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Popete posted:Ships you buy with in game money get reset on a server wipe? Wow, why even bother attempting to play this right now. I have no idea why its touted as a feature by backers. I imagine so they can say stuff like "you can buy ships with in game money now" without having to disclose it takes an insane amount of time and will ultimately be wiped from your account every few months for the next several years also btw, all your in-game currency, clothes, items and weapons also get wiped there's zero progression and absolutely no reason to play this clunky piece of poo poo
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Jan 28, 2020 21:15
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I have a question. If I make a land claim, and it turns out there is a Sandiworm on/in my claim, does that mean that becomes my Sandiworm?
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Jan 28, 2020 21:26
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Spend millions to up the fidelity up the the max, so that players will tune the graphics down to the minimum to make the game run faster (or at least as fast as their lovely engine choice will let them)
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Jan 28, 2020 21:30
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Gothsheep posted:I mean, maybe my uncultured eyes can't actually discern real quality, but I think the game looks pretty good when it isn't breaking. Which I know sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I actually do mean it. When you just look at 'the game' and not some screenshot showing it breaking, it looks quite nice, I think. Hell, EVE Online's cinematic trailers were better quality and those were unplayable as well
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Jan 28, 2020 21:31
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jarlywarly posted:I think they're trying their best avoid telling anyone anything. 
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Jan 28, 2020 21:40
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I still reckon Theatre of War exists because some CIG code monkey found that the Crysis Wars code was built into CryEngine and just pasted their assets in.
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Jan 28, 2020 21:41
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Sean Tracy is a better liar than Chris. Just sayin.
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Jan 28, 2020 21:45
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Gothsheep posted:I'm not trying to say the game is good, at all. Just trying to give some credit where it's due. They've developed some really nice art assets, I think. They aren't the only space game that does...ED looks pretty good, and hell, even X: Rebirth looks nice enough. Just saying, in this one aspect, texturing and modeling, they did alright. it's one of the easiest things to produce, is the mesh and textures. Interactions make the thing. Take a racing game. You're still using the same overall concept of an engine that handles environmental physics using meshes, but do some of them *feel* good. Not because the thing controls _well_, but because it controls realistically. It's one of the reasons why our earliest pisstakes were for beautifully rendered shots of things that may appear later. There are still entirely missing ships, and ones that have gone through their second and third iteration.
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Jan 28, 2020 21:54
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Rotten Red Rod posted:The elves in my head told me so! lol this was funny
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Jan 28, 2020 21:59
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Hav posted:it's one of the easiest things to produce, is the mesh and textures. Interactions make the thing. Come on, that's trivializing the process of making an art asset in a modern game engine. It's a lot of work and there's a lot of technical know-how when it comes to building proper materials, rigging, setting up the nodes for interaction points, etc. Calling art assets one of the easiest things to do is just looking at game dev from a programmer centric POV. You can't have a game without programmers but your game isn't going to be fun to play without someone making good user experiences and assets. It also belies a lack of understanding of what it takes to build a good mesh with proper flow, good UVs, etc. So for example, a lot of the "feel" in gunplay and racing games comes from how well the animations are done and how they respond to player feedback and feedback from the physics in the game world. /endrant. I'm a CG artist/designer and this stuff bugs me lol. Sorry. That all being said, polished assets and animations are one of the last things you should do, since they're so heavily dependent on systems that come beforehand. UnknownTarget fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 21:59
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Antigravitas posted:You know, I think SC so slow because they have just overengineered something that was already done in a sane fashion elsewhere. Actually, SC is the way it is for the same reason. It's universal. It's one of at least my theories that they ended up polluting the engine with a bunch of revisions because they assumed they were going to own it free and clear, which is why 'starengine' was a brief thing. That they missed a patch by over 350 days after announcing the initial '3 day' shift to Lumberyard tends to add weight. Here's the kicker, though, none of it really means a thing if they can't get the network layer working, and they appear to have gone with microservices to stream context, which is one of the reasons some things just don't appear. Chris effectively hit up Crytek. They supplied a flight model, and the kickstarter began. After a while, it appears that CiG poached a bunch of people from Crytek and tried to jam the old guard and the new developers together, which worked about as well as my last three mergers. There was an attempt to outsource; this was premature and asking for trouble as they hadn't settled the design document. TheAgent posted:besides you want to see how AWS begins to poo poo the bed trying to do low latency FPS combat, well, enjoy you dumb fuckers I still don't know how they're going to make this work, and I'll be at NANOG '78 hosting a Hackathon. I'll be the harrassed looking one yelling about docker. Nalin posted:I totally have, but I guess I should say that it also really depends on the ship you are flying. How much sunk cost are in for?
