Yup - they haven't delivered for years.
Nobody hates SC - there is just a lot of disillusioned people disappointed by endless delays, mediocre product, and laughable excuses.
Buy a Javelin!
The Star Citizen Thread v5
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Yup - they haven't delivered for years.
Nobody hates SC - there is just a lot of disillusioned people disappointed by endless delays, mediocre product, and laughable excuses.
Buy a Javelin!
hmm I have to disagree with you here. The graphics of a game are not only decided by how old an engine is, more about how much work is put into them.
I'm pretty sure CryEngine could do, with enough time and effort, CGi movie quality graphics. And they modified the engine a lot. Do you have any examples of games that look much better than SC? I have lots of doubts and complaints about that game but graphics is not one of them. The planetary tech they are showing blows Elite away (I know Elite is playable), same with lightning and details.
Show us on the wallet where the Star Citizen touched you.
The truth is, many of the people here are/were backers. As time creeps on, as dates are missed, and more bugs are made evident (which you think would be a finite number), the enthusiasms erodes. I think you'll find most people here have a critical (denotation, no connotation) approach to this project. It's not a game, and the promises Chris has made, along with his quotes about delivering, and a slew of missed dates (and that's without looking back in time to see how he's done the same with other projects) are all coming into focus.
I'm fairly certain this did not start as a scam. Gamers wanted "space games." However, SC has now turned into a marketing project without any substance, here in Q4 of 2016. The space game niche is being filled. The audience for SC has already been captured. There are stragglers during the Free Fly events, but the majority who want to throw money into the engineering debt pit are already there. If they have enough funding, then they should stop the ship sales, hole up, and make a game.
Graphics are dependent on the engine. Dependent on the API more specifically. Also dependent on how that API's features are used most effectively and, more importantly, implemented.
So yeah, game engine age can have an impact on graphics... it could be resolved but, again, depends on modifying the engine - and modifying the engine means "refactoring" many/most/ever graphically visible object/effect/artifact.
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I'm confused - which one is more sad?
Why do you spend so much time talking down people who are talking down a game?
Why does it matter so much to you if we mock Chris Roberts?
He's the one that's taken millions of dollars form people so why on earth would he be worried about a bunch of people taking the pith?
Are you Chris Roberts? Are you his representative on earth or something?
That shift key deffo needs sorting.
I think you are whistling past the graveyard on this one. Why even bother developing and releasing new game engines if that was the case. Lets face it SC`s engine is hitting for 8 yrs old and will be 10yrs gone or more if the game even sees the light of day by then. The whole thing is a poorly conceived, badly executed mess and if you looked at it critically you`d see that, but continue whistling if you want.
Hatred? For a PC game. Have a serious word with yourself.
And get your shift key fixed.
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Hatred? For a PC game. Have a serious word with yourself.
And get your shift key fixed.
^same
Even CGI movies look "old" after some time passes. And as far as i know SC already reworked some ships from several years back in order for them to keep up with the newer models. The main problem i have with it, its always called a "alpha" but seeing how much work is put into some assets and the entire game seems to be still in a fluid state and cosntanly changing reworking an refactoring its such a waste of money and time. The only reason the most advanced stuff in SC are ships is only because they make a huge amount of money out of it...and more then half doesnt even exist at this point only as a .jpeg.
Its really infuriating when you realize then atleast 130.000.000.000 dollar is being used for a R&D phase of a prototype and a huge amount of money is being blown away for assets that are most likely to be reworked on because the game as no real seeable basic form of gameplay in it. Beside CR telling us that with the 60.000.000.000 dollar they are able to make the game...how does it now look like?
Sure, if by "enough time and effort" you mean both rebuilding it from scratch to be a ray tracing renderer, and also waiting long enough for consumer hardware to have enough processing power to deliver the frames in real time.
In any case, "movie quality" doesn't mean anything. Wrath of Khan was a movie featuring computer generated imagery. So was Avatar. So was Wing Commander, for that matter.
They really don't. They didn't back in the late '90s, with, say, UnrealEngine, and they haven't suddenly developed that problem since then.
Coincidentally, SC does the same thing. It's why we have all these fidelity animations and why we have the spaghettification bugs when ships blow up or otherwise disappear.
Then again, neither does SC…
Yes we are. What we aren't doing is uncritically buying every claim made by CIG, or ignoring the decades worth of 3D and physics-based gaming that has come before it. This how the discussion arises, as opposed to competing over just how loudly we should sing its praises. Instead, we actually discuss whether the latest claim out of the dream factory has any basis in reality, either as far as sensible design goes in the cases of it not being implemented (i.e. the vast majority of cases) or as far as it's being offered up in the test environment.
Five actually, and probably more than that.
3. You're have a general industry or hobby interest and want to see how this new game is coming along… if at all.
4. You have a direct interest in the success of the game, but aren't uncritically swallowing every bit of CIG PR as if it was truth from on high.
5. You have some passing interest in the careers of Roberts et al., possibly as a continuation of the soap opera they've established over the last few decades, what with the Rising Star connections, the organised crime connections, the getting-throw-out-of-two-industries storyline, and all the other twists and turns that would make for excellent daytime TV.
