The Star Citizen Thread v5

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The thing is that both ED and NMS rely on PG for their core gameplay. Thats their strong and weak point. For Star Citizen PG is just another tool. They are not interested in quantity of planets to make it a believable universe but in focused quality. Rich storytelling, deep lore and focus on sci-fi multiplayer adventures. Completely the oposite of both NMS and ED.

Have to admit. This is what sold me into the project years ago. I can't stand cookie cutter universes like your GTA and your watchdogs and sadly I have to say ED here as well. I felt 100 well crafted systems with lots of content was doable. Just hope that with Stanton getting filled out the other 99 systems will come along at a far quicker pace.
 

jcrg99

Banned
...Just hope that with Stanton getting filled out the other 99 systems will come along at a far quicker pace.

Easy cake. They just need to release 1 and claim that all the others are actually already out there to be discovered by hidden jump points. And just release one or other "in-game real-time in-engine playable groundbreaking gameplay not-on-rails footage" to "prove" they exist.
 
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It wouldn't surprise me if Star Citizen uses a lot of PG for their mission content as well, granted they'll also be interspersing it with non-PG narrative driven missions, like we saw at Gamescom, but I have serious doubts that all of it will be like that.

If they are doing that it'll be interesting to see how they handle it.

If i remember correctly so far..they didnt add a single "generic" mission into the PU all mission that are in are narrative driven, always flying to the same spot over and over again. Always to the same station with the same layout for the same information you ahve to gather inside for the same "story" you are playing...showing a super static universe...
 
Specifically…

For reference, in 1991 when they made that demo, Falcon 3.0 was already out, using both Gouraud shading for its terrain and limited textures. Indeed, both were popular features in the Amiga and PC demoscene to show off your programming prowess. No-one had any doubts that they could be done on PCs. Also, no-one thought it was a “risky assumption” that PC price-performance ratios would continue to drop. And no-one though that the final Strike Commander had anything remotely like the best graphics, music, or sound-effects. Doom had arrived. Also, Strike Commander wasn't a very good flight simulator compared to Falcon 3 or, hell, even F-15 III, and it was poorly optimised and slow.

This whole passage suggests that contrary to Chris' claims, they didn't really play or pay attention to their competitors' products because so much of what he says is nonsense. About the only thing he gets right is the doubts that Wing Commander would sell well. That's because it didn't sell well. When he talks about other companies kind-of-almost-but-not-really “stealing their ideas”, the only sensible thing this could have relate to was Lucasart, who of course offered all the “revolutionary” features in X-Wing and TIE fighter (plus better graphics, music, and sound effects). Arcade and console hardware with specific support for these features were in development at the same time — hardly the influence of Chris.

Anyone who knows the story of how Apocalypse Now was made will understand how laughable that particular comparison is, no matter how much the Origin guys had to stay at the office and eat pizza. [weird]

Fair enough but do you have any unbiased sources that prescribe to your description of the time? I was alive but a youngin back then and didn't really care about all that stuff.
 
The thing is that both ED and NMS rely on PG for their core gameplay. Thats their strong and weak point. For Star Citizen PG is just another tool. They are not interested in quantity of planets to make it a believable universe but in focused quality. Rich storytelling, deep lore and focus on sci-fi multiplayer adventures. Completely the oposite of both NMS and ED.

But that makes it even more boring, strong "rich storytelling" missions...that you have to do over and over again for that mission grind and credit gathering is the worst you could do. After the 3rd time you are sick off the story and dont care at all about anything in it.And you just wish for a SKIP buttong for anything "story" related.
Even worse if you a mission speed in the form what we saw in alpha 3.0 video...

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Dont get me wrong rich story telling missions are awesome...for the first time. But lose alot of their flavor if you have to repeat them over and over again.
What SC tries todo is painfull as a player...only if they mix up one-time story mission with a bunch of generic mission that it may succeed in what it wants to do.

The thing is...even generic mission arent that bad.

You could use the same hollywood contact scenarip like in that alpha 3.0 video..but rather over the coms he would say:"Hey i need your help with some pirates making trouble, i will send you the details over" All voice acted animated...at that point it goes to a text with details and the PG mission generation stuff.

When you are finished the narrative stuff comes back "Thanks for the help with those pirates!Here is your reward"
 
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My meter is going crazy when I hear these buzzwords in relation to games. Everybody wants to have the deepest, richest, most high def bla bla. It can't be denied that Star Citizen has created a lot of colorful story for its universe and its ships. Only I have no more faith that any substantial part of that will ever be represented in the game.

Take the bloody cocktail mixing minigame, for passengers with health simulation, differently skilled flight attendants (my favorite example :p ). Looking at the Alpha's current state and even the "Alpha 3.0" scripted fetch quest, that's little more than a castle in the sky.

