The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Artemus]

You have nothing to worry about. Being made fun of here is something of a badge of honour. It can indeed be most entertaining. Most posters have a firm grasp on reality, and those that don't simply disappear after a while

Then I shall wear the cone of shame with pride.

Loved that part, the awful chat interface isn't shown for "immersion" purposes unless you explicitly open it with a keyboard shortcut. [squeeeee] There is no menu option for that, because this "game" is from the early 90s, where using a cheat sheet next to the keyboard was the norm. They haven't figured out how to do a standard 2010s game UI (like Elite has, guess how the chat works there).

You might be a little to late for asking a refund, but depending on your location you should try it, because that is clearly not the product you pledged for in 2012.

Thank you for the kind words sir! I agree the interface is blocky and super clumsy, however they did turn it on in 2.4 when you enter the game. But only for your first life, after that you have to toggle it open.

I'm only in for the cost of a 'AAA' game I'm going to chock it up to an idiot tax for not doing my research before backing.

What you've described is by design.
From where I'm sitting (pretty much on the fence) CIG will be delaying this one indefinitely and milking the backers, ie the outcasts and questioners who are now here, Until RSI/CIG bankrupt themselves.

Or... Roberts pulls a rabbit out of his magical German hat and mazeballs all of us by the years end.

Enjoy the ride.

Agreed. It's baffling that more backers haven't turned and asked what is happening. Reading reddit and the CIG/RSI forums its like everything is on schedule in everyone's mind. It doesn't matter that the graphics are sub par, the game has no real content, and most of all only 26 people can be in a server...what? Wasn't this supposed to be a mmo? If Roberts had anything viable he would of thrown it out to the masses by now.

 

[f.zlim]

Dunno, I won't agree to the new ToS, so I will never see anything beyond 2.3.1 not even during "free flights".


The game interface is made by people, who don't have clue about game user interface design. It unusable, regardless if you are new player or a veteran backer. And that is solely Chris Roberts fault, because he is in charge to let professionals do that job, he got 116 millions for that.

No sure if those people are clueless with game UI design or the design doesn't meet the so-called "vision" of the chairman.
I posted this recently (see below) and what is more concerning™ to me is, if the same percentage of the cost is applied to SC/SQ42 funding today, that means 98.6mil (85%) goes to mocap stuff and only the remaining 17.4mil goes to game design.

You may say this is a ridiculous correlation of two different developments which are 20 years apart. You may be right.
But with the chairman exhibiting more interest in mocap stuffs and with the current mini-PU filled with glitches, I can't help but thinking most of the funding had been spent on mocap effort instead of game design/gameplay. I backed primarily for a game first, not movie first. [ugh]

Wing Commander IV - $10 million - A 1996 Texas Monthly profile claimed the space combat sequel had a $10 million budget. Of that $10 million, $8.5 million was spent on live-action video sequences, according to Jamie Russell's Generation Xbox.

http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

 

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

Star Citizen continues to exhibit signs that it's no longer trying to be a wannabe Star Wars game, but instead a wannabe Dead Space game....

 

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

Annnd it would appear as though Chris Roberts is returning to his Larry Niven "borrowing" roots as what appears to be a Kilrathi (a rather blatant rip off from Niven's Kzinti species, giant, ferocious bipedal feline aliens) character model in a supposed leak from Star Citizen which has turned up on Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize...rom_the_leaked/

(Take the above with a large helping of doubt as to whether this is real or not, but if it *is* for real? Hmm, not sure what to make of it to be quite honest. Not exactly *impressive* to say the least...)

*Edit* Ok, on further reading of the posts on Reddit, this appears to be an old asset which featured in promo material for SC back in 2012. Why someone felt the need to bring it to light now is anybody's guess.

 

[Backer42]

No sure if those people are clueless with game UI design or the design doesn't meet the so-called "vision" of the chairman.

Both, because the chairman never saw that interface until playing SC for the first time on a livestream and he was very angry about it. And he most likely never saw it again after that incident, because obviously nothing changed.

Meanwhile I'm convinced CIG/RSI executives don't like nor play video games, including their own one. They just figured out, that the gaming crowd is the ideal demography to fleece with promises. They like doing video webisodes and movie stuff though.

In 2012 I fell for a Chris Roberts who pretended he really wants to build and play the ultimate spacesim, which has never been made before. I believed that. Now I think, he likes driving Porsches and yachts more. I don't think CR is a gamer, and never was one.

