Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

[Xink]

There are only two currently viable models for MMOs post launch.

1. Subscription based
2. Free-to-play, buy-able extras on top of the free to play game

The F2P model often puts in significant blockers to progress, often at the cost of time, if players do not pay any real cash. These may be microtransactions, larger expansion based sales, or a combination of both.

More than 90% of the market goes for the F2P model as it does not rely on a core base of players to keep supporting the game in order for it to survive. Many more players are willing to spend one off fees just to play a few hours, than players are willing to commit to monthly subscriptions.

MMOs need not just cover running costs, but to make profit on top of cost of development. This is just business sense, larger market means more money.

Will notice there is no option where sales of one game pays for running costs of another game. This is not a business model. Companies are in it to make profit, not to fulfill some loopy promise. Whatever CR said about SC that does not fit into one of these models is the same as any other thing he's said - manure.

This has nothing to do with SC, CIG, CR, crowdfunding or anything of the like. It's just business. MMOs that cannot even cover their running costs by one of these models go the way of the dodo. If this is still hard to understand perhaps pick up a business management book and do some reading on the subject.

At the very least, CIG will have to continue selling ships, currency, skins, pets and what not post release. Given how expensive their infrastructure and support seems to be to run, due to how inefficient the game is, there will have to be a lot of sales in the released game state.

Of course, there's always the fan community when code is finally released once the project goes under 10 years from now.

 

[Cotic]

For SC and the new gen console, the adjustment is made for SSD only.

What evidence is that there SC changes its streaming method depending on whether an SSD is detected or not? Please provide proof, such as a video.

So you can manage your assets 100X faster than a standard 7200RPM hard drive.

A HDD has a constant throughput of ~100MB/s, to be 100x faster would require an SSD's constant throughput to be 10GB/s

Just read how coders talk about the possibilities of the new PS5

And yet you are the only one talking about it being in place in SC, no one else is saying a word about the marvelous SSD enabled tech in SC. Just you...

And you know what ? That's exactly what SC do now when you approach billboards, approach a new ship, open some closets, etc.

Again, prove it with more than words.

By deciding not to sell on console, and therefore not to be limited by their technical capacity, and coding SC with SSD in mind...

This makes no sense. The I/O complex on the PS5 is considerably faster than anything else available right now, (SC's mythical SSD enabled tech included). If the Xbox and PS5 are able to push data through much faster than current PC designs, how can they be the limitation?

---

I don't believe there is any mythical SSD tech being used by CIG. It is simply a situation where they are trying to load so many assets that an SSD almost becomes a necessity, the throughput and seek times are obviously a benefit over spinning platters.

Regarding Microsoft's DirectStorage

How DirectStorage could improve the PC
So what does this mean for the PC? We have some hints. Microsoft describes DirectStorage as “an all new I/O system designed specifically for gaming to unleash the full performance of the SSD and hardware decompression.” Games, especially gorgeous open-world games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, continuously load assets into the background so the player can roam around the world without seeing a loading screen.

“DirectStorage can reduce the CPU overhead for these I/O operations from multiple cores to taking just a small fraction of a single core; thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better physics or more NPCs in a scene,” Microsoft adds.

The relatively slow pace of an open-world game like Read Dead Redemption 2 allows textures and other new game assets to be loaded in while you’re playing, without a noticeable loss of performance. Presumably DirectStorage would allow this to happen with faster-paced games, or ones with even more complex scenery.

Microsoft’s Goossen told Digitial Foundry that doing decompression on the 4K textures to match the speed of the SSD rate would have consumed three Zen 2 CPU cores, plus an additional two more just for the I/O overhead. With DirectStorage, Microsoft reduced that down to just a tenth of one core. All that CPU power can now be repurposed for other things.

DirectStorage works in conjunction with the Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS) technology also built into the Velocity Engine, reducing the number of textures that actually need to be loaded.

This increased efficiency translates into two to three times improvement on the effective amount of physical memory, and two to three times more I/O bandwidth, Goossen said. Could we see these sort of improvements within PC gaming, too? Let’s hope so.

Perhaps CIG should sell their mythical SSD-only streaming tech before Microsoft gets theirs out?

 

[Mu77ley]

And here we ago again with what always happens when you point out flaws in the Star Citizen argument:

 

[ArAsH]

And here we ago again with what always happens when you point out flaws in the Star Citizen argument:

I think a lot about a football pitch watching this thread. You know, like watching the game in a pub and suddenly 3 or 4 people around you turn into top managers

 

[LittleAnt]

Except CIG are NOT using this tech the way everyone else is, namely efficiently.

So you know in details how CIG is using this tech ? Because for me I just know the results, not how they do it...
And you are also saying that Sony will not do it efficiently too (they will not use the Microsoft Sampler Feedback Streaming for what I know) ?

MMOs that cannot even cover their running costs by one of these models go the way of the dodo. If this is still hard to understand perhaps pick up a business management book and do some reading on the subject.
At the very least, CIG will have to continue selling ships, currency, skins, pets and what not post release.

As said before, SC work together with SQ42. The 300M$ funding is not for SC, it's for SC+SQ42. You have to analyze the funding model of the 2 games, not just SC. Every sale of a SQ42 chapter will fund the next SQ42 chapter + SC.

 

[Viajero]

Good for you for jumping in to his defense mr mod, but he already answered

Nah, was actually adding to the point an angle you may have missed .

