Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Lol. It's not an exhaustive list. The fact that you have to highlight a mechanism that you think is simple to implement in MMO (when it's complex in fact) says a lot. So change my "sitting" by "different gravities" or "zero g" or "different temperatures with effect" or "full interactable ingame screen" or "different atmosphere with effect" if you prefer. You want more ? I just scratched the surface...

But it was you who added it to your list in the first place when listing the amazing tech that exists in SC.

If you list sitting, of course you're going to get called out for it. It looks like blatant padding.

Not to take anything away from SC for what they have achieved that is good and perhaps somewhat groundbreaking (the planets for example) adding things like sitting just makes you look desperate.

And again, we come to the position of SC is good because it has XYZ while dismissing any games that have ABC but not XYZ.

I've been down this road before with backers, comparing lists of gameplay features that exist in SC vs ED, and it just gets silly. They start adding things like "walking", "walking with a box", "walking in buildings", "walking outside buildings" or they start listing things that don't actually exist yet (future as present tense).

Its just a futile exercise.

But at least don't put "sitting" on your list of features when SC does indeed have much better things to list, which you yourself noted!
 
So... SC has this implemented ingame right now?
Yes
It modifies how your character sits in a chair based on gravity? That's pretty cool.
Don't know, I haven't find a chair in 0 g yet
Not to take anything away from SC for what they have achieved that is good and perhaps somewhat groundbreaking (the planets for example) adding things like sitting just makes you look desperate.
? Desperate of what ?
I just talk about sitting because you cannot sit in a lot of MMO. You even have a lot of MMO where there is no collision between characters.

At first, I genuinely wondered why you seem trigered by this feature and afterthat I remembered that ED have benches on which you cannot sit...
It was not directed against ED. ED have some nice features like cutting metal plate that SC doesn't have yet.
 
SC is the bestest game evar. You can ride a spaceship and walk around, holding your mug of supremely simulated coffee while a box sits on your bed in the same gravity as everywhere else, then go take a dump and your dung flies out the back of the spaceship and hits another spaceship that just happened to be flying by, shattering their windscreen and causing a blow out because of pressure, all while another spaceship parks near a cave and goes diving for rocks.

Fidelity.
 
But it was you who added it to your list in the first place when listing the amazing tech that exists in SC.

If you list sitting, of course you're going to get called out for it. It looks like blatant padding.

Not to take anything away from SC for what they have achieved that is good and perhaps somewhat groundbreaking (the planets for example) adding things like sitting just makes you look desperate.

And again, we come to the position of SC is good because it has XYZ while dismissing any games that have ABC but not XYZ.

I've been down this road before with backers, comparing lists of gameplay features that exist in SC vs ED, and it just gets silly. They start adding things like "walking", "walking with a box", "walking in buildings", "walking outside buildings" or they start listing things that don't actually exist yet (future as present tense).

Its just a futile exercise.

But at least don't put "sitting" on your list of features when SC does indeed have much better things to list, which you yourself noted!
You dropped the most amazing thing. In order to walk you need to see where you're going. And this is achieved by such groundbreaking inventions like a virtual eye in the game world. Yes, you can view the game world via an eye of your character. And that's not all! That character can carry items. You're a movable container in a virtual world. You can even lie down! With the items! And see it all through the eyes of the character. It is an amazing feat and I've never experienced anything like it.
 
SC is the bestest game evar. You can ride a spaceship and walk around, holding your mug of supremely simulated coffee while a box sits on your bed in the same gravity as everywhere else, then go take a dump and your dung flies out the back of the spaceship and hits another spaceship that just happened to be flying by, shattering their windscreen and causing a blow out because of pressure, all while another spaceship parks near a cave and goes diving for rocks.

Fidelity.
You have exactly understand where the magic of SC is and why it gets so much money. You try to be ironic when in fact that's what a lot of gamers want and start to get in SC.
 
