Mirificus posted:

Blue On Blue posted:

Each elevator takes a real path ! It doesn’t just teleport you fool !!!

colonelwest posted:

The landing zones are all a Potemkin Village setup to give the illusion of size and scale that they can’t actually achieve. That’s why everything is cut up to a ridiculous extent and you have take multiple train rides between small/pointless/empty concourse areas to get to your ship. The whole thing looks like crap other than a few individual objects that have like a billion polygons or something and reduce you to sub 30fps on a 4090.

Tippis posted:

“Issue” huh? Yes, I suppose that's one way to describe the system maintaining its integrity protection to make it ever so slightly more difficult — or at least troublesome — to let incompetent programmers ruin your OS.

Top tip: don't do this. UAC never needs adjusting.

There is a distinct and important difference to note between “elevators take a real path” and “elevators take a path real elevators would take”. SC elevators certainly do one of those things.

Funnily enough, the one time I heard a semi-sensible rationale for huge space states, it was back in the EVE walking in stations era, where CCP were very aware of goons and their penchant for… well… goonery. So one of their design worries was the need to avoid 500 goons piling into an area and declare “pool's closed” so no-one could get in. Designing the areas silly huge would help mitigate that problem, as would an idea they had about “jelly collision”, where characters couldn't actually block each other — they'd try to avoid intersecting, but would ultimately squeeze through almost no matter how think the ground was with goons.

…of course, walking in station as originally envisioned never happened. There's probably a lesson to be learned there.

Tippis posted:

Maybe that would also help fixing the issue where stairs kill people for no discernible reasons

Blue On Blue posted:

that's what's so hilarious about the entire pile of poo poo that is CIG/SC and their constant rambling about fidelity and no short cuts

i really need to find that video of the elevators, where the developer was showing how the elevators (from a side cut view of the game world) will come when called, then turn around and follow a pre-set path to the next area, and continue on like so

except it was stupid looking because it was a real elevator (well game world elevator) that was stopping, turning, going up down left and right to make its stops, instead of just DOING WHAT PEOPLE DO IN VIDEO GAMES and teleporting the fudging elevator to where it is supposed to end up

as we have already seen it the elevators break constantly and routinely, so why bother with all this horse poo poo of no short cuts, when the game just makes them all fly off into deep space anyways!

ZeusCannon posted:

Part of goon antipathy towards SC is imagining a world in which stairs do not protect

Thoatse posted:

Aren't there also videos of the elevators going all Willy Wonka flying around off their paths too?

Thoatse posted:

Aren't there also videos of the elevators going all Willy Wonka flying around off their paths too?

quote:

Simple and easy can be done quickly. Those that stick to the tired routine ways of faking it know that well. Bethesda have far more resources than CIG, and their project has been in development for a similar length of time with a barely updated Creation Engine, yet they have opted to stick to the usual cop out mechanics. No manual flying from space to ground, no walking around inside your ship while in flight. No EVA, no boarding, no ship to ship docking, no refuelling (they explained they "have made ships with unlimited fuel because they didn't want players to get frustrated", sounds a lot like one of those "you'd get bored" excuses doesn't it?). Starfield touts that they have 100 star systems - but they only have 4 built cities to visit in those 100 star systems. The cell technology to give the impression that you can land anywhere on a planetary body is just an extension of the cell technology in Skyrim V updated because the hardware is better. Of course what few know is that Bethesda could draw on years of modders doing free work on their engine to demonstrate how to extend it's capability.

You keep comparing this project to other games that don't even come close to the same level of complexity and capability this project has now, and you don't even know what the final version (or Squadron what 42 has) is going to be.

Chris Roberts decided (with the full backing of the community) that we would go for as little faking it as is possible. That's why there was no-one saying "You'd get bored of walking around in, and out of your ships interior after the 10th time."

As you say 90% of the work that the players can see comes at the end, and yet the player has more immersion and capability to just go and do as they please (when it works) now well before that end than most games made by the Fortune 500 Billion dollar companies. It's the most common statement made by new players when they come to the project.

It's not just 2 games either, it's a whole franchise, we know they are building these games with an eye to the future and they have already stated plans to have at least two follow up story campaigns after Episode One of Squadron 42 which will not require a whole remake of the game engine, tools and even in-game assets.

