What is Star Citizens Serving Meshing and Persistent Entity Streaming

Star Citizen is one of the most ambitious and highly anticipated video games of all time. The game aims to provide players with an immersive experience in a massive, persistent universe where they can explore, trade, fight, and build their own careers. To achieve this, the developers have been working on two critical technologies, namely serving meshing and persistent entity streaming.

What is Server Meshing?

A technique for distributing the game world across several servers is known as serving meshing. Traditional online games host the entire game world on a single server, which can cause performance problems when a large number of players congregate in one place. By dividing the game globe across several servers, each in charge of a small section of the game world, serving meshing provides a solution to this issue.

In the case of Star Citizen, the game world is vast, with multiple planets, space stations, and other celestial objects. Serving meshing allows the game to create a seamless experience for players, regardless of where they are in the game world. When a player travels from one location to another, the game seamlessly transitions from one server to another, without any visible loading screens or interruptions in gameplay.

How Server Meshing Works

In order for server meshing to function, the game globe must be divided into smaller zones, each of which is hosted on a different server. Each server is in charge of overseeing the game state for the zone in which it is located, including dealing with player activities, NPC management, and AI execution. Players are able to explore the game environment without interruption when they switch between zones since their game state is automatically transferred from one server to another.

Server handoff is the process of moving a player’s game state from one server to another. In order to maintain the player’s progress, it entails synchronizing the game state across the two servers. This can be a challenging operation because it requires sending the player’s inventory, health, and other crucial game state data in addition to their position.

Server meshing makes use of a variety of optimization methods to guarantee that the player has a smooth transition between zones. These include methods like client-side prediction, where the client predicts the player’s movements to reduce latency, and predictive loading, where the game client preloads assets for the next zone before the player arrives.

Challenges of Server Meshing

Server meshing is a complex technology that presents a number of challenges for game developers. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the game state is synchronized between servers, so that players do not experience any glitches or loss of progress as they move between zones.

Another challenge is optimizing the network traffic between servers. With server meshing, there is a large amount of data being transferred between servers as players move between zones. This can put a strain on the network, and developers need to ensure that the network is optimized to handle this load.

Finally, implementing server meshing can be a challenging and costly technology. It takes a lot of work to design and optimize, and a sizable amount of server infrastructure is needed to host the game world.

Persistent entity streaming

What is persistent entity streaming?

Persistent entity streaming is another critical technology being developed for Star Citizen. Every entity in the game world needs to be persisted in order to maintain the game state and allow for server meshing. This includes not only player objects, but also every other object in the game, such as ships, planets, and NPC characters. In traditional games, all game objects are loaded into memory at once, leading to high memory usage and long loading times.

In the case of Star Citizen, the game world is too large to load all game objects at once. Persistent entity streaming solves this problem by loading and unloading game objects as the player moves through the game world. To achieve this, Star Citizen uses a dedicated database called the Persistent Entity Store (PES) which stores and streams every entity in the game world in a graph database format. This means that the entities are represented as nodes in a graph, and the relationships between them are represented as edges.

For example, if a player transfers an item from their inventory to a ship’s inventory, the graph database updates the relationship between the player’s inventory node and the ship’s inventory node, without needing to modify any other nodes or edges.

With this method, game entities can be persistent quickly and effectively — even for intricate nested structures. However, PES’s success will depend on how well it can scale to deal with the enormous number of entities in the game world and the volume of real-time player interactions.Challenges of persistent entity streaming:

Managing the transition between entities is one of the primary difficulties with persistent entity streaming. If done incorrectly, the game will attempt to load and unload objects in real-time, which can cause performance problems like lag or stuttering. Large open-world games with unpredictable player movement between elements, like Star Citizen, make this particularly challenging.

Making sure the loaded entities are current with the game’s server state presents another difficulty. In the context of Star Citizen, this entails making sure that the persistent state of the game world is synchronized across all users and servers so that everyone sees the same thing. In order to manage the synchronization of state between many game servers and clients, a strong and dependable backend system is required.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Star Citizen can construct a fully persistent, immersive environment thanks to the combination of serving meshing and persistent entity streaming. Players can easily explore the large game environment without encountering any jarring transitions or loading delays. No other game on the market can compare to the experience this creates.

The game is already undergoing alpha testing, and players are already enjoying the advantages of serving meshing and persistent entity streaming despite the fact that the technology underlying them is highly complicated. It will be interesting to see how these technologies are further tuned and enhanced as Star Citizen develops and evolves.