The Star Citizen Thread v5

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I wonder if CiG with June already ticking by is frantically preparing its next statement of reasons why 3.0 wont show on the provided "aim release " date or if they think they do have enough to slip away with an actual pre-alpha patch release (AC style). Bad enough that these alpha-patches which are going on around the clock in other companies are celebrated as "the next big thing" in Star Citizen even tho their quality falls way behind comparable companies development. I honestly dont believe that their usual approach to this matter (just reach the projected date, maybe push in a ship sale a couple days earlier then fall silent about it and let 1 or 2 weeks go by before coming out with a bogus explanation: someones cat died) will work out this time and if the SC community swallows that pill hook and sinker AGAIN then it ll be a shock to me. Nobody really believes them anyway that 3.0 will be a show early july as advertised and many posts I see have their expectation adjusted to august already.

That still poses the question if people will simply think "yeah, as expected" once this date is broken and go on as usual or if this will be the final nail to the coffin for many. I admit I expected a lot of "last nails" in the past and the amount of understanding, giving leeway and overall tolerance to mispractice shown by CiG has always surprised me. This doesnt seem to be a healthy company-consumer relationship or at least not a normal one. How did CiG manage to evoke the overall opinion of "being bad at dates and communincation" while at the same time keeping the trust and support of enough people to keep the show running? Is it really that all these people believe CiG can do this or is it more that they want them to be able to do it so every failure, every slip-up is met with the minds "okay but on the next attempt they will succeed" explanation. Obviously the people who are still carrying this project by continuing to give them money are beyond help. Their personal investment is so big by now that its probably impossible for them to break the cycle without professional help. The breaking factor now seem to be the majority. People who made small purchases in the past and are now waiting for something to come out of this. Some have executed their right on a refund already but many seem to still hold their horses and keep waiting for something to happen. THATS the crowd of people who probably would have the biggest impact on SCs future. If they do nothing this show will continue to go on as the whales are obviously perfectly fine with waiting to 2025+ for an alpha-complete. Simply demanding a refund probably wont affect development too much anymore as CiG seems to have cut back many of its companies in order to downsize expenses or at least that should ve been one of their priorities if this whole thing was a scam so they can comfortably sit back and endure the pokes and jokes directed at them. It doesnt matter when survivability is secured.

The question is more if this silent majority of people will "break" at some point riling up. Not simply demanding their money back but becoming angry enough for being fooled this long in order to pursue a trial and investigation. The white knights seem to understand this simple truth hence their motivation to detract and deflect ANYTHING negative directed at CiG. Sometimes its hard to believe that this "movement" we can observe now has formed by pure chance without active directing by CiG and to be honest purchasing reputation-management and engaging in open deception isnt beyond CiG in my opinion.

I think an uprising is needed by now in order to determine if CiG is indeed on the right track and had done everything in its power or if its a project without any hope. And same as with a horse with a broken leg the compassionate thing to do would be to terminate it as soon as possible to prevent the slow withering not to mention saving peoples sanity about this whole mess.

Regardless the outcome I can only see a good result out of such a measure. If the SC supporters are proven wrong it ll give them an out of all this saving them money they could use on successful things instead not to mention stopping all the hatred and unhealthy investment regarding marketing and advertising. If (to my total surprise) CiG would go through such an investigation unscathed and proves that its on the right track it ll silence all the nay-sayers and doubters in one swift move. For the consumer, its a win-win. Not for CiG of course. And if I was being the company I wouldnt run the risk of a trial (regardless if I knew I m innocent or not, the announcement of a trial alone without any results given could be crushing for my reputation) and would try to avoid it at all costs. Of course in order to avoid trial CiG could simply allow insight into its books and show what they got....something that the original ToS allowed (?). If they have nothing to show and the books would reinforce/prove mismanagement then yeah, they wouldnt do it.

The decision about CiGs and Star Citizens future lies therefore in the hands of the silent majority. The biggest advantage for CiG is of course that this "critical factor" are all private individuals. They are all isolated and "joining forces" is a hard thing to do, especially on the official forums where the fanatics run interference all day long and try to control every discussion with their propaganda. A select few instances in the past where outstanding individuals have proven that staying on course and demanding answers DOES have an effect will trigger a response. Its only a matter of time before the next one arises presenting a critical milestone for CiG. Their only real response will be eventually to release quality on par with expectations. Delays only work so long. But depending on the wealth of these whales this could be indeed a long way off.



