4th Stimpire Queen posted:

"Tactical Vehicle Insertion"

Physics still on point.

https://v.redd.it/tustqcrvqi3a1/DASH_1080.mp4

Popete posted:

CIG give Monocle Cat admin powers and let him cleanse spectrum in an inquisition.

lobsterminator posted:

Isn't that just a normal map?

Sandepande posted:

I have a sneaking suspicion that Cat is the worst mansplainer on the planet.

Odd Wilson posted:

All that passive aggression unleashed into real aggression

the future generations will speak in hushed tones of a cat with a giant hammer silhouetted by light of every color as Spectrum burns in cleansing flame

the ghost story will frighten the children into never stepping out of line and to buy another Idris for safety

The Titanic posted:

This gave me the worries. It probably actually happens too which is worse.

Mirificus posted:

quote:

Cloud Imperium does something unusual, not seen in standard game development, they do R&D on features with the intention to include any upgraded features that are the result of that R&D.
[...]
Cloud Imperium dev's told us quite a while ago they are researching RGB bump maps to achieve what hasn't been done before, height maps that can curve using the 3 values, 0 - 255 each, of the Red, Green and Blue scale as well as the greyscale.
[...]
There is no way that Chris could have known if this was coming back in 2014 or even 2015
[...]
This is just one example of how they are pushing the boundaries, there are several other things they are doing that are equally 'out there'.
[...]
It has nothing to do with making money from ship skins, it's about pushing the limits and making the absolute best use of the technology you have available.

Sandepande posted:

I can imagine him doing fifteen minute lectures during his munchalot sessions.

Shazback posted:

If anyone needed further proof he is talking out his rear end, add this to the pile. Everything he says here is anathema to project management and if CIG are really doing this they will never finish the game.

The whole reason for having a target engine is to avoid re-work. You see with the R&D / engine programmers what features are available, what it's reasonable to expect can be optimized to run well based on your timeline, and what the key workflow or requirements will be (how many polygons do you expect to render on screen? Deformations? etc.) so you can brief your art team, level designers, animation team, etc. on what constraints they're working with.

Sure, you might have some targets for your engine that will have to be optimized, perhaps your art style has some constraints for the engine R&D that aren't fully sorted out. But otherwise the engine team is there to optimize how the game runs, work with level designers and artists and audio teams to make sure -their- work shines.

If you don't freeze the engine and let the R&D team pipe their changes straight into the game... Well then you're in deep poo poo.
The engine optimization team have no idea what they're supposed to work on. Improving these new R&D features that aren't used by anything? The things that are causing bottlenecks in performance currently? Issues the artists and animators are raising?
Your artists, level developers and every other person is stuck in an endless loop of re-work. Cool new RGB bump maps? Brilliant. Now every single asset needs to be re-worked so that they have this new feature. Every change to the engine means every asset, every animation, every single thing that has been done in the project has to be re-checked, upgraded as necessary, re-worked if something bugs, or worse.
Even for the R&D team it's actually pretty crap. They're limited so much by the ongoing project that they can't make substantial changes. Why is Vulkan so impossible to implement? Because they can't break everything completely. They've probably spent more than ten times more effort to implement janky and inefficient conversion systems so things continue to work.

All this before the obvious issues that any undocumented features, hacks, work-arounds and such (used knowingly or unknowingly) will break in a million interesting and unknown ways as each team works, re-works and re-re-works each part of the project, and nobody has a clear scope of work (too many polys to draw? Is this a topic for the R&D team to devise a new graphics pipeline / rendering engine? Or for the engine team to improve culling, LoD decisions, perhaps some minor improvements to draw speed or shader order for large assets, maybe some baked lighting or other things can reduce on-the-fly computations? Or should the artists scale back the asset's raw poly counts, make some more agressive LoDs?) .

And keep in mind that each week that goes by your team is losing motivation and the competition's games are looking better.


A normal company would have frozen the scope for SQ42 on a Wing Commander-like game: instanced space battles, cutscenes, a few base areas you can walk around between missions, add in the graphical flourishes that Chris demands like hands moving in the cockpit to match the player's input... Voila.
During this time, develop a separate engine / improve CryEngine for the next game. Make and release the next game. Improve the engine again while this second came is being made. Repeat.

The Titanic posted:

It went to ew quickly. I'm sure he has nice opinions on vaginas and which pee color is the best color, likely in e-book length.

quote:

You clearly have no idea what DNA is in Star Citizen, or what it means to the future of the game.

quote:

There you go.. you don't know. One of the recurring themes that comes across from detractors who spout argumentative nonsense is that they don't understand how games are normally made, so they can't see the differences between what CI are doing and what the relative advantages are. They then jump to conclusions about what they think is possible and what they think isn't... the FUDster talking points are based upon this constant level of incredulity. They can't see how it could be possible so they have decided it just isn't.

DNA is the system for giving all characters in the game, every player and NPC, a unique appearance complete with asymmetry varying head shapes and body styles with the ability to age over time and have wounds /scars. It also involves how clothes, and rigid body wearables are fit to the characters, not an easy nut to crack! Other games get around this by having a standard sized head and body for the majority of game characters and NPC's that are not hand made story characters. The DNA tech is involved in solving how they can have many characters all animated within the view of a player or even group of players, all with reasonable game download sizes. Ever noticed how in most games there is only ever 1 or 2 characters speaking at a time in live gameplay? Have you any idea how animation retargeting, only possible with DNA, will revolutionise game mocap in the future?

Complex? You think so? Compared to other games yes it bloody well is!

OK.. well.. they've done it. It IS working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZqndIW6Hxc

quote:

Another take on the old FUDsters mantra of 'Defund Cloud Imperium Games!' to get what we want. The respect this crowd has for this community's intelligence is pitiable.

Please can I have the time back I wasted reading this utter nonsense? You sold me a bill of goods.

corn on the cop posted:

i know people have speculated whether pisscat was a false flag, but there's no way anyone could ever be this much of a boring knob on purpose

corn on the cop posted:

there's no way anyone could ever be this much of a boring knob on purpose

corn on the cop posted:

but there's no way anyone could ever be this much of a boring knob on purpose

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

Ever noticed how in most games there is only ever 1 or 2 characters speaking at a time in live gameplay?

Monocle Cat posted:

Hey! How are things over at the Frontier Developments long running Star Citizen thread? Going to blow past 120,000 posts soon! There are some real humorists over there!  

We've had 5 patches: 3.17.0, 3.17.1, 3.17.2, 3.17.3 and 3.17.4 - I suppose whether you consider them 'major' has a lot to do with what's in them... let's see shall we:

DNA head Textures update
Colonialism Outpost - Derelicts
Additional Stanton La Grange Points
Derelict Reclaimer Settlement - POI
Derelict Reclaimer Space Missions
Space Station Clinics: Variations
Lorville Hospital: Maria Pure of Heart
AI - Planetary Navigation
AI - Dropships and Reinforcements
Coffee Shop Vendor
Siege of Orison
Jumptown Event
Illegal Delivery Missions
Selling Items To Shops
Ship to Ship Refuelling
Mining Gadgets
Anvil C8R Pisces
Greycat STV
Drake Corsair
Anvil Centurion
Drake Mule
RSI Scorpius
MISC Hull A
Rivers

Plus:
Loot Generation T1
IAE Showroom event - A free-fly and sale..

commando posted:

Frustration: When will the game be good?

I want CIG to succeed.

Gotta say that, wouldn't post here otherwise. Even the most jaded fans of the game want it to succeed.

However... for me personally, the game succeeds when its good, and the game is very far away from good.

Or more specifically...

The game feels far from good from a gameplay perspective... in my opinion
The game feels like it has enough tech that it should be good, if not now... then soon. There are enough good elements to the game that it shouldn't take too much to make it good.

And those two things together, are a frustrating mix.

Defining good is subjective, and I'm sure I'll get 50 picardpalms with people explaining that its the best game they've ever played in the comments, and if you feel that way then good for you, I do not. I feel that the game is hollow. It has some very positive elements, some key features that it does very well.

But there is no depth to it.

