hitbox2

So people seemed to like the technical story about the desync, good thing I got more of those.

Let me tell you about missiles shall I?

In most games, missiles are rather simple constructs since you have to factor in the possibility that players will spam them when their supplies are full. Generally the more realistic a simulation gets, the more complexity you also find in the missiles. All the way up to for example a DCS where the missiles are pretty much equal in simulation depth to the planes itself. The game can afford that because even in a harsh engagement, missile use is complex and you won't find 2 digit numbers of them in air usually.

Cig, visionary company, again thought it would be mighty cool to inject high complexity missile simulation into what's basically intended as an arcade combat design (this isn't a judgement, it's just a design philosophy)

Now before we go into the details of how they screwed it all up, please take the time and go Google star citizen DB and check out just how much crap gets calculated for a single missile launch and engagement

Here I just copy pasted the headers of the component data that a missile inherits in star citizen


code:
local name	name	category	class	type	subtype	manufacturer	size	mass	hp	price
	damage physical (hp)	damage cluster (hp)	explosion radius (m)	lifetime (s)	max range (m)
	signal type	guidance type	tracking distance (m)	angle (°)	ignition time (s)
intercept accel main (m/s²)	intercept accel mav (/s²)	intercept accel rotation (/s²)
	intercept speed angular (°/s)	terminal accel main (m/s²)	terminal accel mav (/s²)
	terminal accel rotation
(/s²)	terminal speed angular (°/s)	boost accel main (m/s²)	boost accel mav (/s²)	boost accel rotation (/s²)
	boost speed angular (°/s)	accel cost linear (fuel)	accel cost angular (fuel)	fuel terminal time (s)	signal
 minimum	signal maximum	signal amp seeking	noise amp	no lock timeout (s)
cluster missiles
cluster count (missiles)	trigger distance (m)	trigger angle (°)	eject speed (m/s)
As you can see from these data headers, missiles are fully simulated IFCS objects, which means they have a complex multi order flight model instead of a simple speed and direction one.

Now I said before hit detection and hit recognition are all client side. This doesn't go for missiles. Missiles are essentially AI ships and they are server controlled.
Now remember the servers already piss themselves with the least bit of load from single digit client numbers (10 people on server becomes a hindrance to good gameplay already) and now you have ships like the gladiator which can fire 8 missiles in short order, or the constellation with over 20 missiles.

But not enough. This is still not completely horrible. For that we need the cig factor.


Goons and goonettes, I present you, the rattler missile.

http://i.imgur.com/VXkOj6E.jpg

Gaze your eyes upon Roberts wet dream from wing commander times. A missile that fires 8 other missiles. And it's the best missile in game to and comes with a hardpoint size that almost any ship can carry.


Now imagine 2 people fire 2 missiles at each other. That's suddenly 32 physics enables ifcs controlled warheads on a server that's on last inch life support already. Absolute carnage.

You wanna know why you don't see people rattler spamming anymore nowadays? Because this shit has been Un touched for almost a year. Cig knew about this just as long as well. Just nobody did anything about it. So even the numbest missile spammer couldn't keep a straight face anymore after bringing the server down a fith time a night after all these months. The problem so to speak, has been solved by not touching it for so long that everybody just stopped playing.

Oh and guess what Roberts decided to put into 2.6?




Missile pickups...