Star Citizen Thread v6

JohnMice · Aug 6, 2017

Asp Explorer said:
Do you know just how long that has been around? I've got a game from the 80's on a floppy disk that will display four live 3d view points at once, in real time, at a higher FPS that Star Citizen can manage

But is it in a MMO context?

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

Asp Explorer said:
Do you know just how long that has been around? I've got a game from the 80's on a floppy disk that will display four live 3d view points at once, in real time, at a higher FPS that Star Citizen can manage

I dont know what games you are talking about but I tend to believe you....does that make me a sycophant?

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
But is it in a MMO context?

Does it matter because Star Citizen currently is not a MMO either.

VidarSnipes · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
But is it in a MMO context?

Doesn't matter, MMOs aren't limited by rendering.

Cobra1984 · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
But is it in a MMO context?

CIG have yet to show planetary tech in an MMO context, never mind holograms and render to texture.

Asp Explorer · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
But is it in a MMO context?

Unfortunately no - single player only.

However - it doesn't make much difference to the renderer - especially as most MMO's are asynchronous - it will only render what it is told to, and each client may find themselves represented differently on another client.

Especially in Star Citizen - where the network implementation is in the urm, state its in.

Cobra1984 · Aug 6, 2017

@ JohnMice

I had hoped you would address the discrepancies between your claims regarding Star Citizen development and those made by Sean Tracy and Chris Roberts.

Particularly your claim that focus NOW is on surface POIs vs Sean Tracy saying that everyone was working on that 14 months ago.

Also I wanted you to source your claim about the content of the ATV replacement being "explaining how delays happen to general gamers".

Thanks

JohnMice · Aug 6, 2017

Maruun said:
But that isnt what they did, they had plans for a house and trying now to build a skyscrapper out of it, without using a architect, trying to build a skycrapper on a foundation of a house. After so long they still have no real foundation for their game they are still in a prototyping phase and there is no end in sight. They still havent done the ground floor! The cement is not even dry after so many years.

All that money wasted for a glorified techdemo...a wobbly small scaled model out of broken sticks, messi glue and 10 times recyled paper...and its still not able to visualise how it should look like in the end...

I can't agree, CIG not only has one of the greatest game designers in Chris Roberts, Tony Zurovec, Sean Tracy(architects) etc but also great engineers across the several fields of game design with the will to push the boundaries of what can be done in gaming.

They had plans for a house but with the amount of funding they got they went for the skyscraper, that's why they went the extra effort of re-building their engine to accommodate said skyscraper.

They have a great foundation imo. 64bit Large world map, FPS gameplay, Multicrew and EVA nailed out, only major thing left to integrated are the seamless planetary landings which are coming with 3.0 and then optimizing the network and overal performance. Rest is fleshing out the professions, adding AI and keep adding content.

McGlashan · Aug 6, 2017

MTBFritz said:
In order for that to happen they need to completely trash Star Citizen (the house) and start from scratch. With a new engine (best self-made) and a new concept. Only I feel that such a decision would result in massive backlash from the community and the press.

The problem with building a new engine from scratch is I don't think they have the skills in house to do it. Although I suspect the big song and dance they've made about render to texture is more a marketing exercise ("We need to shift attention away from the ongoing delays. More buzzwords please!" - Sandi) than something the engineers actually found challenging. At least I'd hope so. It wouldn't bode well for developing a whole engine from scratch if they had struggled with something so well-established.

Cobra1984 · Aug 6, 2017

MTBFritz said:
In order for that to happen they need to completely trash Star Citizen (the house) and start from scratch. With a new engine (best self-made)

This snippet aroused my ever churning gut feelies again, which... let me just listen... what's that gut feelies? An engine change was being discussed internally as late as 2016 prior to Gamescom?

Sadly I cannot source a gut feely weely.

Cobra1984 · Aug 6, 2017

McGlashan said:
The problem with building a new engine from scratch is I don't think they have the skills in house to do it.

They had the talent in the early days to do just this.

Star Citizen could have been phenomenal. Someone at the top wouldn't listen - that info is afaik in the public domain.

Zyll Goliat · Aug 6, 2017

Asp Explorer said:

Meh - I've tried it and got absolutely nowhere. Nobody is missing anything much anyway. My Star Citizen sessions inevitably end up with something like this:

https://s2.postimg.org/mtcm0o2qx/cigdsc.png

which 90% of the time ties to this:

Code:

ERROR: invalid entity passed to EventPhysGridChange
ERROR: invalid entity passed to EventPhysGridChange
ERROR: invalid entity passed to EventPhysGridChange
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x000002150F976760
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021481B4EEA0
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021517D17A80
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021481B562C0
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x00000215178ACC80
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021517D1B490
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021517D1B490
CIG online service connection failed : code [2]
[CIG-net] stop() - ConnectionLost
CServicesThread::UpdateConnection connection failed
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021548CA5CD0
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x0000021548CA5CD0
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x00000214CECD98A0
RelinquishCharacterPhysics: _objects/characters/human/male_v7/export/bhm_skeleton_v7.chr Instance: 0x00000214CECD98A0
CCryLANMatchMaking::FreeRemoteConnection connection=0 numFilledSlots=1 numUsers=0
[ContextSystem] disabling debug traces
System Shutdown
[CIG] CCIGBroker::Shutdown
[CIG] CCIGBroker::StopProcessThread

