If you guys are going to keep discussing orbital physics can you please fork this thread.
I suppose it might be good to have a topic about it, but for now we’re focusing more on their effect on possible Kickstarter stretch goals (and general trolling, in the case of ThornEel).
I’m almost tempted to urge you to get back on topic 
Man that’d be so awesome. I’d break off just to see that view.
That wasn’t the objective, but rather (a poor attempt at) humour : as Kichae wasn’t exactly wrong, this isn’t exactly a sign of apocalyptic changes and the end of this age. Or at least that was the intent, sorry if it came up as trolling.
More on-topic, I’d definitely love a stretch goal in the line of managing the effects of the giant pieces of wreck from such monsters when it is destroyed, along with bright meteor showers in atmospheres, and craters when it hits the ground, both within and without atmosphere.
But reasonably, that’s probably not a good idea given the resources it would take for what is mostly eye candy - better have the wrecks consume in long bursts of plasma until nothing is left, and/or having wrecks not being pushed far so they stay in (fixed) orbit.
Btw, what would an exploding 30km space station look like? I’ve seen images of a satellite destroyed by a missile, but I can’t imagine scaling that up thousandfolds.
Sorry for lot more crude representation here but this would be more likely.
Each debris blast vector is represented by arrow.
As you can see most probable one to hit the planet is one blasted retrograde. (station roatated counterclockwise from our point of view)
That is purple.
Most likely to escape is the red one piece.
It is prety rough estimate but should be correct.
However this is for the bigger parts. Small ones would most likely obey what you drawn.
they would have smaller mass so the energy to propel them directly would not need to be that high.
Bwa ha ha ha. I had to give him some time…
Well I do have to comment here as whilst I followed your project for many years, inc your excellent tech blogs you use to do, Star Citizen certainly pulled in me cash quicker, and so I’ve followed it quite ardently.
Star Citizen is based on cryengine, however as well as having a full license meaning if crytek does go under (which seems unlikely by this point, seems to have been a cash flow issue) they are implementing a pretty major change to engine in the form of double precision, so the limit on their individual maps has confirmed to be at least 1/100th scale of the actual distance from the sun to pluto, which being that distance google tells us is 5906376272 km(at the time the 1st article was written no doubt i.e Nov 9, 2009) so there systems can be up to 59,063,762.72km now weather this means it can have maps up to 59 million km by 59 million km or that the total m3 can add up to this, or that it can have 59 million km by some other less value maps, I cant say, only quote the given information, however this doesnt actually mean their maps will be this large, only they can, still the 30km figure is for 32bit.
However they are doing a massive change to the engine, and have some crytek employees working there, so I doubt they’ll have to many scaling issues, and their funding is approaching 50 million usd via their website now after tax at 20% (not sure if usa uses this figure thats the uk amount) but yeah so that means they have probably around 40 million to play with, probably around 38 if you count the portion of funding from kickstarter and its associated fees to the taxable income. Still they have invested in a “team” of people to investigate and develop procedural generation technologies which was a stretch goal.
They are however not in any great rush as they have allot of other bits to do, your issue has been well you waited to long when kickstarter 1st appeared, early on projects were hitting really high goals with ease, your project is older and frankly you should have taken a punt before Star Citizen got its greedy mits on space sims cash, sure this is all very well in hindsight and if your a bit of a perfectionist like me I can see how you can get stuck in the trap of waiting for the perfect moment but still, it is what it is by this state.
So my suggestion to you is how about you contact Cloud Imperium (err star citizens actual company name) and try to see about flogging your procedural generation tech to Star Citizen, given the kinda funding Star Citizen enjoys they can probably afford to plop down a million or so for use of your tech as a starting point to their procedural generation, and a million would go a long way to developing your own title(s), you could justify such investment as well you’d be sharing your tech with a competitor, better yet you could get some kind of cross-tech licensing agreement where any changes they make to your tech in future would be shared with you, and allowed to be used by you, which will be a way of keeping it up to date once cash investment begins to trump experience, and its not to hard frankly for Chris Roberts to plonk down an extra million stretch goal and attain it, CR is struggling to find strech goals as it is, I realise of hand it may seem counter-intuitive to flog your cutting edge tech to someone you probably dislike out of principal just for muscling in on the market you been aiming for, for years, and doing so brilliantly at it at that, but, what you have right now is cutting edge tech which you said yourself is not going to necessarily hold out forever, so you may well be able to get more cash and have a better chance of getting to make the game you’ve always dreamed of via working with CIG then not, sure thats just my view and its possible CR might not be willing to plonk down all to much on such tech, but given how easy an extra mill for say said tech would be to get for CIG, and given its inherent value at this point, they may well be, worth a try.
As for Elite: Dangerous, sure they have some developing to do, but they were by all accounts working on the game for years before the project shows up, and they are well known for being pretty good at procedural generation, theyre not going to rush it either, but dont be surprised if they come up with some pretty stellar tech when the time comes.
