The Star Citizen Thread v5

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SlickReed

SlickReed
LQnV3i5.png


lMpKyJi.png
 

Stigbob

Stigbob
SlickReed said:
http://i.imgur.com/LQnV3i5.png

http://i.imgur.com/lMpKyJi.png
Click to expand...

Nothing positive to say about Star Citizen and having to fall back on a lame attempt at a negative comparison with the BDSSED doesn't make any difference to Star Citizens many many problems.

THE LIST

Initial release 2014 (didn't happen)
Ship sales (overpriced engineering debt)
Dates (all missed so far)
Flight model (man it's bad)
Likely completion decade (if at all)
Use of backer funds (the backers will never know)
Wild theory-crafting (everything not available to play)
Pay2win (it is)
Comparisons with ED (ED is the BDSSE)
NMS (going the same way)
Derek Smart (he was right)
Citcon 2016 (disastrous)
3.0 (not in 2016)
Refunds (get em while you can)
Scapegoating (Derek, Illphonic, leavers)
The new TOS (your money is ours we don't need to make a game)
Development start date (it was October 2011)
Star Marine (on again, off again, already in the game)
Illphonic (CiG gave them the wrong scale to work to)
RSI forum (cast out the unbelievers)
Freelancer (history repeating)
Underdog act (CiG/RSI are now a multinational multimillion dollar business)
Sandworms (Frank Herberts IP)
Coffee machines (Lol)
Blood oxygen levels (no space in the game)
Chris Roberts physics expert (he isn't)
Legalistic bluff called (the escapist)
Labelling backers (goon, special snowflakes, high maintenance, toxic dinks)
Accusations of corporate espionage (beer4thebeergod)
INN ( Run by a rep management company, less viewers than pgabz)
Star citizen subreddit (controversial tab concealed by default, brigading)
PG birds (scopecreep on the fly)
Handcrafted universe superior to PG (this may take some time)
Switching focus from handcrafting to PG (NMS/ED bandwagon)
PU neglected for SQ42 (vast majority of backers want PU)
CR thinks he's making a movie (repeatedly says "movie" when he means "game")
Mocap (hollywood obsession)
Build your own studio (repeatedly)
Expensive reshoots (repeatedly)
Renting the imaginarium (most expensive in the world)
"Original" artwork (other studios logo's still visible)
Ongoing scopecreep (cargocult)
Physical relocation to hollywood (they trade on the internet)
100 systems at launch (they'd need decades for this)
Tusken raiders (George lucas's IP)
Nipple jets (jetpacks not required for EVA)
Killer door control (no space in the game)
Refactoring (does not mean what you think it means)
Top Gun "inspired" stuff (Hornet ad and inverted finger)
Monthly patches (have never been monthly)
Tutorial broken ("fixed" by removing it completely)
Ships don't spawn correctly (very old bug)
Random ship explosion (very old bug)
Multicrew numbers exceed player maximum
FPS not impressive (in an FPS engine)
Animations are glitchy
No VR support (you can't just add it later)
The "patcher" is a complete download everytime
Chat UI unchanged (CR said it would be changed live)
Crash reporter not reporting information
Staff retention issues (leavers)
CR makes unrealistic demands (from the man himself)
Lack of internal coordination (seat numbers)
STOP SAYING 'VERSE (Joss Wheedon IP)
New ship direct copy from final fantasy (can't be bothered with CIG name)


SUB LIST THE CULT

Claim to be the voice of backers (actually internet loonies)
Greymarket (you can't say black market that sounds illegal)
Deterring customers (the prospect of playing a game with them)
Run a hate sub (r/dereksmart)
Hatesub moderators shared with greymarket (financial motive)
Interference with the ED forum (exposed gaming the rep system)
Brigading
Threats
Death threats
Abuse
Misinformation
Review bombing competition (LOD ED NMS COD:IW)
Journalist intimidation ("wah" clickbait)
Suppressing the truth (happily embrace positive lies)
Paranoia (they see Derek everywhere)
Encouraging purchases (whilst applying the above)
False claims about ED's development time
Yaw is not a dirty word
Living embodiment of the Streisand effect
 

Dooguk

D
Asp Explorer said:
Maybe we could license StarEngine...........
Click to expand...

