Fidelitious posted:

Chris Roberts' game saved his eyeballs so he did the logical thing and became completely obsessed with it thus leading on a 25+ year path that ends with him being paid by Chris to live on a farm and not tell anyone anything he knows about Star Citizen.
In between he had a website that's "definitely a joke" and has "funny" things posted on it from when he was a child that didn't know any better (24 years old) and also made his own grift to buy a bunch of bullshit that nobody cares about from said game that saved his eyes.

Now he continues to post inane minutiae about Wing Commander and seems to play through it again frequently.

Fidelitious posted:

Chris Roberts' game saved his eyeballs

Renfield posted:

It's worse than that.
He had surgery that saved his sight and was told to read as part of the aftercare.
He read the wing commander novels, and credits this with saving his sight.

dialhforhero posted:

Who is Ben?

quote:

The real technological leap (and why they keep using the term 'seamless' in the StarEngine showcase video) is Object Container Streaming on the game client and Server Object Container Streaming in the live game service. There is no other game that has this type of streaming memory load technology in a multiplayer open world.

Coming later the backend simulation of a continuous persistent virtual game universe with Quantum, Quasar, Odin and the virtual AI population that feeds into that live game universe simulation is also unique to Star Citizen. When it is fully implemented not only will it completely change Star Citizen, it will completely change the gaming industry's attitude to what a live game service should be.

Innovation takes time and money, but more importantly it takes the will to do it. In terms of revenue Bethesda makes far more money than CIG, they have had years to build teams with expertise in the game engine and tools they have created. Yet when they made a whole new game franchise they barely put any work into updating Creation Engine, and it shows. Just about every reviewer of Starfield has pointed this out.

The key to understanding the difference between CIG and other game development companies is that CIG are unconstrained by investors, CIG can innovate. Our money goes directly into making the game better, not into the bank accounts of investors who will then decide whether they want to fund future innovation.

Those who say CIG haven't released a game and therefore the funding / time taken can't be judged until the final product is released are being disingenuous - the PU was released to live players on December 23rd 2015, the designation 'alpha' simply means it is still being built upon, but it was a playable game release. If instead they had released Star Citizen and then gone on to release Star Citizen II, Star Citizen III etc and expected everyone to pay full price for each iteration they would be happier with that? They think CIG should have done the same as Rockstar?

If you bought a $45 game package on December 23rd 2015 you have had continuous access to a live multiplayer game and all updates for free for $0.48/month... and you didn't have to wait 8 years between update releases of major new features developed in complete secrecy and with no consultation with the players.

If they want to argue that features that were discussed or 'promised' didn't make it into the first live release then they have a point, but that point relies on a limited understanding of what those 'promises' required in terms of technological advancement and how CIG could be reactive to opportunities that presented themselves in the meantime- such as spherical grid planets. There is a difference between the aims and goals of a project and the actual nuts and bolts that were expected at the projects inception.

The aim was to make the Best drat Space Simulator Ever, that is what drove the community to provide world record levels of support. If Chris had been offered the technology to make his game far superior to what was originally planned, and he hadn't taken it, imagine how the community would have reacted to finding that out.

There has also been the argument made that they could have made the 2016 version of the game (which would have looked a lot like Starfield does now) and innovated with subsequent updates, but that ignores the fact that core engine technology would have still had to have been worked on to allow that post release updating. Which is exactly what they have done, they have a live game service running while they do the R&D to extend the games capability, unlike players of Elite Dangerous we don't have to hope for future innovation that we would be allowed to purchase at some time in the future, we get to see the progress of that innovation on an almost daily basis at no extra cost to the player.

The fact that Chris could make a decision to innovate and give his gaming community the opportunity to always be able to look forward to the best that can be done with the hardware and technology, rather than what investors mandated, is what makes this project what it is - unique.

