Elite Dangerous Catch-All

I'm pledged to ALD, and I spend a fair amount of time on ALD's subreddit. The funny thing about Mobius claiming Azrael is that Lavigny's Legion, one of the core groups on said reddit, is based right next door in Carthage.

Which means that LL had to set up a special group to ensure Carthage remains under LL's control, and hope that Mobius never tried to push their faction into our system. I joined said group.

This may be my complaint about player groups - while they may be easier to control and have the potential to become Powers, I'm hoping we avoid an EvE Goon Swarm type of thing where a hugely massive player group runs roughshod through the galaxy.

Any Xbox One players take a crack at the full game as of yet? Curious what we've retained in terms of ships/money/stuff.

Clearly, I am in no shape to fly tonight. I found a compromised nav beacon and picked a fight with a Federal Assault Ship, and then botched my power management in a way that left me shieldless while under fire.

Ouch.

Haven't tried it yet myself, but world on the street is that compromised beacons and hazardous RESes are no joke.

zeroKFE wrote:

Haven't tried it yet myself, but world on the street is that compromised beacons and hazardous RESes are no joke.

My one Compromised Beacon experience was hella fun.

I haven't been into a HRES yet, but hat might change tonight.

Motley and I were in a Hazardous RES earlier tonight. It's fun, but easily manageable with two people.

Is it my imagination, or did interdiction get more difficult?

I have had a couple of successful ones since 1.4 was released, but tonight I actually failed 3 of them in a row. Of course I had killed 3 of the 4 Pirates for my mission, and I just wanted to kill the 4th and go to bed. After the 3rd failure, my canopy was compromised, so I said $&#! this and just went to the Nav Beacon instead to find a 4th one.

Hrdina wrote:

Is it my imagination, or did interdiction get more difficult?

Failed to avoid one for the first time last night. So maybe?

What were the ranks of your attackers? They get harder to avoid at higher ranks.

Orphu wrote:

What were the ranks of your attackers? They get harder to avoid at higher ranks.

Didn't look at the rank, but it was a Sidewinder that earned me a 4k bounty after a short tickle from my beam turrets. The encounter didn't last longer than a few seconds.

So I haven't really had a need to juggle power-management much so far, but I'm slowly filling out my arsenal while building up a buffer for my next hull. I'm rocking my first Class 2 turret and I'm wondering if there's any way to have power prioritized that that one vs my two smaller ones? I guess I'm a little confused by seeing them listed individually in the power-priority display while they all seem to draw from the same energy buffer... or am I misunderstanding that screen?

4K for a sidewinder is pretty high. Must have been a high rank.

Rezzy wrote:
Hrdina wrote:

Is it my imagination, or did interdiction get more difficult?

Failed to avoid one for the first time last night. So maybe?

Unless things have changed, the standard tactic is to just submit to the interdiction by throttling to zero. Your FSD has its "normal" cooldown instead of the long cooldown following an emergency drop. Unless you're in an unshielded trading ship, you'll have plenty of time to get back into supercruise before the enemy can knock one ring off your shields.

+1

My typical flow is hit next target until I see my attacker (I wish "next hostile" worked in SC) to make sure it's not an anaconda in a wing of 5. Then submit and destroy whatever it is. It probably has a wanted level anyway.

I rarely fight interdictions. Even if I am out gunned, I can usually run away after submitting unless as Carlbear points out I'm doing something silly with a ship outfitted for maximum trading.

Huh, I never would have thought of submitting to an interdiction. I lost a high-valued cargo mission due to a failed dogfight from an interdiction the other night. :/

Anyway, I finally picked up a Vic Viper last night night. Kept the Sidewinder I kitted out for maximum smuggles. Is there really no way to have your other ships transported closer to your current location? I really wanted to start exploring and bounty hunting in the Viper along the way, but I kind of want to stay near my other ship in case I want to pick up a transport mission...

Also, is it possible to wipe out an entire pirate crew (I'm playing Solo mode), or are their members randomly generated? I came across a small system with only two dwarf stars and a tiny planet (with orbital station), and nearly everyone I came across were part of the "[Whatever the solar system's name was] Blue Pirates." I contemplated trying to kill every last one I saw, but am afraid that I'll never actually get all of them. Then I started to wonder if there was a base somewhere....

Orphu wrote:

+1

My typical flow is hit next target until I see my attacker (I wish "next hostile" worked in SC) to make sure it's not an anaconda in a wing of 5. Then submit and destroy whatever it is. It probably has a wanted level anyway.

If your aligned with a PP faction you are often interdicted by opposing faction NPC's... I don't even bother fighting back.. even if its a sidewinder. The reward is 200 or 400cr... not worth the time, and you don't get PP faction points unless you're actually in enemy controlled territory. I'll just put full pips to engine and turbo until the FSD is ready to go.

Time to sit in the FD talk at the AWS re:Invent conference where they talk about the backend server stuff. Should be super interesting.

athros wrote:

Time to sit in the FD talk at the AWS re:Invent conference where they talk about the backend server stuff. Should be super interesting.