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Jan 28, 2020 22:10
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Gothsheep posted:I'm not trying to say the game is good, at all. Just trying to give some credit where it's due. They've developed some really nice art assets, I think. They aren't the only space game that does...ED looks pretty good, and hell, even X: Rebirth looks nice enough. Just saying, in this one aspect, texturing and modeling, they did alright. They've got very good materials and a lot of their high rez textures are great. I'd also give them a bit of credit for their lighting engine- the atmospherics and ship lighting effects can be very good. I won't give them much credit for the modeling though. A lot, a lot, of the assets in Star Citizen are far too form-over-function for the good of the game. Things like mapping the interior of a ship exactly to the dimensions of the exterior sounds very fidelitous and cool, but in practice it is a loving nightmare that prevents you from updating interiors without having to rework exteriors. They blow their poly budgets out of the water over and over again, even for a modern 2020 video game. Just unoptimized smooth curves all over the drat place. They also frequently don't bother to build good collision maps, leading to a lot of the NPC pathing and clipping problems that you see all over the game. Technical aspects aside, a lot of what they've built is just so bland. 90% of what has been built for Star Citizen is just completely devoid of personality. It is the video game equivalent of corporate art. Close your eyes and picture a Star Citizen city. I'll bet your mental image is going to have wet metal, boring neon advertisements, and dumpsters. And steam from vents and guys in leather jackets. Where's the weird poo poo, thousands of years in the future? To compare to a gritty industrial area in Warframe: Fortuna is an industrial swamp buried underneath Venus, desperately trying to maintain the failing terraforming efforts of a long-dead civilization, staffed by debt-prisoners who've had their heads cut off and shoved into the chest cavities of robot bodies. A two minute trailer for this one area has more personality than all of Star Citizen's maps put together.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:12
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Scruffpuff posted:How people aren't seeing past this is one of the great mysteries of our age. Its sunk cost + identity politics. Not really any more of a mystery than Scientology. Human brains are way more flawed than most people are willing to consider. Brain viruses are real and take a lifetime of therapy to unravel.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:14
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UnknownTarget posted:/endrant. I'm a CG artist/designer and this stuff bugs me lol. Sorry. That all being said, polished assets and animations are one of the last things you should do, since they're so heavily dependent on systems that come beforehand. Apologies, it's just that the majority of tooling is designed to make graphic/mesh/environmental design easier, and as you say, they're doing this arse backwards. No offense intended. Gonna suggest that they need to figure it out better because they're revising ships that they've sold. jarlywarly posted:I still reckon Theatre of War exists because some CIG code monkey found that the Crysis Wars code was built into CryEngine and just pasted their assets in. Living Legends is the best thing to come out of that. The Best.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:15
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TheAgent posted:yeah, which is why no one ever does it Its the problem we've been discussing ITT for years. If you can actually earn ships, nobody will buy them, and those who did will feel ripped off. But if you can't, then nobody who didn't back will play. This is an inherent design contradiction and they do not, and in fact CANNOT solve it. So "you can earn ships but they get deleted every month" is the best stopgap pretend solution they have. "Just cuz its beta!" Is the excuse that lets this lie work.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:16
