Star Citizen: Big MoMA's House

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Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

AP posted:

It's now November 2015, the RSI TOS at one time used to refer to "Accordingly, you agree that any unearned portion of the deposit shall not be refundable until and unless RSI has failed to deliver the pledge items and/or the Game to you within 12 months after the estimated delivery date.", the original estimated delivery date was November 2014, so we've now hit the deadline. It also said "In the unlikely event that RSI is not able to deliver the Game and/or the pledge items, RSI agrees to post an audited cost accounting on its website to fully explain the use of the deposits for the Game Cost and the Pledge Item Cost."

Some people think this TOS stuff is important and a gotcha to CIG, I'm not sure the TOS is important at all to individual backers as if something even looks like it could come to court it makes much more sense of CIG to just fully refund the backer who's unhappy. But if Derek Smart is trying to get access to the books maybe the "audited cost" part helps him.

They do refund people and that's happened since Derek got involved, so that's a change, everything else is guesswork as to what he's really going to do (if anything).

CIG can safely ignore their own TOS clause about audited cost accounting until a backer with enough money decides to sue to enforce it. Honestly I think DSmart wasted the chance to really stick it to CIG. He should have stayed quiet until today, THEN demanded to see the audit.

But gently caress it, someone write a good effort post on why CIG should follow their own TOS and post the Cost Accounting and I'll put in on the brown sea. Time to go straight from 0 strikes to Permaban

# ¿ Nov 1, 2015 16:17

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:17

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

In the scale of project fuckups, the use of CryEngine is the smallest of the problems. Scope creep, poor project management, and perfectionism is the real issue, and that happens on any project, anywhere.

Best case scenario at this point is that SC creates so many bitter kickstarter vets that any future crowd funded game has a huge chorus of people saying "no stretch goals. Finish the game first".

Mukip posted:

The fuuuuuuuck

The ride never ends.

Redshift25k is a MWLL and MWO exile too. Poor dude changes games that aren't out yet and is forever disappointed.

Of course I recognize the name because I'm the same thing.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 15:56

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Photosyphilis posted:

I wanna see a compiled list of all the humanitarian things you could've done with all the money that was funneled into this spergs wet dream

About 185 houses in Haiti for earthquake victims

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 16:10

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

Hey, I recognize your name! You're the guy that made the great pixel art of the ships in the previous threads' OP:s. Would it be okay to use the art in a potential SAGDC game?

Sure, go nuts. All I ask is you give me credit. Its free advertising

http://imgur.com/a/F05Bl

# ¿ Nov 3, 2015 19:25

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Namefag Edgelord posted:

Oh man this is going to be so some day if/when you find out what I do for a living. This is like some kind of weird "pre-selfown" happening here.

Yeah, your posturing and braggart attitude totally isn't an attempt to cover up deep insecurities and self esteem issues. Please tell me more how you wake up every morning feeling good about yourself and how "successful" you are.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 19:08

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

G0RF posted:

'Edgy' youtube guy gives old school Dennis Millery rant about the state of the nation at CIG, after taking potshots at Derek Smart and whatnot...

It's annoying, but there's some decent commentary here after the open. It's causing some discomfort on reddit, so it's got that going for it...

Awesome. I especially liked the Inner Sphere map and two battletech references. The dude is probably an MWO bittervet too.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 19:51

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Vire posted:

Nope good to see that the reddit thread is the same old down vote machine with any dissenting opinion being downvoted into oblivion while the echo chambers is in full force. They are literally enraged by the thought someone might be concerned for their financial stability. Although it probably could have said anything and have been down voted because SA was in the username.

Nah, my alt without SA in the username gets downvoted just as much. Every once in a while I post to take the temp of the reddit SC cultists, so far the cult is still going strong.

"why the gently caress would you care about me or any other stranger life/money? Stop pretending you do, if you have doubts and money problems deal with them don't preach your fears to strangers, no one cares lol"

and

"Stop telling me what to do with my loving money and mind your own business!"

