The Star Citizen Thread v 3.0
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I believe Nowak is talking about this guy (Marco Corbetta), he was the lead developer on Far Cry and now works for CIG (I have no idea how much he was involved with the large world stuff though).
Mu77ley
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Toumal's post explains perfectly why: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=57576&p=2758836&viewfull=1#post2758836
It's a hidden loading screen behind an on-rails cutscene.
That's what scaling is. They scale EVERYTHING except ships/characters and buildings,etc. by 1:100.
Have you got a source for the size of the gas giant?
That's not a loading screen, it's delays caused by the match-making. They go away if you play in Solo.
That cog sculpture, several interlocking cogs that aren't connected and won't work together if connected. Is that a representation of Star Citizen?! ;-)
Anyway, more seriously, not encouraging from a single player game view point, especially as it looks like it will just be a FPS with occasional space ships.
Mu77ley
Volunteer Moderator
Sometimes I think they've outsourced the realism research side of things to these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7yfLwMds5c
I already replied to Toumals post (in the very same post you just replied to, so I doubt that you missed that).
And no it's not a hidden loading screen behind an on-rails cutscene. The statement was not in relation to planet landing, it was in relation to having adjacent maps and seamlessly transitioning between them (Instrument asked the below question because of the discussion about star system map sizes, not planet landings):
Instrument: "CIG has always spoke about building SC in instances any reason you can not have 2 maps next to each other to make a map twice the size and then repeat this to get the size map that you want?"
Regarding scaling, Toumal specifically said that they weren't simulating the proportions of planets, my comment was only related to that and not any of the other aspects of scaling. Here's a reference for the gas giant size.
loading screens going away in solo, doesn't change the fact that they are still there in open (and personally I have no interest in solo).
It's not a loading screen though.
"hidden" loading screen, call it what you want, it's obviously not a seamless transition.
Well I finally got in, not that I've tried too much to be honest, but still. Yes, with max graphics it looks nice, other than that, what can you say.
Ok look. Streaming and "large worlds" are two different things. Streaming means you still have small maps (8k x 8k x 8k), but there's a way to transition between them with the game rendering something while the other map is loading. That's actually what we've seen in the videos by CIG: They start their hyperdrive thingy and you get a motion-blurred effect that conceals the fact that you're actually not in the old map anymore, while the new map loads. They let some basic shapes fly by that look like planets, and then have them end up at the same spot as the assets in the target map. Obviously that has nothing to do with simulating space travel, and everything to do with obfuscating a load screen. I believe that's what they added to Cryengine, and it's not hard to do if you are a source level licensee, which they are.
Large worlds however implies that the max. size of each playable area is large. And even if you don't subscribe to this nomenclature, and see double precision as something else, the fact remains that SC exhibits no attribute of having a double precision coordinate system at this point in time. I don't believe they have the resources to do that task right now - and in fact, since their design plans call for rooms in space, I bet they never will.
You can have a perfectly fun space shooter action game, no problem. I'm not saying the game will suck because of this. But the difference between a transition effect in ED and the ones in SC is that in Star Citizen it's something that changes how you perceive the world. Space feels small that way. And worse, you don't have control during these transitions.
The only real "offender" in ED is the hyperspace jump animation. Technically, there's nothing that prevents Frontier from replacing that with a less generic travel depiction, one that uses the real star positions, letting players experience the shift in constellations. But you know what? ED's supercruise more than makes up for it, it's the greatest thing in space games since sliced bread because that's a really well done application of computer simulation. You get to experience the scale of star systems, live, while in full control of your craft. Space travel like this may well become reality at one point, but the scale of things is already highly realistic and allows ED to let you experience things at any point in the star system.
I'm not a fan of the delay in the transition to and from supercruise, I still hope there's going to be improvements made. But damn, that's levels above what SC is doing. Does SC "need" that? Honestly, if it wants to be the BDSSE, then yes it should. If it's so realistic as SC fans are so fond to say, then it should be held to a similar standard. Better graphics alone aren't gonna make me play Freelancer all over again.
As you can tell I'm really disappointed that SC is turning out to be more of a action/social game than about actual space flight. All this talk about it not "needing" this or that I find as irritating as people claiming that Elite doesn't "need" more depth. It does, and it does.
