I took another look and indeed, both mattk and you mentioned it. On the other hand, you won’t be running around in your ship most of the time while not engaged in combat so there probably wont be much of running around involved. Especially if you have a multi crew ship where there’s a member for each job.
As for your “walking isn’t gameplay because wikipedia says so”-ish statement, not every gameplay element necessarily consists of all mentioned characteristics like overcoming challenges. There have been games which consisted purely of clicking a button shaped like a cow (no challenge there). Hell, there are games where you do nothing, and those people are arguably playing the game. If walking through corridors to come from one point to another point is a pattern defined by game rules, you have to interact with the game by pushing buttons to open doors, that should already be enough to count as gameplay.
I would argue that, as the primary form of intended interaction with the game, they are.
I will agree with you that it isn’t very good gameplay, but at the end of the day, what was presented in that video is the basic framework, the foundation upon which the rest of Star Citizen will be built. That is the game and that is how it plays.
It might be mathematical identical (sure, its all about vectors and transformations), but you face different problems you have to workaround (if you dont fake within a space engine, e.g. by having simple skyboxes, having planets on lower scales, etc.). Moving an ARMA truck in a 32x32 kilometer setting with a few kilometers/hour and where you dont have to to handle large scales is not the same as when you have to render multiple very (!) large objects close and very (!) far away (you can forget about kilometers) where floats reach their end with regards to position precision, and I doubt this problem is solved with doubles, depending if they want seamless transition from one solar system to another.
And moving objects at lets say half light speeds where your engine of choice says “OMG” due to precision issues again is another topic.
Sure all this can be solved, but its a different story you dont have to think of in ARMA.
But anyway, as this is about the Star Citizen video basically, I think they are on a good way from a development perspective. Lets see what we get when they release the social module and the FPS module in a few months.
As of the gameplay argument, I would tend to agree with @TerranAmbass: walking around the map is indirectly a part of the gameplay, as it both involves the level design and the developper’s choice of how the game should be perceived / played.
For instance, after finishing a big Skyrim dungeon (or explorable cave), the player would [EDIT] not have to walk again from the ending room back to the starting point: [EDIT] it almost always has a quick shortcut. Sometimes, when no shortcut, the walk back includes more encounters, and then it is worth. Otherwise, having to walk all the way back in empty corridors is nowaday widely considered as a very poor level design.
Or another example, this time in MMOs: making full time travel like in WoW (mostly before Deathwing expansion) versus one-click travel like in GW2. The question is: how much time the travel is taking? Does it add any meaning?
In WoW, it gave full credit to demonists (and mages I think?) that could TP guys instead of waiting for them 15 minutes. Then again, can the player afford to loose something like 30 minutes (or more!) of walk in his weekly 2h play if there’s no demonist around? GW2 choose to make the player’s life easier (so does WoW also from what I’ve read, in the latest expansions).
SC will have sooner or later to answer these questions, and I must agree with some previous posts: the video does not give a good example of teamwork, nor does it give a proper gameplay view. How the hell can I shot the ennemy ship properly with the provided vision seen in the video?!?
As for the station’s corridors, I guess they’ll be “immersive” and fun the first few days… then become a pain in the ass very quickly.
Just to mention it, I thought running around (air)ships in Guns of Icarus Online was actually quite fun. Of course, being airships, there was often more than 1 way to get from A to B.
It’s literally the same. As far as rendering is concerned, the precision of floats is greater than the resolution of modern monitors, whether you’re dealing with star-sized objects or molecular simulations.
This is the reason why converting engines to 64 bit is such a difficult thing to do. There has been no need for it until now.
Having objects collide at relativistic speeds (relative to each other) is not fun gameplay (except in KSP), so you simply don’t go out of your way to make it happen. Making interstellar travel possible in realistic timescales (even with FTL) is similarly not fun (even in KSP) so again you don’t bother.
So yeah, you don’t have to think of these things in Arma. You also don’t have to think of them in Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, Infinity: Battlescape, EVE Online, or any other game I can think of except Kerbal Space Program.