We will build our own. It shall be know as The Worm Engine (always with the The cos' it's the ultimate engine, with more fidelity than you would ever need, and it can easily accommodate millions of players all in the same instance. It's going too be great. :)

Now all we need is funding????

(Looks towards SlickReed on previous page) [yesnod]
 
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Noctrach

N
I don't know if this discussion is entirely "finished" yet, nor do I want to throw fuel on any kind of fire... but I honest to god don't understand why making an engine for your game was an impossible prospect.

I'm in agreement with the fact that since CIG didn't know the scope of their game or funding they would generate it should never have been part of the original plan to build a custom engine.
However as the money poured in and they started hitting stretch goal after stretch goal... I really don't see why it would've been a fool's errand.

Sorry Ben, but I don't share your opinion on how unfeasible it is to create a custom engine for a game, you don't have to create everything from scratch.
You'd have to build a framework, a renderer, and a generous supply of tools, the latter being by far the hardest and most risky part of development.
UI, Physics, maths and audio libraries exist as very robust and well-tested middleware, and did so even at the time. ( Havok, FMOD, Wwise, Scaleform, XNA, GLM...etc)

CD Projekt Red created a multiplatform (360 + PC) engine from scratch for Witcher 2, with only 10% of CIGs current budget and team.
It took them roughly two years to create it while they developed the core gameplay up to Alpha in BioWare's Aurora engine they used for Witcher 1. (source: seminar by Krzysztof Krzyscin, technical art director at CDPR)

CIG would realistically have easily been capable of performing a similar feat. Build the proof-of-concept gameplay in CryEngine 3 while building their own tools with the insane funds and talent that they had already acquired after the first year, then start porting these core gameplay mechanics to the new engine once it was done. (You don't need a fullscale PU to test gameplay mechanics for fun factor, as you guys yourself are demonstrating with the Arena Commander and Star Marine modules)

Honestly to me it would seem that the only real reason a custom engine for SC would've been unfeasible is because it would've most likely hampered CIGs abilities to keep selling pricey concept ships to keep the show afloat.
 
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DLewth

DLewth
Noctrach said:
I don't know if this discussion is entirely "finished" yet, nor do I want to throw fuel on any kind of fire... but I honest to god don't understand why making an engine for your game was an impossible prospect.

I'm in agreement with the fact that since CIG didn't know the scope of their game or funding they would generate it should never have been part of the original plan to build a custom engine.
However as the money poured in and they started hitting stretch goal after stretch goal... I really don't see why it would've been a fool's errand.

Sorry Ben, but I don't share your opinion on how unfeasible it is to create a custom engine for a game, you don't have to create everything from scratch.
You'd have to build a framework, a renderer, and a generous supply of tools, the latter being by far the hardest and most risky part of development.
UI, Physics, maths and audio libraries exist as very robust and well-tested middleware, and did so even at the time. ( Havok, FMOD, Wwise, Scaleform, XNA, GLM...etc)

CD Projekt Red created a multiplatform (360 + PC) engine from scratch for Witcher 2, with only 10% of CIGs current budget and team.
It took them roughly two years to create it while they developed the core gameplay up to Alpha in BioWare's Aurora engine they used for Witcher 1. (source: seminar by Krzysztof Krzyscin, technical art director at CDPR)

CIG would realistically have easily been capable of performing a similar feat. Build the proof-of-concept gameplay in CryEngine 3 while building their own tools with the insane funds and talent that they had already acquired after the first year, then start porting these core gameplay mechanics to the new engine once it was done. (You don't need a fullscale PU to test gameplay mechanics for fun factor, as you guys yourself are demonstrating with the Arena Commander and Star Marine modules)

Honestly to me it would seem that the only real reason a custom engine for SC would've been unfeasible is because it would've most likely hampered CIGs abilities to keep selling pricey concept ships to keep the show afloat.
Click to expand...

