Bumble He posted:

i hope you did not get this av yourself mate!

Dementropy posted:

It's called "emergent gameplay."

Agony Aunt posted:

Goddamn! I only just gave lowtax money for my Mumu avatar.

drat you whoever changed it!

That's a well known backer isn't it? Bad New Baron?

e: t: BNB taxxe

IcarusUpHigh posted:

I too have been experimenting with a flight model in Unreal

https://streamable.com/jbk7a

an actual frog posted:

Hello did someone say The Expense earlier?



I've no idea how that astro boy dude does it. This bs all takes waaay too much effort

Dooguk posted:

In space no one can hear you scheme.

Mendrian posted:

What is the chud/shitizen ratio anyway?

Dementropy posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

<snip> I was trying to do cargo missions last night <snip>

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Thats just some more of that magical hidden gameplay the devs managed to fit in this patch

Te-he!

Krycek posted:

Akshualee, star citizen is fully feature complete with every crobber promise fulfilled and every ship flyable. Even the banu merchantman. They just don't tell us how to find it.

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Someone archered concept art of the Banu Merchantman over on Amazon.

I don't know how the gently caress I recognized it, so, thanks Commandoes for filling me with such useless information.

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Someone archered concept art of the Banu Merchantman over on Amazon.

I don't know how the gently caress I recognized it, so, thanks Commandoes for filling me with such useless information.

Sarsapariller posted:

That complaint about the hammerhead at Grim Hex is interesting. I was trying to do cargo missions last night from there and I saw several people (including myself) get killed by what looked like an NPC hammerhead with the pirate paint job.

It was firing in the no-fire zone, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a human player? But it was very odd.

The rest of the run was me flying for 2+ hours only to have every single cargo mission glitch out and become undeliverable, but that is basically just Star Citizen and nothing worth writing about really happened.

Fidelitious posted:

I'm throwing my vote in that whatever flight model this guy makes in a week will be superior to Star Citizen as he is not suffering under croberts in his personal project.

IcarusUpHigh posted:

I too have been experimenting with a flight model in Unreal

https://streamable.com/jbk7a

IcarusUpHigh posted:

I too have been experimenting with a flight model in Unreal

https://streamable.com/jbk7a

Dementropy posted:

skeletors_condom posted:

Best aliens eva

IcarusUpHigh posted:

I too have been experimenting with a flight model in Unreal

https://streamable.com/jbk7a

an actual frog posted:

Hello did someone say The Expense earlier?



I've no idea how that astro boy dude does it. This bs all takes waaay too much effort

quote:

Case No. CV 17-08937-DMB-(FFMx) Date: July 18, 2019
Title CRYTEK GMBH v. CLOUD IMPERIUM GAMES CORP., ET AL.

Settlement conference held.

A settlement agreement is not reached. The Court understands that the parties will continue their efforts to settle the case, and they may contact the Magistrate Judge’s CRD if they wish to schedule a further settlement conference.

Several old fish in the yard posted:

I love Star Citizen because of the fact there are hundreds of hand crafted, visually customizable spaceships with their own gravity and airlock systems, each one hardware customizable with hundreds of guns, missiles and electronics etc to choose from. Just recently they added the ability to add comfort of life items to the interior of your ship like coffee makers, alarm clocks, picture frame that you can put your own pictures in etc

A lot of the ships also have a unique and niche roles, like exploration, science, mining, prospecting, building outposts, ambulances, police, criminal transport, fuel, cargo, command, fighters, bombers, news film journalist etc etc. There are multi crew ships where you and around 40 of your friends can all play on a capital ship and players can launch out in smaller player controlled fighters!