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UnknownTarget posted:Come on, that's trivializing the process of making an art asset in a modern game engine. It's a lot of work and there's a lot of technical know-how when it comes to building proper materials, rigging, setting up the nodes for interaction points, etc. Calling art assets one of the easiest things to do is just looking at game dev from a programmer centric POV. You can't have a game without programmers but your game isn't going to be fun to play without someone making good user experiences and assets. It also belies a lack of understanding of what it takes to build a good mesh with proper flow, good UVs, etc. You're missing the point. Art is simple compared to making a game. Any single component is. Its not just "art easy, code hard". Building a simple POC engine is also easy. I could bang out a SC server in a weekend. The problem is all the gameplay systems, which have to be built, which have to work with your art and your server, and everything has to be configured and wired up and performant. And compared to just making assets, that's gargantuan. There's tons of artists on turbosquid cranking out AMAZING art and it doesn't cost 500M dollars. Because there's no game. That's easy by comparison. Same with making a quick engine.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:20
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Hav posted:I still don't know how they're going to make this work, and I'll be at NANOG '78 hosting a Hackathon. I'll be the harrassed looking one yelling about docker. I'm assuming they'll try and spin up some of their own servers to handle this gamemode. mostly because I doubt they'll get over 500 concurrent users at any point and setting up the hardware for that should be easy. They'll probably do a server in LA/Austin, and in the EU (most likely Germany/UK)
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Jan 28, 2020 22:26
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jarlywarly posted:I still reckon Theatre of War exists because some CIG code monkey found that the Crysis Wars code was built into CryEngine and just pasted their assets in. From the ashes of Citizen 54 arises the free to play notta loot box farm that will save PC gaming and Che' Robbert. After all, wheels are still round, aren't they?
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Jan 28, 2020 22:30
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Virtual Captain posted:Sean Tracy is a better liar than Chris. Just sayin. How does he look in a polo neck though?
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Jan 28, 2020 22:38
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Technically, 3.8 was supposed to introduce partial persistence where they wouldn't wipe your belongings with every new patch. So far this hasn't actually played out that way since they keep introducing money dupe exploits and wiping. They don't seem to have any of the logging a typical MMO would have so they aren't able to selectively deal with these issues.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:45
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Remember SSOCS and how that was supposed to fix everything and allow for thousands of players on a single server?
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Jan 28, 2020 22:49
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Hav posted:How much sunk cost are in for? Constellation kickstarter + a Cutlass a year later (later swapped to a Buccaneer for $0 because the Cutlass was trash). I never bothered to refund years ago because I was lazy. So... $310 back in 2013/2014.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:52
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Nalin posted:Technically, 3.8 was supposed to introduce partial persistence where they wouldn't wipe your belongings with every new patch. So far this hasn't actually played out that way since they keep introducing money dupe exploits and wiping. They don't seem to have any of the logging a typical MMO would have so they aren't able to selectively deal with these issues. Wouldn't surprise me if they continue to wipe progress until they shut the servers down.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:05
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Nalin posted:Constellation kickstarter + a Cutlass a year later (later swapped to a Buccaneer for $0 because the Cutlass was trash). I never bothered to refund years ago because I was lazy. So... $310 back in 2013/2014.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:07
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TheAgent posted:it would not only be a janky mess if you're trying to use AWS, but also super cost prohibitive. not for data costs, but the sheer amount of CPU cycles Star Citizen currently burns on everything. maybe they worked out a solution for that so its no longer CPU load heavy, since unlike the PU there won't be any substantial tasks to handle besides player updates, but I doubt it They should colo on a backbone. Get a rack, rent a couple of boxes for the time being, and scale up if they need to. Business virtualization shifted the targets for datacenters; we sold our last Sterling datacenter for $20 million because we decided go t'cloud. Business users eat latency, mainly because most of the poor fuckers are on Citrix virtual boxes, or their internet connection sucks rear end because Verizon pays a