Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

General
513

Funny you said that because I told CIG they needed to do exactly that - build an engine from the ground up - over 3 years ago. And of course I was given a good old fanboy drubbing for it. lol. I even offered to spend an extra $200 should they decide to change direction, but of course what do supporters know? Years later and creaking along with no end in sight - whatever.

What’s more I have to wonder how long JoergZdarsky has been involved with SC as Izor has pointed out procedural was derided and poo- poo-ed at every turn. I remember well because I posted videos from Inifinity.

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514

Oh but we can, especially after years of delay, bugs that never get fixed questioning whether they can be fixed at all and a never ending rewrite of the backend (personally if I was going to pick an engine I wouldn’t start with 32bit!). What’s more, is it really advisable to leave a host of persisting bugs until the backend is finished? Leaving things to the end may end up being a bigger problem than you think.

As for using an FPS engine, well, I think results speak for themselves as many videos demonstrate. Anyway, I doubt you are going to be swayed by any argument questioning SC, even from long term supporters of that haphazard enterprise.

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As soon as the backing started, spending roughly the same amount into SC than into I:BS, maybe a bit more, however I am no regular hardcore forum’ler at SC. But, of course, I:BS is poo-poo-ed at there in the same negative harsh way as SC is here. Thats still sad as in the end we all adore space games, but what I wonder what else you expected?

Hmm don’t get me wrong, I would not rule out that SC becomes a big fail, due to them (RSI) delivering something that is not really close to what was described during the backing phase. Sure, it can happen and there is a big risk that something like this is going to happen. Its just that most arguments are from my point of view rather opinions than facts, bound to “I dont like the community / company / promotional or backing behavior”. The videos are fine with me, I rate them positive as I like what I see - the available modules are more important to me, especially some of the next ones at 2.x. That they are late in their roadmap is a fact yes, and some of us would prefer different developing priorities is completely fine. Also that they might have been a different stage developing everything from scratch (however they would have to recreate the whole first person part for SC too again as thats a big part of their gameplay). Maybe, maybe not. But this doesnt bring me to the point where I loose faith that I receive something in the end I can enjoy, not at this point. That time may come when they deliver the release with some more crucial aspects and leaving the alpha stage / telling that their tweaking and engine customizing has ended. There are no problems to agree that the result is sh*t then :slightly_smiling:

@Topperfalkon
Good post I fully agree with.

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516

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the following has something to do with it:

http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Anticipated_Release_Schedule

Of course you could argue this is all due to Alpha and I’m sure you will. But even by their own statements they should already be in Beta - a long time ago. What’s more this is dangerously close to false advertising which of course they profited from. Naturally schedules get moved and releases are sometimes delayed…but what is going on is far from the occasional delay, especially with so much funding, employees and resources at their disposal.

Of course I could adapt your wait and see approach before making a final decision and that’s fine. But it doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on; if I see a drunk pilot getting on the plane or crashing into the walkway before even leaving the ground, guess what, I’m not going to wait and see if we get to our destination - I’m getting off. And I did - thank the cyber gods.

But I still have no problem with SC posts here…this isn’t CIG where people are banned for wanting to start a woman’s organization. Here IBS isn’t about stoking fanboyism and getting them to do their dirty work for them; here everyone has a voice and we can disagree - respectfully. Yes we are fans but it is a far cry from the rampant white hot fanboyism of SC…though SC fanboyism isn’t what it use to be and is slowly dying as the years tick away. What’s more we have called out the Devs here and the Devs have corrected us when we are wrong. It is a really solid partnership and one I feel very positive about. So please, don’t toss Derek Smart’s name around just because someone disagrees with you. As for Derek Smart, he is absolutely right on a few points but excessive on others.

Anyway, I guess that can be qualified as a rant - an informed one but a rant nonetheless. :wink:

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I’m an original Elite fan from the late 80s, was wondering if anyone would pick up on that ‘generation’ comment, glad you did. :slight_smile:

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518

This is just for fun:

These guys seem to be enjoying the current iteration:

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With so much core stuff not working I feel some of the nice little polish features will now not ever be implemented. Thing like voice porting (or CIG’s version of it)

Those who know me over on Sc forums might have seen I lobbied for years to get something like ‘voice porting’ added to the game. Voice effects for players based on surroundings/helmet on/off etc, using the games own VOIP and even a base teamspeak plugin to do the same so orgs can also have great comms effects. And in the end we did see the audio devs say its on the list to come not too far in the future and even better than the old IM voice porting demo video below.

Even CR mentioned voice porting in one of his 10 for chairman videos… although he failed to grasp what it was at the time. I asked a subscriber to ask the question, bu the subscriber must of failed to explain what voice porting was.

What is voice porting? - watch the video below - listen and discover joy of voice porting

Voice porting - 2008 tech demo video from Interstellar Marines (watch from 12:40 minutes).

But other things I lobbied for like to name a Moon or Moon or Mars like body or base after late Sir Patrick Moore (BBC Sky at Night) did get thru and now Dave Haddock the lead writer keeps me updated on his search for something to name after Sir Patrick. Which was a really kind thing for him to do.

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520

Didn’t ED implement something like that as part of their Wings update?

522

To be honest, I would love it if they somehow managed to save the game because the more space sims that are out there the better it is for us players and the space game genre. That said, I don’t really see them being able to save it. And it’s pretty interesting to look at the comparisons between SC and Battlescape; I have noticed that the Infinity Engine runs very smooth and has very few bugs in comparison to SC’s Engine even though Infinity is still in the Prototype stage. The IBS Devs definitely are moving in the right direction by keeping bugs to an absolute minimum because, like it or not, supporters are still playing their game regardless of being in Prototype or Alpha.

