The problem is that he's not just confused about how procedural generation works or what it is, he's also wrong about how other games do it and how SC is different. ED doesn't do what he's suggesting, nor does NMS. Hell, the way he describes it, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri uses the same “procedural generation” as SC (but is vastly faster).
The Star Citizen Thread v5
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He said that ED systems were randomly put together. It's not that simple though is it
It is as if Chris Roberts doesn't know anything about (contemporary) game development.
I have said that Sidewinder has more volume, but it's still not enough for a proper spacecraft if you want to include any living space.
Edit: Besides, F-15C is 19.5 meters long and 13 meters wide, while Sidewinder is 14.9 meters long and 21.5 meters wide, therefore they are comparable in that regard. Not when it comes to total volume, but I have already said that.
That's my point. Mustang is a hollow shell, with almost no space for a power plant or propellant tanks, oxygen reserves or anything else, and with that it loses any kind of believability in my eyes. Both Sidewinder and (Edit: smaller, that is, sub-Constellation) SC ships could include living quarters, but not while being a, you know, spacecraft.
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Now, THIS makes more sense...
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ROFLCOPTER!
Even better ROFLSPACESHIP!
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Plus the handwaving...
The way he openly uses names of other games with negative connotations, while none of the other developers do such a thing shows how much of a loser and unprofessional this guy is.
Be honest. How many CEOs or otherwise high level professionals have you heard talk about specific competitors by name and say theirs is better in every possible way? It simply doesn't happen because there is something called professional courtesy let alone basic human decency.
CR is just a rude, uneducated buffoon who generated a cult following as such people are known to do. Just like some politicians rely on their uncivilised manners and seeming ignorance to appeal to voters who had lesser opportunities in life.
Any decent human being with an ounce of brain who listens to interviews of CR and DB will invariably sympathise with DB, whose manners are impeccable. Have you ever seen him talk about SC in anything but an enthusiastic optimism? He seems genuinely excited for it to release so he could play it, while the other CEO uses his technology in such an ignorant way to push his product.
I hate arrogant, ignorant people who think they are better than everyone else even if they have nothing to show for it.
Be honest. How many CEOs or otherwise high level professionals have you heard talk about specific competitors by name and say theirs is better in every possible way? It simply doesn't happen because there is something called professional courtesy let alone basic human decency.
CR is just a rude, uneducated buffoon who generated a cult following as such people are known to do. Just like some politicians rely on their uncivilised manners and seeming ignorance to appeal to voters who had lesser opportunities in life.
Any decent human being with an ounce of brain who listens to interviews of CR and DB will invariably sympathise with DB, whose manners are impeccable. Have you ever seen him talk about SC in anything but an enthusiastic optimism? He seems genuinely excited for it to release so he could play it, while the other CEO uses his technology in such an ignorant way to push his product.
I hate arrogant, ignorant people who think they are better than everyone else even if they have nothing to show for it.
Have you seen submarine beds? The most 'living quarter' a Sidey can have is a single person submarine bed with the ceiling touching your nose. Either that or it will be a set of straps on the top wall of the access corridor to the cockpit so you can strap yourself secure and go to sleep ISS style.
What is surely in there though is a hatch you can use to get from the cockpit to the SRV bay and to the main hatch of the ship.
The reason they release ships so rarely with a relatively small selection of ships is because they care about their architecture very much. Every ship has a detailed layout (which we don't know yet exactly' which should accomodate all the internal modules you can have in a logical and visible manner.
That's why they can't willy nilly add or subtract module slots from ships even for pressing balance issues. The architecture is fixed to enable fast transition into future updates where this is relevant.
Each time you visit a new system/planet in NMS/ED for the first time you experience a randomised output of their respective rule sets. He didn't say anything to suggest he didn't understand the deterministic/persistent nature of those rules. He might have done in the past mind.
Calling a tiny bed "living quarters" is a bit of a stretch, though. SC's Mustang has a walk-in cockpit, an entrance shaft, and a small room with a kitchenette, few shelves and a bed and some other things in a ship roughly the size of aforementioned F-15C. I just hope we will have something a bit more reasonable in ED.
"Deterministic" and "random" are antonyms, though. There's nothing random in icy planets being far away from the star, to give a simple example.
