The Star Citizen Thread v8

[Winterwalker]

There's a reason why actual game development — and indeed all software development — has this prolonged grey-box/placeholder/concept design phase, long before any real work on art even begins. CIG skipped straight to the “real art” part, and then didn't even particularly pay attention to it either, but skipped straight to the art polish phase. And they have no game to put any of that art in.

Shush now, there will be a jpeg of a grey box, sale!
A steal at $50 per jpeg of a box; a grey one for xmas, a red one for valentine, a blue one, a green ..

Interesting though isn't it. Grey boxes wouldn't raise much money but the thing that does raise you the money, gets in the way of your game development. Catch 22. Nice post Cmdr.

 

[Tippis]

Shush now, there will be a jpeg of a grey box, sale!
A steal at $50 per jpeg of a box; a grey one for xmas, a red one for valentine, a blue one, a green ..

Interesting though isn't it. Grey boxes wouldn't raise much money but the thing that does raise you the money, gets in the way of your game development. Catch 22. Nice post Cmdr.

I don't know — it seems to have worked for real game companies, so it might work for CIG as well, especially at 3× the price just to really hammer home the exclusivity angle.

 

[VR jefranklin18]

This is absolutely terrible. But I'm sure the fans will convince themselve that it's awesome.

I'm pleased I am not alone in thinking that. I think a lot of us take the SRV mechanics for granted in ED because we are so familiar with them. For example, I was material hunting the other weekend (using the SRV with VR for the first time) and noticed again that each wheel was individually to bumps and small rocks on the landscape - something that was lacking in the above clip. Plus even in VR Medium setting, there was still a lot more planetary detail than the SC clip.

 

[milligna]

What exactly has their "physics programmer" done day in, day out for like... what, 4-5 YEARS now?

Are most of these 606086086 employees just part-time contractors doing stints here and there with a very tiny sliver of them actually full time employees? Surely backer money isn't being wasted on five years of a man jiggling XML values a few times now and again when it could be better spent on hundreds of marketing videos and silly Croberty schemes. I mean, that's a couple of espresso machines a year.

 

[[VR] scipio_77]

Continuing the complaints about cockpits... i dont understand the big deal. I've been a pilot for 25+ years and quite a few aircraft, like some early WW2 warbirds and cold war era Soviet stuff are abysmal for both layout and visibvisibiolity. Ever flown a MiG-21? I have... visibility and cockpit layout is by far the most horrific I've ever had to expexperienced. Or we can discuss the visibility of early Bf 109s or the American P40s... CR wants to bring the feeling of WW2 to SQ42. He has said so repeatedly. Not every ship is going to have the cockpit of a Vulture or Keelback... thank goodness.

Well, contemporary airplanes use a combination of special helmets and cameras to give you the ability to see through your own airplane.

I'm not saying a game needs to be bound by what is achievable today, they can make the design whichever way they want. But on the same logic, we don't need to use airplane designs and technology from the 70s or 40s to justify how a spaceship should look and feel.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

What exactly has their "physics programmer" done day in, day out for like... what, 4-5 YEARS now?

Are most of these 606086086 employees just part-time contractors doing stints here and there with a very tiny sliver of them actually full time employees? Surely backer money isn't being wasted on five years of a man jiggling XML values a few times now and again when it could be better spent on hundreds of marketing videos and silly Croberty schemes. I mean, that's a couple of espresso machines a year.

They have been working beyond the event horizon. That is unfortunately a region you cannot see from the other side since no emisssion of light escape the gravity well of the massivest, biggest and successfullest game ever to be.

 

[Dooguk]

What exactly has their "physics programmer" done day in, day out for like... what, 4-5 YEARS now?

Use the wrong engine?

 

[Viajero]

What exactly has their "physics programmer" done day in, day out for like... what, 4-5 YEARS now?

What physics programmer.