Some are salty because they feel they pre-paid for a promised game, but the majority didn't just want to pre-pay for a game, we wanted to support an idea. A change in approach between a gaming community and those who make games. We didn't want to be seen as mere consumers, we wanted a partnership between community and development team so that any gamer now or in the future could come and enjoy the 'no investor imposed limits' gaming experience, and we got that. It's that idea of a partnership between creators and consumers that let's us take pride in our collective achievement. If we change the paradigm from middle-men investors mandating our future gaming experience to player communities directly funding their idea of the best games is it any wonder those middle-men feel threatened by such a project?

Mirificus posted:

Tippis posted:

I'm curious to know what he thinks “object container streaming” actually is, and what his references are for this belief…

pisshead posted:

Well I just played for a while, and it doesn't seem to have changed much since I last played it a few years ago. I'm on a newer, much better PC and the performance is just as bad, even with all the graphics turned down to minimum. I haven't noticed any difference to the gameplay (running around randomly designed indoor areas, going up and down elevators, and the clunky flying). The UI is terrible. Often you can't read text or elements because it's white on white or blue on blue. The interact 'F' mode is awkward. Steering the ship is awkward. Trying to line up your ship in third person camera is awkward. Going through doors is awkward.

Even with the graphics turned up to max it doesn't look that special in this day and age. So you get terrible performance for no reason. In a busy area I'll be at single figure FPS while my graphics card has 0rpm. No idea why. Every indoor area either looks like generic 80s scifi dank, or shopping mall. The character does everything slowly, he gets off a chair like Mr Creosote, you have to press drink over and over again to empty a bottle of water to get your hydration up. Can't believe I downloaded so much for this.

Randalor posted:

How many of the buyable jpegs ships are actually in the game now, and how many are still just free donations to CIG without the benefits of actual donations?

Vengarr posted:

Isn’t the game F2P? Are people still buying PNG ships? Have they finally been added to the game?

Randalor posted:

How many of the buyable jpegs ships are actually in the game now, and how many are still just free donations to CIG without the benefits of actual donations?

Opioid posted:

Announced: 105
Released (flyable in game): 74 (70.4%)
In production: 11 (10.4%)
Remaining: 20 (19%)

And yes, transport truck with wings is released and functional with a ‘snap to grid’ type of effect with cargo boxes. But because of its design it can’t land while fully loaded. Only dock to spaceports and unload to other ships.

Tippis posted:

I'm curious to know what he thinks “object container streaming” actually is, and what his references are for this belief…

Blue On Blue posted:

And how many of those are just reskins of the same ship to inflate numbers

mdxi posted:

I am super late to the party on this, but I want to do another installment of "things that have changed in my life since i discovered Star Citizen", because I feel like personal timelines are great for illustrating how long this poo poo-show has really been dragging on.

I discovered the Star Citizen thread in 2012, around summertime. Everyone was very hype and was buying up ships and participating in the great spreadsheet wars with other orgs. The comedy hadn't actually started yet. I was temporarily bunking in the finished attic of a friend, because my apartment lease was up and it was taking longer than anticipated to buy a house with the person I was in an LTR with at the time. I was mostly playing this awesome new game called "Cookie Clicker" on my brand new Samsung Chromebook 3. Since then:

• 2012: Bought a house; spent 2 years as a quasi-stepdad to a couple of preteens; ended the LTR because she got a job across the country that she'd have been crazy to turn down, and I didn't want to move
  
• 2014: Met someone new, who introduced me to backpacking in the desert southwest of the US
  
• 2016: Sold the house, married the new person, and moved westward myself; made new friends and started doing a lot of volunteering with learn to code type groups; learned how to have fun outdoors in the winter
  
• 2017: Got into volunteer grid computing, a hobby that would (to date) lead to me having donated over 500 CPU-years and over 3.5 billion points worth of GPU time to university research groups, and have a lot of fun dicking with hardware while doing it
  
• 2018: New job
  
• 2019: Started feeling strongly burnt out over the holidays and decided to take a four month sabbatical; started volunteering at local science museum, which was even cooler than I thought it would be
  
• 2020: January: Oops a pandemic is about to happen; scramble to find a new job before the poo poo hits the fan in the US (made it with a couple weeks to spare; never met anyone in the office)
  
• 2021: Midyear: The world has woken up again; decide to move to a different state; buy a house
  
• 2023: New job; starting to think really hard about an exit plan from computing as a career
  

Meanwhile, Star Citizer still doesn't exist, and the true believers are still posting screeds on the internet defending it while treating it as a gacha game.

