posted:

It's $100, $90 warbond, and comes with a special armor set for warbond only. The cheapest alien fighter yet.

posted:

Gotta say, that is a really good looking ship. It borrows just the right amount of elements from the Prowler, but still have its own style.

posted:

Wow. Talk about a drat sexy fighter. Tevarins got style in spades. Still waiting on an alien explorer though. Preferably tevarin although ill take banu.

posted:

I say CR should spend less times making these drat ships and more time making that SQ42 video and roadmap AND THE drat GAME ITSELF, but then looking at the way this subreddit laps this poo poo .jpeg promise up every drat time i can't blame him

posted:

No wonder CIG aren't in a rush to release Starcitizen. New concept of a ship that has no more functionality (and missing a ton of mechanics) than most of the ships already in game, but everyone willing to throw money at it.
At this rate, I can't even be mad at CIG for the constant delay of features. Instead I should applaud them for being able finesse so many people out of money so easily.

posted:

Just last week I had finally decided to close my wallet until more progress was made, progress that met my own -personal- expectations. Today I'm about to buy another $90 ship because this ship looks bad rear end and apparently I have zero will power.

Spatial posted:

People seem really skeptical of the funding tracker going crazy during the reign of Corona-chan but it makes sense. Look at sales of PC hardware for example, it's way up and lots of items are sold out. It was even more pronounced a couple of months ago. Games are one of the few things that are going to do well in this situation, and now that the whales have nothing else to spend money on they naturally have more to waste on SC.

Thuorn posted:

That might be true for when COVID started shutting everything down. But the record breaking back to back to back months started in NOV.

MedicineHut posted:

It really does not make much sense though. If you check when this latest crazy revenue growth started you will realize it was during October-November last year, and has simply continued at similar levels into 2020. It started, and still is, completely decoupled from Covid 19.

The Titanic posted:

This is absolutely darling. I love it. <3

BluesShaman posted:

What exactly is the difference between 'unsatisfied' and 'dissatisfied?'

I'm reminded of a Fallout 4 meme where the four dialogue options were 'ok,' 'ok,' 'ok,' and 'sarcastic ok.'

tuo posted:

Young duck just squeezed doggo's nose when he ventured too deep into it's holding pen, and after a short kinda shock, he looked like the happiest dog alive with his tongue hanging out sooo far and looking at us all "did you see that? it bit me! I love it!". Animals are good!

Daztek posted:

Chris? Who's Chris???

Thoatse posted:

Dwesa posted:

[Esperia] Talon - New Concept (link in comments - VIP only today)

What are the most upvoted comments? Are people angry with lack of progress and yet another ship JPG sale?



Let's take a look at most controversial comments.



I guess we can observe shift towards the next stage of the citizen cycle, currently the discontent from lack of progress is once more quelled by another ship sale.

Purring taxxe:
https://i.imgur.com/RVNBns6.gifv

quote:

Man, I was trying not to spend any money on SC anymore, but today is my wife and my anniversary..

Mr. Peepers posted:

TBH I have questions about the people who apparently just collect wild animals.

Pixelate posted:

give me my neck back Chris Roberts

Nyast posted:

So apparently Flight Sim 2020 also has a walking-on-ground mode and the detail level is quite impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahNcj4i5l5I

But don't worry FUDsters, Star Citizer still has more gameplay than FS 2020. Stuff like functional train rides, toilets, quantum screen saver and elevator/ramps/doors death traps. Checkmate goonies !

Nyast posted:

So apparently Flight Sim 2020 also has a walking-on-ground mode and the detail level is quite impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahNcj4i5l5I

But don't worry FUDsters, Star Citizer still has more gameplay than FS 2020. Stuff like functional train rides, toilets, quantum screen saver and elevator/ramps/doors death traps. Checkmate goonies !

Inspector Gesicht posted:

Does Microsoft Flight Sim use procedural generation since they're going 1:1 for scale? I read that while the game is half the file-size of a Call of Duty and it uses internet streaming to improve surface textures.

tuo posted:

that's what I say every morning when I step into the bathroom this creature shits in over night (runner ducks basically poop all day)

Inspector Gesicht posted:

Does Microsoft Flight Sim use procedural generation since they're going 1:1 for scale? I read that while the game is half the file-size of a Call of Duty and it uses internet streaming to improve surface textures.

