Status of Offline Mode

Actually Brad made an official post about a couple features prior to release, a whole thread I mean. One of the weekly updates.

The search function is your friend.

Its not something that should have to be searched for. Communication should be direct and clear. Not every one of the 1000's of backers visits the forums. They have our email addresses, so there's no excuse not to use them when dealing with a missing feature of such obvious importance to people. They could announce at the bottom of this thread that offline play will be this Thursday and how many people would actually get that message?

As I've said else where, I'm sure its being worked on, but in the absence of clear communication people will usually assume the worst. The steam forum should be ample evidence of that.

Well I think the offline mode and sim speed issues are really one and the same.

We need the ability to host our own servers so we can play offline and throw better hardware at the hosting than the amazon stuff for larger games.

I suspect the best fix they can do for the sim speed at the moment isn't optimizing the software at all.
They need to split running games up into multiple processes with each process handling 1 or more planets.
I doubt there will any gain for splitting planets into 2 processes in fact I would suspect it to be much worse.

Units moving between planets AKA different sims is fairly predictable.

They need parallelization.

We can always throw more hardware at it.

I'd very disappointed if the server is not at least splitting planets into different threads. I am however not sure about splittting the sim of one planet into differnent threads. If that can be figured out to have some sort of speed improvement it might be pretty good though. And yeah the real question for sim performance is: How well does the server scale with multiple cores? So far all we know is "one core per server due to 8 servers on an 8 core cloud server".
If -in my dreams, I know this much is unrealistic- it has a 24x speed up for 24 cores on even one planet sim speed quickly will be a non issue as soon as more cores can be thrown at the server.

They do split planets to separate threads as far as I can remember.

The systems they use for hosting are computers with an Octo-core CPU, one core for every game (the server hosts 8 games) and it has 16GB of RAM, which means 2GB for every game, in theory. (Though it's not as linear as that I'd imagine)

However these also take from each other, so a really large game will take resources otherwise wasted from a small game due to multi-threading.

We don't know the Ghz, or what type of RAM though, as we haven't been told.

Do they? We don't know how well it actually shares the CPU in an average game. If there are 8 games running you very likely get the sim speed of exactly one cpu core. It might even be the case that the server instances are directly assigned to cpu cores to deliver a more reliable experience. That way at least cpu wise a crazy big game won't stall the other games on the server, until the server runs out of memory.

I'd... imagine they do, I could be wrong though with that, as that bit was just an assumption. *shrugs*

Uber (Garat I think it was) said that the server uses multiple threads (1 per planet I believe) & that Play Fab has a load balancing system. The evidence certainly points that way as we had those terrible lag problems when more than 8 games were being assigned to a server. I also think this was probably part of the issue when the 40+ player games were attempted.

One thing I have established, the game is often much smoother for larger games on PTE (edit: when using the same build), so I'm guessing if no one is using it you get a whole server dedicated to a game rather than 1 core...

If the point is to have 8 servers on a single machine then, assuming a decent load on the backend, most games very likely have 8 servers on them, so sharing cpu isn't gonna help you much. That's what I'd assume.

EDIT:
Based on your findings for the PTE this means games with a 8 tiny planets should stay at a stable sim speed with close to 8x the units compared to a game with 1 bigger planet on PTE. I wonder if Uber can figure out to at least get more than 1 effective sim thread per planet, as I think quite often games have too many units for a single cpu on a single planet.

I'd be surprised if they haven't put parallesisation in from the get-go, they're just using one core per game now because money. Being able to plan ahead is one of the major advantages to building an engine from scratch, no need to hack in something as integral as multi-threading.

It's an interesting question. Hopefully there are a lot of server things within a single planet that are embarrassingly parallel. You'd hope pathfinding is one of them, technical posts down the line would be cool. Collision detection is one of those things I'd also like to know about, even though the solution for that will likely be more standard.

One thread per planet should be very very easy to implement indeed. The interesting part is to split up the the sim of a single thread. Doing that in a way that scales not only with a fixed number of threads but with n threads is where the real magic is.

EDIT:
Oh btw I just clicked edit on your, @trialq, post and put in my post, clicked ok and was like "wtf where is my post".
I definitely did not have enough sleep this night sorry

Trust me my friend, yesterday evening i played a game with 4 small planets (2 of them being asteroids). And 3 AIs.
As usual, producing a bunch of 400 bots and moving them on the planet resulted in sim speed slowing down to 1 FPS.
Not having offline mode is not a problem for me, provided i can play what i would call a "standard" multi player game.
I'm not claiming for thousands of units, just a bunch of a few hundreds of units to make a huge battle. The client is dealing with this without any problem, but the server is just exhausting. And it's allways the same. So even online game is preventing from really enjoying the game.
And it's not a network issue. The debug window clearly shows what's going on. Navigation (path finding i guess) is taking most of the time.

Thats just terrible.....

Brad, and the Uber devs, have almost certainly read every thread that has been made on the topic and have been willfully silent. This can only mean one thing. They aren't going to add offline; they removed it from the store pages deliberately and know the whole thing will blow over eventually if they just ignore it.

Admit it; we were duped.

Thanks for linking; I wouldn't have found it otherwise. Glad we got some kind of acknowledgement from them. I'll maintain an iota of hope.

I really hope your wrong.

He has no basis for these claims, the devs have responded multiple times that offline is coming, Brad even responded to a thread a couple of days ago.

This was the last time Brad said something on the subject..

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...s-for-the-saviors-in-need.63989/#post-1005240

@kreidos please don't make backless claims, do your research, don't misinform people. The devs aren't on the forum 24/7 they're either working, or at home, or out.

Edit: Also since you seem to be a new user, just so you know, clicking on the orange arrow (Do it in the thread I linked to, before the quote) It'll show you where the quote came from IIRC.

Edit2: Eh nvm, I decided to not be lazy! https://forums.uberent.com/threads/devs-opinion.64474/page-2#post-1005218

Clearly you were too busy penning your scathing takedown to notice that someone else had already calmly linked a post by Brad, where-after I thanked him for informing me that there was such a response.

https://forums.uberent.com/goto/post?id=1006386#post-1006386

My apologies, but he was responding to you without knowing so either I guess.

My requests still hold water though.

Garat has also been addressing the issue on the steam forums.