling:\n\nOn Monday morning, the team went into action to determine the root cause for the issue. There were dozens of possibilities, all (or none) of which could be part of the issues we were observing. Bug reports submitted by dedicated backers were our first point for analysis. Like doctors trying to identify a mysterious illness, we looked for common environmental factors. Was there a significant geographic distance between players? Surprisingly, no: in many cases, players with almost no latency between them were still having issues.\n\nThe team moved on to examining our own code. Several possibilities presented themselves: leftover code was causing the game to attempt to connect to Crynetwork chat with each session, missing movement smoothing code that had been developed but not implemented in 12.4 and there were potential issues with the servers not correctly recognizing when they were full. Each of these possibilities became a JIRA task instructing Star Citizen\u2019s engineers to investigate and repair a given item for the next patch.\n\nWe\u2019ve already implemented a number of fixes which we believe will improve the multiplayer experience in 12.5, and we\u2019re continuing investigating several other possibilities that we hope will improve the experience. Was one of these items the \u2018magic bullet\u2019 that fixes the multiplayer experience? Our tests are promising, but we won\u2019t know for sure until we\u2019ve patched Arena Commander and seen how it impacts players around the world. We know it can be frustrating not to see a \u2018one button\u2019 fix, but kind of extended process is necessary to preparing for the future launch of the Persistent Universe. Expect to see an improvement in 12.5, and greater improvements as we continue our work!\n\nWe\u2019re learning how to make the investigative process better, too. On Tuesday, two of our programmers updated the server software to provide more detailed concurrency numbers. Knowing more specifically how many players are in the game in a given interval will be a valuable tool for investigating how the server behaves where changes are introduced in the future. Next, QA will use this tool to test 12.3 compared to 12.4 to try and discover where the performance changes were introduced.\n\nIn the meantime, I\u2019d like to thank you all for your efforts in helping us discover these issues, both those waiting to play and those who have been dogfighting in less-than-ideal conditions. We\u2019re working to make this the best possible experience, and that\u2019s something we couldn\u2019t do without the support and help of all of our backers. There will be bumps along the road as we improve the technology behind Star Citizen and the balance of the game itself\u2026 but we\u2019re going to share the process by which we deal with all of these issues with you as it happens.\n\nI\u2019ve also had questions from several backers about international servers, expanding to places like Australia and Europe. Current indications is that this isn\u2019t the cause of the problems we\u2019re seeing with 12.4\u2026 but it is something on our roadmap, with plans to enable these servers by the time Arena Commander 1.0 launches!\n\n\u2014 Chris Roberts","de_DE":"Gr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\nAm Donnerstag haben wir die Mehrspielermodi des Arena Commander f\u00fcr ein viel gr\u00f6\u00dferes Segment von Geldgebern ge\u00f6ffnet. W\u00e4hrend des Feiertagswochenendes haben unsere Ingenieure die Serverstatistiken sorgf\u00e4ltig verfolgt: Anzahl der erfolgreichen Verbindungen, Anzahl der fehlgeschlagenen Versuche, Anzahl der konkurrierenden Spiele, durchschnittliche Latenzzeiten und dergleichen. Wir haben auch Zeit damit verbracht, Ihre Twitch-Feeds zu beobachten, die sich als unglaublich wertvolles Werkzeug erwiesen haben, um die praktische Erfahrung mit dem zu vergleichen, was wir intern testen.