The Titanic posted:

I'm a bad person full of bad ideas and it's best to not look into it too much because the abyss looks back at you and you don't want that. :3

Nalin posted:

Star Citizen has semi-realistic physics in space. If you turn decoupled mode on, it somewhat acts like a proper spaceship. (Decoupled mode makes your flight system stop trying to bring you back to 0m/s when you are not trying to move.) You maintain your velocity in a direction unless you apply thrust in a different direction. Rotation/pitch/yaw is not affected by turning decoupled mode on and your thrusters will always work to bring it back to 0m/s (if you have thrusters). The game used to calculate thruster placement vs your center of mass so losing thrusters could make things weird, but they removed that at some point and fudged it so all thrust is done from your center of mass. I'm not sure why they made that change but I've seen some people mention it. It probably improves performance by making the calculations much simpler (especially in multiplayer). Additionally, the mass of your ship does come into play and affects your acceleration, but you'll never really notice unless you are carrying cargo. Your thrusters are very powerful so most of your ships are quite nimble.

Atmospheric flight is a little different. There is already stuff in the game that makes atmospheric flight different, but you never see it because your maneuvering thrusters are so powerful that they can keep you in place no matter your angle. This is why you see people just "stand" there floating. If you turn on decoupled mode, your ship suddenly becomes affected by gravity, drag, and wind, which you normally wouldn't notice because, again, your maneuvering thrusters are just so drat powerful.

3.10 will make huge changes to atmospheric flight so it feels "proper". Thrusters are made weak in the atmosphere and they've given surfaces on the ships proper lift. Your thrusters will also overwork themselves in the atmosphere and if you try to hover for long on maneuvering thrusters, they will overheat and stop working and you will crash.

TheAgent posted:

TheAgent posted:

a guy I worked with in analytics used to seriously do poo poo like this for presentations and it would take 90% of the meeting to explain what anything meant on those charts

ggangensis posted:

I see, well, maybe I should give the game another try when 3.10 is released. Thanks for the explanation.

All these (recent) Videos I've saw where ships flew in the atmosphere looked hilariously bad, like straight out of Half-Life 1 with sv_gravity 0, but let's wait if 3.10 fixes that. Thing is, I can live with such a behavior in space, in fact, the "flight physics" in Tie Fighter weren't much better in the sense of being "realistic". However, stuff like turn-rate, acceleration and deceleration were pretty well balanced, made sense and I had fun with it. However, in atmosphere it's different. Seeing a 890jump just standing in the air, nose towards the ground just feels "wrong", especially when CR seemingly values fidelity over everything else.

Maybe they'll get it to work in 3.10, maybe they won't. At the end of the day it's just one thing on the long, long list of things wrong with SC. As I see it, it's a death march where the best they can achieve are small but ultimately meaningless victories ("at least the transition from space to atmosphere was nice", "well, the flight physics were pretty good", "the hubs look pretty", ...), while the vast majority of promises (or lies, depending on how you see it) were never even close to reality.

ronmcd posted:

Star Citizer: Maybe they'll get it to work in 3.10, maybe they won't.

Dooguk posted:

ObsidianAnt takes a quick look at Star Wars Squadrons. Has a few digs at Crobear along the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoIRG55oUnI

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/SwiftTropix/status/1273271721127079939

Nalin posted:

Star Citizen has semi-realistic physics in space. If you turn decoupled mode on, it somewhat acts like a proper spaceship. (Decoupled mode makes your flight system stop trying to bring you back to 0m/s when you are not trying to move.) You maintain your velocity in a direction unless you apply thrust in a different direction. Rotation/pitch/yaw is not affected by turning decoupled mode on and your thrusters will always work to bring it back to 0m/s (if you have thrusters). The game used to calculate thruster placement vs your center of mass so losing thrusters could make things weird, but they removed that at some point and fudged it so all thrust is done from your center of mass. I'm not sure why they made that change but I've seen some people mention it. It probably improves performance by making the calculations much simpler (especially in multiplayer). Additionally, the mass of your ship does come into play and affects your acceleration, but you'll never really notice unless you are carrying cargo. Your thrusters are very powerful so most of your ships are quite nimble.

