The Star Citizen Thread V2.0

[Nick 'Paradox' Parker]

I can only say that you can use 3PV but it is absolutely ineffective for combat.

Fair enough, but I can only say that I will put my bet on any 3PV BF4/CoD player with 5 to 10 years experience, to make it work against human players before I'll dismiss SC 3PV as combat ineffective. Where there is a will, there is an way/exploit. Those videos were enough for me to see even more writing on the wall.

 

[Aleksej]

Ya, it was kinda addressed to a previous statement from you when you mentioned the gameplay as boring, but also meant to others that meant the same. xD



Maybe it’s 70-100 now, but here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous It says FD had about 235 staff members on hand in the UK and Canada. I cannot say for sure but they have probably all at one point of another been working on the game. Still 70 – 100 is more than CIG’s 12.

Not everyone in FD is working on ED. There are other projects that FD is working on.

Well still their engine was designed for this type of game since Braben has been wanting to revisit the Elite series for a long time and planned ahead. The engine CIG “bought” was not designed by nature for zero g flying and to be used as a “MMO” engine. So they also here had an advantage.

It was CR's choice of the engine and no one forced him to choose it. It was his deliberate choice making any excuses that it was not designed for zero g flying are invalid.

Na. The reason for the delay was the multiplayer backend. They initially wanted to use a the CryEngine netcode, but decided it would be a waste of time and wanted to instead design their own which they then used the next 6 months on. The flight system they had back then is probably the same one we are demoing now since if you look at the livestream they did in December, it looks about the same, so it really has not been worked on that until probably PAX event.

You cannot deny this (18 December 2013 by CR):

I feel that the Dogfighting module, especially with Star Citizen’s greatly increased profile, needs to be more polished than a typical “alpha”. There are a lot of eyes on the game, and more than a few people wanting us to fail. Because Dogfighting is the first module that will involve significant gameplay, it has to be good – I don’t feel that we will get a pass just because it is pre-pre alpha.

So we had two choices: either fork development and spend time building something that would involve throwing away work in order to meet the December deadline and deliver something that wouldn’t have the level of polish I’m happy with, or stay on course to build something that would lead directly into the finished game.

You see nothing polished perhaps but there are people with other opinions on this matter. I for one believe the game had some rough spots but was a nice polished alpha release with minimal with game breaking bugs (unless you count not having proper HOTAS support as gamebreaking)

No proper HOTAS support and the absence of in-game control settings are indeed game-breaking for me.

A bit of misinformation here. This was something that was planned from THE START. If you read their kickstarter it mentions it promised backers early access to their ships after 12 months. Because it was a success and probably helped them gain extra money is just good for them. Does not mean they are “money hungry” and do not care about gameplay.

You also admit that this allowed to gain more money. And now they want even more, hence rushed release of AC. Otherwise there will be a lot more frustrated people.

This was also a bit wrong. Idris got redesigned because of SQ42. They needed a bigger ship for the singleplayer missions so they increased the size. Also if you read Star Citizen kickstarter, it says there about their physics based flight model, so it was planned from the start. They even had an early working model (you can see it in use on their kickstarter).

Would be nice if we could continue to have a friendly tone while discussing this. Friendly discussion is the best type of discussion

Also sry for some spelling mistakes, I am really tired and should go to bed xD Too lazy to fix in microsoft word. I'll continue the discussion with you tomorrow! Good Night

This only means that they did not have solid vision of what they were doing in SQ42. There was no solid planning. Otherwise Idris would be a Frigate from the very beginning. The statement below is just indicative of this.

This issue we’re focusing on the work Foundry 42 has done on the Idris. Work shifted to Foundry 42 when the Idris became the principal capital ship for Squadron 42.

 

[forger]

Maybe it’s 70-100 now, but here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous It says FD had about 235 staff members on hand in the UK and Canada. I cannot say for sure but they have probably all at one point of another been working on the game. Still 70 – 100 is more than CIG’s 12.

don't turn into one of those guys that are waste of time to argue.

