The Star Citizen Thread v 4

[Aleksej]

How does that nullify what milligna said? Do you disagree that you need to plan your game for VR from the very beginning? There's practices that your game has to have in order for it to be actually enjoyable in VR.
Mentioning FD's problems with the new SDK is totally irrelevant.

Support was promised at release, not during the development stages. For the moment VR release is going to happen 1-2 months. SQ42 is going to be released this year at best. So what they need to do is to have VR release by that time. They still have time.

I think that implementing support now, when everything is constantly changing and is not finalized would be a waste of resources.

 

[milligna]

Should I provide you an example of the developer that has implemented VR support more than two years ago, however, ran into issues last year in Autumn?

Sure, but that developer also incorporated VR into the core of the design right out of the alpha gate and most everything bar some of the galaxy map is built around it so well that it's one of the benchmark VR experiences. Their work will be rewarded when the consumer versions are released, temporary hitches getting direct mode to play nicely are just that - temporary hitches. They did the hard work and will have a lovely VR game ready for consumers. I expect them to support 1.0 just fine, and it's AMAZING already on the Vive. Folks are in for a REAL treat, let me tell you.

It's not a waste of resources to plan for VR if you claim to be providing VR support. Trying to compare SC's floundering VR promises to a company that has done pioneering, almost orgasm-inducing work in the field doesn't make SC look better. I mean, seriously -- do you think anyone at Frontier regrets having rock solid VR implementation early on and wishes they put if off till the consumer version was released? The SDK roadbump was just a small one, it already had plenty of workarounds and I'm sure they understand the importance of properly supporting 1.0.

Support was promised at release, not during the development stages.

That's not true, tho. Support WAS promised during the development stages. A year ago CR claimed DK2 support was a few weeks away. I can dig up more promises and citations if you need it. It's REALLY hard to spin all this in any way that makes CIG look good, much less makes Frontier look bad. Now, shall we stick to Star Citizen? As so often when Elite: Dangerous is alluded to, SC tends to suffer.

When it comes to VR, it isn't even a contest. It's a bloodbath.

 

[MaxLexandre]

Please don't turn the topic about speaking about each other, yet about the content. Or attacks could go both ways, and yeah...

You're saying you can throw in any old broken feature and that covers 80%? Even if i needs retrofitting with someone brand new later on?
I don't think this is good application of a principle intended to give a rough estimate of completion.
If that's how you're going to do it, then don't bother, the estimate is going to be totally meaningless.

The 80% should be the mechanic and functionality, for example the new EVA tested on 2.1 PTU was those 80%, working, all fine, but it had bugs and merge problems with animations, ship's physics grids and things like that, so the left 20% are really all those work on bug-fixing and polish they have done, and we should be seeing it soon, on the 2.2 PTU. There's features on SC, that were done to those 80% and didn't work out, got rewritten, and that was indeed the current EVA that's going away.

Even what i do when it comes to php development and things like that, the last 20% are really the hardest ones, where all the bugs and other bigger challenges with the implementation pop in, to a point it just doesn't work and need to start again, so i can't honestly say what they go through is something that isn't part of what development is, it is to some people when on SC this things clearly transpire more.

Have they said how will they implement VR in SQ42 (or is that a no no given all the TPV and movie stuff)?

It was shared the intent to do it, not details about how will they do it, if on SQ42. I'm not sure how games that do support VR that also use this style with the cameras, cut-scenes and so on, work with VR.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Have they said how will they implement VR in SQ42 (or is that a no no given all the TPV and movie stuff)?

Have they said how they will implement it in game with all the animations that take over the camera?

I thought all that stuff was meant to be a non starter for VR?

Definitely - I remember seeing some VR Best Practices video where those points were explicitly named and mentioned as things you never want in a VR experience. I'm not sure if it was a Steam or Oculus dev talking about it (or maybe nobody of any import at all), I'll see if I can find it again. It was quite informative.

However, as far as SC is concerned - VR doesn't matter. VR takes away all the fidelity and immersion that CR wants you to experience. He wants you to watch his movie - not be a participant in it.

