The Star Citizen Thread v9

[sovapid]

QD is a disguised loading screen.

It is not. You can drop out of QT at anytime. You can modify your ship status in QT. You can see other players position update during QT. I can fly a small ship out of a big ship during QT. Multiple players running around in a ship in QT can interact.

[The train,] It's another loading screen.

It is not. Multiple players running around in the train see each other. I can fly a ship along side the train and you will see me moving along side the train.

I will give you this, they have gone to all the trouble to not need loading screens, but are implementing game mechanics that might as well be a loading screen.

 

[DLewth]

I will give you this, they have gone to all the trouble to not need loading screens, but are implementing game mechanics that might as well be a loading screen.

It's one of the strangest choices I've ever seen, and I'm one of the weirdos who actually liked the Mass Effect elevator talks. Seriously, 1000 years in the future, artificial gravity has been invented, but we're still hopping around on the Piccadilly Line?

At least the QT times are completely arbitrary and may be fixed, but the trains are just... odd.

 

[metatheurgist]

CIG is missing an opportunity by not making a video of Women riding sandworms for their next con.

 

[TenakaFurey]

It is not. You can drop out of QT at anytime. You can modify your ship status in QT. You can see other players position update during QT. I can fly a small ship out of a big ship during QT. Multiple players running around in a ship in QT can interact.

Absolutely none of which means the game isn't loading in the planet I would be travelling to. Which...it would need to do at some point. The game isn't going to be storing the data of an entire system, planet or even city in memory at any one point in time. That wouldn't be possible so of course it is going to load planetary data in at some point.

Arguing otherwise isn't going to make that truth false. When I leave point A, I have the data for point A in memory...when I have arrive at point B I will need the data for point B so somewhere along that journey, that data got swapped.

QD is a loading screen of the type so many backers said wasn't going to exist. What do you think NCB and OCS do?

And...I'm not complaining. Short of requiring enough memory to store all the map data at once (and not many players have supercomputers) or having a compression routine good enough to allow such data to fit in memory (at which point CIGs money issues would be over), such activity would be necessary.

My issues are
1....why does it take so long?
2....QD does nothing to enhance the sense of scale of the universe. QD didn't make me feel space was big the way supercruise does....it made me feel I was in a long tunnel. Maybe I am alone in this, but if I'm not, then QD fails at one of its tasks....to impart a sense of scale.

Like it or not....QD (and, by extension, train rides and elevators and so on) appear to be the usual hidden loading screens between mapzones so many games have used.

You seem to be arguing that because I'm not looking at a static screen with the word "loading" that I'm not seeing a loading screen. Welcome to 2018.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Not really. It actually is a fair bit of work, the overwhelming majority of backers are dudes, there is little monetization to be done. Honestly, I think the average whale would be more impressed by ice cubes and trains than female models.

Look at any MMO and see how many people walking around are using female avatars, and its pretty certain a vast majority are dudes.

There is a reason people say MMORPG stands for Mainly Men Online Role Playing Girls.

 

[sovapid]

Absolutely none of which means the game isn't loading in the planet I would be travelling to. Which...it would need to do at some point. The game isn't going to be storing the data of an entire system, planet or even city in memory at any one point in time. That wouldn't be possible so of course it is going to load planetary data in at some point.

Arguing otherwise isn't going to make that truth false. When I leave point A, I have the data for point A in memory...when I have arrive at point B I will need the data for point B so somewhere along that journey, that data got swapped.

QD is a loading screen of the type so many backers said wasn't going to exist. What do you think NCB and OCS do?

And...I'm not complaining. Short of requiring enough memory to store all the map data at once (and not many players have supercomputers) or having a compression routine good enough to allow such data to fit in memory (at which point CIGs money issues would be over), such activity would be necessary.

My issues are
1....why does it take so long?
2....QD does nothing to enhance the sense of scale of the universe. QD didn't make me feel space was big the way supercruise does....it made me feel I was in a long tunnel. Maybe I am alone in this, but if I'm not, then QD fails at one of its tasks....to impart a sense of scale.

Like it or not....QD (and, by extension, train rides and elevators and so on) appear to be the usual hidden loading screens between mapzones so many games have used.

You seem to be arguing that because I'm not looking at a static screen with the word "loading" that I'm not seeing a loading screen. Welcome to 2018.

Sure, fine. Yes the game is constantly loading and unloading assets: ergo the entire game is a loading screen.

Look at any MMO and see how many people walking around are using female avatars, and its pretty certain a vast majority are dudes.

There is a reason people say MMORPG stands for Mainly Men Online Role Playing Girls.

Female character = smaller hit box = i'm playing as a female character.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

QD is a disguised loading screen.

LIES! SC has no loading screens, unlike that other space game that has loading screens.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Female character = smaller hit box = i'm playing as a female character.

That's not usually the reason i'm pretty sure.

I think its something to do with beeeeeewbs.

 

[sovapid]

LIES! SC has no loading screens, unlike that other space game that has loading screens.

Yeah, but that other space games does the loading screens so well you hardly realize they are loading screens.

 

[Asp Explorer]

So that's why they needed multiple mocap studios!!!!!

 

[DLewth]

Female character = smaller hit box = i'm playing as a female character.

I always played as Slash (think I remembered that right) in my Quake days, not because I identify as an an annoying girl on hoverskates but because she was annoyingly hard to hit...

 

[Barking_Mad]

lmao! Do some lady gets put off years ago about no female avatar and now wants to complain about it. Read her tweets. She’s an idiot. The power of the internet, everyone thinks their opinions matter.

