The Star Citizen Thread v8
- Thread starter Yaffle
- Start date
- Status
More accurately, this is CIG, there will never be refactoring, because they haven't got the slightest clue as to what the term actually means. But they'll keep using it as an excuse for doing the exact opposite of refactoring.
I thought "refactoring" meant "Tear it up and start again".
CIG know what they're talking about
It's based on the fact that nothing of note in SC is considered final (even by CIG) and that many components have already had to be revised, sometimes more than once, as the development goal posts have shifted, engine capabilities have had to be expanded and existing assets have aged. Item 2.0, itself a redesign, has been responsible for triggering many downstream revisions, especially of ships. It's no secret, it has happened openly (apart from when it hasn't, eg the Lumberyard switch), to the point that the word "refactor" has become one of CR's trademark buzzwords, along with "fidelity". Which brings me to...
Yes, you are absolutely right, I've just got tired of using inverted commas every time it comes up now. In the context of SC I use it to mean "we didn't plan anything properly so that thing that you thought was done now has to go back to the drawing board".
Bounder, I have another suggestion! Have you tested Evochron Legacy? Very similar to ED, even better in some ways. Has full newtonian flight model and very good hud to utilize it. Graphics are a bit retro, but very functional.
I must ask after all of these posts. Will SC ever be a thing? or did we all throw money at a fail?
An innocent question.
An innocent question.
I didn't throw money at it
I backed off as soon as i saw the helmet flip demo and the audiences reaction. Far too easily impressed by fluff.
Will it ever be a thing? Maybe, if backers keep throwing money at it, something should be delivered, maybe in 5 years or so, that is half decent.
I always take glassdoor reviews with a pinch of salt but...
I didn't throw money at it
I backed off as soon as i saw the helmet flip demo and the audiences reaction. Far too easily impressed by fluff.
Will it ever be a thing? Maybe, if backers keep throwing money at it, something should be delivered, maybe in 5 years or so, that is half decent.
I never threw money at it either. Partially because of Roberts' track record and the fact that he had been out of the industry so long but also because I think I am alone in thinking the Wing Commander games were utter dross.
I don't think it will ever be released in a form to call itself the BDSSE and at some point I think they will run out of whales to milk but am not convinced there will be a substantial game when that happens either.
Goodness. It appears that RSI may be holding a ship sale. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//16470-Newly-Flyable-Ships-Ready-For-Takeoff#terrapin
Who would have thought? And it looks like they're also about to reach the two million accounts (as recorded on their funding page).
With so many people pledging their alliegance, and with such an excellent and reliable source of funding, surely the very best darned space simulation of all time* must soon** be forthcoming.
*Geological definition of time applies.
** "Soon" means "before the next ice age kicks in". Possibly even earlier.
Who would have thought? And it looks like they're also about to reach the two million accounts (as recorded on their funding page).
With so many people pledging their alliegance, and with such an excellent and reliable source of funding, surely the very best darned space simulation of all time* must soon** be forthcoming.
*Geological definition of time applies.
** "Soon" means "before the next ice age kicks in". Possibly even earlier.
If by "be a thing" you mean a way of collecting expensive spaceship JPGs, then yes: it's a thing.
If, however, you're asking if it'll ever be a game, I fear you'll be disappointed. CIG spend most of their time creating the eye candy that sends the whales into a wallet-loosening frenzy but haven't actually built a game yet.
They've got an ill-suited engine, bad coding, a buggy tech demo and are now running a poll on their site asking the faithful what they should do next as "Management" clearly haven't a clue.
Whatever the poll result, it'll give CIG some much-needed breathing space as they blame further delays over the next year on "ensuring we address the express wishes of our backers."
What's sad is that they've operated like this for the past 5/6 years and will doubtlessly continue to do so until the funding dries up and they're forced to close doors.
If I were cynical, I'd suggest it's just the excuse CIG need to revisit some of these older JPGs and refactor the art to ensure continued fidelity in the Verse. If I were cynical...
Last edited:
I wish they went for the I-war flight engine. That was truely spectacular. Full Newtonian, side-slipping with retro thrusters, 6-degrees of freedom.
Here's a let's play of it if you've never come across it before.
[video=youtube;e7BNFURTgGs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7BNFURTgGs[/video]
That's pretty much par for the course with any game's development. It's just not a process the public usually gets to see. Normally triple-A games only get announced when they are almost finished already... and have already gone through multiple iterations in all parts of their design, code and art assets.
But I thought we were specifically talking about refactoring textures/materials for real-time raytracing. What do you think is there, specifically, that needs to be changed for this tech to work?
Oh, right, you were just generally venting at CIG out of frustration and uninformed cynicism and not even discussing the actual topic I was talking about.
Last edited:
Not in their seventh year, and while in what's supposed to be an alpha stage, it isn't.
Par for the course in game development is to have clear feature freezes that you then use as a basis for going forward. You do not shift goal-posts or revise components or change engine capabilities at that point because it's such an immensely bad idea to do so. All doing so does is land you in the kind of never-progressing quagmire that CIG has found itself in for the last couple of years.