Ohhh, I've been curious about how they set it up, especially after reading about how Destiny implemented their cross instances. Do report back.

Here's the description:

Elite Dangerous is a Kickstarter-backed, massive-scale space MMO by Frontier Games. With no prior experience with AWS, Frontier have used EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Elasticache, and CloudFormation to deploy a cross-platform PC & Console MMO experience that is sold and distributed worldwide. Every action made by each of the 825,000 (and counting) Elite Dangerous players drives the combined game's story forward, and impacts a live galactic commodities market running on EC2 and RDS in real-time. Frontier uses AWS to create a simulation of the entire 400 billion star systems of the Milky Way galaxy using physics engines running on Amazon EC2. Finally, learn how Elite distributes updates and DLC to game clients using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.

I'll report after its done. Likely tonight as I type up my notes more in depth.

825,000?! Wowie!

Already have a couple of jackasses planning on ambushing the speakers about the state of the game. Seriously.

*sigh*

Wow. Holy sh*t that was a great talk! Notes tonight!

Ohhh, thanks athros, can't wait to read 'em!

Rezzy wrote:
Orphu wrote:

What were the ranks of your attackers? They get harder to avoid at higher ranks.

Didn't look at the rank, but it was a Sidewinder that earned me a 4k bounty after a short tickle from my beam turrets. The encounter didn't last longer than a few seconds.

Unlike Rezzy, I was the attacker in the three cases I failed. I didn't note the level of the opponent, though.

I've also noticed with 1.4 that my control inputs seem "less fine" than previously. I still haven't figured out whether that is real or just my misperception. I did try to re-cal my CH stick, even though I've noticed this with button-based yaw inputs (which would not be affected by cal). Maybe they made yaw more powerful because so many people whine about having to roll & pitch instead of yaw?

WipEout wrote:

Huh, I never would have thought of submitting to an interdiction. I lost a high-valued cargo mission due to a failed dogfight from an interdiction the other night. :/

I always submit, then deploy hardpoints ASAP. Then again, I'm flying a Vulture. I don't even bother to look at who is doing the interdiction, unless I am worried about an Authority ship finding me.

WipEout wrote:

Also, is it possible to wipe out an entire pirate crew (I'm playing Solo mode), or are their members randomly generated? I came across a small system with only two dwarf stars and a tiny planet (with orbital station), and nearly everyone I came across were part of the "[Whatever the solar system's name was] Blue Pirates." I contemplated trying to kill every last one I saw, but am afraid that I'll never actually get all of them. Then I started to wonder if there was a base somewhere....

I suspect that even the smallest pirate factions have a virtually limitless fleet of randomly-generated mooks.

athros wrote:

Wow. Holy sh*t that was a great talk! Notes tonight!

I am looking forward to reading about that. Hopefully the ambushers were thwarted.

Athros PLEASE post your notes! We work with AWS (among other public cloud vendors) and it would be so cool to hear how it applies to something I really really like. And would make for some amazingly geekily good sales material for the sales hounds.

Rezzy wrote:
Hrdina wrote:

Is it my imagination, or did interdiction get more difficult?

Failed to avoid one for the first time last night. So maybe?

It's a known bug -- should be fixed before too long.

Anyone else getting this weird bug where the mouse cursor gets locked to the middle of the screen? Happened to me and Xeknos today. Joining CQC for the first time seemed to trigger it.

Tamren wrote:

Anyone else getting this weird bug where the mouse cursor gets locked to the middle of the screen?

It's a Steam Overlay issue. Shift-Tabbing in and out of the Steam overlay will unlock the cursor for a bit. It got a little better with the last Steam update and I've just installed another and am hoping this is now resolved. Fingers crossed.

If you don't need Steam, opening the game without the overlay enabled should sidestep this issue entirely.

Ok. Notes. WARNING: LONG POST! LOTS OF IMAGES!

Initial Slide
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.02.44.jpg)

Proprietary engine. Created in house for a lot - Kinectrimals being one before E : D - called COBRA
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.03.20.jpg)

After the history of FDev and such:

Actual dev process. How did they decide on priorities? Boss Challenge 1:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.06.09.jpg)

Vision trailer. "What we'd like to see" - pretty sure the mockups were a lot less cool than this, but it gives the right idea.

Multiplayer architecture:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.09.15.jpg)
edServer the main server component to the multiplayer. Generally in multiples.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.10.04.jpg)
Listing of services used. PHP app is FDev grown for the use in ED architecture.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.12.57.jpg)
Super basic server architecture. Uses UDP traffic. NAT Traversal a real pain in the ass - use a network relay in the client to help that process. Use Route53 for routing. First is physical location (put to the right AZ), second is latency routing to find the best cluster of servers in the AZ.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.14.46.jpg)
watchdog.py uses metrics from CloudWatch with the EC2 API and the edServer builds in S3 to deploy servers, along with AutoScaling Groups (talk later)

The metrics in the bottom corner: That's a sample of the FPS per player on a cluster - that's how the backend determines when to build more servers for the cluster (pass the Metric to CloudWatch, key off of an alert threshold).

