Star Citizen Thread v6

[[VR] Merkir]

"One concession was that a one-tenth scale was adopted for playability and feasibility purposes"

Does anyone know the specific playability and feasibility reasons? I'm genuinely curious.

 

[Knightshark]

It's the new catchy term for Lag. It's going to be a feature.

Ah, and low FPS is just "quantized time"!

 

[Tippis]

"One concession was that a one-tenth scale was adopted for playability and feasibility purposes"

Does anyone know the specific playability and feasibility reasons? I'm genuinely curious.

Complete guesswork:

For gameplay, large scales means you need to move at higher speeds or it'll become boring, and at higher speeds, the engine runs into precision limitations and aliasing bugs that expose too much of the wiring to the player and also makes the gameplay unreliable. And, of course, there's the old suspicion that the distances are just inherently infeasible with the engine — the fact that the gameplay doesn't support them is just a happy coincidence that lets them back off that particular cliff.

A more mundane reason could be that having too much space gives the players… well… too much space. The universe doesn't feel as dense and alive if you never see anything because everything is hundreds of light-seconds away, and your draw and sensor distance only reaches out to a fraction of that.

 

[Knightshark]

Complete guesswork:

For gameplay, large scales means you need to move at higher speeds or it'll become boring, and at higher speeds, the engine runs into precision limitations and aliasing bugs that expose too much of the wiring to the player and also makes the gameplay unreliable. And, of course, there's the old suspicion that the distances are just inherently infeasible with the engine — the fact that the gameplay doesn't support them is just a happy coincidence that lets them back off that particular cliff.

Yeah, but what is the point of building tech that supports ludicrous sized maps, if you only use a microscopic fraction of that map and force players to travel between these microscopic hotspots for tens of minutes without any way to interact. Isn't that what you de facto get game composed of endless loading screens that feels exactly like Freelancer where you also jump between hotspots?

 

[Viajero]

Complete guesswork:

For gameplay, large scales means you need to move at higher speeds or it'll become boring, and at higher speeds, the engine runs into precision limitations and aliasing bugs that expose too much of the wiring to the player and also makes the gameplay unreliable. And, of course, there's the old suspicion that the distances are just inherently infeasible with the engine — the fact that the gameplay doesn't support them is just a happy coincidence that lets them back off that particular cliff.

Yes, something along those lines is still my suspicion. If the engine had been really fully converted to 64b and precision issues were not such then in principle there would not be any barrier for CIG to implement full fidelity at 1:1 scale and then adjust the ship quantum speed limits as high as necessary (beyond the ridiculously arbitrary 0.2c) to make gameplay not boring and make travel as short and sweet in time as they like. Such a system would also allow for full flight control in quantum, as opposed to just straight lines.

The fact they have not done it yet suggests to me their 64b implementation is not quite as smooth as CIG claims it is. It also suggests their procedural techniques may not be able to cope with 1:1 scales.

 

[Tippis]

Yeah, but what is the point of building tech that supports ludicrous sized maps, if you only use a microscopic fraction of that map and force players to travel between these microscopic hotspots for tens of minutes without any way to interact. Isn't that what you de facto get game composed of endless loading screens that feels exactly like Freelancer where you also jump between hotspots?

Welcome to the inherent problem of space games with any allowance for realism, I guess. There's a reason why so many games just use space as a terrain or setting, not as anything that is actually worth simulating.

Also, part of that is just inherent in how floating-point numbers work — you can represent ridiculously large areas, but ironically, the larger they are, the less of it can actually be used in practice. There are ways around that, of course, but if you've painted yourself into a corner by crowing about continuous areas and no loading and all that, you've kind of shut the door on those solutions.

 

[Knightshark]

Welcome to the inherent problem of space games with any allowance for realism, I guess. There's a reason why so many games just use space as a terrain or setting, not as anything that is actually worth simulating.

Also, part of that is just inherent in how floating-point numbers work — you can represent ridiculously large areas, but ironically, the larger they are, the less of it can actually be used in practice. There are ways around that, of course, but if you've painted yourself into a corner by crowing about continuous areas and no loading and all that, you've kind of shut the door on those solutions.

I think ED solved this problem brilliantly. Without super cruise the game would not be the same. Only in supercruise do you get a sense what astronomical scales are, these are scales where the speed of light is slow. You get the sense for the structure and dynamics of planetary systems, you can appreciate exotic or rare formations. You enter a station and when you leave you realize that things are moving relative to each other.

ED managed that all from day one of premium beta (which is the moment i joined), without making a hassle about 64bit seamless blah blah we hear from CR/CIG since 2013.