Frontier Developments, the company I founded in January 1994 (and whose first product was a version of the “Frontier” game for the CD32 console), is now a very well established game development company with 235 people in the UK and Canada, with its own technology and tools and a great team of game developers.

means the company has as many developers if needed but they are working on all projects that FD has currently, unlike CIG which cannot make even one game's fictional part properly working for HOTAS and TrackIR inputs Frontier ED is not only FD project.

Specifically for ED frontier has 70-100 developers and never had more
and even if FD would had 500 000 chinese developers and ED would be under development from the year 1875 wouldn't change a thing about how broke AC is released. it's bullxhit

when you develop a game for flying in space you:
1) choose your engine carefully to support main gameplay;
2) make sure you can FLY with all proper devices and not just KB/M and pads and have FUN by doing so;
3) design flight model first and ships after that! and design ships for SPACE flight keeping in mind that in space you can strafe;
4) make sure complicated devices has customization options easy enough to implement and DO implement them in alpha or you are showing that you are ignoring hotas users;

funny thing i saw old poll where KB/M was named as main input for 27%, 6% were gamepad and rest stick/hotas BUT when after it turned into MMO it became clear only stick/hotas is not what they have in mind at all

NOT A SINGLE thing from the list works. flight model was not fun at first (dev told us this) so they tweaked it to be "fun", added gimbaled all over the place guns because they were unable to hit anything (lamers?) the guy who coded flight model told us at the release that the game is unplayable for him with Hotas, ships are redesigned all the way because designers didn't take into account too many things, input controllers are left somewhere in the unknown, probably as CR said: next month will be fixed, so what does that show us? only that CIG doesn't care about hotas users, and when they saw millions rolling in untypical SC MMO clearly turned into typical MMO - dumbed down, weird mouse control choices, now head tracking will move gimballed guns, huge arrows, useless radar, overpowered missiles, turning rates that are much closer to any AAA first person shooter than any AAA flight/space simulator, power management is a joke.

don't get me wrong, i like SC and where it is heading, it is good that it is not ED, but i just cannot respect developers that are so stupid and ignorant - they never admit their mistakes!!!! they released AC and it is because WE WERE impatient, not because they were dumb enough to release it in current state and then all i see and read is "we are happy, fans are happy", CR don't even understand what a thin line is he walking on with selling ships for hundreds and thousands of dollars, he don't know what turrets in space means, he cannot express himself clear enough to be understood, he frequently has to put huge effort to explain things that he or CIG couldn't explain in the first time and there is one easy rule to remember: stupid person is not the person who cannot understand but the one who cannot explain himself clearly.

so while their priorities of fixing crucial game parts (input customization and sensitivity, flight model, 6dof, power management) is low on their list the game is non existent for me

 

[Kris]

Ok. My little friendly rant time. What i don´t understand is how it did CIG so long to get fully stuffed. Kickstarter finished Nov.19 2012. I understand that they relocated to new offices (and hiring new stuff takes some time) etc, but that doesn´t have to take so much time? But right now it seems to be better, and reading Monthly Updates has given me much hope - it looks like all up to 300 people are working hard.

Second thing - has CR explained why he chose CryEngine? Why not any other engine (i understand that building their own engine would take much more time)? Are CryEngine tools simply "most ready" for this kind of space sim from available engines?

 

[Mr.Nowak]

CIG is doing everything absolutely the opposite way - they do not know what exactly they want, hence they release something and start patching it all the time.

It is obvious that they could not have released AC at the same level as ED Alpha was released.

Can this get more ridiculous? Just because you don't know much about how game development or CIG works they don't know what they exactly want? Go pay them a visit and talk to them and see.

It's all about perception. The controls issues do not even appear in the "Known Issues" section, which suggests they are not important to CIG - if you want to look at it that way. If they had an alternate section with priority items being worked on as "Improvements" and this included a reference to the controls - it would go a long way to give some of us a bit of confidence in CIG, and that they are taking it seriously.

It's all about knowing how game development works. You don't put unadded features to a known bug's section on a patch list. Controller support was told to be improved on the AC Launch news. Should they also add multiplayer still not added in to Known Issues?

