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toiletbrush posted:Server Meshing sounds like one of those things where the devil is in the details and a precise definition is deliberately vague so that all sorts of insanity can be claimed but no failure to deliver can really be tied down to a specific lie. Agreed except for on the last count. That one is possible too, but harder and you may need compromises. But that's "may", honestly not necessarily all that complicated. Space is huge which helps. Its all doable with smart people in charge. But the question is does that actually make the game more fun? And probably not.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:21
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lobsterminator posted:I haven't seen too many videos showin florae, but do all the alien worlds look like generic evergreen forests of Earth? Possibly created with a simple middleware that is meant to be used for Earth biomes? Sometimes it is just rocks.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:23
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Lammasu posted:I love the regular appearance of people going, "I'm doing my yearly Star Citizen check in. Has anything changed?" I should have learned a long time ago that the answer is literally always no.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:26
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kuddles posted:If you read the latest Q Drops, you would know that the Clintons and other deep state operatives are deathly afraid that Chris Roberts is going to destroy their ultimate plan of forcing everyone to play EA microtransaction titles to fund their kiddie porn enterprise. I mean, the way citizens seem to view themselves, and unfairly treated man-of-the-people Chris Roberts, as the persecuted minority in the face of The Evil Game Industry Establishment.. yeah, it veers dangerously into the same cultish bullshit as Trumpers.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:33
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I said come in! posted:I should have learned a long time ago that the answer is literally always no. CIG is actually amazingly consistent about making absolutely no progress towards either releasing a game or imploding. I don't know how they do it.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:40
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https://www.mikerindersblog.org/a-scientology-price-list/
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Apr 5, 2021 17:46
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Beet Wagon posted:CIG is actually amazingly consistent about making absolutely no progress towards either releasing a game or imploding. I don't know how they do it. They are progressing towards imploding we just can't see the progress bar. But one day 
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Apr 5, 2021 17:48
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About 170 Ships/Vehicles and still no dedicated STEALTH Scout Ship ? posted:Checking the Ships Matrix, one can find, give or take, about 170 in between Ships, Vehicles and their Variants.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:25
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Zaphod42 posted:I mean, if you have $500 million dollars, that's plenty feasible. There's some concerns with scaling, latency, regions, etc. But games with thousands of players all interacting using different server nodes are extremely possible, its just nobody is investing in MMOs right now they're making things like Destiny instead because functionally most people don't WANT to have to fight a thousand people at once, its not very fun. But as someone said in a post responding to that one before: Seems like you should go get a job at CIG.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:30
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The Titanic posted:Seems like you should go get a job at CIG. Nah I wear my heart on my sleeve, if I was ever in the same room as Roberts I would be instantly fired haha
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Apr 5, 2021 18:35
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Mirificus posted:Furthermore, the ability for the Terrapin to "hold" heat from venting out, will be obviously limited to a short time.... at some point, the Pilot would be forced to vent all the trapped heat out, thus sending out a hell of a IR signature, and thus revealing its position..... space submarine!
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Apr 5, 2021 18:40
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https://i.imgur.com/lAs8Ftx.mp4
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Apr 5, 2021 18:46
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Mirificus posted:Furthermore, the ability for the Terrapin to "hold" heat from venting out, will be obviously limited to a short time.... at some point, the Pilot would be forced to vent all the trapped heat out, thus sending out a hell of a IR signature, and thus revealing its position..... Yeah, but then they’d have to add a stealth system. And Vanduul. And gameplay.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:51
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:Yeah, but then they’d have to add a stealth system. can the ship even do the armor thing they talk about?