The semi-major axis of Pluto, which I tend to think of as the “average orbit”, is about that distance. 5874Gm according to wikipedia. Given it’s 250 year orbit and 1989 perihelion it probably hasn’t been at a 5.9Tm height during our lifetimes.
It really wouldn’t. I mean, it wouldn’t be a bad start, but it wouldn’t be enough and it certainly wouldn’t get it done before Star Citizen (“now featuring all the unique features of INovae engine games!”). Infinity the MMO (for which a million would barely be a start) might still have some success by offering a game that is separated from the real world economy, but that’s about it.
I don’t recall, so a reminder would be nice: Are those maps stitched together to create patchwork solar systems, or are entire solar systems limited to that size? Because that would cover only out to the orbit of Mercury in our solar system.
No idea merely regurgitating information provided by them, cryengine does feature steaming technology so theoretically you could stitch them together infinatum, still in practical terms, even without doing so, in a game, its provides allot of space, for things, it may be “small” in comparison with reality but its vast enough for plenty of interest for players, space for a great number of them, afterall in the average game planets are usually nothing related to planet sized, and its a massive step up from a 30km m2 map, as for the size you may well be correct, like I said merely used the stats the 1st article a google search provided,
The point is however star citizen maps are not going to be 30km by 30km or even remotely close, but massively larger, and when not in fast travel mode, players are limited to well atm 120m/s or 268.5 miles per hour (in a 300i) when not boosting and when out of fast travel ie whenever theyre taking control of the ship manually, (atm prolly some faster ones eventually) meaning thats plenty of space for a vast number of locations of interest, more then enough frankly for players.
You make a valid point, but to me that raises the question of whether they need all that space at all if they’re going to do it like that. They may as well have Freelancer-esque dimensions. There is usually a choice between “Reality-sized”, or “Game-sized”. Why go for one somewhere in no-man’s land between the two?
No matter how big they can twist cryengine’s solar systems into being, I-Novae will always be able to say theirs are 1:1 scale. It simply has more credibility. No point in being big just for the sake of it.
Having said that, ensuring that the space is used effectively will ultimately decide the effectiveness of any design decision.
Wait, what?
Really?
I mean, it’s a space game with a fifty million dollar budget… and they’re limiting spaceships to the speeds of real-world road-legal can-buy-one-right-now cars?
I mean yeah it’d be a really expensive car to go that fast on public road, and a really expensive speeding ticket if you didn’t go to Germany to do it, but still.
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That sounds an awful lot like Freelancer (except those maps actually were something like 40 km across, according to the game), so I assume the systems will be fun-sized. I’m OK with that (so long as they’re consistent, they can make space as cartoony as they like, and I’ll be OK with it), but it’s not the impression I had gotten about the game.
Given the technological level there is behind I:B, it should rather be around a few dozens of millions. Like in 20 or 35. One million is basically pocket money at this point.
Now the true question: does I-Novae really want their direct competitors to get such a major stride for the sake of a couple of dozen millions of dollars ? I think not.
SC might be upgrading Cryengine technology for their needs, but how long will that take ?
Probably a year before they can get something stable enough to go for a beta-test.
Wow, just wow.
How is that dimension you live in?
You do realize that CR considered I-Novae for SC and they decided that it was not worth the risk… And that INS would probably bend over backwards for any investment at this point (so they have food to eat).
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Its worth noting the “Arena Commander” or dogfighting pre-alpha module uses normal cryengine so its map is limited by the 30x30km figure, meaning in order to make it feel spacious enough for dogfighting they may have slowed things down, however, whilst I-novae is focusing on realism in the form of parity of scale, star citizen is focused on realism in the form of real physics, for instance a ship generates g forces like a real one would in space, so for every action there is a reaction, thusters fire independently, and actions are converted into independent movement, if an individual thruster is damaged then the amount the damage impairs the function effects how to the ship handles, as the fly by wire control system now has less power available to that thruster, it will try to compensate but theres only so much it can do especially if one of the ships thrusters is shot off entirely.
As a result as the game nearly allowed turns on a dime, any and all real world forces exerted on the players characters are limited to a maximum of current human g limits, and if you begin to approach those limits your character will begin to and then black out, impairing the controlling humans view of the world.
So any maximum speed will be affected by the forces on the players body, the reason for the fact that ships are so slow is to ensure, that players dont spend half the time blacked out when trying to do manoeuvres, and that their bodies arent crushed to a pulp by g forces whilst manually controlling the ship, faster travel relies on travelling on a pre-defined pre-calculated route, which incorporates acceleration and deceleration (inc an emergency option) into said route to ensure g forces never exceed lethal levels, in the event activity is detected approaching the ship the emergency deceleation routine is activiated dropping the player back to manual control.