It was par for the course in the development of Duke 4 and Daikatana. They've been quite famous for a very closely related reason…
Normally, triple-A games get announced when the licensing is complete, or, if it's a long-standing franchise, a few months after the last game was released and sales numbers are in, just to show that the company isn't abandoning the IP. The iterations on design and code happen before they start to assemble them into a whole, because those are the one that defines the budget of what can (and should) be done; iterations on art assets happen when art budgets are determined (this is something quite different from iterations on concepts).
The venting at CIG has nothing to do with cynicism, but on the fact that they're very clearly and explicitly not doing it right. They're iterating on art without knowing the performance target they have to work with; they iterate on code before the designs are complete; they iterate on designs as new art is invented. This means that they're not actually iterating — they're just wasting time on things that have to be thrown away. There is nothing to iterate on because it's fundamentally junk.
In this particular case, a new rendering technique would mean that they'd go back to zero on almost everything they have because of the late-stage interdependency of all those details. They will never have the time they need to actually design the core fundaments of the game that would determine when, where, how, and if that technique should be used.
Last edited:
Obviously SC has a far grander scope and vision than most AAA games, which usually have the sense to keep their scope in check, and in realistic constraints.
In case of SC, I believe they'll probably drop a large chunk of what they've planned and promised at some point and deliver a more trimmed down product, hoping their backers will accept it. Or it will end up something like the situation with ED, where it's a continually developed game and they keep saying the missing features will come at some future update and will only be a truly "finished" game once it's finally sunsetted.
I'm not sure what you're going on about here. It's not like I'm here to defend SC or anything of the like. I came here to talk about real-time raytracing because that interests me.
Which particular details are you referring to? You talk like you know something, but you're not going into any detail.
The poster I was replying to, appeared to make the statement (to paraphrase) "CIG has failed at doing some other things, so they must fail at implementing RTX as well"
Which stinks like a clear logical fallacy to me, basically rooted in cynicism. The poster did not go into detail why implementing RTX would be particularly difficult, or why CIG would fail at it. You haven't done anything to explain the reasoning behind that thinking either, other than the same "they were perceived as having failed at some other unrelated thing too!"
Last edited:
Nah. SC has the same scope and vision as just about any ambitious space game since the 1980s. The problem is that part of being realistic, which Chris has always failed at (cf. Freelancer — the exact same game, but with proper constraints in place that eventually forced him out). The difference is that those games turn limitation into creativity, which is how creative and interesting things are always made.
I'm going on about how what CIG does can never be considered “par for the course” outside of a couple of completely disastrous projects, where the main contributing factor to their ending up that way was exactly that they chose that particular course (and consequently failed to even score a par).
They are working backwards, focusing on producing high-detail art assets to sell to their customers, and never getting around to actually nailing down the critical parameters of what those assets should be able to do; of how high the detail can be to allow them to do those things; and of — only then — actually figuring out what tricks they need to employ to deliver the kind of look they're after.
If CIG were to suddenly introduce a new rendering technique, they'd have to scrap the one thing they have nailed down: the art. Again, remember that they don't know their rendering budget yet because they don't know anything about what else the computer has to process at the same time, so whatever they produce for this new rendering technique can only ever accidentally be right by pure chance. Most likely, they'll overdo it (because: no idea of the budget) and have to throw it all away again should they ever actually get to the stage of figuring out that budget.
You'd be right that this would be reasonably easy to add at a later stage, but that's assuming that every layer underneath is set. You know what players will do; you know how much stuff will be shown on-screen as they do those things; you know how much work this means for the hardware; you know how much of a margin you have to play with to add this new neat tech. CIG knows none of those things — indeed, upper management have actively discouraged and scoffed at the notion of trying to work against a known rendering budget.
The detail level of art assets. The one thing they have done a lot of work on, and the one thing they have no way of nailing down at the moment — the one thing they must know before they can try some new fancy tech that they come across.
…and that statement is not based on cynicism but in the simple fact that they're not doing it right. Those “other things” are the same class as RTX, so consistent failure at implementing one points pretty squarely towards failure at implementing the other. There's nothing to suggest that they'd accidentally do it right this time.
Last edited:
No space game ever has delivered the scope that SC has promised. Dreams and promises don't count. What is your point?
Considering this is a PC game, the exact rendering budget would depend on what hardware the end user has. So they would have to deliver multiple levels of detail in any case, if they want any sort of scalability.
Almost certainly RTX will be something that can be offered as a toggleable option in the graphics settings for those GPU's that support it, not something that requires the entire art pipeline being specifically tailored for it and making it incompatible with other types of rendering. Sure, it might turn out the art is not perfectly optimised for it, and it might turn out too heavy for most people to run on their hardware (but we can't really know since that hardware is not out and we don't even know when the game, OR the hardware would actually be released - unless you know something about the subject I don't) but as far as I can see, there is no reason why the current, existing assets would outright not work, as is.
That pertains to RTX, how? It's more about how surfaces, lights, shadows and materials are rendered, and less about the geometry.
- Status