StarCitizen Server Meshing Architecture

Quantum is a system for simulating activity with economic impacts and determines how much of raw material or assembled products are available and where, how much things cost, how busy and how dangerous or safe space travel lanes are, and other such aspects of economic scaling.

Subsumption AI is used to drive NPC behavior up close. The game is supposed to have a population that is 90% AI NPCs that drive economic variation and action in general. This makes the game world seem alive even if there are no players currently with you in game. The NPCs have the ability to decide what to do, how to move around, make jokes and idle banter, and can use various equipment in the game as well as fight either in person or as spaceship pilots.

Not totally sure about pCache but it appears to be used on the server to capture changes to state in the universe that should be stored persistently. This is part of the server container streaming feature which allows servers to stream in areas and sets of objects as players approach and then stream them out when they are left empty for a time.

Also free fly weekends are when the game is at its worst, the servers are bought to its knees.

Again, no fault to the player and its completely on CIG but its a shame that a lot of players never get to see the game in its best light because free fly is a nightmare.

World of Warcraft ("WoW") is the elephant in the room. It killed the previous elephant (Everquest aka EQ) but has reigned supreme in a shrinking space for 18 years. It partially shrank because it used to have a social component that has mostly been replaced by social media but there are other factors too.

But what I scratch my head at is all the bad competitors that came afterwards and predictably failed because they made product decisions. The most common one is focusing on PvP. MMO is an interesting genre because only something like 10% of the population at best cares about PvP. So right off the bat you've reduced your potential market by 90% without doing a thing. But no, you get assured that "our PvP is so good, casuals will want to PvP".

There's another factor here too: in a persistent world where your power increases, PvP players fundamentally want an unfair fight. They want to be rewarded for various grinds. Contrast this with deathmatch and battle royale games where everyone is basically equal other than player skill.

Anyway, Star Citizen has now raised (and spent) over half a billion dollars on the same bad premise of PvP.

Server meshing aims to create a single persistent universe but PvP, which most will want to avoid, is fundamentally unfair because the people with the best ships, paid for with real money, will win. This is such a fundamentally bad and limiting design, it's hard to comprehend.

Imagine instead SC had defined a small core game loop and gone for a Sea of Thieves like world, both PvP and non-PvP. SoT has like 8-12 players on a server and they can PvP. Interestingly, a lot of players don't want this so they monopolize a server and agree not to PvP. Even in WoW, which has faction PvP, the players have basically voted out world PvP by concentrating a single faction on each server with very few exceptions.

But SC is doing things like server meshing when after a decade they still don't have a core game loop. I occasionally check in on the SC roadmap and progress. Not because I'm interested in playing but because I like watching a car wreck in super slow motion. Constant missed deadlines, new (incomplete) features being promised (and a few added), more promised features to fix the bad previous features and so on. It's a disaster.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik