Who cares if it's shaped like a pretzel as long as it's pretty.
Well, there are different approaches, I don't think that anyone calls for removal of flying cathedrals from Wh40k, for example.
The Star Citizen Thread v5
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Well, there are different approaches, I don't think that anyone calls for removal of flying cathedrals from Wh40k, for example.
Also, you locked s-foils in attack position to get better weapon spread, at the cost of being a larger target that (for the moment) can't land. You don't fly around with them in attack position for the same reason you don't sail around with your gun ports open. Duh.
Don't confuse detail with clutter and definitely not with a lack of purposeful design — they're almost the exact opposite of each other.
Don't confuse detail with clutter and definitely not with a lack of purposeful design — they're almost the exact opposite of each other.
That ship has always given me the impression that the designer created it after watching their kid play with playdough.
Interesting enough that machine also came from the 90s
I don't think we should forget that CIG also puts radiator fans on their Space ships, along with air breaks.
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All these useless twiddly bits that are there to sell to the people of the future might not be far off the mark. It is possible that the rubes who have had all their intelligence bred out of them would be suckers for such "go-faster" additions
from Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons":-
It was written in a time in America where cars were getting more and more stupid, and their tailfins were getting more and more ridiculous.
from Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons":-
It was written in a time in America where cars were getting more and more stupid, and their tailfins were getting more and more ridiculous.
I would have thought that the company that is all about immersion and fidelity, with the stated aim of measuring blood oxygen levels, would care a great deal about purpose.
Space ships are not like exotic cars or even fighter planes, where it is reasonable to expect to survive malfunctions that are not initially catastrophic. Instead they travel through vast expanses of ludicrous cold and near vacuum. As such, any total breakdown or hull breach will kill the occupant, unless help arrives in time. Anything in space without specific function is a liability.
Today's space missions incur around a 1 in 60 chance of not coming back, according to a former astronaut that I spoke to; those missions are entirely peaceful, and within 1 ls of Earth. While interstellar travel is a distant dream for SC
p), interplanetary travel is way to dangerous for civilians unless the ships are super safe . If today's astronauts had to go off into space every day, as future citizens will, most would be dead in a few months.Snaps can look stunning without being covered in spines and fins and other greeblies. For example, I LOVE The design of the Aegis Avenger
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What a lot of the SC ships are missing are strong profiles. TIE and X-Wing, whatever their technical deficiencies, have great shapes.
If you go down the path of design where you glom a lot of different shapes together you lose that.
I have no qualm with the SC ship designs. Yes they're unrealistic, but if I want realism I play Rogue System. Star Citizen is not about realism, never was. And no, it doesn't matter how often CIG talk up their "realism", it's a fantasy game, just like Elite. So ventilation fans, air intakes etc. I have no problem with.
To take a different twist, I set up my Saitek 55 in SC just like it is in ED. It makes flying so much easier!!! As for ships and game play, I'm trying to figure out which game I like more. Right now, I'm 80% SC and 20% ED. But, that's because I'm a Billionaire in ED with all the ships I want. Combat is significantly harder in SC to me. But, since I like a challenge, that also draws me to SC!
Favorite ship in ED is my engineered Python with ship kit. The ship kit changes the Python from bland, to awesome looking. My favorite ship in SC is the 315p/ 325a, because they are both sexy and fun to fly!
As for real money, I have about $120ish sunk into each game, so that's a wash.
Favorite ship in ED is my engineered Python with ship kit. The ship kit changes the Python from bland, to awesome looking. My favorite ship in SC is the 315p/ 325a, because they are both sexy and fun to fly!
As for real money, I have about $120ish sunk into each game, so that's a wash.
Ships designed with only realistic purpose in mind can look a bit dull. I believe they're attempting to create purpose, but also nice aesthetics. I've seen the phrase "rule of cool" associated with SC; I don't know where it originated, perhaps with CR. But it defines the goal fairly well, I think.
Don't get me wrong - that's not to say you can't take it too far. Personally, the Aurora doesn't really appeal that much to me. But not because of all the greebles, it's just the basic shape. But I've seen other people say it's their favorite ship in the game. The Starfarer is quite bulky - which might make sense, as it's a sort of freighter - but it's totally not my thing. I know a couple of owners that love the thing. So in the end, the game is offering a lot of different looks - and thus, players have a wider variety of choices for what fits them the best.
Does it make realistic sense that the Sabre basically looks like a fighter plane in space? Not really, no. Same with the Vanguard. But I think they're cool as hell.
And as Pomerlaw pointed out above - some players really like wings and spoilers and air ducts, even if those parts do nothing whatsoever.
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As a general rule, nothing ever originates with CR. Same with this — the phrase has been around since at least since the '50s.
As for it defining the goal, you'd think they'd use more inspired designs than rather blatantly ripping off fighter jets and just adding junk to pre-existing shapes. If they were actually going for rule of cool, they can do anything, but instead, it's just the same old generic and derivative stuff we've seen since the early '90s.