In the end all this back and forth and endless arguing only has one goal.....to determine if Star Citizen has a future or not. This isnt about "hate". Pretty much everybody on this forum has stated that they "want" CiG to succeed but doubt their capabilities based on Chris Roberts record. People dont want Star Citizen to fail. They are simply demanding answers. Of course getting answers could mean that Star Citizen will fail but this will only happen if the answers are matching the skeptics thoughts. I personally would like them to be exposed as the liars and conartists they are in my mind and be punished for that but I am not invested and only holler from the sidelines.

Sorry all for rambling on :)
 
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Sorry guys, I was yerteady on a date and forgot about the ATV.

Here it comes!

Around the Verse: Upgrading Ships to item 2.0
[video=youtube_share;qkCuBdPpj18]https://youtu.be/qkCuBdPpj18[/video]
TLDR
Studio Update

Austin

Design

  • Some core tasks they've been focused on are state machines for the first NPCs being implemented and state machines for organization of animation assets for Mission Givers as well as the navigation beacon system.
  • State machines are used for visualizing how the NPCs will behave, but tell animators when and where animations need to transition between each other.
  • The navigation beacon system will allow players to create their own roads so to speak within a star system. These beacons can also be shared for others to use. Beacons can also be hacked or destroyed allowing a variety of gameplay options to occur such as selling points of interest, hacking a beacon and selling the location to pirates for an ambush, or disrupt the ability to travel.
  • Miles Eckhart is getting polish along with other mission givers by the Derby office.
  • Miles will be unlockable through reputation earned by completing other quests and once unlocked will give a variety of mission encounters.
PU

  • Tony Zurovec has completed the conversion of the subsumption tech to Linux for integration into the backend system and also completed the shopping service for game mode to hook it up.
  • Review and directed mission scenarios for 3.0.
Ship Art

  • Josh Coons has been busy with LODs for the Cutlass black in order to optimize the performance at varying distances. This process takes awhile due to the LODs being mainly crafted by hand.
Engineering

  • Providing support for the shopping service.
  • Engineers created a Diffusion gateway service that allows external and non Diffusion services to communicate with the game as if they were internal Diffusion services.
  • Diffusion also had a focus on integration into the primary game development stream.
  • A new tool is being developed for the creation of services via a simple UI for engineers to add, remove, or modify components and give resource management control. This saves a massive amount of time for engineers.
  • Ooze has had Star Citizen specific extensions added to it which gives Diffusion greater access to services to provide more intricate support for gameplay features.
  • Work on the router mesh functionality which distributes services over multiple router endpoints and created improvised redundant communication paths between other services. The goal for the router mesh is to provide a high level service availability and performance.
PU Animation Team

  • Finished the two handed carry animations which include standing, crouching, and zero g.
  • Players when standing can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates which is the new standard metric for crates.
  • Crouching players can pickup 25, and 50cm crates.
  • Zero g players can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates and move them around in space.
  • Players will be able to pick objects off the floor and lift them onto a shelf that's 175cm high if deisred.
  • a mocap shoot was done by Steve Bender for FPS starts and stops for the stock rifle animation set and captured Sandi Gardiner doing female exercises for the exercise usable.
  • Also captured animations for other various things such as going into a bar, ordering and receiving a drink, or buying things from a shopkeeper.
Ship Animation Team

  • Continued work on cockpit experience.
  • Updating Gforce blend space poses, utilizing a low pass filter for smoother, smarter camera motion and adjusting geometry to allow for button presses.
  • Also adding the ability to make com calls within a ship during flight.
DevOps

  • Optimizing the build and publishing systems.
  • Ahmed and his team have been collecting feedback from three network locations to compare to internal data and have found ways to improve performance.
QA

  • Focus on figuring out which bugs are relevant and not as the new tech has rendered many bugs obsolete and not requiring fixing by developers because of the new systems coming online saving a lot of developer time on inquiries.
  • New vehicles, ships, and FPS items came online with the Behring P8SC SMG as an example of one of them.
  • Testing the new procedural breathing and stamina system as well as the air traffic controller.
  • Bug fixes and quality of life fixes for the launcher.
  • Support for the animation team with mocap file clean up, setup and take down of shoots, and editor bug testing.
Player Relations

  • Focused on preparing for 3.0 and the new player experience which will be going up on the site to match the content that's in the game.
  • Evocati ranks are growing in the coming weeks and more folks are being added to Austin, Manchester, and Frankfurt QA.

