Mirificus posted:

That doesn't invalidate that prior work done in RDR1 transpired into RDR2. Sources are from inside the industry too.

L. Ron Hoover posted:

This guy used an anonymous source as his industry source. What an idiot! Guess he didn't get the memo, my terrible education told me never to trust those!

quote:

Big game companies like Rockstar have special R&D departments work on building tools and and systems that they use for many of their games. Those tools and systems are then used by game designers to make interesting gameplay systems. EA alone spent nearly 2 billions last year in R&D alone.

Those tools and game systems that are then used by game designers to build codes include written code by tech engineers.

I blurred out the identities of the involved in the discussion for the sake of privacy as I have no way to ask for permission to each one of them.

I've dabbled in multiple discussions about games and their development along the years. I find it a interesting topic as you seem too.

You've got the exact same timeline as me, followed since 2012 and backed an Aurora in the end of 2013.

I've been playing and following the game ever-since. I never subscribed though. My ship is a Aurora » 300i » Avenger » Cutlass Black.

The reason why you seemed clueless about the game was because you were comparing Star Citizen planets with Elite lol

If you left in 2016 you have 5 years of catching up to do.

Star Citizen is a alpha game in heavy development and constantly being updated and iterated. Because of the ever evolving nature of alpha stage in game development it's priority is adding it's core features over complete functionality and polish. Still it doesn't matter it can't be player and enjoyed by anyone.

Despite the alpha stage it's already the best space game for many space nerds out there, as proven by the constant growth in funding and player engagement.

Many people love the idea that Star Citizen full scope is bringing to gaming. Many more support it constantly along the years, the little minority who doesn't is and will always be irrelevant until they do. No matter how desperate and depressed they get.

If there's one thing I regret about this project is that wish I would have backed it earlier.

Mirificus posted:

I've dabbled in multiple discussions about games and their development along the years.

Zaphod42 posted:

lmao

Thoatse posted:

Mirificus posted:

Big game companies like Rockstar have special R&D departments work on building tools and and systems that they use for many of their games. Those tools and systems are then used by game designers to make interesting gameplay systems. EA alone spent nearly 2 billions last year in R&D alone.

The Titanic posted:

All the people are super cute when they talk about how studio X or Y used all the knowledge and assets and service time from their previous game A or B and such, and thus that counts as dev time or something.

But it also means they have experience in the field, and it's the natural progression most actual game studios need to do: release a game to stay viable and make enough money to make the best one

SC doesn't have this past, it's skipping GTA 1-5 and cutting to 6. It's missing the RDR1. It's never done Half Life or anything else.

This is, hilariously, a bad idea. It's like when you have your hobbies buddies and they think they, as like one person or a tiny team, is going to just waltz in and make something comparable to a GTA.

I'm sure people know people like that, are people like that, or heard of people who heard of these people. CIG is that hobbiest today, except they've been funded for a decade to keep trying and trying, while the output is not there.

They've basically transformed millions and millions of dollars into a bunch of 3D models. Congrats I guess.

Scruffpuff posted:

But Chris's history as the guy who changed the color of a pixel in a game he commissioned other people to make so long ago people were still setting the DMA and IRQ settings on their audio cards is the most solid foundation you can have to make the next Rockstar-equivalent industry-changing product. This is the guy who took a physics class once and knows you can swim in space and that you have to stay quiet or the other spaceships will hear you talking. He's taking the expertise that only being fired by Microsoft and having all your work thrown out and rebuilt from scratch can bring to a project. It's exactly why an Inuit who's lived in an igloo his whole life can immediately build a skyscraper because his friend took him on a vacation to New York and opened his eyes to how far along technology has come. If you see it, you can immediately replicate it! It's why we all drive cars we built ourselves from metal ores and use electricity we made ourselves by creating our own power plants.

Popete posted:

It's always amusing how backers have built up this idea that Star Citizen is doing amazing things and will fundamentally change gaming forever and yet no one outside a fairly small niche of the gaming community cares about this project anymore. It's time to shine was like 8 years ago by now everyone's pretty much moved on from even gawking at it.

