Lladre posted:

Don't be "that" guy.

Sunswipe posted:

Be THIS guy.
*crotch thrust*

Tippis posted:

TheAgent posted:

Total in 2013: $28,446,117
Total in 2014: $32,933,205 (14% bump from previous year)
Total in 2015: $35,961,202 (8.5% bump from previous year)
Total in 2016: $36,100,538 (.4% bump from previous year)
Total in 2017 (three days of funding remain): $34,592,496 (4.2% drop from previous year)

this will be the first year star citizen hasn't grown in funding

BigglesSWE posted:

Oh God I miss him. His episode from the 4th season was probably the best.

-MY GOD!
-Yes, I suppose I am!

TheAgent posted:

its also hard to believe that the 3.0 hype has been touted for almost 2 years

where does the time go

(it goes into ing)

big nipples big life posted:

you have a google alert for your own name

big nipples big life posted:

there is no hype for 3.0, 3.0 is just a minor patch. all the real changes are coming in 3.1 or 3.2

big nipples big life posted:

there is no hype for 3.0, 3.0 is just a minor patch. all the real changes are coming in 3.1 or 3.2

iospace posted:

TheAgent posted:

I think you mean 4.0, as the 3.x series is just laying the groundwork for their expanded pipelines

now that the basics are in place, content will start coming at a much faster pace

Tippis posted:

Alternatively, in your case:

spacetoaster posted:

What show is that?

Also, if any of you like cool RPG's divinity 2 ain't bad.

spacetoaster posted:

What show is that?

Also, if any of you like cool RPG's divinity 2 ain't bad.

big nipples big life posted:

there is no hype for 3.0, 3.0 is just a minor patch. all the real changes are coming in 3.1 or 3.2

celewign posted:

I like how it's immediately obvious that people spent their Christmas money from their parents on the game.

Xaerael posted:

AH! I need to know the name of that game.

quote:

How I crashed into a planet at 1,500 kilometers per hour

Charlie Hall
Dec 29, 2017, 10:00am EST

With the release of Alpha Patch 3.0.0, Star Citizen’s persistent universe (PU) has received a major upgrade. After a few hours with the latest build, it’s very clearly still a work-in-progress. New features like atmospheric flight set the game apart from its peers, both in the fidelity of the experience and in the science fiction that underlies it. But a poor user interface and pernicious bugs make it incredibly frustrating to play.

The Alpha Patch adds three new, planet-sized moons to the game and, along with them, the ability to perform planetary landings. Figuring out how to get from point A to point B took quite a bit of work. Here’s what I’ve been able to figure out so far.

When you drop into the PU, you’re placed on board the Port Olisar space station, above the planet Crusader. The planet’s three new moons — Yela, Daymar and Cellin — are tens of thousands of kilometers away. To reach one, you first need to open up your MobiGlas, which is a holographic menu system that you project from your left wrist. It’s cool, but also unnecessarily complicated. The color choices and various bugs in the display mean you can hardly read it at times. Nevertheless, you use the mouse and keyboard to manipulate a holographic map in front of you, choose a destination and then hop in your ship.

But let’s say that that you want to go to the moon Cellin, and it’s on the other side of Crusader from you. You obviously can’t fly a straight line from Port Olisar to Cellin without crashing into Crusader.

Also, since the game is nowhere near finished, Crusader hasn’t actually been built yet.

Instead, you have to travel between a series of navigational beacons that sit in high orbit around Crusader. Once you move to the right beacon, the planet is no longer in the way, and you’ll be able to plot a straight line to Cellin.

Movement from beacon to beacon is accomplished via your ship’s quantum drive. It folds the space in front of your ship and allows you to travel at about one-fifth the speed of light. That means the hop from Port Olisar to the correct navigational beacon only takes a few seconds. Once Crusader is out of the way, it’s only a few seconds more until you’re in orbit over Cellin.

Here’s where things get a little screwy.

