The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Jon93]

Yes it is, Ben Parry is a graphics programmer from the Foundry 42 UK office (and ex-Frontier dev) and is working on cool gas cloud tech that I assume will help a lot with the procedural generation planetary landings amongst other things. http://partedveil.com/?dev=BParry_CIG = Always plenty good info from him so we are very lucky to have him!

Well that has to be awkward...

And yes, the gas clouds using the optical blend shapes (last weeks ATV was it?) were really cool (or wait... you're referring to the volumetric clouds for planets? )

Now add that to this

[video=youtube;10TAH5LVCow]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10TAH5LVCow[/video]

 

[303i]

Now that's a hard question, especially when it comes to complexity. I can define what it's not. There is no complexity in a simple translation of a 3D object, and there is only a bit of complexity in adding inertia to that. I know the old SC system was complex, as I have experienced some interesting behaviours of Aurora in 0.8 (as in yaw problems over a certain forward speed).
As for realism - the presence of inertia (even in very light ships), reasonable accelerations (tiny maneuvering engines are as powerful as a single main thruster, which is roughly an order of magnitude bigger), lack of absolutely massless behaviour (which I have seen on the Glaive video), a rough lining up of the center of mass and center of thrust in ships' design (the Mustang should be unable to fly forward with engines that high up).

Finally found it:

https://youtu.be/mdunEkbIV8k?t=7m17s

He explains how the pipe system works and a bug where the items continue to work due to not draining power correctly. Also shows thruster failure when the power runs out after he fixes the bug.

https://youtu.be/5vHF8PGLMAI?t=2m2s

Another one where the ship doesn't fly due to no power being sent to the thrusters.

 

[Viajero]

*Mod hat off

Talking about this flight mechanics that stand out ?

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT3ZvnUnUkU

Ah man, that vid brought me a good chuckle and reminded me of all the flight model and controller discussions over st the RSI forums... All to waste, but good times!

 

[VidarSnipes]

Finally found it:

https://youtu.be/mdunEkbIV8k?t=7m17s

He explains how the pipe system works and a bug where the items continue to work due to not draining power correctly. Also shows thruster failure when the power runs out after he fixes the bug.

https://youtu.be/5vHF8PGLMAI?t=2m2s

Another one where the ship doesn't fly due to no power being sent to the thrusters.

Those only show that SC has some rudimentary power control, similiar to the ED's (and other games'), but there is no mention of what happens when just one thruster stops working. All I've seen in parts of those videos you have linked is that SC is as complex (power to engines - they work, no power to engines - they do not) as a game from 1998 (Descent: Freespace) or 2001 (Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos) or their competitor, ED.

 

[briguy168]

Sorry, don't have it. Got rid of this overrated junk about a month ago. Oh, and sorry for being subjective again. It's obviously become a crime to be subjective nowadays. But it's ok to trick your backers and bait&switch on them. Later if they start complaining, you can always blame it on them for being subjective.

What can I say, I calls them like I sees them
Like I said several pages back, you are entitled to your subjective opinion and can post them as often as you please but don't kid yourself to think that they're anywhere near being objective.

Do you have a Hotas and play SC with it?

Yes I do. I have a Warthog HOTAS with rudder pedals and will never look back. It's soo much better than mouse and keyboard, IMHO

 

[lysan]

I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped being rude. It's fine to have a difference of opinion, but calling someone a "snake oil salesman" and getting worked up over someone posting SC information in a SC thread isn't healthy for the rest of us. Thanks.



Source is anyone that has played SC for an extended period of time and does a lot of combat. As a hornet player, losing your wing or multiple thrusters is a usual combat thing and severely affects performance (having a top thruster fail on a super hornet usually means you need to respawn). It's possible you didn't notice it in the PU due to the awful framerate, but during the next free flight, try jumping into AC and see what happens when multiple parts of your ship fall off. Even losing a wing will make turning feel different. In third-person view, you'll see your thrusters firing at different angles in an attempt to balance the loss of mass. I'll float around on youtube and see if I can a good video showing this.

I also fly the Vanguard, which has 4 engines (2x primary, 2x backup), and losing one of the primary engines directly impacts flight performance. Losing both primary engines will make you useless in combat, and you'll need to limp home on the backups. If your forward thrusters fail, the ship is basically unflyable.

