Chris Roberts knows how to build a game lol
He is for me one of the greatest visionaries of the video games world. This is game making at its state of art
Chris Roberts reminds me of one of those brainy Professors who knows everything there is possibly to know about gaming. Unfortunately, like a Professor, he lives in a world of intellectual theory and knows nothing of real world applications and limitations of todayâs technology. This becomes painfully obvious watching a door open into empty space until the rendering has completed.
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People said the same of Molyneux
They know how to make games⌠far less accomplished at delivering them on time and on budget with the features that were expected
Given the different the technical and gameplay aspects they combine (e.g. the synchronised teamplay while one is flying and the other one walking inside the ship looking both out onto the same scene at the backside door of the ship) I can live with that visible LOD here and there. And there is hardly any game that hides LOD that good that its not clearly visible 
But yeah, more effort here to hide that would be welcome nonetheless.
Overall an interesting style jepp. I liked the scene in the bar where the mission details were provided. The hardware requirements bother me also,the necessity for optimization is pretty noticeable. But I remain confident ATM as thereâll be better hardware at the point the game might be available in a year or two (current hardware wonât be a benchmark anymore when there are succesors of the GTX 1080). And, what makes me also confident, Iâve received me GTX 1070 yesterday hooray and was pretty suprised how even the current 2.4.1 is running, even with an old CPU (i7 2600k). For sure not comparable with other games with high fps, yeah. Monitoring it with MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner I get about 24-28 fps depending on the scene (medium). Which is fine with me as it is probably not optimized yet and my CPU could be a bottleneck (GPU usage remains at ~50 percentage according to the stats, what?!). If it sticks to anything somewhere close to 30fps in these settings I am fine (but thats maybe Iâve been playing with an rather old GTX 570 before for quite a few years until now).
Hats off. That was really good.
it is bit sad⌠in a way. 
I guess i was hoping to see Infinity like this in far future.
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I donât know what would make you think it canât at some point I the future 
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Some extra info in this ED forum link below, post Fridays gamescon demo. Like what they âhopeâ to show at CitizenCon regarding PG etc.
*reposting
Summary of what CR spoke about with BadNewsBaron and Captain Richard:
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They ran the demo presentation close to 22 (perhaps closer to 30) times to various parties at the con. Two crashes happened and one hard hang.
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Unlike a lot of other games, including those with PGâed planets, there is no specific draw distance. In 3.0 the curvature of the planet is the horizon.
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Plans for Citcon are to show off âthe next levelâ of the PG tech. Vegetation, water, oceans. A âCrysis styleâ planet.
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The checkpoint on the way to Delamar is a QD beacon that also provides your EDL assisted âflight tunnelsâ.
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The 40 stations quoted at the demo are not all planned for 3.0. Weâll see more duplication and modularity of the existing stations to build it out. They are working on a modular set for stations at the moment.
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The tech allows for IRL scales but is being reduced for gameplay reasons. Weâre looking at a 1/10th scale of distance between planets. Planets are 1/4th scale in size.
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40 minutes to cross Stanton. Discussed here.
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Emphasis on ship maintenance for large haulers making long trips. Coming with items 2.0
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Jobwell is coming in 3.0 along with more hand-crafted missions and those provided by actual characters.
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Some elements of the PGâed mission system coming in 3.0.
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The last day of the shoot at Imaginarium was for the PU, not SQ42. Another shoot planned for PU mission content later in the year.
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Lots of work still to do on facial capture. Eyes, hair, skin specifically.
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Work on live facial capture (!). The plan is to release news reports in-game as quickly after the events as possible.
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The plan is for player driven events to be reported on to create a more dynamic, living game.
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Items 2.0 inlcudes ageing, wear and tear.
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Player characters are supposed to age as well (?)
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The mocap rig owned by CIG is in the UK. It was used to shoot the 3.0 stuff in the demo but at Imaginarium. The plan is to get this set up in the LA studio with smaller mocap sets at each studio as well. They might keep using professional sets in Ealing for the larger scale shoots.
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SQ42 Ch.2 planned for about two years after Ch.1 comes out.
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I hate this behaviour. Wave a feature like they are the first to do that when it is not.
IB and ED clearly do the same. Even the old Frontier did this quite well.
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They are the first to do planets with such level of detail, which game have you seen that has created detailed interior/exterior structures on a procedural planet with physically correct lighting of those structures blending in the planets atmosphere along with animated characters in a multiplayer environment. The landing zone is visible from outer space if you look carefully in that demo. Also the interior+exterior of the ship with complex UI augmented in a 3d scene. Not to forget the volumetric shadows. They are first to achieve this level of detail on a procedural planet. I am waiting for their planet tech 2.0 and specifically looking forward to volumetric clouds and their impact on surface lighting to be shown in october.
The only thing scripted in alpha 3.0 demo was the mission, everything else was a real time working game.
Though my issue with star citizen is that of restriction on city covered planets such as arccorp, I want those types of planets to also be fully free to fly and land anywhere. Another is scale, though i am not bothered by it, the scale still is huge enough for a lot of game play.