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 20:32

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

The whole article is basically a microcosm of Star Citizen:

- They created a starship without any regards to how it would fly.
- They rushed delivery, multiple times, crunching before each release but ultimately having to drop something substandard.
- They repeatedly changed priorities resulting in nothing to show for all the work.
- They outsourced production only to get something that wasn't usable due to poor oversight.
- They have to redesign everything to accommodate mechanics that were finalized after it was built.
- They're promising it will be better once everything is fixed, but have no idea when that's going to happen.
- Their solution to all of the problems is to sell another ship.

gently caress em. They have no idea what the gently caress they're doing, they have nobody in charge who can manage worth a poo poo, and all they can do is come up with more concepts. The whole loving article is nothing more than a laundry list of gently caress-ups, broken promises, bullshit backtracking, and lame excuses. Topped off with a link so you can buy one!

Well the good news is that we finally know what Ben Lesnick means when he says something is a priority.

What a clusterfuck.

I'm enjoying Beer 2.0 - Broken and Bitter.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2015 01:29

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Loiosh posted:

Yup, I suspect that like with most MMOs, a lot of these issues will have an initial design that will be iterated on, changed, and fixed as the alpha and betas progress. I recall that the original design for Age of Conan insisted that players would have hard collision boxes until a Goon spent a day on a bridge knocking people off it with his horse. And nothing could be done about it.

They removed the hard collision boxes after that.

Doing poo poo like this is why I'm still a bit hopeful about the game. I don't expect the game to be good; but I do expect that it will be really easy to troll the hard-core roleplayers by breaking their immersion.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 17:38

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Madcosby posted:

But doesn't giving away "a ship or two" equate to getting the most cash-expensive ships in the game for free?

Seems like a big deal, even if it's just a ship or two

Supposedly stolen ships don't get replaced, so while you have a free ship for a while, its just a matter of time before you lose it.

I think of it like killing a dude in an FPS and taking his uber-weapon he bought with game credits. It might be "free" to you, but you're going to get killed and lose the weapon sooner or later.

*Of course this is all moot because doing anything like this in the PU will is at minimum 2 years away, if the game does not fold before then*

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 17:49

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Madcosby posted:

I buy an entry package to the game. You have a one man ship worth more than my entry package and insurance. This fraud plan I'm suggesting has no bearing on whether or not the ship is the most expensive or crew-based. it's just entirely exploitable.

While thieving and insurance are part of the game, there is no way this won't be exploited.

One of them will have to go.

This isn't a new idea.

CIG's entire plan relies on A- automatically detecting blatant fraud and preventing stolen ships being flipped for credits. B- Ship turnover is so high a stolen ship is meaningless.

Of course we have no idea how A or B will work, and CIG will probably gently caress it up.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 17:58

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

EVE has persistent asset tracking as well. The difference is that (to my knowledge) none of those games (including EVE) have an insurance mechanism that returns the asset to the player. In EVE if you lose something and it's insured you get a paltry sum of ISK that's barely worth the effort. Personally I don't see how CIG's approach is remotely viable. If new ships aren't delivered in a timely manner then people will complain about how the insurance mechanic is worthless because it takes X hours/days/weeks/whatever to play again. If new ships are delivered at a pace that exceeds the balance of the economy then you have excessive inflation. Even ignoring the exploitation issues I struggle to see how this won't be a systemic problem.

Have you not learned that CIG has intention of making a functioning economy that players have any influence on?

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 18:06

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Loiosh posted:

I wonder when people say something like this if they're expecting an MMO to have a hard rule book designed from day 1. It's not very common with MMOs, especially those trying to be innovative.

Blizzard had no idea what WoW would be when they started design. They knew they liked EQ (most of the original members were hard-core EQ raiders), and wanted to make something like it, but better. They didn't even have a quest tracker in their original design. It was added in the F&F Alpha when family members complained. Their original design around talents was completely changed, multiple times. Originally Talents would be small improvements to somewhat tweak your abilities (+5% damage or increase the rate of point generation for rogues). Originally each class would have a unique class quest and epic weapon (like cleric sticks for EQ). All of these things changed.