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Apr 5, 2021 18:53
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Speedtree is cool though. Not cool enough for me to pay for it but its nifty.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:58
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Zaphod42 posted:You wouldn't have to scale it down to like 50 players or anything too compromising like that, but you would have to start making some technical decisions and running tests and setting limits and CIG is allergic to anything that approaches game design. EVE online is like 20 years old and its server architecture (while a pile of old code) can almost achieve what Chris wants. With modern tech, a massively multiplayer real time combat space game with hundreds or even thousands of players interacting across server instances is feasible. But it will be expensive and take designing from the ground up instead of CIG's "from the sky down" Having played EVE Echoes recently, I get the impression that EVE's system is fundamentally not that much different than, say, Everquest. You've got a zone/system/whatever pinned to each CPU (or CPU core these days), you start encounters with mobs or other players and start autoattacking, the random number generator does your rolls in the background, and occasionally you pop a few abilities on recast timers. My understanding is that EVE goes a step further in handling massive lag just by dialing down the server tick rate (ie time dilation) on a per-zone basis. Personally I'm rather fond of these sorts of systems because they have nice clean breakpoints for concurrency. You could imagine running a 100 zones/star systems on 1 modern without a lot of optimization (you can easily pack 128 cores in 1 box these days), if you can live with your game state being updated only as fast as a single CPU core can process it. But that's 20+ yr old architecture packed into a modern server. Twitch-based gameplay definitely adds a lot of complexity, but Planetside and Planetside 2 are a thing. So that brings us to 10+ year old architectures. Realtime multiplayer with hundreds of players is a shitfest, but it's cool and good. If Crobbler had top talent, I think they could build a Planetside 2 In Space. Realistically, I think the absolute limit to what they can build is a buggy jankfest with way too many calculations (and therefore trust) placed in the client to make things kinda work. Given what we've seen with this network code so far, I've got zero faith they're programming things at all defensively. Zero chance of bullets passing through clouds of servers to puncture your life support systems while your engineer defuckulates the shield combinators. But there's a small chance of health bars on your engines going down and your crew pressing F to fidelitously repair them. 
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Apr 5, 2021 19:03
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Blue On Blue posted:can the ship even do the armor thing they talk about? No. But it will. And it will be even better than you've been imagining for the past 8 and a half years
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Apr 5, 2021 19:04
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cmdrk posted:Having played EVE Echoes recently, I get the impression that EVE's system is fundamentally not that much different than, say, Everquest. You've got a zone/system/whatever pinned to each CPU (or CPU core these days), you start encounters with mobs or other players and start autoattacking, the random number generator does your rolls in the background, and occasionally you pop a few abilities on recast timers. My understanding is that EVE goes a step further in handling massive lag just by dialing down the server tick rate (ie time dilation) on a per-zone basis. See this is the thing about designing games; its complicated and lots of different things are possible with different tradeoffs. The thing is, a system like you described, an "everquest" like zone system, that can do what Roberts wants as long as you can dynamically instantiate new zones and scale their sizes, and you handle moving between zones smoothly enough (faster than EQ lol) then players won't even notice. That's not even the be-all-end all approach I would necessarily take, but again, there are MANY ways to skin this cat. If you actually wanted to make a game. Yeah, planetside 2 is a good example for this. It wouldn't fully do what Roberts wants but its one of the closest retail examples we have, outside of academic white papers. But PS2 is itself 9 years old. Again, we don't even know what's really possible with modern tech because nobody is even really trying. (because, again, its not worth it and its not really fun lol) So it depends. What can ANYBODY build? Anything. You want twitch gameplay with hundreds of players, even thousands? Doable. Giant space world? Doable. And I disagree with you; if you want bullets that can puncture life support systems; that's EASILY doable. If you want a bullet to be fired from one server and hit a ship in another server? Again, DOABLE. None of that is really even all that hard. Seriously. But again, if the question is what can CIG build, well, all we're ever going to see are fancy 3d models loaded up in off-the-shelf Crysis engine. The people in charge fundamentally cannot architect a game engine and won't hand control over to people who can, so new features are just mod level patches on Crysis. Everything is just an FPS with some hacks. So yeah, they'll never get that more complex, game-changing stuff working that way.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:10