 

[frostypaw]

I feel terrifically sorry for him tbh. Basic physics are all there by default anyway - his job is to try and make their utterly insane method of stitching the world together work - a 64bit megamap with whole physicalised rotating and orbiting planets with all those vehicles correctly affected by those physics but with the commandos inside under a different set of rules of physics (apart from the pilot for mysterious reasons)

It's nightmarish compared to little local bubbles of reality. He's probably locked himself in a cupboard somewhere weeping and rocking himself to sleep

 

[Tippis]

It's third hand, sure, so you can take its damning conclusion for what it's worth but I'll just repeat what has been told to me by the (community) guy who's been most involved in testing, analysing, and providing actual feedback on the vehicle modelling in SC (to the point where they actually just straight-up used his numbers in one early Arena Commander balance pass):

The vehicle movement modelling is based on a knowledge of physics that does not include an functional understanding of acceleration. As in, they have not expressed how vehicles, or parts of vehicles, will move in terms of ms⁻² because the designer does not understand what the unit means, and has had to invent his own over-time measurement to try to express an approximation the same phenomenon. Chew on that notion for a while and despair.

Now, I'm ready to believe a lot of very mean things as far as the (lack of) competence of CIG goes, but this one is a bit rich even for me… but it would explain a great many things.

 

[Viajero]

Source your quotes plz?

 

[Jonny Shiloh]

It's good to see them release a patch on time for once

Yeah, there is that - I was sceptical, but I'm man enough to admit that my scepticism about them actually managing to stick to the plan for getting 3.1 out seems to have been misplaced. Pending 3.1 actually releasing on time, of course...

Hope they can keep it up for the next 3 patches this year.

Oh no, I'm starting to come over all sceptical again...

But I'm wondering what's behind this sudden adherence to deadlines and timescales? Is it maybe the steely hand of Erin on the tiller - emphasising to visionary-but-rubbish-at-sticking-to-the-roadmap bro Chris that big ideas are grand and all, but you can't faff around forever changing blue pixels to green, and that at some point you actually have to start delivering something? Given Erin's recent pronouncement where he began delicately rowing back on the "1,000 player instances" promise, I believe there must now be a realisation in CIG's upper echelons that they have to start seriously making a playable game out of what is still pretty much just a demo (and not a particularly good one at that).

If they manage to keep this up, 2018 is going to be an interesting year for Star Citizen.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It's third hand, sure, so you can take its damning conclusion for what it's worth but I'll just repeat what has been told to me by the (community) guy who's been most involved in testing, analysing, and providing actual feedback on the vehicle modelling in SC (to the point where they actually just straight-up used his numbers in one early Arena Commander balance pass):

The vehicle movement modelling is based on a knowledge of physics that does not include an functional understanding of acceleration. As in, they have not expressed how vehicles, or parts of vehicles, will move in terms of ms⁻² because the designer does not understand what the unit means, and has had to invent his own over-time measurement to try to express an approximation the same phenomenon. Chew on that notion for a while and despair.

Now, I'm ready to believe a lot of very mean things as far as the (lack of) competence of CIG goes, but this one is a bit rich even for me… but it would explain a great many things.

Lul. What the... I don't understand Fahrenheit neither, or Volt and Ampere. I just use them when I have to. And if he has worked out his own unit, I guess he's ready to convert it now to SI units. Never done before? We have developed a groundbreaking measure of a previously unknown phenomenon: The rate of speed change of pixels dislocating!

 

[frostypaw]

It's pretty believable after the Roberts/Garriot Zero-G conversation. Roberts clearly doesn't grasp it in any way - I imagine the "agree or leave" policy meant that nobody who understood it could keep that job

 

[Tippis]

Source your quotes plz?

Wish I could, hence the problem with it being third-hand. It's all from the horrible depths of the super secret let's-laugh-at-CIG Discord club house. There was a video in the previous thread (I think) that discussed the end result of that design, and how everything in SC relied on fixed target times for all actions, as explained by the same guy — I'll se if I can find that at least.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Erm....

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize...procedural_walking_is_so_cool_why_its_not_in/

I watched the video.. its erm, ok. I mean, the guy is moonwalking a lot of the time and its quite janky. Not going to mention that in the thread though, someone will come out with either its alpha or that i don't understand game development.