For the record, I myself have NO problem with SC spaceships not making sense in terms of lack of internal compartments for power generation, engines etc. - I can't play a power generator, and it's just a game anyway. So especially for the small ships where this very obvious, I don't really give a hoot.
It's only an issue if you take CRs statements about how realistic everything is. Then it's just a matter of no, it's not realistic, CR is spewing words for the sake of sounding grandios. It can still be super fun and great to play with those unrealistic ships though.
It's only an issue if you take CRs statements about how realistic everything is. Then it's just a matter of no, it's not realistic, CR is spewing words for the sake of sounding grandios. It can still be super fun and great to play with those unrealistic ships though.
The only thing I can think of off-hand are the Mac vs. PC ads, but then, us Mac users are pretty cult:y so it's not like it in any way contradicts your observation. But even then, and even when the whole thing was couched in a thick layer of humour, no actual names were uttered. As soon as it was actual “Bill” and “Steve” or “Windows” and “OSX”, the tone changed completely.
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It's not randomised. It is entirely deterministic. Everything he said suggested that he didn't understand which is which.
In fact, that's kind of the point here, and it reared its ugly head in that german article that appeared a while back: Chris has invented this false equivalence between procedural generation and randomness, to the point where you can use it as a litmus test for whether a publication has any idea what they're talking about or if they're just amateur mouth-pieces.
The whole point of using procedural generation in games is that it is 100% deterministic. If it weren't it would be utterly worthless for pretty much all purposes it is being used in modern gaming. It is because it is fully deterministic that, every time you enter a system in Elite, it is the same. It's why every time you land on a planet in ED or NMS, they're the same. It's because they're not random — they're simply generated on the fly based on the parameters fed into the underlying algorithm, and that algorithm resolves the same every time you feed it the same parameters.
You could randomise those parameters, but that is not the same thing as the procedural generation being random. You could procedurally generate the parameters themselves, but that still doesn't make them random. You can feed it fixed parameters, similar to the seed in Minecraft, and you get the same world every time because the procgen is deterministic — not random. That way, you can just store the parameters, if you like, and maybe any alterations and interactions done by the player (or the artist). By all accounts — and this is what has Chris so confused — NMS does the first; Elite does the second; the SC planet builder does something along the lines of the third, kind of like a more recent version of Bryce3D. None of them are “randomly put together” and all of them allow the artist to go in and set things up to their liking — that part pretty much comes inherent with procgen.
If you ever see someone confuse “procedurally generated” with “random”, you can pretty much immediately conclude that they have just disqualified themselves from saying anything informed on the topic. Chris is skirting very close to that edge with his mumbling…
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Frakin A
As with all PG it will be interesting to see how it replicates out across multiple systems. Given the number of stations/outposts they are talking about per system, I would have thought repetition was likely to be a factor particularly around the structures. One of the things with PG is it gets the reputation of generating some random object, but the reality is its not random but determined from the rules set employed by the PG. I am really interested to see how clever CIG's PG actually is when you see it replicated across several planets.
Oh but it does happen all the time. Usually it's a sign of desperation though.
For a good example, check out BMW's anti-Tesla ad where they go "You could pay a reservation fee now and wait two years for an electric car... or you could drive our hybrid car now!"
It's completely pointless and they're not winning anyone over with this, but they're still trying. So yeah, it happens.
But it's a sign for them being in trouble. Just like BMW.
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You're the only one to have suggested anything of the kind, so… :S
Hits the nail right on the head.
The guys making the game are doing a stellar job, as everyone keeps saying. It may not be their cup of tea but the art assets are really good, a lot of the sounds are great, the ship designs are stellar and I personally really like the "retro" (for us, modern) style HUD in the cockpits of ships. If the game reaches gold I look forward to buying and playing it.
But Croberts is evidently clueless about what is being created, in every video I see of him he's a stuttering buffoon who continually missteps with his words, his explanations and his understanding.
If I could give him one piece of advice, it would be to have someone else doing the PR.
CR love regarding the self as the center of all things having little or no regard for interests, beliefs, or attitudes other than one's own which simply means that the man is EGOCENTRIC and when he said that he wants to build the unverse it is exactly what he does he actually building an egocentric universe around himself.......
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