Atmospheric flight is a little different. There is already stuff in the game that makes atmospheric flight different, but you never see it because your maneuvering thrusters are so powerful that they can keep you in place no matter your angle. This is why you see people just "stand" there floating. If you turn on decoupled mode, your ship suddenly becomes affected by gravity, drag, and wind, which you normally wouldn't notice because, again, your maneuvering thrusters are just so drat powerful.

3.10 will make huge changes to atmospheric flight so it feels "proper". Thrusters are made weak in the atmosphere and they've given surfaces on the ships proper lift. Your thrusters will also overwork themselves in the atmosphere and if you try to hover for long on maneuvering thrusters, they will overheat and stop working and you will crash.

ggangensis posted:

All these (recent) Videos I've saw where ships flew in the atmosphere looked hilariously bad, like straight out of Half-Life 1 with sv_gravity 0, but let's wait if 3.10 fixes that. Thing is, I can live with such a behavior in space, in fact, the "flight physics" in Tie Fighter weren't much better in the sense of being "realistic". However, stuff like turn-rate, acceleration and deceleration were pretty well balanced, made sense and I had fun with it. However, in atmosphere it's different. Seeing a 890jump just standing in the air, nose towards the ground just feels "wrong"

ggangensis posted:

Maybe they'll get it to work in 3.10, maybe they won't. At the end of the day it's just one thing on the long, long list of things wrong with SC.

My money is on: They won't.

CIG posted:

Ships now also have individually simulated aerodynamic surfaces that contribute various small forces to the motion of the ship. Each force is dynamic and bespoke, allowing us to simulate wings of various kinds as well as flat plates and lifting body forces. Ships with wings are now able to stall, make level turns, lose speed in tight turns, and benefit from various aerodynamic features.

Expect EVERY ship to behave differently and with a lot more character. For example, each ship has its own aerodynamic stability, so the Gladius will feel more stable when compared to the Hawk, which can turn faster but is much harder to control.

colonelwest posted:

It’s hilarious that Star Citizen’s “development” has gone on for so long that almost all of its original pitch has become hilariously outdated. PC gaming was “saved” years ago by Steam and the availability of better/cheaper/more standardized hardware, to the point that it’s arguably the lead platform. Then there was an explosion of new space games to such an extent that now even EA, the ultimate scum lords of the industry, are about to release a spiritual successor to the X-wing series.

TheBombPhilosopher posted:

Also, I would like to thank this thread for making Google "why is human hair so hard to do?". It just really stood out to me over the last few pages how hair just stands out so much as being obviously fake. Even in the UE5 demo trailer they cheated as much as they could with the hair, having it bound up in a tight little pony tail. The water was also obviously fake and bad in the UE5 trailer now that I looked for it. It looked like it was made out of jello or something.

Hair and water, man. Hair and water!

Bofast posted:

I don't think any developer wants to be the one that tries to simulate every strand of hair on the head, all 90k-150k of them. Well, except possibly Chris Roberts.

Scruffpuff posted:

Nah, his wife instructed him on the inverse relationship between hair and quality.

Squadron 42 is Still Advertised to be Content Complete (Beta) in 11 Days posted:

EDIT: I have just noticed that the last roadmap stated that S42 was planned to be content & feature complete (ALPHA / OPTIMIZATION) by the end of Q1, which is also reflected by Roberts last letter about S42 where he stated "our plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of 2019", which was only delayed by one quarter.
So the development of S42 is already effectively delayed by almost a quarter without a proper announcement.

Endie posted:

I'm not white-knighting for a second: SC is hosed and doomed. But that looks like a perfectly normal (if over-complicated because super-imposed) set of burn-up charts, albeit not in any skin of Jira I've ever imagined existed. I suspect that they are full of lies because they're at the comfortable end of the spectrum for a very large project (bigger than I've ever run, obviously) and there are a couple of teams in there that badly need further help with their estimating, but if your mate needed to explain a burn-up chart to people working in software then the target audience must have been pretty fresh-faced young pups.