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

The fun part is that even if Star Citizen somehow gets the best planets on the market (I don't think their current iterations are that good, but putting that aside) - who is going to use them? Which other studio is going to spend hundreds of millions to switch to outdated CryEngine with wonky physics? EA and Rockstar won't bother, that's not their type of engine and gameplay. Most studios don't have the money and time.

The only one I can think of is Bethesda (has money and outdated engine), but even then developing their own solution will be likely cheaper and easier expendable in future (and I am not sure whether they haven't started yet).

Sammus posted:

Their "plan" to implement real materials modeling and stress/strain stuff might be the dumbest thing SC has ever talked about implementing, and that says a lot. The true believers are going to eat that poo poo up.

Does everyone remember Red Faction? Some of the guys at Volition had to go take basic architecture and civil engineering classes because they didn't know how to build poo poo in a realistically simulated environment without all their poo poo falling down or being ugly as gently caress or just horribly unstable.

Those were buildings (something we've been making forever) on Mars (1/3rd gravity, so it's easier to make stuff that doesn't fall down) in a game series that absolutely prioritized fun over realism and wasn't afraid to sacrifice reality at a moment's notice for cool factor.

Now expand that to spaceships. My brain hurts just thinking about it. In order for this to work, someone at CIG has to be capable of designing and engineering fully functional spaceships. Literally. And even if it works, it will still run into a billion edge case scenarios where it just doesn't work.

Unless CIG cheats and creates some class of new materials. Things with unrealistic young's modulus', expansion coefficients, thermal efficiencies, hardness...... Things that are unobtainable in the materials we use now. They could call it Unobtainium, and use it throughout their spaceships to avoid running into pitfalls like "why do all my ships split in half the moment our maneuvering jets kick on," and "My ship crumples like a tin can whenever I fire the on-keel rail gun with the engines running," and "My off-keel railgun detached the moment I fired it."

Chris The Visionary Roberts posted:

The Room System has been in the game for quite a while and fully works including equalization of gases / atmosphere between room volumes (including dissipation into the global room aka open space / vacuum)

When you suffocate for lack of oxygen that is because you are in a "room" with not enough oxygen.

The Room System is basically how the game describes volumes of gas, their pressure, density and temperature so a planet has a room (it's atmosphere) a ship has rooms (various compartments between bulkheads), even "The Coil" in Squadron 42 has it's volume described by a "room".

We use it for the Player Status System (breathing oxygen), for atmospheric flight (the room system contains all the information in terms of density and composition of the atmosphere in terms of gasses that flight model uses to calculate drag and lift), weather (some of the current weather ground FX are partly influenced by the room's temperature, density and even composition of gasses in the atmosphere), contrails (in atmosphere and in space gas clouds) and atmospheric entry effects on ships.

So the Room System is very important for a lot of systems and has been been in Star Citizen for years.

What @MGibson-cig was saying and may have been lost in translation as you don't know our internal terms is that rooms can have two states; mutable and immutable. Mutable means that the room has a finite amount of density / pressure / gasses which can pass to another room if it is connected to it and there is a difference in pressure. So if you open an door to space from your Aurora if the internal room is set to mutable the atmosphere inside will escape outside. Immutable means the room has what is considered an infinite amount of gas and it's pressure won't change. Planet Atmospheres are immutable rooms, as is the vacuum of space. When we first set up rooms on the vehicles we didn't have the life support component (and it's related vents) implemented yet so we had no way to supply more oxygen to a room that had lost it, so the designers set the ship rooms to immutable (infinite supply of oxygen basically) as a temporary measure because otherwise if you opened your door in space you would lose your internal breathable atmosphere and suffocate if you didn't have a space suit on. All ships have rooms, and in fact why people occasionally suffocate on a ship in some places is because the room volume hasn't been set up correctly and there is some part of the ship without a room, and without a room there is no atmosphere and the game treats everything outside a room as vacuum.

