Star Citizen Thread v6

[Agony_Aunt]

I think someone doesn't know exactly what the difference between a planet and a moon is.

A moon (or technically satellite) orbits another object that isn't a primary object (ie: sun) and of sufficient mass that it at least has a roughly spherical shape, as opposed to a captured asteroid. It also can't be too massive, otherwise it would not be a moon, but a a partner planet (ie: binary or trinary).

Now let's go to google to find the official definition...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_satellite

There is no established lower limit on what is considered a "moon". Every natural celestial body with an identified orbit around a planet of the Solar System, some as small as a kilometer across, has been considered a moon, though objects a tenth that size within Saturn's rings, which have not been directly observed, have been called moonlets. Small asteroid moons (natural satellites of asteroids), such as Dactyl, have also been called moonlets.[12]

The upper limit is also vague. Two orbiting bodies are sometimes described as a double body rather than primary and satellite. Asteroids such as 90 Antiope are considered double asteroids, but they have not forced a clear definition of what constitutes a moon. Some authors consider the Pluto–Charon system to be a double (dwarf) planet. The most common[citation needed] dividing line on what is considered a moon rests upon whether the barycentre is below the surface of the larger body, though this is somewhat arbitrary, because it depends on distance as well as relative mass.

In other words... erm... its wibbly wobbly.

 

[Cobra1984]

What are the roles of the 24 Crew Complient of the Javalin Class DD?

Chris Roberts answered this question in April 2016 -

10 for the Chairman: Episode 81 Apr 4, 2016 @ 30:36
"So the plan for the big capital ships is much like what happens on a big seafaring ship in today's world, so there's a HELMSMAN position, and the difference between the sort of bigger ships is that you'll have multiple CREW STATIONS, multiple SEATS where people, you know:

One person's just a HELM
One person's doing COMMS
The other person's doing WEAPONS
The other person's doing RADAR

And potentially you have like a CAPTAIN'S SEAT and they're... giving instructions to the various people manning the different SEATS.

There's cockpit style SEAT CONTROL because potentially the interface for you controlling the ship is all different but it'll be very much like a HELMSMANS STATION on a sort of NAVY SHIP that you would see in today's world. That's how we've set up the IDRIS and how we're setting up the BENGAL.

There may be a mode that we'll do because we've talked about several different kinds of modes and one you know sort of like moving your ship around cos the big ship's just sort of gonna be sort of slow like moving a slow ferry or tank around. There may be a mode you can switch into were if you've got a certain kind of flight control system besides just sort of manoeuvring the engines and position, you know, strafe position on your ship, you also kind have maybe some kind of a HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAY, and you could click and say, 'I want the ship to go to THIS area or THAT area', and then the cap ship version of IFCS tries to get you there and then you can manually take it over and adjust the course.

I mean JOHN PRITCHETT already has a task for him... which is sort of so that second stage so... stage one of the cap ship is sort of, the big massive ship handling which we're sort of in progress for, we need it for the Starfarer and then obviously the Idris afterwards... and then the second stage will be sort of a kind of a more GO TO positional mode that you can do were you could say, 'Ah! You know I wanna go... A HUNDRED METERS to this spot, a HUNDRED METERS AHEAD', and the system tries to move you there." - Chris Roberts




---------------
The above quote is the source of the wiki naval reference posted by Clarissian in response to Vasious' question above. There are no mentions of any of this from CIG prior to April 2016 or indeed after it, or at least I don't have a quote stored. If there was any further mention of it, please share

Some of you may know if April 2016 coincided with sales of the capital ships, I don't have any data one way or the other - but capital ships were on sale and continue to be on sale whilst the above quote from CR is still very much in the minds of Star Citizen backers, as was demonstrated by wiki naval references posted by a backer right here.

So that CR quote can be shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be selling cap ships, and promoting the sales of cap ships by proxy on this forum.


edit - John Pritchett, the dev named by Chris Roberts as having the task of implementing this stuff, no longer works for CIG and has moved to Gearbox. MOD NOTE: That info is publically available on LinkedIn but if I'm crossing a line by mentioning it please remove it from my post

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Moderation, responses to posts that are moderated typically disappear as well to keep things clean. My particularly well thought out response to why the someone felt CIG should be commended for shifting focus to things people didn't back the project for was nonsense also vanished, a casualty of the nature of the thread.