In the end, it mostly matters what's playable. And that is precious little.
The main problem with calling it “rich” and “deep” is that at the heart of it all it's a Chris Roberts creation, that is deeply derivative and trite. It also become very repetitive very quickly, same as every other game in the genre because there's simply no way avoiding that short of making it… well… short.
 
Fair enough but do you have any unbiased sources that prescribe to your description of the time? I was alive but a youngin back then and didn't really care about all that stuff.
You have the games themselves. You can get them on GOG if you want a nostalgia trip, or just look them up on youtube.

While it's a bit late to really demonstrate the exact year (and I'm sure someone will turn this around to “prove Chris right”), I suggest the brilliant Second Reality as an example of what the demoscene was up to (it was made by the guys who went on to do Max Payne and 3DMark… so maybe it's a bit of a cheat to use them as a benchmark).

If you look up Gouraud shading in games, chances are you'll come across Sim Drive for the Namco System 22 as the first use of the method, followed by various 3DO games a year or two later. The thing is, these systems don't pop out of the ground out of nowhere — the decision (and the design needed) to build hardware acceleration for textures and shading did not start in mid-'91 when Chris supposedly gave everyone the idea to use these techniques. Chances are also that you'll come across an entire glen full of true scotsman as far as what Strike Commander supposedly did first — the simple fact is that they were being used in small scale for simple things before that. It wasn't really until the late-era 486es and early Pentiums that there was enough oomph in PCs to do more than that… and that applies to SC as well — it was pretty universally panned for the horrible performance that resulted from trying to use both textures and Gouraud shading at once. It runs decent enough in DOSBox on a modern machine, though. :D
 
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Those comments are fun. A lot of "You should go play Elite Dangerous then, that's just WWII planes in space unlike our game, which Chris Roberts says is... WWII planes in space."
 
Those comments are fun. A lot of "You should go play Elite Dangerous then, that's just WWII planes in space unlike our game, which Chris Roberts says is... WWII planes in space."

I think youll find WWII planes won't work in space because there is no atmosphere in space.

Therefore Commandante Roberts didn't lie and there would never be atmospheric combat in space. Hence "the ships will fly like WWII planes in space".

Which is exactly what they are doing, flying non atmospherically.

Good day, sir!
 
The main problem with calling it “rich” and “deep” is that at the heart of it all it's a Chris Roberts creation, that is deeply derivative and trite. It also become very repetitive very quickly, same as every other game in the genre because there's simply no way avoiding that short of making it… well… short.

The juvenile old toss that Roberts comes up with would embarrass a teenage fan fic author. If people are using his "deep, rich" writing skills as a pivotal selling point of the game, you know it's in trouble. And we all know that he hasn't actually played a game since the 90s (including Star Citizen), and doesn't realise games like Mass Effect have set a pretty high bar for space opera storytelling (ignoring ME3, admittedly). I was playing the new Deus Ex over the weekend, and that's just another example of how far sci-fi games have come, and if you put it next to the FPS elements of the current iteration of SC it makes CIG's efforts look utterly amateurish. "But SC has space ships!" So then you point out the shortcomings of the flight model or whatever. "But SC has FPS!". And so on.
 

jcrg99

Banned
That´s pretty much summarise my experience so far about the SC...he is not alone in this for sure...

What happened with the "rule of cool" that those Star Citizens defend all the time? So, now, that is not important at all? For the main feature of the game, which is combat, that shouldn't be cool? Amazing.
 
What happened with the "rule of cool" that those Star Citizens defend all the time? So, now, that is not important at all? For the main feature of the game, which is combat, that shouldn't be cool? Amazing.

Don't try. Reading the flip-flopping rationalizations from the fan base of a game that doesn't exist is like watching a four-year long hokey-pokey dance marathon.
 
Now that is compelling stuff and does somewhat changes my opinion of him; however, so long as the game is being made and developers are willing to stay around him, I could really care less how he manages.

It is a tough but workable management style. I've been in such an environment before. If you get a good team that communicates well you will be producing results that make management happy. I don't really see it as a detriment to CR, it is just his way and we aren't required to consider him a "nice guy."

What I take issue with is his management of the project life cycle. What I observe as problematic are scope creep, missed deadlines with no revised deadlines, no control over expectations, over-reactions and overall tone deafness (metaphorically).
 

Mu77ley

Volunteer Moderator
Fortran and C++ for the heavy-lifting, actually! You'd think Fortran would've died away by now, but (a) a lot of legacy code is in Fortran since in part it used to dominate in speed over other languages and (b) it's still pretty fast

Hurrah! I wouldn't wish Python on my worst enemy. ;)

Python does seem to be heavily used in academia though, judging by friends who work there.

I'm amazed Fortran is still around, I remember I did some work experience at a software company when I was at school (aka the week I learnt and wrote a text adventure in Pascal), and they were in the middle of phasing out their old Fortran stuff then. That would have been 1986 or so. *feels old*
 
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