I presume CIG are claiming this is another never-before-invented technology and giving it a new silly name, instead of just calling it inverse kinematics... wait a minute! That sounds like a name CIG might use!

Oh, lol...

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/866xtj/ptu_is_shutting_down/dw2u4bs/

No, someone actually called CIG incompetent for this. lol

Just imagine, someone calling CIG incompetent! Would you believe it?

 

[Jonny Shiloh]

Erm....

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize...procedural_walking_is_so_cool_why_its_not_in/

I watched the video.. its erm, ok. I mean, the guy is moonwalking a lot of the time and its quite janky. Not going to mention that in the thread though, someone will come out with either its alpha or that i don't understand game development.

I presume CIG are claiming this is another never-before-invented technology and giving it a new silly name, instead of just calling it inverse kinematics... wait a minute! That sounds like a name CIG might use!

I saw that, and my first thought was "why is he walking like he has severe stomach cramps and really needs to go to the toilet?"

Anyway, there's still something about SC's walking model that looks off to me - like everything else, it just seems too floaty, as if things that should be connected to the floor aren't. Mind you, I don't understand the process of alpha, or game development, so bear that in mind.

 

[Skizomeuh]

What physics programmer.

Indeed. The position is open since (at least) 01/16.

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Perhaps I was a bit flippant/expedient in my last post, so for giggles here's the frame I posted from Sovapid's YT video and see what it might reveal:

What it shows to me is that there are issues with the lighting, shading and rendering part of the engine:

1. The underlying terrain and shading thereof looks fine, but a little hard to tell as the shadows cast by the "normal" rock objects are short, but that looks OK.
2. The big nasty chevron of shadow across the landscape at the 1-2 o'clock position looks like a bugged shadow cast from whatever is up in the sky shooting at the buggy - it lacks shape definition and has no edge blur. It also looks like it might be in the wrong position if the ship casting it is behind our view. So I can only assume this is a separate shading pass from the terrain shading pass and poor framerate/network position updates might account for it, or could be the cause of poor frame rate/stutters.
3. Interestingly the near terrain with the "detailed" texture looks like it has been applied to the underlying terrain after the shadow pass, which is why it occludes (takes a lump out of) the shadow that I'm assuming is cast by the ship flying overhead. That detailed terrain texture also appears to be the source of tesselation (think of it in this case as extreme bump mapping, but its actual geometry generated after the texture is applied). IIRC CryEngine introduced this in 2013/14 and you can set the amount of geometry (bumpiness) generated from an attribute(s) in the texture.
4. If the overhead ship is another player then it could be that the shading passes and order of texturing and rendering have got out of order with positional updates (networking again), with potentially other issues if that's not the case.

Anyway you cut it you have rendering/lighting/shading bugs in the engine, which at best look a bit nasty and at worst might be causing crashes, memory leaks and other weirdness. I've seen these kinds of issues fixed with (the correct) 6 lines of code, but have also seen the render engine having to be dismantled and almost re-written to fix. Luckily it's still Alpha.

To be fair I would also expect Frontier to be tackling this kind of thing in their upcoming new lighting model as well, but I'd hope it never reaches the public gaze...

 

[frostypaw]

I reckon there's no other ship when you watch how it moves around. I'm pretty sure it's because the texture tessellation is hacked in and that near-field square of super-pop-in-tastic effect is being rendered by a separate process that's borking up at the edges. The trick looks alright close up on foot but when you can see the pop-in it's awful.

At least the shade/dust objects overlaying foreground bright features/negative colour bug is fixed - now if that could be propagated back to the previous game which is still suffering that bug with the nebulae that'd be lovely

It's an effect I like when working, but the lack of subtlety of how it's been applied here is to my mind typical of the project - from the ultra majestic music to the ridiculous attention to showy detail the idea of putting this tech in and using it subtly and appropriately was never really an option.

Is the entire game to be played in third person? There are so few first person videos - harder to drool over your $40 toy car from the inside I guess