Heck, the raids and instances were redesigned in the middle of production. After the success of Scarlet Monastery (instance) they decided they should redesign their raids to be winged, just like SM was (thus, the original Naxx). Molten Core was too far along to really make use of that design.

There's an entire history of MMOs that got scrapped or changed in development because their original ideas didn't quite work out and they had to adopt to changes.

Bullshit. Blizzard had a plan, a very well detailed one that laid out the long term plan for where the game was going. They did not just start writing code and say "oh, make it like EQ but with warcraft crap". Blizzard adopted and changed the design as development progressed, but these were refinements; and is normal in software development. You are confusing "lack of a plan" with making minor adjustments.

Everything coming out of CIG in the last year screams poor project management from the top down.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 18:16

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Of course. Their approach of having players influence a system level economy while ensuring the universe was big enough to prevent things from getting out of hand seemed really cool. But functioning economy and delivering ships in a timely manner don't seem to relate.

Honestly I can't wait for the first iteration of ship replacements being delayed. Either replacement times are long, and using an Aurora to suicide against a more expensive long replacement time ship is going to make the carebears freak out to no end. OR replacement times are short and the carebears freak out that ships are too disposable. I don't see much middle ground here.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 18:18

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

frozenpeas posted:

Let's say it takes even an hour to get your new ship. How are you supposed to dogfight? How many players would sit around playing Battlefield if you only spawned once an hour?

Is the pvp stuff going to be completely separate with its own respawn mechanic or do they intend to systematically depopulate the game every few hours?

We seriously have no idea. The carebears and self proclaimed hardcore "ace" pilots are demanding that replacement times be very long on the assumption that their ship will never get destroyed. Meanwhile CIG actually wants a populated game server, which means fast replacement times. So of course CIG has not said a word about it.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 18:51

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Madcosby posted:

Just curious, with regards to ship rebuilding times and the effect of insurance:

Do you think CGI hasn't said much because they haven't fleshed it out, or because they're aware that making any declaration now may affect ship sales?

Both. They probably plan on figuring out the replacement times later, but won't even say THAT because it may affect ship sales.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 18:55

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Loiosh posted:

What Eldragon says, but for people who want to JUST PVP without loss, that's what Arena Commander will be. It's basically (supposed to be) a multiplayer game within the SC universe that pilots practice on.

So in addition to having the large MMO where you do your MMO thing, there's also Arena Commander where you can gently caress around in the quicker PVP gameplay.

I suspect AC will be a depopulated ghost town as soon as the PU starts up. Why play in practice mode when you can play the real thing. Players have zero incentive to just gently caress about in AC with the exception that they want to try an expensive ship before they buy it. And if CIG tells players waiting for their ship to be replaced "go play AC" players are going to be pissed.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 19:00

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

blueberrysmith posted:

Holy poo poo you weren't kidding. This is their release? Did anyone actually test this prior to releasing this to 1000 idiots to mess around with? Seems like the very basics don't really work.

No, this is the public test before the release. The Public Test Universe (PTU) exists for crash testing and the only people who should bother downloading it are masochists.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2015 21:06

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

To the modern hipster worker, making your office space look as much like a prison environment is desirable, because they are doing it ironically.

I'm pretty sure their toilet stalls don't have doors either.

Although I do find it funny that this thread has devolved into whining about the price of office furniture. Like somehow goons slowly became grumpy old men.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2015 20:03

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Dapper Dan posted:

Even if you are right, how can you defend doing something that benefits relatively few and costs more time and money when they have only released a pre-alpha proof of concept and absolutely nothing from the single player portion that is coming in a year?

Not to mention all the growing pains with a new architecture and unforseen problems.

