The Star Citizen Thread

[Bains]

Wing Commander, TIE-Fighter, Descent: Freespace = Space Sims

Star Citizen = Space Sim

=

I'm an expert.




Wow......... It's so easy to become an expert these days.

(Yes, I did play both TIE-Fighter and Descent: Freespace. Two of my favourite games ever.)

Out of interest what did you think of X wing, give that Tie Fighter was a sequel? LOL

 

[Boomotang]

If you can show me a single post that you have made to date where you acknowledge a subject has been touched on that you can not speak about as a peerless expert I will happily retract my statement. Good luck with that.

You thrive on the off topic...


If you can prove to me that Wing Commander, TIE-Fighter, and Descent: Freespace weren't space sims, then I will relinquish the crown of 'expert' that YOU so graciously bestowed upon me. Hahaha!

 

[Sir.Tj]

Thread will be closed to allow a cooling off period.

It will reopen later when forum members are able to discuss the game without sniping at each other.

 

[Boomotang]

So they're starting to release some information on Capital Ship gameplay. Pretty cool stuff. I thought this was interesting.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/2615293/#Comment_2615293

Firstly I'd like to state the in JP this month they wanted to show work in progress and the thought process we have gone through. It's in no way supposed to suggest that any design at this stage is set in stone. As any developer worth their salt will tell you, once implementation begins things change - that's a given.

We did start out having ship roles - a science officer, weapons officer etc. However we quickly realized that, with that set up, you will always need a fixed amount of people to run a ship. The concept works well for a single player campaign like Squadron 42 where you serve on a UEE vessel. In fact we will probably run with something very similar to what you have written above.

In the PU things are different - you may not want to imagine that you are on a UEE ship and this is where the concept of "seat actions" really took off. Seat actions are separate tasks that can be assigned to individual crew stations. By default, say when you buy an Idris, these seat actions will be applied to crew stations in a logical fashion so you and your crew can just jump in and fly.

However because of the flexibility of seat actions we wanted the player to be able to assign as many or as few seat actions to stations as they wish in the persistent universe. Using this system you could fly a cap ship with just a few very skilled crew members or assign fewer tasks to a greater number of stations. Your choice!

Of course, using this system you do lose the idea of crew roles but the functionality and flexibility is there for you to make and assign those roles yourself. For example you could assign just radar and long range sensors to a station and call it your "Threat Assessment Station" or assign radar, navigation, comms and name it "Ops". If you want to imagine that your ship is a UEE vessel you could give your crew official titles. Or you may be part of an organisation which assigns its own crew roles.

I love their goal of making it customizable. This way certain orgs can tailer cap ship SOPs to how they run their ops, and the number of crewmen that they usually have available.

 

[Thargon]

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather they concentrate on the core gameplay and just get something released - i.e. the DFM/PU with SQ42 with nothing more.

Stop adding more features, and adding more complexity until they get something out the door. Extend it when they have something to show by all means, but they are making a rod for their own back by promising all this stuff, and increasing the features day by day when nothing has been released yet.

 

[Mr.Nowak]

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather they concentrate on the core gameplay and just get something released - i.e. the DFM/PU with SQ42 with nothing more.

Stop adding more features, and adding more complexity until they get something out the door. Extend it when they have something to show by all means, but they are making a rod for their own back by promising all this stuff, and increasing the features day by day when nothing has been released yet.

You guys are looking at CIG with a very narrow view. Everything is being developed at once by a huge team. Also these features were one of the earliest promises and will make the game way more interesting.

People look at Star Citizen as if it is being developed by a team of 50 people working on the Dogfighting Module aka Arena Commander but there are 200 more developers working on all aspects of the game.

 

[Boomotang]

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather they concentrate on the core gameplay and just get something released - i.e. the DFM/PU with SQ42 with nothing more.

Stop adding more features, and adding more complexity until they get something out the door. Extend it when they have something to show by all means, but they are making a rod for their own back by promising all this stuff, and increasing the features day by day when nothing has been released yet.

