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I identify as the ewok that slung a rock at himself
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Apr 13, 2024 19:57
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FishMcCool posted:Not sure how complete/up to date it is, but there's a list of promised features here, with references to the claim (kickstarter, spectrum, youtube, citcon...) for each one: https://starcitizentracker.github.io/. 
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Apr 13, 2024 20:09
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Am I constipated or is the physics engine bugged again
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Apr 13, 2024 21:50
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Help turd collision PhysX keep crashing my sphincters server mesh
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Apr 13, 2024 21:54
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Worf posted:Help turd collision PhysX keep crashing my sphincters server mesh Your issue has been added to the backlog
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Apr 13, 2024 21:56
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Worf posted:Am I constipated or is the physics engine bugged again The gas pipes don't have enough bandwidth.
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Apr 13, 2024 21:57
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https://i.imgur.com/f6wKvqj.mp4
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Apr 14, 2024 03:36
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Virtual Captain posted:the... it... they're... once the.... ya whoa did ep did ah whoa did
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Apr 14, 2024 12:02
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Torquemada posted:ya whoa did ep did ah whoa did A fantastic callback
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Apr 14, 2024 14:39
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Apr 14, 2024 19:13
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Apr 14, 2024 19:26
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I finally got around to playing Starfield, I have Gamepass so I didn’t have to buy it separately. Man is it the most boring and bland answer to the question “what if Bethesda made a space game?” you could ever come up with. They really spread themselves thin and had no clear vision for what they wanted the game to be, and it was all made infinitely worse by their blind adherence to a comically outdated game engine. It’s just a pile of disparate mechanics that never really jell together, and the whole experience is gutted by ridiculous technical compromises like the incessant loading screens. It’s all then wrapped in a package of bland world building (Space Texas vs Space California), and even more bland procedural generation. I was two planets in and already seeing duplicated space dungeons. It also has some of the worst lighting I’ve ever seen in a AAA game from the past decade. It’s like the whole thing was tuned to run on a poo poo-tier LCD monitor with no contrast from 2006. No matter how I tune the HDR settings, the whole game is just a murky grey mess on my OLED monitor. colonelwest fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Apr 14, 2024 |
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Apr 14, 2024 19:41
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ya whoa did ep did ah whoa did
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Apr 14, 2024 21:11
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colonelwest posted:I finally got around to playing Starfield, I have Gamepass so I didn’t have to buy it separately. Man is it the most boring and bland answer to the question “what if Bethesda made a space game?” you could ever come up with. drat but at least the Star Citizen dream lives on CI!G could go bankrupt 10 times and the dream would still live on but lol
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Apr 14, 2024 21:25
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colonelwest posted:I finally got around to playing Starfield, I have Gamepass so I didn’t have to buy it separately. Man is it the most boring and bland answer to the question “what if Bethesda made a space game?” you could ever come up with. I was completely shocked that anybody assumed the game would be anything but this, it was always going to be exactly as you just described it I wrote the game off completely when I read about what game engine they were building it on years ago
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Apr 14, 2024 21:37
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Worf posted:I was completely shocked that anybody assumed the game would be anything but this, it was always going to be exactly as you just described it Yeah I was in the more optimistic camp, especially after Microsoft took over Bethesda and pushed them towards delaying the game for a year. But the naysayers in this thread were all right. The Creation Engine absolutely killed the game in its cradle, and resulted in a product that is so far behind the rest of the industry that it’s really unacceptable for a game released in TYOOL 2023. But I’m sure that Star Citizen and its 12 year old Frankenstein CryEngine modification will blow it away. Chris just needs 10 more years and another billion dollars.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:03
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Starfield is a mediocre Bethesda game with none of the charm of Fallout to carry it. Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk were released prior and both had something interesting to break through being just another one of those. The only things that actually baffle me about it are outside of the game. People fast travel, hit a load screen like every other game, and this is somehow a new problem. Everyone expected the impossible scenario of just pointing in any direction of the galaxy (including empty space) and finding a Skyrim's worth of curated content. It all gets capped off when Todd decides to go insanely defensive and make it all worse. Microsoft has been taking the Ls so hard on its studio acquisitions of otherwise very high profile contenders that I don't know what the hell is going on over there.
