skeletors_condom posted:

BoredGamer: Star Citizen - Should You Get a Subscription?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJaeUeKANf8

What a shill. I don't believe that the only kickback(s) he received was a new PC. There is just too much corporate agit-prop.

Beet Wagon posted:

why don't star citizens own furniture

new phone who dis posted:

I actually followed this thread for a long time so I know how deep the hole goes, I was just wondering if anything had happened in the last 2 years or so that was significant. I think the last time I was here an employee was dishing dirt and there was tickle porn.

Sarsapariller posted:

The biggest thing is that they got an outside investor and had to reveal their financials as part of the deal, and as part of those financials it turned out they were basically a year away from bankruptcy when they took the money. They were consistently making 30million a year for loving nothing and Chris still managed to piss it into the red.

The investor gave them an extra year of runway but they had to meet a quarterly release schedule and have the single player game out by 2020. It's been... about a year since then. They've squirted out three incredibly stripped-down patches and fans are getting really riled because they're failing very visibly in the public eye. It's looking extremely unlikely that they will have even the barest-bones version on the single player game ready next year. They continue to sell ludicrously overpriced trash- the latest was a 140 dollar anti-air tank, in a space game, that had a total range of 2km and the missiles didn't do any damage.

As far as actual releases go- nothing really, the thin quarterly patches that they shove out purport to introduce more features but mostly just break the existing game further. They do poo poo in the most nonsensical backwards ways, like making the fully enclosed elevators actually move through the buildings of the world, and it introduces a million bugs and ways to die that they then ignore forever. The game is 100% tedious and 100% lethal at the same time.

The most exciting thing community wise was the introduction of the streamer Rexzilla who is literally paid to try and organize 50 muppets into live-action "PvP battles" inside the game proper, by flying them all out to one location or another and having them shoot at each other because there are no objectives or teams in Star Citizen and there's barely even functional weapons. Mostly what he actually does is force them to stand in parade lines and yell at them on twitch about how cool they are, which is, uh... it's something to see. Anyway he got all the cross-promotion and money from the company and it pissed all the other idiots off who'd been shilling this trash relentlessly for the last 7 years, so a bunch of them rebelled and that didn't really go anywhere and now 7 months later they're slowly crawling back, it's awesome.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Do you know what a "Signed Distance Field" is? Is this another thing we just invented, and it actually means "hitbox?" We'll never tell!
* Okay today's episode is literally about making the sparks bounce nicely. That's- that's it. They put this out with their heads held high.

Sarsapariller posted:

The investor gave them an extra year of runway but they had to meet a quarterly release schedule and have the single player game out by 2020. It's been... about a year since then. They've squirted out three incredibly stripped-down patches and fans are getting really riled because they're failing very visibly in the public eye. It's looking extremely unlikely that they will have even the barest-bones version on the single player game ready next year. They continue to sell ludicrously overpriced trash- the latest was a 140 dollar anti-air tank, in a space game, that had a total range of 2km and the missiles didn't do any damage.

Conspiratiorist posted:

Is a SQ42 release in 2020 an investor imposition? What happens if they don't meet the deadline?

Conspiratiorist posted:

Is a SQ42 release in 2020 an investor imposition? What happens if they don't meet the deadline?

Conspiratiorist posted:

Is a SQ42 release in 2020 an investor imposition? What happens if they don't meet the deadline?

posted:

OK. Here's a really simplified version.

All solid object assets in the game are made of 3D meshes. Even small particles that just look like lights, or ships, or player avatars. These are comprised of points in a 3D space called vertices, a Vertex is a single point in 3D space defined by 3 numbers - X, Y and Z values. You need 3 vertices joined together by a flat plane to create a 'Face' some 3D renderers (game engine for example) use these triangular flat planes, some join two triangles together by sharing two vertices to create a 4 point polygon flat plane to show one Face as in the image linked above.

A model is made of many Faces. The more Faces, the more memory is needed to load and display the model, the more megabytes you will need to download. Scale is not important. A tiny highly detailed model with many hundreds of thousands of Faces will take a huge amount of system resources, whereas a simple huge 3D model with only a few dozen Faces will take very few resources.