\n\nDurch die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung einer neuen Version des Spiels mit vielen \u00c4nderungen und der Erh\u00f6hung der Anzahl der gleichzeitigen Spieler haben wir eine Vielzahl von Lastf\u00e4llen und Bugs aufgedeckt, die wir noch nie zuvor gesehen hatten: Schiffsbewegungs- und Prognoseprobleme, Matchmaking-Bugs, die das Zuweisen \u00fcberm\u00e4\u00dfiger Spielerzahlen zu Spielservern und anderen Tracking Edge-F\u00e4llen beinhalten, und bestehende ungenutzte Motorfunktionen, die Probleme verursachen.\n\nDas Ergebnis ist, dass es mit Patch 12.4 eine inakzeptable Verz\u00f6gerung und das Auftreten von Gummib\u00e4ndern gibt (der Effekt, wenn Schiffe im Weltraum zur\u00fcckspringen). W\u00e4hrend Sie alle wissen, dass Arena Commander ein Pre-Alpha-Modul ist und dass unser Ziel darin besteht, genau diese Probleme zu bestimmen und zu beheben, scheinen sie mit diesem Patch signifikant genug, dass wir uns einen Moment Zeit nehmen sollten, um dar\u00fcber zu sprechen, wie wir sie in den kommenden Wochen reparieren wollen.\n\nIch m\u00f6chte betonen, dass dies Teil unseres gemeinsamen Prozesses ist, und es ist eines der Dinge, die die Entwicklung von Star Citizen so einzigartig machen. Wir h\u00f6ren von Spielen, die jeden Tag mit d\u00fcsteren Mehrspielerproblemen starten. Im Gegensatz zu einem traditionell ver\u00f6ffentlichten Spiel, das vollst\u00e4ndig in die Wildnis startet, l\u00e4sst uns Arena Commander mit Hilfe der Community echte Lastausgleichstests durchf\u00fchren, um Mehrspieler- und Konnektivit\u00e4tsprobleme in diesem fr\u00fchen Stadium auszuschlie\u00dfen. Dies jetzt zu erreichen bedeutet, es in Zukunft richtig zu haben; Sie helfen sicherzustellen, dass zuk\u00fcnftige Updates und Module etwas verbessern, das funktioniert, anstatt es f\u00fcr ein v\u00f6llig Unbekanntes zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen.\n\nDas Team bereitete bereits Patch 12.5 f\u00fcr den Start vor, der beide Fixes und eine oder zwei neue \u00dcberraschungen enthalten wird. Mit dem Aufkommen der neuen Probleme mit Latenzzeiten und Gummib\u00e4ndern wussten wir jedoch, dass wir unseren Fokus erh\u00f6hen mussten. Wir hatten diese Probleme mit den 60.000 Spielern, die Zugriff auf den vorherigen Patch hatten, nicht gesehen, so dass wir sofort dachten, dass eine unserer serverseitigen \u00c4nderungen sie verursacht haben k\u00f6nnte. Am Montagmorgen setzte sich die Produktion hin und entwickelte eine Checkliste, um m\u00f6gliche Ursachen (und Verbesserungen) f\u00fcr die Probleme zu untersuchen. Hier ist eine kurze Auswahl:\n\nAm Montagmorgen ging das Team in Aktion, um die Ursache f\u00fcr das Problem zu ermitteln. Es gab Dutzende von M\u00f6glichkeiten, von denen alle (oder keine) Teil der Themen sein konnten, die wir beobachteten. Fehlerberichte, die von engagierten Geldgebern eingereicht wurden, waren unser erster Analysepunkt. Wie \u00c4rzte, die versuchen, eine mysteri\u00f6se Krankheit zu identifizieren, haben wir nach gemeinsamen Umweltfaktoren gesucht. Gab es eine signifikante geografische Distanz zwischen den Spielern? \u00dcberraschenderweise nein: In vielen F\u00e4llen hatten Spieler mit fast keiner Latenzzeit zwischen ihnen immer noch Probleme.\n\nDas Team ging zur \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung unseres eigenen Codes \u00fcber. Mehrere M\u00f6glichkeiten boten sich an: \u00fcbrig gebliebener Code veranlasste das Spiel, mit jeder Sitzung eine Verbindung zum Crynetwork-Chat herzustellen, fehlender Bewegungsgl\u00e4ttungscode, der entwickelt, aber in 12.4 nicht implementiert wurde, und es gab potenzielle Probleme mit den Servern, die nicht richtig erkannten, wann sie voll waren. Jede dieser M\u00f6glichkeiten wurde zu einer JIRA-Aufgabe, bei der die Ingenieure von Star Citizen beauftragt wurden, einen bestimmten Gegenstand f\u00fcr den n\u00e4chsten Patch zu untersuchen und zu reparieren.\n\nWir haben bereits eine Reihe von Korrekturen implementiert, von denen wir glauben, dass sie die Multiplayer-Erfahrung in 12.5 verbessern werden, und wir untersuchen weiterhin mehrere andere M\u00f6glichkeiten, von denen wir hoffen, dass sie die Erfahrung verbessern werden. War einer dieser Gegenst\u00e4nde die \"Wunderwaffe\", die das Mehrspielererlebnis verbessert? Unsere Tests sind vielversprechend, aber wir werden es nicht sicher wissen, bis wir den Arena Commander gepatcht haben und gesehen haben, wie er sich auf Spieler auf der ganzen Welt auswirkt. Wir wissen, dass es frustrierend sein kann, keine \"One-Button\"-Fixierung zu sehen, aber eine Art erweiterter Prozess ist notwendig, um sich auf die zuk\u00fcnftige Einf\u00fchrung des Persistent Universe vorzubereiten. Erwarten Sie eine Verbesserung in 12.5 und gr\u00f6\u00dfere Verbesserungen, w\u00e4hrend wir unsere Arbeit fortsetzen!