Star Citizen Thread v6
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Personally I wonder how long will it take them to introduce the "object container streaming", without which they will be limited to 4-5 POIs on lunar surfaces (per moon, I hope). Theoretically it's supposed to be finished by the end of this year, though considering how successful they were in implementing network bind culling (announced for 2.6, then for 2.6.1 IIRC, then for 3.0, then ultimately removed from 3.0 schedule), I find that deadline unrealistic.
since it seems you don't know mutch of the SC development, I will give you some informations:
Before CR starts to talk about PG (strangely when ED release the game), he said that PG was the evil and that He never go down that route. His intent was not to land on planets but instead to have some locations on planets in witch you can land via a loading screen, like you can see in this video:
[video=youtube;bANTtzpmg6E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bANTtzpmg6E[/video]
I've just been reading about Object Containers. It sounds like there are lots of benefits from a performance point of view but it seems fiendishly complex as well. The idea of a ship within another ship, each with their own physics grids sounds hard to implement. Thinking of artificial gravity as a field, if you had a ship floating above you pointing straight up with its rear door open, would they be able to simulate a player throwing something into the air and it would go straight up and the point it entered the other physics grid/OC it would then slide to the side as that gravity took over? It sounds like it could.
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This is ridiculous.
In the beginning when CR said it want handcrafted locations because PG was boring, white knights repeat ad nauseam that that was the right choice and that procedural games sucks. Now they try to make believe that PG was always the way to go and that CR would do PG from the beginning.
In the beginning when CR said it want handcrafted locations because PG was boring, white knights repeat ad nauseam that that was the right choice and that procedural games sucks. Now they try to make believe that PG was always the way to go and that CR would do PG from the beginning.
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Perhaps - but it'd be easy enough to implement hierarchically with snaps - or whatever the young ones call database cutoffs these days.
I wonder if you even realize how fitting this statement is for ALL the Star Citizen development since it began? And that too can be easily tagged on to CiG and can be accused of being intended that way. Dont communicate clearly, keep it as vague as possible, "hit" as many peoples nerve as possible to secure leeching the suc......keep up funding.
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Lol ChiefMy sarcasm is wasted on you
Yea well that one did zoom past my cockpit. I enjoy good sarcasm too. I guess my head is pointed in the right direction sometimes.
Chief
I thought they were lying. Turns out I was right.
CR specifically bashed ED and used it as an example why SC would be better.
Exactly.
The original idea was to have it just like in the Freelancer game (that had 50+ systems) where you had one location per planet to "land", with "landing" being just a loading screen into a small scenic hub where you could get quests and such. Example in video bellow at the 35:38 mark:
[video=youtube;S7-KJ4ReavA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7-KJ4ReavA[/video]
This design intention was shown in the 2014 Citizencon ArcCorp Landing demo. In 2014, so it was before the addition of the Crytek developers from the German office that joined CIG, namely Marco Corbetta and Carsten Wenzel who developed said tech and allowed for the introduction of PG planets and a change in direction of the original design.
Basically now with PC besides having the seamless planetary landings instead of automatic cutscenes CIG can in one single planet add much more gameplay content. Besides this it opens up other kind of options, namely exploration of derelict, outlaw bases while leaving room to grow with modular building, creation of player bases and such.
Noone here is claiming CR believers are rational. And it wasnt 'foolish', and your repeated insinuations that consumers should know better on a technical lvl than the ceo and founder is absurd.
Stop defending this nonsense.
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Not with severely limited amount of points of interest possible right now (4-5 per moon). Edit: By the way, lately there was a footage shown of a Freelancer approaching a moon, and it was almost identical to the one shown in the Gamescom 2016 previsualisation. The only difference was in the camera position, IIRC. I think it might mean that the planetary landing is on-rails, and only thing players can control during descent is the camera. It's highly improbable that's the case, but I feel we can't discount that possibility until 3.0 shows up and stops the speculation.