Turbulent



  • The RSI website is undergoing a redesign in order to consolidate everything that's currently playable and give new players and existing players a good idea of what Star Citizen has to offer and allow newcomers to understand what Star Citizen is all about.
    • They've taken inspiration from many websites that they've liked which have fit this approach they're going for and were inspired by the many community contributions that have helped new players and created immersive content for many to view.
  • A new module will be implemented to guide new players into the right direction of how to play Star Citizen. This a guide on how to master Star Citizen, but to get your feet wet and let you figure out what you're doing and go from there.
    • This module is being designed as modular as it can be to allow it to adapt to the changes and new features the game will release in the coming months and years.
  • Spectrum 0.3.5 should be released by now and if not will be in the coming days.
    • One of the features available in 0.3.5 is the ability for the viewer to choose whether to view the thread in chronological or nested and have the setting persist across all clients and sessions.
    • Another feature is the read state and allowing users to know which threads or replies they haven't seen as indicated with a yellow dot in multiple areas on Spectrum.
    • Tags are also being changed to allow for better customisation of them and the ability to manipulate bookmarks to whatever you'd like to call them.
    • Search is being upgraded to allow for search filtering of author or role and mobile now has the search function available.
    • 0.3.5 will also come with several performance improvements with thread listing being 10 times faster than before.
  • 0.3.6 will feature a revamp of the mini profiles and have actions available on them as new builds release such as the friends system.
    • 0.3.6 will also allow for custom roles and be able to add and assign roles to members through the mini profile.
    • 0.3.6 is also going to have endline images, linked formatting and more formatting options.
    • Private group messaging is slated for 0.3.6, but may not make it will 0.3.7.
  • Voice and game integration is still ongoing as well.

Ship Migration Part 1



  • To support the long term features we wanted in the game we're currently converting all of our ships to the new Item 2.0 Framework
  • Components need updating to fit the new architecture so they will work with the new Interaction System
  • Every single team at CIG is working towards this due to the level of and demands of the features wanted
  • The old 1.0 infrastructure worked well for it's time, but with the level of complexity and features we wanted it would soon lead to chaos as far as controls and callbacks were concerned not to mention if something needed to be augmented or added at a later date, and in the process increasing variety as well
  • The Item 2.0 System is actually allowing components to affect game-play in a logical and intuitive manner as with quantum fuel tanks on bigger ships allowing more fuel and thus longer distances before refueling
  • The new Interaction System now ties interactions with certain interaction points enabling more contextual and logical control behavior
  • Every team literally is having to revisit all of our animations, damage materials, the UV2s and even props
  • Where lights are concerned they now have things called light groups that designate where these lights are and when exporting the level it creates item ports where the lights attach to, now the control manager is aware of them and they can get power and control

    • They took it a step further and have something called the light controller which registers to the control manager and the lights register to that now there’s, for example, a button to turn lights on and off
  • Each ship requires an entire retrofit from step one
    • Interactions that used to occur automatically, some of that control has been given over to the player
    • In some cases they took old assets and updated the code to implement them, in other cases they updated the assets to adhere to the new code
  • Balance tweaks which will give the player incentive to explore upgraded items
  • They need to maintain game play that the community loves with the balance and hard work done by the designers
  • A lot more capacity for multicrew ships with Item 2.0
  • Each component (Ex: physics, geometry, etc) can have their own update or they can update in a batch update
  • One of the biggest improvements they hope is going to be with the IFCS
    • Just recently moved it from a main thread physics to one of these batch updates
 
Sorry guys, I was yerteady on a date and forgot about the ATV.

Here it comes!

Around the Verse: Upgrading Ships to item 2.0
TLDR
Studio Update

Austin

Design

  • Some core tasks they've been focused on are state machines for the first NPCs being implemented and state machines for organization of animation assets for Mission Givers as well as the navigation beacon system.
  • State machines are used for visualizing how the NPCs will behave, but tell animators when and where animations need to transition between each other.
  • The navigation beacon system will allow players to create their own roads so to speak within a star system. These beacons can also be shared for others to use. Beacons can also be hacked or destroyed allowing a variety of gameplay options to occur such as selling points of interest, hacking a beacon and selling the location to pirates for an ambush, or disrupt the ability to travel.
  • Miles Eckhart is getting polish along with other mission givers by the Derby office.
  • Miles will be unlockable through reputation earned by completing other quests and once unlocked will give a variety of mission encounters.
PU