None of it is hatred. Hatred is what you see from the plaintiffs as their sole mode of response whenever dissenting opinion is raised about the state of the game or the competence of its makers. It's what you get from backers who yells at a cancer patient that he should die already just because he raised concerns about the game's UI. It's what you get from backers who tells a guy in a wheelchair go kill himself for exercising his consumer rights. It's what you get from backers who stalk, harass, and threaten violence on people with actual process insight who soberly and rationally opine on the flaws in said process.
Ok, disclaimer first: it's Friday, I've had a few, I'm going to try to minimise the drunken tangentrambles but who knows.
Rightso...
The thing where you pick a specific target point is a design decision, I think. But to be totally clear, your destination point is just some coordinates (in 64 bit, yes) you just move over there really fast. I can't disprove this idea that there's a new "scene" or whatever, with words, how could I? Sufficiently advanced fakery is indistinguishable from just doing the thing. But really complicated fakery would have been exciting and AtV would have just done a show about that instead.
First off, just so I don't get some "aha! SSE only exists on PC" type gotcha-ing, I'm going to start saying SIMD (single instruction, multiple data). SSE is a kind of SIMD, there's a newer PC one called AVX, on the 360 it was Altivec... all variants of the same idea - several numbers side by side in one wide register, and you can do the same operation on all of them in a single instruction.
What Derek's link above doesn't mention is that you tend to wrap all these weird types and unpronouncable intrinsics into a more user friendly, multi-platform friendly container, so if you need to, say, get the Y component out of it, you call a thing called "GetY" and it gives you the right thing. What it's doing at a hardware level, though, is shuffling the components around so Y is at the start, or is all of them, and it's taken a whole operation that could have done four of something else.
So how does a coding standard matter for this? Well, take these two apparently identical operations (yeah someone probably wouldn't do exactly this, but hopefully you see the point):
Option 1 is one operation. Option 2 takes six swizzles, three adds, and maybe some more swizzles and masks packing them together at the end. It's also the kind of code that's easier to write when you're trying to think about a problem rather than ideal vectorisation. This is where I talk about fanaticism, and where Frontier shines, IMO, because not only did they design a really idiot-proof vector library, but they have a general attitude that if you try to work around the interface design and start writing sloppy code, someone comes to your desk and kicks your butt for it. This kind of sloppiness naturally creeps in, but Frontier's general culture is one where you get called out even on apparently harmless deviations from the standard, so the standard stays strong. So there you go - fanatical cleanliness, miles of well-build explicitly 32-bit SIMD code, well worth sticking in 32-bit and working around the pain it causes.
So CryTek didn't do the things above. Obviously they've put out some groundbreaking tech over the years, but "fanatical cleanliness" isn't exactly their watchword. Watchphrase. I asked a guy who used to work there why there wasn't an explicit SIMD vector library like wot I was used to, and he said they'd trialled one, but because the original interface had funnelled people into Option 2 style code instead of Option 1, it actually ran much slower and they abandoned it. Modern compilers are still smart enough, though, that if it can work out what you're doing - do four adds in roughly the same place, say - it'll try to reorder the instructions so they were already side-by-side, and so on. In many cases it'll probably even out-perform because it saw stuff you didn't, and switching to 64-bit probably breaks a few less things.
Now for the hedge - this started as an off-the-cuff comment. I've not profiled either codebase at either precision, I'm not even sure how you'd test them side by side. Don't trust anyone who claims to be certain when they don't have the profile data to back it up.
So yeah, Regel, I hope that answered your question. dsmart, I hope I've not walked into some quibble about your precise definition of "coding standard". Jools, I hope I didn't arm anyone. Frontier, you're only fanatics in a good way, mostly.
Rightso...
And it's your gods-given right to claim it. No one can take that away from you. You're wrong, though. You seem hooked on this idea of maps, scenes, whatever you want to call them, with edges that a player has to cross. I feel like you keep trying to find ways I've said that's true, when I've said the opposite.
For (2) and (3), check my posting history on here before I became a Foundryman, ED fans had some inexplicable mental block on it too, I tried to explain them a thing, we end up with Adept thinking ED does things in 128-bit instead. For (1) vs (3), I actually have no idea what your definition of a "64 bit sized scene" is, I can't understand how it's not the same as (3), but you keep not defining it. Your use of terminology is frequently non-standard, this might be why you keep accusing me of obfuscating when I'm trying to be as clear as possible.
Yes. Right here. This is the thing I'm saying is the case. If you're not talking about demand-loading, or network LoD stuff, this is absolutely the thing. Each star system will probably be its own world, obviously, but within the star system, the thing you said there is true.
The thing where you pick a specific target point is a design decision, I think. But to be totally clear, your destination point is just some coordinates (in 64 bit, yes) you just move over there really fast. I can't disprove this idea that there's a new "scene" or whatever, with words, how could I? Sufficiently advanced fakery is indistinguishable from just doing the thing. But really complicated fakery would have been exciting and AtV would have just done a show about that instead.