And I worry... that with what CIG is planning, the depth isn't coming anytime soon. Like I'm not really that excited about 3.18, or even 4.0, because I believe that nothing I've seen scheduled to go in by 4.0 will fix the game's core issue... which is that its empty. There is nothing to do. There no endgame, nothing other than an endless, repetitive grind.

And if I were really cynical... I'd wonder if this is by design. If your goals in the game are anything other than grinding to purchase new ships... then why purchase new ships?

But lets set that aside, and assume that's not the real problem. Making the game good has to be good for ship sales right? The most jaded and cynical take is likely not the correct one. CIG likely wants good end game content, it likely wants the game to be more than that endless grind for new ships.

So, since this is a personal post, based on my own opinions, here's what the game needs to be good.

Top tier blockbuster level PVE end game content. The kind of content you might find in a game like Destiny 2 or Warframe. LOTS of this content AND it must be bug free and nearly perfect because in order to compete with other game's... that... is... the... bar. Anything less just won't cut it, no matter how many fancy ships CIG adds. Seamless planetary transitions and ship interiors are - in the long run - not a replacement for high quality content.

OR:

Emergent game content based on interactions between players following the formula taken by multiplayer sandbox games. You acquire resources and items, you store them somewhere, and you must defend them. By defending them, you generate content for other players who attempt to take your belongings.

OR:

A mix of both

Its worth noting that I'm describing theme park and sandbox style content here, and I think that one of these two paths will get Star Citizen to "good" with much less effort than the other (creating high quality PVE content is hard) but that's not what this post is intended to focus on. Back to the topic at hand.

The problem that I see, and the real topic of this post... is that I don't see any of this in the cards in the medium term. I don't see it happening within the next 2 years.
I don't see lots of blockbuster PVE content coming soon.

If this was in the cards, I think we'd see signs of it. The "lots" stipulation kind of guaruntes that this is the case, but lets just... for the sake of argument, lets water this down, and ask "Will there be ANY top tier blockbuster PVE content in the game in the next two years?".

And even this... I think the answer is no. The game is too buggy, to early. Performance is too bad. The AI is too terrible. There is essentially no hope at all that we'll see really impressive content within 2 years IMO. I hope I'm wrong... I do... I didn't spend a lot of money on ships, but am a backer and have invested in this game - since 2016. I hope I'm wrong, but I see no signs of high quality content making it in - in the medium term. VHRTs don't cut it, the missions in the game that I've played... seem terrible. Its like its all placeholder content waiting for something else - which might be the case, there might be very good, very reasonable reasons why the content is so bad, but none of that matters from the perspective of this post.
I don't see multiplayer sandbox content coming soon either.

And with this, I was hopeful I really was. I really thought this might be coming very soon. Persistence is the feature which serves as the foundation for the Sandbox survival game genre. 3.18 is getting persistence. You add 2 and 2 together and you might assume that Star Citizen will be getting survival sandbox style content in the near future.

Except that its not happening, and for the most bizarre of reasons. CIG doesn't want to implement a server selector, so they're just implementing persistence, but they aren't really planning on leveraging it to improve the quality of the game at a fundamental level. Persistence will mean very little to the playerbase for the foreseeable future. The coffee cup trick doesn't really work if you can't get back to your server.

Now there is one loophole here, and that loophole is piracy. Piracy is a mechanic where you must defend resources you've acquired, and by which you generate content for others and they generate content for you.... but I am not sure that piracy can fill a hole of this size. Without some form of base raiding, I don't see it happening, and the fact that piracy is rare and very easy to avoid also leaves me without much hope that it will fill the void in quality content that this game has. This could be a game about piracy, where piracy is a cornerstone mechanic - an alternative to the base raids in Rust.... but a lot of work would have to go into piracy for that to happen. That's not going to happen when freighters can just take a slightly different route to avoid a snare. You'd need active piracy, the kind of piracy that involves tracking down and chasing targets rather than just passively hoping that they're incompetent. That doesn't appear to be on the horizon.
Taken together, I can't shake the feeling that while the game will certainly improve over the next few years... it will remain hollow.

And that's a depressing feeling, because the game - as we all know - has so much promise.