Each Face has only one side which will display a texture or a physical property such as light reflection or hard surface collision. This is called the 'Normal'. Normals only work on one side of a Face. If you collide with a face from the wrong side you either get no result, or get unexpected results in the physics engine. The easiest way to think about it is: The Normal is the side you 'normally' interact with and see because 3D models are not solid inside.

Because 3D meshes are so resource hungry and would be massive files to download each time you download the game a more efficient version of showing a solid object or detail on an object called PBR was developed initially purely for complex light rays to interact with to create an illusion of detail, but later other interactions became possible. Physically Based Rendering - this takes place on GPU, not the CPU.

You can use images called height maps, or bump maps on the 3D mesh Faces that give the impression that there is far more detail to the model than was ever actually made by the modeller. So that you can download a very simple model with a few Faces and a Black and White image to recreate a very complex looking model in the game engine. Also because the 3D model is simpler it loads into system memory faster to be worked on by the CPU. The 3D mesh and Normals is simple, the view and light interactions is highly complex.

What the PBR system and height map does is tell the game engine to break each Face on the 3D model into smaller sections, then the black and white values of the image are applied to the 'height' of the vertices of the model at that new smaller subdivided Face to create finer detail. (Eg. 0 = black, the lowest point, 255 = White, the highest point, you can invert this).

Unfortunately everything that interacts with 'Normals' won't interact with the height map generated model, and the height map faked 3D is held in VRAM not the CPU/RAM where the physics engine is working to make everything appear to react to a solid object. This is why you can appear to sink into the ground in certain places in the game because the 3D mesh and height map generated imagery are not matching up, your feet are colliding with the underlying 3D mesh Face Normals not the image of the ground surface which because of the height map appears 'above' the mesh.

The way to get around this is to take the height map computations from the GPU that define the object shape that you actually see and treat them like an invisible skin - this is the Signed Distance Field - it's the distance between the 3D model surface Faces inside, and the height map outside. It doesn't match the 3D mesh with it's Normals exactly, it matches the height map representation that overlays the 3D mesh. It's calculating new Vertices and Faces 'On-The-Fly' via the CPU. Then you tell the physics engine running on the CPU thread that anything that touches that skin should behave as though it contacted the 'Normal' of the 3D mesh, and so it appears that you have a solid surface reacting as if in the real world but it is a temporary virtual skin created by the GPU.

There are 3D model programs that do this, and then you could save the 3D 'skin' as a more complex 3D mesh to export. If you didn't save the new 3D mesh it was lost when you closed that Work In Progress Window just like your game assets are lost when you close the game, or go somewhere away from that game asset. Here is a guy creating a complex 3D mesh terrain from a simple few Faces flat mesh. When he first makes the model it is 26.2mb, and 1000 Faces when he finally finishes it is 465mb and 91 million Faces, but you could download the 26mb flat plane model and image and recreate the island yourself exactly the same as his with Blender, On-The-Fly just the way the Lumberyard engine does with the simple 3D models and height maps it gets from CIG. What he takes nearly 10 minutes to do on one model mesh, the PBR renderer in Lumberyard does in about 1/1000th of a second on multiple meshes. The difference between the underlying Orange flat model he started with and the virtual grey terrain model of the Island of Capri is the Signed Distance Field.

Short version: A Signed Distance Field is a very detailed invisible temporary memory resident only skin wrapped loosely around a very simple downloaded 3D model which is informed by the underlying mesh 'Normals' reaction to the world around it.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Okay today's episode is literally about making the sparks bounce nicely. That's- that's it. They put this out with their heads held high.

new phone who dis posted:

I actually followed this thread for a long time so I know how deep the hole goes, I was just wondering if anything had happened in the last 2 years or so that was significant. I think the last time I was here an employee was dishing dirt and there was tickle porn.

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/_JR_DF_/status/1110300264924409857

Agony Aunt posted:

Its possible the Calders are leaning on them, but we have no proof.