Nyast posted:

Well, it "feels wrong" because everybody's expecting the spaceships to behave like airjets/planes in atmospheres, or at best like helicopters.

But I think the closest comparison you could make are drones. Star Citizen ships simply behave like small drones. You know, the remote controlled ones that anybody can buy ( not the army's plane-likes ). It's pretty fascinating to watch them fly. They can hover, strafe left / right and accelerate very very quickly. In fact they look like a no-clip model, except they're real. SC ships behave like that. So I think the problem is that it doesn't "feel" like what players are expecting for a massive ship. Small drones weight a few Kg, but imagine if you scaled them up ( both in terms of mass, but also thrust power ) to the size of a spaceship - they'd fly like no-clip in reality too.

quote:

Of course, in the end all of that doesn't really matter; what's important is whether the flight model is fun and interesting, and SC pretty much fails at that.

trucutru posted:

The thing is that the MIGs, F-whatevers and WWI triplanes were designed to fly so a good simulation feels "right". The ships in SC were designed to extract money from nerds with bad taste so, in the end, their flight model parameters will have to be based on completely arbitrary numbers hand-picked by the developers. This flying brick is more agile than that flying brick but less than the flying gatorade bottle.

Will they, the developers of SC, manage to do that job well? I don't really have my hopes up.

trucutru posted:

The thing is that the MIGs, F-whatevers and WWI triplanes were designed to fly so a good simulation feels "right". The ships in SC were designed to extract money from nerds with bad taste so, in the end, their flight model parameters will have to be based on completely arbitrary numbers hand-picked by the developers. This flying brick is more agile than that flying brick but less than the flying gatorade bottle.

Will they, the developers of SC, manage to do that job well? I don't really have my hopes up.

ggangensis posted:

I see, well, maybe I should give the game another try when 3.10 is released. Thanks for the explanation.

ggangensis posted:

I think what's missing in atmospheric flight in SC is a sense of weight and the location(s) of the actual thrust. In DCS it really makes a difference, a relatively heavy aircraft with 2 engines like the F-15 feels quite different from a single-engine Mig-21, which is a featherweight in comparison. It's hard to describe, but the flight physics there, in combination with the sound effects and the cockpit vibrations really convey the sheer energy of the F-15, while the Mig-21 feels more like an arrow with bad maneuverability. Also the constant battle for energy is easier to win with two strong engines: Standing vertically for some time is possible in a F-15 or Su-27, but would kill your energy asap and send you into a stall in a Harrier.

While I don't expect these levels of realism in SC, at least a feeling for the thrust required to keep a big ship from falling down would be nice. Drones go down if you put them too far vertically while "standing". In SC you can tilt your ship upside down (or wherever there are no thrusters) in atmosphere and nothing happens.
To me the atmospheric flight seems half-assed: Chris wanted it in the game because the transitions to space from planet are fidelitous and look impressive, but having the ships as weightless entities looks stupid.

But anyway, I think it's futile to discuss flight physics in SC. Even the best (whatever that means) atmospheric flight physics won't save it. True, it would eliminate one sore thumb that sticks out in every video, but there are others that are more severe and so deeply interwoven in their Franken-Engine that they can't be fixed.


Agreed.

Mirificus posted:

TheBombPhilosopher posted:

The Space Shuttle accelerates 0-60mph in 5 seconds. That's performance car category. But it is also the slowest acceleration the Space Shuttle's flight profile. It only goes up from their. By 2 minutes into its flight its traveling at 3000 mph, twice the speed of an F-150. By 8 minutes into its flight its traveling at 17500 mph. We all know how spectacular the launch of a Space Shuttle is. Many ships in SC are bigger than the Space Shuttle with greater (I would think think) acceleration and higher velocity. Yet flying a SC vessel in the game seems to be about the boring thing a human can do.

