Can Star Citizen Really Support 10,000 Players?

Is Star Citizen built to support its lofty goals of having tens of thousands of players in the same server shard or will a huge portion of the game need to be redesigned before achieving those goals?

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[forgiveusmen]

Star citizen is literally the first time since fallout 3 came out that I’ve actually felt immersed and able to enjoy a video game. Never before have I found a game that I connected with

[IT_ODIS]

I think adding more major landing zones on planets would help massively with this problem. Once server meshing is closer to being finalized you could have a server for each landing zone and player numbers per planet would stay about the same but the main load would be split 3x. Planets as big as star citizens deserve more major locations anyway

[elfwyn]

Once Server Meshing is stable the number of players is technically only limited by players in very close proximity.
Once two players cannot interact with each other physically they could as well exist on two separate shards performance wise. Dynamic Server Meshing wants to address this by having even close proximity players be handled by separate servers that speak with each other to allow player interactions.
By that point Player Count is only limited by the clients hardware and Framecount.

The current Mission Design is currently tied to the limited state of the Game. With Server Meshing as a prequesite thousands of locations have to be dynamically created to allow for that many players. From my Point of View those features have been Part of the plan from the start. Every step is going in that direction.

I think currently each planetary body or city location could easily support 100-200 players in terms of Missions and Facilities.
With more professions becoming feasible they will split into Traders, Bounty Hunters, Miners, Salvagers, Escort and Supporters, so it is unlikely that more than 30 players will crowd into a single room. And even if that was the case it should be easily scalable until better procedural tech comes online.

[aguspuig]

7:10 space stations are way bigger than youd think, theres defiently space there for many more hangars, im not sure if they could add up to the thousands, but way way more than the current 20 or so per station for sure would be possible

[brbrd]

StarCitizen said PES would allow everything to persist indefinitely and thus far it seems they were right. We will see what happens over the coming months. PES at one point was just theoretical and years ago people were in doubt over full persistence ever being possible.

They have the time and they have the money and they have the talent for server meshing. The theory is sound. We will find out soon(relative to the timescales that the game operates on, lol)

[Tryn]

my hope for the game is that when squadron 42 is done and we can finally play it that we will be so busy playing that, that a lot gets done in the PU and having even probably 300 in one server would be so much more lively and so much fun imo. more player interactions = more fun

[parispm]

I imagine Object Container Streaming is the mitigating technology for handling overcrowding. If each shard is running a Game Instance with full swap ability then eventually you could imagine a single shard supporting multiple instances of the same Container. This would provide these high trafficked areas to be essentially self contained overlapped instances which could potentially have a max capacity before a new instance is established for more players. Additionally they could potentially pop the unneeded instances freeing up the server shards processing. 🤷‍♂️ all hypothetical, but we’ll have to wait and see either way it’s cool stuff.

[DennisBLee]

I'm no game dev, but I'd imagine the move would be once static server meshing is in, they could give each planet or system it's own server linked to the others and then potentially support 1000 players per 'shard' or instance of the verse. Much more than that and we'll either need far more systems or content will have to be scaled to accomodate.

[OversizedPringleToe]

In hubs, or places where combat/player interactivity is limited, they should make it so that servers are smaller, but can replicate other players from other servers. It has been done before is some games.

[froggerify]

I played for the first time last night in my 100i. In some ways I'm amazed in others in like eerr. It's like the flight mechanics are half done, feels like flying a plane on ice skates 😁? Game runs beautifully on my PC, the frame rate stabilizes as it finishes indexing and cpu load decreases considerably when it's not indexing new areas. The definitely need to fix that

[CrouchAfterdark]

Right now in Stanton at 100 players ... I rarely see anyone, now and then perhaps two or three others at a major station. As it is, in your though experiment, it could easily support 300 players with plenty of room. Though, the issue with mission cross over is an issue.

[BizzMRK]

What I am wondering with the whole server meshing and sharding is how small they are planning to make these shards and how they want to avoid fading in/out of players or sudden percieved "lagspikes" when switching shards which can occour in other games like Elite Dangerous aswell where you are awkwardly stuck in place for a second until everything loads in or how they actually plan to synchronise the shards with the decoupled replication layer. It would be a bit awkward for shipwrecks from different shards to magically appear out of nowhere.

[StormRavenOmegaForce]

I get the feeling that CIG is well aware of the increase in server load and I suspect they will dramatically increase the sheer size of each city, landing zone and space station to accommodate the increased load. That's where Vulkan comes into play because it will be able to handle the increased number of assests.

[justalex]

I still remember the day 3.17.2 dropped and we all got a load of money...there was a huge queue of players at the new deal ship terminal in lorville, that already showed how little the game currently is ready to be scaled up to even a few 100 players more.

[AndroSpud]

Why is no one talking about SpatialOS from Improbable studios?? They were using this on Maverick Proving Ground and Scavengers. Look up the videos... The teck works very well

[josephjohnson]

Each server will be a planet with another server as the city even possibly a server for the inside of major capital ship

[CynicalMournings]

Mission-wise, once quantum is fully integrated, a lot of missions will be generated by NPCs and not necessarily be tied to crafted spaces.

[brianv]

I think it's going to be another 10 years before we see over 500 players in one server without it crashing or FPS being s*** LOL

[TheWasd]

O7 Levelcap, stay strong. Hopefully 2022 was kind to you.

[ckeoni]

SC has a long way to go before supporting anything more than 100 player servers. Planetside 2 is my go-to game for large FPS battles.