We have the initial implementation of life support components and their connected vents working internally but rolling it out for the ships will take a while as we need to literally "plumb" the ships with a set of extra components, not just the life support component but all it's vents. We have a few other systemic ship features like more interactive cockpits (DCS style) we've been working on, as well as the dynamic fire system (which also uses and affects the room / atmosphere) and an update to the "pipe" system that shares resources like power, heat, fuel, atmosphere between components that will be more flexible and scalable so it's really a matter of scheduling when we do passes on our huge number of ships to set them up for the new systems that are waiting and the ones to be ready soon; As everyone always has more work than time it is going to be more efficient to update multiple things once we crack open a ship to update it, hence some of the functionality we have waiting in the wings hasn't been rolled out just yet.

There is a lot of very cool systemic gameplay that we've been working to finish off in the background for ships that once all together will create a spaceship simulation like no other. Let me give you an example that factors in our new physical damage (that we are working on as I type; this is one of things that I'm pretty involved in), fire, room, pipe and player status systems.

A ballistic round passes through the ship's shield, which scrubs off some of its kinetic energy but not enough as the round's velocity was high as was its mass as it was an armor piercing round. It manages to penetrate the armor and strikes an internal component, say a power relay node (something else we are working on as part of the pipe system refactor). The power node takes damage giving it a chance to "misfire" while in use. A few minutes later the node does misfire, blowing its fuse and resulting in it catching fire. The crew of the ship doesn't realize a fire has broken out in one of the side corridors, as they are busily concentrating on fighting the ships attacking them. The fire starts to spread along flammable surfaces, and as the fire starts to engulf other components they also catch fire. The engineer on the bridge of the ship sees his console flash red giving him a warning that several components have failed and looking at his ships schematic he sees a fire has broken out below decks. The engineer decides to seal the bulkhead doors on the corridor to contain the fire but the doors have no power as the power node is out! He comms one of his crew mates to leave his turret and grab an extinguisher and put out the blaze which is slowly creeping towards the power plant room. Fire reaching a ship's power plant or it's ammo stores are two sure fire ways for your ship to go boom. With the physical damage system ships will no longer just explode when their hit points reach zero, they'll explode because something inside them went critical and exploded (due to damage or heat), which then damages everything else. Outside of that damage will affect the ability of the ship to function or it's structural integrity so they also could become a lifeless hulk as much as they could go up in a flash of light. When the crew member gets to the corridor where the fire has broken out is has already consumed a huge amount of oxygen in that "room" (the corridor) and has released noxious gasses, so the crew member can't breathe and quickly retreats to put on a fire resistant suit and helmet. The engineer in desperation manages to reroute power away from the destroyed node through a secondary node restoring power to enough of the bulkhead doors to allow him to contain the fire. Noticing that there is an external airlock in the sealed off area he opens the airlock, venting the oxygen in the sealed off corridors and rooms to the vacuum of space, depriving the fire of the ability to burn, putting most of it out. By this time the crew member is suitably dressed and can extinguish the fire that made it past the bulkhead door before it can grow again. The engineer then reseals the airlock and allows the life support system to replenish the air in the vented part of the ship. Once done the engineer opens up the bulkhead door allowing the crewmember in with a replacement fuse for the power node, restoring power to that section of the ship, then returns to his turret. It's been a close call but the ship is still alive and in the fight!

What I describe will be possible once we have finished and deployed the systems we're working on. I know it can be frustrating to wait for all of this functionality to be online but I promise you everyone is working as hard and as smartly as possible to get there; we are just going for a higher level of systemic gameplay (versus scripted) than most if not all games, and to architect all of this so it works in multiplayer at scale is no small feat.

I am very invested in making Star Citizen's gameplay as systemic as possible as I think this will open up so many possibilities of emergent and immersive gameplay. The downside of this approach is that it takes longer to see results as opposed to scripting actions as you have to build the fundamental systems first and have them interact with each other before the full extent of the gameplay becomes apparent. But for the long term, and for people's ability to lose themselves in the universe of Star Citizen for many years to come it is the approach that will have the best results.

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

The fun part is that even if Star Citizen somehow gets the best planets on the market (I don't think their current iterations are that good, but putting that aside) - who is going to use them?