If they are, this is good, because backers then can blame the Calders for rushing CIG if SQ42 turns out to be a buggy mess and terrible story, and then they don't have to blame CR.

If its late, CR simply absolves himself.

quote:

The control of the company and the board still firmly stays with myself as Chairman, CEO and majority shareholder.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Okay today's episode is literally about making the sparks bounce nicely. That's- that's it. They put this out with their heads held high.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Oh good there's another segment. They sent their audio team to loving sweden to record... chemistry noises? Guess you couldn't get those anywhere else, foley guys? Hope you enjoyed your paid vacation.

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/Wiborg1978/status/1157341619814916099
https://twitter.com/Wiborg1978/status/1157351187953397765

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

Forbes printed a story about how Chris is a disaster and Sandi stalked his wife and child and then strangled him resulting in a restraining order but then they got married anyway because love conquers all.

MedicineHut posted:

Hopefully it will not be that easy:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/16912-Letter-From-The-Chairman

Agony Aunt posted:

Take a look at what Gariott did when things went downhill with SoTA. He gave the CEO role to someone else.

Quavers posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

Oh good! A citizen has emerged to explain the signed depth fields to us.

Now I'm no 3D modeler but I'm pretty sure that 90% of what this guy is saying is so wrong that it's like stimpire.txt except for 3D modeling

quote:

Each Face has only one side which will display a texture or a physical property such as light reflection or hard surface collision. This is called the 'Normal'. Normals only work on one side of a Face. If you collide with a face from the wrong side you either get no result, or get unexpected results in the physics engine. The easiest way to think about it is: The Normal is the side you 'normally' interact with and see because 3D models are not solid inside.

quote:

Because 3D meshes are so resource hungry and would be massive files to download each time you download the game a more efficient version of showing a solid object or detail on an object called PBR was developed initially purely for complex light rays to interact with to create an illusion of detail, but later other interactions became possible. Physically Based Rendering - this takes place on GPU, not the CPU.

You can use images called height maps, or bump maps on the 3D mesh Faces that give the impression that there is far more detail to the model than was ever actually made by the modeller. So that you can download a very simple model with a few Faces and a Black and White image to recreate a very complex looking model in the game engine. Also because the 3D model is simpler it loads into system memory faster to be worked on by the CPU. The 3D mesh and Normals is simple, the view and light interactions is highly complex.

quote:

What the PBR system and height map does is tell the game engine to break each Face on the 3D model into smaller sections, then the black and white values of the image are applied to the 'height' of the vertices of the model at that new smaller subdivided Face to create finer detail. (Eg. 0 = black, the lowest point, 255 = White, the highest point, you can invert this).

Unfortunately everything that interacts with 'Normals' won't interact with the height map generated model, and the height map faked 3D is held in VRAM not the CPU/RAM where the physics engine is working to make everything appear to react to a solid object. This is why you can appear to sink into the ground in certain places in the game because the 3D mesh and height map generated imagery are not matching up, your feet are colliding with the underlying 3D mesh Face Normals not the image of the ground surface which because of the height map appears 'above' the mesh.

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

Forbes printed a story about how Chris is a disaster and Sandi stalked his wife and child and then strangled him resulting in a restraining order but then they got married anyway because love conquers all.

Colostomy Bag posted:

All I remember is the lamp.

Sarsapariller posted:

Oh good! A citizen has emerged to explain the signed depth fields to us.

Now I'm no 3D modeler but I'm pretty sure that 90% of what this guy is saying is so wrong that it's like stimpire.txt except for 3D modeling

stinch posted:

so are signed depth fields something they should have finished in the first 6 months of working on the engine but didn't due to incompetence? or a modern feature that now needs adding because their engine is from 2011?

Sarsapariller posted:

Oh good! A citizen has emerged to explain the signed depth fields to us.

Now I'm no 3D modeler but I'm pretty sure that 90% of what this guy is saying is so wrong that it's like stimpire.txt except for 3D modeling