No big deal, it can be written again.

If you quote a post which is deleted, then your post in likely to also be deleted. Especially in this thread. Mods don't have all the time in the world to babysit threads, especially those in offtopic, so threads here tend to be get handled more... roughly.

Whatever you do though, do not repost something if it was your post that caused the initial deletion. That's a good way to get banned. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing this, so just tread carefully.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Chris Roberts answered this question in April 2016 -

10 for the Chairman: Episode 81 Apr 4, 2016 @ 30:36
"So the plan for the big capital ships is much like what happens on a big seafaring ship in today's world, so there's a HELMSMAN position, and the difference between the sort of bigger ships is that you'll have multiple CREW STATIONS, multiple SEATS where people, you know:

One person's just a HELM
One person's doing COMMS
The other person's doing WEAPONS
The other person's doing RADAR

And potentially you have like a CAPTAIN'S SEAT and they're... giving instructions to the various people manning the different SEATS.

There's cockpit style SEAT CONTROL because potentially the interface for you controlling the ship is all different but it'll be very much like a HELMSMANS STATION on a sort of NAVY SHIP that you would see in today's world. That's how we've set up the IDRIS and how we're setting up the BENGAL.

There may be a mode that we'll do because we've talked about several different kinds of modes and one you know sort of like moving your ship around cos the big ship's just sort of gonna be sort of slow like moving a slow ferry or tank around. There may be a mode you can switch into were if you've got a certain kind of flight control system besides just sort of manoeuvring the engines and position, you know, strafe position on your ship, you also kind have maybe some kind of a HOLOGRAPHIC DISPLAY, and you could click and say, 'I want the ship to go to THIS area or THAT area', and then the cap ship version of IFCS tries to get you there and then you can manually take it over and adjust the course.

I mean JOHN PRITCHETT already has a task for him... which is sort of so that second stage so... stage one of the cap ship is sort of, the big massive ship handling which we're sort of in progress for, we need it for the Starfarer and then obviously the Idris afterwards... and then the second stage will be sort of a kind of a more GO TO positional mode that you can do were you could say, 'Ah! You know I wanna go... A HUNDRED METERS to this spot, a HUNDRED METERS AHEAD', and the system tries to move you there." - Chris Roberts


The above quote is the source of the wiki naval reference posted by Clarissian in response to Vasious' question above. There are no mentions of any of this from CIG prior to April 2016 or indeed after it, or at least I don't have a quote stored. If there was any further mention of it, please share

Some of you may know if April 2016 coincided with sales of the capital ships, I don't have any data one way or the other - but capital ships were on sale and continue to be on sale whilst the above quote from CR is still very much in the minds of Star Citizen backers, as was demonstrated by wiki naval references posted by a backer right here.

So that CR quote can be shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be selling cap ships, and promoting the sales of cap ships by proxy on this forum.

Nice quoting CR directly... but you then have to ask, what are they going to actually do.

Imagine them flying between two stations doing a bit of trade. Helm, ok, that's fine, they are controlling the flight. Comms? Nothing to do really unless they meet someone... request docking? Weapons? Nothing to do unless they get into combat. Radar? What the hell are these guys doing at any point?

 

[Asp Explorer]

What the hell are these guys doing at any point?

Powering the Imaginator Drive, refilling the Big Benny's machine, mopping floors and mixing drinks, I assume.

 

[Azirphaeli]

Nice quoting CR directly... but you then have to ask, what are they going to actually do.

Imagine them flying between two stations doing a bit of trade. Helm, ok, that's fine, they are controlling the flight. Comms? Nothing to do really unless they meet someone... request docking? Weapons? Nothing to do unless they get into combat. Radar? What the hell are these guys doing at any point?

I'd imagine this is why Elite's multicrew ended up being [initially] limited to only combat focused rolls with easy jump-in-jump-out. The reality is flying through space is kinda dull enough when you are controlling the whole ship going from A to B, let alone when you are sitting around twiddling your thumbs with literally nothing to do.

One way to get around this would be for there to be dozens of micro-events that could occur, merely to justify the existence of roles. Stuff like "oh no, there's an electric short in panel [xyz] in the crew quarters. Better send the engineering guy to fix it." and "Oh dear oh dear, some alien bug is clinging to the ship we'd better send security out there to deal with it."

