The Star Citizen Thread v5

[milligna]

Whenever I see the treadmill people at trade shows and the like I can't help but think: "Jesus, you people are DOOMED."

I'll have to check that game out but it looks like it'd still make some people sick. I wonder if there will ever be enough of an audience for devs to "just ignore it and trust that enough people can handle it" along with plenty of caveats. Perhaps as the tech evolves or our children mutate and become immune to sim sickness.

The year consumer VR launched properly is probably not a good time to make 30% of your customers ill, tho.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Dont worry its "easy!" to do. They can just add it later! We have no idea how VR development works and commonsense has no basis in development what so ever.

Yup - it's not something to worry about. Ben Lenslock will be right on it - as soon as he's finished acting and got time to be a developer again

 

[Osmanthus]

Yup - it's not something to worry about. Ben Lenslock will be right on it - as soon as he's finished acting and got time to be a developer again

This is one of the saddest things one can say

The man's IMDB page lists AtV as if it's some kind of long-running TV show

 

[frostypaw]

This isn't great, so we decide to shrink eerything 100 times to "regain" the precision.

Why would shrinking anything ever "regain" precision?

I think you might be misunderstanding the other party's argument, or you think they're incredibly stupid. I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong as it's perfectly correct, but the only really relevant bit was the last sentence - 1mm is 0.1cm you see extra decimal places of precision, and that's just what I was saying apart from the delusional stuff about people claiming SC didn't do it. No one's said that as far as I know. I was just avoiding any exponents as it just adds to the confusion.
To take it the rest of the way at your 10's of kms range the smallest thing we can measure initially is 0.01m and after the conversion it's 0.000000001m. That's where the public get confused and sees things as 'smaller' - relative precision isn't understood and this is not the first time. The whole thing is a nonsense anyway which only makes it worse - just because minecraft's maps are all in whole numbers no one's saying well those must be atoms as that's the smallest 'whole' thing or other such nonsense but the moment there are fractions involved everyone's up on the chairs screaming

 

[Stigbob]

Interdictions are fun half the time in ED - The time you're the one doing the interdicting.

I love getting interdicted it's like mice scurrying towards the cat.

 

[Soliluna]

I love getting interdicted it's like mice scurrying towards the cat.

I like it too, provided it makes sense. Not a "I understand why you're interdicting me" sense, but the "I've just got into hyperspace after you were shooting at me in regular space so it's impossible for you to have immediately got into hyperspace and re-interdicted me" sense.

 

[Stigbob]

I like it too, provided it makes sense. Not a "I understand why you're interdicting me" sense, but the "I've just got into hyperspace after you were shooting at me in regular space so it's impossible for you to have immediately got into hyperspace and re-interdicted me" sense.

I never get that because I vaporize them the first time around. When I'm mission running I swap things like the interdictor, extra fuel tanks/scoop, SCB and SRV hanger for cargo space, but I leave the core build (war FDL) untouched.

It's not unusual to make more from bounties whilst running missions than the missions themselves.

 

[Ben Parry]

Why would shrinking anything ever "regain" precision?

I think you might be misunderstanding the other party's argument, or you think they're incredibly stupid. I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong as it's perfectly correct, but the only really relevant bit was the last sentence - 1mm is 0.1cm you see extra decimal places of precision, and that's just what I was saying apart from the delusional stuff about people claiming SC didn't do it. No one's said that as far as I know. I was just avoiding any exponents as it just adds to the confusion.
To take it the rest of the way at your 10's of kms range the smallest thing we can measure initially is 0.01m and after the conversion it's 0.000000001m. That's where the public get confused and sees things as 'smaller' - relative precision isn't understood and this is not the first time. The whole thing is a nonsense anyway which only makes it worse - just because minecraft's maps are all in whole numbers no one's saying well those must be atoms as that's the smallest 'whole' thing or other such nonsense but the moment there are fractions involved everyone's up on the chairs screaming

Upthread, there were suggestions that CIG had changed the size of things to gain precision, or to make it possible to have large systems, or whatever. I was just making absolutely clear that the way you achieve that is by making zero changes to the engine whatsoever, as it's a universal feature of floating point numbers - the reason I included exponents in the explanation is that fraction-and-exponent is literally how that number format works.
I don't think the other party is stupid, but SKUnimatrix's friend is a professional programmer and still didn't get why you'd need longer floats for larger numbers, so I've got to assume it isn't common knowledge.