This has been planned for quite a long time. The design team can't fix bugs to help release AC any sooner. Neither can the 3D modellers or concept artists. The list goes on.

They aren't increasing the planned features day by day. Capital ships are part of the DFM, just not it's first release build, and it's only because they take longer to develop. (plus they chose a single seater fighter to be their test bed for future development) Don't you get that? It's a 'combined arms' environment that is part of the core gameplay. A lot of that functionality is applied to smaller multi-crew ships like the Constellation. It's what SC is. It may take a little longer to develop because it has a bigger scope. But that's what we WANT.

If you have a big plan, you don't just develop the individual parts in isolation one after another. That's a sure fire way to disaster. You've gotta think about the big picture throughout the whole process.

 

[Neo-ST]

So they're starting to release some information on Capital Ship gameplay. Pretty cool stuff. I thought this was interesting.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/2615293/#Comment_2615293



I love their goal of making it customizable. This way certain orgs can tailer cap ship SOPs to how they run their ops, and the number of crewmen that they usually have available.

Capital ships are gonna be such a chaos...
Good team coordination is not something people over internet do best. If anyone here plays BF3/4, you'll know what I mean.

 

[Mr.Nowak]

Capital ships are gonna be such a chaos...
Good team coordination is not something people over internet do best. If anyone here plays BF3/4, you'll know what I mean.

If you want good team coordination check out : http://www.realitymod.com/

Best public teamwork game i have ever seen hands down. A lot of players from there also got Star Citizen.

Also the fact that you can hire NPC's to take capital ship positions is a good alternative. If you don't have a group of people that can teamplay very well as a team you can hire NPC's.

 

[Boomotang]

Capital ships are gonna be such a chaos...
Good team coordination is not something people over internet do best. If anyone here plays BF3/4, you'll know what I mean.

Have you played in a coordinated PlanetSide 2 outfit?

 

[Mr.Nowak]

Have you played in a coordinated PlanetSide 2 outfit?

Not only that but any ship that has more than 1 user is generally aimed to be a co op ship so you won't be stuck in a Constallation with random dudes on the internet that you don't know (Unless you are being boarded). It's either people you know from your organisation or the NPC's that you hire to man them.

 

[intel]

Chris is giving people more Toilet paper to keep them happy as it seems. But these Toilet paper come with UEE figure on it

Anyways to collect money they have been constantly making so many Promises. But the lesson I have learned from Game development Industry is developers will try anything to get its product Over Hyped and then not fulfill even half of those promises.

 

[Evenios]

gotta say im pretty ticked off at the way they are handling things right now. I think the damn thing has become a overhyped PR train. Frustrating enough that they waited nearly half a year to release a module they wanted to 6 months ago only to have it delay and even after they fixed the magical "major" bugs that popped up they STILL cant release it. They seriously need to throttle down on the whole damn hype train and work on actually getting stuff out to us. I say if the damn arena commander isnt released today then they should just delay it a week or two and stop teasing us (and frustrating both them and us) with this pardon me, crap about the daily go or no go thing.

then again on the other side of the pond you have Elite Dangerous beta which brings NOTHING new to the game and it has quite a few frustrating bugs that the devs are silent when a patch or update is coming and silent on when any actual new features are coming.

so dunno if im entirely happy with the way either project is going at the moment.

i sure as hell hope that they actually add some new features into "premium" beta otherwise what the hell is so "premium about it"? other then getting it before "standard" beta?

 

[Memnoch]

They seriously need to throttle down on the whole damn hype train and work on actually getting stuff out to us.

I never followed the Kickstarter and subsequent money drives or even the forums for that matter. So I don't know when it started or whether it was there from the beginning but I think I first realised something was up when I started seeing things like the Wingman's Hangar videos.

I kept thinking "Who are all these people?" Are they the developers? Marketing folk?!

I sincerely hope this works out for them all, I really do. I can imagine a future job interview:

"So, what did you do between 2012 and 2016?"
"Marketing for Star Citizen" <innocent stare>
"Thanks for your time!"...

