Just goes to show how the public is so easily swayed by fluff and packaging. And I recently checked out a SC fan video posted a month ago and it was quite revealing…door opens and the entire room renders from a blur. No thanks. I remember having this problem with my high end computer ages ago - guess they will never learn: their engine was never able to meet the challenge - and clearly it never will.
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I havent lost faith in SC (as that what they aim for naturally takes its time), and those screens proof me being right 
. The planet looks good, especially as their procedural planet generation is in development for a relative short time up to now.
Looking forward to the 2.7 release. Thanks for the update!
Its because the game is still in development and they are writing some future proof systems that are more efficient and robust to handle the game better, since the game is in alpha, they have left out some bugs as working on them right now would be a waste of time. Plus star citizen even in its buggy state is a lot of fun, as there is 10 times more gameplay than battlescape in a small region of space. Though we will have to see how battlescape would turn out when its gameplay is done.
Few more screenshots that are missing in the post above.
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That’s been the standard excuse for the past 4 years and I for one am sick and tired of that old song you keep singing.
Who are you trying to kid?
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I love battlescape, I mean no offence to this game/community, I have supported it more than star citizen and will continue to support it and see where it goes. My point was that star citizen has FPS mechanics, EVA, game world that gives you some purpose like earning currency and buying things from it, you can hide behind a space station and snipe a complete stranger, in game chat, along with space combat etc and a ton of other things you can do. Battlescape doesnt have that scope which is understandable, and I have played both battlescape prototype and star citizen till alpha 2.4, I enjoyed star citizen more because of the detail of their gameplay despite being buggy. In regards to battlescape its still too early in its development, but yes battlescape will have only combat and right now its stable more than star citizen. And I fully appreciate and want that. I am just stating that star citizens scope is way beyond battlescape, and its gameplay will be more detailed with all respects no matter how you compare or complain and more gameplay means it will be more fun automatically since you will have many roles to do in the game. And in the small area of space that star citizen offers currently as of alpha 2.4.1, it has already many things to do in comparison to battlescape, which makes it more fun to play. Whereas when battlescape is done, we will have a better picture to compare its combat with the combat mechanics of star citizen.
And lastly I unnecessarily made my post salty I guess by this statement, which I wrote in a hurry
“Plus star citizen even in its buggy state is a lot of fun, as there is 10 times more gameplay than battlescape in a small region of space.”
I should have just remained with an alpha excuse and made things peaceful with screenshots only but since the trigger is on with my explanation above therefore lets fight, come at me bro. 
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After 4 years of development with no end in sight and the only thing to show for it is a buggy engine that permits minimal players in any given instance at the bargain basement price of 117 million?! I’ll pass thanks.
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That’s not really a purpose. There aren’t really any player-driven MMOs out there that have any real purpose driving them. The only one that gets close is EVE, and only because of the tangled history behind all the player groups still running out there.
If that’s true, that’s quite damning of Star Citizen’s devs. Admittedly, INS has been around working on this much longer, but it’s still only really one or two engine devs and a couple of designers, that manage to put together a limited-scope, but relatively stable prototype.
No, just no. It might be more fun if it’s well balanced, but if people end up being forced into roles in order to get the best experience, or just can’t experience certain roles because they can’t find people to fill less glamorous roles, then that’s going to suck massive balls.
Don’t get me wrong, I want SC to succeed, because I’ve put money into it. But I would have settled for Freelancer 2. I like the idea of being able to walk around inside ships and stations, but I can’t see how that won’t have an effect on the space sim side of the gameplay, and it might make the overall package less fun. So I won’t start getting excited over SC until it’s getting closed to finalised.
The thing that worries me far more about it at the moment is that they’re still apparently having issues with stability in core tech and networking
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+1, nothing to add and totally agree. They have a seriously large scope and had quite a rampup phase in the beginning. I dont care for the current lack of features, polishing and customizing the underlying engine and adding fundamental elements (combining eveything together, procedural generation, optimizing for double precision) still has to be their prio 1 focus before they get back to certain gameplay elements. INS had the same prio for years.
I can wait and enjoy their progress.
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That is the worst excuse for the bad management, greed, money-grabbing and fraudulent business practices we’ve come to know from RSI, or whatever the hell they prefer to call themselves these days.
How can people compare INS development to that mess?
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Couldn’t agree more. I keep hearing the same old Alpha argument but it doesn’t wash anymore. It use to after the first few years but it has been revealed the bugs are due to CryEngine’s outdated coding which the devs have spent years trying to unravel and reconfigure. With all the time, resources and MONEY SC has sunk into that engine, they could have built their own with far better results! What people fail to understand is that the constant never ending delays are not caused by designing assets and gameplay but actually trying to get the engine to perform.