As for the 64 bit, the first alpha testing of this is expected in Arena Commander Release 2, expected later this year, however their 1st cryengine mod, PBR has already been undertaken and rolled out into the hanger and ac, i’ll be honest while they may plump a mill maybe a mill and half maybe even 2, the idea they’d find spending 20-30 mill is ridiculous, in any transaction its all about leverage, how much is what you got worth to me + the time I’d save getting it, they do have some of if not the best people across the games industry who have flocked to SC to escape publishers thumbs and to be involved in something big, and exciting,
Whilst Inovaes tech is no doubt impressive its still mostly the work of one dedicated and talented guy over a period of many years for the most part, however 2 equally talented individuals would take half the time to arrive at the same point, and 6 - 10, the standard development assumption is a cost of 120,000 usd per developer per year (obviously not all salary, equipment, licenses insurances etc) for employment for a million bucks, that’s enough for 8 people for a years employment, in that time they could likely achieve a great deal of what one talented guy took 8 years to do, perhaps they’d need to hire said 8 people for 2 years that’s two million, so paying a million for said 8 years of worth maybe worth it so they can get to the nit and gritty of how to use the system without spending said time in r&d, obviously they’d have to separate the elements of i-novaes graphics engine from its procedural tech before they could use it, which may reduce the price their willing to pay.
Why on earth would they plump 20 or 35 million, enough for 166 people for a year or 291 people for a year respectively, when if they were going for that kind of investment in tech they’d be better of doing their own system from scratch anyhow, as they’d end up with a vastly superior tech for that kind of cash flow, sure maybe if Infinity Universe had done a ks before Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous and done a crowdfunding section on their wbeiste, and even been 1/2 of the marketer Chris Roberts is you might have somewhere between 20-35 mill funding for IV right now, but well that boat has sailed, a mill, maybe two longer term is the best funding you can hope for for IV development from crowdfunding at this point, any more will have to come from private investors, and by a mill I mean the mmo might make that but probably not right now market to saturated wait till next year when some games are more out and some people find they dont like them,
For battlescape about 100-200k is the best your likely to get, any more should be set a stretch and may be a struggle, and then only if the kickstarter video is well voiced and acted, and the dev presents a likeable figure, KS funding has got harder as time goes on specially as so many of the 1st generation of KS projects are still under development people went a little crazy at the beginning there, and now many of the people most likely to fund (like say me) are waiting to see how the 1st generation of KS funded games we plumped for turn out before we decide a more long-term funding strategy with reguards to crowdfunded projects, many of the titles wont be around till 2015, some 2016 before we find out, in the meantime our KS funding has slowed to only the most amazing titles.
Informed criticism fail…
there are actually cars that go that speed, and quite a bit above. Not really in normal circumstances though. 270 mph/120m/s has been crossed for street legal cars though: http://www.venomgt.com/
Agreed, a dozen millions may seem far-fetched.
However, selling your best technology a million on a one-shot is ridiculous as well. That is, in the case where you’re not selling to a certain amount of clients (the amount being a critical variable).
Take “Unreal Engine 3” Development Kit for instance : UDK Licensing Resources - Unreal Engine
They get 25% or gross revenues after the first 50K$ (plus license fee). There was a few AAA games that used UDK3 and turned a few millions of profit. “Epic Games” was sure enough that the royalties would fetch enough profit, probably more than if they asked for high license price, because the clients are somewhat already known and have reached a certain amount.
I was intentionally taking UDK3 as example, since I know “Unreal Engine 4” is different (5% for early adopters, but no floor start): they’re aiming at a much larger client pool than previously.
Now there’s probably the worst part of your argument: having 2 persons on a job doesn’t mean that it’s done in half the time. This is especially most wrong with high-tech jobs, but let’s put a simple understandable example: you want to tile your kitchen. Maybe the kitchen is so small that 2 tilers will disturb each others. Maybe the second tiler has to wait for the first to finish his job before the second tiler can go on. Now imagine something as complex as programming…
Sure, there was so far 8 years of development because he wasn’t working 100% on I:B. But could it be cut to 2 years with the correct team ? Not really sure of that.
Another chunk of the iceberg you’re missing: where’s the workspace (building?) rent ? Surely you won’t forget the support team as an essential part of after-sales service ? Nor should you assume that marketing and commercials goes for free …
There’s more expenses to account for than engineer or developer salary, and they can be quite high too.
Why so ill-foretelling ? 
My left little finger tells me the crowd will be cheering for getting at last some real space action, more than visiting your spacecraft in your hangar or hanging on promises of possible skirmishes (10 vs 10 is hardly a real battle, let’s face it ). Plus, I:B comes with a real demo, not only promises.
True, SC has squeezed a lot of $ from fans and supporters, but they did not reached 35M in one night. It took them a lot of marketing engineering.
Now let’s not be hasty. One shouldn’t be too proud, least they starve to death, but once you go black, there’s no coming back.
Talking about black hole of course
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