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Guest Ollrick

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You call this a Beta?

Ok, then i am Muhamad Ali...

That is a bottomless cheek

CTD all the time... worse graphics ever...bad performance ...

It´s a shame.

 

It´s a Pre Alpha, not more not less...

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9 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

The form could have been better, but the message has value. The state of this game is not what you would normally call beta.

True. Not in the “traditional” sense. But I honestly do feel that definitions a have shifted of late.  
 

the word beta has become an all encompassing phrase from... janky af and lacking any presence of finality to the original pre release format.  
 

similarly alpha is often used in cases where internal betas are first released to the public.

 

things are not as clear cut as they used to be / should be...

 

still, I go with feature-complete but unpolished, unbalanced as the “proper” definition of beta. And as such this game fails in that respect.  
 

But one thing is for sure; a product that has already brought hundreds if not thousands of hours of enjoyment to thousands of players is NOT a pre-alpha, which is certainly limited to staff or at most high paying Kickstarter/l or actual ALPHA backers. 

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IMO it feels more like an Alpha 2 test than a Beta or OBT. Don't get me wrong it is great vs EQN Landmark with what they actually have going but, the player experience and quality of life need quite a bit more polish for the new player experience or for new player retention before it is fit for public consumption. All too often small studios or hell even some AAA studios open the doors too soon for funding with EA funding that can make or break games long before they go live.

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12 hours ago, Guest Ollrick said:

You call this a Beta?

Ok, then i am Muhamad Ali...


That is a bottomless cheek

CTD all the time... worse graphics ever...bad performance ...

It´s a shame.

 

It´s a Pre Alpha, not more not less...

Bye, would ask for your stuff but dont think you have any

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Software developers know what "beta" means. 

 

When they decide to use that label even though the game is definitely alpha, it's a marketing ploy...the terms have lost meaning because devs decide to use the term to present their game in a more finished state than it is. 

 

Personally, I think DU has several years before it will be "feature complete" where the core elements are ready for the mass public. 

 

I'm not shocked that NQ would be interested in making a buck or two -- I think they will start losing subs when the first waves start to renew, but who really cares? Those people might come back in a couple years, and the 1.0 launch will be expected to attract a much larger, fresh wave of new players. 

 

Also, NQ was founded in 2014 -- after 6 years, I'm sure it reassures investors a lot knowing the product is in beta and collecting paying subs...would you want to keep bankrolling an alpha product going on 7-8 years? 

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16 hours ago, Guest Ollrick said:

You call this a Beta?

Ok, then i am Muhamad Ali...


That is a bottomless cheek

CTD all the time... worse graphics ever...bad performance ...

It´s a shame.

 

It´s a Pre Alpha, not more not less...

Hmm... Did you check to see if the cause of CTD wasn't on your end?  Bad performance again... Could be on your end.   Graphics, well again...see above.

 

It's a shame you're so bad.

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1 hour ago, LouHodo said:

Hmm... Did you check to see if the cause of CTD wasn't on your end?  Bad performance again... Could be on your end.   Graphics, well again...see above.

 

It's a shame you're so bad.

Now let's be fair here. My system is rock solid with good ventilation and no OC, and DU is the only game I play that frequently crash to desktop. And every time I play, I discover some new variation of a bug different from the last time. Ever time. I've even seen a couple of kernel driver BSOD crashes with this game.

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1 hour ago, CptLoRes said:

Now let's be fair here. My system is rock solid with good ventilation and no OC, and DU is the only game I play that frequently crash to desktop. And every time I play, I discover some new variation of a bug different from the last time. Ever time. I've even seen a couple of kernel driver BSOD crashes with this game.

It does have problems but until you can rule out all possible issues on your end.  You can't be sure it is the game or on your system.  I have seen people say the game is bad and they are trying to run it on a second gen i5 with a stock on board gpu.  With the game installed on a 7200rpm HDD.  

 

I have had issues with the game.  But most of them were fixed by me cleaning up my SSD and having a decent page file.   My biggest bottleneck now is my GPU.. but I am waiting on that one.

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55 minutes ago, LouHodo said:

It does have problems but until you can rule out all possible issues on your end.  You can't be sure it is the game or on your system.  I have seen people say the game is bad and they are trying to run it on a second gen i5 with a stock on board gpu.  With the game installed on a 7200rpm HDD.  

Okay, but the graphics should also match the required hardware. Players that have issues are comparing it to other games they can run and wondering why DU is struggling.

 

In other words, If DU is going to require a powerful rig, it should look like it.

 

I think "bad performance" is totally fair -- if the game looked a lot better and lagged I think people would be more sympathetic. "Okay it lags, but that's because it looks wonderful" is easier to swallow than "it lags and the terrain looks like it came from 1998" 

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14 minutes ago, michaelk said:

Okay, but the graphics should also match the required hardware. Players that have issues are comparing it to other games they can run and wondering why DU is struggling.

 

In other words, If DU is going to require a powerful rig, it should look like it.