Let’s say that you want to reach a particular point on Cellin, like a mine or a farm. They’re scattered all around the surface of the planet, and each of them shows up as a blue square on your heads-up display along with its linear distance from your ship. But some of those locations will be on the other side of the moon from you. Right now, there’s no indication that they are.

Bugs we encountered

We found several challenging bugs in Alpha Patch 3.0.0. First off, the implementation of TrackIR support is not ideal. The view floats around, even with a large dead zone, and requires a reset of the system’s center point every minute or so. I’ve resorted to flying without it for now.

The issues with the UI overall were most troubling. At times, the in-cockpit HUD would fail to display and I had to switch back and forth between third-person and first-person views to get it to show up at all. The MobiGlas menu was difficult to read when backlit by the dashboard display in some ships, and it seemed to change brightness at times.

The most challenging bug was a ghosted image of the MobiGlas that remained in my field of view, no matter what I did. It seemed to be complicated by the shadows being cast by Crusader’s central star. The only solution was to reboot the game entirely, losing any progress that I’d made.

Of the six times that I closed it, the program crashed five times and required me to manually kill it through Windows Task Manager. ()

All of these bugs were found, with evidence of them being repeatable either in part or in whole, on the Star Citizen bug-tracking system.

I flew into Cellin at 1,500 kilometers per hour before I figured that out.

The workaround is that pilots must use dead reckoning to guess if the point of interest they want to visit is on the hemisphere that they’re facing, and then use Cellin’s own set of navigational beacons to move to the correct side of the moon and begin their descent.

What’s frustrating is that, outside of using a ship’s quantum drive, spaceflight is relatively slow, given the distances involved. Elite: Dangerous solves this problem with an in-between speed, called supercruise, that lets you orbit a planet relatively quickly. But in Star Citizen quantum flight and navigational beacons is the only way to go. It’s an in-fiction choice, and one that makes gameplay dramatically different.

Back to my two crash landings.

I was aiming at a landing point that was on the other side of the planet from me. That was clearly a mistake, but one that was very easy to make. As I began my descent, I had some 800 kilometers to go, so I pegged the throttle at about 1,500 kph and sat back.

Minutes passed, and my concentration drifted.

When I looked back at my screen, my HUD was telling me that I had another 300 kilometers or so to go. But the ground completely filled my view. I became disoriented and unsure of where my horizon was.

Cellin is basically a barren wasteland. With no points of reference like buildings, cities, rivers or towns, it was difficult to tell just how close the ground I was. Imagine standing in a perfectly white room and running at a plain white wall at full speed, and you’ll begin to understand the dangers involved.

The first time it happened, I died on impact. The second time, I bounced.

My second crash. I thought I had another 500 kilometers to go. The mountain range I was looking at turned out to be a series of low hills. The bounce was unexpected, and likely a bug. (There’s a lot of that going around, friend...)

Losing the horizon and misjudging your distance from objects like the ground and mountains is a big danger for real-world pilots. Becoming “instrument rated” is therefore a big step in the life of a budding pilot, as it means that you have the skills and the experience necessary to use the instrumentation there in the cockpit to keep yourself and your passengers safe. (Ya ever heard the story of the pilot who could land a plane in real life but couldn’t land a ship in Star Citizen, Charlie? Good times!)

Right now, Star Citizen’s other features, including its instrumentation, are both incomplete and buggy. That makes flying ships close to the surface much harder than it should be.

Testing the Alpha Patch was further evidence that the team at Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games could stand to focus a bit more on the basics of flight. To me, the joy of a spaceflight simulation is the joy of maneuver. If you’re not having any fun simply flying the ship around, then you’re not having any fun at all.

The Titanic posted:

It’s called Immortal. Slowbeef actually did a great LP of it:

https://youtu.be/KA1kIBwGhrk

G0RF posted:

Oh dear, Charlie Hall is taking a break from telling readers about how Star Citizen is leap-frogging Elite and actually describing his player experience with 3.0. It actually makes for good reading in places, though the deferential interjections seem tonally incongruent.