Nowak never said that streaming (i.e. segmented worlds) and large worlds (i.e. change to DP) was the same thing, he merely said that the people in question worked on both. Also I'm fairly certain that the quantum drive sequence in the multi-crew demo was not a hidden map transition, I believe it was simply a fancy shader effect, but one that kept you within the same map (remember the maps are 100 million km across, whereas the distance traveled was only about 3000 km).
And as far as the transition to and from supercruise, I have no idea how you can possibly claim that it is levels above what SC is doing (quantum drive), when SC has completely seamless transitions in and out of QD (at least as far as I can tell, based on the multi-crew demo).
I think Toumal was actually referring to Elite's supercruise design as being more impressive than SC's quantum drive design by virtue of adding scale to the local star system as well as additional gameplay mechanics.
That would be fair enough, supercruise definitely has advantages over SC's quantum drive, but the in/out transitions certainly doesn't appear to be amongst those.
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When there's a delay due to network limitations, calling it a loading screen or a "hidden" loading screen is rather ridiculous
When there's a delay due to network limitations, calling it a loading screen or a "hidden" loading screen is rather ridiculous
When there's a predictable delay due to network delays every single time, and the developer goes out of their way to make a custom animation to mask it, then no it is not ridiculous to call it a "hidden" loading screen.
Well the implication of multiple statements of several people was that cryengine was now 1) double precision, 2) supporting map streaming (maybe CIG's branch does, but the main branch does not), and 3) SC "doesn't need those things anyway". It's all rather vague, and the tenor of the message is to just shut up and be quiet, SC is gonna be awesome. Which is fine in church, but not in the videogame business.
You're making an assumption which you can't possibly back up. I also doubt you have personal experience with CE since your figures are those stated by CIG, which are artificial figures and are the result of downscaling.
You have not read my post. Read it again. You're not in control. There's no actual star system. You're on a rollercoaster ride. You can't visit the rings of a planet unless that's a "map" that SC gives you. Also it's not to scale by a long shot, Quantum drive gives you 1/5th of c, according to the official wiki. Yet travel times are just a few seconds.
The upside is that there's never gonna be a Hutton Orbital in SC.
The downside is that there's never gonna be a Hutton Orbital in SC.
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True. And I am not happy with that either. Still, it's very minor compared to, say, the on-rails landing sequences of SC, or the fullscreen flashing effects obscuring a complete change of scenery like in the planetary landing demos of SC - which I hope are gonna be completely replaced, though I don't get my hopes up.
You mean there's a different animation when you exit supercruise in open than there is in solo? I honestly haven't noticed.
Also there's predictable delay in EVERYTHING you do in a multiplayer game. There's different ways to make up for it depending on what part of the gameplay it is, but you're the first person I've seen to universally call them loading screens.
No
Its been confirmed multiple times by CIG that the gamescom demo was staged on one DP map. You can hop in and out of "warp" in any direction and fly on normal engines all the way which took them 2.5hrs.
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1) No one ever said cryengine in general supported DP (as far as I can tell), that is obviously something unique to SC, so no idea where you got that from.
2) I honestly don't know if streaming (as in segmented worlds) is fully implemented in SC yet. Btw. when you say main branch, what are you talking about? the EaaS branch or the licensee branch?
3) Eerm, as far as I can tell the one making this claim was yourself (Toumal: "Not that any of this matters because AFAIK map streaming is not available yet, and if you do double precision you don't really need them anymore."), so if you're getting confused about that then I don't really know what to say.
Where all making assumptions that we can't back up, since none of us has access to the actual code, or do you actually have some evidence for your assumption that CIG is doing a map transition during the QD sequence?
And it's funny how you question my experience, when you're quite clearly the one confused here. The large map sizes in SC has nothing to do with downscaling and everything to do with them shifting to DP (i.e. large worlds), the only other way they could scale the maps within cryengine would be to increase the MPU value, and I have seen no indication what so ever that they have changed it from the default value of 2.
The only somewhat "artificial" number would be the 100 million km one, since CIG has "artificially" reduced the size of the map from the possible 8.8 billion km down to this (since they simply don't need anymore than that for 1:100 scale), but I doubt that is what you're referring to (CIG doing less than what they are actually capable of within the engine).
