Star Citizen Thread v6

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We were specifically told we could land anywhere we wanted, IIRC. They will find it hard to wiggle out of that one if they don't deliver.

https://youtu.be/C1wX1Kk3Ajg?t=9m21s

He clearly says "anywhere" on that moon. I was concerned about that circular structure in orbit though. I hope those aren't points of entry that you must pass through to get to the surface.

They could allow you to land anywhere on a limited instance map with a selection of pads after you enter via the freelancer docking ring you spotted. That way anywhere would be technically correct in terms of that map.

Remember "star marine is already in the game", Chris Roberts is not above pulling a Darth Vader on any deal he's made.
 
Added to this that I don't think anyone here holds any criticism towards the "rank and file" programmers...far from from it. It's the management the greed and ongoing idiocy of such.

^^^ this cannot be stressed enough.

Many of us backed this project. We were promised a game. We'd still really like to get our game, and we'd like it to be a very good one for us all to enjoy.

CIG have many talented people, and they have produced some impressive things - but time and time again, one particular thing happens and takes the entire project and all progress made back by a few years.
 
We were specifically told we could land anywhere we wanted, IIRC. They will find it hard to wiggle out of that one if they don't deliver.

https://youtu.be/C1wX1Kk3Ajg?t=9m21s

He clearly says "anywhere" on that moon. I was concerned about that circular structure in orbit though. I hope those aren't points of entry that you must pass through to get to the surface.

I'm not sure how limiting the entry to that ring would help anything. If you can control your ship after passing that point, what's stopping you from flying around the moon at slower speeds? If you can't, what's stopping you from circling the planet from above that point? It's either a placeholder for something even the demo magic couldn't achieve or a reference to Freelancer. Or a bad portent.

Edit: And if it turns out that lunar landings are so severely limited, I'm sure people won't mind that much, as I'm sure they will think that limited lunar landings are better than no lunar landings.
 
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I reckon it about 80/20 odds that this project will fail and wil be use an example in how not to handle a game development project in project management game developers classes.

I'm hoping as most people seem to have given up on it, it will not affect crowdfunding for games to much.

Unusually for Roberts, they seem to have been very tight-lipped on the subject of just how seamless the transition will be in 3.0, which I don't take to be a positive sign for anyone expecting the experience to be like the purpose-built marketing demos CIG have been pumping out for the last couple of years (e.g. Pupil to Planet, Gamescom '16). I am fully expecting a non-interactive cutscene or other smoke and mirrors as you drop into atmosphere, if not the totally separate planetside module that has been suggested once or twice. It will be hand-waved away as "placeholder", or "no one complained when ME:A did it" or similar, as well as the inevitable "CIG never promised it would be seamless".

I complained about ME:A using cut scenes for traveling around. If you going to have space ship in a game as a vehicle let me fly the damn thing.

They will use something to hide it just like E: D does.
 
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They will use something to hide it just like E: D does.

They can certainly use various techniques to "hide" things, or disguise loading screens with cinematics or mini-games - that has been going on since the 80's.

However, with the sheer size and number of the assets they are hoping to load and / or generate on the fly - some of these wait times are going to be quite considerable. Even with the small areas they have today, waits in the minutes are not uncommon, and their legendary mega-map is - as far as I am able to test - a server-side instruction to "load everything you possibly can, and run with the assets you've preemptively cached" in the vain hope it does something useful.

All of this is very simple to verify using OS tools.
 
They can certainly use various techniques to "hide" things, or disguise loading screens with cinematics or mini-games - that has been going on since the 80's.

However, with the sheer size and number of the assets they are hoping to load and / or generate on the fly - some of these wait times are going to be quite considerable. Even with the small areas they have today, waits in the minutes are not uncommon, and their legendary mega-map is - as far as I am able to test - a server-side instruction to "load everything you possibly can, and run with the assets you've preemptively cached" in the vain hope it does something useful.

All of this is very simple to verify using OS tools.

I wonder about that too, i have no problem if they use disuises that give you a sense of seamless transition aslong it doesnt take overly time to do so.
But i personally fear the return of the freelancer docking rings, in SC it could end up that you need to fly through those rings in order to get a animation that brings you to a set high of the planet until you get again full control over your ship again.
When i saw those rings in that presentation it immetdiatly gave me a bad premonition. Even more so when they intentionally flew through them before the camera "faded" to near surface flight.
 
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Isn't mega map that the whole system is one honking huge map file, but it only loads your locality?

Which is when I want to know how large such a map file would be when you're hand-tweaking the surface of these proc-gen planets and hand placing god knows how much throughout the systems. The mind boggles
 
Isn't mega map that the whole system is one honking huge map file, but it only loads your locality?

Which is when I want to know how large such a map file would be when you're hand-tweaking the surface of these proc-gen planets and hand placing god knows how much throughout the systems. The mind boggles

Judging by the file accesses - nope.

Mega-map tries to load absolutely everything your PC can handle, then dumps 99% of it when CIG's server sends a "run now" message.

It loads assets you'll never use. It loads assets you will use, and then promptly dumps them. It then reloads them yet again - and again dumps everything when you are playing in a stable session - and has to load then yet again in that session.

It's all sorts of absolutely crazy. You can monitor this behavior in real-time using nothing more complicated than process monitor.
 
Isn't mega map that the whole system is one honking huge map file, but it only loads your locality?

Which is when I want to know how large such a map file would be when you're hand-tweaking the surface of these proc-gen planets and hand placing god knows how much throughout the systems. The mind boggles

It is supposed to be a type of streaming of the world around you, like a more complex version of what the Elder Scrolls games have done from Morrowind and onwards. It is actually supposed to do the exact opposite of what the name suggests: to be very tiny and to not use “maps” in any conventional sense at all. If done correctly and cleverly, it could even completely do away with stuff like physics grids, “network LoD” and — to some extent — even instancing. But as Asp mentions, they're not doing that — they're making a very daft pre-fetch/force-run process that almost creates more problems than it solves, just to create an illusion of something pointless.