I could end this post here, and it would be complete, but there is one other thing I want to mention. One other issue I want to bring up.

And its that I lack faith in what I think that CIG actually plans on doing.
Star Citizen the simulation

This is what people like to tell me the game is, what its going to be. This is what people like to point out when they don't like my posts and want to correct me. I don't understand the game, because Star Citizen is a simulation.

What does that even mean?

I mean, EVERY game is a simulation. Metal gear simulates military bases and asks the player to crawl through them. Red Dead Redemption 2 simulates the old west. Dwarf Fortress simulates every drat thing to a degree that I imagine Star Citizen will never manage to match.

Just being a simulation doesn't mean that the game's concept is good, and it doesn't really bring anything new to the table by itself.

I couldn't care less that Star Citizen is intended to be a "simulation". I don't care about the degree to which NPCs are modeled. I don't see how that improves the game experience for me. Now maybe I lack imagination and vision, or maybe I've just been exposed to many different games and so have a more realistic understanding that saying Star Citizen is going to be a simulation means little. Oblivion was a simulation, look up "Goblin Wars" and "Radiant AI". The game was simulated to a degree that almost no one understands - BECAUSE IT HAD ESSENTIALLY NO EFFECT ON THE PLAYER.

And that's the problem with games that attempt to be in depth simulations. The vast majority of what's simulated is going to be completely meaningless, its going to have no impact whatsoever on the player. If you steal a goblin staff in Oblivion, and start a goblin war... but don't realize that it even happened, and don't see the war occur, then what's the purpose of it?

It was a waste of developer time to have implemented it.

People tote out the word "simuation" like its religion. You don't understand they say... Star Citizen will be amazing because its a simulated universe. Sigh...

What matters is the player experience, and if the "simulation" doesn't directly impact and significantly improve the player experience, then it wasn't worth building in the first place.

I -sadly- don't see the player experience undergoing the kind of transformation that would make it competitive with other games within two years. I wish I did.

If you think I'm mistaken, and have a more positive take on Star Citizen's viability over the next few years, I'd love to hear it.

the best community posted:

Dude, you could have just typed:
"Testing game systems during numerous consecutive development cycles isn't supplying me with sufficient amounts of dopamine!"
and saved us all a whole lot of time.

Lord Stimperor posted:

Every end of year or so I compare my own progress to that of star citizen as a sort of gratitude exercise. So SC is at least useful for that

Mirificus posted:

Monocle Cat posted:

You clearly have no idea what DNA is in Star Citizen, or what it means to the future of the game.

quote:

of the Red, Green and Blue scale as well as the greyscale.

feedmegin posted:

Anyone who can say this has no business talking about graphics.

(It's not /as well as/, you get grey by mixing equal levels of RGB. This is computer graphics or even web design 101)

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Star Citizen: the Norte Dame of video games.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Star Citizen: like a cathedral it will take way more time than you think.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Star Citizen: this game could truly be in development for the next 20 years.

(and wtf is Norte Dame?)

HexiDave posted:

However, the idea that CIG is going to revolutionize graphics development by tweaking a few texture channels in a shader is uhhhhh interesting.

Sandweed posted:

Monocle cat becoming a mod on spectrum is joining my "Roberts announce the switch to UE5" of things that will never happen but would be insanely funny if it did.

HexiDave posted:

Presumably he's talking about the alpha channel in the image file. It's common to have RGBA (or some order of that) in game image formats to do diffuse color and transparency, but when you also have normal (surface normal, aka bump) maps you use R,G,B to refer to the surface vector (basically the angle), so you could repurpose the alpha channel for something else. There's a ton of random things you can do with the different color channels, but these days there are much more powerful tools to build additional details than trying to cram them into 256 values in a heavily compressed image.

Graphics programming is all about cheating to build a visual presentation with as few resources as possible, so using special hacks and tricks to get more details using math and image formats is "the job". However, the idea that CIG is going to revolutionize graphics development by tweaking a few texture channels in a shader is uhhhhh interesting.

chadbear posted:

It's disappointing but it's the closest we get to a 10 for the chairman these days I guess