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Zaphod42 posted:See this is the thing about designing games; its complicated and lots of different things are possible with different tradeoffs. Sure, I think static zones and clearly delineated transition points would be achievable by CIG's Full Sail team. My personal dreams.txt is that there's a scrappy indie dev team under Chris Roberts' 1000 metric tons of bullshit trying to claw their way out. I remember SWG having a mix of both static and seamless zones. Planet were the big zones you spent a ton of time loading, and the planets had grid boundaries that players transparently moved through seamlessly presumably to different threads or processes or whatever. Well, it was more or less seamless.. there were a bunch of item dupe bugs concerning that. So I dunno, unless there's a bunch of good middleware to use these days, I don't know that it's necessarily easy.  quote:Yeah, planetside 2 is a good example for this. It wouldn't fully do what Roberts wants but its one of the closest retail examples we have, outside of academic white papers. But PS2 is itself 9 years old. Again, we don't even know what's really possible with modern tech because nobody is even really trying. (because, again, its not worth it and its not really fun lol) Yeah, clearly there's unexplored territory for some enterprising devs. But certainly not with decade old CryEngine and AWS, IMO - and as you say, it's not worth it. That said, Riot had a nice article series about building their custom network for League of Legends which was pretty interesting: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-i But clearly they had demonstrated a need for such things. quote:What can ANYBODY build? Anything. You want twitch gameplay with hundreds of players, even thousands? Doable. Giant space world? Doable. And I disagree with you; if you want bullets that can puncture life support systems; that's EASILY doable. If you want a bullet to be fired from one server and hit a ship in another server? Again, DOABLE. None of that is really even all that hard. Seriously. Sure, but could those systems be implemented with fidelity? As you well know, Star Citizen doesn't cheat like other games 
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Apr 5, 2021 19:41
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I logged on for the first time in a year. Had a fun 3-4 hours with 2 of my friends. Did a space mission shooting down some guys, then landed our ships on a planet in a pitch black night during a crazy sandstorm, killed some dudes, made some money. I accidentally shot a friend but I had the small ship with a Rez bed in it so he came back quick while I carried his gun back to him. It was a lot of fun. FPS sucked a lot of the time and one time the tram doors didn’t open but we all had an enjoyable evening for a few hours. Maybe the key is just to care less and just play it occasionally for fun? 
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Apr 5, 2021 19:49
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Zaphod42 posted:Nah I wear my heart on my sleeve, if I was ever in the same room as Roberts I would be instantly fired haha Well just say how with infinite money and time you can totally do thousands of simultaneous players interconnected via some AWS server architecture where they can shoot at each other through n number of servers. It just money and time.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:52
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Opioid posted:I logged on for the first time in a year. Had a fun 3-4 hours with 2 of my friends. Did a space mission shooting down some guys, then landed our ships on a planet in a pitch black night during a crazy sandstorm, killed some dudes, made some money. I accidentally shot a friend but I had the small ship with a Rez bed in it so he came back quick while I carried his gun back to him. Any game is fun if you co-op it with friends and don't take it seriously. But that doesn't mean its worth $60, much less hundreds or thousands of dollars.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:58
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Zaphod42 posted:Any game is fun if you co-op it with friends and don't take it seriously. But that doesn't mean its worth $60, much less hundreds or thousands of dollars. I mean, I saved up and paid $60 for a sega genesis game that gave me 10h of playtime 30 years ago. I’m sure with inflation it’s not a wild proposition to play a fun space shooter game with friends for $60. I really can’t argue a persons personal dollar:enjoyment values though so if that experience is only worth $5 to you then that’s cool. To me it’s worth $60 to occasionally pop on and play that while looking at fancy graphics
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Apr 5, 2021 20:17
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The Titanic posted:I'd wager to say a good portion of SCs early success and which helped pace the way for the social situations they're in now is they managed to create some good boogey men out to squash "the dream" and it could only be saved by "us". You're right overall but the timeline is a little different iirc. SC's first named enemy trying to bring down the great Christ Roberts long before Derek was a mythical internet bad guy cr used to openly whinge about that went by Manzes that allegedly had several aliases and was always lurking in shadows with FUD on his mind. Also Beer was a beloved hero in SC world/reddit for a long time for his '10 For The Chariman for dummies' interpretations he did and wasn't labeled and attacked as an apostate until the Sandi email fiasco. Goons were never trusted but tolerated until Ben Lesnick victimblamed that goonette that got sexually harassed by Dick Wulge which kicked off a forum pogrom that made goons go from nervously tolerated to actively despised and mod teams were mobilized and deputized to protect the townfolk from them. Derek didn't appear in the scapegoat lexicon until after The July Blog and Escapist article which wasn't until 2015
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Apr 5, 2021 20:53
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Opioid posted:I mean, I saved up and paid $60 for a sega genesis game that gave me 10h of playtime 30 years ago. I’m sure with inflation it’s not a wild proposition to play a fun space shooter game with friends for $60. I really can’t argue a persons personal dollar:enjoyment values though so if that experience is only worth $5 to you then that’s cool. To me it’s worth $60 to occasionally pop on and play that while looking at fancy graphics Nothing wrong with that, really glad you are having fun
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Apr 5, 2021 21:14