Perhaps it's just a British thing, or even a "me" thing, but those videos just don't sit right we me at all.

 

[Iskariot]

Perhaps it's just a British thing, or even a "me" thing, but those videos just don't sit right we me at all.

It's not just a British thing I can assure you.
I have played a few of Roberts' games and enjoyed them and I will most likely play SC, but the whole approach does not feel good to me. Roberts' is somewhat known for promising more than he can deliver. I will just wait and see what will come of this. I hope it will be a fun game. But I think I might be too deeply involved in ED by the time SC sees a release. For me ED is a 'lifelong' dream come true after all. It is higher on my list of priorities than SC.

then again on the other side of the pond you have Elite Dangerous beta which brings NOTHING new to the game and it has quite a few frustrating bugs that the devs are silent when a patch or update is coming and silent on when any actual new features are coming.

I think the initial beta has been released mostly to discover what happens when a lot of new players join in the fray.
You are partaking in a controlled experiment so to speak. It should not be viewed as a game as such... yet.

 

[Andrew Sayers]

dunno if im entirely happy with the way either project is going at the moment.

Both projects are at tough points in their development cycles right now, but here's some context that might help...

Daily go/no-go meetings are a decent enough management strategy internally, but people come to them with all sorts of information we don't have - from complex graphs to the looks on their teams' faces. Star Citizen's unprecedented transparency puts them in a weird limbo state, where they show just enough for people to feel their pain, but not enough to have their confidence. On the other hand, regularly crunching people through weekends increases the number of silly mistakes they make (i.e. blockers) and reduces their ability to diagnose and fix those blockers, so I agree a weekly schedule will become more sensible if Arena Commander doesn't come out soon.

As to ED's premium beta - they haven't added any big features since alpha 4 was released, and it seems like their focus is on scaling issues around the start of beta. They averaged about one release per month during the alpha, so I reckon we'll see something interesting in a couple of weeks when they've got a better handle on things.

 

[Mr.Nowak]

I never followed the Kickstarter and subsequent money drives or even the forums for that matter. So I don't know when it started or whether it was there from the beginning but I think I first realised something was up when I started seeing things like the Wingman's Hangar videos.

I kept thinking "Who are all these people?" Are they the developers? Marketing folk?!

I sincerely hope this works out for them all, I really do. I can imagine a future job interview:

"So, what did you do between 2012 and 2016?"
"Marketing for Star Citizen" <innocent stare>
"Thanks for your time!"...

Perhaps it's just a British thing, or even a "me" thing, but those videos just don't sit right we me at all.

The guy who is running Wingmans Hangar Eric Peterson is the head of CIG Austin. He is in charge of more than 60 developers. Nearly as big as the Elite : Dangerous team.

 

[fourty6to3]

It's as if CIG is trying really hard to find any excuse they can to not release anything, possibly because they've been giving us the run-a-round this whole time? Not sure.

Seems I should start looking into the grey market soon and figure out my options for dumping some cargo. Something about this just isn't sitting right, especially since "official word" seems to change from one day to the next. Who's running things over there?

 

[Mr.Nowak]

It's as if CIG is trying really hard to find any excuse they can to not release anything, possibly because they've been giving us the run-a-round this whole time? Not sure.

Seems I should start looking into the grey market soon and figure out my options for dumping some cargo. Something about this just isn't sitting right, especially since "official word" seems to change from one day to the next. Who's running things over there?

What official word is changing?

If you want to dump some cargo then head to http://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades be sure to read the Scam warning.

 

[Vargur]

The marketing seems to be indeed their weak point.
They have lot's of advertisement and ways to generate more funding, but their communication seems to be allover the place and very unprofessional.
You would have thought that after the 5th time they missed an estimated release they would refrain from giving people possible release dates anymore until all is 100% certain.
Just saying "it's done when it's done" would suffice, they can give out additional information inbetween about their bugfixes, CIG's internal workings and techdemo's without giving people false hope.
The only reason why they can get away with this is that those 500k people are invested into the game and really have no reason to not want to play the game anymore, since they basically already bought it.