Nyast posted:

So apparently Flight Sim 2020 also has a walking-on-ground mode and the detail level is quite impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahNcj4i5l5I

But don't worry FUDsters, Star Citizer still has more gameplay than FS 2020. Stuff like functional train rides, toilets, quantum screen saver and elevator/ramps/doors death traps. Checkmate goonies !

Nyast posted:

So apparently Flight Sim 2020 also has a walking-on-ground mode and the detail level is quite impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahNcj4i5l5I

But don't worry FUDsters, Star Citizer still has more gameplay than FS 2020. Stuff like functional train rides, toilets, quantum screen saver and elevator/ramps/doors death traps. Checkmate goonies !

Fidelitious posted:

Chances are it's somebody that fosters injured animals before sending them on to an animal sanctuary.

Inacio posted:

quote:

I drove it into the cargo bay and had a 30k. When I logged back in this happened.

El Spamo posted:

Look, it's a talon! It's hooky, and also feathery! CAW CAW

Also, is "ROC" an acronym for anyhting or is it just a out-of-place mythological reference?

CIG’s Core Tech - Quick Reference Guide - both Complete and In-progress posted:

Thought it might be useful to old and new backers to create this post which takes you through some of the key technical challenges CIG has faced and are still facing, including a description of what they are (in layman’s terms)
I originally wanted to share this with a friend, but couldn’t find one source for it, so here you have it.

Caveat: This information was put together by trawling through CIG videos, dev responses, youtube creators etc so cannot promise it’s 100% accurate, in chronological order or indeed manages to convey just how difficult these technical challenges are.

64 bit float precision – In Game
CIG made a move from 32-bit to 64-bit precision within the game engine, as 32-bit limited them on the playable size of the game world. 32-Bit is often used and ok for smaller worlds that span several kilometres. However, CIG clearly had the issue where they needed to provide detail from close up i.e. in your cockpit/ship all the way out to a distant planet and beyond. This of course cannot be faked with a backdrop or boundary in this game, if you think ‘hey I want to go there’ you can.

Physic grids – In Game
Physic grids were implemented to calve up entities in the game world into their own ‘grids’ for them to behave independently from each other, allowing for players to behave as per the grid they are within. For example, a ship orbiting a planet at speed would have its own grid so you could get up walk around inside regardless of whether you were moving in the game world at 1000m/s. In the meantime, a player on a planet could look up and see this ship as they themselves move separately with the rotation of the planet (as they are part of the planet grid).

Bind culling – In Game
Bind culling was introduced to improve server performance. It works by eliminating the need for the server & network to have to update entities that are far away from the player.

Client - Object Container Streaming – In Game
Before OCS was introduced, both the client and server had to track all items at all times, whether it was near you or not.
Client-OCS was introduced initially so that only items you interact with/near are streamed into your client, which meant your machine only has to stream in items it needs, thus improving performance. However, the server still has to track everything.

Server-side - Object Container Steaming (SSOCS) – Actively being worked on
This is the desired state for OCS, it would effectively mean that neither your client nor the server has to keep track of everything in the game which is not being interacted with. For example, an abandoned ship where no players are near i.e. no interaction, is saved in a state until a player or interaction with it takes place, at which point the server would stream these saved states back into the game. An example given by CR was that a player could land on a planet and drop their favorite mug on the ground by a tree. Once that player left, that mug would be saved off and not actively tracked by the server, when the player drew near the server would stream that item back in. The idea behind this is to improve server performance drastically by the servers not having to track all items all the times.

ICache – aka Item Cache – Actively being worked on
ICache is a new breed of database being designed to optimize querying of items in a scalable fashion, whilst also using best practice for fault tolerance and recovery. For example, all nodes have their data replicated in the network so even if one goes down a new node can be spun up taking its place ensuring data (AKA UEC) isn’t lost.

