The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

Folks, he is getting us to go in circles on ED, again.

Let us not detract from the fact that what was shown to us was primarily hand crafted terrain while going at high speed across the proc gen terrain to hide its lack of detail.

Squadron 42 was delayed, again, despite CR himself promoting the demo beforehand.

Several threads popping up on RSI and reddit with disgruntled backers

The demo was full of distracting graphical bugs

Planet tech was not fully demoed, instead they showed us a mission that is likely not even representative of how missions will actually work

Floating buggy, no tread marks

No demonstration of updated space combat

Landing still looks stupid

Demo was a pit of wasted money when they have a game to finish

At least CR was straight with us about what still needs to get done...no dates, but at least he articulated what to expect

Thank you.

Well said.

Attempting to "engage" in honest discussion with... well, "that" is likely to lead to folks getting banned or the thread being put on temporary timeout.

Which is the purpose of that tactic.

To derail attention away from the glaring facts that at their OWN showcase for their games, CIG spectacularly FAILED.

Failed to live up to their own self-generated hype surrounding Squadron 42 by having no playable level showcasing what can be done in the game. Not even a trailer or a video. Nada

Showed a pretty in places, but ultimately bland, derivative "progen tech demo" that was teeming with buggy lighting, textures, terrain, character models and featured nothing that revealed anything of value relating to Star Citizen or Squadron 42, other than to show off that they can make another demo reel.

Ultimately, there is nothing to be gained about trying to discuss the merits of the surface detail shown in that planetary landing showreel.... because it wasn't in-game. At all.

And the biggest take away from THAT fact is that.... CIG never *once* called it for what that footage was... R&D to show what their tech is like. They carried through that demonstration as if that was what PLAYERS WOULD GET in Star Citizen/Squadron 42.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Nice try, but we were comparing the terrain shown on an in-engine video. I posted a blurry screenshot from a video, so you already had an advantage from the start. Show me an real-time in-engine video and that will be a fair test.

You have an odd definition of "fair test", at the end of the day everything about is completely unfair. From the very fact your pointing at a video of a game you can't even run, of assets hand created for a show and saying it's "in game" to (with respect) your clear biased to that particular unfinished title. Comparing with a consumer ready game that generates worlds on the fly, landscapes that have not been viewed by an art department.

Discussing the details surrounding PG and it's use in these titles is fun however there is little point engaging here because we just don't have SC's PG tech available to us.

 

[lysan]

…and yet, it's vastly more complex than anything CIG has ever shown. And it's actual in-game and in-client, as opposed to their special-purpose dazzle-reel stuff.

We never expected ED to be the leader in Graphics, however I'm pretty sure it will be right up front when it comes to the PG tech, CIG don't have this knowledge, not even by a long shot. What we saw was nothing new for a AAA game, you can get much better results by using Wold Creator, World Machine or Terragen. The question are, will it be a uniform quality across a entire planet?

When we can see it in the game and play it ourselves we will know, Hi-Ban dreams, he hasn't tried it, I can show you several videos and claim that what you see are in a game, but unless you can actually download the game and start playing it, it's nothing more than a show case.

 

[VidarSnipes]

So, am I wrong by guessing that the demo is a blend of a) bland, basic procedurally generated terrain, b) with parts of the surface shown during on-ground gameplay brought up to a better quality with handmade assets, c) totally-not-Dune sandworm cutscene?

 

[Hi-Ban]

…and yet, it's vastly more complex than anything CIG has ever shown. And it's actual in-game and in-client, as opposed to their special-purpose dazzle-reel stuff.

Or, wait, are you talking about what CIG showed? Because yes, their demo has a lot of the hallmarks of the kind of pre-baked non-dynamic world we saw in the late-Source/early-UE3 games of that year, only with less polish as one would expect.

We could say it is almost on par with the planetary tech v1 shown on the gamescom, but it's definitely simpler than the planetary tech v2 demo.

 

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

So, am I wrong by guessing that the demo is a blend of a) bland, basic procedurally generated terrain, b) with parts of the surface shown during on-ground gameplay brought up to a better quality with handmade assets, c) totally-not-Dune sandworm cutscene?

d) All of the above.

 

[dumbo]

We could say it is almost on par with the planetary tech v1 shown on the gamescom, but it's definitely simpler than the planetary tech v2 demo.

As you're certain about that, in what way is it simpler?

 

[Barking_Mad]

So, am I wrong by guessing that the demo is a blend of a) bland, basic procedurally generated terrain, b) with parts of the surface shown during on-ground gameplay brought up to a better quality with handmade assets, c) totally-not-Dune sandworm cutscene?

Correct.

 

[ghcannon]

d) All of the above.

Excuse me but how do you know that? I ran through bits of the flythrough video frame-by-frame and it I couldn't see stark differences in terrain topology between regions. Sure - they might have simply covered it really really well. But you don't really know.

They could have 50 developers working on algorithms for this. Maybe they just made it really really well.