Edit: Looking back, it was you suggesting that instead of doing a 64-bit conversion, CIG had just scaled 32 bits to cover the same range and lost precision. I must be misinterpreting your argument.

Edit 2:

From the minute they "released" the PU, I stated that it was a hack job. I outlined how I figured they were handling their scenes. I mentioned how it simply wasn't possible for them to do a 64-Bit conversion of that engine. I outlined how they were going to "stitch" (ED does it gracefully btw) together the scenes in order to handle the load, create large ranges etc.

At least some people still reckon CIG hasn't done the work they say they did.

 

[ianw]

I like the way this floaty pointy argument has been going on for days now and still no-one has any idea what the other parties are on about.

And I don't understand any of it.

 

[Soliluna]

I never get that because I vaporize them the first time around. When I'm mission running I swap things like the interdictor, extra fuel tanks/scoop, SCB and SRV hanger for cargo space, but I leave the core build (war FDL) untouched.

It's not unusual to make more from bounties whilst running missions than the missions themselves.

Haha I tend to run with limited ammunition because I love missiles and rail guns, if it's worth the ammunition I will certainly humble them.

 

[lysan]

I like the way this floaty pointy argument has been going on for days now and still no-one has any idea what the other parties are on about.

And I don't understand any of it.

We just don't understand floating point...

 

[Soliluna]

I like the way this floaty pointy argument has been going on for days now and still no-one has any idea what the other parties are on about.

And I don't understand any of it.

It's the difference in size of the stored value, so 32bit occupies 4bytes, while 64bit occupies 8bytes. This allows for more digits represented, thus greater precision or range.

The rest of it doesn't matter unless you care to program stuff :>

 

[Stigbob]

Haha I tend to run with limited ammunition because I love missiles and rail guns, if it's worth the ammunition I will certainly humble them.

I was running twin railguns modded to use fuel as ammo in my FDL, wonderful weapons you should give them a go. I've switched back to modded hi-ex cannons now which nail an anaconda's power generator in two or three decent hits.

That's right everybody I like the engineers stuff.

 

[xyphic]

We just don't understand floating point...

TBF, that can be said of most people, including developers. Fixed point FTW!

 

[Knightshark]

No, you guys still aren't getting it. The point I'm trying to make is that all this magical doubling and halving, there's no point in a programmer trying to do it manually, because that's what the "floating" in floating-point is. The first 8 bits of a float32 are literally that trick, built right into the number format.
I'll try to do a made-up decimal version, let's say we make up a fictional format that has seven decimal places (instead of bits) of mantissa, and two of exponent. Here's how some numbers might get represented:

1.36cm	1.360000 * 10-2	(works fine)
20km	2.000000 * 104	(so far so good)
20km + 1.36cm	2.000001 * 104	(oh dear)

So the format's lost us 36mm. This isn't great, so we decide to shrink eerything 100 times to "regain" the precision.

1.36cm / 100	1.360000 * 10-4
20km / 100	2.000000 * 102
20km / 100 + 1.36cm / 100	2.000001 * 102

That literally doesn't touch the main number representation at all, it just subtracts two from the exponent. Precision hasn't got better, it hasn't got worse. If there's some code somewhere that wants to, I dunno, sort objects into buckets, and it was assuming that 1m intervals was a good granularity, you've confused the hell out of that, but it'd have been confused by adding a moon several million km away too so it needed fixing anyway.
If you do a "fourteen decimal place conversion" instead, 20km + 1.36cm gets represented as 2.0000013600000 * 10⁴ and everything's dandy, besides people a strange recurring bug where people insist you didn't do it.

I am impressed by the effort you make to explain this to laymen. Kudos, it really cannot be more clear why double precision is important.

 

[Lobstris]

Well, I went trough example of explanatorily pic what Derek posted. Well, passive scan and active scan is what we have in ED. We don't configure them for how strong it is etc. but I really don't know it would make gameplay more engaging.

Heh. Personally, I've been reading all of this radar modelling stuff and positively drooling.

Think of it this way: E: D's scanner modelling in super-cruise just hands you scanner returns 'on a plate'. People moan that supercruise doesn't make for engaging gameplay.

