There are a few in the Concierge forums that are quite cynical of this game being PvP-only (lolwut) but there seems to be an undercurrent of fence-sitting until the last minute. I think we will see a few of them tip over once we hit the final countdown.
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I suppose I might as well add my two cents about my feelings towards Star Citizen and Infinity, and let me preface this by saying I in no way intend to denigrate Star Citizen, I hope it turns out great.
Like many of us here, I have been following Infinity for years (since 2009 apparently). Back then our minds were filled with imagination and wonder about what we might expect and what we will do once this game came out. But our thoughts were founded on a tangible premise; by that time the I-Novae Engine was already fundamentally working and we could see it in action. We could see the potential it could offer. Year after year we saw with our own eyes the progress that had been made and the physical product as it matured. The dev team didnât bother to distract us with marketing, trying to hype up a product hidden behind curtains, they laid it bare for all to see.
When I first heard about Star Citizen, I guess around the time the Kickstarter was going on, I didnât know what it was about. I looked into it but all I was met with were vague graphics and text describing a space game made by Chris Roberts. It wasnât surprising he put his name on it, I loved Wing Commander and Freelancer, but I wanted to know more: was it a PvP game, was it a sandbox game, was it an MMO? I honestly couldnât figure it out. Some time and tens of millions of dollars later, they release a hangar for backers to view their ships in. This didnât help me, I still didnât understand the scope and purpose of the game.
They have since revealed quite a bit more about the game, and put together a rather impressive albeit quite thoroughly choreographed demo a few months ago, but to me it just looks like heâs trying to make a whole game into a cinematic. Iâm sure I might understand quite a bit more about the game if I kept following it, but thatâs the point; I stopped following it because it was confusing. They failed to maintain my interest because I had no idea what it was I meant to be invested in.
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Iâm betting youâre thinking, âwell, maybe cry engine CAN do thatâ, especially since CIG has hired on a lot of the engineers that built the engine! You hammer and beat on an engine enough, you can re-engineer it to do what you want it to do, you just need three things 1) time, 2) money, and 3) the engineers, that know enough about the engine, to beat it into submission and make it do what you want it to do. There is no âcry engine canât do thisâ!
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Shovelâs getting a few new heads and a few new handles. When youâve got the sort of resources that CIG have to throw at gutting and rebuilding a game engine⌠
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To be fair, CIGâs original prototype was built with the Unreal engine (before anybody even goes there, itâs an FPS engine that they were gonna have to gut and hammer it back into what they needed it to do also), it was only due to âlicensing issuesâ that they had to switch to using cry engine! So, itâs not like they werenât going to have to heavily modify what ever engine they chose to use!
to be fair any engine can turn into anything if you put money+devs+time, that also applies to an engine made by a single line of code saying hello world, the question is pretty much why didnât they do their own engine instead, if they had to rebuild cryengine. Donât get me wrong, iâm not bashing on SC, iâm just curious why they didnât do something like that instead, i bet development time would accelerate right after having an engine made by their own, or getting an engine made for space sims, since the focus of cryengine is neat lightning effects and heavy graphics on small enviroments.
It can take a LOT of time and money making an engine and my guess is that they didnât want to spend the pledgers money on something they never said they would do.
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One of my programming teachers had three sayings:
- Be lazy. Donât do work you can easily avoid by using something that already exists and modifying it to your needs.
- If you want to steal something, steal from the best.
- If something works, donât mess with it.
So, in my opinion, thatâs why they didnât develop their own engine:
First of all, by using CryEngine, they already have a large part of the work that needs to be done to create an engine completed. You donât need to start programming things like lighting and shadows from scratch. (However, this has the downside that such things might need to be done from scratch anyway or at least heavily modified, because the way you are using the engine is simply incompatible with the logic of those parts of the engine.)
Second, by using CryEngine, they can hire developers that already know the engine. They donât have to educate them on how to use an entirely new engine that might be very different from what theyâre used to. Even if there are developers who are not very familiar with the engine on the team, they can hire people from CryEngine to help them and provide them with tutorials. They donât have to acquire that experience while trying to make a game.