  • Tony Zurovec has completed the conversion of the subsumption tech to Linux for integration into the backend system and also completed the shopping service for game mode to hook it up.
  • Review and directed mission scenarios for 3.0.
Ship Art

  • Josh Coons has been busy with LODs for the Cutlass black in order to optimize the performance at varying distances. This process takes awhile due to the LODs being mainly crafted by hand.
Engineering

  • Providing support for the shopping service.
  • Engineers created a Diffusion gateway service that allows external and non Diffusion services to communicate with the game as if they were internal Diffusion services.
  • Diffusion also had a focus on integration into the primary game development stream.
  • A new tool is being developed for the creation of services via a simple UI for engineers to add, remove, or modify components and give resource management control. This saves a massive amount of time for engineers.
  • Ooze has had Star Citizen specific extensions added to it which gives Diffusion greater access to services to provide more intricate support for gameplay features.
  • Work on the router mesh functionality which distributes services over multiple router endpoints and created improvised redundant communication paths between other services. The goal for the router mesh is to provide a high level service availability and performance.
PU Animation Team

  • Finished the two handed carry animations which include standing, crouching, and zero g.
  • Players when standing can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates which is the new standard metric for crates.
  • Crouching players can pickup 25, and 50cm crates.
  • Zero g players can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates and move them around in space.
  • Players will be able to pick objects off the floor and lift them onto a shelf that's 175cm high if deisred.
  • a mocap shoot was done by Steve Bender for FPS starts and stops for the stock rifle animation set and captured Sandi Gardiner doing female exercises for the exercise usable.
  • Also captured animations for other various things such as going into a bar, ordering and receiving a drink, or buying things from a shopkeeper.
Ship Animation Team

  • Continued work on cockpit experience.
  • Updating Gforce blend space poses, utilizing a low pass filter for smoother, smarter camera motion and adjusting geometry to allow for button presses.
  • Also adding the ability to make com calls within a ship during flight.
DevOps

  • Optimizing the build and publishing systems.
  • Ahmed and his team have been collecting feedback from three network locations to compare to internal data and have found ways to improve performance.
QA

  • Focus on figuring out which bugs are relevant and not as the new tech has rendered many bugs obsolete and not requiring fixing by developers because of the new systems coming online saving a lot of developer time on inquiries.
  • New vehicles, ships, and FPS items came online with the Behring P8SC SMG as an example of one of them.
  • Testing the new procedural breathing and stamina system as well as the air traffic controller.
  • Bug fixes and quality of life fixes for the launcher.
  • Support for the animation team with mocap file clean up, setup and take down of shoots, and editor bug testing.
Player Relations

  • Focused on preparing for 3.0 and the new player experience which will be going up on the site to match the content that's in the game.
  • Evocati ranks are growing in the coming weeks and more folks are being added to Austin, Manchester, and Frankfurt QA.

Turbulent



  • The RSI website is undergoing a redesign in order to consolidate everything that's currently playable and give new players and existing players a good idea of what Star Citizen has to offer and allow newcomers to understand what Star Citizen is all about.
    • They've taken inspiration from many websites that they've liked which have fit this approach they're going for and were inspired by the many community contributions that have helped new players and created immersive content for many to view.
  • A new module will be implemented to guide new players into the right direction of how to play Star Citizen. This a guide on how to master Star Citizen, but to get your feet wet and let you figure out what you're doing and go from there.
    • This module is being designed as modular as it can be to allow it to adapt to the changes and new features the game will release in the coming months and years.
  • Spectrum 0.3.5 should be released by now and if not will be in the coming days.
    • One of the features available in 0.3.5 is the ability for the viewer to choose whether to view the thread in chronological or nested and have the setting persist across all clients and sessions.
    • Another feature is the read state and allowing users to know which threads or replies they haven't seen as indicated with a yellow dot in multiple areas on Spectrum.
    • Tags are also being changed to allow for better customisation of them and the ability to manipulate bookmarks to whatever you'd like to call them.
    • Search is being upgraded to allow for search filtering of author or role and mobile now has the search function available.
    • 0.3.5 will also come with several performance improvements with thread listing being 10 times faster than before.
  • 0.3.6 will feature a revamp of the mini profiles and have actions available on them as new builds release such as the friends system.
    • 0.3.6 will also allow for custom roles and be able to add and assign roles to members through the mini profile.
    • 0.3.6 is also going to have endline images, linked formatting and more formatting options.
    • Private group messaging is slated for 0.3.6, but may not make it will 0.3.7.
  • Voice and game integration is still ongoing as well.