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Has Roberts ever clearly stated whether planetary landings will be seamless in 3.0? I've been under the impression he's been unusually tight-lipped on that subject, which leads me to believe it won't be. I mean obviously time will tell, and the longer they delay it the more chance they'll have of getting it working, but at the other extreme there have been the rumours of it being a separate module (again, the longer they delay it, the less likely that is). And no, I don't count some random magazine fluff piece as evidence either way.
I remember the first showing of SC landing on planets, it was (I am sure it was just a coincidence) at the same exact time that Horizons was being released and unlike ED Horizons landing on airless moons, SC would be on planets with atmospheres and cities etc.... now 2 years later and 3.0 may be released this year (maybe because they keep delaying it and until it is any guesstamate is as good as any other), and the moons (not planets) will be airless also. Hype, expectations, and then finally reality and the hype and expectations aren't gone they are just 'delayed' but just wait and see...... seem to be the SC way.
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Calebe
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Calebe
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Any chance to get a source for that info? I've never heard of that number of "points of interest" before and since the moons size, the showed variations of derelict ship wrecks and variation of habitat modules I have trouble believing it considering the play area each moons allows for.
The Freelancer footage approaching a moon was the one shown in the Gamescom 2016. They used gamescom and citizencom footage in the latest atv'svto illustrate between dev talks about planetary landings, derelict ships and so on. Last ATV was the same, with the use of some of last year's Citizencon footage of the crashed Javelin turned into pirate base.
Landing to planets seamlessly has been confirmed for more than a year now and it's been reiterated in almost every ATV since then, there's no plans to go back to on-rail planetary entering because the new tech allows for seamless flying from space to planet, the only exception might be for massive cities ike ArcCorp for trafic control reasons they might enforce a on-rails landing to prevent crashing. Last ATV senior technical director mentioned the work on Procedural Generated city's, maybe in the next gamescom they showcase some new's about it.
It has been confirmed for more than a year that seamless planetary landings are a thing. Both Chris Roberts and a multitude of dev's that regularly show on ATV have been very vocal about it. Never seen nobody mention any kind of separate module for moons or planets, everything goes inside the Persistent Universe big map without loading screens besides the initial one when you log into the game for the first time.
SC will indeed have planets with atmospheres and city's (they have shown development of said tech and shared that evolution for a year now) as demo'ed in both gamescom and citizencom presentations.
Star Citizens moons are not airless, at least not all of them. Some have atmosphere and fauna has shown multiple time already in several ATV's.
Actually the last ATV's were dedicated to showcase the tech used in building the moons:
[video=youtube;SCThuKBJ8EI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCThuKBJ8EI[/video]
AND in how CIG is populating them with content (derelict ships):
[video=youtube;k38JKOA_IOw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k38JKOA_IOw[/video]
German Magazine GameStar had an exclusive insight to 3.0 build and made an article about it:
http://www.gamestar.de/artikel/plus...tizen-alpha-30-exklusiv-gespielt,3316854.html
Reddit already translated and summarized: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/6nau6m/gamestar_titelstory_summary/
4k Album: http://imgur.com/a/qiSk4
Part 1:
Part 2:
http://www.gamestar.de/artikel/plus...tizen-alpha-30-exklusiv-gespielt,3316854.html
Reddit already translated and summarized: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/6nau6m/gamestar_titelstory_summary/
4k Album: http://imgur.com/a/qiSk4
Part 1:
Demo, with some in-depth look at systems (AI, Planets...)
- Gamestar visited Foundry 42 Frankfurt to play a preview of Alpha 3.0. In the beginning text, the author asks the question, why F42 my have delayed Squadron 42. More about that later.
- The Demo starts at GrimHex. The Player wakes up and uses the new mobi-glass to equip himself with some clothes.
- They walk outside to the landing pads where a Gladius waits
- They get introduced to the new use-System and item 2.0, where they can control many things more detailed (entering the ship, HUDS...)