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The biggest issue is that SC has to at some point in the future go from 40-50 players to many times that number without any steps backwards, that's what has been sold. I do not think it is possible. It remains the largest issue on the horizon for CIG. They can turn all the promised mechanics/game loops into guns that shoot fixing/healing/mining etc and probably just retcon that without too much issue. But at some point they've got to turn a single instance CryTek mod that is barely hanging together as is into a seamless MMO probably they can spin it out for many years though.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:26
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Opioid posted:I logged on for the first time in a year. Had a fun 3-4 hours with 2 of my friends. Did a space mission shooting down some guys, then landed our ships on a planet in a pitch black night during a crazy sandstorm, killed some dudes, made some money. I accidentally shot a friend but I had the small ship with a Rez bed in it so he came back quick while I carried his gun back to him. I guess that's the magic of Star Citizen -- it is the most ambitious, high-fidelity, never-been-done-before, more-gameplay-already-than-any-AAA-game, do-everything space/planet/trolley simulator, which will and/or has already changed the entire landscape of software development and is definitely worth supporting with as much money as possible. But the key to Star Citizen is to care less and just gently caress around in it on rare occasions with a couple of friends, the same way you could with any indie-tier multiplayer game. When you can hold both the dream (it's the best drat space simulator ever, eventually, when it's done, it's aaaaaaalpha, etc., etc.) AND the reality (all the fun you can have in Star Citizen is fun you could have in nearly any other game, except most other games would let you have more fun) in your head, you will be Enlightened.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:29
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Opioid posted:I mean, I saved up and paid $60 for a sega genesis game that gave me 10h of playtime 30 years ago. I’m sure with inflation it’s not a wild proposition to play a fun space shooter game with friends for $60. I really can’t argue a persons personal dollar:enjoyment values though so if that experience is only worth $5 to you then that’s cool. To me it’s worth $60 to occasionally pop on and play that while looking at fancy graphics That's cool but then literally every single game on steam should also qualify. (the multiplayer ones at least I guess) You've set the bar so low that every single game that qualifies as "Is a game" also is worth $60. Which... as a wannabe game developer, god I wish more gamers felt like you did. Trilobite posted:I guess that's the magic of Star Citizen -- it is the most ambitious, high-fidelity, never-been-done-before, more-gameplay-already-than-any-AAA-game, do-everything space/planet/trolley simulator, which will and/or has already changed the entire landscape of software development and is definitely worth supporting with as much money as possible. Yeah, if that's all you want, they could have made this game for like $10 million and been done 4 years ago. But the whole point of SC is its trying to be MORE. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 21:40
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jarlywarly posted:The biggest issue is that SC has to at some point in the future go from 40-50 players to many times that number without any steps backwards, that's what has been sold. I do not think it is possible. It remains the largest issue on the horizon for CIG. They can turn all the promised mechanics/game loops into guns that shoot fixing/healing/mining etc and probably just retcon that without too much issue. But at some point they've got to turn a single instance CryTek mod that is barely hanging together as is into a seamless MMO probably they can spin it out for many years though. Yep. Also the dogfighting (which is poo poo anyways) has been playtested and balanced for 40-50 players (lol not really) so how is all that going to work if you suddenly turn player counts up x100? It won't. You'll have to throw everything out and rebalance all your ships weapons and health and everything for balance. Same with.... everything. Lmao. And again, for the people who paid $4,000 for a big fancy ship to feel satisfied, that needs to be a loving powerful ship. Which means the people who paid $400 for a big ship find out they actually have a poo poo ship. The idea is "we're all pledging just to help the project we don't care" but uhhhhhh the "not caring" will last for like 24 hours and then they'll start complaining, I promise. Not to mention that if the $4,000 ship is worth buying, then that means its an awful grindfest and the only people playing will be the investors, so it'll never see the large scale mainstream appeal they're dreaming of. It'll just be them. Citcon is the entire playerbase of their massive space MMO. No plebians at all. Or, if they balance the game such that the plebians can actually earn ships, then Mr. $4,000 investment finds out that he wasted his money and some johnny-come-lately earns his ship in a month, and he starts complaiing. SC has become too many conflicting visions all being promised and pre-sold at the same time. We've said it before ITT, but SC would need to be like 12 full games at this point, and not just that, but 12 DIFFERENT games. What some people want from PVP directly conflicts with what other people want out of the game, and as long as its all dreams and "in alpha" then everybody can ignore that things don't work, but if they actually release the game then a lot of people are going to be unhappy that it isn't what they wanted at all. Worse, it isn't what they paid for.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:46
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I played Aliens: Colonial Marines with three friends and we had a blast.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:56
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https://twitter.com/jakeacappella/status/1377670028628262912 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/citizens/18074-This-Week-In-Star-Citizen quote:Jake Bradley From INN, to Relay, to CIG 
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Apr 5, 2021 22:00
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CGI sure has changed things. We've come a long way from the nineties, when every alien world SG-1 explored strangely resembled the forests of British Columbia.