Ship Migration Part 1



  • To support the long term features we wanted in the game we're currently converting all of our ships to the new Item 2.0 Framework
  • Components need updating to fit the new architecture so they will work with the new Interaction System
  • Every single team at CIG is working towards this due to the level of and demands of the features wanted
  • The old 1.0 infrastructure worked well for it's time, but with the level of complexity and features we wanted it would soon lead to chaos as far as controls and callbacks were concerned not to mention if something needed to be augmented or added at a later date, and in the process increasing variety as well
  • The Item 2.0 System is actually allowing components to affect game-play in a logical and intuitive manner as with quantum fuel tanks on bigger ships allowing more fuel and thus longer distances before refueling
  • The new Interaction System now ties interactions with certain interaction points enabling more contextual and logical control behavior
  • Every team literally is having to revisit all of our animations, damage materials, the UV2s and even props
  • Where lights are concerned they now have things called light groups that designate where these lights are and when exporting the level it creates item ports where the lights attach to, now the control manager is aware of them and they can get power and control

    • They took it a step further and have something called the light controller which registers to the control manager and the lights register to that now there’s, for example, a button to turn lights on and off
  • Each ship requires an entire retrofit from step one
    • Interactions that used to occur automatically, some of that control has been given over to the player
    • In some cases they took old assets and updated the code to implement them, in other cases they updated the assets to adhere to the new code
  • Balance tweaks which will give the player incentive to explore upgraded items
  • They need to maintain game play that the community loves with the balance and hard work done by the designers
  • A lot more capacity for multicrew ships with Item 2.0
  • Each component (Ex: physics, geometry, etc) can have their own update or they can update in a batch update
  • One of the biggest improvements they hope is going to be with the IFCS
    • Just recently moved it from a main thread physics to one of these batch updates

Some interesting stuff there. A bit concerned about the LOD stuff being done manually... that's going to be a lot of work. Surely they could automate this. I used a tool years ago to create various LODs for textures. Presume such must exist for their needs.

Also... what do they mean "Each ship requires an entire retrofit from step one"... that sounds daunting.
 
PU Animation Team
  • Finished the two handed carry animations which include standing, crouching, and zero g.
  • Players when standing can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates which is the new standard metric for crates.
  • Crouching players can pickup 25, and 50cm crates.
  • Zero g players can pick 25, 50, and 75cm crates and move them around in space.
  • Players will be able to pick objects off the floor and lift them onto a shelf that's 175cm high if deisred.
  • a mocap shoot was done by Steve Bender for FPS starts and stops for the stock rifle animation set and captured Sandi Gardiner doing female exercises for the exercise usable.
  • Also captured animations for other various things such as going into a bar, ordering and receiving a drink, or buying things from a shopkeeper.
This will be awesome!
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the updates as always Rolan. Hope your date went well! :)

The massive ship refactoring effort (again?) seems a bit mental to me. Lots of needing to redo things still, definitely seems like a case of the "cart-before-horse" problem that various posters on here have talked about over the months/years.
With that said though, the cargo concept seems quite cool, actual mechanics are very welcome!
 

jcrg99

Banned
The decision about CiGs and Star Citizens future lies therefore in the hands of the silent majority.
There is an important factor that people usually forget , which can make a lot of difference for the good or for the bad of the RSI business/future: there are good chances that the absolute majority of the current Star Citizen "community" are people that were gifted by friends/relatives with in-game packages... a common whale approach to try to support/help the game to succeed which started from day one and never ended (sometimes they gift people that they don't even know, just talked to them through the internet or gifted in some stream/event).

These ones won't be refunded ever, neither for who gifted nor for who was gifted. And all these people with some "gift" email buried in their email inbox (or accidentally deleted by them hahaha) simply don't care about Star Citizen. It's just whatever game under dev that some crazy friend/relative sent to them and they don't have machine to play, or don't care, or tried to play one time and that was too bad and just decided to leave or even liked a little but decided to wait for a finished product, and due all this long wait, simply forgot about this.
 
Is the "Exercise Usable" in the PTU at the moment, for the male avatar to use? I can imagine they are a bit "damned if they do, damned if they don't", announcing mo-cap of such a specific person for such a specific activity...

Is it me being cynical or does that smack of some kind of... nm it is just me being cynical. I do wonder why they couldn't just get a union rates female actor to mo-cap riding an exercise bike or whatever it is?
 
Last edited:
Likely related to Item 2.0.