- With item 2.0 CIG can make every object in the world interactive by giving it properties.
- With the new Star Map via the mobi-glass, they now can fly to POIs instead of the old marker on the hud.
- Todd Pappy on the answer after the Strechtgoal Levski: "When C.R. makes a stretch goal, that means it has to be in the game in the given time. Often it depends on how important it is for C.R. Let's say, it's very important for him. The NPC Miles Eckhart, too."
- Via the Star Map they jump to the edge of the atmosphere of Delamar and are then flying down manual. During the atmospheric entry, flames start appearing around the hull. This depends on your speed and the size of your ship.
- A new flight control system shows the way to a landing pad on the highly detailed Levski landing zone, where are now also garages, where you can get your ground vehicles.
- It is planned, that the ship will despawn after landing and some time has passed, to make space for other players.
- Normally you would now go to a kiosk to let the ship repair and refuel because this would take some time.
- In the Demo they have problems with the elevators and the physics grid, so they had to use console commands to go down.
- The Details in Levski are really impressive.
- As they approach Miles, they noticed a change in his behaviour. Miles notices us, checks us with a short look and looks down again on his mobi-glass. This seemed very natural.
- This behaviour got they already to see when they visited Bob Reininger who is in Frankfurt for final implementations of the NPC's for 3.0. In General, all features from other studios come to Frankfurt to get implemented in the 3.0 build.
- Gamestar got a deeper look at NPC behaviour and got shown the new features. In comparison to last years Gamescom demo, they made a huge jump in the details of movement. Everything seems very natural and the facial expression is incredible and in combination with the voice over nearly real. They are not done yet with NPC's, all the time are coming new features and bugs get eliminated. They want to make NPCs in 3.0 as perfect as they can.
- The quest-givers and subsumption in 3.0 are test objects because, in the future, every NPC will use this technology in Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
- Subsumption is more a system than a script.
- Between 7 and 14 missions will be in the game. How many it will be, depend on how many problems they have to face until 3.0 But they will add them via updates.
- The mission from Miles is finding a missing person. Last known place is Yela. A signal is coming from a possible crash site. The job is obvious: Fly to the position and find out what happened.
- They go back to the landing pad and fly up out of the atmosphere, where they choose the new signal as a destination and start quantum travel.
- Everything they do is seamless. There is nowhere a Loading screen.
- Now they fly down to a caterpillar, a wreck.
- this kind of wrecks will be partially be procedurally generated.
- Some of them will be taken over by NPCs, but not in 3.0 yet. Some of them will fight you, some of them are friendly and want to trade.
- They leave the Gladius and go on foot explore the caterpillars interior.
- In one room they find the corpse of the missing person. (Sadly the interaction system in the demo fails) But now 2 enemies are coming from behind and start to fire at you.
- To kill the enemies they use an anti-vehicle weapon. A lot of power, a lot of help.
- Pascal Müller (Senior Environment Artist) and Michel Kooper (Lead Environment Artist) show them the Leveleditor (PlanEd) in detail. They confess that it sometimes might be a little boring to edit for such a long time a moon, that consists only out of rocks and dust. But Gamestar admits that they achieve with the tool some really interesting locations. Objects groups are automatically changed and look each time different.
- They try to make each moon recognisable by their surface, geographic details and lightning.
- Now the people from Gamestar are allowed to play 3.0 by themselves.
- Shortly after they used the new nox bike, the game crashed.
- After a restart, they try it again and everything works fine and they cruise around. The controls aren't perfect yet, at least for the gamepad.
- Driving one round around a moon with a Dragonfly will cost you >3 hours.
- The dimensions of a solar system becomes very clear when they looked at SolEd (The solar system Editor). Seeing the proportions to each other is stunning. That became clear when Sascha shows the Stanton system in SolEd and kept scrolling out and out and out. These dimensions alone are fascinating.
- Even people who closely follow the development might not imagine how big this universe is.