I've just been watching Elite Cmdr Will and Kate's videos of the first few days of trying out Star Citizen...it certainly made me smile at some of Kate's comments during the 3 videos she's put up so far..."I can't believe it, I have an actual box on the bed in my ship!" :D

I really enjoyed seeing Star Citizen through certainly less jaded eyes than mine, she conveys a sense of wonder I seem to have lost just plying my daily way through the myriad of bugs that make up the Star Citizen experience ("My god! That's actual water down there, it's a sea!")...Well worth a watch whether you're a backer, a cynic or just a typical SC agnostic...very entertaining. I'll be following her video progress as she continues :)

Things like this video remind me of why I wanted to play this game in the first place. Things covered in this video remind me of how Chris Roberts failed to learn his lessons from Freelancer... despite claiming otherwise. Things not covered in this video, like his dozens of shell companies and his clan's blatant plundering of backer money, remind me of why I refunded in the first place. ;)

A prime example of this in the video is the "I have a box on my bed!" moment. I can appreciate this type of attention to detail, especially in a game that (allegedly) attempts to model physics. I enjoy verisimilitude in games (which is what most people incorrectly refer to as "immersion"... though it can aid in preserving immersion) because I enjoy world building, and a game's mechanics is a huge aspect of world building in my opinion.

In a game like Space Engineers, where something like this is possible (though not necessarily advisable), whether that box would move would depend upon how you designed your ship. A ship without artificial gravity, that box would react as an unsecured box should react without artificial gravity: bounce around the cabin in reaction to the ship's thrust. In a ship with artificial gravity, it would still react to the sum of forces applied to it... though a high enough gravity, combined with a low enough thrust, should allow it to mostly stay in place due to friction. Of course, the bed object in Space Engineers does include secure storage for small items, and the conveyor system in the game encourages you to make use of the in-game cargo containers, but still, you can very much have a "box on your bed" if you want to. ;)

Though most multi-player servers "clean up" unsecured objects like that, just to ease the load on the server. :(

Here, though? The game's flight model simulates effects acceleration has on a person's body. People can "red out" or "grey out" during maneuvers. Conversely, those boxes didn't budge at all during flight... despite the game's mechanics indicating that the game's artificial gravity should be insufficient to overcome the effects of ship thrust. This breaks the world's verisimilitude, and also highlights a missing feature of a bed that is in a potential freefall environment: it should have straps as a safety feature. Straps that could be used to secure those boxes to the bed. Which is what I do all the time when I have a single bag of grocery in my car. Seat belts are good for more than just keeping people in their seats during sudden, unexpected deceleration. :)

It's little things like that highlight the lack of planning that plague this game's development, as well as the fact that this game would be a lot better as a single-player game. A more coherent design philosophy at the beginning of development would've treated beds and flight seats as alterative storage slots, allowing players to store small boxes there, and strapping them in so they become easier to track when the ship is on the move. It also demonstrates why more abstract inventory systems are usually used in games, especially multi-player games like this one. Not only does it reduce the amount of data that has to flow between clients and servers, but the more "real" you try to make a game, the more problems you create for yourself down the road.
 
Lol. It's not an exhaustive list. The fact that you have to highlight a mechanism that you think is simple to implement in MMO (when it's complex in fact) says a lot. So change my "sitting" by "different gravities" or "zero g" or "different temperatures with effect" or "full interactable ingame screen" or "different atmosphere with effect" if you prefer. You want more ? I just scratched the surface...

I didn't say it was simple to implement, that's a different thing. (Although CIG have naturally over-complicated it absurdly by opting for the unified body model ;))

I was saying that your list didn't stand up your contention that:

The tech demo is not a tech demo anymore, complex content start to appear in game.

Transporting a box in a ship is not complex content. Reaching a box on a ledge with a physics tool is not complex content. Standing in the back of a ship eating a burrito is not complex content. Literally none of the examples you gave amount to "complex content" 😁

What's next? Sitting down while reading my 'full interactable ingame screen' is complex content?

You may be personally impressed by the tech, and that's fine. But you seem to be confusing any technical complexity in their execution with gameplay complexity in their output. They're not automatically the same thing.

Personally I think there are some overlapping game mechanisms in SC that do border on complex content. I just think it's funny that you mentioned all of this chaff instead ;)
 
Last edited:
You have exactly understand where the magic of SC is and why it gets so much money. You try to be ironic when in fact that's what a lot of gamers want and start to get in SC.
Suppose you have a video of a piece of dung flying out of a spaceship, hitting another spaceship and causing a crack on the screen? Will pay good money to see that.

Also buy more Idri if you like simulated dung in your space games so much.
 
SC is not an MMO (and indeed struggles in general large-ish scale multiplayer), despite its ambitions in that direction, and it has made its own path in the MMO direction incredibly more difficult by layering on so, so many systems. SC development has become 'science' (as in experimentation begets theory begets further experimentation) as opposed to 'engineering' (intended function limits recursion of experimentation).

For sure science has its place when you may not be sure of the spec of what you need, but perhaps not when you're trying to construct a product with a known spec.

