Boost indeed helps moving about and keeping close to each other … also to correct mistakes. It already feels quite good and it having a drawback also helps. It could be tweaked to be even sharper etc… It does change the importance of other componets though, so that has to be kept in mind. If there are countermeasures ingame but just “boosting” out of the way is much more effective … well you may be out of energy and still have a few “flares” left … etc etc.
I think the boost would be even better if they remove the delay when pressing the boost and beeing able to boost imediatly without that gap between presses which probably comes from the delay. Also the boost should sound more rockety-like and not like the broken tv currently.
The problem I have with audio warnings is that if you don’t use them sparingly, you’ll have audio collision.
For instance, if all of your examples (or at least as many as would make sense to play at the same time) triggered at once, you’d either end up with the audio playing simultaneously, playing sequentially, or doing priority based filtering. The first (and optionally the last) of those options lose information, and the second (and optionally the last) means it’s impossible for all the notifications to be timely.
Audio notifications need to be for things that either can’t be trivially seen (missile lock and tone), or will result in almost immediate death if ignored (critical damage or surface collision warnings). You only really want one or two different types of notifications per context where possible.
Overshoot can be displayed trivially on the UI using a mixture of text, numbers, shapes and colour in the vicinity of the target.
Also, the autopilot could theoretically be used to prevent overshoot by slowing down for you. Sure that’s easy-mode, but it’s an option.
Also interesting in Around The Verse 3.15 UK was the section starting at 1:50 where they explained their new implementation of asteroid fields. Actually it seems they’ve chosen an approach that we discussed at the Procedural Terrain Rendering How-To thread in order to make asteroid fields working in the current Unity version and utilize the additions since 5.4 - by creating a set of initally calculated asteroid meshes (in ATV the say they use ~10 different ones) and procedurally spawn them in larger fields. Something that could be done in Unity with GPU instancing also.
Very interesting, as I was thinking about to rebuilt that asteroid part also in my prototype in that kind of way. As I also think although completely individual asteroids are cool, it can be a huge overhead to calculate each and every single asteroid individually - and at least with Unity this strategy allows instancing on GPU. And if you increase the precalculated meshes to a certain number, and vary them by rotation, material and size, the player probably wouldnt notice. And you could recalculate them at a certain point in the background anyway so that the asteroids change over time depending on the players position.
Does anyone know how for example E:D handles this? Or also I:BS?
2.6 released today, it’s a pretty major update. So far the things i’ve noticed are a fancy new ship/loadout screen, flight model changes, performance and load time improvements and star marine, which is quite good fun. Im pretty happy with how it plays, at low framerates its not very fun as with most shooters, but with just a modern gpu and a 7 year old cpu i’m able to get a solid 60 out of it. SC has also moved their backend to lumberyard, amazon’s network/cloud service focused fork of cryengine this update.
I just read about them switching engines. I’m assuming it will only affect the network side, but to me it smells of problems. At least I-Novae have built exactly what they need themselves and aren’t relying on others to plug the gaps.
Amazon does have limitless money and are pushing hard to get into gaming development, which likely means they will throw a lot of money into the engine which should hopefully benefit Star Citizen in the long run.
Still, depends upon how you look at things.
Proud to have stopped the ship sinking. Or prideful even though the ship is still sinking.
As far as I followed Amazon’s license deal with Crytek of the CryEngine early 2015 I’d say Amazon’s Lumberyard engine is simply 99.9% stock CryEngine 3.8 (Amazon isnt a software company), just with enhanced or added API components (UI/Tools, Network components) to have easy access to the Amazon services (e.g. Amazon’s cloud services AWS3, Twitch integration etc.). And Amazon provides full access to the engines sourcecode. I wouldnt even call this a “change of the engine” as it is still the CryEngine, just licensed and enhanced by Amazon.
I very much doubt RSI had to change much of their code but just switch to a few tools and make use of the new API components. Eventually some network parts, so I’d guess they made that Lumberyard move earlier this yeah when they started to work on that part or while they reworked the UI.
IMHO it makes sense as they might need a big infrastructure at some point which Amazon can easily provide and is already available by S3, and RSI doesnt have to reinvent the social community software wheel. And for sure Amazon is a more reliable partner than the horrible Crytek company over here in Frankfurt which seems to be close to insolvency.