- In 3.0 will be a interesting cross-play-system. 2 Players will get different quests and sometimes the same job, maybe even with different goals and this might bring 2 players to the same location where both of them don't know what the other player want. It might be very interesting to see how the people react.
- But this might also be a problem because the reputation system is coming with 3.1
- With a console command, they teleport to an outpost, which might be part of a mission in 3.0
- Currently everything in them is not useable, but this will change, because item 2.0 makes it possible (don't know if already in 3.0).
- Not everything that will be in 3.0 could they test. (trading, insurance and stamina).
- Many apps and improvements on systems are missing in the demo.
- Question for Todd Parry: Can you fill this huge space with interesting stuff? Todd: "I don't know. But it is my goal. I am as long pessimistic until I see results".
- He is very optimistic with planets and outposts, but the next challenge is to make it a living environment.
- They work piece by piece and systems are coming together which will help them to make the next step. Most of the time it takes longer than C.R. and the developers want, but they need this time to have a foundation to build on.
- Many people think, that C.R. should have forced some parts a bit more and don't be the perfectionist. But with 3.0 the editor thinks, that they may not have done something huge (content wise), but something that will be the base for a game that can be played for years.
- The displeasure after the cancelled demo for SQ42 was huge, but everyone who knows CIG for a bit longer knows why it wasn't shown. At first, there was the new planet tech. SQ42 is C.R.'s baby. And everything has to be perfect. Gamestar speculates, that C.R. want to have the planet tech also in SQ42 (!speculation!). An additional reason was the work on the AI. Until last year, they worked on Kythera and CryAI, but C.R. didn't want two systems. Brian Chambers: the foundation has to be perfect for such an important part of the game. They had to make half a step backwards and build it right. Both systems got merged together into the subsumption AI. Todd about SQ42: "It's going". Brian: "I would like to show and say so much more". He sees every week all these cinematics and epic space-fights and then he always thinks: "what are procedural planets?! Look at this!". But they can't they anything about that. All the animations and their quality are the same in SQ42 and SC. Brian: "It needs more time, but they think it was the right decision. We make good progress, but the core elements they develop for 3.0 are also needed for SQ42. So the work at the NPCs are necessary for SQ42 to achieve such high-level animations, facial expressions and behaviour. They really want a high quality for the characters. Everything must be better or at the same quality as everything in other comparable games. And I am not happy until we reached this goal. For Star Citizen, I show features when they are not ready and polished, but for SQ42, I don't want to do this. If I show it, it has to be like Activision or Bethesda is unveiling a new game at E3, only with the difference that everything we show is ingame." According to C.R., no work got wasted from last years Vertical Slice of SQ42. The team decided to not show any work in progress last year. He wants to show the finished system without any compromise solution and workarounds. With the current status is C.R. very happy:"When the people see it, they will understand and they will be very happy about it". It's done when it's done. When we can see SQ42 didn't want C.R. us to tell.
- In front of the studio are loud noises to hear. The city is building a Subway in front of the building, which has to be on the surface because the urban planners missed some how that they can't go under a bridge nearby. With organisation problems is Brian Chambers (Development Director) familiar. Brian worked on Effects for Star Trek Voyager, was animation director for Red Dead Redemption and some GTA's are influenced by him. Then he worked at the WWE brand and then joined Crytek as a Senior Producer at Ryse: Son of Rome. It is relatively quiet although it is a plan office. The atmosphere is relaxed and concentrated. In front of 2 or 3 monitors, the developers are writing code, thinking about problems or making skype calls. They get every day many applications, but they are very careful in hiring people because they have to fit. The mentality is very important, you can't just have good knowledge. Star Citizen wouldn't be possible without this outstanding team.
Part 2:
- An often asked question to C.R.: "Do you believe, that you can do it?" On the one hand because of the sheer size and on the other hand because of the technological challenge.
- Chris and the team are confident, that they can achieve this.