Well she's a 3D character artist for Ubisoft, so she knows what creating a female model would involve. So there is that.

And theyve spent God knows how many hours creating ship models and then redesigning them over and over again yet they didn't bother to take the time to create a female character model. It is pretty lame.

 

[Cmdr-Wotherspoon]

Well she's a 3D character artist for Ubisoft, so she knows what creating a female model would involve. So there is that.

And theyve spent God knows how many hours creating ship models and then redesigning them over and over again yet they didn't bother to take the time to create a female character model. It is pretty lame.

It gives Chris and Sandi something to make forced jokes about on Around the Verse.

And I do like the suggestion from Liz Edwards that they may not have introduced the female avatar because programming the "jiggle mechanic" may be too difficult. I do hope there's not a jiggle mechanic.

 

[Cobra1984]

Well she's a 3D character artist for Ubisoft, so she knows what creating a female model would involve. So there is that.

Well Ubisoft have a working, scaleable, dynamic animation system.

CIG can show you some stuff in an editor and do a lot of waffling.

They've had the female models for years, they even tweeted them - in editor of course.

 

[Cmdr-Wotherspoon]

I will give you this, they have gone to all the trouble to not need loading screens, but are implementing game mechanics that might as well be a loading screen.

I'm not sure if CIG has decided whether it's a game or a simulator yet. Real space flight involves a lot of waiting: however, if I have 90 minutes to have a play in Star Citizen, I don't want to spend more than half that time getting somewhere I can start playing. Let's hope CIG tunes the travel times down a bit: if we can have one-sixth size planets, surely we can have faster quantum travel?

 

[Cobra1984]

One counter-argument would be that this is a self-made issue; they could just make them the same size. We're a thousand years into the future, you really dont need to postpone something as basic as female models because they have to be a few feet/inch/yards/whatever non-metric thing shorter. To me it sounds like a convenient excuse.

Female mocap does not translate to a male model, even if the model heights are the same. Any animator will tell you this.

It's the insistence upon using expensive mocap instead of a modern animation system that is the problem - a very old and unresolved problem in the engine, none of this was designed or specced for and none of it was ever built.

It's a shoestring budget, poorly designed, backwards built engine trying to cope with platinum budget assets and very expensive mocap data.

And that's why all the experienced devs quit and that's why there will never ever be a commercial release.

 

[Skizomeuh]

The whole "women avatars" thingie puzzles me... And even more while looking at how everything released by CIG so far has been so perfectly baked it tastes like raw. Anims are clunky, avatar faces are hideous

- Many animations to be (re)done? we!l... mocap retargeting anyone?
- Not the same sizes? well... first, see previous point. Second, hey why women should be less tall (let alone from a pure balance point of view, shouldn't everyone have the same hitbox by the way)? Fidelity? why no variations on male sizes too then? How do you explain this one?
- Too much assets to be done? Don't they already have enough ready after 5+ years?

I think that, as always, decisions are made, reflexion on what are the consequences of the said decisions and how to implement takes place years later and the decisions changed multiple times along the way.

 

[Viajero]

if we can have one-sixth size planets, surely we can have faster quantum travel?

This is precisely one of the aspects of this development that has yet to receive a proper answer. Been discussed many times before. Travel speed is one of the levers you have to balance and adjust gameplay and playability indeed. But CIG seems to have decided not to touch those QT speeds at all, for years. It is also worth noting that somehow CIG has been also incapable of making that QT be controlled by the player (it is stuck as a straight line and at fixed velocity) in any shape or form.

Personally I think these are hints that not all is well in the 64b positioning conversion CIG attempted some time back. Conversely the planets scale is also a lever to play with to make games playable and balanced. But for a game that prides itself on being the epitome of fidelity it is also very puzzling to see that worlds are 1/6 to 1/10th of actual scales. 1:1 scale should not be an issue for playability if you have proper procedural generation technology and can also increase travel speeds commensurately to reduce travel times. But CIG seems stuck at the 0.2c QT speed in straight line.

As mentioned I think all these suggest technical limitations or serious issues in both their procedural tech and the 64b positioning conversion.

 

[Zyll Goliat]

Sure, fine. Yes the game is constantly loading and unloading assets: ergo the entire game is a loading screen.

I am curious......Do you honestly believe that whole Hurston and other planets/moons is been loaded on the beginning of the game?

 

[TenakaFurey]

Sure, fine. Yes the game is constantly loading and unloading assets: ergo the entire game is a loading screen.

Did you have a point or is today your day to be petulant?

This type of solution was inevitable. Maybe you weren't amongst the CIG backers who previously denounced attempts to explain this as "lies" coming from "haters" but as things stand, the question was ALWAYS more about how well CIG would hide the loading screens than whether such activity took place.

It turns out....about as well as many others.

This isn't a problem for anyone who didn't buy into CIGs overhyped promises and technical explanations. "No loading screens" is what was promised...seamless transition...and they succeeded.

Mostly. As I said, it seems fairly obvious where loading takes place, but the games performance is so weak that it's impossible to determine if loading had any impact. But you have a number of small zones in the city connected by tunnels and those small zones appear designed to corral you into travel using those tunnels.

Or, as I found out, straight down when the world decided the floor didn't exist.

That's a typical layout using traditional smoke and mirrors for game map design and I'm not seeing any issue here, not seeing any problem....other than CIG appear to be using technical solutions that have been in use for decades and that certain backers had a greater expectation about "seamless" and "no loading screen" than was technically feasible.