The Star Citizen Thread v 3.0

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Stormprooter

Stormprooter
Neo-ST said:
Are you kidding me?
Any proof that this is what they're settling for regarding the flight model ?
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No proof - just a gut feeling. CR has stated that in his vision he wants a 'seamless' translation between controlling FPS and space flight with the mouse. The gimballed aiming is here to stay, the easy mouse mode is here to stay. The flight model may get some work done, but it will not be enough in my personal opinion - though I hope I'm wrong.

If push comes to shove, I intend to create a modded version where manual gimballed aiming is removed, and the easy mouse mode disabled for space flight/combat.
 

Monk

Monk
Stormprooter said:
No proof - just a gut feeling. CR has stated that in his vision he wants a 'seamless' translation between controlling FPS and space flight with the mouse. The gimballed aiming is here to stay, the easy mouse mode is here to stay. The flight model may get some work done, but it will not be enough in my personal opinion - though I hope I'm wrong.

If push comes to shove, I intend to create a modded version where manual gimballed aiming is removed, and the easy mouse mode disabled for space flight/combat.
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In that case, this is just Freelancer 2 in a new universe, right?

I'd be okay with this, though I can understand a lot of backer's frustration that were expecting a true stick focused space sim.

Fortunately, I've got ED for that.
 

Confucios

Banned
C
Pomerlaw said:
Holy hell that looks awesome.
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Indeed it looks, but at what cost? I fear for my GPU lol. Don't know if it was a lucky coincidence but it's amazing that when the smaller ship collides the bigger one gets it's front windows shattered and proceeds to explode... Ramming tactics confirmed!
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
Confucios said:
Was this crash staged?
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I actually have no idea. Everyone was up to their eyes in last minute problems, so I never watched the rehearsal playthroughs.
How taxing will this be on the performance?
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I dread to think.
What impressed you the most?
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I must be incredibly jaded, I can't think of anything that's impressed me. The sound design always takes me by surprise when I remember to put on my headset, though.
 

Confucios

Banned
C
Ben Parry said:
I must be incredibly jaded, I can't think of anything that's impressed me. The sound design always takes me by surprise when I remember to put on my headset, though.
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Not even the Gamescom Demo? Nyx Landing? :D I'm surprised because gfx always seem to steal the show and audio seems lacking compared with Elite for instance.

More Q's (ill try not to bore you so I'll try and ask some more interesting ones, feel free to [redacted] any of it):

- Since you worked heavily in ED which relies a lot of it's content in procedural generation, how do you think that will work out for StarCitizen/CryEngine?
- What are your thought's of the flight model in it´s current state? (It is my understanding that current manoeuvrability of the smaller ship´s is essential on the long term for them to evade / survive against bigger, more powerful, but less mobile ships.)
- Will you attend CitizenCom ? If yes, what are you looking forward the most?
- What´s your favourite ship/role in Elite/SC and why?
- Have you seen/tested the latest CryEngine Lightning techdemos? It seem´s that lightning is really the biggest differentiating factor between amazing gfx and epic gfx. Will Star Citizen aim for that quality in the future? Say 5 years?
- How big do you see the game being, we are sitting at 31GB´s with only a fraction of what is planned, will we need 500GB SSD´s? :D

That is all, for now :p
Thanks for your time once again.

edit-typos
 
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Ben Parry

Ben Parry
Sadly you've run way off the end of anything I can say sensible or useful things about. I'm going to CitizenCon but I really don't know anything about it. I'll probably corner some poor person and ramble about graphics at them.
Lighting is always important. In the last few years we had PBR finally be a big thing, I'm glad we jumped on that train with Elite before it left the station. Now we've got people opening the GI can of worms again. Besides CryEngine, have you seen the stuff Ready At Dawn did for The Order 1886? Probably totally incompatible with the kind of game we're making but very innovative. We keep throwing ideas around for how to lift the quality, it's just a case of finding something that'll handle dynamic scenes, vast areas of empty space, and won't eat all the memory or frame time while doing it.
 

Confucios

Banned
C
Ben Parry said:
Sadly you've run way off the end of anything I can say sensible or useful things about. I'm going to CitizenCon but I really don't know anything about it. I'll probably corner some poor person and ramble about graphics at them.
Lighting is always important. In the last few years we had PBR finally be a big thing, I'm glad we jumped on that train with Elite before it left the station. Now we've got people opening the GI can of worms again. Besides CryEngine, have you seen the stuff Ready At Dawn did for The Order 1886? Probably totally incompatible with the kind of game we're making but very innovative. We keep throwing ideas around for how to lift the quality, it's just a case of finding something that'll handle dynamic scenes, vast areas of empty space, and won't eat all the memory or frame time while doing it.
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It´s ok, I completely understand you can't respond to those since they kinda lead into deep waters! I had to ask anyway, sorry for being inconvenient :p

I've seen what RAD did with The Order but since the game was so narrow and cinematic heavy I couldn't really take it serious as a game experience, it was more like an interactive movie with very bland gameplay (Ryse shares the same problem). It mostly seemed that they focused all the resources (or only had that many to use) on the beauty of it and not enough on engaging gameplay!

