The Star Citizen Thread v5

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Well the guy explained his reasons for that in the last ATV. He wanted to make sure that what you see is exactly what your friends see, because he feels that very important in a MMO in which you'll most likely be having constant interaction with your friends. [

Alright, but

Given the results, i think at the end of the day it has been worth it.

What results are you talking about?
 
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I bet that The Escapist are feeling a little smug right now.

OK, well some of their article was a bit iffy but the general gist was about the same - crappy management, wasted dev effort due to bad decisions, technical issues, etc.

Eh...this writer did what Escapist couldn't and that was be objective.

In the end, it is more hard-hitting because it isn't mired in
 
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Alright, but



What results are you talking about?

I'm talking about having a 1st person view on the same quality and smoothness as a faked 1st person view, but this time it's not faked.
In my opinion it's a nice achievement, but more important, it also has its benefits.
 
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I'm talking about having a 1st person view on the same quality and smoothness as a faked 1st person view, but this time it's not faked.
In my opinion it's a nice achievement, but more important, it also has its benefits.

But that's what I'm asking, what are the benefits?
 
Yo Ortwin.... Still waiting on that killer lawsuit you said you were working on buddy.

Anytime now would be good for you I'm sure.


Any. Time.

The lawsuit was magnificent, it was packed with fidelity and was the best damn lawsuit ever.

Unfortunately there was a miscommunication of scale with the typing pool and the resultant 4 tonnes of wood-pulp with a single second class stamp never made it past the post office counter.
 
One thing I find interesting is that the subreddit is suppressing this article despite it being an unbiased, honest, well researched piece of journalism.

You would think they'd be touting the article as how CIG have somewhat conquered the pitfalls of undertaking such a project, how they've managed to get a semi-functioning machine into working as a well oiled machine, no insignificant thing getting all these people and studios working as a cohesive group.

Maybe for you,me and majority of ppl. in this thread but for those "hardcore"SC fans this kind of objective articles are just the introduction of the harsh reality and they will keep refusing it no matter what.....It´s kind the same like when some ppl. trying to avoid the alarm clock that keeps waking them up for the job/school.....aaahh let me sleep just for 5 more minutes...you know....
 
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But that's what I'm asking, what are the benefits?

First of all, let's make clear one of the concepts of Star Citizen is player interaction. You know, CR wants us to interact with all this stuff in 1st person. Interact with objects, interact with ships, interact with other players... No loading screens, all seamless, all in 1st person, etc... So for this game, much stuff has to be made in terms of player animations, animations of players interacting with the ship controls, the player getting into and out of vehicles, grabbing and interacting with stuff like boxes or other objects like a bottle of water, etc...

If you have a faked 1st person view, that means you have to do everything twice, and not only that, you must do all player interactions twice, and make it so it all looks good from both views, even if the hands may be in different places in 1st and 3rd person views, so if you grab a box in 1st person, you must make that box fit inside your hands in 1st person, and after that you must do the same in 3rd person, and try to make it so it looks ok even when you know that it won't be exactly in the same place in 1st person and in 3rd person. If you get a weapon you must do 2 weapon models, one for 3rd person, and another for 1st person which must be distorted for it to look good on your 1st person field of view. You must do 2 animations, one for each point of view. And if you want to make it so the player can grab the weapon and equip it seamlessly, you must do some kind of animation in which you hide the transition of that weapon between the 3rd person model and the 1st person one.
Ok this looks like a lot of work, right?

If you have unified 1st/3rd person views, like SC does, you just have to make one animation, you can have just one model, no need to make tricks to fake transitions between models or to make 3rd person view objects to fit into 1st person views. So this means less work needed in the long term when creating content/animations, and less possible glitches, which translate in less work in the long term. And what you see is what others see, it wont happen that you think you're completely covered behind an object, but you get shot because your 3rd person model is exposed to enemy fire because it's different than the 1st person one.
Oh, and less megabytes to download. And the wow factor, too.
 
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You know the speculation that they've now got a well functioning machine on the go and everything's now on track, after it was revealed that they've effectively spent the last two years chasing their own tail.

What if the well functioning machine is no realer than all the (now proven to be empty) hype we've heard for the last two years.

The only thing we can be absolutely certain of is they messed up big repeatedly and concealed it, why should anybody trust what they currently say.
 