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Apr 5, 2021 22:04
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Opioid posted:To me it’s worth $60 to occasionally pop on and play that while looking at fancy graphics Sure if you’re happy having spent AAA cash on a sketchy alpha, then it’s all good. It is made by a bunch of chancers who promised a ton more stuff to a ton more people for a ton more cash. But that doesn’t have to concern you, it’s true. And if you enjoy it in its current state then it doesn’t matter if it never coalesces into a stable game either. Have your fun
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Apr 5, 2021 22:07
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when you're loving around with friends you can have fun with *anything*. I was walking in the woods today and there was a group of lads having a great laugh chucking sticks in a river.
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Apr 5, 2021 22:10
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Quavers posted:
So how many community managers are they up to now?
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Apr 5, 2021 22:17
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C-Bangin' it 
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Zaphod42 posted:The idea is "we're all pledging just to help the project we don't care" but uhhhhhh the "not caring" will last for like 24 hours and then they'll start complaining, I promise. True. But if CIG ever manage to solve The Riddle of Chris ("What is release, anyway?"), they're multiply hosed no matter what. I mean, what's their business model if they have to release their minimum viable product and can't hide behind "It's alpha! It's tier zero! It's a pledge, not a sale!" anymore? They've said that they won't continue to sell ships for cash money after 'release', but c'mon, they're going to keep selling ships, it's the only way they know how to operate, and Amazon's not going to give them servers for free. Plus, assuming Chris doesn't pull a Lord British and scuttle out the side door mumbling how he was only a creative director the whole time, his work here is done and he must away to tend to his ravens, etc., how else can CIG pay his salary? How would they afford to continue development (or continue the appearance of development) without some kind of income? There's a good argument to be made that CIG would just say, "yeah, gently caress you, new money's all we care about" and let the whales complain about how their $4000 chariot has been nerfed and devalued. They've done it before, after all. Move the complaints to concern, mobilize/astroturf some "we all knew those were pledges, just GIFTS to fund development, never meant to reflect the actual in-game value of the ships" posts to throw up a smokescreen, and talk about how they are constantly looking for ways to improve the game balance and the patch after the next one will introduce some changes. Hell, they might even actually try balancing the game, although if they keep selling ships, then the newest ship will always have to punch more above its weight than the one before, so good luck with that, I guess.
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Apr 5, 2021 22:22
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Quavers posted:https://twitter.com/jakeacappella/status/1377670028628262912 About time dude finally gets something for his nonstop shilling for the last half decade or better. He was doing it for free at INN while the guy running it was secretly on cig's payroll and hiding it from the zealots there shilling in thy name and Relay was just INN with blackjack and hookers and no W2 forms
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Apr 5, 2021 22:30
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Beet Wagon posted:I played Aliens: Colonial Marines with three friends and we had a blast. hosed up if true
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Apr 5, 2021 22:33
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Beet Wagon posted:I played Aliens: Colonial Marines with three friends and we had a blast. I played shroud of the avatar alone and it loving sucked. Theory is sound
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Apr 5, 2021 22:40
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I played a space game once. Hitting escape opened up a menu. It was terrible. Confirmed.
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Apr 5, 2021 23:00
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