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Apr 15, 2024 04:34
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Elite Dangerous, and No Man's Sky had already solved the issues that Starfield had, so it sucked to play Starfield and see these issues that were understandable for Skyrim, an Xbox 360 game, still be present on current gen hardware with ultra fast SSDs.
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Apr 15, 2024 04:39
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A big thing seemed to be they were trusting so much they could tack a bunch of procedural generation stuff onto the creation engine and it would just sorta automatically make everything fun to play, but than just had a bunch of problems tacking the procedural generated stuff on, and it ended up not being fun to play. I don't even think it's really a problem with the engine, it has it's issues sure, but if they had just put their time into making good content and refining the gameplay systems, they could of easily made a good game with it. But yeah the setting ended up being generic as hell, there wasn't nearly enough content, and the gameplay systems didn't work well together at all. I do get why they were drawn in so much by the allure of vast procedural generated worlds and what not, as Bethesda has been using procedural generation in games for decades, but before now mostly just to generate maps that artists would then fine tune and add on too. Turns out when you're not just using it as a base it's pretty hard to make it intresting.
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Apr 15, 2024 05:00
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Leaning on procedural makes sense in a way, since they apparently wanted to go big. But then they ran out of time/skill/interest to implement a system to make the various POIs at least partially randomized, and I believe they're acutaly aware of how repetitive that stuff gets and really quickly as well. I'd like to know if the lore explanation for all the facilities all over the place was decided early on, or put in after it started to look like that they don't have enough stuff to find. Also the outpost system and its complete uselessness as a mechanic really grated me.
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Apr 15, 2024 06:02
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Mailer posted:The only things that actually baffle me about it are outside of the game. People fast travel, hit a load screen like every other game, and this is somehow a new problem. Starfield is "weird" in that regard because it's meeting in the uncanny valley of fast travel that makes it glaringly apparent how little there is going on, and makes that worse by adhering to the old bethesda standard of "being able to fast travel to anywhere from anywhere" because that's the House Style that's inherently incompatible with what they're doing. Take the other games in the "same space" as Starfield, No Mans Sky and Elite Dangerous. E:D doesn't have fast travel, straight up. You spend at minimum 30-60 seconds in a system reorienting yourself to your next target, fueling your non-infinite fuel drive up, balancing heat against how impatient you are to jump, possibly dealing with interdictions or hyperdictions if you're unlucky, for every system on the jump; and then actually getting to your destination and landing without blowing yourself up on a high-G planet is another several minute commitment of interacting with the game (especially now with the added heat/damage/speed question of overcharged supercruise). "How compelling that is" is a completely different question, but that friction of time spent has been a core concept of the game for forever and the requirement of that friction is why people spending weeks or months circumnavigating the universe is/was notable enough to comment on when people did it. Elite Dangerous is also a niche title that only a specific subset of players really likes, because of the type of friction it gives you. No Mans Sky has teleporters everywhere that are easily accessed, but not instantly, and within that never let you just TP straight to an end destination-- again there's the nominal friction of manually piloting from space to specific spots on a planet, with the implicit "opportunity to be distracted by something else en route", and then filled their procgen list with "weird poo poo" a la 1950s pulp scifi to be distracted by, if you're someone who resonates with the vibe they're going for. No Mans Sky is also a niche title that only a specific subset of players really likes, because of the type of friction it gives you. Starfield, on the other hand, is what you get if you took Skyrim and said "every PoI is open on the map the instant you start the game up, but you can only click on PoIs to move from location to location". The managed to laser-target the One Thing that their house style games had going for them and removed it with a scalpel-- the entertainment value in getting lost, getting distracted, finding an interesting-looking point C while wandering from point A to point B and going over there to see what's going on with it; and they managed to excise that aspect with such scalpel-like accuracy that if you were in Bethesda with a mission to secretly sabotage their next game, it'd be hard to imagine what you could to do kill it more dead. Starfield was also trying to appeal to "everyone who liked any Bethesda game ever" and removed any sort of friction that may have been "not fun enough" and in doing so, removed any appeal for most people-- and it did so in ways where you can't even add the friction back if you want it. It's bland, unmemorable, and did it in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with being "patched better" later because in trying to be everything to everyone, its parts work actively against it so that it's less than the sum of those parts.
