News Sneek Peek #5 - Slow zoom from the edge of a misty crater

Radamanthe · Nov 10, 2015

Stormprooter said:
It seems kinda logical to me to start with airless worlds for landings. Worlds with atmospheres kick up a whole new set of complexities, that I believe FD want to implement properly and not in some half-baked fashion. For example, in an atmospheric world you'd have things like weather, winds, clouds, precipitation and so on and so forth. For those worlds which also support complex life, you have to add in plants and animals (perhaps oceans as well) and so on and so forth, and for worlds with large populations and cities - there all all the extra complexities that go along with that - A massive undertaking I would think.
I don't think the issue is mixing hand-crafted and PG content together, it's just anything beyond a small airless world with a few outposts is going to take a lot of time to get right, and FD want to start giving us the whole planetary landing experience now. I'm sure FD will solve the problems required to make more worlds accessible, and done really well, and I'd rather have a limited set of places to land now, than have to wait until it is all implemented to be able to land anywhere.
Best to be patient. As far as I have seen so far (from Alpha 1 in Dec 2013), FD have consitently delivered a constantly improving game (with bugs & hiccups and niggles, but generally moving in a positive direction).

I'm perfectly aware of the technical limits. I asked for the RP implications.

If I cannot land in athmospheric worlds because of the ship design, that's credible. Then is it possible to land on Moon? (ie. did they use bitmaps for high scale and procedural generation for low scale on objects like Moon?). If not, what's the roleplay reason?

mossfoot · Nov 10, 2015

Radamanthe said:
I'm perfectly aware of the technical limits. I asked for the RP implications.

If I cannot land in athmospheric worlds because of the ship design, that's credible. Then is it possible to land on Moon? (ie. did they use bitmaps for high scale and procedural generation for low scale on objects like Moon?). If not, what's the roleplay reason?

They said the moon will be possible, but it will require a permit. Whether it's available at launch is another matter

Stormprooter · Nov 10, 2015

Radamanthe said:
I'm perfectly aware of the technical limits. I asked for the RP implications.

If I cannot land in athmospheric worlds because of the ship design, that's credible. Then is it possible to land on Moon? (ie. did they use bitmaps for high scale and procedural generation for low scale on objects like Moon?). If not, what's the roleplay reason?

Ah, sorry I misunderstood. The roleplay reason? I have no idea. Probably none at all, you just can't for now because of the time it will take to accurately model the known lunar surface. Or they may be able to obtain the terrain data from NASA and fill in the detail with PG? Dunno.

Im_Lost · Nov 10, 2015

mossfoot said:
They said the moon will be possible, but it will require a permit. Whether it's available at launch is another matter

They probably mean the Sol permit.

Pomerlaw · Nov 10, 2015

Kerrash said:
Some belts do have more fogging than others, it depends on their composition.
The original level of fog was a mistake in the shader giving a huge amount of over draw.

I don't think it was a mistake. I think it was a downgrade to get better performance.

Older belts had volumetric fog that looked awesome :

[video=youtube_share;5jTRbmUzc8o]https://youtu.be/5jTRbmUzc8o?t=10[/video]

Patrick_68000 · Nov 10, 2015

Flak said:
I think that if you couldn't land on Earth when landing on populated planets *with* atmospheres arrives, there would be much nashing of teeth and a lynch mod parked outside of FD's offices!

Optionally a subject of the empire could be forbidden to land on the capital of the Federation

V3teran · Nov 10, 2015

Pomerlaw said:
I don't think it was a mistake. I think it was a downgrade to get better performance.

Older belts had volumetric fog that looked awesome :

https://youtu.be/5jTRbmUzc8o?t=10

It was to allow the consoles to share the same engine, i said this way back on the KS that consoles would hold back the potential of the PC which is always the case.

nexxo · Nov 11, 2015

V3teran said:
It was to allow the consoles to share the same engine, i said this way back on the KS that consoles would hold back the potential of the PC which is always the case.

>sigh< No, it was not to allow consoles to share the same engine. The consoles could already use the engine. The lowest PC spec for this game is below the capacity of the XBox One.

V3teran · Nov 12, 2015

nexxo said:
>sigh< No, it was not to allow consoles to share the same engine. The consoles could already use the engine. The lowest PC spec for this game is below the capacity of the XBox One.

Ok so why was it changed then? People were doing fine on older rigs before the change as reported by many on Guru3D which is the king website for GPU analysis. Consoles do hold the PC back, my PC dont even break a sweat when playing this game, although that could be changed if it wasnt for consoles. Its always been known that consoles hold back PC games, reason why Star Citizen is PC only as it cannot be done on console as Roberts even said himself.