Third, by using CryEngine they can start producing things immediately. They donât have to wait for work on the engine to reach an acceptable state and they donât have to worry (or at least have to worry less) about things breaking as they upgrade to newer versions of the engine and game. So they can get an FPS module ready for the people to mess around in (which only needs the work of a single FPS level design team and some FPS logic which is probably already in the engine) while the work on hammering the engine into shape and using whatever black magic voodoo they are using to make it submit to their will. Which means that they can more easily get more money they can use to further work on the engine.
Fourth, their intent was to develop an awesome game, not an awesome game engine allowing for the creation of awesome games and an awesome game. So as long as the game works, the engine might as well be held together by a shoestring, make any developer reading its source code bleed from their eyes and vaporize anyone who tries to develop another game in it or even mod it. As long as whatever Crynkenstein they end up creating allows them to make that single game run in an acceptable manner, what the engine is capable of is irrelevant. If they have the money and the number of devs needed to make it work quickly, why not do it?
(Substitute CryEngine with Unreal, Unity, etc in the above where appropriate)
It is possible that if they had worked with the I-Novae team so they could use the I-Novae engine, they could had done the same thing in much less time, with much less money and with much better quality. It is also possible that the same could had been done if they had developed their own engine. And either of those options would had also resulted in a good engine that could had been used to make further games or additions to the game easily.
(The below might not be very accurate. I havenât watched the development of Star Citizen too closely so I might be completely wrong here. Just some speculation on my part)
But it is understandable that they took the less risky option of starting work on something they were more comfortable with and trusted more. After all, I bet they themselves did not believe they would get that much money and create a game of such scope. From what I understand their original plan was to build something that wouldnât be much more than a conventional space sim but with very good graphics, something that could be easily done in an FPS engine with little modding of the engine needed. And most of the money they got came post KS. So perhaps by the time the big money started coming in, they had already committed to a certain course of development and were unable to shift from that.
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You say this as if Iâll let me team pick fair fights. It is a domination game. And I will dominate you.
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I couldnât have said that better myself. Lol
By the time theyâre done itâs not even going to be close to what CryEngine used to be.
Chris Roberts never thought it would turn into the sensation that did it.
I got to say for not following star citizen you have a pretty good handle on the scope of whatâs going on. I congratulate you on your intellect! I do feel the same that if they would have had the option to get their hands on an engine such as this one powering this game things would have ran much smoother.
@BadMan123 in the future you can quote multiple people by highlighting text in their post. A pop up should appear that should allow you to quote it in your reply.
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Well, at least now we know for certain that the people who develop new great space games like CS will soon have another great engine to choose from, one made specifically for space games 
And if that was too subtle, that meant that Iâm very glad that the KS got funded and this thing is finally happening! Hereâs to great new things happening and thanks everyone who helped make this happen! Iâm so happy with how friendly and supportive people from other space game communities have been!
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agree, however lest not bring this discussion into this forum
Cheers and moar SPACE GAMES is awesome.
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That SC stream was pretty good, nice and up beat at the end.
We still see quite a few comments on the KS from SC fans who pledged. And also Elite forums, still getting the odd one or two commenting they have pledged. I think most have come from SC though and on the whole have been very supporting of the KS. Which is good to hear.
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I love this decadeâŚ
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Very polished.
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Well the Mechwarrior Online guys took also Cryengine and modded it⌠the outcome was a very, very unstable crank engine, and they needed (needing?) loads of time to mod something or put additional features in it.
Second, like in every other game e.g. Elder Scrolls Online that engine is also kinda âoldâ youre producing more and more spaghetti code and this will result in more and more bugs, slow engine etc, etc.
so i donât know wether this was the best idea taking an engine and mod it for your needs.
Even if you have Cryengine dev support, they cant help you with your stuff what you created from it.
no wonder why they have nothing ready than just ships, a hangar module etc atm.