For realistic scale reasons, I am looking forward to IB to do something awesome with their game play on which they can extend to this level of detail in future. The main feature of IB that stands out against other games is scale, seamless space travel and smooth level of detail updates and on the back end a good engine architecture designed specifically for the purpose of space, so it will be easier to extend vs star (cry) engine which would be quite messy on the back end due to a lot of retro fitting, which can cause trouble with updates in future.
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you can simply add custom made structures over procedural content. It is made by ED and IB and it is made also by space engine.
The only difference is that che custom content in SC is more detalied because they have a lot of artist working on hand made content.
the fact that the structure is visible from space is not a merit. In real world this tructure would have been too small to be seen from space, you can see it because the dimensions in the entire system are fake
âThey are first to achieve this level of detail on a procedural planet.â
this sentence is so ridiculous that donât deserve an answer.
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There are a lot of technical details that SC has and other games dont have with PG planet tech, that makes their tech stand out and are first to do it at this level of detail. Also their planets have a handcrafted layer on top of procedural generation. But I just remembered that Outerraâs planets have more details than star citizen though not good at interior+exterior structures. So may be they are the first to do it, but till citizencon october this year, the tech game is still on.
fair enough, you are right
bye
Except Molyneux games arenât actually good outside of the abstract. And the early days when there were actually talented programmers working for him compared to the rest of the field.
A long time ago, a clever abstract was all you needed to make a good game compared to the other crap. That stopped being true around the time Black & White 1 came out. B&W1 had a very interesting concept, but was complete crap compared to everything out then, let alone like 2 years ago, in other regards.
Chris on the other hand, he seems to know what good game design is. Except putting heavily single player story elements in this game heâs described so clearly as this supposedly persistent, evolving, player interaction driven world. Because thatâs what the previous 3.0 demo was.
Thatâs not really true. The planets themselves are as detailed as Elite or Battlescape.
The planet has to be pretty tiny for that to be true, but that aside, thatâs not exactly anything new. You only load in as much texture as you need to display at a given distance. If you were to take the texture you see from space, and freeze it in place and come to view it at land level, itâll be a landing-pad coloured mush rather than a heavily detailed landing pad. At least it better be, otherwise graphics cards will be screaming.
This still begs the question as to why backers have to wait 6 months to get their hands on it. If itâs actually working, it should be in the hands of the backers, no?
I donât think thatâs fair. Black & White was a good game in a year packed with memorable releases. I donât think Molyneuxâs problem was ever game design, it was plotting a route from the idea he had in his head to actually making it a reality he always had a problem with. He needed a good manager, and Godus was no exception to that.
Sure, but he has the same problem when it comes to making a coherent end result. He was lucky that when Microsoft finally got fed up and took control of Freelancer there was enough there to launch with a coherent game, but had it been down to CR then, he probably would have tried to make something like SC.
I might not say that Chris effectively and efficiently uses a budget, but given a very big budget he still seems to be making something good with it that many others could fail with.
SWTOR, for reference, had a $300million budget.
Hellgate London, if I remember correctly, had a considerably large budget (tens of millions) and a 150 person development team. And even with 150 people on the team, they were still farming out the majority of assets and made truly awful programming decisions that crippled performance.
Comparatively, Chris Roberts has made extremely good hiring decisions, and seems to have been spending money alright. Big games just cost a ton to make.
Now what usually happens with bad designers and producers, meddlers, like say Planetside2, is a game constantly keeps getting scraped and remade because itsâ not testing well. This doesnât seem to be happening with SC. Itâs just taking a while because of how much detail and polish there is.
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I remember that. I still donât quite understand how they managed to screw up that badly.
How is that costed though, given itâs a licensed product? Also, is that lifetime budget, or just development budget? If itâs the former, it raises a whole set of other questions. Also, SWTOR isnât exactly a simple game, and thereâs a hell of a lot of art and writing assets that have gone into it, which are also not cheap. Thereâs probably also at least an element of Hollywood accounting going on there.
Iâm still not convinced by this. I think they could have saved money by making an engine change relatively early in development. I think in particular CR got lucky that Crytek were in need of funding at the right time for them. However, I still see this choice as being an ongoing liability and cause of delays. It worries me particularly that 3.0 is supposed to include netcode performance fixes, and yet theyâre 6 months from going live.
Itâs not really the overall development time that bothers me, itâs the disconnect between what theyâre showing off and what theyâre providing to backers. Itâs an alpha, all the backers should already be on 3.0
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Inovae: âHereâs a video of our capital ship combat and orbital bombardments, Itâs working just fine with a few stability issues now and then. Weâll let you try it out in 4-5 months maybe, BYEEEE!â
Can you imagine? 
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I donât know whether they support this or not but isnât Vulkan supposed to be some kind of holy grail as far as boosting performance is concerned.
Perhaps support for that would lower the GPU requirements? Although from what I have just read it seems more like it would make higher-end CPU requirements lower.
The article below includes a YT link, indicating that DX12 support comes first.
I thought this was real before finishing your post and was super excited because it meant capital ships were done too. You got my hopes up!
A good interview with Brian Chambers from Foundry 42 Frankfurt, the guys working on the PG tech.
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