TheBombPhilosopher posted:

Expanse is hard sci-fi?



Anyway, can any of you folks help me understand the obsession in SC with fidelity, graphics, and simulation? Yes, nice graphics are nice, but what's wrong with stylized graphics like Freelancer and WoW? And what's with this craze about fidelity and simulation? How much does having a character model physically climb up a ladder, rung by run, add to the game verse just popping into the cockpit? How much does having the player model move around joysticks and pickup bottles and take off caps add to the game? Seems like a lot of work for a novel experience that quickly fades away. And simulation? Nothing about Star Citizen is realistic. No Newtonian physics, no orbital mechanics, space ships with windows, space ships with faster than light travel, space ships with pew pew guns instead of drones and missiles, space ships hand flown instead of being flown by the autopilot, within visual range combat in space, ect ect. It's an arcade game! So why all this talk about having to learn how to fly space ships and such? Why can't SC just admit it and embrace the Freelancer/space opera-esque model of graphics, ship design, combat, solar systems, ect? An MMO done is this style seems like it could be fun. I never played Wing Commander, but from what I know nothing about that games were high fidelity, superior graphics, or good simulators. They were just another space opera game it seem to me.

colonelwest posted:

There’s definitely an inherent tension between portraying the huge scale of space and actually making all of that space interesting, which no game has ever fully resolved. You can procedurally generate an entire galaxy like in Elite, but actually making any of it compelling in a gameplay sense still requires very labor intensive manual processes.

Pixelate posted:

Don’t you pick on 4.1 next!

That little guy is soo cuuute

Like a Thoatse post or something

AlmightyPants posted:

Has there been anything interesting in the past 2 months? I just realized that I forgot about the scam due to the real world and being totally overworked lately. Anything ever come close to the majesty of the guy with a plastic bag on his head? That, to me, is peak star citizen.

Scruffpuff posted:

I think the problem is that nobody has bothered to decide what's important and nail down the illusion rather than trying to walk a tightrope between proc-gen vs handcrafted, limitless and generic vs. smaller vs tight experience.

Frankly, it's possibly to do both. Imagine you have a proc-gen system like Elite, that takes care of your vastness. That tech has been nailed down forever. But then, you sit down and create your space opera. You decide which planets will be part of your theme park story, and you start with one or two. Add fast-travel options between them. Hand-craft the planetary points of interest, and keep them small. Again - fast travel and teleports.

When you're in the story-driven themepark mode of play, it's all about teleporting or auto-landing to points of interest etc. When you're sandboxing it, it's about manually landing space to planet like in Elite.

People who want the sandbox can gently caress off from the story within the first hour and fly off into the infinite ala Elite. Those who want the story can follow the MMO breadcrumbs and use fast travel and have epic setpieces. Eventually each type of player will dip their toes into the other half of the game.

gently caress this fidelity space battle hands controlling the commando who's drinking the coffee that's fueling the argon levels that's blowing on the sexy bear. gently caress all that. Just recreate the wheel - the games I described already exist. Merge them, polish them, give them a good feel, then decide how to expand on the experience. A hybrid approach is fine. The people who want the infinite are so stubborn that they won't accept the idea that a different approach might wind up very fun.

TheBombPhilosopher posted:

Expanse is hard sci-fi?



Anyway, can any of you folks help me understand the obsession in SC with fidelity, graphics, and simulation? Yes, nice graphics are nice, but what's wrong with stylized graphics like Freelancer and WoW? And what's with this craze about fidelity and simulation? How much does having a character model physically climb up a ladder, rung by run, add to the game verse just popping into the cockpit? How much does having the player model move around joysticks and pickup bottles and take off caps add to the game? Seems like a lot of work for a novel experience that quickly fades away. And simulation? Nothing about Star Citizen is realistic. No Newtonian physics, no orbital mechanics, space ships with windows, space ships with faster than light travel, space ships with pew pew guns instead of drones and missiles, space ships hand flown instead of being flown by the autopilot, within visual range combat in space, ect ect. It's an arcade game! So why all this talk about having to learn how to fly space ships and such? Why can't SC just admit it and embrace the Freelancer/space opera-esque model of graphics, ship design, combat, solar systems, ect? An MMO done is this style seems like it could be fun. I never played Wing Commander, but from what I know nothing about that games were high fidelity, superior graphics, or good simulators. They were just another space opera game it seem to me.

trucutru posted:

Toaster chat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y


well-designed toaster (x-wing) vs the future of toasters (star citizen)

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

I like his videos

Quavers posted:

Doors control, Service beacons, Ship destruction (Dev Responses)

Granular control of doors https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/granular-control-of-doors/2965999

I was wondering what the chances are of being able to only open a door halfway. If you could only let a door open halfway when you are being boarded you could create choke points allowing for a more defensible position.