But hey, if loading screens, lag, getting dropped and enduring a myriad bugs is their thing then to each their own. Eventually though players are gong to get tired of pretty and actually expect the game to work - but at this point they’d be lucky to even get a finished game. Either way, I’m sure Gary Oldman is laughing all the way to the bank.
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[sarcasm]That means Shores of Hazeron is the most automatically fun game ever!
www.hazeron.com
It’s a first person survival game where you can design your own alien species and with city-building and empire management and have the cities you craft your own tools and armour and weapons and ground and air vehicles and rockets and spaceships you design yourself and stuff and build fleets of spaceships and have your cities train NPC officers and bridge-crews that you can order around and the ship lets you travel to other any star system you see in the sky when you look up with slow-boating at lightspeed or with a warpdrive or you can use wormholes and you can walk around your ship and you can have other players join you on your ship and use tons of different systems and repair stuff or play poker during the flight and trade and mine and it’s a single-server MMO with hundreds of millions of star systems that have procedurally generated planets and moons and asteroids and abandoned ringworlds that all move around with celestial dynamics and lets you command fleets of warships in battles with other empires or against NPC pirate raids all from the bridge of your flagship and there’s all sorts of weapons like knives and shotguns and rifles and stuff and they can be made better with better technology your city unlocks and the materials you make them out of and you can use anything as a weapon that you can carry like flaming tourches or boxes or anything you’re holding and you can kick and punch and bite stuff and sometimes weird alien rat creatures get onto your ship and you have to hunt them down and kill them all or get an exterminator to go do it for you and you can tame and ride alien creatures around and you can kill your own spaceship crew and eat them if you forget to bring food and make their skin into backpacks to carry stuff in and you can ride a motorbike out of the airlock on your ship down to the surface of a planet enter the atmosphere of a planet ride down to the beach get off your bike wade into the sea and punch a fish in the face and it’s just the best thing in the history of ever.
Does Star-Citizen have all those features? I guess Star-Citizen is automatically less fun than Shores of Hazeron.[/sarcasm]
On a more serious note, I’m still reasonably confident we’ll get a pretty solid game from CIG within the next few years. They’re still making progress and they’ve done so much work on that engine now that it might as well be a custom-built one.
And no need to get angry about things, everyone’s entitled to their opinions. Please don’t start hating on people for their continued support of other games, ‘what happened to you community, you used to be cool’. 
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I’m glad that SC is going into PG Planets, we are still in the 1st generation of this tech, most developers that want to use full-scale planets are still in a tight spot due to the technology not being mature, struggling with 64bit precision and related problems.
However it’s a bit silly to compare SC with their 300 man development army and IBS, it could actually be seen as a compliment that IBS is being compared to them. Looking at it realistically, Flavien has spent around 3-4 years full time on INE and Keith about 2-3 years, that would give us about 7 man-hour years that INE has been in development. If RSI dedicated a ‘small’ professional team of just 10 people to their PG endeavors, they could in essence reproduce what INS had done in the last decade within a year.
I don’t want to go into ‘ethical’ issues with SC such as their approach to development, PR, fundraising and management. I also don’t see a point of coming to a forum of one game and declaring that some other game is better, in any form, we are fanboys here, some of us liberal, but fanboys none the less.
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I think this is because we have quite a mixture of people here backing INS or I:BS for very different reasons, e.g. when I look into the various threads for procedural planets or tech. I for example don’t care for the I:BS game, I almost completely just backed it to support INS to develop and polish their engine further after following its progress in blogs for many years (and so that they maybe some day can do other games with it, e.g. TQFE).
Thus I, and maybe others that opened threads about SC or ED, don’t feel that much bound to I:BS and have to rant emotionally about other companies such as RSI or FD, but enjoy their progress as well as prefer some kind of scope elements or core aspects here and there compared to I:BS or further games. Thats why lots of people back multiple games besides I:BS and SC I guess.
Nothing wrong with that.
Absolutely. I really look forward to see how the customized CE works out here we the same problems we discussed in the other mega thread, and keep my fingers crossed for some insight views on algorithms etc.
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I’m an idiot. 
My sincere apologies @JoergZdarsky ,
Did not thouroughly read the last part of your post.
My missplaced rage is uncalled for.
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According to my [imprecise] calculations, and my calculations are [far from] always correct, this planet on the screenshot is about the size of Netherlands (for reference, Kerbin is two or three times bigger).