I think that most of the people on the internet seem to be used to the publisher model which easier to understand for the end customer. The controller and flight tweaking is an ongoing process which is said to be feature complete at 1.0 and this was repeated many times.

Further flight model upgrades to better handle unique thruster power combinations and refine the control of each ship

Source : https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13909-Arena-Commander-Launched

Ok. My little friendly rant time. What i don´t understand is how it did CIG so long to get fully stuffed. Kickstarter finished Nov.19 2012. I understand that they relocated to new offices (and hiring new stuff takes some time) etc, but that doesn´t have to take so much time? But right now it seems to be better, and reading Monthly Updates has given me much hope - it looks like all up to 300 people are working hard.

Second thing - has CR explained why he chose CryEngine? Why not any other engine (i understand that building their own engine would take much more time)? Are CryEngine tools simply "most ready" for this kind of space sim from available engines?

It is smart to staff up slowly. You get your core teams and design set up first and them you staff up. It als had to do with the funding CR got. He never wanted to fully staff up without having the proper money to support it so he gradually staffed up in relation to the crowdfunding as well as structure of his teams. CIG as around 100 employees at Q3 2013 and 200 at Q1 2014.

BTW Almost 300 people are working on Star Citizen now, more than Frontier employs total, and way more than the number of FD employees working on Elite. Source is in this thread a couple pages ago.

BTW did you guys see the trailer thingy Nowak linked, the one where you can see a brief glimpse of inter-system travel in a scripted, pre-rendered cutscene? I really don't see how that can hold a candle to Elite, even though it was pre-produced and could've shown how amazing travel is going to be.

I betcha it's going to be a cutscene in the final game. I can't see them getting anything like ED's Supercruise into the game.

268 but yes. You have to think about it CIG didn't have many employees last year. The staffing up just happened in the last 2 quarters to reach a proper production speed.

Yea the inter system travel looked pretty good to me. But when you think about it the Elite Dangerous interstellar travel is also right now at least a cutscene because you can not move you can not quit it you just watch. The way it is handled in the engine even though it uses the locations of the galaxies around the interstellar travel to reflect on the interstellar travel sequence "wall" is still a sequenced event but it looks good and feels great that's why no one says "it's a cutscene".

A cutscene or event scene (sometimes in-game cinematic or in-game movie) is a sequence in a video game over which the player has no or only limited control, breaking up the gameplay

But why is everyone expecting these classical cutscenes out of SC that's what i don't get. Everybody is expecting a cutscene experience while SC is aiming for proper immersion. They didn't show how the jump looked from the cockpit of the ship they just showed it from far away. Everybody from E: D just shrugs away from SC saying it's not so seamless when it's not even out yet.

This to me looks very impressive and it is not a view from the inside of the cockpit. CR said there won't be loading screens in SC so we will experience interstellar travel in a cool and immersive way.

This only means that they did not have solid vision of what they were doing in SQ42. There was no solid planning. Otherwise Idris would be a Frigate from the very beginning. The statement below is just indicative of this.

It seems that you have experience in writing a 1000 page singleplayer script. Tell us more on how it works and what are the quirks of it.

 

[Aleksej]

MPC, I just wanted to say that even though I may disagree with some of your views, I really appreciate that you took the time to respond to individual points.

BTW Almost 300 people are working on Star Citizen now, more than Frontier employs total, and way more than the number of FD employees working on Elite. Source is in this thread a couple pages ago.

You raised a few good points about the engine - even though Frontier started work in earnest after the kickstarter, they were probably making sure that they could do Elite with their engine eventually.

But I ask you, does that really matter? What matters to me is the result. Chris Roberts could've just bought out the Infinity Engine guys and have the greatest space engine ever made. Hell, for that amount of money he could easily buy Terra or a similar professional-grade visualization engine that is not only great for space and ground, but even goes down to the FPS level.

I think the main point for me personally is that I've come to realize just how small in scope Star Citizen really is designed to be. To me, the expectation is now that of an updated Privateer/Freelancer mix with high poly ships and a FPS portion. I may well be positively surprised in the end, but for the moment that's where I set my expectations. Calling it the BFSSG or similar is unwarranted however. It can still be fun, it can still be quite awesome, but it doesn't look like it's going to fill my need to roam free in space.