Also, it's less about the CIG designs not being realistic (in spite of all the gab about realism and fidelity, but as mentioned, that was just nonsense from the get-go so that's excusable in a way) and more about not making any sense, even in the heavily disbelief-suspended universe they've created. There's an in-universe justification for the s-foils and solar collectors in Star Wars — there's very little justification for any of the random girders they've glued onto ships in SC.
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Fair enough - as I said, I didn't know the origin.
I think examples of "previously unseen visuals" in video games are very few, and far between. And many of those unique examples would date back to the 80's... games such as Pac Man, Q-bert. Later examples might be Tetris, or in a gameplay sense - perhaps Doom. Even Minecraft, for all it's popularity, is just pixel art made into 3D.
One of the earliest games I can recall playing with isometric battlefields would be Warcraft II. Does that mean the entire Red Alert/C&C franchise was just a rip-off? Or Civ? One could argue that. But both of those franchises were also very entertaining, and offered quality gameplay. Just because something "wasn't invented here" doesn't mean it's just a worthless, blatant rip-off that should be immediately tossed into the $5 bin at BestBuy. Plenty of games have followed the idea presented in Doom (or Wolfenstein, if you prefer that ancestor), and they've been highly successful and entertained countless people.
There is 'lore' justifying it all in Star Wars. I've got a copy of the Star Wars Visual Dictionary sitting on my bookshelf. Great book for SW lovers. But let's be honest here - all those descriptions of what the inner components of a Lightsaber does - it's all fictional, post-film text.
The original Death Star didn't have an exhaust port because the lead engineer was trying to sabotage the Empire, and it didn't have a trench for some other plot reason. The port itself was just invented as a small, difficult target. The trench existed specifically because the physical model had defects coming out of the vacu-mold, and a trench was suggested to sandwich the parts together. The 'trench runs' scenes we all love made use of this new design. In other words, if the physical model had popped out in one solid piece - that fun bit of "fly through the trench" never would have happened in the first place.
In other words, all that story and lore and justification - it came AFTER THE FACT. The starting point was "Does it look neat on-screen? Good. Keep going."
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…and that wasn't the argument, so you go ahead and do that.
The point remains: “rule of cool” does not accurately define the art style of SC because it's all drab, uninspired, derivative, non-cohesive and inconsistent, and it also goes directly against the stated goal of offering realism and fidelity. If they wanted realism, they could go for realism. If they wanted logic consistency with some justification and purpose behind it, they could do that too. If they wanted cool, they could go for cool and just go bonkers with a very bold design language to keep it from just getting messy. But they did none of that.
That's because we didn't see the inner components until after the film. The s-foils and solar collectors, we do see, and their use and purpose is made pretty clear without anyone drawing a diagram. But again, the whole point is that there aren't even those kinds of justifications for what the CIG artists vomit out — it's just what gets through the Chris-filter (until it doesn't, and has to be redesigned for the umpteenth time).
That would be a good argument if you hadn't just offered an example of how the justification came before the thing was presented to the world, and given a purpose within the story and universe of the movie…
Thanks to ILM and the Chew/Hirsch/Lucas trio of editors, Star Wars is a brilliant example of show, don't tell (in spite of George Lucas' tendency to do the opposite). The design in particular tells its own story, which is crucial to really being able pull off that rule-of-cool excuse that people so desperately wish to apply to SC.
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It looks like the tail section was inspired by some heat exchanger unit. Sadly that design only works with airflow.
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That one is called an Imperial Cutter. It's in some other game.
Which is standard when it comes to SC's fighter designs. *ba-dum-tsh* (and yeah, the irony of certain other game's designs having wings/winglets/lifting body designs isn't lost on me)
The Aurora has to work both inside and outside the atmosphere(like most of the SC ships), so this is not something horrible... it only makes you think how it works in space(talking about the heat).
To loosely quote commander Mephane "it looks like a space shuttle model that somebody bent over their knee"
What I hate about it are the winglets which would make it pitch up dramatically in an atmosphere. Anybody who cares about aeroplanes can immediately see that the design is aerodynamically borked.
On that bit, we're just going into the land of "sushi isn't good food, because I don't like it."
You may find it drab, others do not. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion of it, of course. Some people think BMW makes an attractive car; i think they mostly just look like an average Camry. Others think Ferraris look ostentatious, while I think Pininfarina is a brilliant designer. There's nothing wrong with you liking what you do, and what you don't. Both styles appeal to a lot of people.
...because they didn't exist.
The word "solar panel" weren't even used to describe the parts of the TIE fighter. That bit was invented later, and there's still fan debate on whether those panels act as solar collectors or radiators.
Well, we weren't given access to the "making of Star Wars" while the film was - you know, being made. So feel free to stop looking at anything CIG does, until the game is completely released. Maybe by then someone will have made a little diagram, pointing out that the rear sections of the Aurora aren't wings, but a Photonic Neutrino Array.
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