Because CIG can put just a couple of developers on the task working at half-time, with no release date specified and get it done sometime in 2018 or later. The work will sit in a side repo for years and not touch the trunk. The brown sea who want DX12 will be satisfied that it is being worked on (and they clearly don't give a poo poo about release dates), and nVidia/AMD will throw money at CIG to provide full dx12 support because it is going to sell a lot of high end cards. So long as cost of developer time < money brought in by promising this feature "eventually" its worth doing.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2015 17:18

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Warcabbit posted:

... dude, I had the nuclear launch codes. It was a pretty well known secret what they were through the 70s-90s.

12345?

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 17:16

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

For a short while "Pubbie" was as well. But someone with a brain realized they had taken the "ban any words used by goons" too far.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 18:11

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Edmund Honda posted:

I'm the BDSSE that implements a hard velocity cap in space travel

There isn't a multiplayer space game that doesn't have one. Blame Comcast, Tim Berners Lee, and/or Al Gore. Take your pick.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2015 20:20

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Midnight Voyager posted:

Do you not see the difference between what you're talking about and someone just coming right out and saying "I don't care about human suffering at all"?

Genuine question, because what I'm mad at is the latter.

Most functioning humans have the substance to at least feel bad when people point out how literally everything they own was probably produced by human suffering. We can't really do that much about it, seeing as how we're a bunch of broke wage slaves with the political sway of a fish, and fighting every single example of worker abuse with our wallets would require not buying anything. But most of us probably do what we can to avoid companies with blatant human rights violations, and we actually have a feeling in our hearts when we hear about horrible working conditions.

And here comes Octopode with the sweeping statement of "I don't care about human suffering as long as I get my video game. There's nothing wrong with giving thousands of dollars to these people!"

A real human being typed that and felt no shame whatsoever. This is not a person with a functioning center of empathy. THAT is what people are piling on him for.

PS: Does it not matter that they are doing something lovely just because there are other similarly lovely things out there? This is the Star Citizen thread and we are talking about the people behind Star Citizen being lovely.

ah geez, how did this end up on a new page, move on, citizens.

Sent from my iPhone

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 04:20

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

alphabettitouretti posted:

People have been talking about how to handle griefing on here, but recently I have seen it show up more and more. So I figured I would take a moment to describe how this kind of problem is solved in real-world applications with something called Data Science. This is a field of study I have decided to dedicate my career to, and I have been formally trained on it. This field is so new there doesn't exist a degree for it yet (expect it to show up next year or so). This is how Google identifies spam, how military identifies targets, how insurance companies identify fraud, how the ISS determines where on its frame a leak is occurring, how banks flag odd spending behavior, how Amazon determines if your complaint is worth looking at, how Uber determines if it's "boost hour", how Comcast determines if you are likely to Churn or not and keep you on hold longer - you name it - it's everywhere now.

So this is how it works:

We start with something called Analytics. Gathering incidents as they are reported. These incidents will have associated features such as vehicle velocity, user, type of gun, location, time/date, language/terms used in report, ship type, etc. There are many topics here like dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, feature engineering, etc. but I won't get into that.

Now at first you need a human. The human tackles each griefing incident one at a time and determines fault. This database of labeled incidents (labeled meaning fault is determined) form a "training set".

Next, you build a "classifier model". If you know some python, check out http://scikit-learn.org/stable/ and click on Classification. What you find is a myriad of different models we can use with fancy words but they all essentially do the same thing - establish a relationship between inputs and outputs. The inputs will be our features, and there will be two outputs

Out1: {Grief, not Grief}.

Out2: {Fault Player1, Fault Player2}

Now with our chosen model (chosen with methods I will not describe here but you can read on the link provided), we need to train it. Each model has a different training method but suffice it to say the model adjusts its parameters until it is good at making educated guesses about Grief and who is the griefer.

Next, we set a threshold. Perhaps 99%. This means If the model is 99% sure of how to classify some particular incident, it will label it as such. If however it is <99% sure, it will forward the case to a human who can make a determination, and add this incident to the training set to improve the model.

Got it? This is only the tip of the iceberg so if you have questions I will do my best to respond.