Corporate game companies make games for investors to make a profit - the player experience is secondary. This community and Chris Roberts always puts the player experience first before any other consideration where it is known to be possible. None of the games you mention made by either start up's or existing corporates released a Live multiplayer game to play while it is still being built.

If you want to be so pedantic then CIG did release a game on Dec 23rd 2015 (3 years and 2 months after the company was formed) with around 400 employees and $100 million total revenue, and they haven't charged a penny to existing players (more than they wanted to pay by choice) for all upgrades and addons since. Unlike the makers of No Mans Sky at least they were open and honest about the state of that game release and made people aware of the future plans for it. If you're going to keep giving all those other projects a pass on their 'faking it' lack of scope then you should judge Star Citizen by what it was capable of in Q1 of 2016 because at that time Star Citizen already had capabilities that ED, NMS, KSP2, Flight of the Nova and even Starfield won't have - probably ever.

quote:

So much in this statement demonstrates that neither the OP nor the 'jump on the bandwagon' respondents actually know anything about this project beyond a cursory glance.

It ignores:
We already know they are working on 3 other star systems not released because the game servers are not in a condition to be able to take that content, we have no idea if there are any other star systems in current development.

We know there are star systems and game mechanics / assets for Squadron 42 in current development, and that's only what they are willing to share with us. We have no idea how much there is going to be in Squadron 42.

People make broad sweeping statements like 'It'll take years for them to bring Squadron 42 assets to the PU" How the hell do they know?

Why aren't they listening when we are told Squadron 42 is basically one huge dynamic mission inside the PU?

Why aren't they paying attention when full persistence is listed both as a Star Citizen roadmap item AND a Squadron 42 item? What on Earth do you need full persistence for in a purely scripted standalone single-player game with periodic game saves? Why does a basic single-player game running on a cut-down engine need full persistence?

Why is Quantum required for a single-player game if all it does is simulate a virtual backend economy for a multiplayer game? Of course if you knew that isn't all that it does you might think differently.

If Spectrum is merely an app to to manage assets and connect players to players, and players to that backend end multiplayer economy and game world communications why is it included in a single-player game - surely it would be easier to just script all that 'stuff' to run on demand?

Why are they using Render To Texture to show live screen and holographic communication between game characters, in real time, in s single-player game? Surely canned cut-scenes would be much easier? Why is Chris saying on the Squadron 42 vertical slice with directors commentary, if you go to the place that character is who's just made that call from the evil villains lair you can photobomb the holographic call to Captain White aboard the Stanton? What's that all about?

Why do they need buoyancy, swimming and boats in a single-player spaceship space warfare FPS shooter game? There are no large water bodies in the Odin system as far as we know. Scripted boat travel is easy to fake, you don't need to make buoyancy unless those water craft are player controlled and need to react to in-game physics. Why was Chris telling us they had a team working on custom wave generation when CryEngine already has a perfectly serviceable water body simulation? Which waterbodies are there in Squadron 42 that require such custom waves, and why do you need them if all you want to do is some GTA type gadding about in water?

Why do they need to develop a whole DNA system for character creation capable of creating millions of unique looking characters with full asymmetry - and solve the 'attachment problem' it creates - if they are making an 'on rails' go only where you're told single-player game? In a standard AAA game if they want to push the boat out as far as characters are concerned they make the tier 0 characters, then 10 races each with 10 male and 10 female variants and give them slightly different skin tone, eye colour, hair, clothes and make-up to make thousands of differing variants, no player really notices - why do you need a system that can potentially create millions of unique looking characters even if you stripped them naked and they were changing clothes often? Why do you need to be able to recognise 'at a glance' so many individual looking characters? Why do those characters need to age over time and have battle scars? Why do they need to write into the lore of game character regeneration that scars persist through regeneration?

The FUDsters do themselves no service when they show time and time again, they don't pay attention and even when they do take a glance they bring zero critical thinking skills to bear on even the scant facts they can glean.

