Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

Titanfall 2 is a great runner-up (in a purely subjective, opinionated, entirely arbitrary way of measuring ‘goodness’ in videogames.) to Shattered Horizons, funnily enough. At least as far as the fps combat goes. Great movement system and maps that make good use of it… I guess it doesn’t really count in that list as it doesn’t have the whole 6dof movement as a mechanic and/or pointless gimmick. (looks at cod)

Of the four you mentioned, 2.6 Star Marine is certainly a thing that exists…

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If Star Citizen has half as much conflict between warring factions as this thread, it should be pretty awesome.

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I’m really enjoying Titanfall 2 still.

But yeah, out of those, the only two contenders really are Star Marine and Shattered Horizons. I haven’t tried Star Marine yet (still calming down over the shitty UI bollocks I encountered the other day), but the little time I got to spend with Shattered Horizons was fantastic. I wish they’d make a proper sequel

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Someone did an analysis of the Star Citizen 2.6 netcode.

I know nothing about netcode, but found this video a good watch. Check the source, and make your own minds up. Am just passing along some info which is both interesting and entertaining at the same time.

What’s your netcode code experience been like?


source: the internet (where I saw it)

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An image that has been cropped by dsmart to exclude the well performing gunfire delay test, interesting. As for movement, netcode is unlikely to stay in it’s current state as the next major update includes the new system thats been in the works for ages now, so anyone who wants to “make their mind up” might want to hold off until then. I have noticed the delay though especially the disparity with damage delivery, it gives notable advantage to the offensive playstyle. Video itself does solid testing.

You’d probably have done better to just pretend you didn’t get this from dereksmart’s website because linking to dereksmart.com as your “source” for an unrelated video seems like unnecessary bait.

If you could compare the delay for a jump between COD:IW and …COD:IW when he was in dev, what do you think you would see ?

@mattk50 to prevent living in a bubble that only echoes your own opinion on a matter (which isn’t really known to produce ‘well informed’ opinions), it is (unfortunately) necessary to see the other side of ‘the debate’. Given how much effort DSmart puts into bashing cig, his posts are worth to at least source check, as they might lead to videos as the one posted before.

@kamui I’ll just take a shot in the dark, but given that they keep recycling the same engine over and over again, my guess is that the delay between both wouldn’t be that different.

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Optimization comes at the end of a development.

Yup, but the need for optimization often stems from new, unoptimized code. If the amount of new code is minimal (like for example when using an engine that has been recycled over the last decade constantly, including optimisations), then the potential gain isn’t as high as when you’re rewriting the code from scratch.

the engine is made as a support to dev games (multiple games), it’s not like if it was the code of the game itself. Star Citizen, and Star Marine, is made of new, unoptimized code.

The engine is just an abstract layer. you still need to dev your game when you finished to recycle your engine.

Just play to Star Citizen, or Star Marine, and tell me if you seriously think that the game is optimized and the devs behind this cannot do better…

The team behind this game is seriously experimented. just give them time.

I get the feeling that you don’t understand what I am talking about. I was talking specifically about the CoD games, who use a recycled engine, without drawing any conclusions for Star marine (or any other game). You asked how different the delay would be, comparing CoD:IW retail and dev, and I gave you my opinion on that matter (and that matter alone).

The engine btw is not just a tool or an abstract layer. It is figuratively speaking the heart/core of your game. It contains all the rules that your game obeys by. It creates the possibilities and boundaries.

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ok effectively I didn’t understand. Yes you are probably right, it is not a good example. But you understood what I was trying to explain.

Yup, and I agree with you on the matter, that Star Marines current delay problems isn’t necessarily representative of how it will perform at the end.

Small caveat though: There’ve been instances where the netcode was just broken on release day of a AAA game (driveclub for example), so it is imperative that at one point they start to put a lot of effort into that netcode part (which is a bit confusing to me at the moment, given that they changed to lumberyard, because as they themselves put it: amazon has more manpower than us to do the networking part (or along those lines). So I wonder how big amazons part will be in improving the online experience. They did sign some cooperation contract with cig if I understood that right, so it might be that they keep exchanging informations, including cig telling amazon what they need the engine being able to do network wise, and amazon implementing those things into new builds of the lumberyard engine; cig then doing another one day port of the new lumberyard build to whatever-they-call-their-branch-of-the-engine-again; looking how it improves their games; rinse and repeat).

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About the lumberyard, they just merged two branches. no big deal. And there was apparently (merge made in one day) no conflict at all (as they both modified different parts of the engine). The words “they replace their engine by a new called Lumberyard” that I read in some articles is abusive, and really disconnected to what really happened.

they executed a “diff” between Lumberyard, and their engine, and integrated the result in it.

Probably. I probably missed a post somewhere, where they went into detail what they did, and how they did it.

[quote=“dekaku, post:1443, topic:136”]@mattk50 to prevent living in a bubble that only echoes your own opinion on a matter (which isn’t really known to produce ‘well informed’ opinions), it is (unfortunately) necessary to see the other side of ‘the debate’. Given how much effort DSmart puts into bashing cig, his posts are worth to at least source check, as they might lead to videos as the one posted before.
[/quote]
If we’re actually going to start discussing ds, here’s my take on him and his arguments. He’s a jealous incompetent who can’t stop tripping over his own failures, the result is his criticisms are mostly projections of his own failures in game dev. He pretends every bad review he gets is from an SC fanboy meanwhile he produces hot garbage an experienced dev would produce faster in a week of work in unity. He charges hundreds of dollars for nonfunctional weapon packs and other nonsense, the only difference between SC’s price model and his is that he cant actually get anyone to pay for his text blurbs describing weapons, since he cant even afford to make decent jpgs for them. It’s important to realize that since a few years ago dsmart has staked his own reputation or whats left of it on SC failing, once someone does that they can no longer be trusted to change their opinions or provide reasonable argument with new information, no matter what SC does he will continue saying the same things.

Some would argue his failures make him qualified to criticize SC, i would argue they demonstrate he is stuck in 2000 era development strategy and hasn’t been able to move past it. The lumberyard stink he made is a good example of this, the way upgrading and “changing” engine components works is very different for a large studio with resources to actually write their own versions of engine components, most even AAA games simply have to rely completely on the engine as a self contained core, but SC has the budget to rip out pieces of the engine they dont like and do it their own way. This is something DS has never been able to do and so he doesn’t believe its possible or understand why changing to a lumberyard core didn’t take them more than a few days of skilled engineers working.

My point is that no, it isn’t worth checking dsmart’s arguments. I would put more weight in random stranger’s opinions, at least there’s a chance there they aren’t coming from a bitter washed up idiot better known for being a forum warrior back to the usenet days than any game’s he’s made.

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Personally I like following DS his twitter. Most interesting CS news is linked there.
His own personal blog is way to long most of the time for my taste and often a lot repeating the same things.
But he does a lot of linking his sources.
So even if you don’t agree with his conclusions, it’s still an interesting collection of information regarding SC.

A lot of interesting points you bring up, which I won’t deny. My argument is simply that: Exactly because he is this “bitter washed up idiot”, he’s more likely to share/retweet/blogify any type of information, that could (and will) be coined against sc/cig. He’s working like an aggregator for everything ‘contra-cig’, which can lead to interesting videos like the one linked above. What makes his blog valuable isn’t necessarily the stuff he writes, but the sources he links to (which Izor already kindly pointed out). Regardless of how little you value his opinion.