Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
- Thread starter Yaffle
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I once tried to make a pen and paper to computer transition of a board game. I learned C+ or (++?), encountered libaries and we all had graphical UI with mouse at that time. I couldn't figure how to determine if a click of mouse is within a predetermined shape on the screen (country, province, hex) and so I can relate when CIG can't figure when NPC fall under surface.Got some interesting goss on how planet tech works (or doesn't), which speaks to this kind of thing. Will write up in a while.
It's still weird that they don't just cull all NPCs below the surface tho...
The 10th ship sale event of 2024 has begun
Sales events of 2024 so far
Jumptown 2.1
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
Sales events of 2024 so far
- In Case You Missed It
- Siege Of Orison
- Valentines (Coramor)
- Chinese New Year (Red Festival)
- Free Fly
- Capture The Idris
- Jumptown
- St Patrick's Day (Stella Fortuna)
- Overdrive with F7C mk2
- Jumptown again
Is it me or are the names in SC just corny? Jumptown, Grim Hex etc.
Jumptown is a sad story. It began as a community-driven conflict zone when players found an unmarked outpost that sold drugs at low low prices and it's now yet another ship sales event.
Remember, Chris has been thinking about making this game since he was a wide-eyed teenager watching Star Wars.
The 10th ship sale event of 2024 has begun
Jumptown 2.1
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.robertsspaceindustries.com
Sales events of 2024 so far
- In Case You Missed It
- Siege Of Orison
- Valentines (Coramor)
- Chinese New Year (Red Festival)
- Free Fly
- Capture The Idris
- Jumptown
- St Patrick's Day (Stella Fortuna)
- Overdrive with F7C mk2
- Jumptown again
Funny regarding how they recycle the same few events time and again throughout the year. I remember when their magic systems would make dynamic events on the fly and no events would be repeated. That was part of the pitches they made over the years and backers lapped up. That was the dream. The reality? Same few events repeated time and again throughout the year, each with a ship sale attached.
And backers still lap it up.
Hot Gossip
Some more thoughts from our friendly CIG dev:
(Although in fairness some of these things are outside of their technical wheelhouse. This is their understanding of how it all works, and the repercussions they saw.)
Some more thoughts from our friendly CIG dev:
- The planet surfaces are shaders, not meshes. The terrain is recreated every server tick. Terrain modifiers are done in real time rather than using sculpted meshes which are manually baked in.
- This has some benefits for real time base building / altering the terrain. But there are downsides...
- It's far from optimized, causes entities to fall through the surface, and has issues with mismatches between appearance and collision.
- Regions can't be designated / locked off. Changes to global terrain settings lead to settlements / derelicts having the ground change beneath them etc.
- The AI nav mesh also can't be sub-divided, so AI can walk off across the entire planet...
- RASTAR's core objective was to allow previews of placements on terrain and automatic adaptation to future terrain changes. It never really worked on those fronts.
- Spawn closets were buggy on deployment, but RASTAR added extra issues. The settlement spawn closets are extra flakey due to this.
- A 'kill volume' to clean up NPCs under planetary surfaces has been requested many times.
- Art Director Ian Leyland emphasised that SC is a 'live service game' and that buggy deployments have to be accepted and can't be dwelled on. Devs just have to move on.
- Devs have been told 'server meshing is coming' for multiple years in a row, but the missions/levels deployed at the time were not designed to account for higher player counts. The attitude was: 'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it'.
- The inverse kinematics used for the unified avatar have various drawbacks in a PvP / MMO game. Realtime calculations can go awry, need to be networked, and tend to make gameplay less snappy. (There's also an argument that they don't provide gameplay metrics on the animation side, and so don't bring any standardization / structure to the gameplay design).
(Although in fairness some of these things are outside of their technical wheelhouse
. This is their understanding of how it all works, and the repercussions they saw.)That really comes with a "to a certain extent" clause. If its a live service game, players will generally be tolerant of a low level of bugs, as long as fixes are quick in coming. Its the players who are impacted, not the devs, and basically they are then saying the players just need to deal with it, move on.
We've all seen the fallout of FD's buggy releases as well as in other games we play. A certain level of tolerance is there with most players, but if your average non-invested player was trying out SC and had to face what backers have to face, they'd throw their keyboard through the monitor. If a different game dev told their players they had to live with buggy releases, they'd be flamed to the bone.
That's why decent game devs build a sold foundation first before letting players play the game. Not that CIG can really do that, because they need those sweet sweet ship sales to keep themselves afloat.
Corpos are taking all our fun!
Maybe he should have seen the doctor to correct that wide eyedness. (wide goes as laterally mighty in my lexicon. Left-right mighty. The "wide eyes" do open vertically, so I just pretend it's an eyesight failure of his. #whenagermanexplainsenglish)
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Come on, it's an art director. What does he really know about making a game. He designs ships and art, not user experience. Fair to say that he's likely the lesser competent person to make a statement on gameplay.
CI(G?),s dev process is like a big homework project for most kids. There's too much time to worry about working hard on it, until there isn't and it's a mad rush to get something done to turn in for a grade.
If as Art Director he's somewhat responsible for the new godawful fake-hologram UI that's practically unreadable, then hhee ddeeffiinniitteellyy hhaass zzeerroo cclluuee aabboouutt mmaakkiinngg ggoooodd uusseerr eexxppeerriieennccee
It's quite the conundrum for them. For the all the complaints leveled at Frontier, not all unjustified I may add to be fair, they have provided a pretty solid platform for Elite Dangerous. I mean, think that the entire galaxy, with thousands of factions/BGS/players, all interacting with each other has been running for ten years already, had major updates and additions, and the technical problems are utterly trivial when stacked against what a Star Citizen player has to contend with at pretty much any given point during a play session. Frontier's main concern and problems with Elite aren't so much technical but resources and I'll keep saying it, give Frontier half of that $600m and see what we'd have, which is still 3x what Elite has earned up till 2020 according to wikipedia. But, muh ship interiors and shiny ships for mortgage payments...
But...but...they said they'd take their time and release a proper working game...not a half finished mess. 
12 years into a 2 year delivery...