- The passion and the know-how is really impressive
- Every goal is with current technology achievable, says C.R.
- But not every goal or idea will be implemented in the way it is planned because they realise, that it isn't fun or a good way to do it this way. But they have no problem to go back and start new to make a better implementation.
- A huge amount of time was invested in building up this team and the foundation (making changes to the engine etc.)
- Marco Corbetta and Carsten Wenzel (ex-Crytek members, now for 2 years at CIG) make clear, that there is no CryEngine anymore. If you compare the engines 1:1 you have around 50% of CryEngine code and 50% of new engine code. But if you look at the actually used code by SC, you have around 10% CryEngine code and 90% new engine code.
- 2 things resulted in a huge refactor: The sheer size of the universe and the interaction possibilities.
- To make a hole solar system with huge planets possible, you need to make it possible, that the engine can handle these coordinates. Such precision in such a huge world is only possible with 64Bit precision.
- This change took them about a year.
- The huge amount of interaction possibilities with NPCs and objects required a re-write of the Job-Managements-System, so that the code is not blocking the main thread. The logic now makes full use of all cores, because they need many refreshes for the many entities they will have in the game.
- A weakness of the CryEngine was, that not everything can be an entity. They changed that and now every entity can have different components. A ship has the flight-control-system as a component. Then it has a life-support component in form of different rooms with oxygen. There was no component-system in the CryEngine.
- This is called the item 2.0 system. This lets the team develop and test each component independently.
- According to Chris, this is a very modern principle in programming that is expandable-friendly, performance-friendly and makes it easier to synchronise the game world over the network.
- The first plan was to make SC like in other MMO's with capsuled instances with not many players.
- Currently there are 24 players on one server, which will probably not change in 3.0)
- The rework of the engine also affects the network. There will be many servers that can communicate with each other that will enable instances with thousands of players.
- A physical server contains currently 32 cores that make 8 virtual machines possible for dealing with data. This is because currently, the CryEngine can't do much with more than 4 cores.
- And another problem is, that more cores don't mean more players in a linear equation. This will change in the future.
- When they get 24 players with 4 cores and the scaling with CPU relatively linear to the player count, they can get far more than 100 players on one server.
- And when they have the server network and the seamless transition between them, every player practically plays in the same instance of the world.
- A huge step towards this is the Batch-updating. With this technology, one batch is processed from all core together. This makes Synchronising much easier. Especially physic is with this method much better scalable.
- Because this technology still needs some time, it is important to continue to rework the CryEngine to allow for much more, like a huge amount of NPCs.
- The plan is, to have 90% of the population to be NPCs.
- All these demands from the game (huge universe, planets, ships physics, physics grids, effects, etc.) are not easy to satisfy.
- The Demo they played run on an i7 5930K, Nvidia GTX 980 and 32GB RAM with about 30 Frames.
- They have still problems with elevators, the ragdoll-system and server crashes.
- What Hardware will we need? Corbetta and Wenzel: It should run on modern hardware but it will scale very good with much better hardware. They really want to use all the power of your machine.
- To be aware of performance issues, they don't want to have the best hardware in their PCs and they have a huge variety of components in the developer PCs to notice problems fast.
- Optimisations for the new Ryzen processors are scheduled to be worked on.
- They don't want the same reputation like Crysis (running gag: "Can it run Crysis?").
- The minimum specs for the PC are these: 4 core CPU, 2GB GPU, 8GB RAM. Recommended is an SSD.
- Graphic settings will give you many controls over the performance demand.
- Currently there is only one quality setting for the overall quality
- There probably won't be more than 20 options for the graphic settings because it would need too much testing.
- But there will be enough options to control the performance.
- Will there be a downgrade? No, because they don't have to develop for consoles. They can develop for future hardware and people can turn back settings by themselves. And current High-end hardware will be in 2 years only upper middle-class hardware and SC will hopefully be played for many years.
