The Star Citizen Thread v 3.0

[Iskariot]

The attitude thruster configuration ruins the model. The thrusters function like they have no throttle, only on and off, and are severely overpowered for the ship size. So to turn the ship slightly, the thrusters first fire an overpowered burst to rotate, and then a slightly less powerful burst to slow down the ship to the desired rotation speed.

But the thrusters could just fire a weak burst and be done with it. I can't stand watching footage of the game because the ship is constantly being thrown around everywhere instead of flying smoothly.

Just asking.
Isn't the counter burst necessary to stop the rotation, as one would expect in space?

 

[M.E.A.T]

Ok guys confess which one these nerd's are you?

[h=3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gawRjeZisYY[/h]
Their enthusiasm is amusing !

Whoa! that's impressive. I almost like everything in that video.
Is it just me that feel flight model is not smooth from the 3rd person view? Same with the turrets, the movement is jerky and follow the mouse like FPS.
I hope they fix these things though. Also, not sure if the Warthunder mouse control is still in the game (or will it ever be removed)?

 

[Troels]

Just asking.
Isn't the counter burst necessary to stop the rotation, as one would expect in space?

Yes, but I think Space mentioned the counter burst in relation to adjusting your rotation speed down to the desired value (since the initial burst would tend to overshoot), not stopping as such. To my knowledge though, there is no counter burst in this situation, since the initial burst does in fact not overshoot (the IFCS makes sure to apply exactly the right amount to hit the desired rotational speed, and no more). As such the only time a counter burst is applied is when you want to slow down or stop your rotation, as you mentioned.

 

[Hydrino]

There's a difference between REC (the currency you can currently earn in-game, and use to rent ships/equipment), and UEC (the "real" in-game currency, which you currently cannot earn in-game, and which allows you to buy ships/equipment permanently)

UEC can be bought with real life money, REC cannot.

Thanks for the clarification.

 

[SuperG]

Well i think the right way from simulation perspective, would be to add acceleration the duration of active truster. For agile ness this acceleration coul be powerfull enough to be short enough to just smooth out the movement. With a little over schoot by the deceleration thrust. A counter puls of deceleration.
The bigger the ship the power mass ratio is lesser so slower rotation but also longer overschoot and very smooth respons. This give the feel of flying something massive or big.
You get the effect of short thuster pulses when light fighter is moving a lot dodging enemy fire.
But big heavy salverger has longer burst but much weaker compared to the mass it needs to turn.


Movement thrustet could be of more compact less feul efficient design. Make sense for movement isn't done much. Cruising at long acceleration is.
While maintrusters could be for fuel efficiency space drive like a fusion ion drive. Big but can run for years.

But this strongly influence thruster placement. Which leads to design conflict of fantasy concept design. Made pure for good looks. So they have to cheat as pure simulation of thuster physics might be broken or conflicting.
The joystick should be using stick displacement over time to interpret thrust activation.

That make sense for physical correct FM simulation.

 

[Troels]

Well i think the right way from simulation perspective, would be to add acceleration the duration of active truster. For agile ness this acceleration coul be powerfull enough to be short enough to just smooth out the movement. With a little over schoot by the deceleration thrust. A counter puls of deceleration.
The bigger the ship the power mass ratio is lesser so slower rotation but also longer overschoot and very smooth respons. This give the feel of flying something massive or big.
You get the effect of short thuster pulses when light fighter is moving a lot dodging enemy fire.
But big heavy salverger has longer burst but much weaker compared to the mass it needs to turn.

It's basically a question between having a slightly underdamped response (which will overshoot and then settle down to the target speed via counter thrust) or a critically damped response (which will hit the exact target speed with no overshoot, but will also take a bit longer). To my knowledge (based upon the interview with John Pritchett), the IFCS is currently set up as critically damped, however they might have changed this with the introduction of jerk.

You could of course also have an overdamped response, but that wouldn't really make sense from a realism perspective (a critically damped response would always be strictly better), although it might make sense from a gameplay perspective (an overdamped response would basically take significantly longer to hit the target speed, than both underdamped and critically damped responses, thus making the ship less maneuverable and with a greater feeling of inertia).