 

I think "bad performance" is totally fair -- if the game looked a lot better and lagged I think people would be more sympathetic. "Okay it lags, but that's because it looks wonderful" is easier to swallow than "it lags and the terrain looks like it came from 1998" 

I also think to the Devs, getting everyone to one shard, and making it stable is #1 priority.  And as seen by the Beta launch, thats apparently not an easy task.  Like, sure there is EvE but lets take a minute to think about it. In eve you are just a ship.  Not an avatar, there are no voxels.  There are no customization to this level in DU that happens in real time.  Look at eve yes there are 2k people in Jita at one time. but 1800 of them are DOCKED.  And Jita has its own personal server.  Have you played eve when 2k people are on grid fighting? its 10% tidi (time dilation) and it is a fucking shit show, and can turn a 1 hour fight into 8 hours that goes at a snails pace.  NOT ONE single person in eve says they lke TiDi, but they deal with it as its the only way to not have the servers shit itself.  Planets,suns, etc in eve are meaningless to render as you dont really interact with them.  No gravity.  It is single shard, but gates with loading screens divide everything.  The VAST majority of fights in eve are 100 or less, and often way less.  You can play Hell Let Loose with 100 people on a server.  So what DU is trying to accomplish is pushing the boundaries of how many people can interact at once.  And to me, that is the most important thing.  Graphics have to take a back seat as this "single shard" everyone in the same "universe" is DU's biggest selling point.  We can sit here and argue how well they doing on performance thats fine, but the reality is they had to start small with the graphics.  Go watch old early Alpha footage.  The graphics are improving, but at a small pace.  Same thing happened with EvE.   Once they feel comfortable with server stability i expect more graphics improvements, but on smaller scales most likely. 

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Except that network performance and single-shard server tech has nothing to do with client-side graphics and GPUs choking on 1999-level rendering. That implies low level shader issues that have nothing to do with network optimization. 

 

Of course I agree that optimizing their core server infrastructure is important, but I'm not super impressed with their implementation of "single shard" as it stands. Especially for "beta", to the OP's point. 

 

Modern MMO servers aren't singular behemoth machines, they are often large clusters of hardware, clusters that can scale and split load just as a "single shard" would. The reason players are split into different servers is purely to limit how many people exist in similar areas at once, not because of some core technological inability to scale servers or add players. 

 

There's no magic way to easily render lots of people in the same location at once. Single shard tech doesn't somehow make this easy or cheap. From what I've seen, there's nothing all that special here. 

 

For example, splitting starting players into multiple clones of the same cities does exactly the same thing as splitting people across different servers.

 

It distributes load so there's not too many people in one area at one time. Nothing will ever remove the challenge of syncing lots of clients sharing the same space, especially when hardware cost is a thing.

 

There's no technology that will somehow make rendering lots of people in the same area a linearly scaling operation. Consider 500 clients battling each other. One ship moves. That one movement must be transmitted to the server and synced across 500 clients. If every one of the 500 clients is moving and shooting...that's 250,000 operations to sync in total. Every one extra player in the battle adds to this load exponentially

 

Believe what you want, but I'm really skeptical of the idea that NQ's tech is so cutting edge it can cleanly handle these large battles.

 

I definitely understand how ambitious it is...that's why I'm a bit skeptical based on what I've seen of the beta so far. If they can't optimize the basics (there's clearly some sloppy stuff happening client side) I wonder how they will solve this most fundamental issue with multiplayer gaming (without merely throwing hardware at it, which affects their bottom line). 

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23 hours ago, michaelk said:

Okay, but the graphics should also match the required hardware. Players that have issues are comparing it to other games they can run and wondering why DU is struggling.

 

In other words, If DU is going to require a powerful rig, it should look like it.

 

I think "bad performance" is totally fair -- if the game looked a lot better and lagged I think people would be more sympathetic. "Okay it lags, but that's because it looks wonderful" is easier to swallow than "it lags and the terrain looks like it came from 1998" 

I believe JohnnyTazer hit it on the head.

 

If you want pretty but unstable and shallow gameplay, there is Star Citizen.   But let me warn you it runs pretty bad also....and doesn't have a quarter of the calculations to do.

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My point isn't that DU must be AAA-level pretty...it's that their poor performance isn't a result of some mind-bending, cutting-edge tech that will make 30,000 person battles an effortless thing to handle. "Single-shard" is more of a marketing concept than a technical one; as I mentioned, most MMOs already use auto-scaling fleets of servers instead of singular machines. Server tech has nothing to do with client-side issues and GPU utilization that's far too high for the quality we see. 

 

The OP's point is that this isn't really a beta -- it has years before it is feature complete and a big part of that is optimization.

 

Anyone that's worked in any sizable software project knows that optimizing after the fact is much, much harder than writing a solid core. If the game is struggling at this point when most the features aren't even implemented...that means a lot more dev cycles will be spent fixing mistakes vs. improving the game.  

 

If you're going to set extremely ambitious technical goals and sell those ideas as a core feature that's fantastic -- but it's 100% reasonable to be skeptical of grand claims, especially when the game struggled so bad to become stable even with a small beta launch. IMO the only reason it even improved is because people are farther apart and there's fewer players logging in...

 

Of course DU has a lot of room for optimization and I have no doubt it will improve immensely in the coming years -- but it will be years of beta...and ultimately? Single-shard is just a cluster of servers like any other. It'll be subject to the same practical and financial constraints as any other IP...especially if the game continues to focus on a niche space. 

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