Elite similarly is not (technically) an MMO, any more than those php browser / database games were in the past. Where Elite struggles is with underdeveloped or very slightly unsuited-to-task systems (p2p networking is good for keeping things fast and limiting bandwidth bottlenecks at data centres but it sucks ass for synchronising empirical states) and the low players/instance count (though this has less impact in a game of this type than you might think).

But; there is no fixed term for what constitutes MMO; typically these days the term is more often used when more than one process hosts the game - that is there are several 'x player' servers talking to each other and passing players between each other. Not that dissimilar to Elite's instances in Open, except server-authoritative (and typically 'robust'), not p2p.

Should SC finally get their server meshing/instancing ideas sorted out and separate the viable from the not*, that's the point where SC becomes a true MMO and surpasses Elite. But that's far easier to make a glib comment about than it is to execute.

*: Initially SC had a more grounded vision of how their instancing would work, in that there could be several instances of any particular physical location (dependent on load/location/player grouping settings), but they went off on one thinking about how to compress that into a single shared physicality, which IMO isn't wise at all.
 
Here, though? The game's flight model simulates effects acceleration has on a person's body. People can "red out" or "grey out" during maneuvers. Conversely, those boxes didn't budge at all during flight... despite the game's mechanics indicating that the game's artificial gravity should be insufficient to overcome the effects of ship thrust. This breaks the world's verisimilitude, and also highlights a missing feature of a bed that is in a potential freefall environment: it should have straps as a safety feature. Straps that could be used to secure those boxes to the bed. Which is what I do all the time when I have a single bag of grocery in my car. Seat belts are good for more than just keeping people in their seats during sudden, unexpected deceleration. :)
Swimming pool in space chariots. Nuff said.
 
I'll give it a pass then. And i'd do the same if it was for ED or any other game.

People who say things like "I can't believe it, i have an actual box on the bed in my ship" are probably the same sort of people who went wild over the helmet flip demo.

Its the sort of amazement that makes me think if you showed them a pack of 32 different coloured crayons they would be equally amazed.
Personally, I hope I never lose my sense of wonder while playing a video game. The first time I saw the sun reflected off the ocean, near sunset, in Empyrion: Galactic Survival, was definitely a "wow" moment... and it remains a moment worth savoring if I'm not doing anything time critical at the moment. Heck, I still have those moments while playing Kerbal Space Program.

And having come from an era where there were only four colors available to you in games, the moment we got a wide pallet to play with was definitely amazing. ;)
 
So... SC has this implemented ingame right now? It modifies how your character sits in a chair based on gravity? That's pretty cool.

I'm going to have to call horse hockey on this claim. From what I've seen on SC videos, and even analyzed on one occasion, every environment in SC, outside of a freefall one, seems to have Earth standard gravity. There are plenty of games out there that do have such non-standard gravity, so it's easy to identify their effects should look like these days.
 
I know exactly how to get killed by my MSR doors, elevators, i know how to get my avatar to fall through buildings, i could spend an hour of creating calamity after calamity, if i wanted to, because they have not gone over every inch of the game fixing every little trap and hole, nor should they at this point, that's for BETA refinement. when you have everything in place, then you run a pass over it to fix all the cracks.
No it's not. It's a deep, deep issue with the core game engine, and the link between object positioning in said code vs the terrible physics engine that still makes use of artificial jitter in 2021. Dont get me started on how many levels of broken this is. They will NOT fix them, ever, unless they dump CE entirely and start over with something that works.
 
Personally, I hope I never lose my sense of wonder while playing a video game. The first time I saw the sun reflected off the ocean, near sunset, in Empyrion: Galactic Survival, was definitely a "wow" moment...
Something like that ?
Better seeing it from 8:30 if you have some time to watch this video.
 
I'm going to have to call horse hockey on this claim. From what I've seen on SC videos, and even analyzed on one occasion, every environment in SC, outside of a freefall one, seems to have Earth standard gravity. There are plenty of games out there that do have such non-standard gravity, so it's easy to identify their effects should look like these days.
I can confirm, every planet and moon has the same gravity for players, ships and wheeled vehicles. They are kinda mass-less with some hardcoded "go downwards at a certain rate".
 
I'm going to have to call horse hockey on this claim. From what I've seen on SC videos, and even analyzed on one occasion, every environment in SC, outside of a freefall one, seems to have Earth standard gravity.
No. You should try the alpha. If the effect doesn't suit you, it doesn't change the fact that the game manage diffferent gravities and 0 G
 
Back
Top Bottom