Well, not impossible. But it's tricky to get a new team working together smoothly, and it's tricky to get a large team working together smoothly, and almost impossible to produce revolutionary tech without a team working together smoothly. Plus, you'd then have to wait while they built whatever dev tools they needed so whilst I'm not convinced Cryengine was the best choice, using something that already exists probably was. They still have the option of (ahem) refactoring it module by module in the future.
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
Noctrach said:
I don't know if this discussion is entirely "finished" yet, nor do I want to throw fuel on any kind of fire... but I honest to god don't understand why making an engine for your game was an impossible prospect.

I'm in agreement with the fact that since CIG didn't know the scope of their game or funding they would generate it should never have been part of the original plan to build a custom engine.
However as the money poured in and they started hitting stretch goal after stretch goal... I really don't see why it would've been a fool's errand.

Sorry Ben, but I don't share your opinion on how unfeasible it is to create a custom engine for a game, you don't have to create everything from scratch.
You'd have to build a framework, a renderer, and a generous supply of tools, the latter being by far the hardest and most risky part of development.
UI, Physics, maths and audio libraries exist as very robust and well-tested middleware, and did so even at the time. ( Havok, FMOD, Wwise, Scaleform, XNA, GLM...etc)

CD Projekt Red created a multiplatform (360 + PC) engine from scratch for Witcher 2, with only 10% of CIGs current budget and team.
It took them roughly two years to create it while they developed the core gameplay up to Alpha in BioWare's Aurora engine they used for Witcher 1. (source: seminar by Krzysztof Krzyscin, technical art director at CDPR)

CIG would realistically have easily been capable of performing a similar feat. Build the proof-of-concept gameplay in CryEngine 3 while building their own tools with the insane funds and talent that they had already acquired after the first year, then start porting these core gameplay mechanics to the new engine once it was done. (You don't need a fullscale PU to test gameplay mechanics for fun factor, as you guys yourself are demonstrating with the Arena Commander and Star Marine modules)

Honestly to me it would seem that the only real reason a custom engine for SC would've been unfeasible is because it would've most likely hampered CIGs abilities to keep selling pricey concept ships to keep the show afloat.
Click to expand...
I hadn't heard that CD Projekt Red managed to do such a thing, I'll have to look into it and maybe adjust my position.
The main part I think isn't actually the tools, it's the "framework" side of things. Writing all the really low-level stuff that the other features need to run on top of - thread-friendly containers, job systems, an abstraction layer for the renderer, etc - and giving them a good interface that you can really rely on to build the other low-level stuff, is big work.
You can speed things along by buying physics, audio, maths libraries as middleware, but if you're buying middleware (and I pray you're getting full source licenses for it), why not buy a bunch of it that you know will work together, i.e. an engine? As an example, integrating Scaleform into an engine can be time-consuming as they provide you with a set of example shaders, but you're expected to customise them to match your actual rendering pipeline. CryEngine comes with that work already done, as I expect most other Scaleform-supporting engines do. I think overall, the middleware-gluing approach gives you some benefits in being able to pick and choose what you get, and navigate around things that you think are bad news, but it comes at the cost of having to do the integration, and at the risk of not spotting that one piece of middleware really pushes you towards one paradigm, while another can only run efficiently if it's talked to in a totally different way.
 