Then again, KSP is great fun even (if not thanks to) its chibi planets…
It’s funny because I recall many SC fans hating on procedural generated content, claiming handcrafting every single planet would be quality over quantity.
I have to wonder how those people feel now, now that their favorite game is said to be getting pg as well 
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I too have followed both engines for many years and once financially supported SC. But I soon found out SC was more interested in profit than results. Also find it pretty ironic that SC fans are pushing the procedural element of SC here on IBS forums when I and a very few others received 95% negative feedback from fanboys for promoting procedural back in the day, even before the hangars were created.
And like you, I for example don’t care for the SC gameplay but for different reasons. I don’t care for it because the Engine is a complete waste of time and it will never perform as many can now see with their own eyes. I also don’t like the gameplay because the so called instancing that was suppose to support between 100~200 players has shrunk down to a few dozen - on a good day! Clearly your definition of ‘progress’ differs from mine, even under the most broadest terms. But there you go, there’s my rant…or opinion, once more depending on your definition.
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Just to nitpick, I’d call this the 2nd generation.
I think David Braben and perhaps some others that I’m not aware of would hold the title for the first generation of PG endeavors like this.
Check out Frontier: Elite II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier%3A_Elite_II
It’s one of the first games I played on an old 386 sx/16. I had a nostalgia kick back around 2009 and went looking to see if he was going to make another game when I ran across I-Novae. Of course later on, Braben went and kickstarted E:D, but his tech still wasn’t quite as far along as I-Novae’s. They just hadn’t been nurturing it during the intervening years. He almost looked shocked when his kickstarter succeeded so well. I think they had to scramble to create what they did make in the time they gave themselves.
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All fair points. I am not that much pessimistic about SC but thats maybe due to the fact that I dont regularly look that much at the promo stuff and the promised timeline, but just keep watching if there is something new to be seen and look at other things meanwhile. Yes, the number of players bothers me too, however I think its too early to tell fingers-crossed.
RSIs decision of using an “FPS” engine is most often pulled out of the dark when the criticism starts, but maybe its just me that I am still confident that the CryEngine can (not must, but can) evolve to something good for the game if customized right. And, thats for sure, if RSI cannot change the CE with Foundry 42 and its original developers to work with SC over here in Frankfurt, no one can. Yeah, it might have been the wrong choice at the end of the day, but I think no one here is able to judge this currently. Personally these “those RSI idiots choose a FPS engine for a spacegame” arguments are not in any way sufficient for me. During my experiences in the Procedural Terrain thread over here, IMHO the fact that an engine is “meant for FPS” itself is not really relevant (space is in some aspects more simple as “on-the-ground-ground”-gameplay, and you just skip a few things an engine provides out of the box). Its the fundamental restrictions of an engine that can block you or have you rework certain larger parts. SC targets for a a combination of first person and space, and has a few of the original engine developers, so IMHO this decision may work out, maybe not, we’ll see. I think this cannot be compared to other games and strategies such as I:BS - the scope is completely different and might require different decisions.
In the end I dont like the simple “RSI are f*cking betrayers” statements in that “Derek Smart” style. I judge them when the money runs out and I can see what they have delivered or not. Not before. The same I am going to do with INS and Rockfish for example.
Yeah? IMHO the community was overall positive to have PG additionally on top of handcrafted content. There was a strong wish to be able to move on planets (similar to ED) besides staying on space stations and its been a stretch goal of RSI to investigate into this with the procedural approach as they soon made clear that this cannot be done handcrafted.
But if there was a negative opinion of the SC community, we’ll I also wouldnt agree as I like added procedural content for different reasons, especially in space games with an explorer kind of aspect. Thats why I felt in love with SE
Lets see how good their PG implementation works when 2.7 comes out.
They might be able to do it… eventually. But they knew (or should have known) from the start that their choice of engine would require massive engine rewrites. It might have been simpler to do what FDev and INS have done and start with a custom-built engine. Building an engine from the bottom up would have helped with their chaotic development plan as they wouldn’t have to contort an existing engine to doing more things it was never designed to deal with. That kind of oversight does make me question the competence of the person making those decisions.
Which were largely based around it being developed by a studio that only really made FPS games, and therefore probably only expected the people using their engine to be making similar kinds of games. That being said, there aren’t a whole load of engines out on the market that would be capable of achieving what SC is after.
I think someone needs to keep them honest, in the same way that the community here (somewhat) affectionately needles the developers about keeping to deadlines (or, at least, accurate deadlines). There should be a point at which you stop promising features and actually start delivering some of them. That’s not really happening as fast as I would have liked for SC, especially given the amount of funding they have to spend on development.
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