There will be a hundred hand crafted star systems on release, with dozen of planets and moons which are all 100% explorable. These planets, moons and space stations will be inhabited by billions of NPC which each individually have their own AI subsumption algorithms so it seems like they have a life. They will get up in the morning, leave their apartment, go get breakfast, go to their job at air traffic control and when they finish work, they will go to bars, meets their NPC girlfriend and go for food, do shopping then go back home. You can chat and banter with them when you request a landing spot, you can judge their mood by how and what they say that day. You can even bump into them later in the bars and buy them a drink if you think they need cheering up, it possible to block them from going to work and they will act differently depending on their character traits as well as how they have been feeling lately. So your negative actions might make them yell for the cops, or attack you or even break down and start crying!. Later on you can even hire them to be an NPC member of your crew! Like you could cause them so much strife for their personal life in game that their relationship breaks down, they are on the verge of loosing their job from stress and lack of sleep so when you step in and offer them a shoulder to dry on, then a job on one of your ships they'll leap at the chance, not only that, they'll also be grateful for the opportunity and possibly word will get out to their NPC friends or previous work mates so rather than the player having to go through the rigmarole of advertising for jobs, interviews, hiring, training and bonding with new crew the chances are you'll have a small already tight knit group of NPC's sending you their CV's pretty much begging you to give them a job. I'm hoping that NPC's that knew each other before you hire them get some sort of bonus to their stats like certainly they should hire moral, be willing to fight longer and harder because it's their friends they are fighting for not just some strangers.
Most of the time the NPC's will seem so life like that for all intents and purposes you will have no idea if it's an actual NPC or another player! So many other games pretend to have massive cities with a teaming population but in reality they are just dumb NPC, like in GTA 5 they don't even pop into existence until they come into render view range and when they do they have the most dumb basic AI that they may as well be cockroaches. Like they will walk on paths, leap out of the way of your car and run away if shot at. That's about the limit of their ability. In Star Citizen they have daily routines, jobs, relationships and families. They need to eat a certain amount of food, sleep a certain amount of hours, wash a certain number of times every day. You helping them out will go a long way to improving their lives and your chances of them doing favours for you like being put to the front of the queue when it comes to looking for a landing spot etc.

The planets have vast cities that put the city in Blade Runner to shame with dozens of intractable stores, mission givers and other players. Outside the cities and on some plants there will by hundreds of alien life forms to discover and exploit, many of them living in vast procedurally generated forests. Just landing on one of the many planets will involve potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay with mining, missions, base building, refining etc. As an example there is a great ship (a personal favourite of mine) called the Endeavor-class*. It is a fully modular space platform that can be adapted to a variety of both scientific and medical tasks. It was initially developed by MISC (an in game ship manufacturer) as a floating laboratory and can be fitted out with everything from a long range telescopy unit to a mobile hospital! Currently it will, on release, have dozens of different space science packages which will include things like advanced long range scanner to detect jump points. It comes with additional shieling so that it can conduct 'near'stellar corona' research which means it's one of the few ships that can operate in a close orbit around a Star. So not only are you able to get valuable research done, but you are safe from most enemies trying to scan you out and even if they do they probably can't get close enough to attack you without burning up lol! The ship itself looks the part, with a long thin central body which houses the main labs, then jutting out the side are 4 arms that each hold a dome. Each of the domes can be configured independently so as to have 4 distinct bio-domes that each support life of different plants.
Now at this stage of the game I'm not really interested in the ships other role as a battlefield support ship which allows the treatment of Marines and pilots to swiftly get back to the battlefront. Although I do somewhat like the idea that the internal docking bay is capable of maintaining a Cutlass Red, which is a space ambulance with basic life support and treatment equipment to keep injured players/NPCs alive long enough for the more advanced equipment on my ship to treat them properly. It may sound like it would take a long time for a fight to move away far enough that a dispatched space ambulance flown by a player can come and pick you up, treat you, fly you back to a space hospital, patch you up and get you back to the battlefront, but believe me it's a lot faster than respawning currently. There is even the option to operate 'under the radar' and go into black market surgery, where for a fee injured soldiers can be given illegal implants and augmentations to enhance their battle prowess. Indeed I think once rumors get out you are operating a top notch facility players may get intentionally injured just so they can take advantage of the under the counter upgrades you are able to offer them...

Anyway I envisage having a crew of about 7 with at least one or two support ships that come along. A typical outing would go something like this, we scan a rare jump point and qt to it, then pass through to a distant part of the universe. From there we use a the scout support ship to look at planets in the system and find the one with the most abundant life. I order my crew to fly the Endeavor over and set up an orbital patch that lets os scan the entire surface. I'll use the Telescope module to look right down at the surface and find various suitable landing places. The scout ship will then move the other planets and continue scouting. The other support ship will be something like a heavy fighter and will parasitizing our long range scanners to keep an eye out for potential threats. We undock the Cutlass Black (a small cargo, pirate style ships capable of fighting) and send an away team down to the LZ I determine to be the most interesting. Then the team do the usual stuff like taking air, soil and water samples. Then we collect various fauna like plants, seeds, saplings, animals (both dead and alive) and bring them back to the ship. The reason I'd have air, water and soil samples taken 1st is that the remaining crew on the Endeavor can calibrate one of the domes to be a suitable climate for the fauna that is being brought back up. Once the away team arrive back it's all hands on deck as we swiftly move all out exploits to the biome. We plant the saplings and seeds and make sure animals are put in the most suitable sized containment cells. Now the hard work begins, it'll be a mixture of observation and trial and error to work out best nutritional mixtures and watering schedules to get the plants to grow fastest. It helps that we can move in orbit around the Star and tilt the ship so we have the best amount of light from the Star and the plants are getting the light frequency they expect.
(I snipped out a few paragraphs here as I started rambling a bit).