REVERSE THE ‘VERSE: EPISODE 2.08
TLDR
  • Todays show was hosted by Brian Chambers and featured two guests: Ben Dare, Senior Level Designer and Ivo Herzeg, Lead Animation Engineer
  • Ben’s job is to create unique and interesting environments for Star Citizen with a focus on modularity
  • The satellite concept took about a month from start to finish and is currently in the hands of the concept art team before Ben can start creating stations with the new method.
    • There will be three main types: Defence, Communication, and Science which can be configured in a variety of different shapes and sizes.
    • They will have interiors that will vary in size and shape.
    • Satellites will be destructible to an extent with modules being able to be damaged or hacked from the inside to disable certain systems with viruses. They’re still talking about whether or not they’ll be completely destructible.
    • Depending on the satellite, there will be automated defence systems, especially if its a military satellite.
    • At this time, satellites will not be player controlled, but in the future that’s something they would like to do.
  • Ivo Herzeg’s job started 12 years ago making animation tech for CryEngine and he’s still doing it now, making sure the game has the animation tech it needs.
    • The Unified Rig is important because it reduces the amount of animations needs and allows them to be shared. For example when he worked on Crysis 2, they had 1200 animations for guns compared to 50 for Star Citizen with the Unified Rig.
    • It also allows them to add physics to each joint in the body making the characters fully physicalized.
    • The head stabilisation isn’t done yet and will be iterated on constantly in the future, but it’s in a good place now.
    • The head stabilisation technique used was influenced by a chicken walking video Ivo Herzeg found after their first solution failed and that was the starting point for where the system is now.

P.D.- I know I'm late xD sorry
 
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Maybe for you,me and majority of ppl. in this thread but for those "hardcore"SC fans this kind of objective articles are just the introduction of the harsh reality and they will keep refusing it no matter what.....It´s kind the same like when some ppl. trying to avoid the alarm clock that keeps waking them up for the job/school.....aaahh let me sleep just for 5 more minutes...you know....

This is a problem CIG has. There are so many SC fans that accept everything that CIG does, and won't complain about anything - defending them to the hilt. CIG hear this and carry on.

I remember, in the early stages of ED (sorry - first example that came to mind) we were going to have 'jumps' to points of interest within a system, with no 'travel wherever you like'. The players hated that idea and the DDF (good job guys) argued tooth and nail for a system where we could go where we like. FD said it would be an awesome amount of work, but the backers still argued for it. We then ended up with Supercruise and we can now travel to any point in space, rather than jumping around a series of boxes.

This made ED a far better game than it would have been if we didn't challenge FD occasionally.
 
You know the speculation that they've now got a well functioning machine on the go and everything's now on track, after it was revealed that they've effectively spent the last two years chasing their own tail.

What if the well functioning machine is no realer than all the (now proven to be empty) hype we've heard for the last two years.

The only thing we can be absolutely certain of is they messed up big repeatedly and concealed it, why should anybody trust what they currently say.

It wasn't that I got an "everything's fine now" vibe from the article, and it doesn't even touch on the financial situation for example, but I thought it put a lot of the current and prior issues into a believable perspective. And it gave Roberts enough rope to hang himself, as he loves to do. The bit that really ground my gears was the description of him going directly to artists and cutting leads and managers out of the loop, because I've been on the receiving end of that and it's humiliating and demoralising. He comes across as someone who read a book about management and leadership once, but didn't really understand it. All the bluster about how he expects his decisions to be followed, and yes, bad decisions are arguably preferable to a lack of decision, but the piece he's missing is harnessing the talent and experience of the people around you, especially when you've been out of the game for over a decade. They're all just button-pushers who exist to make his will reality as far as he's concerned, and anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear is not a "team player", and that's the end of their career. I can't stand that self-consciously "I'm tough but fair" delusional approach to management (if you couldn't tell).
 
