Mirificus posted:

Don't forget the gaming press and the sponsors of them, the corporate investors, who make money from games don't want a crowdfunded game to succeed since they can make no profit from it, and worse than that, others might band together to shut them out of future game developments to rival their output. They don't care if a game is small and niche - but if it looks as if it will be competition to their AAA titles - then they care. In Star Citizen you will be able to 'virtually' do anything that you can do in just about any other game, and more.

Party Boat posted:

I like the idea that CIG will simply use the same business model as the No Man's Sky developer, a company that released an actual game.

Sankis posted:

true, but saying "see you in the single unfinished star system" doesn't sound as fun

Daztek posted:

lol wtf is this signature

quote:

This kind of talk really gets on my wick... honestly. I have been critical of CIG Community Team communications, I'm not a dyed in the wool white knight even though there are those who insist I'm a koolaid drinking delusional fanboi.. but let's call it like it is.

CI cannot instantly react to whatever is the flavour of the week forum topic and demands made by players - that changes with the wind and any other game releases announced. I've talked about this in another thread but it bears more approaches from different angles.

There's nothing of any significance in 3.11?
Except the new cargo bays and space station cargo docks. Who cares you can't do anything with them. Right? That's not the point, one of the blockers for putting physicalised cargo handling (by players and NPC's) was the fact that the cargo boxes that are used on current ships are too resource hungry to have thousands of them in one place in the game. The Hull E and Hull D for example fully loaded would have many 10's of thousands more polygons each when fully loaded. We've seen it before when ships were brought into the PU. Remember when the Reclaimer first arrived and brought servers to a crawl?

They've told us they are working on the Hull C and the physics grid refactor it needed to extend the central corridor, but when the Hull series was first mooted they did say they would have also refactor the cargo boxes. The fact that they have equipped space stations with hundreds of cargo boxes means they are testing this - in Star Citizen cargo handling is a thing and the cargo boxes can't simply be scaled up versions of the small simple polygon cargo boxes because everything is physicalised. The big cargo boxes have to have collision physics and attachment points, cargo grids inside them just like ships and probably other stuff too that I've forgotten. If a space station can load into the server with thousands of these cargo boxes, then so can a Hull E and D... but multiple D and E's all in the same location being loaded up? What does that mean for persistence? Are all the contents of the cargo boxes recorded in the iCache? Just because you can't see into the cargo boxes in 3.11 doesn't mean that there isn't anything in them to test persistence. Just like the average player had no idea the 'Where is Pico' competition was specifically designed to test the introduction of persistence... which is now in the PU. No changes huh?

We all want to know what is the progress with Squadron 42, part of the reason we want to know is because of the tech and content trickle down that will come to the PU from it. With 3.11 we get the first direct evidence of that trickle down - perhaps there's cargo handling in Squadron 42 also? - but, the new character customisation coming with 3.11 is that direct evidence of Squadron 42 tech trickle down.

The new character creator doesn't just give you some new facial features, it gives whole new scale and shapes of the head, that means all animations made for the base male and female heads have to work with these new meshes, head wear, eyewear and hair has to fit those new scales and shapes, and do it without deforming to grotesque proportions. This is the 'Attachment Problem' mentioned in 2018. No new significant content in 3.11 huh?

Normally in games they have to hand edit meshes and animations to fit all the characters, there is no procedural way to make stuff fit a variety of characters so normally they 'fake' variety in NPC's and just make a few base models of each gender - it's not hard to fool players, you change the UV textures - darker skin, different eye colours etc. You give the same model a new hairstyle and hair colour, a different colour set of clothes, you scale the 'base model' to fake different body sizes and there you go - hardly anyone notices the cookie-cutter NPC models.

Did anyone decry Bethesda only putting 2 or 3 of the children in each populated area to adopt in Skyrim V? No but there were only 2 base child models, one male one female.. if they had put dozens of children running around you would instantly know - they are just clones. There ARE clones in Skyrim V and if you play for hundreds and even thousand of hours you realise Bethesda never expected players to do that because otherwise they would have put more variety of characters into the game. The modders did it easily enough with the same tools the dev's were using. I made dozens of new characters for Skyrim V and there were hundreds of other modders making thousands of new characters to put in the game.