I actually worked on the current door component we use in the game so I can give some insight here. There's multiple different animation styles that the doors use. Some of them are authored so that the animation is a one-shot open/close and cannot pause. There are others that are animated, but marked up so they can be procedurally driven from code. Whenever you're walking towards a door with a proximity sensor that starts closing, then detects you and then reverse and opens immediately, that's one of these. There's also some doors that have the bones directly procedurally driven from code, just basic linear interpolation, nothing too fancy, and those can also smoothly interpolate to any position or just stop at any point. So anyways the point is there's a lot of doors that can definitely support this behavior and we already kind of do this in one case. I also worked on breaching, where if you shoot a door enough it will crack open and unlock. That works because they use these procedural style doors and move into a position that's partially opening. We could definitely generalize that for damage, or come up with some method to purposefully partially open a door.
Now the better question is how you go about doing that. Anytime you add new features into the game there's a complexity cost you eat into. The more things players have to mentally keep track of the more taxing it is mentally. Now as a more experienced player that will sound silly, of course you want all the complexity and decisions. But the truth is not everyone is a powergamer, and so a common design trick is to make things that are apparently simple, but the more you engage with it and understand the complexity, the more you're able to be more expressive in the system. This is known as "lenticular design", anyways the point is if you make all doors have really complex interaction schemes, partial open, breach, manual override, security features, etc.. you may have just added a ton of mental overhead to the game, maybe that's fine, maybe not, but there could be some ways to hide it. Like put the panel to the side and so you can happily play SC for your entire life and never have to engage with it unless you decide to or learn something that pushes you to engage more.
So long story short, there would be some design and code work, but there's absolutely nothing fundamentally that could prevent this, that said not sure if something like this is on anyone's radar atm, though to be fair it's been a while since I've worked on doors which are owned by another team now.


Question about plans for service beacons https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/question-about-plans-for-service-beacons/2966010

It has been stated that activities like cargo hauling will eventually become more and more dangerous because of piracy. Thus escorted convoys may become very important in the future in order to make much profit.
CIG seems to plan an implementation of a ingame reputation system for a better evaluation of potential service provider. Nontheless I am wondering if there are any plans to have tenderings addressing only a limited and specific group of people (i.e. members of the same org.)
A service beacon with a random stranger includes only a single event and this short term focus won't necessarily discipline the contractual parties involved. The upcoming reputation system cannot completely surrogate genuine trust in people you know since it will have it's limitations.
On the other hand People within an organisation probably tend to fullfill job assignments much more faithfully than a complete stranger because consequnces or sanctions for betrayal might be much more severe (e.g. exclusion of the org.). The membership within an organization is a rather long lasting relationship to a certain group of people. The commitment to this entity may let you hesitate to deceive their members in the first place.
Furtermore organisations would become much more interesting for people with starter ship if memberships were required for getting lucrative assignments. Organizations would also gain the opportunity to foster social interactions between members through financial incentives and motivate it's members to participate in those events.
Will there be the option to create service beacons which are limited to orga- mates?

The good news is the same gameplay team that works on service beacons also works on the party and group system. We've brainstormed lots of cool new additions to service beacons and also missions regarding party members and org mates. Now that the party and contacts system is maturing with the most recent changes in 3.9 I think things like that will get more possible, it's really just a matter of when not if. We have a lot of priorities and there's always a balance we have to strike between filling out more fundamental features in the game and maturing the ones we already have, and what features are higher priority than others


Surviving a ship destruction https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/surviving-a-ship-destruction/2966021

In many different wars in human history we have had ships that were "destroyed" and sank but survivors were alive in sealed cabins and survived to be rescued. In Sci-Fi novels and movies we see this occur really often and its great for story telling.
Will we ever see a point were somone in the aft compartment of a constelation or in the crew quarters of the carrack could survive the ship being blown into multiple pieces and be trapped in their room without an airlock knowing that on the other side of the hallway hatch is hard vaccume?

If you search spectrum I'm sure you can find some old answers of mine where I've addressed this. Long story short is, this is something we've wanted for a long time. We've made some important steps towards making it possible, but there's still a good amount of work to do to get it to work like you imagine. Like many things, it's a combination of building up tech and balancing priorities. I don't want to speak any kind of ideas on dates or anything, but do know that this is not forgotten.


TL;DR:
DOORS
We've brainstormed... we have a lot of priorities
We've wanted... important steps... to get it to work like you imagine

AlmightyPants posted:

Has there been anything interesting in the past 2 months? I just realized that I forgot about the scam due to the real world and being totally overworked lately. Anything ever come close to the majesty of the guy with a plastic bag on his head? That, to me, is peak star citizen.