The mass of the ship doesn't really matter as such in this regard, as the IFCS shouldn't have any problems adjusting for it. Whether you overshoot or not is entirely down to how fast you want to hit your target speed and then tweaking the response correspondingly. Of course, the total length of the thruster burn would be longer with more massive ships, and as such it might be more attractive to balance your thruster response towards an underdamped response (which is faster, but overshoots), but again it's a question of preference.

 

[Jezzah]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about. All I know is the current model isn't fun whatever they need to do to fun it up a bit is good with me

 

[Jason S]

Well looking at the gamescom presentation it seems that they have solved the seamless transitions without loading screens except the initial one.

This means that the game is now in the ball park where I am interested.

Still not sure about the newton flight model, but I am not that combat oriented anyway and it does look nice graphically.

I do not know yet but this game is certainly starting to peak my interest ...

 

[SuperG]

Well looking at the gamescom presentation it seems that they have solved the seamless transitions without loading screens except the initial one.

This means that the game is now in the ball park where I am interested.

Still not sure about the newton flight model, but I am not that combat oriented anyway and it does look nice graphically.

I do not know yet but this game is certainly starting to peak my interest ...

I to am not focused on Fighter game play. But also would not avoid it. So I got just one fighter of the 5 space craft.

 

[Confucios]

One of my favourite WarThunder player/commentator/analyst did a nice review of Gamescom demo and the state of the game, his thoughtful and insightful comments all around combined with nice gameplay make for entertaining and informative videos.
[video=youtube;XUaiBEpuytY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUaiBEpuytY[/video]

 

[Voivod]

“We have laid off six members of our staff,” he explained. “Actually, only three of those were on the Star Citizen team. However, our work for Star Citizen on the FPS module is almost completed, so we are also reassigning more and more members of that team to other projects. Unfortunately we didn’t have room for all positions on our other projects and had to lay some people off, which is never an easy decision. We appreciate the opportunity we’ve been given to work on Star Citizen and we know the individuals affected will land on their feet as they were extremely talented which any team would be lucky to have them.”

Almost complete?!
Am I missing something here?

 

[1500]

Almost complete?!
Am I missing something here?

Its possible that they have a contract for only so many months of work, or to get the FPS module to a specific stage. It really just depends on what the contract was. Its possible that they will move on and just hand over the code for CIG to finish, in that case the FPS module will not be finished by them. With them saying "almost completed" and "our work" it seems clear that it will be up to CIG to finish the work (or contract another company) on the FPS aspect of SC.


So it seems that DS does in fact have some contacts, because he was the first to announce the layoffs on his facebook page.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-08-17-illfonic-sees-layoffs

 

[bliss]

Some info from a dev on the Quantum Leap drive (I'm going to have to call it the Sam Beckett drive ):

In the Gamescom build jumping without a target was perfectly possible, we did it all the time, and it was really the ONLY way to get around Crusader (not that there was any point). As it stood the game really couldn't process collisions at those speeds, in the final version if you're going to run into something (or possibly if a pirate is casting a mass shadow / interdiction bubble / whatever) you get instantly dumped out in an emergency stop which wreaks havoc on both ship systems and your body

I assume "Crusader" is the name of the demo map/sector?

Crusader is the gas giant, it's about 50% larger than Jupiter, it takes a LONG time to go around

Wait, so the gas giant really is to scale? So then why make the moons so small?

Because we determined anything larger than that was just slow and boring to actually fly around. Basically anything under 20km radius you can just fly around and it's not boring, anything larger than that should be considerably larger and have QNav points of interest to jump between. We COULD make the moons normal Luna size moons but from a gameplay perspective it's boring

But the QD was only at about 0.007c. Why not make them 25x bigger and go 25x faster? I think the community pretty much agrees that they look silly/jarring at that size.

QD has nothing to do with it, it takes forever to circle a 30km moon at combat speeds but even at this QD speed a moon less than 256km in diameter goes by in a second, so anything in that area doesn't make a good gameplay space

That's so awesome. How big is the demo map/sector?
What's the proper term for these things? Maps?
Also, does the "map" have an edge to it? Similar to the wire mesh wall in AC?