I never said you weren't in control, and again I believe that you are wrong about there being no star system during QD (still waiting for your evidence to back up that assumption). I simply said that the transitions for QD were better in SC than they are for SC in Elite, and the quoted line of yours clearly indicated that you thought otherwise. I never said that the distance travelled with QD was to scale, so no idea why you bring that up. QD gives you up to 0.2c. Here's the quote from the wiki, with relevant highlight (although personally I wouldn't rely too much on the wiki in general):
I agree fully on this one.
Actually I have no idea if there's a different animation for open and solo, Mu77ley was the one that said that there was, but I never played solo, so I can only speak for open.
And yes there are delays for everything in games. The thing is that these delays fall in two categories 1) Those that can be hidden by streaming in the relevant data in the background, whilst still allowing the player to fully interact with the game, and 2) Those that can for one reason or another not be streamed in seamlessly, and as such the game has to be interrupted until the data is ready, this latter scenario resulting in a loading screen (or the game simply freezing up). A "hidden" loading screen is then when one tries to hide the delay in the second scenario, usually by taking away partial control from the player and playing a semi-canned animation (Elevators are commonly used for this in FPS games for instance).
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In the 10chairman thing Troels linked there are more details related with the loading/streaming tech that might explain it a bit better:
"– you are orbiting a gas giant that is 182,000 km in diameter with 3 or 4 moons which will take 2.5 hours to go between the moons at top speed in the fastest ship; because of this they will have the quantum drive quick jump to get between stuff but it’s all in the same area/same level so no loading screens.
– Been actively working on the large world which is bigger precision for much larger distances – moved to 64 bit for all their 3D positions, blended with the zone system which is a dynamic container system, meaning you can have a zone inside a zone inside a zone which is a great way for sorting through the data for rendering needs and updates. Helps deal with the fact that they will have huge spaces with nothing and then areas with a lot of very dense information.
– The big challenge with Star Citizen is you have incredible fidelity but you also have incredible scale; no one has ever tackled that properly so they’ve built the core to handle that and the background streaming stuff.
– Will see some of the benefits of the streaming stuff with the 1.1.5 which will include 16 players which is double than before.
– It should have hardly any glitches when people are respawning because they are dynamically streaming and caching in a new way which will allow this big seamless world.
– The Frankfurt studio have people who built this engine and they have allowed us to do stuff you haven’t seen in a normal 3D engine.
– The other big technical thing they are working on is the backend moving to 32 players for FPS, looking at multiple servers slaved together in the cloud to continue to improve this.
– There is nothing that they don’t have a plan for. There is nothing on the roadmap that isn’t doable. Just comes down to how long it takes to get it done, sometimes it takes longer than they like.
– “What do I say [to people who think this is impossible?]” ********."
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"– you are orbiting a gas giant that is 182,000 km in diameter with 3 or 4 moons which will take 2.5 hours to go between the moons at top speed in the fastest ship; because of this they will have the quantum drive quick jump to get between stuff but it’s all in the same area/same level so no loading screens.
– Been actively working on the large world which is bigger precision for much larger distances – moved to 64 bit for all their 3D positions, blended with the zone system which is a dynamic container system, meaning you can have a zone inside a zone inside a zone which is a great way for sorting through the data for rendering needs and updates. Helps deal with the fact that they will have huge spaces with nothing and then areas with a lot of very dense information.
– The big challenge with Star Citizen is you have incredible fidelity but you also have incredible scale; no one has ever tackled that properly so they’ve built the core to handle that and the background streaming stuff.
– Will see some of the benefits of the streaming stuff with the 1.1.5 which will include 16 players which is double than before.
– It should have hardly any glitches when people are respawning because they are dynamically streaming and caching in a new way which will allow this big seamless world.
– The Frankfurt studio have people who built this engine and they have allowed us to do stuff you haven’t seen in a normal 3D engine.
– The other big technical thing they are working on is the backend moving to 32 players for FPS, looking at multiple servers slaved together in the cloud to continue to improve this.
– There is nothing that they don’t have a plan for. There is nothing on the roadmap that isn’t doable. Just comes down to how long it takes to get it done, sometimes it takes longer than they like.
– “What do I say [to people who think this is impossible?]” ********."
edit-filtered the profanity
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