My question is just: What have they achieved in the end? If the game is just a collection of hotspots and travel between hotspots is just a animation, how is this different from old school space games or even remotely innovative?

 

[Britney]

"One concession was that a one-tenth scale was adopted for playability and feasibility purposes"

Does anyone know the specific playability and feasibility reasons? I'm genuinely curious.

It makes sense to make space denser than it really is. Otherwise you have a whole lot of nothing in between interesting places and players. Kerbal also does it, the kerbal solar system is 1/3 of the size of the real one.

I find it funny though that they suggest making the game 'realistic', as if that was a thing so far besides being a marketing term similar to calling wing commander a 'space combat simulator'. Hard to imagine that they implement orbital physics and such as this would create many problems in a multiplayer-environment.

Anyway, it looks like making the game will take a few more years time.

 

[MTBFritz]

A regular Star Citizen day in 7 minutes

Walk around in my Space Hangar
Walk through an empty station
Walk some more in my Space Hangar
Drive my buggy in my Space Hangar (vomit from first person induced motion sickness)
Enter my ships and walk around
Check the store
Normal Routine in Olisar
Do 1 of the 3 available missions
Generic Arcade Space combat with lots of pewpew
Return to Olisar


I guess 7 minutes is the max anybody can stand this game right now ^^ Or maybe add a couple more minutes when kicking a can across the platform with friends

 

[Jezzah]

A regular Star Citizen day in 7 minutes

Walk around in my Space Hangar
Walk through an empty station
Walk some more in my Space Hangar
Drive my buggy in my Space Hangar (vomit from first person induced motion sickness)
Enter my ships and walk around
Check the store
Normal Routine in Olisar
Do 1 of the 3 available missions
Generic Arcade Space combat with lots of pewpew
Return to Olisar


I guess 7 minutes is the max anybody can stand this game right now ^^ Or maybe add a couple more minutes when kicking a can across the platform with friends

Is this the most recent build of the thing? Awful awful awful.

 

[McGlashan]

Yes, something along those lines is still my suspicion. If the engine had been really fully converted to 64b and precision issues were not such then in principle there would not be any barrier for CIG to implement full fidelity at 1:1 scale and then adjust the ship quantum speed limits as high as necessary (beyond the ridiculously arbitrary 0.2c) to make gameplay not boring and make travel as short and sweet in time as they like. Such a system would also allow for full flight control in quantum, as opposed to just straight lines.

The fact they have not done it yet suggests to me their 64b implementation is not quite as smooth as CIG claims it is. It also suggests their procedural techniques may not be able to cope with 1:1 scales.

Yeah, my money's on "feasibility" rather than "playability" being the reason. It's ludicrous to claim playability is even a factor when their "game" still doesn't have any proper gameplay mechanics, it's clearly a excuse for the technical concessions they're having to make. Eventually it will be "we decided to limit the number of players in an instance to 24, for gameplay reasons".

A regular Star Citizen day in 7 minutes

Is there really such a crazy delay between opening doors and the engine deciding what to draw inside the rooms? That's mad, I've never noticed it in SC videos before (not that I watch many any more).

 

[Tippis]

My question is just: What have they achieved in the end? If the game is just a collection of hotspots and travel between hotspots is just a animation, how is this different from old school space games or even remotely innovative?

Oh, that's simple: it's not. But if you cover it in PR lingo and technical jargon, people who haven't really paid any attention to games since the last time Chris actually made a game will not notice because this will be the first time someone has called their attention to those standard elements. It's a bit like all that “bwahaha, eat it console peasants!” chest-beating while trotting around visuals that are slightly below what Naughty Dog did on the PS3 (never mind what's actually available on current consoles).

It makes sense to make space denser than it really is. Otherwise you have a whole lot of nothing in between interesting places and players. Kerbal also does it, the kerbal solar system is 1/3 of the size of the real one.

I find it funny though that they suggest making the game 'realistic', as if that was a thing so far besides being a marketing term similar to calling wing commander a 'space combat simulator'. Hard to imagine that they implement orbital physics and such as this would create many problems in a multiplayer-environment.

Pretty much, yeah. There's nothing wrong with picking a scale that suitable to the gameplay you want to deliver — quite the opposite: it's a hugely important part in deciding on the scope and overall design. I posted a minor wall on the topic here a while back (I think…), on exactly why KSP works with that scale reduction: because what it wants you to play around with is orbital mechanics, and those are only really interesting in proximity to a body you might want to orbit. So there's no reason for the game not to reduce the time spent in the largely irrelevant part of the game world that is the empty space between those bodies. It focuses on the realism that matters and abstracts away the rest.

