It has been a pretty rough patch cycle for Star Citizen. So much so that Return of ZenoThreat was a welcome diversion. The “Ship under XenoThreat Attack” missions are perfect for those going it alone, while the other 4 missions are all geared toward small group and org play. And the rewards were spot on. Blueprints for three different sets of armor plus blueprints for grade A military components.
The Quadra Cell and Quadra Cell MT power plants, the FR-66 & FR-76 shields, and last but not least the NDB-26, NDB-28, AND NDB30 Neutron Repeaters!
XenoThreat has returned to take their vengeance on any pilots flying alien tech. The ship under attack missions feature from 3 to 6 or more gladius fighters in various asteroid settings. From time to time, the lag will prevent you from completing the mission. One mission in particular is in a dense field of asteroids making it a challenge especially when paired with an excess of attackers.
Player angst Palpable
The buggy release of the long anticipated Drake Ironclad along with regression of some key features has set off a firestorm. Of course some of the loudest detractors never wrote a line of code in their life yet beat their chests decrying what a crock of shit the SC code base must be. While I missed much of patches 4.8 and 4.8.1 due to my relocation, at first when I started grinding 4.8.2 it was pretty smooth sailing. My opening moves in the verse were to combine resource collection with the Shubin Interstellar hand and ship mining contracts.
Then my A18 hangars stopped working preventing access to my stash of ores. So I switched up to bounty missions working up to the Journeyman Trackers License(HRT).
Star Citizen Live
What was Lando thinking, hmm, a tech talk will calm down the troops. Too bad most were not in the mood to listen. Benoit did hit a key technical point I had been pondering prompting me to make this org post:
If only folks could see the forest from the trees. while click bait draws views, often times wild conclusion run wild. these folks should listen to the latest SCL and listen for the diddie on asynchronous programming. Async programming is the ONLY way a game client can interact with game services in the cloud. I studied this in a past life and a good general reference book would be “Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming” by M. Ben-Ari. As Benoit(CIG) eluded, not many c++ programmers working in the stand alone game world understand these principles. And of course this is a huge issue when porting SQ42 code to the verse. I suspect that many of the so called flaws in the verse will diminish in stature once all backend services operate in a fault tolerant (explicit) concurrent environment. Discussion is around 1:50:00 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2799590612
The Road Map
The upgrade to 64 bit numbers, the refactor of non thread-safe code, the conversion of a relational database to an edge based database, the refactor for Vulcan, the advent of server meshing, … seems reasonable that the SQ42 code base would need to learn the principles of concurrent programming.
All makes sense to me.