Chris' Fever Dream posted:

A ballistic round passes through the ship's shield, which scrubs off some of its kinetic energy but not enough as the round's velocity was high as was its mass as it was an armor piercing round. It manages to penetrate the armor and strikes an internal component, say a power relay node (something else we are working on as part of the pipe system refactor). The power node takes damage giving it a chance to "misfire" while in use. A few minutes later the node does misfire, blowing its fuse and resulting in it catching fire. The crew of the ship doesn't realize a fire has broken out in one of the side corridors, as they are busily concentrating on fighting the ships attacking them. The fire starts to spread along flammable surfaces, and as the fire starts to engulf other components they also catch fire. The engineer on the bridge of the ship sees his console flash red giving him a warning that several components have failed and looking at his ships schematic he sees a fire has broken out below decks. The engineer decides to seal the bulkhead doors on the corridor to contain the fire but the doors have no power as the power node is out! He comms one of his crew mates to leave his turret and grab an extinguisher and put out the blaze which is slowly creeping towards the power plant room. Fire reaching a ship's power plant or it's ammo stores are two sure fire ways for your ship to go boom. With the physical damage system ships will no longer just explode when their hit points reach zero, they'll explode because something inside them went critical and exploded (due to damage or heat), which then damages everything else. Outside of that damage will affect the ability of the ship to function or it's structural integrity so they also could become a lifeless hulk as much as they could go up in a flash of light. When the crew member gets to the corridor where the fire has broken out is has already consumed a huge amount of oxygen in that "room" (the corridor) and has released noxious gasses, so the crew member can't breathe and quickly retreats to put on a fire resistant suit and helmet. The engineer in desperation manages to reroute power away from the destroyed node through a secondary node restoring power to enough of the bulkhead doors to allow him to contain the fire. Noticing that there is an external airlock in the sealed off area he opens the airlock, venting the oxygen in the sealed off corridors and rooms to the vacuum of space, depriving the fire of the ability to burn, putting most of it out. By this time the crew member is suitably dressed and can extinguish the fire that made it past the bulkhead door before it can grow again. The engineer then reseals the airlock and allows the life support system to replenish the air in the vented part of the ship. Once done the engineer opens up the bulkhead door allowing the crewmember in with a replacement fuse for the power node, restoring power to that section of the ship, then returns to his turret. It's been a close call but the ship is still alive and in the fight!

Sammus posted:

Unless CIG cheats and creates some class of new materials. Things with unrealistic young's modulus', expansion coefficients, thermal efficiencies, hardness...... Things that are unobtainable in the materials we use now. They could call it Unobtainium, and use it throughout their spaceships to avoid running into pitfalls like "why do all my ships split in half the moment our maneuvering jets kick on," and "My ship crumples like a tin can whenever I fire the on-keel rail gun with the engines running," and "My off-keel railgun detached the moment I fired it."

quote:

Every material in the game should be a real material. Has tensile strength and all the things you'd expect of a real material, it's not a very game-ified implementation where there's just some penetration value or whatnot. [...] Because of the way our surface types work with physics and the way they're actually stored is very art-centric. [...] We don't want to have [the aluminum on a ship] act differently or read differently on a box, on a character [...] We have some real materials, you know like titanium or whatever, but we also have things that are created from in-game lore that are lore materials, let's say; it's a real material that exists, just not in the real world, so we have to come up with all those values and they have to coincide with the reality of the value [...]

Tippis posted:

Do you think it would be rude to remind CRobber that DMM is a proprietary, most likely patented, tech and that would land him in the same trouble as back in the Wing Commander days…?

Or maybe he can just change engines. It's a simple two-day job, after all, right?

Sarsapariller posted:

I love this particular bit of Crobberts handwavium. The entire process is completely opaque to the player. You get hit by a bullet, and in a completely unconnected event minutes after the fight there is now a fire and half your ship is gone for no reason- is it a bug or a feature?. Or maybe it's just exploded altogether because you didn't notice in time. Your friend goes to take care of it and the doors don't work- is it a bug or a feature? Then he dies due to gases- bug or a feature? You don't know, you can't know, and of course any mistake is a loss of hours of time!