 

[Monk]

We could say it is almost on par with the planetary tech v1 shown on the gamescom, but it's definitely simpler than the planetary tech v2 demo.

I would say it is a matter of opinion until we can objectively compare the two. If this planet tech does become available for me to play, I will certainly provide a more concrete conclusion based on my interaction with both games. Until then, I can't filter between hand-crafted, camera tricks, or cuts to pre-recorded video to really provide a solid opinion.

So, about the missed Sq42 demo. I'm actually surprised that a demo was even a possibility after seeing the road map slides CR provided. What was on those slides made it seem that a decent demo of Sq42 would have been impossible even with his road map.

 

[Frank]

That's still more simple graphics, they look a bit dated, like something from 2007.

None of the graphics I see in Elite Dangerous look older than 2016, because commercially released VR wasn't available any earlier than that.

 

[Tippis]

We could say it is almost on par with the planetary tech v1 shown on the gamescom, but it's definitely simpler than the planetary tech v2 demo.

There was no “planetary tech v2” of worth shown in the demo, and definitely nothing that in any way puts it above what's been out there for years. All there was was some reasonably high-detail textures and shaders, most of which didn't work properly and kept glitching out. Neither of those things are new or newsworthy either.

At best, it was a vastly more barren version of Mad Max with some prettifying (but still broken) near-distance filtering.

 

[ghcannon]

We could say it is almost on par with the planetary tech v1 shown on the gamescom, but it's definitely simpler than the planetary tech v2 demo.

You didn't just now compare SC's v1 planettech noise pattern with EDs stellar forge. Did you?

 

[hairychris]

We never expected ED to be the leader in Graphics, however I'm pretty sure it will be right up front when it comes to the PG tech, CIG don't have this knowledge, not even by a long shot. What we saw was nothing new for a AAA game, you can get much better results by using Wold Creator, World Machine or Terragen. The question are, will it be a uniform quality across a entire planet?

When we can see it in the game and play it ourselves we will know, Hi-Ban dreams, he hasn't tried it, I can show you several videos and claim that what you see are in a game, but unless you can actually download the game and start playing it, it's nothing more than a show case.

Yep. You can fly to a moon that has never been seen by anyone before, and it has a plausible (and quite nicely rendered even if not to Frostbite level of detail) landscape with geological features, and a designer has not had any direct hand in creating it.

CIG's demo is, currently at least, simply that - a demo. Do we know what was procgen and what was hand-crafted? No..... However the demo was definitely scripted (whether or not pre-rendered, that's another question!) so it could well have been hand-crafted all the way through. So, not really representative.

There were definitely some very weird engine glitches, though. As this was the "blue riband" Star Citizen event I would have expected a lot better. But, if they were originally scheduled to demo SQ42 and had to can it late in the game then that would explain a lot (and not to CIG's advantage tbh).

 

[lysan]

You didn't just now compare SC's v1 planettech noise pattern with EDs stellar forge. Did you?

Yes he did, again, clueless is clueless, One even get speechless

 

[hairychris]

So, about the missed Sq42 demo. I'm actually surprised that a demo was even a possibility after seeing the road map slides CR provided. What was on those slides made it seem that a decent demo of Sq42 would have been impossible even with his road map.

This. Unless it was going to be a completely scripted set of "encounters" with crippled NPC AI (and AI is a major component of shooters) and they couldn't even get that to a state that was better than the demo that they did present.

 

[Stigbob]

Does anyone else think that citcon being a total disaster has marked a change in the tolerance the backers are willing to show to CiG's endless delays and mess-ups ?.

There's a definite refreshing upswing in free-speech on reddit and RSI. I think they might have gone one over-hyped under-delivered step too far.

 

[Hi-Ban]

As you're certain about that, in what way is it simpler?

The terrain in ED is excessively smooth, there are many rounded cliffs and mountains with not very great quality combo of geometry and textures, and then some scattered little rocks here and there which doesn't blend very well with the rest of the terrain. It looks too much "procedural", if you know what i mean.

I'm not saying that is "bad", considering ED has a gazillion of planets, but when you look at them closely, one by one, the visual fidelity is not that good.
Then, that's the balance between aiming for quantity over quality vs aiming for quality over quantity. This should be already known, but when some people try to attack the visual fidelity of SC by comparing it to ED, they sometimes forget that ED chose quantity over quality, and SC is going the opposite way.

 

[Asp Explorer]

The terrain in ED is excessively smooth, there are many rounded cliffs and mountains with not very great quality combo of geometry and textures, and then some scattered little rocks here and there which doesn't blend very well with the rest of the terrain. It looks too much "procedural", if you know what i mean.

You could always apply at Frontier to be the Planetary Surface Rock Inspector. Go from rock to rock throughout the galaxy, making sure each one doesn't look procedural, and lovingly planting assets by hand to give them a wonderful finishing flourish.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Real planets are procedurally generated if you believe in science... otherwise God probably did it, maybe God's working at CIG now...sitting there...using the cryengine tool to place rocks and crabs. Going for a coffee, hanging out with Chris and Erin...