 

[ianw]

The whole other alpha thing is just misdirection.

It's the fact that it's alpha 4 years in (some believers are still touting the pre pre pre alpha line) and given that SQ42 is the first focus for release the PU will likely still be alpha 5 or 6 years in.

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Definitely - I remember seeing some VR Best Practices video where those points were explicitly named and mentioned as things you never want in a VR experience. I'm not sure if it was a Steam or Oculus dev talking about it (or maybe nobody of any import at all), I'll see if I can find it again. It was quite informative.

However, as far as SC is concerned - VR doesn't matter. VR takes away all the fidelity and immersion that CR wants you to experience. He wants you to watch his movie - not be a participant in it.

So essentially to make it a non puking VR experience is not a trivial re-programming issue then?

Even if it didn't run up against the movie plan.

 

[bitstorm]

Okay, so we all know alphas have bugs, yet we are on this thread using the fact one alpha has bugs to justify how bad and incompetent the developer and its code is?

There you go again, generalising.

Listen up.

Not all bugs are the same, some bugs may exist deep in the underlying frameworks causing all sorts of issues, these bugs may be an absolute nightmare to fix and have large repercussions since other software systems have been built on top of them, and more systems on top of those, and so on. You fix the underlying bug then everything sitting on top of that breaks and has to be reworked.

A contrived example, an issue affecting collisions may mean that every single object in the game has to be reworked, fixing the issue may turn out to be trivial but fixing the repercussions may be a huge project in itself.

Some bugs may be easy fixes, some bugs may have few dependencies so that fixing these will not affect much anything else, another contrived example being a typo on mission text, or the wrong reward for a mission.

Not all bugs are the same, please stop assuming they are.

That CIG are having to rebuild much of CryEngine, that they're working at that level, and that we are still seeing many many issues there sets off alarm bells.

I'm not even sure if it's applicable, but using your Pareto principle, when you think the underlying engine is 80% complete, well then you have 20% left to do and that 20% will take 80% of the overall dev time.

edit: You've just said you work developing software, so you know all this anyway... sigh.

 

[MaxLexandre]

SC is not one alpha for 4 years, if we talk about what's Dog-fighting, ships, etc... SC is one Alpha for a Year and Half. --'

Or 2 years and half if you count from the Hangar Release.

 

[Asp Explorer]

So essentially to make it a non puking VR experience is not a trivial re-programming issue then?

Basically yup. To make it a non puking VR experience is going to be an absolute whole heap of work. Real work. Not ship sales or coffee machines.

I'm still trying to find the exact video I'm looking for - but this is at least a start of what is involved.

[video]https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=vr+best+practices&&view=detail&mid=0989E946E6ED0263B8D20989E946E6ED0263B8D2&FORM=VRDGAR[/video]
[video]https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=vr+best+practices&&view=detail&mid=93ECC7E7127049B6F89493ECC7E7127049B6F894&FORM=VRDGAR[/video]

 

[swfanatic717]

Support was promised at release, not during the development stages. For the moment VR release is going to happen 1-2 months. SQ42 is going to be released this year at best. So what they need to do is to have VR release by that time. They still have time.

I think that implementing support now, when everything is constantly changing and is not finalized would be a waste of resources.

I kind of feel like if they want VR support ready in 10 months, they should probably start implementing it soon, if not now...

The alternative of course is to not implement VR support anytime in the near future as you suggest, and simply delay SQ42 further back to 2017, or to a time when it is actually convenient for them to implement VR. Much easier and more convenient, right?

 

[MaxLexandre]

There you go again, generalising.

Listen up.

Not all bug are the same, and they are working on the bugs and issues that should be the priorities, not bugs that affect specific features on SC that still have to be worked out that are not really major.

As the focus is the Persistent Universe, that's where the focus is, on the core mechanics of the game, and that's where clearly things have been improving.

Now what was done on this thread was "look at this bug on the Hangar" and following one attack to how bad SC's development and its code is. Like that was a major bug affecting your gameplay, it's one hangar specific bug that does not affect the rest of the game's gameplay.

