In the MMORPG Star Citizen, an experiment was completed over the weekend, on March 9th and 10th, which is still officially under a confidentiality agreement: Players were able to travel from one system to another for the first time. For fans of Star Citizen, this is a milestone that opens the door to MMO gaming where unlimited numbers of players can play together in a vast world.
What kind of milestone is this?
- Star Citizen has a small number of special testers, the “Evocati”, who must sign a non-disclosure agreement.
- On Saturday and Sunday, there was a tech-focused test for 2 hours each for initially 200, then 400 of these Evocati.
- During this test, players were able to travel from one star system to another. The technology “Server Meshing” was used for this.
Seamlessly jumping from system to system, from server to server
Why is this so important? The site PCGamesN explains: The key point is that each solar system in Star Citizen runs on individual servers or server clusters. Therefore, the seamless transition from one system to another is a surprisingly complex engineering problem that CIG has been working on since 2017.
That’s why successfully switching from system to system is such an important tech milestone.
In theory, this could create a huge game where players switch from server to server within an interconnected universe. With server meshing, Star Citizen could thus potentially grow infinitely.
How did the test go? The secret test was closely observed by fans over the weekend and there was cheering on reddit when the servers reached their full capacity of 400 and apparently everything was working smoothly.
As PCGamesN reports, the transition between systems apparently still occurred over placeholder graphics that were in the “tunnel” through which players flew. On one side of the connection, there was supposedly a spaceship graveyard with destroyed ships.
But generally, the community is said to have been excited about this tech milestone.
So is everyone excited? No, in the mmorpg-reddit, Star Citizen is viewed much more critically than in the reddit for Star Citizen.
There one looks skeptically at the enthusiasm: After 11 years and with the highest revenue of all time, Star Citizen still has neither a single-player nor a multiplayer experience and is merely a tech demo.
But even here, defenders of Star Citizen say: The server meshing is a technology that has never been applied before. If this works, it could radically change the gaming industry, as it ultimately allows an infinite number of players to play together in real-time in a vast mega-universe.
Server meshing could implement what Herman Narula once promised us:
What happened to the man who received $500 million and promised to build the MMORPGs of the future?