Also, Archering time…
pDRihxy.png
 
Judging by the file accesses - nope.

Mega-map tries to load absolutely everything your PC can handle, then dumps 99% of it when CIG's server sends a "run now" message.

It loads assets you'll never use. It loads assets you will use, and then promptly dumps them. It then reloads them yet again - and again dumps everything when you are playing in a stable session - and has to load then yet again in that session.

It's all sorts of absolutely crazy. You can monitor this behavior in real-time using nothing more complicated than process monitor.

That's in AC/SM? As fa as I know, megamap is not enabled in PU.
 
I'll have to watch it again but there was a video of a ship coming in, passing a station in orbit then proceeding down to a port on the surface. I don't remember any kind of transition. But a lot of it was shown from outside the ship but I don't know if that was a second person filming or what the person flying the ship was seeing.

Have to watch that again.

How long was the video? Space is pretty big, if you can just zip down from the station to the surface then shortcuts are being taken. E: D uses super cruise and orbital/glide to get you there fast but then the price is a couple of transitions. I recently did the crossing from station to planet in a python without the use of frame shift. Left it flying unattended for a few hours with power off to everything but life support. Cruised at ~300m/s for 16 hours.

I'm genuinely curious how they'll do it. What will the speeds be like, the distances? If the speeds are very high, have they perfected loading and unloading assets for LOD transitions? Or will they have you come in at one speed, then drop down to a slower speed once you get close? And if they do that, how many seconds will it take to load all of the assets in the area? And of course, network connections to other players in the area, some in air (or equivalent) and some on the ground. Will your game be talking to their game the entire time (while your game is also loading and unloading different details levels of terrain perhaps) or again, will it be more like "you're near the surface now, we slow you down, load the terrain detail, and start sending you the details of all the other players who have descended like locusts on these 2 planetoids"

It's certainly going to be interesting any way you look at it.
 
How long was the video? Space is pretty big, if you can just zip down from the station to the surface then shortcuts are being taken. E: D uses super cruise and orbital/glide to get you there fast but then the price is a couple of transitions.
The entire video I linked to is 29:38 but the actual transition phase is probably 30s to a minute I would guess. There is a segment where you see some king of drive activating and you see white streaks in the periphery. There is then another segment where you see the ship enter the actual atmosphere and you see the front of the ship start to heat up. Either of those could have been an obscured loading screen and if so I would be fine with that. I will leave it up to the nitpickers to decide whether it is a transition free flight from orbit to atmosphere and will only say that its transparent enough for me and would be happy if they can do that for 3.0.
 
@Memnoch

Sorry I didn't see that you'd posted the video you first referred to. I mostly agree that a well-obscured loading screen is fine. It certainly isn't revolutionary and so I'm perplexed why everything is taking so long and they still have so little to show, but that isn't a major concern for me. As long as I can orbit the planet and land where I want I'd say, as a demo of their technology, it's a success. If I can get from a space station to the surface without "feeling" like I've passed through loading zones I'd say it's a decent demo of the possible game itself. I doubt I'd be ready to give them my money since I have very little trust for a business that uses their particular model, but delivering parts of their game and proving they can create and adhere to a schedule are encouraging signs (the weekly slippages are less consoling but anyone that didn't give them a 3 month buffer was fooling themselves. I honestly don't k ow if that's a Chris Roberts thing or a game developer thing. They're all a bunch on cowboys and Id never let them within a mile of one of my projects... bless their hearts)
 
I didn't know about the nitty gritty of what happened at the time but looking through a forensic dissection of Freelancer, feature creep should be CR's middle name(s). He seems to be a perfectionist and someone just needs to grab him by the shoulders and tell me when its good enough to ship otherwise he won't ship anything at all.
 
I didn't know about the nitty gritty of what happened at the time but looking through a forensic dissection of Freelancer, feature creep should be CR's middle name(s). He seems to be a perfectionist and someone just needs to grab him by the shoulders and tell me when its good enough to ship otherwise he won't ship anything at all.

That explanation would make sense if it weren't for the fact that everything he has ever released and showed off has been… ehrm… less than perfect, let's say. And it can't be excused by being pressured in pre-mature releases — it held just as true in the cases where he had the freedom to pick his own level of release quality and timeframe.
 
I didn't know about the nitty gritty of what happened at the time but looking through a forensic dissection of Freelancer, feature creep should be CR's middle name(s).

Some backers seem to think feature creep is a Good Thing because those nasty publishers stifle creativity

Some of the discussions on Reddit are very interesting because of this

He seems to be a perfectionist and someone just needs to grab him by the shoulders and tell me when its good enough to ship otherwise he won't ship anything at all.

If that were true the PU would be a lot less buggy than it is
 
I didn't know about the nitty gritty of what happened at the time but looking through a forensic dissection of Freelancer, feature creep should be CR's middle name(s). He seems to be a perfectionist and someone just needs to grab him by the shoulders and tell me when its good enough to ship otherwise he won't ship anything at all.

There's an interview with him where he says he's aware that's a problem and he wishes on wing commander the movie there had been someone there to say exactly that to him. He then goes on to say he gets rid of any employee who doesn't immediately agree with him.
 
There's an interview with him where he says he's aware that's a problem and he wishes on wing commander the movie there had been someone there to say exactly that to him. He then goes on to say he gets rid of any employee who doesn't immediately agree with him.

Wouldn't mind if what he produces was of some manner of transcendental quality.

It really isn't.
 
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