The Star Citizen Thread v5

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Not true, the engineer bases are hand crafted by artists.

He said that in another post. :) Here's the thing: PG planets and some handcrafted spots is fine. ED does it, and if CIG does it I'd be cool with it. But you cant handcraft entire planets. So when you show your planet tech, I want to see what the non-handcrafted parts are like. Otherwise the demo kinda has no point.
 
I'll take a shot at that :)

In the year 2525
If backers are still alive
If underpants can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the Idris you bought today

In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna instance with you

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Your potato router has died

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your pilot, pick your gunners too
From the bottom of a leadertable queue, whoa

In the year 7510
If Robert's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for Refactor Time

In the year 8510
Robert's is gonna shake his mighty head then
He'll either say I'm pleased where Star Marine has been
Or tear it down and start again, woah woah

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if this game is gonna be alive
He's taken everything these old backers can give
And he ain't released the Polaris, woah woah
Now it's been 10, 000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now Star Citizen's reign is through
But through eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Development only started yesterday

Amazing! I can't rep you right now, but that was beautiful.
 
Yep, if they had PG working - they'd have at least a handful of planets and they could dump a few handcrafted small elements on there and make it seem like they are further along than they are. Instead, it's always one planet or between two small space stations or a small station and a planet station. All of it has all signs pointing towards no PG.

Surely if they had PG working they would create all 100 systems they promised each with a large or small number of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, ring systems. This would be the blank canvas that the artists would slowly mold to their artistic visions, especially around cities, villages, industrial complexes.

They can then start to make sure their AI works in this procedural world, an start layering other systems on top of this, they can study these worlds and find interesting places the mission system can use.

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He said that in another post. :) Here's the thing: PG planets and some handcrafted spots is fine. ED does it, and if CIG does it I'd be cool with it. But you cant handcraft entire planets. So when you show your planet tech, I want to see what the non-handcrafted parts are like. Otherwise the demo kinda has no point.

agreed.

An I saw he said that in another post, that what I get for reading this thread backwards.
 
The thing with SC is that demos... those don't work when the "pipeline" is supposed to be in place, when development is supposed to be hitting its stride.

What was shown at CitCON should have been something playable, something in the client, within the next 1 to 3 months. Not something in the next... well never since it was not a demonstration of what was actually being developed to be in the client at any point. We already know it was solely developed for the CitCON so we know this isn't a demonstration of something coming to the client.

It's Freelancer all over again - custom done "demos" to generate hype to generate funding. Despite being fully funded at $60 million 3 years ago. Double that, and it still isn't funded because... well who knows. For all of the "open development" and "transparency" there isn't the slightest indication as to what is going on internally and the most recent CitCON amplifies that even more as nothing was shown that is intended for release at any point ever. It was just a demo of what they maybe can do, which is something that is shown at the very beginning of development, not 5 years in.
 
Can you imagine the crowds reaction if they had something like this to show at Citizencon 2016?

[video=youtube;5FKrOGj_94g]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FKrOGj_94g[/video]
 
The thing with SC is that demos... those don't work when the "pipeline" is supposed to be in place, when development is supposed to be hitting its stride.

What was shown at CitCON should have been something playable, something in the client, within the next 1 to 3 months. Not something in the next... well never since it was not a demonstration of what was actually being developed to be in the client at any point. We already know it was solely developed for the CitCON so we know this isn't a demonstration of something coming to the client.

It's Freelancer all over again - custom done "demos" to generate hype to generate funding. Despite being fully funded at $60 million 3 years ago. Double that, and it still isn't funded because... well who knows. For all of the "open development" and "transparency" there isn't the slightest indication as to what is going on internally and the most recent CitCON amplifies that even more as nothing was shown that is intended for release at any point ever. It was just a demo of what they maybe can do, which is something that is shown at the very beginning of development, not 5 years in.

It was a poorly hacked together fluff reel, nothing more nothing less.
It's actually refreshing to see some of the more ardent whales and backers waking up from their fantasy world and start questioning and criticizing the reality of the whole thing.
 
If CIG are implementing planetary procedural generation in the way I've visualised it internally, it sounds like an eminently sensible approach to be able to quickly author varied planets.

You first define the size of your planet. You then roughly paint on the land masses, and take care of the detail of the edges using PG. You might define an archipelago or other island chain by changing the opacity of your landmass brush and let the PG turn that into broken land masses. You then paint on your mountain ranges, with the opacity roughly representing the height. The PG takes care of the individual mountains. You then paint on your temperature profile. This informs the PG as to what kind of land you might expect, as well as what kinds of flora, and might also inform the weather types. e.g. if you were painting England you'd make it slightly warmer and flatter in the south and this would inform the PG to prefer things like oak trees, heavy forests, etc. and you'd make it cooler and hillier in the north, which would inform spruces, sparser forests, and so on.

You can define all sorts of these rough layers of characteristics. Your PG would take these as inputs, as well as a seed to generate your final planet. The artist might choose to change the seed and tweak the layers until they get an acceptable result. They'll then plonk on top of these some handcrafted assets like cities (which could alternatively be painted on and procedural), etc. The artist's definition of a planet shouldn't actually take very long, but the work involved in creating the assets for the procedural generator and the algorithms to generate realistic looking landscapes are where the challenge lies, and I can't see that in the few months they've been going at this, they're anywhere near being ready.

Once you have a planet defined, you have to have gameplay elements to sit on top of it. It's all well and good generating lovely environments if there's nothing to do. This is also a *huge* job.

We talk about the comparison between Frontier and CIG when it comes to PG. It boggles my mind the task that Frontier have given themselves. Not only do they have to create all the same sort of assets as CIG, but they don't have the artist's direct input into the planetary makeup. All those layers that we talk about (weather, land mass position, height, etc.) have to be generated by Stellar Forge without the benefit of an artist's eye on each, have to be vaguely plausible / realistic, and *then* have to have compelling gameplay associated with them. Kudos to anyone who manages to achieve that, frankly!
 

dsmart

Banned
Listening to Derek - interesting and measured. Probably talking about some of this thread :)

Thanks. I'm trying a new approach which I hope will help the citizens on the other side of the fence, listen to some reasoning as to why they are the reason that they cannot see the forest from the trees. They're focused on the wrong things.
 
Dear deity on a pogo stick. I've found that Reality TV Show what CIG were involved with.

I really wish I hadn't.

However.... if this is the quality we can expect in SQ42 - there won't be enough lulzbuckets on the planet.
 
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Can you imagine the crowds reaction if they had something like this to show at Citizencon 2016?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FKrOGj_94g

Ahhhh.....I bite that bait.....

Star_Citizen%20bait_zpsygwagcba.png
 
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It was a poorly hacked together fluff reel, nothing more nothing less.
It's actually refreshing to see some of the more ardent whales and backers waking up from their fantasy world and start questioning and criticizing the reality of the whole thing.

Don't know, saw a post on RSI saying that AS IS Star Citizen is by far the best space game out there. Poor deluded fool...

... as for the Polaris, $900 - bet they *need* to sell a few of those.....

G
 
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