If you think about it long enough, you will come to the understanding that this is the only real way to truly handle griefing / insurance scams / etc. and preserve the sandbox world. This is the only method that is as creative and as adaptive as the scammers who attempt to game it.

Thankfully machine learning algorithms are trivial to implement, and the experts in the field are willing to work for CIG for 60 hour work weeks and a 80% pay cut.

quote:

Now at first you need a human. The human tackles each griefing incident one at a time and determines fault.

oops, never mind. Your whole theory falls apart because griefing is subjective.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 15:39

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

The Saddest Robot posted:

Is the person being griefed a pro backer? Have they "invested" more money than the person griefing them?

If yes then ban that fucker who is messing with their cash cow.

Exactly. Or "is the person being griefed a member of the moderator's org?" Because SURPRISE cig lets forum moderators join orgs. What will be really hilarious is if they roll out a voting system where you upvote/downvote player behavior. Because that won't have unexpected (well, to CIG anyway) side effects or anything.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 15:50

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

aleksendr posted:

i beleive In this case the minutia are of greater importance than usual, like how good mortar make the whole house keep on standing up.

I'm not a low level programmer (more like a mix of computer janitor and junior analyst, i clean up other people IT mess) but from what i gather, this whole 32 vs 64 debate is important because most of what they promised in the salespitch will be very, very hard to do (as in much $$$ and german man hours) and always a little bit tricky/unstable if they used the so called 32 bit "hack" to fake a large (as in 100+km) seamless world.

The whole precision thing might also mean long range fights will be impossible due to the enemy ship not really being where you see it, not counting for lag and other funny online MMO problems. If longer ranged fight are difficult for thechincal reasons, that would mean the whole thing will end up being ww2 fighter knifefights with a space skin, making slow turrets (and thus multicrew) pretty much a moot point and high velocity crashes a regular situation (look at any Warthunder vids )

WW2 knife fights was always the intention. Long range combat was never in the plan. Guns ranges top out at 3 km if I remember Correctly.

High velocity crashes will also probably be a common occurrence, if Arena Commander is anything to go by. Slow turrets and Multicrew however are not moot because the combat maneuver speed is incredibly slow by space standards, 300 ms or less. Plenty slow for manually aiming the guns on your craft. The more interesting discussion is "why would I never want to travel in anything other that cruise mode and just run away from everything." and skip combat altogether.

So whining about the particulars if there are still using 32 bit for camera relative positioning for rendering is moot, who cares. Its not worth the performance or memory hit to be able to precisely draw an object that the player will never see or interact with. Large Objects that you can actually see 10+ km away aren't player controlled and are stationary.

The only thing that remains to be proved is if it really is possible to manually fly from point A to point B at 1000 ms for 60+ hours. Which eventually someone will do when the game is more stable or someone does the private server hack.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 22:12

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

kikkelivelho posted:

Based on the video I linked earlier you can detect and lock onto ships that are 20+ kilometers away from you. You obviously can't fire at those ranges, but you can at least follow their movements without being force to engagement ranges. So there's at least some interaction beyond the weapon ranges.

Okay, 20km, that's still inside 32 bit floats (80 km with two digits for centimeters? I need to ponder that a bit), and way smaller than the ranges in use in the 64 bit world space. I just picked 10km because even a Constellation is a tiny dot for actual rendering at that range. Detection ranges probably do need to be a bit larger and closer to 20km, if the really big ships like the Idris or Javelin actually become playable. But the overall point is you hit a certain distance away from the camera and you are no longer trying to render the ship, and its range becomes moot.

Detecting the ship I suppose is interacting with it, but is a very passive experience.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 22:43

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Dusty Lens posted:

I think that CIG really wanted airplanes in space. People chase each other around amazing structures and through asteroids but what they built was a game where you turret a lot and hope you blap the other person before they blap you. It feels like there's a disconnect that's exacerbated by Croberts holding tightly to his old philosophies of low top speed, high acceleration, extreme turn speed compounded by a total uncertainty of how design should meet their "ok lets make it newtonian so we can say we're physics people" mindset. Build me an airplane but for space! Who cares of thrusters literally can't point in the direction of travel!