All the fake reviews from old accounts with low post count and karma points with nothing but out of date information broad insults and bad attitude aren't fooling anyone. Here's a fun fact.. your post count from the old forums was brought forward to Spectrum but since it had no karma points they aren't brought forward. So if you have a poster with many posts and virtually no karma you KNOW they haven't made but a handful of posts on Spectrum.

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

Blue On Blue posted:

that's what's so hilarious about the entire pile of poo poo that is CIG/SC and their constant rambling about fidelity and no short cuts

i really need to find that video of the elevators, where the developer was showing how the elevators (from a side cut view of the game world) will come when called, then turn around and follow a pre-set path to the next area, and continue on like so

except it was stupid looking because it was a real elevator (well game world elevator) that was stopping, turning, going up down left and right to make its stops, instead of just DOING WHAT PEOPLE DO IN VIDEO GAMES and teleporting the fudging elevator to where it is supposed to end up

as we have already seen it the elevators break constantly and routinely, so why bother with all this horse poo poo of no short cuts, when the game just makes them all fly off into deep space anyways!

Mirificus posted:

Pescat asks:

Why...?
Why...?
Why...?

lobsterminator posted:

https://www.pcgamer.com/were-running-at-a-f-ing-wall-and-were-gonna-crashcd-projekts-lead-quest-designer-on-big-budget-rpgs/

This was a relevant article I saw yesterday. One of the reasons why Cyberpunk was such a failure was that in Witcher 3 they could do all kinds of tricks, like fade to black when you enter a quest NPC so it resets the scene or control the camera. Cyberpunk had to be constant first person vision with no cutscenes so you couldn't do trickery. And that made it a different level of difficulty.

The thing is, as a gamer I don't care if you have cuts or cutscenes instead of total immersion, as long as the experience is good.

CRobber chose the most difficult approach for a game even though he doesn't have the leadership or team required to even think a bout pulling off.

Blue On Blue posted:

in my minds recreation of the videos ive seen yes, but that might just be wanting it to be extra hilarious

Scruffpuff posted:

No there's definitely that video out there somewhere, in fact whoever put it up also overlayed the audio from the Willy Wonka elevator scene for extra hiliarity.

quote:

That's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of future monetisation possibilities.

They are making tools that can be licensed out for recurring fees, not just tools for the game but tools that extend the capabilities of third party applications, and more are coming. On an SCLive they talked about working on rigid body deformation in the game - dent's, dings, bent and buckled ship and vehicle structures. There are game companies whose CEO's would sell their first-born child to get their hands on such tools that work in-game because up to now we've only seen those things in niche tech demonstrators.

Squadron 42 sales. The game franchise doesn't have to end with the story of a navy pilot in the Vanduul war, there are endless stories they could make with existing assets in this game universe.

They have a system where there can be gated assets in the game universe - the Chairman's Club lounges, the Million Mile High Club, even the annual events like IAE could be paywall gated, you don't need to attend IAE or Murray Cup Races to progress in the game. They are making their own mocap studios and there are plans for entertainment venues in the game, there's nothing to stop them having 'guest concerts' or even meet and great via FOIP with game personalities... maybe even make them live events. If they want to make 'murder mystery weekend' breaks in the hotels, they can do that. The possibilities in a live always persistent universe are endless and it's all at way higher fidelity than Meta. if they arranged a concert hall venue in the game with full orchestra to play Pedro Macedo Camacho's music I would pay to go to it, and they had an opera singer perform aboard the Gatsby 890J.

They can sell standalone modules, potentially on different platforms - I think that is what Theatres of War was all about, they did outsource it (and the other Arena Commander modules) to a company that mainly did work for Sony Entertainment Division.

They've created a system and pipeline for making in-game story/video content. They've already made waaay more than we 'officially' know about. If you watch the Reunion video listen to what the character says at the end - sounds a lot like it may be part of a series doesn't it? They can sell that content both to entertainment networks and to players who want that content available in the game. A few years ago now Cory Doctorow came into the Star Citizen twitter feed and asked how to get in touch with the senior management of CIG.