 

[Cotic]

Contained within the Eurogamer article from earlier this year

However, the size of the play area is only one aspect - speed of traversal through this space is another key issue, and in the current generation, it's typically achieved by streaming world data or having dedicated loading. Taking Marvel's Spider-Man as an example, the design and presentation of the streaming world is built around the fundamental limitation of how quickly the player can travel through it (a point Sony itself has demonstrated via its PS5 SSD demos).

Star Citizen has a vastly more complex challenge: the player can move at great speeds, requiring a new way to access a lot of high-detail world data. Imagine jumping to a planet or entering a space station and suddenly having a loading screen pop up, or even worse, a massive stutter - traditional systems might have that, but that would not live up to the game's design ambitions for being seamless.

Even if the user had hundreds of gigs of system memory, this still wouldn't be enough to get the job done. Star Citizen's solution is the use of what CIG calls object containers. Put simply, this is any world object large enough to have a number of nested objects within its bounds or an object with an extensive amount of sub-detail. It could be an entire planet, a space station, a city or a ship.

In a traditional game structure, these object containers themselves would be levels or multiple game levels in their own right, which would require dedicated loading sequences. In Star Citizen, as you move through the 3D game space, this hierarchy of object containers is loading in and out in the background in an efficient multithreaded manner to keep slow-down to a minimum. In Star Citizen, the planet itself is an object container, the space station in orbit above is another and then various points of interest dotted around the surface of the planet are other object containers, streamed accordingly.

Star Citizen tech in-depth: seamless scaling from gas giants to detail-rich alien worlds

Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen is a unique proposition: a game designed from the ground up to support the seemingly…

www.eurogamer.net

 

[AlPilg]

And you know that because of? Just asking.

I think at this point it's a given that they do everything in the worst way possible. Sorry.

 

[ArAsH]

Nah, was actually adding to the point an angle you may have missed .

Thanks for clearing that up mr mod, I was under the impression that you where just throwing in a cheap shot in defense for the local specialists. My bad.

 

[ArAsH]

I think at this point it's a given that they do everything in the worst way possible. Sorry.

No need to apologize my friend. I don’t know the inner workings of the company, so I’m not in a place to judge on this. Maybe you know more?

 

[Viajero]

My bad.

No worries, anytime.

 

[LittleAnt]

@Xink
To help you : Mass Effect 1&2&3 over 11 years = 14 million copies.
If SQ42 1&2&3 are a success like Mass Effect 1&2&3, with a game SQ42 at 50$ and removing 1 m of copies of the backers for security purposes, you can add 650M $ to your analyse of the SC funding = 60M$ / years

 

[Sunyavadin]

Contained within the Eurogamer article from earlier this year

Star Citizen tech in-depth: seamless scaling from gas giants to detail-rich alien worlds

Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen is a unique proposition: a game designed from the ground up to support the seemingly…

www.eurogamer.net

so they admit they are just bulk-loading everything.
Thanks for making my point, I guess?

This is literally what was being done 20 years ago when it came to streaming assets. It's not innovative any more, it's a step BACKWARDS.

You know what WAS a cool and legitimately innovative use of this tech a few years ago? GTAV on XBox 360 and how it got around the limitations of the almost a decade old at that point console hardware. So you COULD play the game with a bunch of nasty texture pop, but it worked pretty well, all things considered, by installing one DVD's assets to your HD, while it streamed the rest from the second DVD. BUT they designed it so that that second disc could be installed instead to a USB flash drive. Resulting in the half of the game's assets which it streamed from there to compensate for the crappy 5400RPM HD in the 360, instead loading far faster direct from the solid state NAND via USB than the laser could read the drive. Eliminating the texture pop instantly. This was overcoming a technical limitation of a fixed form factor hardware platform via the means available to them.

 

[ArAsH]

so they admit they are just bulk-loading everything.
Thanks for making my point, I guess?

This is literally what was being done 20 years ago when it came to streaming assets. It's not innovative any more, it's a step BACKWARDS.

I just read the article. Is this seriously what you make out of it?

 

[Xink]

Not sure if trolling, but will try to make it simpler for you. SC/SQ have raised some amount of money to fund development. Fine. SQ chapters 1/2/3.33 and 3/4 gets released and makes some amount of money. Fine. SC releases and requires a further amount of money per year to keep running.

Do you think that:

• A) Company uses already made profits from SQ to continue to keep SC running out of the goodness of their own hearts

or

• B) Company continues to make money off SC using the same mechanism they have used to fund its development

If your answer is A, do not go into business management.

 

[Surefoot]

And you know that because of? Just asking.

Some people have bothered to put nmap probes and such around the running game. We know what kind of data they are exchanging.

 

[AlPilg]

No need to apologize my friend. I don’t know the inner workings of the company, so I’m not in a place to judge on this. Maybe you know more?

I don't know the inner workings of the company nor would I care to know. It's just an impression I've formed from, let see.... oh yes, every single thing I've ever flippin read about it.

What you've got after all this time and money should tell you all you need to know about it anyway, the "game" is objectively terrible.

 

[ArAsH]

Some people have bothered to put nmap probes and such around the running game. We know what kind of data they are exchanging.

And is it that bad? I have no clue, I don’t even know what nmap probes are.

 

[ArAsH]

I don't know the inner workings of the company nor would I care to know. It's just an impression I've formed from, let see.... oh yes, every single thing I've ever flippin read about it.

What you've got after all this time and money should tell you all you need to know about it anyway, the "game" is objectively terrible.

Ok, just an impression. So it’s more subjectively terrible then, cause I have another impression.

 

[AlPilg]

Not exactly just an impression, I've seen it.