The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Marak]

That's not entirely true. ED base seeds for planet types are reviewed by artists. David talks about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVutbSqBI0

Major point is - for FD result is a seed. It can have authorized overrides. It can persistent POIs added to it (since 2.2 it is a thing). More or less now PG universe is galaxy seed + overwrites. Everything else is different layer.

Yes - I've watched DB's presentation many times (and I'll probably watch it again now you've reminded me of it )

But that presentation proves my point! - Using artists to alter things in the procedural generation alogarithms to make things look good is fine. Adding a whole artist developed landscape on top of a proceduraly generated planet is pointless, as it loses all the benefits of PG. An artist adding a base or two to a planet makes little difference, but if the 'biomes' is SC are NOT proceduraly generated then there will be problems.

*Edit - I'm probably not explaining what I mean that well - I'll have a think about stuff

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Yes - I've watched DB's presentation many times (and I'll probably watch it again now you've reminded me of it )

But that presentation proves my point! - Using artists to alter things in the procedural generation alogarithms to make things look good is fine. Adding a whole artist developed landscape on top of a proceduraly generated planet is pointless, as it loses all the benefits of PG. An artist adding a base or two to a planet makes little difference, but if the 'biomes' is SC are NOT proceduraly generated then there will be problems.

Yes, they are very sketchy how they will use PG. I think someone just mentioned they wanted to highly detail around bases and leave rest of planets be 'good enough', as they still don't believe PG can work for them that way.

I will guess that's why they don't use PG term in their presentations. Because it is loaded term, Chris loathed PG as "uninteresting", "not having enough fidelity" and so on so forth. Their most interest was atmospheric flight. But what I have seen they pay very little attention to it.

 

[Marak]

Yes, they are very sketchy how they will use PG. I think someone just mentioned they wanted to highly detail around bases and leave rest of planets be 'good enough', as they still don't believe PG can work for them that way.

I will guess that's why they don't use PG term in their presentations. Because it is loaded term, Chris loathed PG as "uninteresting", "not having enough fidelity" and so on so forth. Their most interest was atmospheric flight. But what I have seen they pay very little attention to it.

Yeah sometimes I think they mention PG is because it ticks off a 'stretch goal'. I'm not sure they at CIG understand it enough to use it as it should be used.

If CR understood Stellar Forge I think he'd change his mind.

 

[Backer42]

Good point, but that 60 mil wouldn't have just been paid to Imaginarium, there's the people paid to invent a new language, the fees for the actors (probably the biggest outlay), all of the dev work that has taken place pre and post shooting etc.

The raw mo-cap data itself is probably the most sound part of the whole deal, seeing as they would have paid top dollar and did get the best in the business to do it, everything else though........

According to sources one of the A-list hollywood actors was upset, that Sandi got paid more than him/her for playing "actress" and dropped out. Now you can estimate where most of the $60m is going to end up.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Yep, if they had PG working - they'd have at least a handful of planets and they could dump a few handcrafted small elements on there and make it seem like they are further along than they are. Instead, it's always one planet or between two small space stations or a small station and a planet station. All of it has all signs pointing towards no PG.

 

[Asp Explorer]

According to sources one of the A-list hollywood actors was upset, that Sandi got paid more than him/her for playing "actress" and dropped out. Now you can estimate where most of the $60m is going to end up.

That has been mentioned quite a few times - but we never did get a reputable source. An alternate version is that someone got upset with the way "enthusiastic backers" acted and wanted no further participation.

We just don't know what happened, and we'll have to wait for the finished product to make any guesses.

 

[ZeeWolf]

I'm genuinely interested in how much hand crafting they'll realistically be able to do. I've had some experience of working with a large height field map and having to tweak and change things even on a small scale is time consuming. Trying to do it on a planetary scale isn't practical, even with the tools they showcased.

No disrespect to the developers who are obviously making great tools, but they demonstrated an area of (I'd estimate) 5km thrown together in 5 minutes. That's pretty fast, but the UK is 243,610km squared according the Google.

You can start doing some simple sums, how long to do an area the size of the UK with no toilet break? How many artists to do a small moon with no sleep?, even just a small town the size of New-York.

There are some games that have PG-ed big areas like Fuel - which I think is similar - artists re-worked some parts, and that wasn't a cheap game to make.

ok, so we know planets in SC aren't 1:1, but we're still talking about massive areas. The only realistic possibility is that they "craft" smaller areas and PG everything in-between... which is pretty much what Frontier do.

 

[Marak]

Those items are the same though, so it isn't making the data size larger. The mapping just references objects and places them at coordinates. There is only one thing (texture element - size can be adjusted on the fly so one texture can be varying rocks of varying sizes with no additional storage cost) stored for the rock, and it is replicated when loaded into memory from the drive when accessed.

Yes - but each element must have its size, orientation, mapping coordinates stored somewhere. If we're talking about a 8 km square that's fine, but if we're talking about 400 PLANETS we got problems.