And for that helpful soul who suggested I am out of system resources to cope with physics grids:

Code:

130983MB physical memory installed, 124953MB available, 134217727MB virtual memory installed, 4 percent of memory in use
PageFile usage: 104MB, Working Set: 88MB, Peak PageFile usage: 104MB,
Current display mode is 5760x1080x32

Or out of VRAM: (no idea why that could possibly be connected)

Code:

Renderer initialization
Logging video adapters:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X (vendor = 0x10de, device = 0x17c2)
  - Adapter index: 0
  - Dedicated video memory: 12244 MB
  - Feature level: DX11 (SM 5.0)
  - Displays connected: yes
  - Suitable rendering device: yes

or perhaps playing on a low power CPU:

Code:

Total number of logical processors: 12
Number of available logical processors: 12
Total number of system cores: 6
Number of cores available to process: 6

But perhaps most relevant of all:

Code:

[CSessionManager::RequestFrontEnd] Started - RequestFrontEndReason="ProcessBootRequest"!
[disconnectlight] Game does not exist!

Hmmmm....so even the MIGHTY TITAN X choke on that much fidelityyyyyyyyy!!!Thats indeed groundbreaking.......

McGlashan · Aug 6, 2017

Cobra1984 said:
They had the talent in the early days to do just this.

Star Citizen could have been phenomenal. Someone at the top wouldn't listen - that info is afaik in the public domain.

Yes, maybe in the early days they could have pulled it off, back when the scope exploded and any competent CEO would have seriously re-evaluated the technology they were building the game on, and before some of the more experienced talent bailed out.

Toumal · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
StarCitizen PiP(Picture in Picture) is groundbreaking tech because it was one of the known limitations of the old "CryEngine" and that it's being developed so that it's usable also in mmorpg setting, which is more complex than in a single-player setting.

Stock CE doesn't have a ready to use solution for multiple viewports. Adding this to CE is a substantial amount of work. Render to texture is easier to implement, though the results are not comparable in quality.

Both are in no way groundbreaking though. It would be groundbreaking if no other engine supported this yet. However, pretty much all the commercial engines, including UE, Granny, and even Unity support this out of the box. Choosing a different engine would've meant that they would've gotten this for free. Also, it remains to be seen whether they actually need this.

So once again, words don't mean what CiG and fans think they mean. Just like "refactoring".

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

Its worth to point out that the 64bit part only applies to CryEngines map and nothing else. This is the problem when it comes to clipping and collision checks within the game, a 32bit engine trying to work with a 64bit map. So far CiG has shown no capability to address nor fix these issues. I cant even say if the map size is indeed true 64bit or just a 32bit map with a lot of decimals behind the"." in order to create the illusion of size. Whoever is the greatest game designer is a personal opinion. I dont agree with you on your picks but as I realize its not fact but your own opinion I dont care less. Just dont try to push your opinion on everybody else.

Star Marine is not "nailed out". Nailed out would indicate that the product in question shows superb quality or content. How is Star Marine nailed out? Or maybe you have a different understanding of the term then I do? EVA is simply floating, Hellion has the EVA part more "nailed out" then Star Citizen does.

Reality check....seamless planetary landings are NOT coming in 3.0. Instead well get a few mini-moons probably without atmosphere. The network code is a big "?" at the moment and nobody really knows when thats coming.

Fleshing out the professions?? Professions are non-existing at the moment how do you "flesh out" a 0 value? They need to start implementing professions before they can flesh them out. Dude.....

Adding AI and content. I love how you manage to make it sound like its a secondary issue. AI and content are THE issue here. And if you know anything about game development you understand that these things take most of your time to implement. The foundation usually is designed and built within a relatively short time, real work starts after a foundation is provided. Only in Star Citizens case after several years and having burned through untold millions of $ they still dont have a foundation...only disconnected modules and a proof-of-concept tech-demo. With the parameters we have (the time since 2012) I could easily project a 2025+ release date for Star Citizen. Only I expect it will change considerably over time the more CiG realizes how so many of their advertised features are impossible to achieve with their foundation and the backers slowly catching up.

JohnMice · Aug 6, 2017

McGlashan said:
The problem with building a new engine from scratch is I don't think they have the skills in house to do it. Although I suspect the big song and dance they've made about render to texture is more a marketing exercise ("We need to shift attention away from the ongoing delays. More buzzwords please!" - Sandi) than something the engineers actually found challenging. At least I'd hope so. It wouldn't bode well for developing a whole engine from scratch if they had struggled with something so well-established.

That's a ludicrous theory considering that CIG has in their rank some of the senior engineers who built CryEngine from scratch about 15 years ago. Shown here at the 5m42s mark:

[video=youtube_share;yisaDxvBH9s]https://youtu.be/yisaDxvBH9s?t=5m42s[/video]

These are the same germans that introduced the PG tech and allowed for the increased scope of Star Citizen.