It wasn't that I got an "everything's fine now" vibe from the article, and it doesn't even touch on the financial situation for example, but I thought it put a lot of the current and prior issues into a believable perspective. And it gave Roberts enough rope to hang himself, as he loves to do. The bit that really ground my gears was the description of him going directly to artists and cutting leads and managers out of the loop, because I've been on the receiving end of that and it's humiliating and demoralising. He comes across as someone who read a book about management and leadership once, but didn't really understand it. All the bluster about how he expects his decisions to be followed, and yes, bad decisions are arguably preferable to a lack of decision, but the piece he's missing is harnessing the talent and experience of the people around you, especially when you've been out of the game for over a decade. They're all just button-pushers who exist to make his will reality as far as he's concerned, and anyone who doesn't tell him what he wants to hear is not a "team player", and that's the end of their career. I can't stand that self-consciously "I'm tough but fair" delusional approach to management (if you couldn't tell).

The thing that got me most is his apparent appetite for tearing someone a new one in front of other people.

It's one thing if two people get in a row and start having a pop at each other - and if push comes to shove then they can take it to the car park - without the fear of losing their job/livelihood.

But to publicly lay into an employee when their hands are tied behind their backs - coz you know - they need to eat. That's just a cowardly abuse of power.

Tough but fair is one thing - if it gets results then at least you can say well he's an ahole but he gets results

But at the moment it just looks like an ahole without results, "tough" (lol) but unfair.

That's just inexcusable.
 
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This is a problem CIG has. There are so many SC fans that accept everything that CIG does, and won't complain about anything - defending them to the hilt. CIG hear this and carry on.

I remember, in the early stages of ED (sorry - first example that came to mind) we were going to have 'jumps' to points of interest within a system, with no 'travel wherever you like'. The players hated that idea and the DDF (good job guys) argued tooth and nail for a system where we could go where we like. FD said it would be an awesome amount of work, but the backers still argued for it. We then ended up with Supercruise and we can now travel to any point in space, rather than jumping around a series of boxes.

This made ED a far better game than it would have been if we didn't challenge FD occasionally.

Exactly but CIG is the one to blame for....they make sure tho create "hostile" atmosphere on their officiall website for all of us "non-believers"by closing all threads that questioning burning issues or simply "katamaried"them into the oblivion....as always making sure first that regular shills put the blame on the OP that dare to question at all the CR&CIG.......
 
But that's what I'm asking, what are the benefits?

I had already mentioned way back when the FPS visualization video was shown. It's actually saves them work in the long run. The guy behind that tech was the same german that made Crysis animation back in the day and they talked about it in the latest RtV that Nolan just posted a TLDR.
Interview with Ivo Herzeg:


  • [What do you do?] About 12 years ago he developed an animation system for CryEngine and now he’s doing the same here. He’s responsible for getting the runtime features in the game and technology up and running that’s needed to support that.


  • [Can you explain what a unified rig is and why did you choose to use it for Star Citizen?]
  • Before he explains what it is he’ll explain some pre-cursor. There’s a first person and a third person, and you only need a simple rig as most games are single player, but as games became more complex, people look down and want to see their legs and so they need to add another rig. Finally most games are multiplayer nowadays which means a third rig, so you’d have three rigs plus animation for first and third person systems.
    • Unified rigs only have one skeleton, but it can take a little bit longer to get animations setup correctly, but it’s much easier in the long run.

  • [What does it mean going forward for players?] It reduces the animations count by a lot. For all the weapons they currently have in Star Citizen, they need 50. If you compare it to Crysis 2, they had 1200.
  • It also forced them to animate differently and in a way that animations will be needed for a variety of different things.

  • With the unified rig, animations aren’t just fewer, but they can be shared as well.
  • All the joints are able to be animated as well so in EVA when you jump off a platform, all of your limbs are physicalized so they aren’t just ragdolled randomly, but based on physics.
  • [Does the stabilization that you’ve done impact mouse responsiveness like mouse smoothing?] Absolutely not, the sensitivity was turned down to get more of a panning effect for the video.
  • [How will sighting work with head stabilization?] They just have to simply align it to the right eye, nothing complicated.
  • [Is the work on head stabilization done?] Not yet, it’ll be ongoing and tweaking is something that’ll happen constantly.
  • [Are you afraid that head stabilisation make character models look like birds when viewed in third person?] No.
    • They took into account how it will look apart from making it stable.
  • [How does stabilization work when you fall down?] It disables when you fall down, when you get up, when you sit, and some other scenarios. Still testing other areas though.
  • [What input did you use to record the stabilization video?] Mouse.
  • [Shouldn’t the visor bounce a little even with eye stabilization. I can imagine a motorcycle bounces a little bit] It depends on what you have, with a weapon your hands bounce, without a weapon your helmet will bounce.
  • [Finals thoughts?] At first their one solution was thought to work, but it didn’t pan out and then after some creative googling and seeing a video of a chicken, it sparked a prototype
  • That’s all with Ivo Herzeg.
\\

My take on the Kotaku.uk article:

I think it was a fair and well written article, nothing really new in it for the ones following the game daily but it might have helped most of the people just looking from the sidelines to realise how hard they've managed to pull trough (and how big of a feat it was). To raise those studios/talent and make it gel and work in a well oiled way to reach where they are now was not an easy task, and it was never going to be.