Then you have the problem of how often your game is interrupted during mundane tasks especially if you are just one player on the ship. Can you trust the AI? Maybe these events only happen in multicrew ships with players on them but then why would you have additional players if it means you take on far more risks even in mundane tasks? You have a goal to reach after all, and don't want to go chasing every bump and creak in the ship or investigating every comm signal your comms office receives just to give them something to do. How long until these random (and thus, limited) events repeat for the 100th time in your SC career and you just get sick of them. No surprises left, "oh we're not chasing after that distress signal the rewards aren't that great."

The other solution is that your crew alt+tabs out to watch youtube for hours on end. In that case, why be playing SC at all?

IMO it's just more trouble than what little gains you may get out of it.

 

[Cobra1984]

Nice quoting CR directly... but you then have to ask, what are they going to actually do.

You can ask that same question of any of the features that have been advertised for Star Citizen. That's literally the $150 million question.

The point I'm making is that these features are talked about, we are told they are IN PROGRESS, and they sell ships. Chris Roberts even goes as far as naming the dev who has a task in his tasklist to implement this example (one of 150+ examples I could give mind) - he actually names the dev - and 16 months later on the ED forum a wild backer appears who is still expecting this to happen, with no mention of it anywhere.

Instead we get render to texture added to Cry and another list of delays and excuses.

 

[MTBFritz]

From the latest massivelyop article on Star Citizen

http://massivelyop.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/comment_451837_attachment_images_1.png

http://massivelyop.com/2017/08/04/s...ormat-gets-a-shake-up-ahead-of-the-3-0-alpha/

“The majority of 3.0’s new features are almost complete”

So one could read this “The majority of 3.0’s new features are still not done”

Oh I totally missed that, its indeed that exact type of shifty and evasive language that makes CRoberts such an untrustworthy character especially after the stunts he pulled in the past.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Oh I totally missed that, its indeed that exact type of shifty and evasive language that makes CRoberts such an untrustworthy character especially after the stunts he pulled in the past.

Its even funnier when you see that in the 3.0 schedule by far most is 'feature complete'. I guess he forgot that they haven't back peddled on them yet. Spoiler alert: in a surprising turn of events stuff that was finished suddenly isnt finished anymore soon.

 

[Tuub t Tute]

Its even funnier when you see that in the 3.0 schedule by far most is 'feature complete'. I guess he forgot that they haven't back peddled on them yet. Spoiler alert: in a surprising turn of events stuff that was finished suddenly isnt finished anymore soon.

"You just don't know what finished development means?"

Tonight's schedule release might make interesting reading for once...

 

[VidarSnipes]

"You just don't know what finished development means?"

Tonight's schedule release might make interesting reading for once...

Nah, I think today's the first part of the cycle - few delays to single elements, but release windows stay the same.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I'd imagine this is why Elite's multicrew ended up being [initially] limited to only combat focused rolls with easy jump-in-jump-out. The reality is flying through space is kinda dull enough when you are controlling the whole ship going from A to B, let alone when you are sitting around twiddling your thumbs with literally nothing to do.

I think FD become a bit of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation with MC. It is a bit obvious to me that it was considered as fun little addition to enjoy and share our avatars, nothing else. There's no code to separate avatar and ship that well yet - that's why SRVs can't be driven by other players. It just does not work code wise at the moment. So they painted themselves into corner a bit there. People who just love to jump into their friends ships love this, but people who wanted crewing to be a serious thing were very disappointed.

As for roles - isn't that been in discussion about SC development (and ED development too) - why would people want to crew? Just to have fun? Then FD in some sense is right by going for 'jump in/jump out/little consequences' route. How many people want this to be deadly serious? Guilds? How many people they are? Is it worth a cost at this point? Reminder, MC is basically a avatar demo. For SC however it is a bit of 'serious guilding' feature, and major one for lot of people, because, well, they want to party together that way.

My personal opinion that I can see few non-combat roles which might be engaging for lot of people. Navigation is one of things as it is quite time consuming and frustrating to follow your path within galaxy. I know there's not much gameplay around it, but just allowing someone to map course, set coords in system, etc. could be actually lot of fun with friends. Another one is repair, but I have yet to see any gameplay related to that in both games. In ED universe it feels kinda out of place with all auto repair going on but nevertheless.