Noctrach

N
Ben Parry said:
I hadn't heard that CD Projekt Red managed to do such a thing, I'll have to look into it and maybe adjust my position.
The main part I think isn't actually the tools, it's the "framework" side of things. Writing all the really low-level stuff that the other features need to run on top of - thread-friendly containers, job systems, an abstraction layer for the renderer, etc - and giving them a good interface that you can really rely on to build the other low-level stuff, is big work.
You can speed things along by buying physics, audio, maths libraries as middleware, but if you're buying middleware (and I pray you're getting full source licenses for it), why not buy a bunch of it that you know will work together, i.e. an engine? As an example, integrating Scaleform into an engine can be time-consuming as they provide you with a set of example shaders, but you're expected to customise them to match your actual rendering pipeline. CryEngine comes with that work already done, as I expect most other Scaleform-supporting engines do. I think overall, the middleware-gluing approach gives you some benefits in being able to pick and choose what you get, and navigate around things that you think are bad news, but it comes at the cost of having to do the integration, and at the risk of not spotting that one piece of middleware really pushes you towards one paradigm, while another can only run efficiently if it's talked to in a totally different way.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong though. I agree with you that CryEngine was the "optimal" choice at the time of kickstarter.
Both solutions carry a roughly equal risk I feel, I'd be biased towards the "new tech" choice as I had some limited experience building very rudimentary (but functional :p) 3D networked game engine frameworks myself in second year.
As I believe you've mentioned, the main advantages of a custom engine would be:
a) Flexibility, a good framework can be super modular.
b) Once you're done building it, your engine team literally knows almost everything there is to know about your tech and tools.
An engine package is more rigid and opaque I feel, even with full source access. On the flip side, these qualities do make problems more predictable and therefore frequenty easier to solve, provided you have dev support on hotline.

It would be a pretty massive task, but I'm not sure if it'd have taken much more time and effort than the amount of work that's been put into modifying CryEngine.
For the project itself... it really is a "hindsight 20/20" scenario. I think a significant chunk of the hurdles you guys have to overcome (mostly physics/precision and networking) could've been somewhat mitigated going custom tech "from scratch".
At the same time, building a networking architecture from the ground up is equally daunting and carries a great amont of risk in and of itself. (Networking would personally be my main concern for this project, the framework is tricky but imo it's really all about planning it properly with the right levels of abstraction.)

In the end for Star Citizen, this is what you guys went with and I'll be interested to see how it pans out. I for one would love to read a full post-mortem review about this project without all the dramatisation :)
Until then, we can forever speculate how it would've been in alternate realities. :D

If you/anyone wants to see the CDPR lecture, I can send it in PM. (Doubt the mods will like to have it posted here since it's not really SC related)

DLewth said:
so whilst I'm not convinced Cryengine was the best choice, using something that already exists probably was.
Click to expand...

Honestly, if you look at the timeframe I really do agree that CryEngine was as good as anything they could've gotten for this project.
Every other engine would've generated the same issues, while being far less mature at the time of kickstarter, and without the prospect of having ex-devs of said engine working on your team. :p
 
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DLewth

DLewth
Noctrach said:
Honestly, if you look at the timeframe I really do agree that CryEngine was as good as anything they could've gotten for this project.
Every other engine would've generated the same issues, while being far less mature at the time of kickstarter, and without the prospect of having ex-devs of said engine working on your team. :p
Click to expand...

Long before I wound up in this thread-o-doom, I remember thinking about this and deciding Unreal would have been a better choice, but I've now no idea how I reached that conclusion. I guess it's the 'armchair dev' version of finding yourself in the kitchen and forgetting what you came in for. [wacko]
Cryengine seems to be (slowly) panning out for them so it might be just as well it wasn't my decision. :D
 

Zyll Goliat

Zyll Goliat
Tippis said:
That looks… awful. Visually as well as mechanically. [where is it]
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Seriously aint all that bad....here I recorded few min of my play in 1080p HiDef with 60 fps so you guys can see all"fidelity"that Roberts talking about[yesnod]
To be honest I personally get bored after few games and still knows to be very laggy and bugged....but as I said just pay attention on movement and details for me that looks good enough and could be the solid foundation for SC PU/SQ42.......

[video=youtube;E1gQ1-rNYLI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1gQ1-rNYLI[/video]

My Spec:
CPU FX 8300 4GHZ
GPU RX 470 4GB
MEM 16Gb DDR3 1333Mhz
SSD 128Gb Samsung
Recorded With AMD Relive
 
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