Sarsapariller posted:

Elite has definitely highlighted to me the limits of procedural content as far as making a fun game. It's absolutely brilliant in what it does, and I'm constantly impressed and even blown away by the technology behind things like the planetary engine. Procgen turned out to be really good at background stuff. Really really good at it. But the only content that's going to stick in a player's mind after the first procgen encounter is the human-generated stuff, be it from devs or other players. Human beings are literally built around filtering out similarity, mentally- it's how our brains keep us alert to changes in our environment. Procgen makes great background noise. But it's still just background noise to the human brain after the settling-in period. I think my dream Elite would be the same game with greater sandbox elements and a single-player story with actual characters, unique settings and encounters, and a distinct narrative arc to follow through. Imagine Elite with multi-player dungeons, hand designed!

The problem with the existing model of Elite is that second part you mention- "Preventing the players from destroying the game." Way too much of the game is designed to play itself, rather than to be an engaging sandbox for the player. It's locked down so tightly that it doesn't feel engaging, at least once you've reached the end of the ship progression path. The world is simply there, untouchable, uninteractive. It's a fishtank where you can drop an ethereal camera down and float it around, but cannot otherwise engage with the inhabitants. It can be neat to sit in your cockpit and watch NPC's fly into a station and listen to radio chatter... until you fly 500 light years away and witness the same scene with different colored lighting.

Meanwhile Star Citizen has veered so hard in the other direction that it has ended up on the rocks. Everything is hand tooled and custom designed, every aspect of the experience, even the planetary biomes. Except they gently caress it all up and nothing fits together and the whole thing collapses. If it were being done competently, though, the game would still be impossible to produce because you just can't expect to fill out whole worlds when you're focused on poo poo like coffee cup placement.

Flannelette posted:

What was the other game, a mmo I think from ages ago that had the same content creep problem as SC only without the money black hole and lasting for a decade. Had hilarious lists of dev chats where they were answering dumb questions about all the pointless things you could do in the non existent game when it was finally done.

Quavers posted:

Shroud Of The Avatar?

Flannelette posted:

No it was way way ago around everquest time and the it was either a fantasy mmo or just a open world fantasy game but the devs kept talking about more and more stupid dumb stuff they were adding in the game while getting further and further from a functional product and of course it never came out because there was no endless money jpg store back then.

Flannelette posted:

No it was way way ago around everquest time and the it was either a fantasy mmo or just a open world fantasy game but the devs kept talking about more and more stupid dumb stuff they were adding in the game while getting further and further from a functional product and of course it never came out because there was no endless money jpg store back then.

Scruffpuff posted:

I think the problem is that nobody has bothered to decide what's important and nail down the illusion rather than trying to walk a tightrope between proc-gen vs handcrafted, limitless and generic vs. smaller and tighter experience.

Frankly, it's possible to do both. Imagine you have a proc-gen system like Elite, that takes care of your vastness. That tech has been nailed down forever. But then, you sit down and create your space opera. You decide which planets will be part of your theme park story, and you start with one or two. Add fast-travel options between them. Hand-craft the planetary points of interest, and keep them small. Again - fast travel and teleports.

When you're in the story-driven themepark mode of play, it's all about teleporting or auto-landing to points of interest etc. When you're sandboxing it, it's about manually landing space to planet like in Elite.

People who want the sandbox can gently caress off from the story within the first hour and fly off into the infinite ala Elite. Those who want the story can follow the MMO breadcrumbs and use fast travel and have epic setpieces. Eventually each type of player will dip their toes into the other half of the game.

gently caress this fidelity space battle hands controlling the commando who's drinking the coffee that's fueling the argon levels that's blowing on the sexy bear. gently caress all that. Just recreate the wheel - the games I described already exist. Merge them, polish them, give them a good feel, then decide how to expand on the experience. A hybrid approach is fine. The people who want the infinite are so stubborn that they won't accept the idea that a different approach might wind up very fun.

Quavers posted:

It has been stated that activities like cargo hauling will eventually become more and more dangerous because of piracy. Thus escorted convoys may become very important in the future in order to make much profit.

Gort posted:

Tabula Rasa came out, I know because I owned it

Flannelette posted:

No it was way way ago around everquest time and the it was either a fantasy mmo or just a open world fantasy game but the devs kept talking about more and more stupid dumb stuff they were adding in the game while getting further and further from a functional product and of course it never came out because there was no endless money jpg store back then.

posted:

Annoyed that I didn't turn of the FPS counter

Inacio posted:

Inacio posted:

fidelity

Mu77ley posted:

That's some tan line...

Inacio posted:

fidelity

Scruffpuff posted:

Sounds like Wish.

Inacio posted:

Popete posted:

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