fuckton to lobbyists. As you say, the JIT model of lambdas on AWS - make a request, do some magic, return a result - doesn't make any sense with the requirement to handle a state model of the instance *literally requiring* wasted cycles. It's hella expensive on AWS. Data's less of a problem in AWS world, but their internal network is deep, rather than broad, and they don't like you measuring it and quench ICMP. When you ask for an EC2 instance in a particular availability zone, you don't get an identical product every time, and can't guarantee anything outside of the Amazon SLA. Now, perhaps Amazon has a special low latency product available, but they'd have it tattooed on their foreheads because of the gains in *financial* hosting, let alone gaming. Wide, shallow access to the backbone by effectively colo'd hosts would be absolute sex, but talking to the people that got poached by Amazon's golden handcuffs, it's a bit chaotic and largely dealing with growth rather than segmenting the wider market. I think they thought they could pull off a shallow state machine that handles actors, then backfills objects and interactions using microservices calls without really understanding the reality of streaming and business commodity networking. The old unicorn of the twitch shooter in space needing a much bigger action/reaction radius over something based on close and medium engagement ranges for tactical combat. One of the things that you have to be, especially in technical jobs, is willing to dump your babies and move on. I've not seen them doing much on the networking side, other than ock socks, and that was an odd thing to trumpet. Nalin posted:Technically, 3.8 was supposed to introduce partial persistence where they wouldn't wipe your belongings with every new patch. So far this hasn't actually played out that way since they keep introducing money dupe exploits and wiping. They don't seem to have any of the logging a typical MMO would have so they aren't able to selectively deal with these issues. Weird that, what with them developing an MMO.  Edit: Datacenter in Austin wouldn't really cut it. Linx could handle the cable and the EU, but it's about to get fun on data legislation there; Frankfurt has some bandwidth to spare, but nothing in APAC? Pacific Northwest gets boned. Hav fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 23:09
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Ah, but not all progression is wiped, backers get to keep their real-money purchased ships and UEC! Don't you see? Star Citizen is the most immersive game ever... Your real-life financial progression IS your game progression! It's certainly not pay to win, because no one ever "wins", lol! You win by having fun (you must purchase all your fun)!
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Jan 28, 2020 23:09
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I thought the whole idea was you were living your life as a star citizen So if you buy a JPEG for $chrisbucks$ that JPEG was now property of your commando It kind of ruins my immersion if I have to keep buying that jpeg each time the universe has a hiccup
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Jan 28, 2020 23:12
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Popete posted:Remember SSOCS and how that was supposed to fix everything and allow for thousands of players on a single server? To be fair, they claimed hundreds. Chris' '1600' is my gold standard. Yeah, for simulated engine threads on a local CPU, although computing will probably converge on enough power by the time Star Citizen is released. Nalin posted:Constellation kickstarter + a Cutlass a year later (later swapped to a Buccaneer for $0 because the Cutlass was trash). I never bothered to refund years ago because I was lazy. So... $310 back in 2013/2014. At least it's a decent amortization by now.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:13
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Popete posted:Remember SSOCS and how that was supposed to fix everything and allow for thousands of players on a single server?
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Jan 28, 2020 23:14
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The game was barely keeping up with me alone in a wankpod. Had to have taken at least a full minute to render just those textures. Remember games that would hesitate when you entered any area that needed new textures loaded? I had forgotten, but CIG has brought those memories back. I have no idea what all the loading times were for, the millions of unnecessary polygons I guess. Game ran more or less fine once that first 5 minutes has gone by and you've looked in every possible direction so that everything was finally memory resident. Which was when the server crashed. Again. Imagine if I'd tried doing something, or had time to!