I posted this recently (see below) and what is more concerning™ to me is, if the same percentage of the cost is applied to SC/SQ42 funding today, that means 98.6mil (85%) goes to mocap stuff and only the remaining 17.4mil goes to game design.

Many millions go directly into private pockets, that's for sure.

 

[SkUnimatrix]

Well it is the Spiritual Successor of Wing Commander we are talking about, there will be ofc a lot of narrative but it will be dynamic in the sense that the npc's react to you differently considering how you approach/interact with them. Their speech is not robotically fixed and it's more organic in the way that it adapts to your attitudes in real time.

Climbing and exiting ship's lock the animation for now but I think that the main idea is to make them: A) Faster B) Dynamic accordingly to the occasion C) Fluid.

Btw you don't lose complete control because I've noticed that I can still turn on / off my helmet flash-light and I think holster the weapon too while doing it.

I've already debated the merits and demerits of COD and why I think its got nothing on Squadron42, it's the same formula of the old COD's with one space ship vehicle that you will, a lot of times, fly by itself while you just aim with gimbals to the several strategically placed targets that will be the same every-single time you replace the mission. The fact that the game is made primarily with gamepad should give it away.

For the "spiritual successor to Wing Commander" the result has been pretty much Freelancer 2.0 with cockpits thus far.

 

[Jezzah]

Film and directing them was always CR main ambition but he was rubbish at that also.

 

[ghcannon]

Star Citizen continues to exhibit signs that it's no longer trying to be a wannabe Star Wars game, but instead a wannabe Dead Space game....

Hey, just throwing some techy notes for anyone interested

All those body-bending issues seem to stem from the skeleton's joints having a wrong transformation (position&rotation) due to issues with the server. They must be relaying all that information to the client. Now whether the issues are due to resolving precision or simply bad syncing with the server clock is anybody's guess.. However I'd really like to see these things fixed as it tells me they actually do have a stable platform.

That's the thing in software development - you design a solution to a problem but sometimes a tiny unforseen issue can become the reason why you cannot get that solution to work coherently as a system without hacking your way out of it. And as soon as you start hacking you start being unable to add proper support for stuff in the future.

And with them picking Cryengine and all the network module issues and rewrites .. I'm not ready to believe they have a stable base to build upon.

 

[Skizomeuh]

Don't know where you get that story from, but basically you're saying that when I press W to walk I send this to the server (i'm ok with that) and wait for it to give me the info on how my mesh has to deform accordingly to the character rig? Two things: this is the stupidest implementation of this, or this is again a weak bedtime story to excuse lack of development structure.

So, they're working on item 2.0, netcode 2.0, and who knows what else, we're yet to see any evidence of progress regarding these btw, to hopefully make the current prealpha to run and behave reliably? Basically they're struggling to make simply work as intended something barely containing 0.1% of the features needed even to reach the MVP state... This is a joke.

 

[dsmart]

Great answer, thanks for standing up for the backers [up]

She responded (on her channel)

 

[Neo-ST]

She responded (on her channel)

http://i.imgur.com/LhJxZ9J.png

Sometimes it's just pointless arguing with some* people...

*

Spoiler

 

[ghcannon]

Don't know where you get that story from, but basically you're saying that when I press W to walk I send this to the server (i'm ok with that) and wait for it to give me the info on how my mesh has to deform accordingly to the character rig?

I don't need to get this story from anywhere, it was a hypothesis based on one approach of implementation. It's not a big deal for an average joe game dev to figure out.

And no, you don't send the deformed mesh, just a position and rotation for the joints. The magic that then deforms the mesh properly (assuming correct transformation) is called inverse kinematics.

And it's not a stupid idea actually at all.

 

[Marcus]

Sometimes it's just pointless arguing with some* people...

*

Spoiler

http://i.giphy.com/RmizVDDPA7yeI.gif

To be fair, I thought that was a reasonable response.

She has the right to see things that way, and she straight up says that its her opinion. Whats wrong with that?

I dont see it her way, I am still waiting to be convinced by SC, but everyone should be able to express their opinion after all.

What I havent liked here recently was the influx of people who thought they had the right to dictate what the conversation should be, or how it should be carried out.

Luckily that seems to have past (thanks to some good moderation on here) and we can get back to sharing out thoughts and talking about SC.

I would still like to hear (especially from the pro-SC crowd) what they think CIG will show off at Gamescom? And also, do you think like I do that they will have to pull some stops out to out do the reveals of Mass Effect Andromeda and COD:IW?

 

[Skizomeuh]

Nope. It's not IK. That's mesh skinning, partly based on the rig as you affect groups of vertice to each of skeleton's bone, but not IK. IK is an animation technique that solves the limitations and constraints of forward animation by taking the problem the other way around.

