It feels like outrageously big given how few is done / ready. As if there were more assets than can be found, and as if everything from textures to music are not optimized /compressed.
Star Citizen Discussion Thread v11
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Probably 90% of my playtime is in open. I've had a few fights with friends and enjoyed running CG gauntlets, but I don't actively seek PvP battles or do Powerplay.
Most games I play multiplayer if the feature is there and I enjoy it. Same for Star Citizen when it reaches beta.
No, Star Citizen doesn't have procedurally-generated cities or planets; they are each manually-created using procedural tools and authored-placement.
Yes, the planet and moon surfaces are fully-rendered.
Do they have fully-realized cities like I saw in a view a year or two ago?
Not really. There are lot of area covered by cities, but they're (mostly empty) set dressing, not “fully realised.” Think Deus Ex without the myriad of locations and NPCs.
To be honest thats a problem many current backers seem to grapple with because oftentimes you get descriptions of future implementations or to-be scenarios that have yet to be delivered/accomplished.
There are no procedural-generated cities in the game. Its very questionable if the available planets and moons are even procedurally generated because a lot of facts point to severe handcrafting and I think the official statement is "procedurally generated with handcrafted locations" which means the procedural engine is so lacking or insufficient that a manual touch is necessary to make it all look good. One of the biggest arguments for procedural generation is a large quantity of planetary bodies. And from the looks of it CIG seems to be unable to provide that. Instead we receive 1-2 new stellar bodies a year.
The fact that CIG requires months to deliver a moon or planet which is basically VOID of content upon release supports the assumption that its all heavily handcrafted using up all available developer time. Most planets have a nice looking surface true....but they are simply empty except for a few select locations which are all handcrafted again. If CIG really is using a procedural engine I d say they are doing it wrong or their own version is so minimalistic that its a shadow compared to other games engines. It certainly doesnt feel like CIG can provide good looking planets and moons on a whim with the press of a button. And we didnt even start to dip into diversity of their procedural generation engine. The first moons were all very similar bland looking with the topography being the highlight. Only recently has CIG started to deliver topic surfaces and the delivery times in between have tripled at the same time. Again....a strong argument that very little procedural generation is going on.
The one city currently available is purely handcrafted and placed at least there is no obvious reason to not assume this. It is also completely empty and consists of no-fly zones for the biggest part. At least I didnt see anybody land anywhere to explore on foot. So blocks with a nice texture skin. Same as the planets and moons.
Yeah there’s stuff like that in the first solar system they’re building out. Not precisely PG, the planets are authored with PG-assisted tools. The cityscape one isn’t really landable/explorable, beyond the one hub which is bespoke like the others hubs. Some of the rest stops etc are randomised in theory I believe. (They tend to get culled from the game when the authored planets / latest assets fill up their current capacity though
)E: D’oh, ninjaed
As far as I can tell they dumped the classical proc gen technique ages ago.
It seems they started out with that, but turned to tools which allow them to hand design biomes at scale instead. They still seem to use more automated stuff like this for rock scatter / trees etc within that system.
Here's arch mastermind Chris Roberts:
Hence the incredible speedy advance of the planetary biomes, as Chris just fine tunes the clothing to match them
All pic honour belongs to goons
Presumably all the memory limit stuff they keep hitting isn’t helped by this approach (although I’ve never really heard a definitive pro take on whether it’d be better/worse than classic PG on that front)
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For me the interest isn't in how it's done (procgen vs handcrafted), but rather the end result. I saw these giant, sprawling cities in one video, and it was made out that we could explore them on foot if we wanted to - miles of roads and corridors and walkways, etc. I just assumed, based on the video, that procgen was needed in order to create cities of that scale, but I'm cool if they are done handcrafted or a mix of both.
But from what I'm reading, these cities (as I imagined them) are more myth than reality.
But from what I'm reading, these cities (as I imagined them) are more myth than reality.
Something like 99.9% of it is covered by No-Fly-Zones, which insta-kill you should you pass them. There are hundreds of tall buildings with empty roofs that rise out from the NFZ you can land on too, but no reason to after the first couple of times (for the screenshots).
no you can't.
you can only land on a limited area or on some of the tallest buildings.
The rest is some empty low poly buildings. Even the traffic is made by some sprites exept the road to the spaceport.
they presented this like a live demo:
if you try to go closer you expolde.
from this:
to this:
Planets are superb and very detailed...there are 2 main cities on 2 planets...Lorville on Hurston and Area 18 on ArcCorps...New Babbage as well on Microtec which is physically there but doesn't have internals until 3.9. Cities aren't up to much and cause more lag than enjoyment...getting around in them is confined to trams and trains so wholly, a bit pointless.
Planets are fantastic..cities are meh.
Some of my in game images below.
Area 18 spaceport
Lorville
surface of Arial (Hurston moon)
Surface of Lyria (ArcCorps moon)
Surface of Aberdeen (Hurston moon)
Surface of Daymar (Crusader moon)
Lorville
surface of Arial (Hurston moon)
Surface of Lyria (ArcCorps moon)
Surface of Aberdeen (Hurston moon)
Surface of Daymar (Crusader moon)
You can rescue turtles from Area 18 food vendors...which is the only reason I go there...
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no you can't.
you can only land on a limited area or on some of the tallest buildings.
The rest is some empty low poly buildings. Even the traffic is made by some sprites exept the road to the spaceport.
they presented this like a live demo:
and made this:
if you try to go closer you expolde.
from this:
to this:
Lol, looked up what the hell Area 17 from the demo was supposed to be. Turns out Arccorp is bristling with imaginary life and gameplay
Minor Locations
- Area04, an ArcCorp designated industrial and commercial zone.
- Area06
- Area11
- Area17 This zone was visited during the Citizencon 2947 Demo. At the time it was located approximately 25km away from Area18. Currently it exists only as a marker on the map, much further away from Area18, and has no gameplay purposes.
- Area20
- Area26, where the Drack Steller fashion exhibition was held in NW02 tower.
- Area39, where Clor Vee used to operate Cubby Blast in a small stall nestled in a back alley of the fourth tier - until the Avasi Scandal of 2931 allowed him the opportunity to secure a storefront in Area18 with a favorable long-term lease.[6]
Odds of them ever revisiting this stuff / adding actual gameplay locales there? Hmm. Made for a nice suggestive demo narrative though
Yeah, kind of. As Mole's screenshots show, there are some nice cities, and some you can walk around lots of corridors and walkways.
But you know how some people say "But ED's planets are boring, just the same boring terrain with nothing to do there", well, its kind of just the same, but replace terrain with corridors.
But, if you know where to go, on which planet, and in which city, and follow miles of corridor, i know of one NPC who gives missions.
There is also a large disconnect between what CIG show off and what is avialable and a disconnect between what backers will say as well (backers have this strange habit of talking about future things as though they already exist... it would be like talking about walking around your ship in ED right now, even though it doesn't exist... yet).
Of course, take what most of us are saying with a pinch of salt, because we have our biases as well, and might present some things in a worse light than they actually are.
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