Also I think supporters are more patient and understanding of Engine development than they are gameplay which is why we rarely see supporters here bitching about the pace of development. Another reason I kept hounding CIG to develop their own Engine was simple logic: if I want to compete in formula one, buying a Volkswagen won’t cut it no matter how much rebuilding I put into it. In short, you don’t try to squeeze your needs into an Engine but rather design an Engine to your needs. Sadly CIG squandered a great opportunity when they had enormous initial support which would have been ideal for announcing the development of a Cloud Imperium Engine. Instead they ended up taking a shortcut, which is never a good sign, and ended up with an FPS Engine for a Space game.

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523

In fairness, INS have had an advantage in that they’ve been working on this engine for over 10 years (albeit primarily with a single developer), and have built it with the intent of supporting large environments with a large player count.

Though, realistically speaking, if INS have got this far in 10 years with one core engine developer, it begs the question of what CIG should have been able to achieve in 4-5 years with the resources to staff the best engine devs in the industry.

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524

My understanding is that none of the Devs, including Flavien, never worked full time on the engine until the Kickstarter?

525

Well, there’s that too I guess.

And Keith still isn’t working full time

526

You might want to consider playing ARMA 3 with the Task Force Radio mod. It’s been providing this functionality for years via integration with Teamspeak. It’s standard fare for anyone interested in tactical realism operations.

528

That’s because Flavien is smart as hell! Like Einstein kind of smart :wink:

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529

I thought I had this game, I didn’t.

I’m thinking of quitting EVE and moving to either Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen full time but I can’t decide which. How’s the game coming along? Is it actually following up with expectations?

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Well, if you want to play a finished game, play Elite: Dangerous. As for ED, you need to try it to really know if you’re going to like it. Some people here don’t particularly enjoy the flight mechanics (I’m ok with it, personally), and it can get a bit grindy to progress to better ships and higher ranks

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531

This can be applied to many games, but ED is only as grindy as you make it. The usual “mistake” made by people is to set themselves some lofty goal. Then all you end up doing is the one thing that makes the goal possible in the shortest time possible and therefore the game becomes a grind.

Play the game with no goals in mind and you may not get very far but at least you’ll be having fun and it won’t feel grindy at all! :grinning:

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532

Planets in star citizen in the screenshot is 1000km in radius (EDIT: diameter) and they are still going with the handcrafted layer on top of procedural one. Plus they have also implemented planetary volumetric clouds, destructable trees and also in house editor tools for artists to handcraft the planets. And for the unaware, they can increase the size of their planets to how much they want with double precision 1000km planet is part of their game lore, not due to some sort of technical limit, they can make battlescape scale planets with their tech. lastly they have also implement oceans on the planets, and have gameplay prepared for underwater. Their ships can go underwater, also they are offering atleast 4 different ground vehicles.

(screenshot of ocean in the magazine)

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calling star citizen a mess or a scam is unjust hatred towards the game and its development. Star citizens development progress and the amount of information they give and show to their community is one of the best, I have seen so far. I have learned a lot from their development approaches. Also calling cry engine some sort of outdated tech is also an ignorance, the cry engine that they started with is no longer the same one they have right now. They have revamped cry engines physics with their custom one, made the whole engine double precision, they are in the process of revamping its networking system which is targeted for year end alongwith a ton of other improvements, the cryengine they have is one of the best for the space game that they are building as its no longer the one they started with. I am not a fanboy of any game, I just love following the game development process of the companies especially those that are transparent in the space sim genre. And one last point, as I seem to be in form at the moment to write my thoughts out. In order to do what star citizen is doing, yes you need money, and if you can get that money, only then you can build a game of this scale else its a 1000 excuses of lack of funds and a dream. I am not hating on any game, but what I have seen is that the amount of money that battlescape raised during their kickstarter and till this point, star citizen raises it in a matter of 3 to 4 days or a week at max. Now thats the success of their marketing dept or any other responsible dept in this regard, and only their success has enabled them to make a dream game.

Following the development approaches of elite dangerous, battlescape and star citizen, one thing that I have noticed is that safe development or stable game releases eats up precious time and leaves you poor which forces you to cut down features and that buggy development releases and marketing / hype at the right time generates you funds which in turn allows you the ability to take more risks.

Just throwing a simple example in the case of battlescape that I learned over time is that if we go back to the 2010 tech demo, it was good enough and generated a good deal of hype (no matter how buggy the engine code would have been at that time) infinity battlescape kickstarter or game should have been launched with a single planet and multiplayer game mechanics integrated by 2011 as a minimum viable product. This would have made this game more famous and generated a good deal of funds and its development would be way ahead today, infact it could have generated the funds to develop TQFE by now and would have had a good large team. Safe development for a stable release or getting stuck in perfectionism in the code can cause you to lose sight on bigger things such as maintaining hype/marketing etc. Now the past is gone and nothing can be done about it, time is still their to make right decisions in the future, but this is a lesson for me as well as game developers in general that code perfectionism or delayed safe releases would leave room for others to grab the opportunity and this is exactly what has happened in the case of battlescape. star citizen / elite dangerous just threw vague ideas with limited tech demos and generated the funds for their goal and battlescapes fame and hype died down in process and right now, there are so many space games eating up the opportunity/fame/hype pie such as no mans sky, elite, dual universe, star citizen etc, that people dont remember battlescape when this game is shown to them or are unable to make out as to what does this game offers which others dont already, what is a unique feature of battlescape in the pool of space games and their features that are already out their.

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533

Eh? Their game lore has 1000km diameter planets? How does that work?

534

Does it matter, also he said radius…