But maybe I'm reading too much into all of the promotional material; which is basically a series of airplane videos directed by Chris Roberts while the game is basically air hockey with guns.

I think it really boils down to CR trying to please everyone at once and this is the first area where it is biting him in the rear end. You can't have airplanes in space AND newtonian physics at the same time. This "IFCS+Combstab" thing allows people who want space planes to fly that way, but they are going to be pissed when someone else turrets. Meanwhile you got the "I want true newtonian" people pissed over the powerful manuevering thrusters that make airplanes in space possible also allows for strafing and all kinds of crazy manuevers that don't rely on the main thruster.

Net Result: Spergs from both camps are pissed.

Personally I think its pretty good so far, but Cruise Mode as it functions now is a mistake. It makes it trivially easy to run away, and plotting an intercept is exceptionally difficult. Your odds of overshooting are high. Although making the "Match Speed" work as a "Close to 1000 meters then match speed" key would fix this problem.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 16:53

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:

in the star citizen justice system there are 2 separate yet equally important parts: the space cops who arrest you and the ~~space lawyers and judges~~ INDEPENDENT ARBITER'S GUILD who decide your fate

there are their stories

Law and Order jokes are always funny, second only to humble-bragging jokes.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 21:34

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

What's dumber, the bulldozer pushing a wreck off the flight deck and into a pit, or the fact that they have a flight deck at all?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 23:13

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Measuring game development time when they reused the engine is wildly inaccurate. So you might be able to say "Fallout 3 only took 3 years!" But since it was just the engine Oblivion ran on, and Morrowind before that, it's not like they started from scratch.

And with what SC is trying to be, they are effectively writing a new engine from scratch. It might be based on cryengine, but its going to look nothing like that engine now. (CryEngine was still a stupid choice).

What's really sad is that CR did not recognize this at the outset and foolishly thought the game would get done in 2-3 years, and when he did realize it, rather than scale back his ambitions, he expanded scope.

Eldragon fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Dec 10, 2015

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 15:24

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

I dunno. A lot of games use UE4 and Unity5, and I've never seen much debate about their development times being all that inaccurate, regardless of whether they have to construct their own development tools or change the engine source. Wouldn't that make a lot of talk about development times irrelevant or completely subjective?

While yes a lot of games are written in UE4 or Unity5, few to none of them are trying to be the ultimate Space MMO with physics, which is a wildly different beast. Most games are following really well established design patterns (FPS, Flight Sim, RTS, etc) where most of the common problems have already been solved.

No one really debates the dev timeline on other games because they are generally released on time and not trying to reinvent the wheel.

So yeah SC is going to take a really long time to develop. There quite simply is no game engine that comes close to what CIG wants to do.

Unfortunately CR is really bad at product management and is unable to scale his ambition into something manageable. CIG claims to be doing agile vertical slice development, but if they were doing it properly, each release of AC/PU/Whatever would be a stable game with minimal features and iterating on it on a regular basis. Not a buggy mess with more ambition and promises than content and major releases 1-2 times a year.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 15:52

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

...I think in the long run what we're really going to be getting is Freelancer 2015.

That's all I ever wanted in the first place.

It would be achievable too if CR had not tacked on so much "realism" and next-gen graphics bullshit.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 16:14

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

I firmly believe it was achievable a year ago. The vast majority of problems we've seen have stemmed from the networking bullshit. Had they made it a single player game with limited co-op we'd be playing it right now.

Probably true. At minimum CIG should have started out with the goal of limited coop and slowly expanded instancing/mmo as their tech caught up.

However, the game as it stands right now still crashes a lot, and my top end rig can't run it at more than 20-25 fps. Not to mention they are years behind on ship development from chasing perfectionism. So I think they have some bottlenecks in the "Fidelity" department as well.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 16:52

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Amarcarts posted:

If they have artificial gravity tech how come the space station needs rotating rings?