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Apr 15, 2024 06:08
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Sandepande posted:Also the outpost system and its complete uselessness as a mechanic really grated me. And that seems to be a change they made mid/later in production, as they've said at first they made space travel a lot more difficult/dangerous, where you could run out of resources if you jumped too much and didn't plan, but than scrapped that. If space travels more difficult than building up some outposts as way points actually starts to make sense. Yeah another issue is they didn't seem to have a clear vision of what sort of game they wanted to make, or if they did have a clear vision they lost it at some point.
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Apr 15, 2024 06:10
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There was no excuse for the lazy space dragonborn temple loop
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Apr 15, 2024 06:23
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Tippis posted:
Wasn't the concept of meshing actually to prevent all 5 clients of each server to be required to pass information accros to the other server? I.e. only those clients that are relevant for the contiguous server would send information through the big pipe. The question still is what/who handles the culling, the decision about what is relevant for a contiguous server and how much added latency that processing adds to the overall real time data transmission? The information to be sent through the pipe is not just the clients' but also any other non player related entity that can affect the contiguous server (bullets, geometries, missiles etc). This is going to be a mess at best with static server meshing, eventhough you could brute force an arbitrary fixed rule for the culling in each server I suppose. But it would be complete chaos if it attempts to re shape servers (geographically and clients) dynamically. In other words it would probably be less than the 47.5 but the added latency required in order to process which information is relevant from any and all entities (player related or not) would probably also help kill any gains there I suspect. MedicineHut fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 08:20
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FishMcCool posted:Arguably, the main point of server meshing is to get commandos to keep throwing money at CIG by making them believe that it'll eventually make all their dreams come true. With this in mind, I'd call server meshing a resounding success.
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Apr 15, 2024 08:37
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:Did they seriously promise all of that? lol What if I told you that CIG owes around $120 millions to investors and that even in the hypothetical case that SQ42 got released in in 2025 likely most of the revenues there would have to be used to pay back investors? https://massivelyop.com/2024/03/19/star-citizens-2022-financials-offer-additional-information-about-investors-and-their-expected-returns/
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Apr 15, 2024 08:42
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MedicineHut posted:Wasn't the concept of meshing actually to prevent all 5 clients of each server to be required to pass information accros to the other server? I.e. only those clients that are relevant for the contiguous server would send information through the big pipe. The question still is what/who handles the culling, the decision about what is relevant for a contiguous server and how much added latency that processing adds to the overall real time data transmission? The information to be sent through the pipe is not just the clients' but also any other non player related entity that can affect the contiguous server (bullets, geometries, missiles etc). This is going to be a mess at best with static server meshing, eventhough you could brute force an arbitrary fixed rule for the culling in each server I suppose. But it would be complete chaos if it attempts to re shape servers (geographically and clients) dynamically. The culling was part of the technical reasoning why it might work if the stars aligned, but as mentioned, that's really just interest management and has been done before. Like all CI¬G tech, server meshing had to be never done before. So this hypothetical technical benefit got drowned out by the idea that you could actually fill your space battle with a dozen 100-crew ships and seamlessly transition between them without ever being told “no” in a system where each server could only ever work with 50 people. And it's that “never being told ‘no’” part where the whole thing falls on its rear end, because then we're right back into the situation that graph shows. If everyone very kindly stays out of everyone else's way, then yes, you could abstract away all kinds of stuff — each ship is its own instance and also the ship battle is separate. At most, if someone is awful enough to look out of a window, they need to see exactly one other instance (the large space battle), and that's doable…ish. But no, you should be able to pile everyone out of a ship and onto a different one; to look through the windows of that other ship and see inside; to fire from inside your ship, through space, into the other ship, and purposefully take out their McGuffin-flux moderators. As soon as you want all of that, you almost immediately arrive at the point where everyone needs to know everything about everyone else anyway, and the meshing does more harm than good.
