Dare I say Starsiege: Tribes (1998) and its 64vs64 matches?
Star Citizen Discussions v7
- Thread starter Brett C
- Start date
Oh yeah i remember that one
Although the quality and power of multiplayer netcode has improved quite a bit since then. That's why i wonder how CiG managed to completely fail on that, i believe there are enough coders on the market who have the knowledge to do a proper netcode. My hypothesis is they just used the cryengine code as is and didnt touch it, but even that wouldnt explain the ties with the framerate. I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code would include network updates in between render cycles, and i really hope that's not the case there for CiG sake...
A clean game is a healthy game. That's why they polish. Also: Croberts heard that that the Witcher was made by polish(ed - he omits the ED where he can, though) company and he wishes SC to shine just like that.
Lol Yeah, I wouldn’t waste my hard drive space installing 2.6 again. Sometime next year though, I want to see this planet tech they’ve been crowing over. I too want to experience having cargo boxes stuck to my fingers as I salute other commandos. I want to ride in someone’s Idris. Maybe it’ll stick to my fingers too, who knows?
I’m looking forward to checking it out. I don’t expect to be floored or have a vision of Jesus Croberts, but I hope, hope, hope it will be fun.
Most of all, I can’t wait to haul some bio-waste!
Even if they do implement everything they've talked about, that won't account for all the crazy dreams that all the hardcore fans have accumulated during the long, long wait. When you really look at quotes like that one about the missions, he didn't describe hands-on mechanics at all, just the idea of chaining hand-crafted pieces. They've been so vague with the actual details that they could conceivably implement things like the golf-swing while being true to the letter of what they've said. But it won't come close to satisfying their more enthusiastic backers. Those backers aren't imagining just another game where you press some buttons and some things happen, they expect Roberts to deliver something utterly revolutionary that works like no other game before it. That's why CIG is petrified by the idea of locking anything down, making it "real", and having to deal with the inevitable backlash. Which is why they just ignore it and work on shopping instead.
For an engine designed with those goals in mind, sure. But SC continues to be a glorified CryEngine mod, c(r)obbled together on top of an engine that was never designed for most of what they're trying to achieve. The independence of systems you described is something that needs to be designed and engineered, it's not just a law of nature that applies automatically. And it looks very much like, in the case of SC, it wasn't.
Indeed. When somebody says "polishing" I understand the term as in "fixing bugs, making it run smooth, optimizing etc" NOT GLOSSING EACH INDIVIDUAL PIXEL for maximum visual fidelity. Graphics have never been a guarantee for a good game but many core backers seem to believe exactly that which is a bit worrying. We have been wondering with CiGs priority years ago but that was at best confusion. Apart from DS who touted that this will never work lots of people were giving CiG the benefit of the doubt and waited to see if they managed to get it work. After all this time with THIS result I can safely say "Derek Smart was right" and chuckle at the bit as well.
I love how that make JPEGs expensive preorders for a giant lootbox as no one can say what SC will be. The two "plagues" of modern AAA games that infuriate gamers, though CIG seems to be immunized to gamers' ire.
Though I'm sure the most hardcore will contort their mind to convince themselves CIG achieved the new jesus, whatever they release.
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Isn't it simply that what they're trying to do is crazily ambitious? And probably impossibly, undebuggably ambitious with finite time and money, regardless of which engine you're using or how talented your team are.
Well that’s the weird part. What they’ve talked about, dreamed about, hypothesized about is incredibly ambitious. What they have so far is pretty run of the mill. I could knock together all of their current gameplay in unity in a week or less. 3.0 is more ambitious, but certainly not more ambitious than Elite Horizons which took less than half the time SC has burned through to get us on the surface of planets.
The only standout in SC is that it looks so damn pretty. That’s the polishing part. It makes for a good presentation as long as you only pay attention to the superficial elements.
The point was that performance isn't a major concern given that the game is in a preAlpha state.
The problems are why are we seeing it like this? Why are CIG wasting time and money doing work they will likely have to throw away? CIG have too much work to do on the games foundation to be worried about stress tests
The game is in a preAlpha state and...for SC at least...the game engine isn't complete. There should be no polishing or balance passes or even ships beyond the bare minimum and the fact that CIG are polishing the game and holding stress tests that prove nothing says a lot about their priorities and management.
CIG squandered at least three years of development because of CRs change in direction from space sim to MMO life simulator. They've wasted more with their refusal to follow standard development practises.
There is a reason most companies get the basic game engine working first. CIG...OTOH...seem to think developing an MMO without the netcode needed to support it is a good idea.
And preAlpha is not the time to be polishing the game, conducting stress tests or creating game assets. The game is likely to change so much between now and release, any such work done now will simply need to be redone.