The rotating ring isn't for gravity. It contains 10,000 hamsters running on it to generate power.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 17:14

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

BMan posted:

Here is what I think is happening:
Croberts wants fighter plane turning battles and G-induced blackouts, right? Jet fighters can pull 9 Gs in real life. To replicate this in a spaceship without fudging the physics, the thrusters have to be capable of 9 Gs acceleration. That's fast as gently caress, which is why the ships seem to accelerate instantly. (Anyone with alpha access want to test the actual acceleration in the game?)

Bingo. Very well put. This is exactly why ships just seem to float without mass or inertia. Its not that they don't have have mass, its that the maneuvering thrusters are insanely powerful.

Spergs in the brown sea did the math on the actual thruster acceleration, I'm not going to bother looking it up. Suffice it to say there are a lot of pissed spergs that space combat they dreamed up ended up being WW2 dogfighting in space.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 18:23

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Filthy Hans posted:

Did they artificially limit these ships to a top speed, or can you just keep thrusting at 9g forever? I assume it's the first, and this highlights for me how Asteroids had a more realistic physics model than any 3d space combat sim.

Yes top speed does in fact have to be limited. Even with Asteroids if you keep accelerating forever you eventually crash the game (or hit a top speed). Top speed has to be limited for gameplay purposes if you want human controlled anything.

tooterfish posted:

That doesn't fully explain this poo poo:

The larger ship goes spinning off like a top. It doesn't react like its mass is commensurate to its size at all. It looks unnatural, like it's a balloon space ship instead of an actual one made of metal and glass.

That's not a function of thruster power, because it's not reacting to its thrusters. It's because it hasn't got enough weight to it.

I was only talking about the ships looking goofy when flying around. When it comes to collisions or any number of goofy poo poo... Are you telling me SC is a buggy mess? I'm shocked! SHOCKED!

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 18:42

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Currently a SC game package includes both Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

After January 31st you will have to buy each game separately.

Reminds me of a company spinning off the successful part of the business from the unsuccessful part.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2015 22:20

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:17

Eldragon: Feb 22, 2003

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Nobody is saying they didn't land on a planet. What they're saying is that the entire demonstration is intentionally crafted in such a way that it appears to be more advanced than it really is. This is based on the following arguments:

- The size of the planet was only 1000km, which is smaller than a moon.
- There were no planetary effects on the ship. No atmospheric effects, no gravitational effects, nothing at all. In other words there was no transition from space to planet.
- The only portion that the player interacted with had been previously shown and is hand crafted.
- You can clearly see the transition between the hand crafted portion and the procedurally generated portion.
- As per this post a lot of the effects used intentionally obfuscated some of problems.
- The demonstration was done in the editor and not the actual engine.

Now I am not a programmer, graphics engineer, level designer, or anything else. I'm just some rear end in a top hat on a keyboard. But my understanding is that, from a technical perspective, what was demonstrated there was not terribly revolutionary. It was essentially a 1000km sphere with some pretty effects applied to the surface and a hand crafted level put on one part of it. Within the confines of the game it was basically a big space station floating in space, and not necessarily representative of the type of tech one has seen in Elite or NMS.

I don't really follow Elite or NMS. But I don't really understand the difference between "Big space station floating in space" and "Planet"? Is this about actually simulating gravity/lift/drag? Or making the terrain look better than just rocky plants by seeding in trees/rivers/whatever?

Why would anyone give a crap about actually simulating gravity and atmospheric effects? These ships have maneuvering thrusters so powerful effects of gravity and atmosphere would probably be negligible for normal flying. Atmospheric combat would be affected, but why bother with the effort? The amount of developer time CIG would need to sink into dynamically calculating would be huge for practically no benefit. Just give all ships a % thruster power reduction and call it a day. But who am I kidding, CR won't cut corners and will put 10 developers on it.

Seems to me everyone will land on a planet once, walk around, say "welp nothing here" and stick to going to the designated landing points. The dynamic terrain then becomes flyover country. Like Missouri.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 23:04

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