In terms of gfx beauty / lightning it's the best done in gaming I would assume, but most of that lightning was pre-baked as they call it, right? Meaning that it was not dynamically being casted but pre-made and putted there? I cant really explain because I'm not knowledgeable about it enough.

Ill try and stick to normal questions from now on :p

- What´s the best thing about working in the making of Star Citizen?
- What's your biggest inspirations tech/gfx wise?
- What's the latest technical hurdle you manage to overcome?
- What's your favourite SC ship?
- Pirate or Bounty Hunter?

Thanks :)

Edited to add this cool ship segment:

[video=youtube;_Kr4Iq7ZuhQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kr4Iq7ZuhQ[/video]
 
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Viking

Viking
Confucios said:
In terms of gfx beauty / lightning it's the best done in gaming I would assume, but most of that lightning was pre-baked as they call it, right? Meaning that it was not dynamically being casted but pre-made and putted there? I cant really explain because I'm not knowledgeable about it enough.
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Do you mean in Star Citizen, or are you talking about another game?
 

SuperG

S
Ben Parry said:
Sure why not?
- The spread out team thing is interesting, but they're really slick about Skype meetings. Even intra-studio stuff gets handled via webcam where at Frontier we'd have conga'd round collecting people. I kind of miss the bug-conga though.
- Open development isn't my business or my problem, thankfully.
- On Elite I spent a lot of time team-running, now I'm fully coder again. It's a lot more relaxing and I don't have to argue with so many people.
- Understanding that I tend to express things in overly-negative terms: Cobra sees a lot of hasty development on top of a rock solid core. CryEngine sees more solid features, but the core is full of insane things I want to delete.
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That make sense, my guess that last point above is the difference between a full licencable game engine and inhouse one. Also because of this full licensable the engine is core software package on its own, need to be in more higher state as part off the package. And feature rich as these engines do compete and need to be flexible to support many games. Customers are other dev teams.
- Biggest challenges: SC - draw calls and memory budgets, ED - procedural gen
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Well my guess is that a heavy game like SC DirectX12 or Vulkan might be of some great value. For drawcalls and multithreaded feeding of the GPU. Huge gain on that drawcall bottleneck up to factor 10 to 20.
Memory budged well under DX12 and vulkan the dev get resposible for GPU memory managment. A big task but you can implement one that fit your engine and asset use best and the dev knows when resources can get free- ed.
Where nV and AMD driver team abstact memory management in DX11 asumes and guess in more genercway.
- Single player: Shockingly I've not actually played it. Most of the graphics team is UK based, so we've got our fingers in everything. Last thing I was working on was that blurry thing that happens in Quantum Drive (it's just there for effect, not to hide a loading screen)
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I looking forward to the SIngleplayer.
 

Dr Wookie

Dr Wookie
SuperG said:
Well my guess is that a heavy game like SC DirectX12 or Vulkan might be of some great value. For drawcalls and multithreaded feeding of the GPU. Huge gain on that drawcall bottleneck up to factor 10 to 20.
Memory budged well under DX12 and vulkan the dev get resposible for GPU memory managment. A big task but you can implement one that fit your engine and asset use best and the dev knows when resources can get free- ed.
Where nV and AMD driver team abstact memory management in DX11 asumes and guess in more genercway.

I looking forward to the SIngleplayer.
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Depending on your card, it doesn't look like Direct X 12 does much other than level the playing field. I can't remember where I found the comparison I refer to, it was linked in the comments section of an article, sorry! The reported results showed that Nvidia cards were sometimes a bit faster with DX12, others slower (probably due to lack of familiarity). But here's the thing... The ATI cards with DX12 showed speeds comparable to the Nvidia cards at their fastest, DX12 or DX11. Sometimes ATI was very slightly faster, sometimes, Nvidia was very slightly faster, but the differences were so small that they could be down to random uncertainties.

I don't know anything about Vulkan.

I'm pretty sure Moore's law helps mak SC easier and cheaper to build and run as it gets further delayed, another reason why delay is not itself a bad thing, but I am ever less convinced that anyone would upgrade their rig just to play it.