Once we have established and can consistently grow the new plants and animals it's then a case of working out the most profitable ones. If it's a cute animal we can sell them at ludicrously high prices to highest bidder but will only sell one sex so other people can't breed them. Obviously with so many planets the chances of someone else stumbling upon the same animal would be almost impossible so keeping the location a secret is very important, that's where having a loyal crew comes in handy. Depending on the range of the animal, it might even be worth going back planetside and killing off as many as we can so even if someone does get the coordinates they won't find what they are looking for and might out the tattle tail.

As for the plants, they will be anylised via several of the scietific machines in the lab. The useless plants shall be killed off and the ones that produce medicine and narcotics etc will be eploited. Indeed if they turn out to be good value then I'd get one of the crew to go and set up another of the biomes so we can grow more. If we have meds or legal stim booster type drugs then that's fine we can get the Cutlass black to distribute them or hire another crew with a faster ship and more cargo to take them to trade hubs and sell in bulk. If on the other hand we find ourselves a very nice illegal drug like some sort of combat perfromence enhancing steroid then things might get a bit tricky. Obviously just flying the stuff to a regular trade hub is out the questions so we'll need some sort of ship capable of smuggling like the Taurus (a Constellation class variant) which has a smuggling hold near the pilot area which is designed to be very hard to scan.. But it's a big ship and will need a few crew so probably something smaller with one or max 2 crew would be better. Anyway smuggling is still being worked on by the Devs so we'll have to wait and see how it pans out, but I know that scan resistent cargo holds, false compartments and counter-scanning devices like sensor dampners etc have been discussed. I wonder if having a few NPC customs staff that are friendly towards you might come in very handy when bringing in illegal goods, like you've met them in bars, bought them fancy meals and drinks, chatted nicely to them when they are conducting buisness and even maybe invited them on one of your luxary ships to go watch racing etc and let them have a taste of the high life. I'm guessing it's the sort of system they will eventually add so that treating the NPC's in certain ways becomes a major part of the game where you butter them up and eventually they are happy to take backhanders to turn a blind eye when it comes to searching your ship etc.

There are at least 2 (or 3?) sentient races which have had their own unique alphabet and language written for them by an expert in alien languages. These Alien races attitudes will very subtly change over time depending on how you and all the other players interact with them. It is possible they will form some sort of alliance with you or go to war with you and all others in your faction. Their dialog on interactions will gradually change over time and may go from a friendly tone to a more hostile attitude, it's very very subtle to an untrained ear but the length of the word and pitch can be a clue as to how they feel about you. That is an almost unbelievable level of detail that I don't think exists in any other game yet!

Space battle will be beyond epic and set a new gaming standard that very few big Dev companies will be able to come close to over the next decade. Imagine you are in a capital ship with about 30 of your real life friends escorting a massive mining vessel crewed by some other friends being escorted by a handful of fighters ranging from single seat fighters to 5man missile ships etc. Unknown to you an enemy guild have been secretly following you in some cloaked stealth ships trying to work out your destination. They might lose track of you but thanks to some long range scanning ships they pick up your scent just before you leave the system. They wait for you to jump and then a couple of stealth ships follow you through the wormhole thing to the planet you are going to mine. The mining ship lands and the crew get to work unloading ore processing equipment, vehicles etc. The smaller ships are scouting about the system looking for a good place to put an outpost and the capital ship is up in space above the mining ship just chilling out whilst the crew busy themselves with everyday duties like ship repairs, cooking, showering (more important than you think) etc.

Suddenly a large enemy military class torpedo ship warps in using a cloaked enemy scout as a warp-to-point. It launches 4 huge torps at the capital and while your crew is scrambling to combat stations and manning turrets etc the enemy turns around and warps out. Seconds later 30-40 enemy human player (a rival guild) ships warp in at various ranges. Thankfully they have no capitals but have some pretty big multi-turret ships and many fast attack craft. Your crew are just now launching a swarm of small fighter so create a defensive perimeter around the ship. You, the player, will be in charge of all of this, overseeing on a large 3D strategic map, commanding which wing of fighters should attack what target (the in-game comms is handled by new software and optional hardware, where a special cam on top of your monitor captures your facial movements and transfers them into your ingame characters face, so other players can see how angry, alarmed of chilled out you are) , telling the engineering team to divert most the engine power to shields on the starboard side, telling repair crews which parts of the ship are priority repairs and the torps burst into your cap ship and rip open a few level to the void! As the fight continues over the next 40 minutes and fighters retreat, dock, repair, change fatigued crew for fresh pilots the enemy manage to get a crew transport ship to the break in your hull, so now you have to command your chief security officer to get out of one of the turrets and form a security team to go and repel the invaders!