I even have this gfy of a sabre after everything's fallen off apart from the cockpit, and there's nothing left to control the ship:
https://gfycat.com/SmoggyOldfashionedGermanspitz

I'm not sure how to answer your RBC question as there's no easy way to prove that. Although back with the 2.0 release, CIG made it so top speed was based on the mass of your ship & power/weight ratio instead of static values. As much as losing a gun or using ammo would increase your top speed. This feature was disabled due to balance concerns in 2.2.

Then stop these untrue informations, lets talk about what is in the game right now, not in the future, not in some show case video, because that is not what is actual in the game, nor is it the state of the game right now.

If you guys continue to proclaim all these feature are in the game, then its comparable to snake oil salesmen talk. Or we could just call this our dream discussion corner where clouds are 100% more fluffy!

 

[Atreiden]

Star Citizen: I guess we'll just have to wait and see!

Spoiler

Because none of the features are in game yet

 

[Osmanthus]

Of course you are. You wouldn't point at a car and call it a bus and then say people know what you're referring to, would you?
Exactly the same thing here. Details matter, that's all I'm trying to say, albeit with a bit of exasperation.

Trolling is posting information purely to get a rise out of people. The result of yesterday's repeated referrals to "loading screens" got a rise out of people and in the very next post you started using the term again, a quintessential example of trolling.

Every time you prove this guy wrong he just turns around, tells you you're messing with 'semantics', and then continues to throw false equivalences at you nonstop.

e: I once had a student who tried to convince me that an exam should be open-book (I.e. You get to take your texts in with you to the exam) because learning the material was 'practically the same' as reading it out of a textbook anyway. This guy reminds me of that student.

 

[Atreiden]

Every time you prove this guy wrong he just turns around, tells you you're messing with 'semantics', and then continues to throw false equivalences at you nonstop.

That is the general Shill tactic for SC I have seen on multiple boards.

 

[Osmanthus]

That is the general Shill tactic for SC I have seen on multiple boards.

Yeah, in the interest of good faith it's best not to assume this when starting out, but they can't all be this disingenuous accidentally. Briguy seems to do things a bit more honestly though to be fair

 

[Monk]

Remember, talk about the project, not the posters.

We've been lucky this thread has stayed open for so long.

Anyhow...Gamescom is just under three weeks. Will there be pre-rendered videos? Will there be livesteams? Will there be live demos? IDK, but I'm sure there are going to be some decently strong showings from a few other games!

 

[303i]

Those only show that SC has some rudimentary power control, similiar to the ED's (and other games'), but there is no mention of what happens when just one thruster stops working. All I've seen in parts of those videos you have linked is that SC is as complex (power to engines - they work, no power to engines - they do not) as a game from 1998 (Descent: Freespace) or 2001 (Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos) or their competitor, ED.

*sigh* this would be a lot easier if you had more combat experience in SC. At least the video proves that each thruster is an individual item, and the existence of that item affects the ship.

Here's a CIG physics programmer talking about thrusters: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/4194842/#Comment_4194842

And here's a video as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSugPmxtZU

In this case, I think 6 thrusters fail (4x bottom and 2x forward top), while the main engine and two thrusters remain working.
Watch the joystick movement as you hear "propulsion low" and notice how the ship takes a lot more time to turn and isn't responsive at all. Shortly after he puts his throttle to zero, he has to rotate his entire ship in order to change direction or stop

Here's a bug where the failure of a thruster causes the IFCS system to get stuck in a loop of attempting to correct the ship:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustri...-of-single-hornet-thruster-makes-it-unflyable

I'm really not sure what else to post to prove to you that the systems exist. Yes, some ships have physics faked a bit just to make them flyable, but the underlying simulation isn't inherently flawed, and thrusters are simulated on one level or another. I'd like to record some videos to show you, but my gaming PC is out of action due to a failed PSU. I just request that you take a look at both decoupled mode and ship damage during the next free flight, it should clear things up. Maybe ask Ben when he's in this thread next.

Then stop these untrue informations, lets talk about what is in the game right now, not in the future, not in some show case video, because that is not what is actual in the game, nor is it the state of the game right now.

If you guys continue to proclaim all these feature are in the game, then its comparable to snake oil salesmen talk. Or we could just call this our dream discussion corner where clouds are 100% more fluffy!

I don't think someone saying that PG planets are coming in 2.7 is the same as saying it's in the game right now. There's nothing wrong with discussing upcoming features.