No, if finding other ships in super-cruise meant actually having to use knowledge of the ships systems in their operation and make a trade off between passive and active systems, or conversely, not being seen in super-cruise involved emissions management and 'flying stealthily' - how much more engaging would the in-flight portion of the game be?

 

[jcrg99]

Not sure if people here are aware of that, but it has been confirmed that Sandi Gardiner is the most formally educated person in the entire RSI company.

The source of the information is herself: http://imgur.com/ou1E5u0

"I’m pretty confident I am the most formally educated person in this whole company" - Sandi Gardiner

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Additionally, enjoy the testimony of the good citizens in this thread: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/7071933/#Comment_7071933

 

[frostypaw]

I don't think the other party is stupid, but SKUnimatrix's friend is a professional programmer and still didn't get why you'd need longer floats for larger numbers, so I've got to assume it isn't common knowledge.

Edit: Looking back, it was you suggesting that instead of doing a 64-bit conversion, CIG had just scaled 32 bits to cover the same range and lost precision. I must be misinterpreting your argument.

The 'trick' as such is understanding why people think that. They don't get exponents and resulting variable accuracy so their sense of scale size is only around the largest exponent where you still get the accurate results needed, namely integer accuracy so ^52 - at that point the range of available real number parts is still just 0-9.999(etc) but 1unit is now 0.000000000000000000000000(etc)00001 rather than the old max integer accuracy at ^21 when 1 unit is 0.00000000000000000001 (numbers of zero's entirely made up because after being up til 5 this still feels like morning and i'm mentally lazy and losing count) and that's smaller right?

the only bit that gives you larger numbers is the larger exponent, but you don't really get to use all of that. I would have been really impressed if someone had worked out star64 that only went as far as integer precision remained so you could do it to ^64 using 6 bits for the exponent and get out to ^57 but there may be reasons that's not a possible thing

anyhow that's spangled me a bit - at this relative time of day my precision for sure is pretty low so i might have talked nonsense. coffee?

 

[Soliluna]

I was running twin railguns modded to use fuel as ammo in my FDL, wonderful weapons you should give them a go. I've switched back to modded hi-ex cannons now which nail an anaconda's power generator in two or three decent hits.

That's right everybody I like the engineers stuff.

I haven't done any engineering yet as I've been so busy with a newborn. Will definitely have to take a look at this though, sounds damned awesome!

Heh. Personally, I've been reading all of this radar modelling stuff and positively drooling.

Think of it this way: E: D's scanner modelling in super-cruise just hands you scanner returns 'on a plate'. People moan that supercruise doesn't make for engaging gameplay.

No, if finding other ships in super-cruise meant actually having to use knowledge of the ships systems in their operation and make a trade off between passive and active systems, or conversely, not being seen in super-cruise involved emissions management and 'flying stealthily' - how much more engaging would the in-flight portion of the game be?

It would be awesome, unfortunately it would also annoy so many of the current players who find combat too difficult. Sadly you can't please everyone and I think FD are happy with the status quo for their scanning, KWS, "honking" et al.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Heh. Personally, I've been reading all of this radar modelling stuff and positively drooling.

Think of it this way: E: D's scanner modelling in super-cruise just hands you scanner returns 'on a plate'. People moan that supercruise doesn't make for engaging gameplay.

No, if finding other ships in super-cruise meant actually having to use knowledge of the ships systems in their operation and make a trade off between passive and active systems, or conversely, not being seen in super-cruise involved emissions management and 'flying stealthily' - how much more engaging would the in-flight portion of the game be?

I personally think that current way scanning works in ED is solid. It is not very good, or great, but solid. FD has doors open for letting to use more knowledge based gameplay if there are systems or corners of systems where current automatic scan just doesn't work. However having EVERY scan to work like this is nonsense. These aren't hard core space sims and even there it wouldn't make engaging gameplay.

I however think FD will do upgrades for scanners in future. They have expressed interest in 'lose lock' feature we have in CQC to be found in main game. Would add additional layer where some knowledge based gameplay can be plugged in.

Also people who complain about supercruise not being engaging most likely moan about traveling in other open world games and MMOs. Some people just don't like it. Problem is that ED don't and won't have shortcuts. Since 2.1 signal sources, and 2.2 will introduce peristent POIs - I think supercruise will be awesome (along the fact it allows us to enjoy sense of scale, enjoy nice vistas, have interdictions done, etc. etc. etc.)