Even if the title was a bit click bait it gave a honest insight with both inside/out point's of view, I say click bait because saying that a game development is troubled is a redundancy when you speak about doing things that were never done before. Being it the raising money to build studios from scratch being it pursuing new ways to push tech to do what you do or just having the will to take risks for the sake of doing something above the norm.

All the big technical hurdles that we saw some dev's opposing to. (TheOrder Graphical Fidelity, KingomCom Layered Clothing and the Rebuild of Cyengine FPS animations (1st&3rd person integration) because they said "it was stupid" or that "was impossible" were proven wrong as that tech is now done and implemented.

It's not about doing what's been done, it's not about going with what works just because it works, it's about pushing boundaries and going the extra mile to get a better game, that's why I pledged and that's why I'm not bothered by delays, I understand the frustration of other's that just wanted another game to play. But that would be about it, just another game to play and nothing special.

The last technical hurdles (planetary landings and server optimization) should be the last BIG mountain for CIG to climb, and that's what they've been working on for 3.0.

The company is now in better shape than it ever was, big team in Germany / Frankfurt and growing, HUGE team in UK. US Studios more focused, communication improved immensely (the Comunity/Dev's Videos revamp was a blessing).

And for those that think that the article was negative or the beginning of even more turmoil about Star Citizen development you will be disappointed. They have a great team assembled, the more they work the better they work, they passed through the asteroids field with just some scratches and with the FPS module and Planetary Landings coming soon the best is yet to come!
 
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And for those that think that the article was negative or the beginning of even more turmoil about Star Citizen development you will be disappointed. They have a great team assembled, the more they work the better they work, they passed through the asteroids field with just some scratches and with the FPS module and Planetary Landings coming soon the best is yet to come!

Thanks for clearing that up Orlando - for a minute there I thought there might be problems!
 
Exactly but CIG is the one to blame for....they make sure tho create "hostile" atmosphere on their officiall website for all of us "non-believers"by closing all threads that questioning burning issues or simply "katamaried"them into the oblivion....as always making sure first that regular shills put the blame on the OP that dare to question at all the CR&CIG.......

I agree.

Someone posts 'I think xxxx is not quite right....'

Mod [Moved to concern]

The Concern forum is the grave of many great ideas.
 

dsmart

Banned
The thing that got me most is his apparent appetite for tearing someone a new one in front of other people.

It's one thing if two people get in a row and start having a pop at each other - and if push comes to shove then they can take it to the car park - without the fear of losing their job/livelihood.

But to publicly lay into an employee when their hands are tied behind their backs - coz you know - they need to eat. That's just a cowardly abuse of power.

Tough but fair is one thing - if it gets results then at least you can say well he's an ahole but he gets results

But at the moment it just looks like an ahole without results, "tough" (lol) but unfair.

That's just inexcusable.

That's not even the half of it. And the stuff that's not yet public pales in comparison to what was said to The Escapist last October.

Thing is, CIG/RSI did this interview thinking it was going to be a fluff piece. But as these things go, most of the other outlets are now carrying it, while adding their own anecdotes to it.

What stood out for me was this part:

"In his opinion, while Frontier’s approach was “a totally viable way to go about it”, it launched with the “basic, bare minimum” of features (“you're just trading and earning some money and upgrading your ship”), the game was “the same game you had 20 years ago”, and Frontier is adding new things in and solving the problems of each new feature “one thing at a time.” CIG’s approach, he says, “is a whole other scale of difficulty"

Then there's this: http://www.pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/star-citizen-elite-dangerous-development
 
The faithful sure are something else, they are a hive mind apparently - or that person has a mouse in their pocket, or voices in their head.

W3YtDVG.jpg
 
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