Your whole ship is now on lock down with all airlocks sealed unless voice comms confirms someone wanting to pass through an airlock is an actual crew member. You can evacuate the pressure out of certain parts of the ship to hinder the invading enemy team or put out fires. You run to your quarters realizing it's make or break time, you open your kit container and have to choose from a selection of light, medium, heavy type guns and armor that you have collected over the last few weeks, then after that you choose which weapons are most suitable for the situation. Then you leave your second in command incharge as you go full FPS Doom style fighting. Except get this, Star Citizen will have a better FPS fighting experience than anything else on the market right now and probably better than anything to come over the next decade or so, think about the subtlety, forethought, tactics and team work in games like ARMA 3 etc.

All of the animation has been captured by Motion Capture techniques and then hand crafted into the game so that it does not look like a regular computer game but more like a blockbuster high level computer generated animated movie that you happen to be controlling! You will have blazing fire fights throught the corridors, mess halls, hangers etc of the ship constantly calling back to your second in command to help in using the ship itself to your benefit. Like you get to a main hangar and the enemy team are setting up a force shield wall with a heavy gun turret and are busy burning through an airlock to one of the armories. Just before you go in from a different airlock you get the pressure removed so you are acclimatized, then get the hangar bay door to swing open into space which sucks out some of the enemy into space, then you open your airlock and charge in with your mag-boots on and start moving between the ships, ship wrecks, cargo, ammo crates etc having the best gun fight you've ever had. All the while through the open bay doors you are watching the space battle play out with ships exploding and refueling, fixing each other, maybe even salvagin some of the wrecks. Way down on the surface of the planet you can just make out the massive mining ship kicking up dust on the planet as they mine away oblivious to whats going on above them as space to ground comms is being jammed by a ship with that specific role!. That'll just be one morning of gameplay in Star Citizen!

One role I'm especially looking forward to is sometimes taking time out to chill and just watch these immense wars taking place, but also using a quick little journalist ship I'll be able to sweep into the battle, weaving in and out of the fight filming what is going on to live news broadcasts witch actual players will be sat in bars watching! Not sure how getting paid works for that one yet, but I guess you get credits on how many people want to watch your channel rather than another journalist, so taking risks for the better shots is worth it.

On a side note I should mention the game is still pre-alpha and much of what I mentioned above is still to be implemented in game, and also much of what is in game is still in a 'tier 0' implementation so looks and plays terribly or is outright broken while they work on ironing out bugs and putting more polish on the stuff that's finished. So don't exepct to jump in and play a flawless 2nd life in a massive sci-fi setting just yet, but if you want to get in early and support the game while seeing first hand how games are developed from the ground up then you can join the pre alpha for a nominal fee, Also don't let the high ship prices put you off, everything will eventually be earnable in game and in the mean time there are many players like me who will be more than happy to interview you and see if you can become part of a crew on one of our ships.
I think the Devs are currently busy moving stuff over from DX11 to Vulkan so they can refactor most the pipelines which will help distribute the resources across a more parallel playing field thus negating some of the bottlenecking we see in more traditional games that use lazy 'off the shelf' software solutions. Seriously, Chris Roberts is working on up to 100x draw calls in the same amount of time most regular games can do just 1! Let that sink in for a minute, not only has he made massive leaps forward in fidelity and realism but he's making it work faster on existing hardware. They are also taking their time to layer all the moduals of the game together to make sure it's going to work smoothly and at the same time are finishing off server meshing so that 40 player crew ship vs ship fights are smooth. Also, most of the game is finished and is just in the 'polish' stage of development but they are holding it back for now as it would contain substantial spoilers.

* The Endeavor class ship is still in the concept stage which means they are still on the drawing board but their roles etc have been fleshed out in the sales pitch and description. I have no doubt it is taking so long because as Chris Roberts said, the Endeavor is the ultimate embodiment of the game’s guiding philosophy to allow players the freedom to choose their own path.