Anyway, it all boils down to money spend to how many people enjoy and will buy game for it. Crewing most likely isn't top 10 thing.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

One way to get around this would be for there to be dozens of micro-events that could occur, merely to justify the existence of roles. Stuff like "oh no, there's an electric short in panel [xyz] in the crew quarters. Better send the engineering guy to fix it." and "Oh dear oh dear, some alien bug is clinging to the ship we'd better send security out there to deal with it."

And presumably then those events wouldn't happen when you are not multicrewing, otherwise you'd never get anywhere. So yeah, it would be events just to justify the role.... so i can't see that happening, erm, i hope.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

And presumably then those events wouldn't happen when you are not multicrewing, otherwise you'd never get anywhere. So yeah, it would be events just to justify the role.... so i can't see that happening, erm, i hope.

Yeah, this is major crux with crewing. To make crewing interesting you have to have gameplay...which might not be accessible or being separate from someone with no crew on ship. It is complex balance...

 

[Ian Skippy]

Nah, I think today's the first part of the cycle - few delays to single elements, but release windows stay the same.

Yeah. Given the ruckus I think it is better to probably announce some 'element delays' while magically keeping the ETA the same, so the cult calms down a bit. Maybe even do the same next week if needed. Then push it back a two weeks to end of september, so we're almost ready to go to the 'current schedule looks like its going to easily make it before xmas, well done!'.

To keep it in perspective, we're heading towards a two year gap between 2.0 and 3.0. If two years ago you'd have said that in 2107 there would still be not even a single finished system, no gameplay loops, almost no persistence (read: savegame) people would have bailed. But apparantly the 'darn I have waited so long a few more months will do' can be sustained for years.

 

[MTBFritz]

I think FD become a bit of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation with MC. It is a bit obvious to me that it was considered as fun little addition to enjoy and share our avatars, nothing else. There's no code to separate avatar and ship that well yet - that's why SRVs can't be driven by other players. It just does not work code wise at the moment. So they painted themselves into corner a bit there. People who just love to jump into their friends ships love this, but people who wanted crewing to be a serious thing were very disappointed.

As for roles - isn't that been in discussion about SC development (and ED development too) - why would people want to crew? Just to have fun? Then FD in some sense is right by going for 'jump in/jump out/little consequences' route. How many people want this to be deadly serious? Guilds? How many people they are? Is it worth a cost at this point? Reminder, MC is basically a avatar demo. For SC however it is a bit of 'serious guilding' feature, and major one for lot of people, because, well, they want to party together that way.

My personal opinion that I can see few non-combat roles which might be engaging for lot of people. Navigation is one of things as it is quite time consuming and frustrating to follow your path within galaxy. I know there's not much gameplay around it, but just allowing someone to map course, set coords in system, etc. could be actually lot of fun with friends. Another one is repair, but I have yet to see any gameplay related to that in both games. In ED universe it feels kinda out of place with all auto repair going on but nevertheless.

Anyway, it all boils down to money spend to how many people enjoy and will buy game for it. Crewing most likely isn't top 10 thing.

Forgive me for harping the advertising drum but fact is that what FD did and is doing is groundbreaking stuff and hasnt been attempted before. The difference to SC is of course that E: D is an actual game which only becomes bigger and better over time. In addition the company has worked hard to build up and maintain an aura of competence and trust in its community. When FD claims to do something I tend to believe them simply because of their track record. Anything from CiG gets eyed suspiciously for exactly the same reason. What I wanted to say, they might not produce perfect solutions very true but its not like the can lean on anybodies else work in this matter, they are the first. Contrary to this CiG is copying the hell out of everything else and so far has only come with 1 original idea which they dont seem to be able to produce at all. Reworking the whole ingame mechanic later on will be hard or impossible so its very possible that whatever FD creates in regard to Multicrew now will stick, unoptimized and unperfect as it might be perceived by many.

Competitors and follow-up companies can take this work and compare it with players interests aka finetuning the whole concept tho. In regards to Star Citizen Hellion has a far smaller size and only has a few of SCs promised features integrated and probably will not grow any larger but what they have already is more then CiG does and in higher quality. If a game like Hellion will build up momentum it ll only motivate other companies to pick up where Hellion ended and expand the scope to create a bigger game with everything H had and more.

