Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

happytrees

happytrees
Straha Yeagar said:
This post in this thread really gets to the heart of and exemplifies what Star Citizen is for the faithful...a theory-crafting simulator and framework.

robertsspaceindustries.com

Skip the gown and just let us respawn in the noobsuit. - Star Citizen Spectrum

The medical gown is pretty much useless, and unequipting it and eqipting an undersuit takes time, so, why not just skip the middleman and let us respawn in the basic undersuit instead? We get the...
robertsspaceindustries.com robertsspaceindustries.com

So, setting the drag n drop complain aside as it will go away ... fundamentally, you should accept that you'll need to get dressed, that you won't have everything "at the tip of your fingers' and that the intent is to reward planful behavior, skill in figuring out what you need for what you'll be doing, diligence in ensuring you've prepared ahead of time by having gear / ships / etc. strategically placed. That's what they are building, so it's important to realize and accept that early in the process."
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Emphasis mine. Everything's a placeholder and therefore above criticism and actually when you think about it the more unfocused and directionless the gameplay the more you need to plan ahead just to get dressed. Coupled with aggressive marketing no wonder they're doing great financially.
 

Straha Yeagar

S
How adorable... The Best Damned Theory Crafting Simulator EVER!

"If you read the monthly reports in serial, you'll notice that it paints a picture where NPC's will make use of medical, refueling, repair and restock professions.

NPC's are truly the catalyst that's missing, to bring everything to life, quite literally.
As much as I love players, they really don't make the best industrial clients.

I just know that industrial gameplay in Star Citizen will be the most immersive gameplay ever created in gaming history. You don't build entire lines of cargo-ships around physicalized cargo (RAFT, MISC Hull), without having a unified vision.

Tractor beams, physics, loading timers, private hangars, MISC Expanse and it being able to pull in saddle bags from the Prospector... I mean... I've seen this sort of stuff with cargo limpets in Elite Dangerous before, but then you add salvage, and hand-held tractor beams and.... it's how they re-invent EVERYTHING that other games do well - and frankly do it better.

It's scary.

I once mused "If only all games would come together to form an awesome metaverse that did it all." Well. That's what Star Citizen is - but seamless. Therein lies the slog."
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Straha Yeagar said:
This post in this thread really gets to the heart of and exemplifies what Star Citizen is for the faithful...a theory-crafting simulator and framework.

robertsspaceindustries.com

Skip the gown and just let us respawn in the noobsuit. - Star Citizen Spectrum

The medical gown is pretty much useless, and unequipting it and eqipting an undersuit takes time, so, why not just skip the middleman and let us respawn in the basic undersuit instead? We get the...
robertsspaceindustries.com robertsspaceindustries.com

"Dragging and dropping items is a placeholder. Let's fast forward to future intent.

You die. You arrive in the hospital. The correct clothing at that point is a hospital gown.

You get out of bed. There is a clothing closet there. Ahead of time, you defined which clothing you'd have should you come back. It is a pair of slacks, a button down shirt, some shoes. You interact with the closet and a few mouse clicks later your hospital gown is now hanging in the clothing closet and your outfit is equipped.

You travel either to your hab where more clothing / supplies are stored, or your hangar where additional storage is available. You visit the suit locker that has the suit you want to wear in it. Couple of quick, easy clicks and you don the suit. You move over the weapons locker, pick up your weapons, pick up some armor, etc.

The INTENT is that everything you need no longer exists in a bag of holding. The INTENT is that you must prepare, make choices, make tradeoffs. The INTENT is that this is not an arcade game. What you do in the game will make sense, it will be immersive. The INTENT is not for it to be an arduous and kludgy "drag and drop" interface.

So, setting the drag n drop complain aside as it will go away ... fundamentally, you should accept that you'll need to get dressed, that you won't have everything "at the tip of your fingers' and that the intent is to reward planful behavior, skill in figuring out what you need for what you'll be doing, diligence in ensuring you've prepared ahead of time by having gear / ships / etc. strategically placed. That's what they are building, so it's important to realize and accept that early in the process."
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Man, some toxicity in that thread. People saying "Maybe the game isn't for you".

Maybe it isn't? Maybe its time for backers to take a long hard look at the game being developed and understand, if ever delivered, its going to be full of this sort of stuff, all in the name of fidelity.

EDIT: Ooof, Nyx gatekeeping anyone who holds a different opinion.
 
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Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Straha Yeagar said:
How adorable... The Best Damned Theory Crafting Simulator EVER!

"If you read the monthly reports in serial, you'll notice that it paints a picture where NPC's will make use of medical, refueling, repair and restock professions.