- It is also important, that this is a crowdfunding game and they have every few month a new public and working build and get feedback.
- C.R. is very happy, that so many people understand that they take the time to do it the right way.
- Internal tests are done with up to 70 people. After that come 2 waves of community testing before the release. (Evocati with around 1000 player and the public test Universe (PTU) with up to 20.000 players.
- Only a version that got through all tests comes online for everyone.
- The multiplayer part is the biggest challenge for them according to C.R. It is one thing to test everything alone in the editor and testing it over the internet from all over the world with people in different locations in the game world.
- It is a challenge to keep track of so many things in the game world and being smart by knowing what to keep track of or to sync over the internet with the clients.
- Huge problem was to synchronize physic over the internet because they have different gravitations and gravitation-directions.
- They are not done with many things for 3.0, so more delays can be expected.
- They have huge ambitions for everything although it is only in an alpha state.
- Question after technical highlights: planets and sheer size of the game, but the answer to this question will always change as they try to add new things and improve the game.
- Wenzel says: Don't quote me on that, but we try to achieve Crysis-Niveau for our planets and moons.
- The game makes use of a Low-Level Interface like Direct X 11. Because Direct X 12 is Windows 10 only, they will switch to Vulkan for newer API features. This will be done in time for the commercial release. They maybe even plan to completely drop Direct X 11 support.
- Vulkan will make a way better core utilisation possible, which leads to more drawcalls.
- CryEngine already plans in the near feature to support Vulkan 5.4, but CIG can't take these updates because the code is too different. But they have a similar plan like Crytek, but they first have to complete the underlying re-write of many components to work on this.
- The current problems are more in the game code than on the graphics API.
- The biggest challenge was the 64 Bit implementation.
- This is something that hasn't the CryEngine neither the Lumberyard engine.
- 64 Bit makes it possible to work with much bigger numbers (264 = 18.446.744.073.709.551.616 Bit instead of 232 = 4.294.967.296 Bit)
- With 32 Bit, it wouldn't be possible to make such huge solar systems.
- For many years CPUs support 64 Bit and even Windows XP got an update for 64 Bit, but today's games are mostly running on 32 Bit.
- For comparison: The game world of The Witcher 3 can be placed in one crater of a moon.
- Someday, Star Citizen should contain around 100 star systems with over 300 planets and moons.
- Every planet and moon should be able to walk on.
- For release C.R. is aiming for 5 to 10 star systems.
- To accomplish that, they made the procedural planet tech.
- This is just a tool for the developers to get a foundation to work on
- The planets don't get procedurally generated as you fly by.
- This works by overdrawing the planet with many biomes and layers. Like with a specific type of forest, stone or in the future also with water (maybe lakes and rivers? We already saw ocean).
- C.R. calls it "painting with a bigger brush".
- But every planet and moon will be revisited from developers to make POIs (Point of interests) and landing zones.
- when travelling through the game world, your PC has to have the correct data ready to get displayed.
- Having a whole star system with real planets is a technical challenge. They have to stream the data very efficient.
- To solve this problem, CIG developed the "Object Container Streaming".
- An object container contains all data necessary for displaying this container. This could be a whole planet, a space station or just a room in a space station.
- SC will now identify which object may be needed and loads this data in time. A hierarchy ensures, that the most important data is at first available.
- More cores will support a better streaming because the main thread will be relieved.
- To support the technique hardware wise, it is recommended to have an SSD and a huge amount of RAM.
- Currently are 4-5 special areas on planets and moons.
- As soon as Object Container Streaming is implemented it will be much more.
- According to C.R., the implementation will be done until the end of 2017.
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You conveniently forgot the city-tech was shown in 2014 with th usual 'coming soon, but first a ship sale!' sloganeering.
Oh, and that 4-5 poi per planet you never heared of? Its in your second post you copy-pasted with such a honest passion for the prohect you didnt read it yourself...
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That's my favorite part. 5 to 10 systems at release. That's a lot, right?
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