SC managed to take this -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViNcBQ8cDA0

- and make it boring. CIG should get an achievement for it or something. CIG blah blah fidelity blah. If your so obsessed with fidelity, CIG, why don't you focus on making on launching and flying your enormous space craft as spectacular and fun as it should be? Wouldn't that be cool?

Nyast posted:

(snip)Small drones weight a few Kg, but imagine if you scaled them up ( both in terms of mass, but also thrust power ) to the size of a spaceship - they'd fly like no-clip in reality too.(snip)

CI posted:

Each force is dynamic and bespoke

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

Thoatse posted:

Haha this guy's batsuit parachute needs a Star Citizen logo on it, it's extremely Chris Roberts's style of never been done before

Thoatse posted:

Haha this guy's batsuit parachute needs a Star Citizen logo on it, it's extremely Chris Roberts's style of never been done before

Trilobite posted:

You're absolutely right. (That's a picture of Franz Reichelt, modeling his 'wearable parachute' in 1912; he climbed up to the first platform on the Eiffel Tower to test it, and plummeted to his death.)

Nyast posted:

A sandbox space MMO. The "MMO" part being instances of 60 players max at the moment, but then there are tons of other MMOs with instancing, that still call themselves MMOs.

Star Citizen ( and by that I mean the PU ) does not have a story, and does not have cinematics. What it has, in terms of characters are:

1. Player characters, with customization - of course, when you need to assemble a character from dozens of different parts, all with customizable morphology and colors, it's not going to look as good as a static face from a single player game.
2. Secondary characters, and by that I mean anything that is a named character, basically mission givers.
3. Random generic mob characters.

Note that some MMOs do have a story and main characters and cinematics. Star Citizen does not, but that still doesn't make it okay to compare it to a single player game.

If you really want to compare characters from Last of Us, Uncharted, Horizon Dawn Zero etc.. to what CIG is doing, then the fair thing would be to compare it to Squadron 42 IMO. Cinematics vs cinematics, or in-game vs in-game. If you still feel that the Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman etc.. characters in SQ42's cinematics are horrible compare to other "current-gen" games, I can respect that, but at least it's a fair comparison with similar goals in terms of quality and budget.

Edit: fixed typos.

Trilobite posted:

You're absolutely right. (That's a picture of Franz Reichelt, modeling his 'wearable parachute' in 1912; he climbed up to the first platform on the Eiffel Tower to test it, and plummeted to his death.)

Der Shovel posted:

Alien fact #8: none of these aliens are in the game. None of these aliens will ever be in the game.

trucutru posted:

Only minor stuff like gameplay and networking stuff are left. Which are about as hard to implement as "unified friendlist".

Mirificus posted:

quote:

Whenever the topic of SQ42 progress comes up, there's a lot of passion involved and a lot of speculation occurs. So, allow me to add some objective data which we can all use to have a more informed debate on the subject.

I graphed Squadron 42 task progress over time up until the SQ42 roadmap stopped being updated back in March. Note that this relates to the SQ42 feature roadmap which was being updated on a weekly basis, not the chapter progress summary page which was not being updated, and was cited by CIG as not communicating chapter progress well.

So let's get down to the results of my graphed data.

Between December 21st, 2018 when the SQ42 roadmap was born and "Q2 2020", CIG scheduled 2,243 SQ42 tasks to be completed. (This is an aggregation of the total number of tasks that were present at the end of every quarter).

By March 6th, 2020 they had completed 1,792 tasks. (This is an aggregation of the number of completed tasks at the end of every quarter).

Thus, over ~15 months and with ~3 months to go before Q2 2020, CIG had completed 79.9% of the work they'd assigned themselves to complete. Incidentally, 3 months is 16.7% of 18 months.

So, on a task-completion basis for development tasks related to SQ42 that they have communicated with us and extrapolating given the last 3 months of work, signs are that CIG is more or less on schedule.

Now, before you click that Reply button to issue a withering retort pointing out that we're not playing the SQ42 beta right now, give me another moment to explain further and highlight the gaps in the data and why it's likely that SQ42's beta is delayed, at least by a quarter or two.