SC's problem is that CIG doesn't seem to know what core gameplay they're supposed to aim for, so there's nothing to guide them in telling what is important and what should just be cut out. They keep mumbling about realism and “space sim,” but everything they're showing off suggests that what they actually want to offer is highly unrealistic space opera stuff. So instead of just going for what would be great game design and sell that, they get all tangled up in trying to excuse a final design that directly contradicts the stated intent.

 

[Almighty Bob]

In the latest ATV they say that Stanton is 800 million km wide, approx 3.5 hours to travel from one side to the other at 0.2C
If the station is roughly half way into the system from your jump point that's 1.5 hours to get there, won't that get a bit boring?

It will get boring if you have to do it on every mission/task.
Have you been to Colonia or Sag A in Elite, how long did that take and how often do you do it.

In Elite I presume that 99+% of players choose not to haul containers from Sol to Colonia and back again, ETC ETC.
The question is what will there be to do in SC when it is released and how will it be balanced?
Cotic, did you see the part of ATV where they say the good thing about the new system building process is that if they change the scale it is easy to implement. That suggests that they plan to balance/rebalance the game during Alpha and Beta as required.

So back to your 90 minute transit. I suspect that in most systems the interesting places will be much closer together and the long journeys will be for Nutter and the explorer/colonia types.

 

[Thargon]

A regular Star Citizen day in 7 minutes

Walk around in my Space Hangar
Walk through an empty station
Walk some more in my Space Hangar
Drive my buggy in my Space Hangar (vomit from first person induced motion sickness)
Enter my ships and walk around
Check the store
Normal Routine in Olisar
Do 1 of the 3 available missions
Generic Arcade Space combat with lots of pewpew
Return to Olisar


I guess 7 minutes is the max anybody can stand this game right now ^^ Or maybe add a couple more minutes when kicking a can across the platform with friends

The Fideleteh!!! Nice video thanks Is this your youtube channel? Wow, those door popping animations as you enter the shops. Something very wrong there.

Oh, dat typical pirat8 voice yerrrrr! Omg... Imaginative LOL

Actually, because a lot of the content in the video is new (to me), some of it seems pretty cool. However, I'm guessing this content gets pretty stale after the 50th time?

 

[VidarSnipes]

So, still no schedule... just saying.

 

[Asp Explorer]

They are just getting lazy now.

Those new space-bikes look more like Nvidia graphics cards than erm, space-bikes

 

[Cotic]

It will get boring if you have to do it on every mission/task.
Have you been to Colonia or Sag A in Elite, how long did that take and how often do you do it.

In Elite I presume that 99+% of players choose not to haul containers from Sol to Colonia and back again, ETC ETC.
The question is what will there be to do in SC when it is released and how will it be balanced?
Cotic, did you see the part of ATV where they say the good thing about the new system building process is that if they change the scale it is easy to implement. That suggests that they plan to balance/rebalance the game during Alpha and Beta as required.

So back to your 90 minute transit. I suspect that in most systems the interesting places will be much closer together and the long journeys will be for Nutter and the explorer/colonia types.

I don't know that that is a fair comparison. You're comparing multi-system travel vs intra-system travel, or going 15,000ly compared to 5.8AU

While people might not need to do this all the time they will certainly need to if they wish to jump to other systems, the distance between the Terra and Magnus jump points within the Stanton system would still take 37-46 minutes at a full 0.2c and a lot of ships will, apparently, not be able to reach that speed, the bigger ones like the Hull C & D would be closer to 0.17c which almost doubles the travelling time.

 

[Memnoch]

They are just getting lazy now.

Those new space-bikes look more like Nvidia graphics cards than erm, space-bikes

I'd love to commute to work on that thing though. Have to make do with my GoCycle until then.

watching the last episode of ATV i had a chill.

the very last phrase of one of the guys that explained the building of a solar system:

''we never been able to complete a solar system with cryengine because that engine wasn't able to do it at all''.

so the shameful truth comes out at last.. 4 year wasted to try to build a entire universe when you cannot even complete a single
solar system ?.

I've just gone and watched this video and you have misquoted to be fair.

https://youtu.be/STwVI6_xWqc?t=38m18s

"...we would never be able to create...one solar system let alone, y'know, the hundreds of solar systems we're going to be able to, going to have to make if it wasn't for this tool. You can imagine the amount of hours it would take to hand move these out. Because the CryEngine was never built to do this. You know, again I say it sounds extremely simple, and it is a simple tool but it wasn't there out the box."

So they have a tool that lets them do what they need to do but CryEngine out of the box never had this tool which would have made it difficult if not downright impossible.