So my 2 cents are that this is nothing to worry about but on the opposite pretty much made sense as they can benefit from the additional API integration within the CryEngine and it wasn’t a big move for RSI from a code perspective.
“switching engines” is incorrect, but shitty games journalists will use the term because misleading people will get them more clicks. Lumberyard is a forked rebrand of cryengine 3.8 which mainly changes networking and integrates with amazon’s hosting service. Star citizen 2.5 was running on cryengine 3.7, star citizen 2.6 runs on lumberyard. Basically the work we’re talking about here is a single version engine update and targeting the always planned netcode work towards lumberyard instead. Not exactly something to worry anyone who hadn’t already formed a negative opinion.
I downloaded this latest build to see if it runs any smoother with the new network code and it does.
For about three minutes before it freezes up my rig.
I’ve tried two times now to load up one of the stations and ended up Alt Ctrl Del to restart out of a freeze.
I’m running a 4970k at 4.5 GHz and GTX 980 Ti SLI on water at 4K and maxed out details.
I very much doubt the game overpowers my setup since the fan on my PSU never even starts up.
Still just using 16 GB of RAM but a memory leak should take longer to be an issue unless it’s a bad one…
Interesting that it freezes your system, that didnt happen to me yet, although I have a partially smaller system (2600k and GTX 1070), but I also only play at medium details. So I doubt also that this is due do overpowering your system (have you meased CPU/GPU load and temperature nonetheless?). What happens to me regularly with the new 2.6 build is that I am continuously thrown back into the main menue due to a network disconnection, but well maybe thats maybe due that lots of people are trying the game currently.
The latest drivers from Nvidia seems to do the trick. I didn’t think it would matter since it’s not really a game yet.
I got one disconnect from the network so far but my latest session went smooth.
Untill I introduced my 325A to one of the station rings.
I need some training on the finer art of flying in SC, but I’m not really playing the game yet. I’ve been burned out by alphas and betas of games before. Not gonna make the same mistake now.
Some things that disturbs me though is that if I go up as close as I can to one of station walls I see through it into space.
That’s a simple thing with collisions that should have been adressed ages ago.
Doors still open and close on top of me and other players or by players I dont even see. I know that’s all down to the network traffic since a lot of people are prolly online right now trying out the new rls.
I really hope that it’s just a problem with the servers and not the new code.
Edit/
Why even have these damn doors at all? The only time it’s really needed is when going through an airlock, and all they seem to do is take up network bandwidth.
It’s sometimes called Starengine, yeah. Game engines of the scale of cryengine are essentially huge piles of software libraries that link to other software libraries. Imagine your making a game, you run into an issue with the coordinate system so you go through taking all the software libraries you need modified and modify them, but those still link to unmodified libraries, so you have half an engine of modified things and half default. One day it comes time to update the engine, most likely for a specific feature (in this case networking related stuff) you take the old still default bits and wholesale replace them with the new version, but with most of your modified bits all you really have to do is make sure they still hook up to the other bits correctly, in most cases they will. If you want to update the modified bits it gets more complicated, you’ll need to actively integrate changes which can sometimes be easy and sometimes hard.
Doing a complete engine switch (cryengine to unreal for ex) gets more complicated as often most of your art assets wont even be compatible without putting in manhours to make things work again, and so much of your code is so incompatible that much will need to be rewritten. Engine version updates are trivial in comparison.
My thinking is that the lumberyard switch is in preparation for the 3.0 netcode revamp. If im right they;ve replaced all the default bits but the netcode aspect is in the process of having lumberyard changes integrated during the new netcode’s development. Maybe they’ve been planning this for a year or more and the new netcode was being built with lumberyard in mind from the getgo.
For anyone else playing star marine, i highly recommend the laser rifle on burst mode. Ignore all but your opponent’s head, it only takes 2 shots to the head from any weapon to kill, but each body part has it’s own health pool meaning if you spray everywhere your opponents will soak it all in their arms and legs and you’ll be playing mechwarrior. Some gameplay from after i figured this out.
Unrelated: i finally updated to a card with nvenc, recording is so smooth and 18 minute recordings take 5gb instead of 100gb holy shit