For a preAlpha, what is on show is impressive.
But for six years of development, it's an embarrassment.
Nor is it supposed to be impressive. It's supposed to be a work in progress. CIG should be digging the foundations, not choosing the furniture.
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No.
Being ambitious would explain things if it took long to finish, and that you might at some point have to surrender to the fact that you have to split things up and deliver it in chunks. That's not the problem CIG has demonstrated. They're not having problems reaching the end goal — they've tripped over their socks trying to cross the starting line. Hell, they've tripped over deciding what floral pattern is supposed to be on the socks.
Also, what they're trying to do is not particularly crazy or ambitious — just poorly described, the the point of being almost completely undefined. They have mumbled incoherently about lots of fanciful ideas, yes, but those are just dreams. Having dreams are not the same thing as having ambition, much less having any kind of ability to actually realise those ambitions.
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There is a difference in being ambitious and saying you are going to do something, when you know full well you can't.
What's ambitious about Star Citizen?
Other than Chris seeing how much money he can rake on?
Star Citizen is very doable. If you think about it, they already have much of the game working. All they need do is merge their tech demos and use their planet generation tech to create a system...
That they haven't done so yet implies they can't.
More importantly, even if it were ambitious, ambition doesn't excuse the wasteful way they've developed this game or the managerial incompetence that seems to be behind much of the problems affecting development.
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Ooh, ooh! I know the answer to this. The answer is wrong, granted, but I know what it is.
“It has never been done before at this scale and with this level of detail.”
That's the very heart of the problem: the idea that detail and scale somehow makes it 1) new, and 2) ambitious. Of course, in reality, it does neither. First of all, everything CIG is doing has been done before, and when asked to specify, even the backers will eventually reduce that claim to talking about visual fidelity. The problem with that is that visual fidelity is just standard evolution and having better graphics is not new. It has happened every week, month, and year for the last half-century. The rest is just mechanics, methods, and gameplay we've seen dozens of times before (and CIG hasn't even gotten around to actually doing the vast majority of it yet).
Secondly, the problem is that detail is not ambitious. In fact, in most instances, it's just stupid. Simulating the oxygenation of blood and its effects on stamina is ambitious if you're programming a body-physology simulator as a medical teaching tool or as a kind of experimental environment — it's a complex system but getting it all right will improve the end result proportionally to how much effort went into it. For anything else, ambition would be to make a really clever abstraction of all of that with the least possible complexity, because while it's neat if it's there, it is so wholly irrelevant that it needs to have zero impact on performance. Complexity serves no purpose in this case — complexity for the sake of complexity means you've just lost the plot altogether.
I'll quote the Jennison letter at this point, because the underlying confusion with this not-actual-ambition is endemic to the whole project:
Substitute… well, anything, really for “artistic principals” and suddenly, a lot of the nonsensical and outright false claims about ambition become clear. The inability to distinguish what's important from what's irrelevant; what's worth spending effort and computing power on and what's not; and what makes it a game and what actively works against that goal is apparent in everything they discuss and show off to try to wow the fans.David Jennison said:
When I look at SC these days, I just see the Monty Python sketch of a man trying to eat a cathedral. It's not ambitious. It's not impossible. It's just very dumb. Perhaps SC is slightly less bad for their teeth… perhaps.
Also, this, many times over. Ambition does not magic away waste or the incompetence that time and time again creates that waste.
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"He who negleteth the Pixel shall not be worthy of the Big Picture!"
A deafening voice sounds in your ear as a reminder of your unworthiness in matters of that what was never done before!
*That showed him! The Man of Destiny reclines satisfied in his Chair of Lecturing.*
I’ve always been confused about this... is he saying Chris overvalues the shoelaces, or is he saying Chris doesn’t understand that the shoelaces are so important? It kinda reads like the second, but what part of this project screams “we don’t care about trivial minutiae “?
Edit: and then I read it again and it seems like he’s saying just that: he cares too much about shoelaces, he doesn’t understand macro.
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The shoelaces are unimportant. Most people only see them from a significant distance compared to the size of the object. The important bits are the basic shape/colours - the stitching and laces being perfect can come later.
Networking might put a general cap on FPS is there's a sync issue - which would explain why it seems to struggle at 70 fps while staring at a blank wall: You still have to keep track of stuff even when you can't see it. But the massive drop when looking at commandos must be a rendering issue. Too many fidels, I suspect.
Having said that, they did manage that 'Schrödinger's door' effect a while back, so there might some level of zen going on that I simply can't comprehend. If a commando T-poses on Olisar and no one is watching, does he still glitch through the floor?
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