That's not quite what you suggested is it. If you are going to quote the man at least do it accurately and give people that haven't bothered to watch the video, and I still haven't watched the whole thing and only what you were drawing attention to, the facts rather than a version of them.

Rewinding a bit to find out exactly what this "tool" is, as I had no idea.

https://youtu.be/STwVI6_xWqc?t=27m53s

The tools is called Solar System Ed (SolEd). Written by Sasha Huber ( did a quick search so spelling may be off!) from Germany. It allows them to build a star system with a hierarchy, adding a star then children orbiting bodies.

Conceptually that sounds fine but that in itself doesn't really answer the core question for me, which is whether their version of CryEngine can graphically depict that star system for many different players at the same time, regardless of how it was designed.

For me, I would look forward to watching a timelapse video, or trying it myself of course, of a ship near an orbiting space station and then flying in real time down to the surface without using quantum drive or any other in-game "trickery". Or an even longer journey, say planet to planet, just to see if it would actually be possible or whether the use of quantum drive is necessary to jump from one instanced location to another.

 

[MTBFritz]

They are just getting lazy now.

Those new space-bikes look more like Nvidia graphics cards than erm, space-bikes

I kinda like the design to be honest and the pilots placement makes sense as well. Depending on the speeds involved and the overall activity this tool is designed for you want a minimal degree of exposure to the environment so HuD feedback and enclosure represent protection features. What irks me a bit more is that how a large percentage of that video is covering the "motorbike" to a degree that makes me again think "yeah lets talk about ONE thing ad nauseum because we have nothing else to talk about".

I know what kind of defense some people will come up with. Parallel development cycles but this is again creating assets which are due for refactoring and add more debt to the burdened developers when all focus should go into creating the base at this point. A base which has been continuously tuned down over the weeks and has already lost a lot of potential compared to the 2016 slides shown at the Citizencon. I m sure there are companies which can pull a procedure like this off. Well oiled companies with good management and directive control. All things CiG has demonstrated to not possess over the last few years. So using this argument I d honestly be more worried then assured but the same things can be perceived in different ways depending on who watches them I guess.

The video I recently linked (and which is not my video btw) doesnt do much for me because I am able to look past the great visuals and ponder what the player actually does while playing this "game". Its all skin. I didnt see much bone or meat. Over the decades I play video games I learned one thing and thats "looks dont make a good game" but "good games tend to look beautiful". In Star Citizens case the incredible looks dont seem to be a "side-product" of the development (what I would assume at this point of development...you know....alpha) but deliberate design decisions which waste an incredible amount of resources and manpower only to be presented in a fashionable way. It doesnt help that CiG presents these tidbits in a casual manner hinting that it all looks like this and doesnt need much of attention to come out like it. Truth is that the PU we currently have access to looks like nothing we see in the videos and while still good looking only keep their "mouth hanging" qualities in the promo demos (*cough* smoke and mirror *cough*) CiG provides. If anything the homestead demonstration in 2016 gave us all the info we need in order to qualify the amount of work and stress a simple 10 minute video puts on the whole company.

I currently believe that all attention and efforts go into maintaining the illusion of progress and content rather then creating it. 3.0 will be a good indicator of how capable CIG actually is. It took them what....6 months since the last patch? They have been given more money and enough patience/time to create it. I m really curious to see what CiG manages to do with all this patience and goodwill directed at them. Will it be justified or just peeved into the wind? I dont doubt there are people at CiG hard at work trying to create the game CRoberts envisioned but if thats really the case its too little too late. We are in year 6 of production and we have been through 150+ million dollars of funding. These factors create a level of expectation which CiG isnt able to match anymore....at least not for me. SO when I see the polished space hangar which looks breathtaking at 4k with a monster machine running it offline I am actually not impressed and distracted but realize that it has been looking like this for years now and very little has been done since then. That realization of stagnation in the project colors everything that comes from them in a bad way. The routine ship sales dont help of course....

 

[MTBFritz]

The tools is called Solar System Ed (SolEd). Written by Sasha Huber ( did a quick search so spelling may be off!) from Germany.

Sorry nope....

Spoiler

Sasha Huber is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich (Switzerland) in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki (Finland)

...taken from this site

I m a little confused now. Obviously I got the wrong person because this Sasha Huber looks like an artist not a programmer and her bio misses any mentioning of this tool or her working for CiG. Also reading her bio makes me doubt she would be connected to CiG in any way anyway. Can you share your findings because I was unable to find anything on the net. Of course not knowing how its exactly spelled doesnt help but the quote of origin comes from the video. If this Sasha Huber is indeed not working for CIG its just another example of outside genius helping CIG to create the illusion of progress. Leaning on other peoples work (*cough* water marks *cough*) and label it as your own.