Oh dang, you got me. I must have been obfuscating, to... say... positive things about Frontier? Let's see if I can unpack what I said to a level that you get it.
First off, just so I don't get some "aha! SSE only exists on PC" type gotcha-ing, I'm going to start saying SIMD (single instruction, multiple data). SSE is a kind of SIMD, there's a newer PC one called AVX, on the 360 it was Altivec... all variants of the same idea - several numbers side by side in one wide register, and you can do the same operation on all of them in a single instruction.
What Derek's link above doesn't mention is that you tend to wrap all these weird types and unpronouncable intrinsics into a more user friendly, multi-platform friendly container, so if you need to, say, get the Y component out of it, you call a thing called "GetY" and it gives you the right thing. What it's doing at a hardware level, though, is shuffling the components around so Y is at the start, or is all of them, and it's taken a whole operation that could have done four of something else.
So how does a coding standard matter for this? Well, take these two apparently identical operations (yeah someone probably wouldn't do exactly this, but hopefully you see the point):
Code:
1) Vec C = A + B
2) Vec C = Vec( A.GetX + B.GetX, A.GetY + B.GetY, A.GetZ + B.GetZ)So CryTek didn't do the things above. Obviously they've put out some groundbreaking tech over the years, but "fanatical cleanliness" isn't exactly their watchword. Watchphrase. I asked a guy who used to work there why there wasn't an explicit SIMD vector library like wot I was used to, and he said they'd trialled one, but because the original interface had funnelled people into Option 2 style code instead of Option 1, it actually ran much slower and they abandoned it. Modern compilers are still smart enough, though, that if it can work out what you're doing - do four adds in roughly the same place, say - it'll try to reorder the instructions so they were already side-by-side, and so on. In many cases it'll probably even out-perform because it saw stuff you didn't, and switching to 64-bit probably breaks a few less things.
Now for the hedge - this started as an off-the-cuff comment. I've not profiled either codebase at either precision, I'm not even sure how you'd test them side by side. Don't trust anyone who claims to be certain when they don't have the profile data to back it up.
So yeah, Regel, I hope that answered your question. dsmart, I hope I've not walked into some quibble about your precise definition of "coding standard". Jools, I hope I didn't arm anyone. Frontier, you're only fanatics in a good way, mostly.
That made me laugh, having just watched this week's Grand Tour. "One hundred and thirty million thousand".
Although, it could still be true by the time CIG releases anything worthwhile.
No doubt that'll land on the Doorstep of Rendering next week.Oooh that's weird good spot.
They seem to still have HUGE problems with shadows. Isn't that a render engine bug? Ben?
Yeah and every time i hear how people throw more money and how proud they are reaching a new high mark in funding while praising the CRoss i have only one reaction to it every damn time...
Err, that's not how humanity works, or the internet. If I give a company $20 for a pizza and they don't turn up for 3 hours, I'll moan about it on Yelp. If I give them $100 for a computer game and it doesn't turn up for years, I'll moan about that, too. I also moan about the weather, earthquakes, and the twinge in my back, but you don't have to listen to it.
Yes, but they haven't taken $135 mil and promised the world. Heck, Rodina is basically *one guy* - but it's one guy with realistic expectations.
Or, because we're very disappointed in it. The world isn't as black and white as you seem to think.
Well, yeah, I'm a forum member and you can't do that because of the rules: CR isn't, so people can moan. It's pretty straightforward, I think.
But if I'd wandered off with $135 million and failed to deliver on my promises, I'd certainly expect someone, somewhere, to have more than few choice words about me.
*Mod hat off
Sorry for my "lost in translation" but still not quite follow the answer
So, I spoke to the guy in charge of this stuff, Marco, and besides laughing a bit about the 64-bit thing, he gave me some specifics that I hope are what you were actually asking. So, he says, "yes, the planet seamlessly generates the complete surface as you move anywhere you go in a planet," when they refer to an area as "handcrafted" they mean the detail objects have been hand placed, whereas other areas have the procedural scatter seen upthread. There are hand-made 2D terrain maps used in the system, but they're layered in with noise and random factors, just less of that than Elite.
The most important thing he said though, I'll just paste:
"I don't think a discussion of SC VS Elite makes any sense, Elite is getting very good results for the context of their game (billions of planets) we are getting good results in the context of Star Citizen (less planets more artists driven with more background story etc.)"
Right
I too liked Lord Of War btw
That's been sitting on my shelf for years. I need to get around to watching it.
I don't understand how anyone can hurt a fully funded game with a team and pipeline that's all set to deliver it's promises with some nasty internet words? Unless that was all a lie?
Do we need to refactor the old saying?
"Sticks and stones may break the pipeline and nasty words will hurt development"?
Or do you guys already chant that at meetings?
He has a point. Until i open the SC equivalent of a can of worms called marketing and the big claims being made. Lets be honest here that the only reason we are making fun of SC sometimes i wonder how big the pressure is on those that have to deliver those claims in the first place. Or how annoyed they are by the handfull of people making fun of it.
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