POLYGON: Star Citizen’s bugs will get you killed


You know, when you stop and think about it, if the core mechanic in your $175 million Space Sim is a frustratingly-designed funkiller after five years, maybe - just maybe - Star Citizen is bad?

Imagine that gnawing feeling in your stomach if you’re a game journalist whose been hyping a dumpster fire for years... Your commitment to the defense was such that you planned even to dox the evil goon in the wheelchair who dared fight for and win a refund...

...but then a couple years later it slowly dawns on you that maybe the biggest publicly funding gaming project in history is actually bad by design, hopelessly behind, beset by potentially existentially fatal lawsuits, and maybe even on target to be THE BIG ONE, the disaster that makes everything from E.T. to Daikatana to Duke Nukem Forever all look like amateur hour botches... so maybe refunds actually were morally justified. Maybe the critics you saw as bad guys actually had a point all along, and you had the power and the platform to have said the same. You could’ve served the public interest in the process but you just couldn’t see what it was even though that was technically your job and it was standing right in front of you like some idiot colossus, staring you in the face.

There’s no shame in reassessing one’s possession when you find yourself on the wrong side of the good. You can still think Derek is a big obnoxious blowhard, and that some of the trolls are too vicious, and that the failures of the project were scope, skill, design and project management ones instead of systematic scamming of the most pathological kind. There’s lots of room for nuance on the right side against a wrong — you just have to get there before you can find it.

quote:

New features like atmospheric flight set the game apart from its peers, both in the fidelity of the experience and in the science fiction that underlies it.

quote:

Testing the Alpha Patch was further evidence that the team at Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games could stand to focus a bit more on the basics of flight. To me, the joy of a spaceflight simulation is the joy of maneuver. If you’re not having any fun simply flying the ship around, then you’re not having any fun at all.

G0RF posted:

There’s no shame in reassessing one’s possession when you find yourself on the wrong side of the good. You can still think Derek is a big obnoxious blowhard, and that some of the trolls are too vicious, and that the failures of the project were scope, skill, design and project management ones instead of systematic scamming of the most pathological kind. There’s lots of room for nuance on the right side against a wrong — you just have to get there before you can find it.

The Titanic posted:

This is both a sad and true thought.

G0RF posted:

Oh dear, Charlie Hall is taking a break from telling readers about how Star Citizen is leap-frogging Elite and actually describing his player experience with 3.0. It actually makes for good reading in places, though the deferential interjections seem tonally incongruent.

POLYGON: Star Citizen’s bugs will get you killed


You know, when you stop and think about it, if the core mechanic in your $175 million Space Sim is a frustratingly-designed funkiller after five years, maybe - just maybe - Star Citizen is bad?

Imagine that gnawing feeling in your stomach if you’re a game journalist whose been hyping a dumpster fire for years... Your commitment to the defense was such that you planned even to dox the evil goon in the wheelchair who dared fight for and win a refund...

...but then a couple years later it slowly dawns on you that maybe the biggest publicly funding gaming project in history is actually bad by design, hopelessly behind, beset by potentially existentially fatal lawsuits, and maybe even on target to be THE BIG ONE, the disaster that makes everything from E.T. to Daikatana to Duke Nukem Forever all look like amateur hour botches... so maybe refunds actually were morally justified. Maybe the critics you saw as bad guys actually had a point all along, and you had the power and the platform to have said the same. You could’ve served the public interest in the process but you just couldn’t see what it was even though that was technically your job and it was standing right in front of you like some idiot colossus, staring you in the face.

There’s no shame in reassessing one’s possession when you find yourself on the wrong side of the good. You can still think Derek is a big obnoxious blowhard, and that some of the trolls are too vicious, and that the failures of the project were scope, skill, design and project management ones instead of systematic scamming of the most pathological kind. There’s lots of room for nuance on the right side against a wrong — you just have to get there before you can find it.