\n\nWir lernen auch, wie wir den Ermittlungsprozess verbessern k\u00f6nnen. Am Dienstag haben zwei unserer Programmierer die Serversoftware aktualisiert, um detailliertere Parallelit\u00e4tszahlen zu erhalten. Genauer gesagt, wie viele Spieler in einem bestimmten Intervall im Spiel sind, wird ein wertvolles Werkzeug sein, um zu untersuchen, wie sich der Server verh\u00e4lt, wenn in Zukunft \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen werden. Als n\u00e4chstes wird die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung mit diesem Tool 12.3 im Vergleich zu 12.4 testen, um herauszufinden, wo die Leistungs\u00e4nderungen eingef\u00fchrt wurden.\n\nIn der Zwischenzeit m\u00f6chte ich Ihnen allen f\u00fcr Ihre Bem\u00fchungen danken, uns dabei zu helfen, diese Probleme zu entdecken, sowohl diejenigen, die darauf warten zu spielen, als auch diejenigen, die unter weniger als idealen Bedingungen im Dogfighting waren. Wir arbeiten daran, dies zum bestm\u00f6glichen Erlebnis zu machen, und das ist etwas, was wir ohne die Unterst\u00fctzung und Hilfe aller unserer Geldgeber nicht tun k\u00f6nnten. Es wird Unebenheiten auf dem Weg geben, wenn wir die Technologie hinter Star Citizen und die Balance des Spiels selbst verbessern.... aber wir werden den Prozess teilen, mit dem wir all diese Probleme mit Ihnen angehen, wie es geschieht.\n\nIch habe auch Fragen von mehreren Geldgebern \u00fcber internationale Server erhalten, die sich auf Orte wie Australien und Europa erstrecken. Aktuelle Hinweise deuten darauf hin, dass dies nicht die Ursache f\u00fcr die Probleme ist, die wir mit dem 12.4. sehen.... aber es ist etwas auf unserer Roadmap, mit Pl\u00e4nen, diese Server bis zum Start von Arena Commander 1.0 zu aktivieren!\n\n- Chris Roberts","zh_CN":"Greetings Citizens,\nOn Thursday, we opened Arena Commander\u2019s multiplayer modes to a much larger segment of backers. Over the holiday weekend, our engineers kept careful track of server stats: number of successful connections, number of failed attempts, number of competed games, average latency and the like. We also spent time watching your Twitch feeds, which have proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for helping compare the real world experience to what we test in-house.\n\nBy releasing a new version of the game with many changes and also upping the number of simultaneous players, we exposed a variety of load cases and bugs we hadn\u2019t seen before: ship movement and prediction issues, matchmaking bugs that include assigning excessive player counts to game servers and other tracking edge cases, and existing unused engine features causing problems.\n\nThe result is that with Patch 12.4, there is an unacceptable amount of lag and occurrence of rubber-banding (the effect when ships seem to \u2018jump back\u2019 in space.) While all of you know that Arena Commander is a pre-alpha module and that our aim is to determine and fix exactly these problems, they seem significant enough with this patch that we should take a moment to talk about how we\u2019re aiming to repair them in the upcoming weeks.\n\nI want to stress that this is part of our shared process, and it\u2019s one of the things that makes Star Citizen\u2019s development so unique. We hear about games that launch with dismal multiplayer issues every day. Unlike a traditionally published game, which launches fully formed into the wild, Arena Commander is letting us do real load balancing tests with the help of the community to flush out multiplayer and connectivity issues at this early stage. Getting this right now means having it right going forward; you\u2019re helping ensure that future updates and modules improve on something that works instead of publish to a complete unknown.