Opioid posted:

No idea, just copied a post with the numbers from last patch

Tippis posted:

I'm curious to know what he thinks “object container streaming” actually is, and what his references are for this belief…

quote:

You aren't logged in to a server, you are logged into a shard which has the Hybrid Layer running the Replication Service. You will remain on the same shard while you move around in the game. Each shard is a copy of the whole game universe. If you want to change shards you'll have to log out to main menu and log back in.

Game zones will be hosted on their own game servers on a shard, to begin with each zone will be a solar system Stanton or Pyro. So on one shard there will be a Pyro game server and a Stanton game server. It's the Replication Service that handles transfer of authority over entities between game servers on a shard. An entity is a game object, a player's head, a gun, a ship, a space station, a planet etc.

The service which splits up game zones on a shard is called the Atlas Service - it determines which areas of the game universe are loaded onto a game server's hard drive. If an area of the game universe is not loaded onto a game server's hard drive then it can't be streamed into that game server's RAM. The zones a game server will hold are decided before that server is spun up and they don't change no matter where the players go. If a player goes beyond the boundary of authority of a game server they will be transferred to a game server that has authority for that neighbouring area.

At first the boundaries between game zones (or territories as they called it during the CitCon demo) will be fixed or static, later the boundaries will be flexible, ie dynamic, depending on where the players move in the shard.

Knowing what each service does helps a lot in understanding how the whole fits together.

The Replication Service - When you load the game client into your PC's RAM you see the area of the game you load into and your player avatar. That area and you have to be present, or Replicated, on the game servers. In order for another player to see you they have to have a copy of your player avatar replicated from the game server to their game client.

All these copies of game entities being replicated to multiple PC game clients and the game server means that something has to have authority over what is being copied (you can't have your game client controlling another player!). The thing that has authority over game entities, including the player, is the Dedicated Game Server, it's the Replication Service that transfers that authority from game server to game server and object container zone to object container zone.

StarEngine uses Object Containers to split the game universe into zones or territories to load into server RAM (Server Object Container Streaming) - the top tier Object Container is the whole game universe, then the solar system nested with it, then nested within that are other object containers containing a planet and moons (this is why you have to QT to a planet first, not direct to a moon).

Within the planet Object Container there are object containers for moons, space stations, landing zones... all the way down to ships and the object container that is the player avatar. While an entity is within an object container on a game server that object container has authority over it.

This is why Star Citizen has so many airlocks, elevators, trains and long winding corridors between areas - it's to give time to load the neighbouring areas (object containers) into server RAM and game client RAM using Object Container Streaming. You get into the elevator in the object container that is the 'hangars and habs' zone of a space station object container and while in the elevator the 'cargo floor' object container is streamed into RAM and the Hangars and Habs object container is streamed out of RAM both on the game server and on each connected game client that has those zones if the players are in the elevator between those zones.

Starfield doesn't have Object Container Streaming which is why you have loading screens even to go into a room, or the interior of a ship. It has something called cell loading to put game objects into your PC's RAM, but it doesn't have a Replication service so you can't see into or interact with objects in neighbouring cells.

When you load your game client zone into RAM you not only have to see the object container you are in but you have to be able to see into object containers surrounding you which means those object containers even though they may be empty of players still need to be loaded into server RAM by server object container streaming. If you are stood by the big observation window on an orbital space station your player avatar is in the space station object container, hangars and habs object container, but you can see through the window into the planet object container and through the planet object container into the game universe object container (which holds the sun and skybox).