Global Persistence – Actively being worked on
Is the tool being developed to load in and out the state of items. ICache is the data base it queries and thus relies on ICache being implemented first. Here are a few examples that have been given on how Global Persistence touches so many areas of the game. “ we can explore gameplay that can permanently or on long term scales modify locations in the game, for example space station damage. Port Olisar could suffer an attack on a shard and it would be damaged for some time until repairs could take place. This would persist even if the server/shard went down as it is no longer just in memory state. There’s a ton more, such as full server recovery after a server crash. People often complain about losing cargo after a server crash, as we can’t get players back into their ships right now after a server crash, unlike a client crash where we lose the state of the server. With global persistence this will be recorded in the shard record it was associated with, so quickly we spin up another instance, it recovers the shard record, then we can use matchmaking to get players back into the shard they just lost connection to, and boom, they’re back in action right where they left off.”

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/where-is-icache-and-physicalised-inventory-at-now/3033094

Physical Inventory – Actively being worked on
The move to physicalised inventory is to remove the Mary Poppins style bag that has everything in it, no mass or size restriction. It’s not just for realism reasons. By physicalising inventories they themselves become persistent entities with state. Which means they could be left inside a ship or under the base of a tree on a planet, they are no longer arbitrarily tied to the player. Physical inventory requires both ICache and Global persistence above in order to work.

Static Server Meshing - Actively being worked on
The idea behind Server Meshing is to move away from a single server as we have it now (with a limited cap of 50 players) by dynamically spinning up and down servers based on the population of an area to allow for as many people in a location as needed.
The first intended stage of this is to introduce Static server meshing. This means the game world is served by multiple servers, these servers would be dedicated to run certain parts of the game world. For example, one server for each planet. Each of these servers would communicate with each other and you’d seamlessly move between them as you traversed it. The added step beyond this to implement recovery, i.e. the server looking after Crusader dies, everyone in Crusader would get a 30k, but would be given the option to spawn back into the world just as they left it on a new server which had just spun up in the background (iCache & Global Persistence) All players outside of Crusader would not be impacted.

Dynamic Server Meshing - Actively being worked on
This iterates static meshing to the desired level, no longer do you have servers serving static parts of the game would, instead the system works dynamically to create as many servers as it requires to manage parts of the world determined by the player count and interactivity. Therefore, any object container in the game can theoretically become a server based on the player population. One of the goals is to potentially have a global server (depending on latency across the world) where every player is effectively in the same universe. It works by dynamically spinning up servers and share what’s going on in highly populated areas, relaying that information to each other and back to the client as if it were one giant server. FYI This also helps remove servers from running in areas of the game where no one exists.
For example say Port Olisar has 300 players at its location, this may be split up by several servers performing the compute whilst at the same time talking to each other so it appears to the player as if they’re all on one server. Or indeed 2 caps ships with 200 players on each could be handled by several servers. Even giant fleet battles could be split between servers to deal with smaller sections of the larger battle.

Server Meshing is dependant on SSOCS, ICache and Global Persistence

Server to Client actor networking – Actively being worked on
This refers to how actions in game like walking forward are shared with other clients. At present when you press the ‘W’ key it's controlled by your client, this information is then sent to the server which then replicates that to all other clients. This has several issues, there can be a noticeable lag between what you do and what the other clients see, whilst also being difficult to manage from an anti-cheat perspective.
Therefore Server to Client actor networking aims to take the inputs you create at the client and send them to the Actor Action Handler, these actions are processed together, before being sent to both server and client simultaneously. This will help when facing players on poor connections, whilst also improving interactions with things like the Mobiglass, where you currently see it popping on and off as the server try’s to play catchup with your interaction.

Vulkan Integration – Actively being worked on
CIG have decided to move from DX12 (Windows 10 a requirement for users) over to Vulkan which is a graphics pipeline and render interface (Part of the Gen12 Renderer rework) which does not require its users to be on Windows 10. Vulkan reportedly has all the same features of DX12 so fidelity shouldn’t be lost by converting.

Subsumption – Actively being worked on
This relates to the AI within the game. Subsumption is being implemented to give AI added realism in the verse. It effectively allows for NPC’s to choose which of their actions are top priority and ‘subsume’ or override that the current task should the AI deem they need to.

There're of course lots of other tech being implemented, such as various Shaders, Gas tech, Cloud tech, Planet tech etc which I haven't covered, but I hope this has been of some use to people scratching their head as to what these things are that keep getting mentioned.

By all means, let me know if I have got something totally wrong, and I'll make edits as we go.

AutismVaccine posted:

(death by fox)

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/friedrichbode/status/1293890173760155650

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/friedrichbode/status/1293890173760155650