 

[FuriousMeow]

Yes - but each element must have its size, orientation, mapping coordinates stored somewhere. If we're talking about a 8 km square that's fine, but if we're talking about 400 PLANETS we got problems.

Well, sure - but that really isn't a lot of data. The biggest cost to local storage is textures and sounds.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Well, sure - but that really isn't a lot of data. The biggest cost to local storage is texturs and sounds.

And hours and hours of unskippable 4k cutscenes from the mind of Genuine Roberts

 

[DLewth]

Ohh yeah.

There's reason why FD spent considerable time for asteroid fields to look different. They are PG generated, using handcrafted textures smartly so they would look unique.

What SC does it very basic at this point. Even NMS succeeded to make variants of assets not to feel the same.

edit: but yeah, them being replicated doesn't mean they are repeatedly stored on hard disk, quite opposite.

PGing every item is doable, but not on realistic timescale (I think Avatar rolled out of Weta's supercomputer at something like 0.01fps). There's a nice middle ground, though: If you have four or five basic rocks, and four or five basic trees, it becomes a lot less noticeable when the same ones keep cropping up.


(Outerra again)

 

[Backer42]

That has been mentioned quite a few times - but we never did get a reputable source. An alternate version is that someone got upset with the way "enthusiastic backers" acted and wanted no further participation.

We just don't know what happened, and we'll have to wait for the finished product to make any guesses.

Let's put that aside and see what will be there for sure: Chris Roberts paying himself as "director" and his wife as "actress". Don't expect them to go below Hollywood standard payment. So guess where a huge part of the $125m is going to end up...

 

[Marak]

ok, so we know planets in SC aren't 1:1, but we're still talking about massive areas. The only realistic possibility is that they "craft" smaller areas and PG everything in-between... which is pretty much what Frontier do.

That's what I'm getting at - the landscape of the smaller areas isn't PG - it's made up of tiles. And the tiles can't be randomly placed as it's multiplayer, and everyone needs to see the same thing.

In ED everything is PG so there's no problem.

 

[Stigbob]

According to sources one of the A-list hollywood actors was upset, that Sandi got paid more than him/her for playing "actress" and dropped out. Now you can estimate where most of the $60m is going to end up.

That has been mentioned quite a few times - but we never did get a reputable source. An alternate version is that someone got upset with the way "enthusiastic backers" acted and wanted no further participation.

We just don't know what happened, and we'll have to wait for the finished product to make any guesses.

Think big chaps this is star citizen after all there's enough funding and scope for pointless mess-ups for everyone to be right. Perhaps the real actor got miffed about both those things and also being asked to re-shoot a really bad script for the third time. By someone they noticed was running about playing at Hollywood whilst bullying staff and flinging empty threats of legal action at news sites.

 

[Ben Parry]

That's what I'm getting at - the landscape of the smaller areas isn't PG - it's made up of tiles. And the tiles can't be randomly placed as it's multiplayer, and everyone needs to see the same thing.

In ED everything is PG so there's no problem.

If you can randomly place a thing, you can deterministically place a thing with the same code, more or less.

 

[FuriousMeow]

And hours and hours of unskippable 4k cutscenes from the mind of Genuine Roberts

Oh.. oh right... oh sweet baby jebus that is going to be a horrendous download. I mean, if it ever gets stitched together.

Thinking about it, I'm starting to wonder if SQ42 will be a space type combat game or more of a space ironic horror comedy combo due to mocap fighting with CryEngine's skeletal system, the random Dead Space/Lovecraftian limbs flying about, the comically amateur Genuine Roberts dialogue, under pants in space, and the glitching through every single surface turning it into Cirque Du Space!

 

[Marak]

Well, sure - but that really isn't a lot of data. The biggest cost to local storage is textures and sounds.

Yes - the texture maps take up some storage space but they are re-used. The info for the placement of a few rocks isn't much data, but the placement & orientation of every rock on an entire planet is.

Then we have to look at trees, and grass and procedural birds

 

[darkoff]

Oh dear they modified script too much and it doesnt sync up with with citcon video anymore
http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/57fd4ce28ccb5-star-citizen-revisions.php

pay points on
- clouds
- the ambush where are the tusken raiders shooting at?
-sniping incident when the guy shoots the dude. Ragdoll addition
-personal shield added to dragonfly
-and many more

 

[Marak]

If you can randomly place a thing, you can deterministically place a thing with the same code, more or less.

But if you're deterministically placing identical tiles it's not going to look good

 

[ZeeWolf]

Oh dear they modified script too much and it doesnt sync up with with citcon video anymore
http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/57fd4ce28ccb5-star-citizen-revisions.php

pay points on
- clouds
- the ambush where are the tusken raiders shooting at?
-sniping inciting when the guy shoots the dude. Ragdoll addition
-personal shield added to dragonfly
-and many more

Those are directors cut special features.

The ending is better in the new version, because it leaves it up to you to decide if Chris Roberts is really an android.