Also, Hi Ben Parry! I remember your ED work from back in the day, and it's been great to hear your thoughts. I have to say that the fuzzy drive was my favorite part of the Gamescom demo too :)
 
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Viking

Viking
I read an article in a game magazine (don't remember which one at the top of my head) where they explained pre-baked shadows and stuff and showed some image examples. I got the impression that this phenomenon was common in console games becaue it was less taxing on the hardware. This is of course important when you want to cater to the least common dominitor because you want to sell more copies to all platforms.

Star Citizen is a PC only game and would never do such a thing. CIG don't have to think about making the game run on consoles, mobile phones, or tablets/pads.
 

ZeeWolf

ZeeWolf
Viking said:
I read an article in a game magazine (don't remember which one at the top of my head) where they explained pre-baked shadows and stuff and showed some image examples. I got the impression that this phenomenon was common in console games becaue it was less taxing on the hardware. This is of course important when you want to cater to the least common dominitor because you want to sell more copies to all platforms.

Star Citizen is a PC only game and would never do such a thing. CIG don't have to think about making the game run on consoles, mobile phones, or tablets/pads.
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They clearly haven't optimised everything yet. Seeing those ship on rail assets stack up behind the building in the Scott Manley video is telling. They should be removed from the playing field. I really wonder how much things will change as more game logic has to be integrated with the maps & assets they have now. In fact quite a few PC games get developed without any special consideration to consoles, this is a bit of a fallacy passed around by PC gamers. The console port can be considered later as a separate build and the Cry Engine is perfectly scalable and able to deal with that. You just make a new build targeted at console hardware and optimise it towards the platform. It doesn't have to affect the original build. Lots of PC games have been ported to consoles long after the PC version has stopped selling high units. Where the problems have occurred giving developers a bad name tends to be porting consoles games to the PC later or when a title is geared towards consoles at the same time which is what happened with the Witcher and Watchdogs.

When Chris Roberts said that supporting a console version would hinder PC development a sensible person would assume he was talking about developing it alongside the PC version. He could still do a console port later as he did with Wing Commander and Starlancer, however he won't because the fans will go nuts and his target audience has always been affluent PC owners since the early nineties.
 

SuperG

S
Dr Wookie said:
Depending on your card, it doesn't look like Direct X 12 does much other than level the playing field. I can't remember where I found the comparison I refer to, it was linked in the comments section of an article, sorry! The reported results showed that Nvidia cards were sometimes a bit faster with DX12, others slower (probably due to lack of familiarity). But here's the thing... The ATI cards with DX12 showed speeds comparable to the Nvidia cards at their fastest, DX12 or DX11. Sometimes ATI was very slightly faster, sometimes, Nvidia was very slightly faster, but the differences were so small that they could be down to random uncertainties.

I don't know anything about Vulkan.

I'm pretty sure Moore's law helps mak SC easier and cheaper to build and run as it gets further delayed, another reason why delay is not itself a bad thing, but I am ever less convinced that anyone would upgrade their rig just to play it.

Also, Hi Ben Parry! I remember your ED work from back in the day, and it's been great to hear your thoughts. I have to say that the fuzzy drive was my favorite part of the Gamescom demo too :)
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In essence AMD mantle is donated to Chronos group so Vulkan is Mantle evolution to more wide crossplatform API.
DX12 is Microsoft huge mutation of Mantle. Where Chonos group express there thanks to AMD publicly. Microsoft does not. But the documentation wil become more their own then it originaly was. As it will be to all microSoft crossplatform limited.
For DirectX12 which has a Ashynchronic Compute capable architecture which fit a heavy multithreaded low overhead API best.
Maxwel2 latest is 1 GFX and 31 compute units. So it can go wild with cuda or OpenCL or DX compute. Like PhysX ( cuda )
But GCN 1.1 and 1.2 can do 1 GFX and 8 compute. But this comes in 8. This architecture is made for parallel computing the render task. How ever it does not go well for a API that is to limited in parralel computing task.


What this means is that in some situations AMD GPU scale very well.
In demo game nV performed twice as good in DX11 but got overrun in DX12.
It is posible depending on game that performance differences could be extreem.
Because nV architecture has ROP's and testelation uperhand. In also big way.

I don't think when Dice and some ask for low level API that AMD started. Based on GCN1.1 it seams like a masterplan. And GCN 1.1 and up is the hardware side of it.

Most game will aim for mainstream. Which means support DX11 or even DX9. DX12 might be optional target.
How ever with option to do insane lots of drawcalles. Games can not. If it needs to run on DX11 the game design and drawcall budged is limited. So gain in DX12 might not be the full potentional.
How ever a special heavy drawcall using port is possible. A lot more state changes more variation in resources.
Some games can put it to good use.

I waiting to upgrade to where nV and AMD role out there 14 or 16 nm GPU. It double dieshrink. Lot of performance gain is possible.
 
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