Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

[Intrepid3D]

the whole thing is really weird…
take a samsung cj890 ultrawide QHD monitor for example… horizontal would make it a 4k right? but
3840x1080=4,147,200 pixeles

Aspect ratio is also a consideration

True, i'm talking in traditional 16:9, tho having said that this aspect ratio is only traditional to us, and even that is getting increasingly debatable.

The only thing necessary to understand is that a screen is not two flat planes, it is a volume so doubling the horizontal and vertical lines, on the same aspect ratio scales in factor multiples, 2X, 4X, 8X........

 

[Intrepid3D]

@Agony_Aunt i was careful to say (up to their current state)

I'm simply making the point that games can take a long time to make, longer than people seem to think even.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Games can take a long time to make.

Quick google, i'll add Star Citizen and EDO (up to their current state) in the ranks.

Shenmue: 6 Years
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty: 7 Years
Galleon: 7 Years
L.A. Noire: 7 Years
Spore: 8 Years
Darkfall Online: 8 Years
Too Human: 9 Years
Team Fortress 2: 9 Years
The Last Guardian: 9 Years
Elite Dangerous Oddessy: 9 Years
Star Citizen: 9 Years
Final Fantasy XV: 10 Years
Prey: 11 Years
Diablo III: 11 Years
Mother 3: 12 Years
Duke Nukem Forever: 15 Years
Starfield: 25 years apparently...


Most of those will be procedurally generated.

Starfield didn't take 25 years. You mustn't take figurative language literally.

 

[LittleAnt]

Do we do this for anyone else here? Or you think you are somehow special?

Don't know but the better way for me is to not test it. Seeing constant quotes of 'stupid' SC players from other places here is a little frightening. Perhaps some of you have already quoted me without knowing it was me !

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I don't think you believe any more than i do that CIG would make original assets for each of the 100 + systems.

I totally believe it.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

in this way it will take about 40 years to complete the work and the installed size of it would be about 2TB.

This guy gets it!

 

[Agony_Aunt]

They're both alpha. Little Ant just admitted so:

Awww, but that means we can't criticize EDO!!!

 

[Agony_Aunt]

@Agony_Aunt i was careful to say (up to their current state)

I'm simply making the point that games can take a long time to make, longer than people seem to think even.

I don't think anyone thinks that modern games don't take a long time to complete if they have a large scope.

But you put in your list games that were stuck in development hell, games that were released in a form which could have been said to be final but then added to, against a game that is still in alpha and on the top end of the development time for the games, up with the "problem" games or false entries (again, Starfield).

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Don't know but the better way for me is to not test it. Seeing constant quotes of 'stupid' SC players from other places here is a little frightening. Perhaps some of you have already quoted me without knowing it was me !

Quite possibly. We can always blank the name if that worries you

But maybe you'd rather stand by what you post elsewhere?

 

[Intrepid3D]

I don't think anyone thinks that modern games don't take a long time to complete if they have a large scope.

But you put in your list games that were stuck in development hell, games that were released in a form which could have been said to be final but then added to, against a game that is still in alpha and on the top end of the development time for the games, up with the "problem" games or false entries (again, Starfield).

So bug fix the Stanton System, call it a game and push it out. At least that way they can call it a released game with DLC's, maybe ones they can charge you another $40 for?

Yeah....no i'll take the criticism of it being in perpetual alpha.. Thank's.

 

[Intrepid3D]

Oh and don't go imprinting your own substituted context for the lack of my own, quite a lot of publishers do that.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

So bug fix the Stanton System, call it a game and push it out. At least that way they can call it a released game with DLC's, maybe ones they can charge you another $40 for?

They could indeed do that! It would be a bold move and one i think that might net them more players. As long as its stable and relatively bug free.

They would of course then need to decide whether they were continuing ship sales in a post-release world. It might hurt their income too much not to, but it would seal SC's fate as a pay to win game... but that's going to happen anyway since they have said they will continue to sell UEC for money anyway.

Yeah....no i'll take the criticism of it being in perpetual alpha.. Thank's.

Your wish is our command

 

[Intrepid3D]

They could indeed do that! It would be a bold move and one i think that might net them more players. As long as its stable and relatively bug free.

They would of course then need to decide whether they were continuing ship sales in a post-release world. It might hurt their income too much not to, but it would seal SC's fate as a pay to win game... but that's going to happen anyway since they have said they will continue to sell UEC for money anyway.



Your wish is our command

That is one thing that bugs me, no pun intended, someone with deep pockets can by pass the grind of earning your ships in game.

You know, i'm all for after sales micro transactions, they need to pay for the servers ecte.... as long as those micro transactions don't result with those with the deepest pockets gaining the upper hand, so yes that is a concern to me.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

That is one thing that bugs me, no pun intended, someone with deep pockets can by pass the grind of earning your ships in game.