75% of LucasArts revenue didn't come from movie ticket sales or TV sales, it came from licensing of products and toys. When you go to CitizenCon's you see that people spend a good deal of money to cosplay, is it any wonder CIG are so keen to support BarCitizen venues? In around 2017 or 2018 all Concierge level players got an email offering a Chairman's Club Handbook - Space Marshall and above got it for 'shipping only' at $25 and lower concierge ranks could buy remaining stock at full price plus shipping around $90, it sold out in minutes. I've got one, it's very nice but it definitely didn't cost $65 to produce. Those Banu Gamecube scratchcards given away at BarCitizen events are fetching up to $100 each now, I was given 6 by Jared Huckaby - I used one for myself and gave away 4 on Reddit the next day. Chris has already put his toe in the water regarding licensing of in-game assets as fan memorabilia, we all 'buy' that memorabilia when we get our goody-bags at the CitizenCons and you can buy limited run merchandise in the RSI store, the Calder family were allowed to buy minority non-voting rights shares in CIG, and what is their speciality? Licensing and marketing.

The future of this project is planned to be far bigger than a lot of people realise.

Drakkel posted:

I can't wait til every AAA video game has world-class hot dog eating and bed deforming tech

quote:

75% of LucasArts revenue didn't come from movie ticket sales or TV sales, it came from licensing of products and toys.

Mirificus posted:

lobsterminator posted:

And of course Pisscat can't get any name right. LucasArts was the game division. I doubt they had much of their own toys or products.

Larz posted:

I swear he does this on purpose, like some kind of performance art.

FishMcCool posted:

I have my own grudges against ED/Braben, starting with the Offline Mode bait and switch, but graphics-wise, I never had a complaint. Barring Space Engine, it's the most pretty/immersive space environment around as far as I'm concerned, and it keeps looking good when things move which is more than can be said about SC. The vistas from binary systems, planetary rings or from the surface of planets in close orbits never gets old for me.

Larz posted:

I swear he does this on purpose, like some kind of performance art.

quote:

I do write these posts off the top of my head, so I admit I might not be as clear in the details as it's possible to be. I also suffer from word blindness so sometimes when writing posts I forget the name of something and have to go find it or sit and wait for it to pop into my head after a while, I'm terrible with names, but understanding systems I am good at, but the overall idea comes across.

I mentioned in other posts above how CIG only talk about components if they are new and relevant, once they have a whole service they just mention the service, of course it depends who is doing the talking. What is now accepted as PES should actually have the acronym PESS because it's the Persistent Entity Streaming Service made of several components.

My aim in writing posts isn't absolute accuracy for those who already know as much, if not more than I, it's to try and describe the overall systems to those who find them hard to follow and don't understand why things are happening in the game. Some may think it but I'm not trying to points score, only further the discussion - if I am trying to be funny, or scathing, the style is completely different. Posts like yours for example if it wasn't directed at me i'd just read it and appreciate the information. I'm conscious there are other read only' people and so if I think a point needs clarifying I jump and do my best. It's a discussion and though i write my posts as if I'm stating fact that's only for brevity, if I'm wrong I'm happy for someone to come along and re-clarify - it is a discussion in a character limited forum post style that doesn't lend it's self to complex discussion, or presentation.

MuLepton posted:

CatGPT

BitBasher posted:

Didn't Duke Nukem do render to texture for the working monitor screens in the movie theater level like forever ago? They even worked in multiplayer.

Tippis posted:

(Granted, the second one only becomes magical if you understand what the UI is telling you.)

Mirificus posted:

JammyB posted:

What am I missing on that second one? It doesn't look right, but I never played ED so I don't know about the GUI. Honestly, none of that looks good to me . Possibly due to all the planets being perfectly lit from the front (if those in #2 are planets, not sure).

Antigravitas posted:

It's just a shame that the rest of it is interminably boring. And I remind you, I just said I get excited at the prospect of playing Space DCS. The act of accelerating your ship is the most interesting part of Elite: Kinda Not Very Dangerous At All Actually

Tippis posted:

That wasn't render to texture so much as viewport and sector fuckery (to expand on the viewport/portal sector fuckery that was used to create under-water zones, mirrors, room-over-room).

Oh, and of course, all the fancy things he's crowing about highlight the current thread title: it's all stuff HL2 did. 20(!!) years ago. And it wasn't the first game to do that. And it worked in MP even back then.