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.15.55.jpg)
Player enters the game. The Route53 stuff determine location, and then least latent cluster as the player is loading in. Bottom left with the server names and the like are where you end up.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.16.12.jpg)
So, a player jumps to Barnards Star. The backend architecture (using a bunch of metrics) will look at the server clusters in the AZ, and try to find the cluster with the most players at Barnards start, then push the player over to that instance/cluster. Ever wonder why it can take a while to load up when jumping out of hyperspace? It's very possible that you're getting pushed around in the clusters. (Barnards star is blue in the graphic).

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.17.44.jpg)
When server loads drop, the watchdog.py will begin to shift players to loaded clusters and terminate the instances when they're empty. Saves on money, energy. The graph shows the connection draining, and load shifting (CloudWatch).

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.18.21.jpg)
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.19.19.jpg)
PHP is the WebAPI, the Background Processor work to keep data flowing to all of the various points in the groups. Lots of orchestration.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.20.20.jpg)
Major learning point: When AZRebalance is enabled, if you terminate all instances in a AZ (say you have A, B, C and you terminate all instances in C) the service will then kill instances in A and B (generally with connection draining - so insta-death) and spin some up in C. Disabling this option was a necessity for the game.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.21.32.jpg)
More learning points: There is a rate limit on the EC2 API, and it will lock out the admin console if that limit is exceeded. The lock out is usually a couple of seconds to 5 minutes depending. When running bulk commands, it's best to space them out a bit.

PHP Composer for the PHP WebAPI dependencies is super vulnerable. Best to cook up the AMI before deployment (deploy all of the dependencies and such before creating instances)

All of the configs (CloudFormation templates, scripts, etc) are in a VCS (believe it's SVN due to commentary).

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.23.27.jpg)
Data structure of a player ship (basic). Generally stored as a JSON formatted file (since it can, and does change a lot) and pushed into mongo.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.26.38.jpg)
Mongo lessons:
Have an arbiter - had a problem where the primary died, and the other 2 elected each other to be the new primary, resulting in both becoming primary.
MongoBackup - have a full replica in an instance that cannot ever be elected to primary, and will never serve production traffic - just in case (quick replication into a new mongodb if needed).
Route53 for traffic routing (API calls for additions and subtractions 0 automatic based on CloudWatch metrics/alarms)

End of Boss Challenge 1 - incoming boss challenge 2:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.27.22.jpg)

2 more vids for the Vision of this challenge - sorry about the shaky, it's a real pain in the ass when people are bumping into you as they shift in the seats.
Vid 1
Vid 2

Early (possibly current) Stellar Forge screenshots. Written by Theoretical Physicists and Astrophysicists.
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.29.55.jpg)

So much information is generated!
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.30.28.jpg)

Discussion on how FDev stores data. Because now they need to actually store data about more than just the player, and some static, pregenerated stuff, now a new model needs to be put in place.
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.32.13.jpg)
Basically, the interesting data is: Player Interaction with stuff, Player Progression (any player progression) and if something changes from the default state.

How things are stored:
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.33.40.jpg)
DynamoDB for the constantly growing data (e.g player navigation data) - it scales nicely with constantly growing data. They tried MongoDB initially and it really didn't work. Very bad.
S3 storage is for things that may change once, and just need to be stored. Example shown is FirstDiscovered credits. It's changed once (AND ONLY ONCE) and then stored off. Needs to be consistent, but not necessarily super speedy (System Map load times).

This crosses over to Boss Challenge 3 (they skipped the slide) - Exploration and Dynamic Trading.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.35.14.jpg)
As things happen, the PHP web app will push them into a queue in Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service). The Background Processor will then pick it up (event fires off) and incorporate that into the background sim.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.36.16.jpg)
They only store the multiplicative - when something is at default, it's not really stored any longer. The example shows that with trading. 1000 stock, player buys 200. Instead of storing it as 800, and incrementing it over the time interval for goods replenishment, they store it as 0.8 (Formula basic: Default Stock level* 0.8 = Current Stock). When it reaches the default (1000 goods) the stored change gets deleted. Only store "interesting data"

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.37.25.jpg)
Background processor working in MongoDB on player actions and trading, showing the JSON examples on the left (tea and fish. There's a UK joke in there somewhere).
IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.38.04.jpg)
Trade route information is generated off of PLAYER trading and making profit! With the above process, it's updated every 24 hours, an aggregate of profit made by players shipping goods around!

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.38.39.jpg)
Analytic reports from all of the processes.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31816623/FDev%20talk/2015-10-08%2011.39.12.jpg)
Data flow breakdown for the analytics. All of the processes at work. ElastiSearch and Kibana.

Making a second post. I need a beer

athros wrote:

Making a second post. I need a beer :)

I think I owe you one. Very informative. Says more about the backend architecture than the gameplay, but that's what I expected. (And it's the bit I'm curious about that they don't talk about on the forums much.)