The animations and clothing attachments are all made to work with that base 3D mesh standard NPC model male or female. This is why when you go around the PU it's the same little Asian girl behind the counter - because 3Laterals' gene-splicing DNA tech and it's attachment problem wasn't solved up to 3.10. All the neck and skull meshes were identical in the character creator up to 3.10 - Now in 3.11 they are not. This means they have definitely solved the attachment problem enough to bring it into the PU - that means it is definitely solved for Squadron 42. They can now have an infinite number of unique NPC's and they don't need to hand edit every piece of clothing, space suit, head wear and eye wear for those 'many' NPC's.

The 'DNA' tech powering the player avatar customiser is a paradigm shift in open world game creation but most will just equate to the other game they know that have such a character customisation feature - it's nothing like other games, no other massively open world game has even attempted potentially millions of unique NPC's because they knew each would have to be hand created and each animation script individually retargetted.

When they call Chris 'crazy' this is what they are talking about, what he wants they think is either not possible or beyond the realm of reality of 'normal' finance to even attempt it, but that is because they won't (or are not allowed by the investors) take the time to do the research and development to make such a thing a possibility. Those who say he shouldn't take a different (harder, longer) approach and just do it the way other game makers do it ignore the fact that if no-one ever innovated we would still be playing line drawn asteroids and thinking it was the pinnacle of technology. Would that drive hardware manufactures to make ever better products?

Back in 2015 during a 10 For the Chairman Chris was asked if there might be a variety of body types for players and NPC's, and whether there would be children in the game. Chris answered 'No' the rationale was that the standard body had to fit in the cockpit of a ship or vehicle, and he saw problems with putting children into the game. The forums rationalised this as him not wanting to see unacceptable griefing of children in his game. He never stated that. What he would have thought at that stage was that every model of human would have to be hand made, and every piece of clothing would have to made to fit each model of human and every animation retargetted for every model of every human. Too much work. This year we see children in CIG videos for the first time, and a few months later we have the new character creator head meshes that suggest the problems of many models of humans have been solved. We may not see the big fat guy in a ships cockpit, but we might see him wandering around the CBD, we won't see children flying or driving but we might see them running around the town and on the trains where no-one can shoot them.

The DNA tech for characters in Star Citizen is going to change the way players think about games. Right now if you see a familiar face in a place in the game you didn't see them before you assume - quite rightly - that it's just a clone of the same NPC. The PU is full of them right now just like any other game, situation normal. Now consider, if you get used to the idea that in Star Citizen no two NPC's will ever look alike - and you see the guy who used to serve you sandwiches down the street from your house on Terra III, and you bump into to him in the street on Tangaroa.. you'll know - Hey that guy has moved! He's left his job! He had a 24 hour life cycle, he had a home in the game and places he liked to hang out in on Terra III after work - you know that, you watched him when you lived there yourself. So you call a friend who you know is still on Terra III and ask them 'Hey go to the sandwich bar see if that guy is still there!' and when they do they can tell you.. Nope it's a different guy, the old guy is gone. You say 'Yeah! He's moved to Tangaroa!' You will not get that same experience in any other massively open world game for many years to come.

You still think that 3.11 hasn't got much in it? OK.

Mirificus posted:

Arc Light posted:

jfc, I skipped most of that manifesto for the sake of my sanity, but the ending is extra delusional. Listing a whole pretend scenario from a hypothetical non-existent game, then pretending extra hard that it somehow corresponds to the latest barebones SC alpha.

It must be so nice to be stupid. Life must be so simple.

FlocksOfMice posted:

You criticize Star Citizen, but consider THIS imaginary scenario which no other game has ever done! No, Star Citizen hasn't done it either, but just imagine that it WILL someday and you'll realize how silly you are!

It's like, it's like theyr'e doing some kind of forum roleplay, but it's all singleplayer roleplay, it's like, children sitting around hearing about a game for the first time and assuming that games will let you do anything so of course I can run for president in the game and make big decisions and also every single person will be a unique person right?

Like how do they think it will even WORK to keep track of BILLIONS of unique NPCs with their own--I just--HOW???