\n\nThe team was already preparing patch 12.5 for launch, which will add both fixes and a new surprise or two. With the rise of the new latency and rubber-banding issues, though, we knew we needed to up our focus. We had not seen these issues with the 60,000 players who had access to the previous patch, so our immediate thought was that one of our server-side changes may have caused them. On Monday morning, production sat down and developed a \u2018to investigate\u2019 checklist of possible causes of (and improvements for) for the issues we were seeing. Here\u2019s a short sampling:\n\nOn Monday morning, the team went into action to determine the root cause for the issue. There were dozens of possibilities, all (or none) of which could be part of the issues we were observing. Bug reports submitted by dedicated backers were our first point for analysis. Like doctors trying to identify a mysterious illness, we looked for common environmental factors. Was there a significant geographic distance between players? Surprisingly, no: in many cases, players with almost no latency between them were still having issues.\n\nThe team moved on to examining our own code. Several possibilities presented themselves: leftover code was causing the game to attempt to connect to Crynetwork chat with each session, missing movement smoothing code that had been developed but not implemented in 12.4 and there were potential issues with the servers not correctly recognizing when they were full. Each of these possibilities became a JIRA task instructing Star Citizen\u2019s engineers to investigate and repair a given item for the next patch.\n\nWe\u2019ve already implemented a number of fixes which we believe will improve the multiplayer experience in 12.5, and we\u2019re continuing investigating several other possibilities that we hope will improve the experience. Was one of these items the \u2018magic bullet\u2019 that fixes the multiplayer experience? Our tests are promising, but we won\u2019t know for sure until we\u2019ve patched Arena Commander and seen how it impacts players around the world. We know it can be frustrating not to see a \u2018one button\u2019 fix, but kind of extended process is necessary to preparing for the future launch of the Persistent Universe. Expect to see an improvement in 12.5, and greater improvements as we continue our work!\n\nWe\u2019re learning how to make the investigative process better, too. On Tuesday, two of our programmers updated the server software to provide more detailed concurrency numbers. Knowing more specifically how many players are in the game in a given interval will be a valuable tool for investigating how the server behaves where changes are introduced in the future. Next, QA will use this tool to test 12.3 compared to 12.4 to try and discover where the performance changes were introduced.\n\nIn the meantime, I\u2019d like to thank you all for your efforts in helping us discover these issues, both those waiting to play and those who have been dogfighting in less-than-ideal conditions. We\u2019re working to make this the best possible experience, and that\u2019s something we couldn\u2019t do without the support and help of all of our backers. There will be bumps along the road as we improve the technology behind Star Citizen and the balance of the game itself\u2026 but we\u2019re going to share the process by which we deal with all of these issues with you as it happens.\n\nI\u2019ve also had questions from several backers about international servers, expanding to places like Australia and Europe. Current indications is that this isn\u2019t the cause of the problems we\u2019re seeing with 12.4\u2026 but it is something on our roadmap, with plans to enable these servers by the time Arena Commander 1.0 launches!\n\n\u2014 Chris Roberts"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":261,"created_at":"2014-07-08T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"11 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-08 17:02:02","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":14004,"next_id":14006}}