Calling Star Citizen an MMO is probably charitable in the eyes of some (or even calling it a game, there now you can’t make that snide comment yourself, I beat you to it, neener-neener), considering that players currently log on to one of several random servers that hold 50 players at once and only have a slightly limited amount of things that persist from session to session. Obviously, that’s not The Vision™, and the steps needed to get to a more presistent single universe were discussed in the latest Calling All Devs video.
Much of the first half of the video talked about global persistence and how a lot of that heavy lifting to be done by the in-development iCache system that effectively works as an intermediary between the player and the database and allows for more scalable persistence than what’s in the alpha currently. According to lead gameplay engineer Chad McKinney, most of the backend setup for iCache is largely complete, with the devs now working to hook the system to Star Citizen’s code.
The latter part of the video discussed server meshing with lead network programmer Clive Johnson, which will link the multiple servers together to share parts of the game and allow players to seamlessly connect to the relevant server depending on which location they’re going to. Before that, however, the team has been mostly working on existing lag, rubberbanding, and desync issues which need to be addressed now before server meshing makes things worse. The devs are also making some progress on getting servers to talk to one another, which is an evidently involved process.