 

[Red Martian]

Yeah. Given the ruckus I think it is better to probably announce some 'element delays' while magically keeping the ETA the same, so the cult calms down a bit. Maybe even do the same next week if needed. Then push it back a two weeks to end of september, so we're almost ready to go to the 'current schedule looks like its going to easily make it before xmas, well done!'.

To keep it in perspective, we're heading towards a two year gap between 2.0 and 3.0. If two years ago you'd have said that in 2107 there would still be not even a single finished system, no gameplay loops, almost no persistence (read: savegame) people would have bailed. But apparantly the 'darn I have waited so long a few more months will do' can be sustained for years.

Place the carrot a mile away, and few will make the effort to retrieve it. Keep it on a wire, and dangle it a few inches just outside of their grasp, and they will follow you for miles thinking that at any moment it will be just within reach.

 

[MTBFritz]

Place the carrot a mile away, and few will make the effort to retrieve it. Keep it on a wire, and dangle it a few inches just outside of their grasp, and they will follow you for miles thinking that at any moment it will be just within reach.

Aye the "trick" is to keep the prize always in sight and just beyond your reach so that your hope and dreams will spur you on. Its still playing you for the poor sucker you are but it seems a lot of people love being treated that way ^^

 

[Noctrach]

You can ask that same question of any of the features that have been advertised for Star Citizen. That's literally the $150 million question.

The point I'm making is that these features are talked about, we are told they are IN PROGRESS, and they sell ships. Chris Roberts even goes as far as naming the dev who has a task in his tasklist to implement this example (one of 150+ examples I could give mind) - he actually names the dev - and 16 months later on the ED forum a wild backer appears who is still expecting this to happen, with no mention of it anywhere.

Instead we get render to texture added to Cry and another list of delays and excuses.

Hit the nail on the head.. this is the major thing that bugs me about this entire project.
We're 5 years in and there's still not a single locked down core game mechanic, and all we get for this 3.0, that actually increased in scope somehow despite them cutting almost all the intended profession, is "technological foundation for procgen planets".

I can't even begin to count how often I've heard the line "they're nailing down the pipeline/core tech/codebase/foundations first so they can do everything faster later" and would very much like to see this start paying off in terms of actual gameplay improvements.

Boarding, ship-to-ship combat, piracy, smuggling, that's the kind of stuff I was hyped for.
But here we are in 2017, and still not the slightest clue how any of that is going to work, if at all. Especially now that we've gone from 100 systems to a couple dozen moons and planets.
At this rate I might even just get my 29 dollars out and dump it into a project more deserving and promising... like Hellion.

As a side note. Render-to-texture has been in games since the goddamn dark ages and it's mindboggling to me how this of all things would take multiple weeks to complete. (I've seen students implement it in their custom rendering engine over the weekend, so what exactly are the 'magic germans' doing...?)

 

[Vasious]

Nice quoting CR directly... but you then have to ask, what are they going to actually do.

Imagine them flying between two stations doing a bit of trade. Helm, ok, that's fine, they are controlling the flight. Comms? Nothing to do really unless they meet someone... request docking? Weapons? Nothing to do unless they get into combat. Radar? What the hell are these guys doing at any point?

Yes, that is what I was mean, all good and well naming four roles, but the other 20 especially when the reply is "read the wikipedia on Seaman ranks"

Still would like to know what the Start Citizen equilivlent of the Wiper does, to make it a player worthy position rather than having it an NPC

I have no issue with the 4 or 5 crew potiosl we already see on other Multi Crew ship games
Artemis, STBC and Pulsar, it is just all the extra non officer crew planned.

As Azirphaeli siad, wont they need a lot of busy work?
And if there is busy work what will happen if you are short crew, for what ever reason, will that busy work become overwhelming and distract from the main game play.

Hence my question, if I was signing on a ship as crewman #21 of 24, with the Importan t bridge roles taken already, what is the selling point to me as a player to sign on?

---

this isnt nit picking for the sake of it.

Lets Say you want just get SQN42 play the game to completion, then get access to the PU with your charater who has just mustered out, wihtout a ship pack, and want to earn your way to a ship, but have no Org ties, and just want to contact work on ships until you can afford your own.