To go from "they're gonna have unique looking NPCs" to "somehow we will track the information of a billion NPCs in greater detail than Dwarf Fortress and that's just one background system" like, do they think Ci!g is going to... build a dozen supercomputers to simulate a whole reality?

Can I be this insane? It seems pleasant??

Devils Affricate posted:

Buried in cargo, foreverially physicalised and loving it

quote:

It's not about the waiting. It's about the journey and experiencing history of the Apollo Space Program of game development. From ambitious plans, evolution, spactacular launch failures to picking up the pieces and learning from them. This is a wonderful, bumpy adventure but without the Viking funeral. Backer since November 2012...or was it 2013. Anyhow I learned to cook my first turkey when I started my game account and so that's my test pilot handle.

HJE-Cobra posted:

Actually Star Citizen has been in development longer than the Apollo space program took to land a man on the moon. Apollo started in 1961, and landed on the moon in 1969. Star Citizen has been in development since, what, 2010? 2011? And still is not a videogame.

How long have you really waited? posted:

If you check my citizen dossier, it shows I enlisted in September 13th, 2012. So, based on that date, I've been waiting for eight years.

The reality is quite a bit different. I'm a bit like Chris, and probably many of you, in a way. When I was a kid I fell in love with sci-fi. I saw things like StarWars and dreamed of flying among the stars and living on a spaceship and having epic adventures. As I got older, along came computers and with them, video games. The possibilities seemed endless. I played every space flight game I could get my hands on. I spent countless hours playing and replaying things like X-wing vs TIE Fighter, Freespace2, Tachyon: the Fringe, the Wing Commander series and Freelancer and Starlancer. I watched FPS shooters become more and more popular and common, while space sims became less so. For years it was all but impossible to find a decent space flight game, and I kept going back to those old classics, hoping someday someone would make the game I wanted; that would let me live among the stars and be the captain of my own spaceship.

When I stumbles upon the RSI website right years ago, I was f'ing elated. Finally, finally, someone was trying to make what I'd wanted for so long. And not just any someone, but Chris freakin' Roberts! The same guy whose Wing Commander games had been so awesome back in the day. I couldn't pledge fast enough (I'd have a four digit ID if I hadn't had to wait for payday to make my pledge, lol).

So, anytime I start to get salty about the delays or disappointed about features being removed from patches I just remind myself that I haven't been waiting on this game for eight years, but more like thirty-five. The difference in the last eight is that I've actually had authentic hope that it might finally happen. And when I get annoyed with the lack of communication from CIG I try to remember that before they started working on this dream of mine, I had no hope at all that it would happen.

The point of all this isn't to excuse CIG's shortcomings, and I'm not a white knight for the project, but instead to offer some perspective that has helped me manage my impatience and temper my optimism with some realism.

I'm the end, this project could still not succeed. But, even if that happens, the last eight years have been better than the twenty-five plus that proceeded them, because at least there was a chance, where before there never really had been.

So, I encourage my fellow backers to keep the faith, even as we hold the devs accountable and make our demands and spew our salt all over Spectrum and debate ideas and speculate on what might be next.

Good luck to us and good luck to CIG. I hope to see us all in the 'verse someday.

quote:

If you check my citizen dossier,

HJE-Cobra posted:

Actually Star Citizen has been in development longer than the Apollo space program took to land a man on the moon. Apollo started in 1961, and landed on the moon in 1969. Star Citizen has been in development since, what, 2010? 2011? And still is not a videogame.

Pennywise the Frown posted:

We landed on the loving moon in the time Croberts had to make a game.

Statutory Ape posted:

croberts has taken about a lunar module worth of funding too

Statutory Ape posted:

lol if you made it past that

Pennywise the Frown posted:

loving LOL



Could have manufactured what, 4-5 lunar modules?

sebmojo posted:

The game that can be played is not the eternal game

Statutory Ape posted:

tbh i accounted for inflation lol. roughly those dollars x 7, and i think he has something like 300 mil. according to him. so whatever you wanna believe its still funny lol

Devils Affricate posted:

Good news, he's still got plenty of leeway!