[quote=“Runiat, post:25, topic:963”]
It’s literally the same. As far as rendering is concerned, the precision of floats is greater than the resolution of modern monitors, whether you’re dealing with star-sized objects or molecular simulations.[/quote]
No I still dont think so (and I dont see the relationship to monitor resolutions?!). I’ve been doing a (very simple) prototype in following a few techniques of KSP after Squad’s Unite 2013 presentation within Unity3D, and the issues they (and me) had to handle (and they did clever I think) were intensified by the scale they had to handle (and we still talk about a solar system here, far away from interstellar travel) within the engine’s float vector-coordinate system and the velocities they additionally needed to handle.
Thats why they had to come up with stuff like scaled spaces, floating origin, reference frame velocities and so on.
You can workaround a lot with it (e.g. RFV allowed me to push players speeds to +800 times light speed within my Unity prototype), but its a workaround with drawbacks, a workaround due to the float limits at certain points of the engine. And a workaround few games like ARMA didnt need, e.g. with regards to the reference frame velocity approach or maybe also floating origin.
Anyway I am interested in any deeper insight if there is some technique I am missing right now which shows that e.g. KSP could have done easier in their implementation which I might take over too.
I doubt (but I am no expert here) that the fact that most modern engines do not support double because there is no need. Writing games like KSP (or every game were you want to get about a certain range of kilometers like in ARMA where they certainly had a few of those issues too) would be so much simpler to do. I guess its more related that the performance impact when doing all vector-calulcations in double rather than floats likely is an issue, and there might be the moment when you still are depended on float when it comes to the GPU. So for most games, esp. FPS float might be a good start. But it certainly is not for space games.
I hope they do exactly that! Really! What would be my worst scenario is that they dont cut the space into “handcrafted” zones (as large as double precision allows) where you can only a) remain in or b) fly from one (handcrafted) system to another (handcrafted) one by having some kind of quantum jump or whatever where you can only watch some kind of fancy “I now travel fast in autopilot without controls - mode” inbetween . If you cannot go from zone / solar system / whatever to another by manually flying into that direction, even if it takes you a day at some FTL-speed, the whole exploration-topic would be lost. My wish would be that they try to go the KSP route on how to handle playable scales, but I am afraid they only push the playable zone a bit by using doubles but still limit the playable area like they do on current arena commander.
Anyway it would be interesting to see how CIG handled in-ship precision of probably few cm with multiple crewmembers and multiple objects, all with physics, onboard, when at the same time simulating larger scales from ship to ship. Thats from my point of view the interesting part of multicrew ships, at least from a technical perspective.
That’s still poor level design in my opinion. If the dungeons and forts were more than just a long corridor, they wouldn’t need a quick exit door. Many (not all) in Fallout 3 did much better, with the layouts being more interesting, more believable and still pretty easy to get out of.
Walk around the spaceship if its a bigger one (e.g. think of the Genesis class with 8 ppl), communicate locally or by radio, craft some stuff, avoid objects like large asteroids, drink a (real) beer ), map / anaylse stuff while traveling, etc.
I understand your point. Maybe its a different expectation how “open” the world should be. I think making it more open could make longer travels more interesting/risky and offers more gameplay options because you have to think of your way back, make sure you dont get lost, it could make you finding something special on your way more interesting (ming areas, abandoned ships, etc). Also known planet areas where you can only go to manually would increase its interesting, because they’re harder to get to.
SC wouldnt differentiate from all the other space games if it just plays in scripted and handcrafted zones, that’d be really boring. And I’d feel faked, because its too obvious that they just simulate some flyable areas instead of space. If thats the case for SC, then the world doesnt need that another space game.
I hope they target for both. You should be able to travel from point a to point b manually, even if thats a longer travel, but with the chance to find something special or mining stuff to trade - or you just use jump points directly from a to be, follow a major story line or gameplay, but hardly dont find anything special because you go the “easy route” or just for dogfighting. Both things, manually fly and use jump points are not mutually exclusive, but could offer a large range of gameplay options.