You know, i'm all for after sales micro transactions, they need to pay for the servers ecte.... as long as those micro transactions don't result with those with the deepest pockets gaining the upper hand, so yes that is a concern to me.

Yeah, but if you bring it up you get the old "There is nothing to win so it can't be pay to win" line, as espoused by his royal fidelitiness.

I suppose we could say Pay To Advance, but it doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same.

 

[Dementropy]

The usual excuses I've seen regarding P2W include:

• I'm not buying ships; I'm supporting the project and happen to get ships as a "thank you." (One wonders how supportive they'd be if CIG removed their fleet of "thank yous.")
• You can earn those ships in-game. (I've stated before that CIG have painted themselves into a corner on this one, because you either make ships accessible without too much of a grind and slap the High Admirals in the face to buying their way to an advantage, or you make the grind insufferable, thus losing a wider audience.)
• It's pay to skip the inconvenience of starting out with nothing. (Just LOL if that's not P2W - and that's compounded by selling UEC for cash.)

Apart from that, certain gameplay is indeed tied to specific ships, meaning players who bought those and have them in their fleet of "thank yous" will already have an advantage over others (gameplay loops pending, of course). In a 'verse that theoretically has multiple systems (let's say 10), a player with a ship designed for exploring will be able to experience the thrill of discovery and the universe will be mapped with nothing new to find weeks or months before someone with a starter pack can upgrade. Ships to suck others out of quantum travel? That'll be fun to run into when you're just starting out. Ships that lay space mine---LOLOL (okay, let's pass on that one for now, because it's just a ridiculous concept). Medical play to keep orgs intact and ready for combat while noobs drop like flies? Big haulers to give people in-game revenue-generating advantages?

I mean, it's CIG's model, and it's been a very successful one, but man is it offputting to players who are working from the ground-up.

 

[VR Golgot]

Oh and don't go imprinting your own substituted context for the lack of my own, quite a lot of publishers do that.

Eh?

 

[cigwatch]

They will reuse assets. It certainly won't be 90% of assets not reused in each system.

How do you know? Especially given current level of asset reuse? Do you think they plan to hire a hundred of location-focused people so that they can copy and paste a bunch of rooms?

And for the bank of assets they have now, we only know what is shown for Stanton and some parts of Nyx. We don't know what they already have for Pyro and in SQ42.

We certainly don't. It is not easy to make assumptions then, isn't it? But it is possible to observe how they approached the problem so far and what they have claimed to bring in. For example, how much assets can you reuse across cities or artificial locations in non-human systems?

"textures do not make themselves"
They have some cool techs in SC that allow them combining decals with tiled surfaces to make new textures easily.

This is not really "cool", this is how it has been done since the dawn of textured 3D. I have been doing it for fun in my spare time, embarrassingly many decades ago.

They are also pretty good with shaders and use them a lot.

It is like saying they use textures . Shaders are code that, among other things, transform texture data into what is "painted" on the geometry. A bump map is a bunch of textures plus a shader. Opacity maps, reflection maps, many-other-things maps - they are all created to work with shaders. Being "good with shaders" only means they are competent at creating assets. It says nothing about the resources they need to deliver on what they pre-sold.

 

[Mole HD]

More to the point, people can criticise one freely, while the other can't be critcized because it has a +5 Holy Shield of ALPHA!

A lot of folk seem to make a whole new online career out of criticising the holy alpha...so just because some official flump 'journalist' from some random fan site on t'interweb hasn't done it yet means nothing. Folks are playing and reviewing it, other folk aren't or have never played and yet still reviewing and offering comment on it, there are countless content creators perpetually streaming or recording vast amounts of hours of gameplay and features, posting them publically ever single day...some good, some bad, some completely indifferent. It's all out there for anyone who may be slightly less informed to go spend most of their waking hours for an entire year just taking a fraction of it all in, both positive and negative.

Yet detractors of the project, halfarsed internet accountants, armchair business analysts and self sworn defenders of the internet who continually pass comment on SC by the hour seem to be obsessed by making the persistent and rather irrelevant point that metacritic hasn't offered it's opinons to make all their one sided and somewhat disparate opinions somehow valid.

What happens in the extremely unlikely fantasy event that Sqn 42 releases to high acclaim or some official review process for SC appears as 'mostly positive'? I take it that such rampant abuse of common sense will be decried as shill pieces too?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Awww, but that means we can't criticize EDO!!!

Fudsteria. I havent even bought it.

 

[LittleAnt]

How do you know? Especially given current level of asset reuse? Do you think they plan to hire a hundred of location-focused people so that they can copy and paste a bunch of rooms?

They are race and company focused, not location focused.
Once all human companies assets will be done, the asset bank for the human race will be almost done.
They will reuse rooms, they already do it in Stanton.