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Jan 28, 2020 23:21
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Hav posted:To be fair, they claimed hundreds. Chris' '1600' is my gold standard. GamesBeat Interview with Erin Roberts, 6/28/2018 posted:GamesBeat: Where are you now as far as how many people can be accommodated in the alpha? Is that going to change? Are you in the hundreds or thousands of players?
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Jan 28, 2020 23:28
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TheAgent posted:tourist gameplay, drink mixing gameplay, This is still the funniest goddamn thing to me https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14804-Design-Notes-Civilian-Passenger-Transport  Hairy Roberts Scruffpuff posted:Remember games that would hesitate when you entered any area that needed new textures loaded? Yeah, Fallout 4 without an SSD. Bethesda has its own creaky engine problems that people are finally acknowledging with FO76, though. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 23:29
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I love his absolute certainty in every statement he makes. He knows enough to know what other companies have managed to accomplish, and then seamlessly affords himself the same ability with absolutely no supporting evidence that he can get any of it done, while possessing none of the requisite skills. It's spectacular.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:33
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Rotten Red Rod posted:This is still the funniest goddamn thing to me The whole passenger liner ship is endlessly hilarious to me. There’s that infamous design doc still up on their website that literally describes a game’s worth of content for it; including hyper advanced NPC passengers who will leave you Yelp reviews based on how comfortable you kept them during their trip, and soldering circuits board to repair the inflight entertainment system. It’s all batshit insane, not only because CIG would never be able to even make 25% of it a reality, but also because it would all just be aggressively boring and tedious. Customer service, the game. colonelwest fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 23:36
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I mean I know people love to throw out the "PlanetSide 2 did it!!" thing, but any battle involving anywhere close to 500 players became a slideshow and was absolutely horrible I guess MAG did 128v128 by splitting up a giant map into smaller areas, but even so when people came together it was a lagfest so I'm not sure how Star "if we get more than a dozen ships shooting in the same area, everything goes to poo poo, hopefully no one shoots a loving missile" Citizen is going to handle 100 let alone 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 people playing together
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Jan 28, 2020 23:42
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"PlanetSide 2 did it" is a completely valid response. The fact that no game should WANT to do this as it's unplayable and anti-fun is beside the point. CIG promised it, and the 50-player limit looks real bad as a result. They never should have promised an MMO. The best way to go would have been the Freelancer/GTA Online route - a fully explorable universe solo, which you can go online with limited numbers of other concurrent players to explore. Each zone should be instanced and pull in a other few players to interact with. (Is that how Elite Dangerous works? I've never played it.) But nope! Gotta be an MMO. Shoehorn that poo poo in. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 23:48
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colonelwest posted:Over on the refund sub Reddit, someone in the U.K. recently got a refund after starting a small claims court case, and reminding them that UK consumer protections don’t allow them to be corporate scum lords like in the US. CIG Refund Dept posted:If you pursue the claim that is your decision but please be advised that you will lose. Your agreed to a settlement (as evidenced by this very email thread) which overrules all previous agreements. We fulfilled our part of the agreement while the charges of your bank are your problem.Only as an additional gesture of good faith we transfer another GBP 30. If you do not withdraw the law suit we will enforce the refund of the costs of our lawyers against you. Our patience is not endless Bwahahaha, that is insane.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:49
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Hav posted:I think they thought they could pull off a shallow state machine that handles actors, then backfills objects and interactions using microservices calls without really understanding the reality of streaming and business commodity networking. Nah you're giving them too much credit. There was never a sane plan, even a foolhardy one. The only plan was Chris saying "I want this" and people under him not being allowed to tell him no.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:50
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Hav posted:They should colo on a backbone. Get a rack, rent a couple of boxes for the time being, and scale up if they need to. Business virtualization shifted the targets for datacenters; we sold our last Sterling datacenter for $20 million because we decided go t'cloud.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:51
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"We had to rewrite the whole network layer to support this huge infrastructure" This is both not fully true, plus they definitely haven't rewritten the network layer. Chris can't help but be a huckster.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:53
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