Sorry, I wrote badly. I meant that in Skyrim, you don’t walk all the way back to your shortcut: there’s always a (most of the time very) quick shortcut back to the entrance. This should be a “standard”, unless you want to bring encounters on your way back. Otherwise, walking all the way back to start is a bad level design indeed.
Funny no one noticed, I thought most here played Skyrim ^^
As for Fallout 3, it is both more realistic and sometimes more frustrating because most building corridors are lacking dsitinctive differentiation.
we did this over the course of months in hazeron, that said we kinda just set the ship to go in a direction and went to do other things while it floated at the speed cap into oblivion.
In starquest we were doing fairly long, iirc 30 mins to 1:30 hour trade runs, during the run people would mill around the ship doing various things. When you have a full character inventory and item system as well as ship components, sensor data, market data, and a bunch of other data to look at you dont get bored super easily. Star citizen’s travel times are planned to be much lower than that, which is probably good because starquest had a bit more going on like furniture, a brig, door passcodes, poisoning and various other shenanegins.
Theres also a certain type of player who happens to have a 2nd screen and is nearly impossible to bore with wait times as long as those times are worth it for gameplay, because he will be reading internet forums or watching a show or some other thing when not doing the game things. (this is me a lot of the time, right now in fact)
Oh, I misunderstood your intention. You want players to be capable of flying between stars even if it takes a day, but you don’t want to force them to do so. I thought everyone was going to be obliged to slowboat.
In principle, I have no objection to allowing doggedly-persistent players to do that, but as a developer or product manager I’m not going to spend even one day on features that cater to that play style. It is far too niche. I certainly don’t want to put any unique content into interstellar space that would be attractive to the mainstream players because I don’t want to see those players feeling forced into spending several hours traveling to some remote location to get access to that unique content.
Down the road, when there’s time to delve niche experiences, sure, allowing a player to keep building speed, traveling at 2000c between stars and visiting the icy bodies and rogue planets of interstellar space could be made into a thing, but it would largely just be something to keep those doggedly-persistent players entertained when they’re going to drive for 15 or 20 hours anyway.
I might even put some unique stuff in there that the deep space explorers would get a kick out of, like seeing an alien ship. You can’t catch them or interact with them, but you can see them and document their passing. Another unique would be to reserve some types of procedural bodies, like rogue planets, to interstellar space. They don’t have anything that any other planet would have, but it lets the deep space guys have something to look forward to. Bragging rights of landing on a planet when there’s no star around.
All that said, I believe I implemented slowboating in the warp prototype. It was incidental to implementing other features. Of course, the top speed of a ship didn’t increase massively when in interstellar space, so it would take a month to get to the nearest star that way.
I would argue that adding a numerous variety of niche strategic options are what fleshes out a game. It’s the same reason you have things like titans in eve, a tiny portion of the players will ever fly one, but their presence enriches the entire game world. Implemented in the right context, even if it’s incredibly uncommon to do, the mere option of deadheading between systems adds to everyone’s possibilities. This is what most AAA these days games lack, they optimize exclusively for what players will complete and then the stuff players probably wont complete is just zero effort padding like collectables, rather than more meaningful options.
In haz You could travel between solar system by means of wormholes within minutes, but in very rare circumstances it was necessary/preferable to spend a few days sending a spaceship through deep space to bypass an unavorable wormhole network arrangement or maybe a wormhole was coming out inside a sun. The only reason it worked well in that game for infrastructure stuff because you didnt have to stay on the ship while it travelled, though, you could essentially swap between any of your crewed ships at will allowing a much greater variety of stuff to do while your ships went around. But if you were deadheading to an unexplored system, you had to be on the ship the whole time or the npc officer would refuse to travel there… Anyways, thats just how haz did it, SC will be a very different game and i honestly have a hard time seeing a scenario where deadheading being there would add anything to the game’s strategic options, based on what we know so far about the world. I could be wrong.