Now I know it's not all super fantastic and I do have reservations about certain parts of the vision, like that the running about and getting trains gets boring quickly, like even the 1st time is supposed to be awe inspiring but it's not that amazing, 2nd or 3rd time and it's a total pain in the rear end, like I have to hook up my old laptop to the power and set it up next to me so I can watch youtube videos while I get to places. I play games like ARMA 3 and yes there can be pretty big travel distances before you get to the action but it's normally engaging travel. For example, I log in and 2 or 3 of my buddies are already on, I get on Discord and find out what loadouts they have so I can choose one to complement theirs. Then I get something like a Strider (basically an armored car) and take a look at the map to work out my route. Whilst driving I have to keep an eye out for enemy players that may have set up an ambush. If you spot them and they only have small arms similar to an M16 then no problem I can just keep driving knowing they can penetrate the armour. But If I see they have an RPG I have to either maneuver and use the landscape to get cover, maybe drive down into a decline or a forest, of pop the smoke canisters and reverse so I can either take a detour or get out and go hunt them.
Another time I might take a helicopter in, well as they are a bit more expensive I tend to hang around and wait for team mates to die and respawn as they can have a free lift to the AO, even then I have choices like, do I fly low to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft or AA ground vehicles but risk making a mistake like flying in to electric wires, if flying low I will have to land, will my LZ be safe or hot? Often enough even complete strangers that have hopped aboard will talk using in-game chat and may warn about landing so I go up high enough for a parachute drop, that way we can just para into or the AO and if we do get targeted by AA missiles or start getting shot at we can all bail out.
Now if I had to log into a loving wank pod every time I died, then walk through a loving shopping mall and get the loving tram just to get to the place I can get my Strider each time I'd go bonkers with so much needless boringness just to get to the fun.
On the other side of the coin, if you are with your buddies (lets day there are 4 of you) and you are traveling towards the AO and you get strafed by an attack chopper that blows out 2 wheels so you have to get out hide until it's gone and then walk the rest of the way it's still actually fun because you still have to keep an eye out for danger, can take pot shots at passing aircraft, might stumble upon a sniper etc. All the while you are talking about how the game's been going, where abouts the rest of the team are strongest so you can work out which buildings might be best to hole up in. You discuss where the strong enemy pockets are and looking at the map you work out a plan to cause a distraction so one of you can sneak over with a satch and level their building. If it's a slow game you just talk about what you've been watching on Netflix. But even when walking it's never that far from the AO. If you really can't be bothered you just put the satch down and stand on it then set it off. 10 seconds later you are back at base and can buy a new ride.
Star Citizen seems to have lost the way with it's forced 'Oh look at how pretty my procedural cities are' bullshit. I think they were going for the Blade Runner intro where you genuinely are in awe at how the city looks, but even that will get boring if you had to watch it several times a day to the point where you would soon hate it.
Now I see this ludicrous elevator system they have in Star Citizen. Why does it have to done like that, I know originally Chris Roberts being all proud that the lifts really worked and you could see out the window of some of them and see yourself travelling. Cool I thought, then when we could see the spaceship outside following the player down as he travelled in the lift, 'OMG', this attention to detail and level of effort ensures this game is going to be amazing but sometimes I feel they got stuck at that point and everything had to have that level of pointless 'realism'. Now after all this time they have lifts with no windows as they travel through areas of map where there is nothing, but the lift still moves along an invisible path so that it physically travels the correct distance from A to B. But why? Who cares? Why not get in the lift, doors close, you assume it's moving but in fact you just load in at the destination. Doors open and you are at the destination. Why on earth does Star Citizen have to add this extra level of pointlessness to the game, the lift has no goddamn loving windows so it makes no difference to anything?! Ok yeah, I get that some stations etc might have straight up and down lifts with windows overlooking dramatic backdrops and that's cool but they should really just 'cheat' with all the other lifts. I'm guessing this sort of crap goes on all the time and that's what's holding the project back for so long causing the costs to spiral out of control.
Don't get me wrong though, there does need to be an attention to detail, but it needs to be in the right areas.

It will happen. I have not said anything outside of the scope of what the developers have told us will happen. If anything I've held back a bit so as not to make new pledgers feel the game is an unreachable dream. I am 100% committed to making Chris Roberts dream become a reality that one day every one will have touched at some point.

Kosumo posted:

I'm taking a "called it" on it.

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

And that's why Star Citizen is good. Or will be. Or something.

(Source is FTR's latest vid's comments)

an actual frog posted:

Hello did someone say The Expense earlier?



I've no idea how that astro boy dude does it. This bs all takes waaay too much effort

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

quote:

I love Star Citizen because of the fact there are hundreds of hand crafted, visually customizable spaceships with their own gravity and airlock systems, each one hardware customizable with hundreds of guns, missiles and electronics etc to choose from. Just recently they added the ability to add comfort of life items to the interior of your ship like coffee makers, alarm clocks, picture frame that you can put your own pictures in etc

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

And that's why Star Citizen is good. Or will be. Or something.

(Source is FTR's latest vid's comments)