Most likely, but what does it MEAN. "Entire retrofit from stage 1"

Stage 1 of what?

- Retrofit from concept stage?
- Complete rebalance pass due to modules no longer fit?
- Remodel ships so modules DO fit?
- Remodel fit with new access panels so players can access said modules?

It's rather vague.
 
Some interesting stuff there. A bit concerned about the LOD stuff being done manually... that's going to be a lot of work. Surely they could automate this. I used a tool years ago to create various LODs for textures. Presume such must exist for their needs.

I imagine they mean that they create X stages of LOD for each texture but then they need to clean it up so it looks good.

So automation of creating them is probably there but not the cleanup stage.
 
The massive ship refactoring effort (again?) seems a bit mental to me.

It makes absolutely no sense to me.

Reworking unfinished assets to become compatible with an unfinished database system with an unfinished network communications layer in an unfinished game with an undetermined scope that hasn't even had a meeting to decide go/no-go on the core concepts yet.
 
Is the "Exercise Usable" in the PTU at the moment, for the male avatar to use? I can imagine they are a bit "damned if they do, damned if they don't", announcing mo-cap of such a specific person for such a specific activity...

Is it me being cynical or does that smack of some kind of... nm it is just me being cynical. I do wonder why they couldn't just get a union rates female actor to mo-cap riding an exercise bike or whatever it is?
It's the easiest way to legally get an extra payout from backer money for the next vacation, I think. :D
 
I've been away for a while, and it's hard to keep up in here - where's the latest bar graph guesswork thing for 3.0? Any sign of Sq42?
 

jcrg99

Banned
It makes absolutely no sense to me.

Reworking unfinished assets to become compatible with an unfinished database system with an unfinished network communications layer in an unfinished game with an undetermined scope that hasn't even had a meeting to decide go/no-go on the core concepts yet.

It makes total sense to me. I guess I already explained why, many times.
 
It makes absolutely no sense to me.

Reworking unfinished assets to become compatible with an unfinished database system with an unfinished network communications layer in an unfinished game with an undetermined scope that hasn't even had a meeting to decide go/no-go on the core concepts yet.

The ships have to be kept in tip top condition or the fidelity will all trickle out and they'll lose value.
 
I imagine they mean that they create X stages of LOD for each texture but then they need to clean it up so it looks good.

Unless they specifically are talking about textures (only), then the LOD work is also related to geometry. And for ship/object polys, you need the artist to do it manually. Scripts can strip polys and objects for you, but cannot determine what you desire visually.
 
Unless they specifically are talking about textures (only), then the LOD work is also related to geometry. And for ship/object polys, you need the artist to do it manually. Scripts can strip polys and objects for you, but cannot determine what you desire visually.

I remember they showed that some time ago when it came to cleaning up the LOD visuals.
 
Also... what do they mean "Each ship requires an entire retrofit from step one"... that sounds daunting.

It means that, as mentioned earlier, they've been stupid and have started building and designing ships long long long before they were even remotely at a stage where they should be building and designing ships.

The massive ship refactoring effort (again?) seems a bit mental to me. Lots of needing to redo things still, definitely seems like a case of the "cart-before-horse" problem that various posters on here have talked about over the months/years.

It's mental, and not at all surprising since it's the natural and inevitable wastefulness that comes out of their backwards processes. It's something people have been saying for years, and at some point, CIG had to start saying the same.

Most likely, but what does it MEAN. "Entire retrofit from stage 1"

Stage 1 of what?

- Retrofit from concept stage?
- Complete rebalance pass due to modules no longer fit?
- Remodel ships so modules DO fit?
- Remodel fit with new access panels so players can access said modules?

It's rather vague.
Quite. “Retrofit” as a term suggests something about the parts mechanics of the ship that now has to be updated (indeed, refactored), but that's far from certain. It might just as well mean that the ships and their designs in their totality have to be retrofitted into a new generic system for… something or the other. It's a neat bit of technobabble obfuscation — I have to give them that they've always been good at that. :D

Unless they specifically are talking about textures (only), then the LOD work is also related to geometry. And for ship/object polys, you need the artist to do it manually. Scripts can strip polys and objects for you, but cannot determine what you desire visually.
Yes, you need to do the fine tuning manually, but that's something very different from crafting the meshes manually. There really shouldn't even be any “mostly” about it. You don't actually need to any of it manually, but if you want some artistic control, then it should still only be mostly automated, with a slight manual tweak. That quote makes it sound like they're doing it the other way around for no sane or sensible reason.
 
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