This is possibly my biggest gripe and concern with SC. It’s become so infatuated with the minutiae of a spacefarer’s life that in order to get anything meaningful out of the game you have to effectively enter that life. I like the idea of being able to walk from my bed in my room at a station to the landing pad of my ship, then walk to the seat in the ship and sit down and take off, but I don’t want to be compelled to do it every time I take off, which seems to be what is suggested. That’s why pretty much every other space game I’ve ever played allows you to purchase a docking computer (X-series, E:D) or simply just automates the process (Freelancer). Reducing the unnecessary tedium and grind is a key part to retention in long-life games.
And for two further asides…
The HUDs they displayed were quite confusing, I hope those aren’t going to be the final designs. Also I agree that the whole OS loading thing was overly long and pointless, considering how much time it took just to animate getting into a station.
Finally, everything looks like plastic. Is that just me? It’s a little jarring though.
Given an unlimited budget, I’m all for having great depth in niche activities. Budget restrictions would inevitably put slowboating at the end of a fairly long list of things that should be done to make for a successful game.
I don’t see Titans being niche. They are the culmination of gameplay for a whole bunch of people. Sure, few players get to fly one, but that “whole bunch of people” contributed to making it possible - it was a group goal. Certainly they get to participate in deploying it, fleeting with it, seeing it in action and benefiting from its victory - or feeling the pain when it dies.
To make slowboating fit that pattern would mean that other players are involved in the slowboating effort. Perhaps setting up a slowboat is just like a Titan, except that instead of sending it off to attack, it is sent off to slowboat some transit that cannot be handled by the jump system. Once there, it sets out a beacon and other ships can follow. A new link in the transit network is complete. Charge whatever toll you want, and players have to decide which route they want to follow to get to their destination, paying tolls along the way.
The trip out would have to have a variety of things to keep the players occupied. Navigation and environmental hazards that can send you off course or damage gear, discoveries to make, stuff to learn (to make sure the beacon is going to operate correctly) and so on.
That’s a fairly literal duplication of the Titan pattern (large group builds a big, capable ship, does stuff with it). I’m sure there are other adaptations of group participation, but they all undoubtedly make slowboating an integral part of the game’s design. I would hope that the slowboat Titan could carry a sizable crew with hangars and such. Maybe the beacon is so large a construct that it’s like building one of those jump gate things; you have to spend a week in the destination system mining, manufacturing and assembling the structure.
Then you have to do more stuff to get the ship ready for another slowboat run. Could be an interesting game. The explorers willing to slowboat open up the galaxy while the rest of the players bounce around in the network of stars behind them.
Did anyone see if they mentioned the system specs of the machine they were running the demo on? It’s easy to create triggers for streaming in data within a demo however it’s dramatically harder to do that in an actual open world game. I would be interested to know what kind of system specs they’re hitting given that I remember reading they were having problems with pushing the # of triangles that CR wanted the ships to have.
Probably i7 processors with lots of RAM, plus 980 GPUs. Why bother with anything less when you both have the money and you’re on stage to push your product? It was a demo that used an existing engine (not hacked-up special-use code), so I would assume that they just assembled something from the available building blocks that works on very high end hardware and the remaining work is to now get it lean enough to run on their recommended system configuration.
The multi crew scenario shown by different views and comments by Chris as a german magazin (re-)played that multicrew sequence together with Chris. I remain with my statement that I like what I technically see about multicrew space.
Yes sorry I didnt make that clear. There is nothing wrong about providing options to fastly move between locations. Its just that the engine should allow to take a different path and move between locations the long way through vast space (with maybe different / additional things to discover), to make it believabe that all the locations are really “connected to each other”.
But, looking at Chris’ comments in the above video, I still have hope that they maybe implemented it that way (2hrs fly to the moon he mention). Although he still talks about “maps”, which in the end is nothing more a specific area with borders. Will be interessting how they handle the borders of those “maps”.
), map / anaylse stuff while traveling, etc.