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Apr 15, 2024 08:47
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Tippis posted:The culling was part of the technical reasoning why it might work if the stars aligned, but as mentioned, that's really just interest management and has been done before. True. I remember CIG stumbling to address that " we tell you 'no' " issue at some point in the past. Tony Z years ago mentioned things like "traffic control will tell you to wait to enter a certain area" or some such. But that alone would also introduce additional latency to process those queues etc. Insane. Only game that I am aware has managed to get anywhere close to the idea is Planetside 2, and even there you have tons of issues with players being invisible to others and popping up out of nowhere in the middle of a firefight etc. And that is a competetnt network team at work. Cant even imagine the clusterfuck CIG would implement even if they tried to replicate PS2 stuff.
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Apr 15, 2024 09:33
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:The managed to laser-target the One Thing that their house style games had going for them and removed it with a scalpel That was my assumption as to why it didn't hit with the Skyrim crowd. That isn't my crowd, but I figured the appeal was wandering off somewhere and "discovering" curated content. No one said that and the running commentary of the time was just "it needs to be more... about space". I assumed it was people expecting No Man's Skyrim and not able to articulate what they wanted without it sounding like a weird expectation. I've played a lot of E:D and NMS and enjoyed both for what they offered, but the backlash felt a lot like what'd happen if citizens were more rational.
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Apr 15, 2024 09:40
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starfield died because it's loving gamebryo and that engine was at its absolute limit back in fallout 4, they can't push it any further and starfield still looks and feels like a particularly good fallout 3 total conversion mod. lol Bethesda can fix gamebryo, they just need more time with it, come onnnnnnn
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Apr 15, 2024 09:45
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It continues to amaze me how idiotic these huge game designer legends can be. Gamebryo is an issue, but the big issue is that they took out everything that's fun about Bethesda games and replaced them with barren procgen planets. Skyrim and FO3+4 you had bad writing, but a dense world where I can still find new things even though the maps are pretty compact. Why would anyone think that removing the biggest selling point in your games would be a good choice? I'm 100% sure they could have made a fun space game with Gamebryo that I would have enjoyed playing if they just kept the scale smaller. 5-10 planets with a limited hand-crafted map each would be amazing, compared to a 1000 empty planets. It would not have pushed gaming forward, and that's where the engine becomes an issue, but not every game needs to be revolutionary.
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Apr 15, 2024 09:59
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lobsterminator posted:It would not have pushed gaming forward, and that's where the engine becomes an issue, but not every game needs to be revolutionary. Yeah, I don't get the engine thing. There's plenty of great games written on pretty garbage engines. They could've absolutely made a great game on the Gamebryo engine. What made the game garbage was on creative side. The technical issues didn't help, but that was an issue of what they were trying to do with it on the on the fly procedural generation. I would've been more than happy of playing a game as technically advanced as fallout 4, but in different planets if the writing/character/setting and gameplay was good, but it wasn't.
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Apr 15, 2024 10:06
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Counterpoint: Daggerfall was and still is a lot of fun, and it does everything with procgen. Starfield is just shite. They have entire planetary surfaces, yet their cities are 5 miserable buildings, 3 vendors, and exact duplicate PoIs are just scattered 2 minutes away from said cities. No sense of scale, and poo poo use of procgen.