 

[Atreiden]

Remember, talk about the project, not the posters.

We've been lucky this thread has stayed open for so long.

Anyhow...Gamescom is just under three weeks. Will there be pre-rendered videos? Will there be livesteams? Will there be live demos? IDK, but I'm sure there are going to be some decently strong showings from a few other games!

Well we know there will be live-streams, because they have invited 4 or 5 streamers with them, to do just that. And I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, that the latest missive said they would showcase PG, so I assume some pre-rendered videos.

 

[VidarSnipes]

I'm really not sure what else to post to prove to you that the systems exist. Yes, some ships have physics faked a bit just to make them flyable, but the underlying simulation isn't inherently flawed, and thrusters are simulated on one level or another. I'd like to record some videos to show you, but my gaming PC is out of action due to a failed PSU. I just request that you take a look at both decoupled mode and ship damage during the next free flight, it should clear things up. Maybe ask Ben when he's in this thread next.

All those videos predate SC 2.0, and the dev post is older than a lot of flight model changes, too. Still, if you ignore that the current flight model is still terrible, twitchy, unfun and unrealistic I have to admit there is at least a bit of a complexity left somewhere. Ben is a graphics programmer as far as I know, so he isn't the right person to ask about the physics.

 

[Osmanthus]

*sigh* this would be a lot easier if you had more combat experience in SC. At least the video proves that each thruster is an individual item, and the existence of that item affects the ship.

Here's a CIG physics programmer talking about thrusters: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/4194842/#Comment_4194842

And here's a video as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSugPmxtZU

In this case, I think 6 thrusters fail (4x bottom and 2x forward top), while the main engine and two thrusters remain working.
Watch the joystick movement as you hear "propulsion low" and notice how the ship takes a lot more time to turn and isn't responsive at all. Shortly after he puts his throttle to zero, he has to rotate his entire ship in order to change direction or stop

Here's a bug where the failure of a thruster causes the IFCS system to get stuck in a loop of attempting to correct the ship:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustri...-of-single-hornet-thruster-makes-it-unflyable

I'm really not sure what else to post to prove to you that the systems exist. Yes, some ships have physics faked a bit just to make them flyable, but the underlying simulation isn't inherently flawed, and thrusters are simulated on one level or another. I'd like to record some videos to show you, but my gaming PC is out of action due to a failed PSU. I just request that you take a look at both decoupled mode and ship damage during the next free flight, it should clear things up. Maybe ask Ben when he's in this thread next.


I don't think someone saying that PG planets are coming in 2.7 is the same as saying it's in the game right now. There's nothing wrong with discussing upcoming features.

The key question is: is the motion of the thrusters on the ship a result of the flight model, or the cause?
Alternatively framed, do the thrusters themselves actually deliver thrust?

I maintain that one way to test this is to check with varying mass distributions on the ship and seeing if flight angular accelerations are changed. It's likely that their model treats the ship as a lumped mass, in which case changing mass distribution inside the ship (e.g. by rearranging cargo) wouldn't have an effect, which I think is fair enough, but one could check that, say, a 10% increase in ship mass results in in a 1/1.1 change in linear acceleration.

e: even after all this it could still be faked, but at some point it reaches a level of fakery that's essentially just the real thing I guess.

 

[govny]

Source is anyone that has played SC for an extended period of time and does a lot of combat. As a hornet player, losing your wing or multiple thrusters is a usual combat thing and severely affects performance (having a top thruster fail on a super hornet usually means you need to respawn). It's possible you didn't notice it in the PU due to the awful framerate, but during the next free flight, try jumping into AC and see what happens when multiple parts of your ship fall off. Even losing a wing will make turning feel different. In third-person view, you'll see your thrusters firing at different angles in an attempt to balance the loss of mass. I'll float around on youtube and see if I can a good video showing this.

I don't know but I find damage affecting combat a stupid feature.
If damaged ship performs bad, you are as soon as Dead, no matter what you can do, you are a sitting duck.
So what's the point in doing that?

 

[Osmanthus]

I don't know but I find damage affecting combat a stupid feature.
If damaged ship performs bad, you are as soon as Dead, no matter what you can do, you are a sitting duck.
So what's the point in doing that?

Well, it at least pretends to be a simulator, and damaged ships behaving "less optimally" than undamaged ships is not unreasonably realistic.