BTW did you guys see the trailer thingy Nowak linked, the one where you can see a brief glimpse of inter-system travel in a scripted, pre-rendered cutscene? I really don't see how that can hold a candle to Elite, even though it was pre-produced and could've shown how amazing travel is going to be.

I betcha it's going to be a cutscene in the final game. I can't see them getting anything like ED's Supercruise into the game.

Could you give the link to that trailer?

 

[Aleksej]

Can this get more ridiculous? Just because you don't know much about how game development or CIG works they don't know what they exactly want? Go pay them a visit and talk to them and see.



It's all about knowing how game development works. You don't put unadded features to a known bug's section on a patch list. Controller support was told to be improved on the AC Launch news. Should they also add multiplayer still not added in to Known Issues?

I think that most of the people on the internet seem to be used to the publisher model which easier to understand for the end customer. The controller and flight tweaking is an ongoing process which is said to be feature complete at 1.0 and this was repeated many times.

Further flight model upgrades to better handle unique thruster power combinations and refine the control of each ship

Source : https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13909-Arena-Commander-Launched

Why should I have a deep knowledge of how the game development works if I see how FD and CIG work? I can compare the results of their work. And what I see is that CIG in comparison to FD does almost everything wrong. It is very simple to come to this conclusion. Again top priorities for flight sim are flight model and flight controls and not a polygon count of the ship.

 

[Aleksej]

Ok. My little friendly rant time. What i don´t understand is how it did CIG so long to get fully stuffed. Kickstarter finished Nov.19 2012. I understand that they relocated to new offices (and hiring new stuff takes some time) etc, but that doesn´t have to take so much time? But right now it seems to be better, and reading Monthly Updates has given me much hope - it looks like all up to 300 people are working hard.

Second thing - has CR explained why he chose CryEngine? Why not any other engine (i understand that building their own engine would take much more time)? Are CryEngine tools simply "most ready" for this kind of space sim from available engines?

Definitely CryEngine was not the best engine for space sim. He has chosen it for the other parts of the game, i.e. not for flying in space and for the nice graphics:

“I made the decision to go for CryENGINE because I felt like its DNA was PC, which is what I’m focusing on. It was very powerful and expandable – so we were able to take the engine and build extra functionality for the space ships, and that’s obviously an important part of our gameplay. And then the rendering look and feel of CryENGINE is more photo-realistic, and I wanted to go for that almost film visual effect, not quite as stylized as some engines come across. CryENGINE does that really well.”

 

[Tiggo]

" I felt like its DNA was PC, which is what I’m focusing on."

Then Mister Roberts grabbed his Xbox-Controller to show of the DFM.


^^

 

[Memnoch]

Definitely CryEngine was not the best engine for space sim. He has chosen it for the other parts of the game, i.e. not for flying in space and for the nice graphics:

So is it going to be more of an FPS with bolt on space flight components rather than a space sim with bolt on FPS components then?

 

[Aleksej]

So is it going to be more of an FPS with bolt on space flight components rather than a space sim with bolt on FPS components then?

Who knows... Unfortunately IMO if they go the way to please MMO community than they will bolt on FPS components and space sim would become an element to get from point A to point B.

 

[Mr.Nowak]

So is it going to be more of an FPS with bolt on space flight components rather than a space sim with bolt on FPS components then?

Who knows... Unfortunately IMO if they go the way to please MMO community than they will bolt on FPS components and space sim would become an element to get from point A to point B.

Confirmed Star Citizen is an FPS game now...

 

[Aleksej]

Confirmed Star Citizen is an FPS game now...

Won't you agree that true Space Sim genre fans supported the game during the early days of KS campaign. After gaining millions of funding it has drawn attention of casual gamers and now the latter group influences the development of the game because it suddenly become a majority. And what do they ask - leave mouse controls as they are, give us maneuvering thrusters that won't cause drift, give us head-tracking aiming etc.

I wonder why aren't they asking for adding "I win" key-binding?

