Because it's closer than any other game in the genre to the genre ideal. I have not put any money in, but I have played in their free alpha weekends, and that game is right on the edge of being incredible. (Where "on the edge" is defined as, "Has a crap ton more work to go".)

Honestly, that game in its current alpha state has given me experiences totally unlike anything I've seen in another game.

That's the thing that's insane to me. When I think "hey, can I do this", and it's something the designers didn't expressly intend, but because everything is done to the fidelity that they've made possible... there's nothing mechanically preventing you from doing so.

It's missing a lot still, and the scope creep has been incredible. Who knows when or if they'll ever meet even the basics of their original promises.

But for example, I found a strategy to board (and steal) spaceships that were intended to be "locked", because I managed to get to an entrance that was not locked, once. I watched some entertaining videos, like where people boarded NPC fighters mid-flight, or parked spaceships inside other spaceships they weren't really intended to fit into.

A lot of AAA games "cheat", where the visuals and the actual game mechanics are pretty different. For instance, in Tomb Raider, a dramatic ledge sequence, underneath, is just a couple arrow keys you can use to balance a value and progress forward. All the wind, leaves, character movement, all of that means nothing, it's just the art layer. Meanwhile, Star Citizen has dealt with bugs like the flashlight coming unstuck from a pilot's suit midflight.

It's incredibly unique. And maybe it's an incredibly unique tech demo that will never go anywhere. Maybe Crytek will take RSI for everything they have. Maybe eventually someone else will take the reigns after they go bankrupt and finish it up somehow with more manageable expectations. Who knows?

But it's the most interesting thing anyone's done in the industry in a long time.

they are selling a dream that appeals to many gamers. they are doing it very well and it is beautiful at times.

I suspect a good number grew up in the days of Wing Commander and Privateer and rose colored glasses remember those days. Now with money to spend it isn't much to fork out a little to relive that experience.

* note, I have not bought into the game

What's hilarious is that there are no rose-colored glasses necessary. Privateer's on GOG. Just go play Privateer. It's still fun and it doesn't cost $30, $150, or $125 million.

The author had no idea what they were doing with kdb.

They even admit that they couldn't be bothered to modify their ingestion scripts to not partition their data.

This seems like a very unfair reading of what the author actually wrote:

> One note about the results for kdb+: The ingestion scripts I used for kdb+ partition/index the data on the year and passenger_count columns. This may give it a somewhat unfair advantage over ClickHouse and LocustDB on all queries that group or filter on these columns (queries 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7). I was going to figure out how to remove that partitioning and report those results as well, but didn’t manage before my self-imposed deadline.

Yup.

>The pickup_ntaname column is stored as varchars by ClickHouse and kdb+, and as dictionary encoded single byte values by LocustDB.

But it would be trivial to convert to enum/sym type in kdb+. It's silly to query and group by strings.

This is one of the frustrating parts of database software. Where can information about the ways to optimize these parameters be found (outside of random posts scattered around StackExchange)?

so true. Either you have lots of experience working with specific databases to setup/optimize queries, and you know what works best through personal blood, sweat and tears, and/or you have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the database architecture/implementation and know the theoretical best approach to structure your schema/queries.

But even then, hardware/networking performance and tuning can throw a wrench in the most seasoned/knowledgeable approaches. Users can further bring otherwise solid setups to a grinding halt with unanticipated use-cases.

The only hope when you hit these inevitable road-blocks is that you're working for someone that appreciates the difficulty of the problem.

The first red flag is that Mark's benchmarks look very different for kdb, even though his ClickHouse times are similar to Clemens.

Looking over the queries, he made some... interesting changes that have him benchmarking oranges to apples.

Completely moot point though as he demonstrates that even when kdb+ is advantaged by having data be indexed, LocustDB is still faster in 4 of the 5 queries he runs...

So yeah, maybe the guy has no idea what to do with kdb - but ultimately having a fast, free and open-source database & query language beats a fast and expensive piece of commercial software.