 

[ianw]

SC is not one alpha for 4 years, if we talk about what's Dog-fighting, ships, etc... SC is one Alpha for a Year and Half. --'

Or 2 years and half if you count from the Hangar Release.

I think you misunderstood - or maybe I worded it badly - I shall clarify.

When I say four years in I didn't mean it's been in alpha for 4 years - I meant it's still in alpha after 4 years has passed - and will still likely be after 5 or 6 years.

 

[Rolan]

By "unfair" I meant that you, like Max, were overgeneralizing things in claiming that all bugs were equal to each other and misrepresenting other people's arguments by claiming that SC's alpha is no worse than any other alpha in terms of quality because all alphas have bugs, even though a lot of them only have minor ones that are only noticeable under scrutiny of the game's functionality.

I think KSP is a reasonable example of a prerelease alpha with no major isssues. Like SC, KSP is notable for spending a long time in a pre-release alpha state. Unlike SC however, most of KSP worked fine throughout that period as new features were added. You don't have to like that answer but it's the truth.

Please don't overgeneralize and misrepresent other people's words in future.

Overgeneralized? Me?
Bugs in the Hangar used to attack PU development... but I was overgeneralizing...

xD OK

I did not say in any moment that all bugs are equal to each other. Quoting you again, Please don't overgeneralize and misrepresent other people's words in future, it's an Alpha, there are bugs and what I'm not gonna do is to attack a game using other Alphas of other different games.
I'm not a fanatic, I'm not gonna hate or defend this game to death. And what I'm not gonna do is criticize a bug in an alpha of a game in development, not for appearing there.
I can criticize many things of this game, not that bugs appear in the alpha stage, I can say what I want if they don't fix them but saying that this game is the worst or that the money is not being used because of bugs...

 

[ianw]

I kind of feel like if they want VR support ready in 10 months, they should probably start implementing it soon, if not now...

The alternative of course is to not implement VR support anytime in the near future as you suggest, and simply delay SQ42 further back to 2017, or to a time when it is actually convenient for them to implement VR. Much easier and more convenient, right?

Well yeah - it just seems crazy having to redo stuff again to accommodate VR when it was being talked about openly in 2013. Back then my reading of the situ was that SC was going to have it and ED were strangely quiet on it leading me to think it wasn't coming to ED.

 

[MaxLexandre]

Haven't Ben Parry already said on this thread several times about they're not going to "redo stuff again" to get VR implemented?

 

[ianw]

Haven't Ben Parry already said on this thread several times about they're not going to "redo stuff again" to get VR implemented?

So they'll leave all the animations and TPV stuff in then?

 

[MaxLexandre]

So they'll leave all the animations and TPV stuff in then?

No, but they don't have to redo them because of it do they? They need to have is yes, one VR implementation of it so it wouldn't run into the issues it currently does, and not changing it to all the players.

 

[Tuub t Tute]

Haven't Ben Parry already said on this thread several times about they're not going to "redo stuff again" to get VR implemented?

I seem to recall him saying something like that. But does that mean

A) Nothing needs to be re-done to make VR work, or
B) VR is not happening because they are not re-doing things to make it work? :/

 

[Asp Explorer]

So they'll leave all the animations and TPV stuff in then?

Having already watched one person puke all over himself in a DK2 - I really hope not!

However, I expect those kinds of "reaction videos" to become very popular

 

[ianw]

No, but they don't have to redo them because of it do they? They need to have is yes, one VR implementation of it so it wouldn't run into the issues it currently does, and not changing it to all the players.

Well I went back and had a quick look.

"To be fair, adding solid VR to an engine is also way harder than people expect it to be..."

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=203785&p=3188027&viewfull=1#post3188027

That was the only one I could find.

EDIT - the link didn't make it in

 

[Tuub t Tute]

Having already watched one person puke all over himself in a DK2 - I really hope not!

However, I expect those kinds of "reaction videos" to become very popular

Barfageddon?