 

[Mr.Nowak]

Won't you agree that true Space Sim genre fans supported the game during the early days of KS campaign. After gaining millions of funding it has drawn attention of casual gamers and now the latter group influences the development of the game because it suddenly become a majority. And what do they ask - leave mouse controls as they are, give us maneuvering thrusters that won't cause drift, give us head-tracking aiming etc.

I wonder why aren't they asking for adding "I win" key-binding?

Yea CR added first person elements to the game just because he wanted to please people. nothing to do with his own decision and his own stretch goal which he wrote.

 

[Memnoch]

Confirmed Star Citizen is an FPS game now...

Hey, I'm just asking questions. I'm on the outside, looking in and wondering what all the commotion is about.

 

[forger]

Yea CR added first person elements to the game just because he wanted to please people. nothing to do with his own decision and his own stretch goal which he wrote.

SC history: hangar released 2013 august, only FPS mode.
Arena commander released 2014 june, still FPS mode in hangar, FPS mode on eject, flying ships added.
Planetside modulde-only FPS
Boarding-mainly FPS
...

so SC is FPS game with the ability to use space vehicles and in current state SC really is more FPS than anything else. for immersion sake i am all for fps+sim, but with one note: please make accents on what you consider as a main gameplay, CIG started with FPS (don't tell me that it was there so easier to start) and that means they put main accent on that part of the engine and with doing that showed what that game will be - FPS with more advanced vehicular usage than middle AAA FPS title

if they wouldn't make FPS they would start to make flight model FIRTS because FPS is already there and no need to touch it before you get main game play right.

and even after 6 month AC delay they have so many things to tweak there...

 

[Aleksej]

Yea CR added first person elements to the game just because he wanted to please people. nothing to do with his own decision and his own stretch goal which he wrote.

So when exactly FPS was announced? I can find it only at 20M stretch goal.

Never mind, 5M stretch goal - boarding mechanics. But this was only small element back then.

Now we have "space sim" built around FPS and not otherwise.

 

[Stormprooter]

Hey, I'm just asking questions. I'm on the outside, looking in and wondering what all the commotion is about.

Many, some or fewer of the original kickstarter backers, and early post-kickstarter backers (like myself) are a bit miffed at the moment.
The original vision for Star Citizen set out by Chris Roberts gave the impression we were going to get a space combat/space flight sim type game with a direct focus on the PC being the desired initial platform, and WWII style dogfighting combat action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M995Mqr67E

This is looking like it's been borked and hijacked by the mousekiddies FPS and casual crowd, and CIG are now pandering to the lowest common denominator.
In a nutshell, Arena Commander is quite unplayable with a HOTAS, but easy as bejewelled with a mouse.
If you know anyone with access to Arena Commander, I strongly suggest you have a go for yourself, and make up your own mind.

Yes, we know this is a pre-alpha, but the general direction of development seems disturbing at the moment. I hope this does change.

 

[Aleksej]

Many, some or fewer of the original kickstarter backers, and early post-kickstarter backers (like myself) are a bit miffed at the moment.
The original vision for Star Citizen set out by Chris Roberts gave the impression we were going to get a space combat/space flight sim type game with a direct focus on the PC being the desired initial platform, and WWII style dogfighting combat action.
This is looking like it's been borked and hijacked by the mousekiddies FPS and casual crowd, and CIG are now pandering to the lowest common denominator.
In a nutshell, Arena Commander is quite unplayable with a HOTAS, but easy as bejewelled with a mouse.
If you know anyone with access to Arena Commander, I strongly suggest you have a go for yourself, and make up your own mind.

Yes, we know this is a pre-alpha, but the general direction of development seems disturbing at the moment. I hope this does change.

That is exactly what I am talking about - the SC is being hijacked mouse-clickers - point and click.

And we can see those people coming to ED. However, their immediate reaction is that ED is too difficult.

 

[Habos]

The loading time for SC is insane and only for a few ships and 2 maps. I can think what would it be like in final game when they add all the ships/systems.
Now that the target arrow gone (I didn't like it at all) they will prove that the blue orb is OK and we should see our loved ship in center of it so that we know we are in the center of action.