 

[303i]

All those videos predate SC 2.0, and the dev post is older than a lot of flight model changes, too. Still, if you ignore that the current flight model is still terrible, twitchy, unfun and unrealistic I have to admit there is at least a bit of a complexity left somewhere. Ben is a graphics programmer as far as I know, so he isn't the right person to ask about the physics.

I'm unsure why you expect there to be a massive difference between pre-2.0 FM and post-2.0 FM. 2.0 added jerk and some flight modes. It didn't remove any damage modelling or change the way damage affects ships. It didn't remove any IFCS functionality or change the way it attempts to correct damaged systems. You would've seen some rather massive complaint posts at this point if any of it was taken away, even I would be complaining about it.

The key question is: is the motion of the thrusters on the ship a result of the flight model, or the cause?
Alternatively framed, do the thrusters themselves actually deliver thrust?

I maintain that one way to test this is to check with varying mass distributions on the ship and seeing if flight angular accelerations are changed. It's likely that their model treats the ship as a lumped mass, in which case changing mass distribution inside the ship (e.g. by rearranging cargo) wouldn't have an effect, which I think is fair enough, but one could check that, say, a 10% increase in ship mass results in in a 1/1.1 change in linear acceleration.

On a physics level I believe the thrusters do provide individual thrust. This setup would be the easiest way to handle a failed thruster like the game does. As a thruster is a specific item on the ship, with specific values contained within its XML information, this makes sense. It also falls in line with the original flight model design.

Once the IFCS/physics system decides to move a thruster to a specific position, then the thrust is applied. Is the animations 1:1 with the physics simulation? Possibly. See, the cutlass's moving engines did have a delay in thrust while they turned around, so that makes me think yes. Although the hornet starts moving a little too quickly before the animation finishes playing. Overall I'm not sure.


In other news, Patch 2.5 notes have been leaked: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/4v6y6j/ask_and_ye_shall_receive/

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I don't know but I find damage affecting combat a stupid feature.
If damaged ship performs bad, you are as soon as Dead, no matter what you can do, you are a sitting duck.
So what's the point in doing that?

That's just part of the game's design as a whole. Accurate damage modelling has been a focus of the game for a while, as shown in the last damage model update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkAaLd0FdK0

Think about War Thunder when you shoot a wing off. It's the same idea.

 

[lysan]

I don't think someone saying that PG planets are coming in 2.7 is the same as saying it's in the game right now. There's nothing wrong with discussing upcoming features.

The problem is that when we talk about SC and progress, then compare it to other games, its always the SC dream that is hold against what is current in whatever game we are talking about.

I could also compare I: netcode dream with SC, however we haven't seen anything related to that in I:, so why even discuss it?

It nice to dream, communities do that a lot, the problem is when you try to sell a dream, how do you measure it?
As an early backer of SC I've been listening to all the commercial talk, I was too sold on the CR vision, however as I started to investigate all that turned into
a bag of nothing, because that is what it is until its realized, a bag of nothing.

77 ship sold, how many can you actually fly? 9, what about mining, trade, bounty hunting, salvage, exploration? only FPS and dog fights are in the game right now.
what about the living breathing world? NPC's walking about like in GTA style doing their thing? not there, NPC crews, and so on and so forth.

I get it, its Alpha, sorry pre Alpha, however we then need to look at its current state, and not inject dreams and future visions.

$117 MIL, 5 years, and still not ready to be released on this side of christmas.

 

[Osmanthus]

The problem is that when we talk about SC and progress, then compare it to other games, its always the SC dream that is hold against what is current in whatever game we are talking about.

I could also compare I: netcode dream with SC, however we haven't seen anything related to that in I:, so why even discuss it?

It nice to dream, communities do that a lot, the problem is when you try to sell a dream, how do you measure it?
As an early backer of SC I've been listening to all the commercial talk, I was too sold on the CR vision, however as I started to investigate all that turned into
a bag of nothing, because that is what it is until its realized, a bag of nothing.

77 ship sold, how many can you actually fly? 9, what about mining, trade, bounty hunting, salvage, exploration? only FPS and dog fights are in the game right now.
what about the living breathing world? NPC's walking about like in GTA style doing their thing? not there, NPC crews, and so on and so forth.

I get it its Alpha, sorry pre Alpha, however we then need to look at its current state and not inject dreams a future visions.

$117 MIL 5 years and still not ready to be released on this side of christmas.

Quoting for truth