Yes I agree, and I think its an interesting discussion. I’d just be interested why people see the CryEngine or lets say a “FPS engine” (although I dont like that definition) unsuitable for a space game.
I am working on an space game with Unity3D (because its IMHO the most “open” commonly engine when it comes to procedural mesh creation) for a while which I’d is similar to cryengine when talking about the very basic structure of the engine. And I havent found many aspects (to be precise: none) where I’d say I cannot use it. The major drawback, at least for me, was the limited precision (due to floats) of the origin-centric vector coordinate system, makes you have to do some tricks to render a large area. But at the moment you get around that by having double precision for your coordinate system, you should (I havent yet had the chance to use an engine with double precision) be able to fire all things off pretty well and nice.
Because, what is a space game in the end all about? You have to overcome the rendering of small and large / close and far away things at the same time (this is where double precision helps), but then it its all about disabling the background so you have depth only rendering = endless black space, and deactivate gravity for all objects (in space) in the physics engine but use all the other neat object’s physics e.g. for your space ship manouvering.
Thats it there is your space game, the rest is “just” polishing with particles, dust elements or light and using handmade- or procedual meshes (asteroids etc), where the typical engines can be really suiting. In fact space ship manouvering is pretty simple once you try that out while setting up an spaceship mesh in the engine of your choice, deactivate gravity and apply some objects with physics attached to apply force to the ship. The funny thing is, it can be more difficult to have an arcade style manouvering when you want to completely use the engines physics because then you have to think on how controlling the different physics forces attached to your ship to have the ship constantly fly to the view-direction.
In some aspects I actually find a space scene simpler to be developed than a FPS shooter because you have to render much less things due to the black space with nothingness.
After CGI opened an office in my hometown in Frankfurt Germany where they took over a good bunch of Crytek developers I have to say “what a clever move in chosing the engine and doing that move then afterwards to get to a already stable but custmized AAA engine for the development process”, thus I am pretty sure this engine has been decently changed to suit their needs, who could that do better than the original developers of the engine.
So again from a programers point of view, and I still think CR made a good choice (though I am more into Unity), I’d really be interested why an engine like cryengine, UE or Unity3D for example would not suit for a space game, once you have it customized e.g. to double precision. Especially with the SCs gameplay.
I’ve paid enough money into SC. Time for me to wait another 2 years now whilst I save up for the computer to run it on max. Hopefully in 2017 the game will far more complete. I prefer the fuller first experience, so am holding off until 2017>. Going on EVA deep inside old wrecked space craft and moon bases and even alien wrecks once you find one. For more detail like this, am going have to wait at least until 2017 onwards to see more depth to the game universe. Maybe late 2017. Gives me plenty of time to do the long and slow save up for a new rig and screen.
The biggest problem I have about their choice for cryengine was that they had to do a rewrite on the engine due to the double precision. Which took them a long time obviously.
The only experience I have in programming using 3d engines are very limited and I definitely never used cry-engine for that myself.
So I can only go by what I read about cryengine. And from what I understand all the tools etc for cryengine are fps focused.
Also from what I understand they started with using the cryengine netcode, but they had to switch to something else for that as well. I guess that’s not necessarily spacegame related though, but it does show that they picked the wrong tool for the job.
What is important to me personally though, a spacesim game has to show space in a true scale fashion, or else it will not feel like you are really out there in space. And SC doesn’t do that, they compress space and planets.
The only reason I can think of them not doing that is because they can’t. And their choice of engine is likely a big reason for that.
You just can’t easily create the Infinities, Elites, NMS’s and Limit Theories on an existing engine. The PG is likely deeply embedded into the engines themselves.
On the upside, it should make creating the fps part of their game easier.
The biggest issue I see with Star Citizen is the sheer quantity of work they have. I’m not a programmer, and not a professional in the field, but it seems to me that designing even just 100 to-scale planets by hand will be extremely tedious/time consuming to make quality and believable. I know they have plans to eventually get a procedural system in place, but that is all post-release.
That being said, I’m not a hater. I asked for a refund when they showed no progress on fixing issues with the ships I wanted to play (most specifically, the layout of the Retaliator) and they obliged with little fuss. It was slow (about a month between asking and receiving), but they were very courteous about it.
A month? That’s rather damn quick if you ask me. Getting a fix to be released takes a lot of preparation as a fix is never shipped alone: most of the time you schedule it with other fix so that you deliver a whole bundle as an update. Also, you have to test that it doesn’t make any regression on the fixed functionality or elsewhere, which takes time as well.
Unless it was a gamebreaking bug (and I’m not sure what you mean by the “layout” of a ship in SC), there’s no reason they should hurry a quickfix.
Cyber has the right of it. It took a month to get the refund, because there was always a week or more between emails from them.
I’m well aware of the fact that a fix takes time. However, the Retailiator was supposed to be a “submarine in space” sort of thing. Now, I don’t work on subs, but I am in the navy, and I assure you that the absolutely shit layout of the Retaliator would never have been approved for use. Compartments that seem to serve no purpose? Escape pods that are nigh impossible to reach? Windows to inaccessible rooms? Weapons locker with only one path of access?
The only thing that they do “right” compared to my ship is the torpedo room is empty as hell. Problem is, we have to use machinery to move the damn things, where the Retaliator has them all preloaded. There’s no way that a mere four torpedoes is the limit of that room.
If they would have just come out and said “Yeah, there’s issues we have to fix” or, preferably, “Here’s a list of issues we’re going to fix” I probably wouldn’t have asked for the refund. Their communication skills, however, are terrible.
It’s been getting fixed and re-broken daily as optimization passes get done and fixing some bugs creates other bugs, they’re already on the 7th PTU release. There’s a good reason its on the test server rather than live. Patches every one or two days, version D or whatever was super stable, but the next patch had a silly 2x performance improvement and started crashing everything constantly again.
Since the patch today, i haven’t crashed a single time. There is a memory leak that eats up performance over time, eventually i was down to 20 fps after an hour ingame when i finally hit a bug trapping me in an animation and i had to force quit. Was really fun battling near the security post though, i flew my 300i over there and jumped in to help two superhornets against a connstellation, it eventually ran away and i followed it for a few jumps and took off a few of it’s engine pods, before it ran back to the olistar and i rammed it to death.
Also had to flee inside the security post after landing and having my ship killed on the pad. Then stayed inside preying on people who tried to enter, there’s some assault rifles floating around in there.
Chris Roberts just showcased live seamless planetary transitions on a 1000km diameter planet on their holiday livestream: http://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen
