The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

To be honest, the Cobra Engine is not ready for the atmo planets yet, I could be wrong though but we haven't seen the technical level reached ATM.

I don't know how to make a planet, however I can make some pretty large maps in World Creator that look pretty nice. The big challenge must be to stitch it all together and make a believable weather system run independently on each planet. then add water and what not, I guess that is where the true magic comes in, and need some really talented coders.

They certainly can do that. Issues are:
* You need weather system;
* You need volumetric cloud system with complex LOD system (imagine asteroids fields but multiple times more complex);
* You need water, you need liquid, you need gas states;
* You need atmospheric effects;

What NMS and CIG tech demo shows are no atmosphere at all. There's some primitive lensing on sun, some storm effects (which are moving textures) and some positioned plant life.

There are so many subsystems/PG layers they have to implement just to make them work as they have intended. I expect cloud and weather system to come next year because it is required by ALL type of atmosphere planets and they will certainly implement some planet types for us to land again next year.

I believe FD is much closer to actually landable atmospheric planet than CIG ever will be.

Edit: to be fair I will guess they will demo weather system for next season (similar to PG tectonic plates), because everything else - clouds, liquid, ice, vapor - is just result of weather system. In airless planets there's little to no movement regarding it so they don't need to take that into account.

 

[lysan]

Thats why i think we will have gasplanets sooner then atmospheric planets. If you get the weather done right their and the whole cloud thing aswell as the flying...you wont get fazed by anything after that.

I agree with that, gas giants and FPS will be the first step, in FSX there are some pretty nice mods for clouds, I would hope it will be in that range for ED.

regarding SC I just hope they release the darn game.

 

[1500]

To be honest, the Cobra Engine is not ready for the atmo planets yet, I could be wrong though but we haven't seen the technical level reached ATM.

I don't know how to make a planet, however I can make some pretty large maps in World Creator that look pretty nice. The big challenge must be to stitch it all together and make a believable weather system run independently on each planet. then add water and what not, I guess that is where the true magic comes in, and need some really talented coders.

I disagree. What really needs to be added for atmo planets? Just take a look at what people ooo and ahhh at from other "games". Throw some trees and some atmospheric effects and you are done. And if we are talking about Infinity Battlescape it does not even have tree's, in fact the planets are lifeless.

The problem is that the content expected from being on an atmospheric planet is much higher when you have an actual game. Look at Infinity Battlescape and how little actual content is on the planet. No planets, no animals no real interaction with the planet its self. Its just a backdrop. With ED people expect to land and drive around, what do you think will happen if FD let people land and there is only a couple type of tree's? Or just one? What if there are no animals? People expect to have cities, and have Skyrim levels of detail of they were to land on an atmospheric planet.

Its funny when you see people complain about the lack of Atmospheric planets but they will not say what they expect from them. How is an Atmospheric planet suppose to effect the gameplay? It seems most people are just happy with the graphical effects connected with it.

 

[lysan]

They certainly can do that. Issues are:
* You need weather system;
* You need volumetric cloud system with complex LOD system (imagine asteroids fields but multiple times more complex);
* You need water, you need liquid, you need gas states;
* You need atmospheric effects;

What NMS and CIG tech demo shows are no atmosphere at all. There's some primitive lensing on sun, some storm effects (which are moving textures) and some positioned plant life.

There are so many subsystems/PG layers they have to implement just to make them work as they have intended. I expect cloud and weather system to come next year because it is required by ALL type of atmosphere planets and they will certainly implement some planet types for us to land again next year.

I believe FD is much closer to actually landable atmospheric planet than CIG ever will be.

I must agree, but still as we all know that FD will do a simulation and not a scripted one, it probably need more R&D or polishing.

https://youtu.be/vxNkk-A2TXk?t=2m18s

 

[Asp Explorer]

I also wonder why "trees" on alien planets in games nearly always look just like trees you can see out your window.

 

[frostypaw]

There's a bit of me tempted to go back god-knows-how-many pages and find all the quotes about the amazing things we were going to see at citizencon and how it was going to blow us away.

Not to be nasty, just to say what most of us have been saying all along - temper the expectations based on previous performance. i don't think anyone here is actually wanting SC to collapse, we've just already tempered our expectations. Sadly even those haven't been met this time which should ring alarm bells for everyone when the doubters are shocked too

 

[1500]

I also wonder why "trees" on alien planets in games nearly always look just like trees you can see out your window.

I would say because life likes to evolve in much the same way, sure there would be some differences but plants on our planet adapted that way because of the environment. Another earth like planet would have similar environmental factors as ours and as such the plants would develop in a similar way.

 

[lysan]

I disagree. What really needs to be added for atmo planets? Just take a look at what people ooo and ahhh at from other "games". Throw some trees and some atmospheric effects and you are done. And if we are talking about Infinity Battlescape it does not even have tree's, in fact the planets are lifeless.

The problem is that the content expected from being on an atmospheric planet is much higher when you have an actual game. Look at Infinity Battlescape and how little actual content is on the planet. No planets, no animals no real interaction with the planet its self. Its just a backdrop. With ED people expect to land and drive around, what do you think will happen if FD let people land and there is only a couple type of tree's? Or just one? What if there are no animals? People expect to have cities, and have Skyrim levels of detail of they were to land on an atmospheric planet.

Its funny when you see people complain about the lack of Atmospheric planets but they will not say what they expect from them. How is an Atmospheric planet suppose to effect the gameplay? It seems most people are just happy with the graphical effects connected with it.

That is the problem, people dream up whatever they like, that is why I post a lot of stuff regarding what can be done with PG.
FD do have one big problem, they want to make a game that can run on a potato PC, you can't have a high quality and run it on a potato, so the trick must be to make the graphic settings so that if you want the awwee you need a powerful PC.

 

[1500]

That is the problem, people dream up whatever they like, that is why I post a lot of stuff regarding what can be done with PG.
FD do have one big problem, they want to make a game that can run on a potato PC, you can't have a high quality and run it on a potato, so the trick must be to make the graphic settings so that if you want the awwee you need a powerful PC.

That has nothing to do with what I said.

 

[BOT #00001]

I also wonder why "trees" on alien planets in games nearly always look just like trees you can see out your window.

Terraforming. That was just a demo world anyways, and the PG planets tech isnt done yet.

 

[lysan]

I also wonder why "trees" on alien planets in games nearly always look just like trees you can see out your window.

[video=youtube;XKP2iawiY0o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKP2iawiY0o[/video]

Science is your friend

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

There's a bit of me tempted to go back god-knows-how-many pages and find all the quotes about the amazing things we were going to see at citizencon and how it was going to blow us away.

Not to be nasty, just to say what most of us have been saying along - temper the expectations based on previous performance. i don't think anyone here is actually wanting SC to collapse, we've just already tempered our expectations. Sadly even those haven't been met this time which should ring alarm bells for everyone when the doubters are shocked too

Let's say I was blown away how CIG managed to under deliver considering even my low expectations.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Genuine Roberts will be announcing hexapod carnipugs in SC next

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

That is the problem, people dream up whatever they like, that is why I post a lot of stuff regarding what can be done with PG.
FD do have one big problem, they want to make a game that can run on a potato PC, you can't have a high quality and run it on a potato, so the trick must be to make the graphic settings so that if you want the awwee you need a powerful PC.

I will disagree. If you have good, clever PG system, you can scale up and down as much as you want. I have seen Horizons planets look like      comparing to best screenshots but hey, people can actually play it at reasonable frame rate.

They can also up requirements for Season 3. Remember, they did for Horizons. Although to be fair I don't think they will. I expect CPU requirements stay there, graphics cards might be required a bit beefy for optimal performance.

 

[hairychris]

They certainly can do that. Issues are:
* You need weather system;
* You need volumetric cloud system with complex LOD system (imagine asteroids fields but multiple times more complex);
* You need water, you need liquid, you need gas states;
* You need atmospheric effects;

What NMS and CIG tech demo shows are no atmosphere at all. There's some primitive lensing on sun, some storm effects (which are moving textures) and some positioned plant life.

There are so many subsystems/PG layers they have to implement just to make them work as they have intended. I expect cloud and weather system to come next year because it is required by ALL type of atmosphere planets and they will certainly implement some planet types for us to land again next year.

I believe FD is much closer to actually landable atmospheric planet than CIG ever will be.

Edit: to be fair I will guess they will demo weather system for next season (similar to PG tectonic plates), because everything else - clouds, liquid, ice, vapor - is just result of weather system. In airless planets there's little to no movement regarding it so they don't need to take that into account.

We also saw a cut in detail for ring systems back in the beta, so optimization will be a big issue.

I would imagine (finger in the air) that FD has a lot of the basic mechanics down, but 1) getting them to run at a speed that's usable duting gameplay and 2) adding anything worthwhile to the gameplay are both massive tasks.

It's a whole can of worms as a rocky planet with atmosphere will imply things like biomes and/or settlements, so the whole shebang needs to be in a workable state before being rolled out.

NMS had an issue with repetitive gameplay. Star Citizen, well, I'm not sure where they stand with proc gen on one side and "planets-worth of playable content" which would involve a chunk of hand-crafting.

Oh, and I've just remembered something from the stream.... >300 speaking roles? Come back George RR Martin, all is forgiven.

 

[lysan]

I will disagree. If you have good, clever PG system, you can scale up and down as much as you want. I have seen Horizons planets look like      comparing to best screenshots but hey, people can actually play it at reasonable frame rate.

They can also up requirements for Season 3. Remember, they did for Horizons. Although to be fair I don't think they will. I expect CPU requirements stay there, graphics cards might be required a bit beefy for optimal performance.

Yup, that is why I said graphical settings

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

And ohh yes, gameplay is more important than atmospheric planets anyway. I would trade full walkable wrecks for atmospheres.

 

[szopin]

I would say because life likes to evolve in much the same way, sure there would be some differences but plants on our planet adapted that way because of the environment. Another earth like planet would have similar environmental factors as ours and as such the plants would develop in a similar way.

Would it have same event to create same moon? Would same exact mechanisms evolve from random mutations? Same amount of comets with water (if that theory is even correct). Dinosaurs were already posted, but the first environmental apocalypse on earth was actually done by bacteria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, Oxygen Revolution, or Great Oxidation)[...]
Free oxygen is toxic to obligate anaerobic organisms, and the rising concentrations may have destroyed most such organisms at the time. Cyanobacteria were therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history

Would love FD to actually 'simulate' life generation but... yeah, realistically it will not happen, we've seen spore and NMS

 

[Insignificant_The_Galaxy_Cat]

Just to re-iterate something about that shambles presented to the world yesterday... Remember back in May when news got out that CIG were going to miss E3 at the last minute, with some of the less kind commenters mentioning that was because Roberts wanted to avoid any direct comparisons with his MIA Squadron 42 and the then recently shown CoD: Infinite Warfare video, as it was going to be there at E3? Remember how the uber supporters played down the no-show as them saving their best stuff for Gamecom and CitizenCon?

Fast forward to Gamecom and what did they have to show? Hours of buggy 2.4 (not 2.5 which they couldn't get ready before then!) "gameplay" during those dull livestreams and then the *big* reveal being no more than a stitched together, not in game demo that was sorta pretty, but mostly bland and forgettable? Again we were told that all the haters and doubters will be silenced at CitizenCon where they'll raise the roof with some sweet new Squadron 42 reveals, mainly one of the missions, whilst 3.0 will be unveiled with all the new features promised at Gamescom and we'd be told that both will be out on release at the end of the year.




So..... What happened yesterday guys? I mean.... was that it?

Was that ALL CIG have got to show people after a full year of "this is just around the corner, just you wait and see!" comments and statements?

 

[xondk]

To be honest, the Cobra Engine is not ready for the atmo planets yet, I could be wrong though but we haven't seen the technical level reached ATM.

I don't know how to make a planet, however I can make some pretty large maps in World Creator that look pretty nice. The big challenge must be to stitch it all together and make a believable weather system run independently on each planet. then add water and what not, I guess that is where the true magic comes in, and need some really talented coders.

Here's the beautiful thing about this though, the Cobra engine is in-house, it is Frontier's own engine, meaning they know how it works, they know all its code they can add and remove as they want of features, such development takes time, sure, but not nearly as long as getting someone's engine and modifying it, not that it can't work with the crysis engine, but it is probably the worst choice they made with SC, the crysis engine is notoriously inflexible and hard to customise.

They certainly can do that. Issues are:
* You need weather system;
* You need volumetric cloud system with complex LOD system (imagine asteroids fields but multiple times more complex);
* You need water, you need liquid, you need gas states;
* You need atmospheric effects;

What NMS and CIG tech demo shows are no atmosphere at all. There's some primitive lensing on sun, some storm effects (which are moving textures) and some positioned plant life.

There are so many subsystems/PG layers they have to implement just to make them work as they have intended. I expect cloud and weather system to come next year because it is required by ALL type of atmosphere planets and they will certainly implement some planet types for us to land again next year.

I believe FD is much closer to actually landable atmospheric planet than CIG ever will be.

Edit: to be fair I will guess they will demo weather system for next season (similar to PG tectonic plates), because everything else - clouds, liquid, ice, vapor - is just result of weather system. In airless planets there's little to no movement regarding it so they don't need to take that into account.

Can definitely be added to the cobra engine, remember most 'water' in games is just a plane with clever transition, all depending on how it is done, but in itself it isn't really a taxing thing once it is there, making it look good and work properly now that is tricky.