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Apr 15, 2024 10:08
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Mailer posted:That was my assumption as to why it didn't hit with the Skyrim crowd. That isn't my crowd, but I figured the appeal was wandering off somewhere and "discovering" curated content. No one said that and the running commentary of the time was just "it needs to be more... about space". I assumed it was people expecting No Man's Skyrim and not able to articulate what they wanted without it sounding like a weird expectation. Getting lost and finding whatever that symbol was just over the hill was a huge part of the previous TES and Fo games. Even Morrowind, which didn't really have compass markers (or even a compass) had this because you had the paper/cloth map which had a bunch of very curious spots marked on it from the get-go — things you might want to go take a look at when you notice you're nearby. I'd also like to refer back to an old effortpost on fast travel as to how and why its absence or presence informs the most disparate parts of the game design, not just because it's “more real” or “more difficult” but because it can bring life to mechanics that otherwise have very little meaning. The funny thing about that in a longer perspective is to look back at Morrowind and the ridiculous amount of fast ravel it had… with restrictions. You could take a stilt strider or a boat; you could use guild teleports; you could use the cult and temple intervention spells; you could use mark and recall. And yet, for all of that, you were hugely restricted in where you could go. You had to go off track; you had no guidance; you would get lost in the canyons and forks in the road, and you'd come across something completely different that warranted exploration. It wasn't perhaps as purposefully designed as in later games, but it was there, and it coloured the entire game. More than that, they actually knew what they were doing with this and could play with it. There's even The One Mission where you have to go from (nearly) the farthest south to (nearly) the farthest north… oh, and you have to follow a restriction that means none of the means of fast travel are available to you. Start walking. Cutting that out and making
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Apr 15, 2024 10:12
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Mailer posted:That was my assumption as to why it didn't hit with the Skyrim crowd. That isn't my crowd, but I figured the appeal was wandering off somewhere and "discovering" curated content. No one said that and the running commentary of the time was just "it needs to be more... about space". I assumed it was people expecting No Man's Skyrim and not able to articulate what they wanted without it sounding like a weird expectation. To be sort-of-fair to Starfield, it caught a lot of flack on launch from directions of people who didn't care about Bethesda games previously either. Like, people heard the marketing about "build your own ship" and "explore planets", said "I don't like Skyrim but this sounds right up my alley", came in expecting NMS at a minimum and got subpar "realistic" planets with little meaningful variation, an inability to fly space-to-surface and a truly, indescribably bad space combat experience So yeah Starfield managed to pull in even more criticism than it would have otherwise by trying to be something it could never be, engine-wise
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Apr 15, 2024 10:24
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At first I assumed the outposts in starfield were actually procedurally generated because they were so generic and boring. Then I started encountering duplicates. I couldn't believe they had to hand craft outposts of that level of "quality".
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Apr 15, 2024 16:13
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Yeah, I had very low expectations for Starfield, going into it with the expectation of just laughing at the bugs after Fallout 76, and it still managed to disappoint. I checked out the main faction's moon and managed to run into a dungeon for the third time, and got the exact same lore reads for the third time. It was full of pirates, which somehow the space police surrounding it couldn't detect despite being able to determine through scans that I had an AI core or drugs on my ship. It's a degree of technological incoherence in the world building that reminded me of Star Citizen's "90's in space" design.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:45
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:At first I assumed the outposts in starfield were actually procedurally generated because they were so generic and boring. Then I started encountering duplicates. I couldn't believe they had to hand craft outposts of that level of "quality". OOF 
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Apr 15, 2024 16:47
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dr_rat posted:And that seems to be a change they made mid/later in production, as they've said at first they made space travel a lot more difficult/dangerous, where you could run out of resources if you jumped too much and didn't plan, but than scrapped that. If space travels more difficult than building up some outposts as way points actually starts to make sense. I would say it all comes down to lack of a clear vision and direction from the top. My impression is that everyone spend a long long time just throwing in the kitchen sink and doing what they felt like. Then when there was actually pressure to release the game they realized it was an disjointed mess with systems that didn't work well together so they cut out everything they possibly could to make the game streamlined and easier to get through. But when they stripped everything out and made it playable they discovered it wasn't fun but at that point there was only time for fixing bugs before they had to shove it out the door.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:53
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The most baffling part of Starfield is the lack of planetary maps. This was probably a limitation based on their procedural generation but the fact they don't even have local maps of their major cities is very strange.
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Apr 15, 2024 16:55
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