A nice interview with the Frankfurt's Lead System Designer about gameplay mechanics for the ones interested:

[video=youtube;NmtdliibcE8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmtdliibcE8[/video]

And this recent video takes on everything the German studio is working currently:

[video=youtube;N8BGWNWPpGk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8BGWNWPpGk[/video]

Toumal said:
Stock CE doesn't have a ready to use solution for multiple viewports. Adding this to CE is a substantial amount of work. Render to texture is easier to implement, though the results are not comparable in quality.

Both are in no way groundbreaking though. It would be groundbreaking if no other engine supported this yet. However, pretty much all the commercial engines, including UE, Granny, and even Unity support this out of the box. Choosing a different engine would've meant that they would've gotten this for free. Also, it remains to be seen whether they actually need this.

Wouldn't you say that applying that tech in a usable and playable massive online game to be a groundbreaking feature? That's what I meant. And they have shown clearly why they need this tech, I think the gif's are self explanatory.

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

McGlashan said:
The problem with building a new engine from scratch is I don't think they have the skills in house to do it. Although I suspect the big song and dance they've made about render to texture is more a marketing exercise ("We need to shift attention away from the ongoing delays. More buzzwords please!" - Sandi) than something the engineers actually found challenging. At least I'd hope so. It wouldn't bode well for developing a whole engine from scratch if they had struggled with something so well-established.

Apart from the skill-set a new engine would also require a clear and intelligent concept. As CiG demonstrates every day they dont have an idea what the game will look like in the end themselves. They are still in the design phase coming up with all kinds of new ideas. All these things have to be considered when working out the concept. The better the concept the quicker a foundation can be built. Right now CiG is continuing to work on an engine which they know cannot achieve many of their goals. Is that wasting backer money or intentionally misleading their backers? Hmm...hard decision.

I think we can assume that CiGs underlings have no clear idea what the head honcho wants. People have a very narrow field of knowledge focused on their particular work. Ben Parry confirmed in past posts that he doesnt really know what other departments outside his own work on. He makes it sound like its a personal decision by him but I cannot shake the feeling that the internal department structure in CiG is designed to keep everybody guessing with only a few people at the top knowing whats really going on. Gut-feeling which I cannot prove. Other games I participated in had a similar attitude from the developers (chatted a lot with the "grunts"). Most of them would focus on their own field of work but the difference was that the end result or overall directive was always available and communicated clearly when asked. Sometimes a developer needs to know where the ship is traveling in order to implement or cover future functionalities into his design even if its not needed at the moment. The constant refactoring and redesign of stuff in Star Citizen as well as the change in direction are a strong indicator that people working on the game have no idea nor the option to gain that information because CRoberts and his relatives are sitting on it like a family recipe.

Kind of like a scam works...only the lead people know whats going on. Keep the rest in the dark, this counts for developers as much as the backers.

I m sorry for the dark picture. If you can refute this scenario more power to you. For the rest as always food for thought.

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

<snip>

misread, apologies

AkenBosch · Aug 6, 2017

JohnMice said:
CIG showcased in the latest ATV some interesting sneak peeks.

https://giant.gfycat.com/AntiqueHarmlessBison.gif

Notice how nice it runs and how detailed is the reflection not only in one screen but multiple. Normaly they are only used in one screen and kinda blurry.

I know I'm not the funniest guy at parties but...notice how that's not the proper rendering of a mirror at all? A proper rendering of a mirror should reflect (in 3d) things back from your point of view, while in that "groundbreaking" tech snippet, the viewports clearly display (in 2d) the point of view of a fixed virtual camera placed somewhere convenient for the demo. Trust me (or even better, trust Asp Explorer

who seems to have his sources spot-on), you won't see high-definition, correctly rendered mirrors anytime soon, not to mention in those sorry remains of a CryEngine. The last game I know of who could correctly render a mirror at very high quality and fidelity of reflections was Duke Nukem 3D, and for very specific reasons you will easily find with 0.35 seconds of Google search.

As for PiP, interactive overlays and renders to texture...yes...

absolutely

groundbreaking

technology

Nothin personal against you JohnMice, I know I won't move you one inch with my small technical intrusion and it's not even my intention to, you are of course entitled to you opinions and have all the right in the world to be enthusiastic about something you believe in.

MTBFritz · Aug 6, 2017

AkenBosch said:
I know I'm not the funniest guy at parties but...notice how that's not the proper rendering of a mirror at all? A proper rendering of a mirror should reflect (in 3d) things back from your point of view, while in that "groundbreaking" tech snippet, the viewports clearly display (in 2d) the point of view of a fixed virtual camera placed somewhere convenient for the demo.

I think I am responsible for that because I used the term "mirror" in one of my posts but CiG doesnt really advertises this as a mirror. Actually its meant as a projected camera footage placed somewhere in space. It "should" be 3d tho as its advertised as hologram tech.

about something you believe in.

Careful else you ll trigger Rolan, its one of his pet peeves