Again, no: server has (should have) few things to do with my character. I'd understand such bugs appeared in other players in my vicinity: server sending too much rot/pos data for my computer which could struggle to sync other players anims and skins, but not my own mesh.
And I can't see the interest nor the logic of controlling envelope server side, a fortiori player's one. So yes, for me they're trying to hide half baked implementation (because some decided it's not that much necessary for "fidelity", that solid foundations are not required) behind "enhancements to the core engine" and refactoring.

OT: I laughed so much my abs hurt recently, hearing that Chris Roberts is a perfectionist.

 

[SkUnimatrix]

Nope. It's not IK. That's mesh skinning, partly based on the rig as you affect groups of vertice to each of skeleton's bone, but not IK. IK is an animation technique that solves the limitations and constraints of forward animation by taking the problem the other way around.

Again, no: server has (should have) few things to do with my character. I'd understand such bugs appeared in other players in my vicinity: server sending too much rot/pos data for my computer which could struggle to sync other players anims and skins, but not my own mesh.
And I can't see the interest nor the logic of controlling envelope server side, a fortiori player's one. So yes, for me they're trying to hide half baked implementation (because some decided it's not that much necessary for "fidelity", that solid foundations are not required) behind "enhancements to the core engine" and refactoring.

OT: I laughed so much my abs hurt recently, hearing that Chris Roberts is a perfectionist.

Makes sense although the only experience I have with this stuff is some very limited work I did with Blender 3D's game engine about a decade ago.

 

[Ozram]

She responded (on her channel)

http://i.imgur.com/LhJxZ9J.png

Back when I watched her and was excited about the game I remember how excited she was about the project while still trying to ask some of the "hard" questions that would never get answered on t4tc. Seems by this response that she's slowly coming around to reality. Perhaps her impassioned troll remarks was a sign of one of her last gasps to keep her dream alive as it slowly but inevitably crumbles. She comes across as quite honest, genuine and fair. Even if belated, I have a feeling the truth is starting to sink in. That was a nice response she made to you DS. I'm glad you give her some credit.

 

[Neo-ST]

To be fair, I thought that was a reasonable response.

She has the right to see things that way, and she straight up says that its her opinion. Whats wrong with that?

I dont see it her way, I am still waiting to be convinced by SC, but everyone should be able to express their opinion after all.

Nah, just forget it.
I ran out of patience a long time ago.

 

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

Hmm, I'm sure that CIG are fully confident that the upcoming updates for the PU will feature such awe-inspiring gameplay as this video shows....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7Xx04vHXc

You know the best thing about this? The person playing SC *expected* this glitch to happen, saying "And there it goes!" with tired acceptance as his character gets spat out of his Freelancer's cargo bay doors and killed for no apparent reason.

But of course, all of these things aren't *really* a problem ya see, because CIG have got the PROPER versions of Star Citizen just waiting in the wings and stuff. They just don't want to show it yet to folks because of "spoilers". And it will just be a matter of flipping a switch and everything will work as expected! Just keep the faith!

 

[Discourse]

Hmm, I'm sure that CIG are fully confident that the upcoming updates for the PU will feature such awe-inspiring gameplay as this video shows....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7Xx04vHXc

You know the best thing about this? The person playing SC *expected* this glitch to happen, saying "And there it goes!" with tired acceptance as his character gets spat out of his Freelancer's cargo bay doors and killed for no apparent reason.

But of course, all of these things aren't *really* a problem ya see, because CIG have got the PROPER versions of Star Citizen just waiting in the wings and stuff. They just don't want to show it yet to folks because of "spoilers". And it will just be a matter of flipping a switch and everything will work as expected! Just keep the faith!

Erm, he was specifically capturing that bug on video so he could post it to the issue council (Star Citizen's bug reporting feature). The game is in development, there are going to be bugs. It doesn't stop others having fun in the game however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPK6AeNqx40

 

[Asp Explorer]

But of course, all of these things aren't *really* a problem ya see, because CIG have got the PROPER versions of Star Citizen just waiting in the wings and stuff. They just don't want to show it yet to folks because of "spoilers". And it will just be a matter of flipping a switch and everything will work as expected! Just keep the faith!

You just don't understand switch flipping. CIG have spent a fortune on very special switches. They are finely hand-crafted my Magic Germans out of purest procedural generation, and of a level of fidelity that only a few people in the world can appreciate. Remember - they are making the best switch sim ever