When you are standing by the big window at TEASA Spaceport you are in the TEASA Spaceport Object Container, within the Lorville object container but you're looking out through the Lorville Object Container toward the clouds which are in the Hurston planet Object Container. All those Object Containers have to be loaded into Server RAM and replicated out to each connected game clients RAM. The Replication Service tells your local game client which zones to load into RAM using client Object container Streaming so that you can be in them, or see into them.

At the CitCon demo during the first part the corridor is broken into 3 zones (object containers) on one game server, both Benoit and Paul had to be able to see (and even shoot) into all of the corridor even when they were only in one zone of the corridor. All 3 zones had to be spun up into server RAM on the game server via Server Object Container Streaming and those object containers and their contents had to be replicated to Pauls local game client and Benoits local game client.

In the second part of the demo they had each of the 3 corridor zones loaded onto their own game server which were meshed together so that each player could still see and interact with all 3 zones of the corridor even when on a different game server.

Obviously to be able to load something or some place into server RAM that area or zone has to be loaded onto the game server's hard drive first. This is the job of the Atlas Service, it decides which territories a server will have authority for and so which areas it will have streamed over the network to the servers hard drive ready for the Server Object Container Streaming service to load into server RAM.

At first the borders between these territories will be fixed like the zone boundary lines in the corridor demo, but this is not efficient because if a server doesn't hold an area a player should be able to see into then that area or zone will have to be spun up on a game server even if there are no players in it. The current Dedicated Game Servers have fixed boundaries of authority - the whole Stanton system.

This is why they will transition to servers with dynamic borders where game zones are streamed to the hard drive of the game servers as required by player needs, if you should be able to see into a zone from your zone the server will simply extend it's border of authority to include that zone so that you could move into that zone, and the zone you move out of so that you can no longer see it is taken off that server's hard drive so that it no longer has authority over that zone.

This is how they simulate many hundreds (potentially thousands!) terabytes of game universe for players even though each server hard drive and RAM can only hold a few terabytes. With dynamic server meshing game zones are streamed to the game servers hard drives as required by player actions and movements. They are going to have to change from a fixed download size game universe zone before game server spin up, to an 'on demand' game universe zone streaming to each game server while it is running. That is the difference between fixed (static) boundary server meshing and dynamic boundary server meshing.

Opioid posted:

Announced: 105
Released (flyable in game): 74 (70.4%)
In production: 11 (10.4%)
Remaining: 20 (19%)

And yes, transport truck with wings is released and functional with a ‘snap to grid’ type of effect with cargo boxes. But because of its design it can’t land while fully loaded. Only dock to spaceports and unload to other ships.

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

Vengarr posted:

I just saw an article claiming SC had its single greatest day of sales, and I have questions. Mostly “how” and “why”. Isn’t the game F2P? Are people still buying PNG ships? Have they finally been added to the game? And

Do you actually have to slowly drink water to raise your hydration meter? I can’t detect satire anymore

BigglesSWE posted:

Every trivia post about WC by Ben is the saddest thing that ever hit the internet, only topped by his next post.

Bubbacub posted:

I think has has a tattoo of something from the Wing Commander movie, and he showed it to Chris and Chris didn't know what it was

Tippis posted:

It only makes sense. Based on the Wing Commander movie, Chris isn't all that familiar with any of the Wing Commander games.

Fil5000 posted:

He's credited with directing the movie though, so you'd think he'd have seen all the things in it.

Fil5000 posted:

He's credited with directing the movie though, so you'd think he'd have seen all the things in it.

quote:

The service which splits up game zones on a shard is called the Atlas Service - it determines which areas of the game universe are loaded onto a game server's hard drive. If an area of the game universe is not loaded onto a game server's hard drive then it can't be streamed into that game server's RAM. The zones a game server will hold are decided before that server is spun up and they don't change no matter where the players go. If a player goes beyond the boundary of authority of a game server they will be transferred to a game server that has authority for that neighbouring area.