what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?
The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet!
Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship.
The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before.
Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.
I ask because player count is how I'd measure scale. Not fidelity.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.
(If you look at the actual progress report that was talking about bedsheets, you’ll note it was from the AI team—in other words, how to make the AI enter/exit beds while interacting properly with the physics engine. Pretty normal stuff.)
While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.
The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today!
I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!
There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :)
In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.