It's noteworthy that while many SQ42 roadmap items were moved from one quarter to another and then completed, there were some that where removed entirely and had not yet been returned to the roadmap. These tasks seem to be the reason for SQ42 being pushed back a quarter by CIG, as they have yet to be completed.

Ultimately, I estimate there to be several hundred tasks in CIG's backlog that had been added and removed and were not repositioned on the public SQ42 roadmap. However this is difficult to determine with certainty as the tasks are often moved between Epics and those Epics often get renamed as scope or requirements change. A good example of this on the PU roadmap is docking, which has appeared as stand-alone Epics for different types of docking (ship to ship, ship to station), disappeared from the roadmap altogether, reappeared lumped back together into a single feature, and disappeared again, likely blocked by the physics refactor involving dynamic physics grids.

EDIT - an Epic is essentially a "feature card" on the roadmap. I'm using Agile terminology here as a dev where an Epic is used to describe a collection of tasks that work together to create a single feature, or a collection of related features.

Also, this is progress on the tasks that CIG has made public; there will also be tasks that are not public, though I'd expect that the rate of progress on public versus non-public tasks should be roughly equivalent.

So, take that how you will. I'm a strong and vocal critic of the implementation of the roadmaps (both PU and SQ42), and the weak communication from CIG under the pretext of "no spoilers". I'm an Agile dev working in the same issue-tracking system CIG is (JIRA) and my team uses a Structure board for backlog grooming which simply lists our backlog Epics in a priority list on a per-team basis, along with blockers. I believe CIG should share something similar with backers; rather than attempting to put a time frame on a feature (which at this stage of development is a bit of a fool's errand), it's much better simply to display priorities and highlight where blockers and dependencies may suddenly shift those priorities.

The silence we've been getting from them as well as the failure of the SQ42 video update to materialize does appear indicate there may be further delays, which isn't terribly surprising. Also, looking at the PU roadmap, we can see that the next 2 quarters still contain feature cards that will be necessary for SQ42, such as final polishing for FPS AI as well as tweaks to flight AI and flight mechanics. OTOH, polishing and tweaks to existing features are things that are done in a beta, so SQ42's beta phase may actually not be that far away. At the end of the day, we really need more information from CIG.

While we can all speculate to the varying degrees of how far CIG's progress on SQ42 deviates from the data my graphing has produced and CIG's own projections for delivery of the SQ42 beta, I think we can all agree that there simply isn't enough substantive and informative communication from CIG for us to draw any informed conclusions, and that they owe us a proper detailed explanation of the current state of Squadron 42, and soon.

EDIT 2 - Link to my original post on this topic back in March which details how my data was gathered from u/jk3farden's SQ42 Progress Watch data, which was pulled directly from the SQ42 roadmap on a weekly basis over all 6 quarters.

quote:

Chris is a great visionary but a terrible managing director. Micromanagement down to the lowest level is true ignorance in game development.

The fact that ships being reworked more than twice is a telltale sign of poor preproduction which is essential in game dev. Knowing the majority of the game mechanics and components required in advance allows minimal revisions.

Just yesterday a blatant example of this is the gladius concept of having physical switches like dcs flight sim. That would mean every ship needs their cockpit buttons reworked, labeled and coded in unison to the ship systems. How can such oversight happen on a macro level?

quote:

From the armchair, it looks like oversight. From an Agile developer's standpoint... it sounds like Agile development. You produce a deliverable, assess new requirements, design new features, implement, test, deliver again, and iterate. You do that until the solution has reached a state you (or your users) are happy with. That's not mismanagement, it's how the methodology works.

Sure, you do attempt to do some planning in advance, but as the product evolves and the involved teams design new features, a lot of that planning and vision will change. Your implementation has to adapt to support those changing requirements as well. That's why the methodology is called Agile; it's designed to adapt to a changing development landscape common in complex software projects.

In more traditional Waterfall dev, you try to plan everything way out in advance and then do it all in one go. But I don't think folks realize that most development isn't done that way anymore, particularly not something with a lot of "moving parts" like Star Citizen.