NPC's are truly the catalyst that's missing, to bring everything to life, quite literally.
As much as I love players, they really don't make the best industrial clients.

I just know that industrial gameplay in Star Citizen will be the most immersive gameplay ever created in gaming history. You don't build entire lines of cargo-ships around physicalized cargo (RAFT, MISC Hull), without having a unified vision.

Tractor beams, physics, loading timers, private hangars, MISC Expanse and it being able to pull in saddle bags from the Prospector... I mean... I've seen this sort of stuff with cargo limpets in Elite Dangerous before, but then you add salvage, and hand-held tractor beams and.... it's how they re-invent EVERYTHING that other games do well - and frankly do it better.

It's scary.

I once mused "If only all games would come together to form an awesome metaverse that did it all." Well. That's what Star Citizen is - but seamless. Therein lies the slog."
Click to expand...

LOL, its scary how their brains work.
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
IMG_9665.jpg
 

Surefoot

S
They just described The Long Dark somehow. Which is a full, released game. And definitely not a "space sim". Why not go and play this kind of game ? Adding a whole another game in that late, over budget, under delivered project is completely bonkers. Reminds me of people who wanted the whole of Subnautica inside SC too.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
SA doing the real theorycrafting...

Not 'How amazing will this be?', but: 'How the hell will this even work?'

SA said:
They seriously don't understand how much information they're going to be sending back and forth.

I was doing some bathtub crunching of numbers and even if we manage to reduce the amount of information required down to minimum for vector updates for moving players in an area...

Assuming a very minimal data structure of just [localuserid, movevector] and the assumptions that they're not going to have more than 65k players in an area, that leaves us with 2 bytes for the id (uint16), and 8 bytes for each coordinate in the movement vector assuming that they're using double precision floating points for their coordinate system. if not, we can reduce this to 4 bytes for each coord, so let's be ultra generous.

That's at minimum 14 bytes of information to encode one players movement per server tick as a vector.

That means with a server of say, 500 people, and we generously assume that only 50% of them are moving at a time, that's still 7 bytes per person on average.

So 7 bytes for 500 people is a 3500 byte payload, or 3.5kb.

That doesn't sound so bad, eh?

To communicate that 3.5kb payload to 500 people, that's 1.75 megabytes per server tick to communicate all that data to all players. This is JUST for movement vectors, in a form that is already fairly well encoded and where we're being extremely generous with the structure CIG might be using.

There is a reason why the rubberbanding issues are so great in MMOs where there is a large player presence.

Obviously, that kind of isn't conducive to a FPS game.

They don't realize the bottleneck isn't processing power, but the transmission of information.

1.75 megabytes per server tick might not sound like much to a giant server with a big data pipe... but what about the poor sap trying to play on ADSL? 3.5kb doesn't seem like much, but that's going to increase by a ton when accounting for more than just player movement. There is a reason MMOs don't have a ton of patrolling NPCs in towns n crap. They stand still for a reason.

And what about the server having to compensate for that poor sap?

They can't answer how they're going to solve these problems because quite frankly they are very difficult problems to solve. They're pushing mathematical boundaries.
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SA said:
I should also emphasizes that the above 3.5kb is per server tick. Perhaps the size can be dropped down via some magic I'm unaware of or some crazy compression science. If they're wanting to be with the big boys and hit 64 ticks per seconds, ing LOL.

They just don't understand scalability and the impact it has on information.

I think the standard for things like entity movement is 15 - 30hz and then apply client side smoothing. Even that sounds incredibly taxing for their scale.
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SA2 said:
There is a reason MMOs don't have a ton of patrolling NPCs in towns n crap. They stand still for a reason.
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Or have their position derived from synched time / other client-side variables at initialization... But this isn't possible if all of your NPCs are supposed to be constantly updating their needs and desires with a rich internal life based on the best AI ever quantumed. Once again, CIG shoots itself in the foot by not understanding the implication of their promises.
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A nice adjunct to the previous ponderings:

'How the hell will they even pay for this?'

---

Postscript:

SA3 said:
They’re doing what Big Publisher is afraid to do - and advancing society as they do it. Is it possible it takes another 10 years until the mathematics catches up? Absolutely. But that’s the price we pay for not settling for FIFA Madden Call of Dookie: 2k32. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIG wins an award outside of just gaming - well, for art, obviously, and I suspect equally likely for cinematics as part of the extended Star Citizen universe - but I’m talking about for something even more meaningful than entertainment.

I’m curious to know: what do you all think CIG’s biggest societal impact will be?

On technology? Mathematics? Economics? Or something totally different?
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