I have no idea if it has a map, but I know I've traveled hundreds of millions of kilometers in one direction. I think the mathematical limit on our maps with precision is like 8,000,000,000km but something we need to change in the network compression policies actually reduces it to an eighth of that. In PU however that just means you'll probably move to a new "map" every billion kilometers or so, obviously you'll be able to QT across a system

so does this mean we can potentially avoid running into anyone (including pirates) by q-driving to a destination in a roundabout way?

Yeah probably, I guess. Gonna use up a bunch of fuel and you'll likely be a shining beacon at the end of each jump but if you're random walking they'd have trouble getting in front of you (though obviously if they figured it out they'd beat you to your goal)

Does this mean that Quantum travel can be, essentially, free-roam? As-in you don't HAVE to go in a straight line? Or will you need to setup a series of straight-line waypoints?
Also, out of curiosity, with 500m/s being the complex geometry speed-limit in CryEngine, does that mean in-engine Quantum travel turns our ships into particles?

You can't turn in quantum drive, you'd have to drop out to change directions.
I don't know

https://as.reddit.com/r/starcitizen..._we_be_able_to_use_the_quantum_drive_without/

 

[Wind195]

Personally I always felt Iffonic was a bad choice to be the FPS team. I feel they could have gone better but that is just me.

 

[SuperG]

Personally I always felt Iffonic was a bad choice to be the FPS team. I feel they could have gone better but that is just me.

Well i think there are 3 key points how they choose.
1 which studio is avaible and in need for next project and not commited to one.
2 have experience with crytech engines
3 fall within budged.

They could ask IDSoft but are commited to there own IP
Cryengine is alien to them
and probaly would ask much more.

My guess they where the best what the can get at the time so move on.

 

[Jezzah]

When I think of illfonic doing this a saying I use often comes to mind.

"Buy cheap...buy twice"

 

[Troels]

Almost complete?!
Am I missing something here?

As far as I understand Illfonic was mainly contracted to work on the gameplay elements of the FPS module, not content. Currently the only major thing on their plate would seem to be finishing up the animations, so they "just" need to do that and they're done basically. After that it's all about adding more content (weapons, maps, equipment etc), but that is not done by Illfonic.

Also I would imagine that CIG might be planning to move a lot of the more technical FPS work to Frankfurt, were they have a couple of former Crytek people employed.

So it seems that DS does in fact have some contacts, because he was the first to announce the layoffs on his facebook page.

He's probably just trawling LinkedIn and the like, for any tidbit he can use in his little crusade. Apparently there was even a post from one of the developers in question announcing his depature on Illfonics forums (three days before DS's facebook post), so not exactly the most impressive "contacts".

 

[Pomerlaw]

Wait, so the gas giant really is to scale? So then why make the moons so small?

Because we determined anything larger than that was just slow and boring to actually fly around. Basically anything under 20km radius you can just fly around and it's not boring, anything larger than that should be considerably larger and have QNav points of interest to jump between. We COULD make the moons normal Luna size moons but from a gameplay perspective it's boring

But the QD was only at about 0.007c. Why not make them 25x bigger and go 25x faster? I think the community pretty much agrees that they look silly/jarring at that size.

QD has nothing to do with it, it takes forever to circle a 30km moon at combat speeds but even at this QD speed a moon less than 256km in diameter goes by in a second, so anything in that area doesn't make a good gameplay space

Dwarf moons and planets confirmed!

 

[Jenner]

"Why Star Citizen is Taking So Long"
http://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-is-taking-so-long-1724835913

Interesting piece about the development of SC, with some 'unnamed' former employees of CIG weighing in.

I don't doubt for a minute that every ambitious project has similar setbacks - dead end development paths, changing scope, etc. That in itself doesn't particularly bother me. (The helmet thing I can totally believe, though, lol). I suppose it's just a matter of opinion if what CIG is experiencing is par for the course, or the signs of development that has gone off the track.

Which brings up Chris' management style. I can absolutely see how he could be tough to work for in that he's a perfectionist and an idealist. I've mentioned before that I've met him, and he's super nice. Very passionate. But I can totally see how he'd be a very demanding boss.

At the end of the day I'm still happy having backed the project. I was sold 'not just another space game' and that's what CR is trying to do. There are enough 'average' games out there that I'm happy giving CIG time to do something awesome.

 

[5thNovember]

Waiting for SC? Read this

http://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-is-taking-so-long-1724835913

Don't hold your breath