Chris has no idea how games work or how players work or even how his own company works. He envisions this grand simulation and then just waves his hand and says "Let it be so" and assumes it worked because none of his project leads will look him in the eye. In reality of course, they would just make your ship spawn random fires at low HP, and all players would just run around with helmets on and airlocks open at all times because it would be just another missing stair to dance around.

It's like a textbook what-not-to-do of game design.

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

The fun part is that even if Star Citizen somehow gets the best planets on the market (I don't think their current iterations are that good, but putting that aside) - who is going to use them? Which other studio is going to spend hundreds of millions to switch to outdated CryEngine with wonky physics? EA and Rockstar won't bother, that's not their type of engine and gameplay. Most studios don't have the money and time.

The only one I can think of is Bethesda (has money and outdated engine), but even then developing their own solution will be likely cheaper and easier expendable in future (and I am not sure whether they haven't started yet).

Tippis posted:

Do you think it would be rude to remind CRobber that DMM is a proprietary, most likely patented, tech and that would land him in the same trouble as back in the Wing Commander days…?

Or maybe he can just change engines. It's a simple two-day job, after all, right?

Sarsapariller posted:

Then he dies due to gases- bug or a feature?

CIG posted:

it's a real material that exists, just not in the real world

Dwesa posted:

Experienced concierge: "Impossible. It was probably a stray bullet travelling through space from a nearby battle that hit your argon tanks, which increased pressure in your gravity goo machine room which led to structural failure and explosion. Basic version of Polaris has only a titanium hull, you need to upgrade to one with durobtanium hull."

Pixelate posted:

There's a weird bit in that vid where the bugsmasher guy imagines gas tank gameplay.

Apparently they want to suck out any noxious gases from an area and store it in the tank that contained the replacement air. (Rather than just like vent it or whatever).

Then they think some fun gameplay would be if players could sneak on to your ship and replace your 'good air' tanks with 'bad air'

Can't wait for the gas tank carrying animations to be complete

Zaphod42 posted:

Okay I'll admit, if in Star Citizen you could break into someone's spaceship and replace all their o2 tanks with farts, that would maybe be GOTY.

Too bad they can't deliver.

Zaphod42 posted:

Lol does the Idris have glass windows?

Not at all a weakness to have your Bridge be directly exposed to vacuum on the first impact.

Pixelate posted:

It’s just a miracle Chris didn’t add sewage gameplay with the toilets

Time_pants posted:

I mean, I can ignore all of that because it's 900 years in the future, so it's not glass it's "nanologically-reinforced transparisteel," but this does touch on a lot of other stuff, like "why does your bridge need a viewing area?" I understand why we, the primitive, ground-bound mud apes of the 21st century want a viewing area: because space is fukken cray-cray and holy poo poo can you believe we're literally objectively unironically in space now holy poo poo just look at it all I don't know what a nebula even is but hey is that one?? But what I don't get is it you're trying to create this grognardian simulator that also simultaneously has like dozens of pages of lore about the guy who invented meteor valentines or some dumb poo poo why you're trying to sell space travel as this insane thing when it's so ubiquitous as to be a loving commute, so who cares?

It's 900 years in the future and space travel is so ordinary that we're selling military-grade spacecraft down at the convention center like the loving boat show is in town and make sure to get there early because 30th-century space Tim Allen is signing moon autographs! Why would I give a poo poo about the breathtaking view of the same void I drive past every single day from the deck of my lovely little space dinghy? Shouldn't I be navigating with 360° cameras or some sort of holographic projection of my surroundings from my reinforced cockpit since apparently we live in a universe where space travel is both incredibly mundane yet also rife with piracy and random daily acts of ghoulish, effortless violence? Why am I worried about what's happening in "the front" of my vehicle when neither I, nor anybody else, is worried about following the flow of traffic because that's a meaningless concept when traveling through a vast, empty void with total freedom of movement?

I don't know. Seems like they're trying to have it both ways.