Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]
- Thread starter green.pixel
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CitizenCon 2954 - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
The engine demo is pretty nice but its just a recap of what we already know. I have a ryzen 7700 + 32gigs of ddr 5 6000 + geforce 3080 + a pci-e 5 nvme and I am still struggling with sub 60fps in space stations sometimes it drops into the 30s. They really need to optimize this engine a whole lot.
Here is the future of the engine talk
Engineering and damage control talk
Here is the future of the engine talk
Engineering and damage control talk
Hopefully moving to vulkan and more systems to GPU will help.
Was pleasantly surprised to see virtual texturing for planet surface, as it allows reduced surface shader and reuse. (Like in Farcry, Battlefield etc.)
They talked about DLSS + FSR. They also talked about moving some systems over to the gpu from the cpu. Hopefully it comes sooner rather than later
This was the best thing from the con so far.
I always thought the Star map was trash but a complete UI over all is very much welcome
Oh, absolutely, the future UI looks very nice.
The engineering presentation was quite exciting as well, as it should allow new gameplay possibilities.
I dunno.
I watched the engineering portion and asked myself when would anyone have time for this? Most space battles end quickly with either you or them dead. I could only imagine how much worse it will be if getting shot at sets off a fire in your ship that will kill you before you even get out of your automated chair.
In the second half of the Starengine you could see the new features like the new water rendering, interaction with water, environment destruction. In addition they visited Pyro and showed the new space station and the moon or planet.
During the presentation about the StarEngine, they talked about some improvements like:
The water looks really good to me now. Before I could do little with it.
Where I need more improvement is the lighting. Raytracing GI alone is too little for me. They should go to path tracing. At the moment I can't judge the quality of the ray tracing GI. It improves the visuals tremendously but I don't know how it compares to other raytracing GI solutions. CIG takes its cue from AMD's GI 1.0. It's good that the Soffware GI will be the new minimum. This probably eliminates the single light probe that was always on in Cyberpunk 2077 even with Psycho Raytracing GI. Only with Pathtracing it disappeared completely.
Was that also the first time they talked about StarEngine TM? Before today it was rather a non-serious term for me.
The new unified UI is going to be very good. Unfortunately they didn't show the holotable in action. As far as navigation is concerned I also found it interesting that you can set markers and sell them to other players.
The player leaves the chair very quickly. Now it needs a crew on large spaceships. You can't get very far on your own.
During the presentation about the StarEngine, they talked about some improvements like:
- much better LOD, draw distance and mesh shaders
- new water rendering and water physics
- environmental destruction
- new cloud tech
- new volumetric 3D light shafts
- ground fog
- ray tracing gi with software mode as new base level and hardware mode
- physically based scope shader
- dynamic rendering of blood, swiss and tears. When cryin the skin also becomes more reddish
- clothing physics which will always be rendered at 120 fps
- hair physics
- new TSR, DLSS, FSR
- fire simulation. Fire can break out inside a ship and can be extinguished by fire extinguishers or oxygen deprivation. They also plan to unlock fire for larger areas
- CIG has also shown server meshing in action. Finally.
- Improved sound. Iliked the sound enhancements. Now there is a realistic sound mode. When you fire weapons or get hit they resonate into the air-pressurized cockpit or space suit.
The water looks really good to me now. Before I could do little with it.
Where I need more improvement is the lighting. Raytracing GI alone is too little for me. They should go to path tracing. At the moment I can't judge the quality of the ray tracing GI. It improves the visuals tremendously but I don't know how it compares to other raytracing GI solutions. CIG takes its cue from AMD's GI 1.0. It's good that the Soffware GI will be the new minimum. This probably eliminates the single light probe that was always on in Cyberpunk 2077 even with Psycho Raytracing GI. Only with Pathtracing it disappeared completely.
Was that also the first time they talked about StarEngine TM? Before today it was rather a non-serious term for me.
The new unified UI is going to be very good. Unfortunately they didn't show the holotable in action. As far as navigation is concerned I also found it interesting that you can set markers and sell them to other players.
The player leaves the chair very quickly. Now it needs a crew on large spaceships. You can't get very far on your own.
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It's hilarious when people have tried to argue before that Star Citizen's development was going to go more smoothly in the future because they stopped the scope creep. lol If anything, it's just getting even more out of hand than ever. They are putting the game out of reach of ever being possible to finish. This would be a complete disaster in any sane situation, but their backers keep funneling them the money to do this, so there's little to no incentive for them to ever start managing things responsibly. If anything, it almost feels like the constant expansion of goals is exactly how they keep up their massive donation levels. A complete ouroboros of project management insanity.
I dont think anybody would be really truly happy with the game as of today if there would be no prospect of further development. That 'what it will be in the future' is still a very heavy aspect of what makes people stay positive about the state of things.Star Citizen makes *some* people happy today.
Also, it is already at V3.21
And you know what I mean by 1.0. I'm just using that as a general term for a game which is 'officially' launched/not in beta.
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Star Citizen will never be "finished". CI has found a really great business model where their customers keep providing them money for a service/game and (hopefully) enjoy what they provide.
I think that's an extremely generous interpretation of the situation. You assume that people are somehow all rational and this is some positive situation for everybody involved, working as planned. Instead of, ya know, a studio leader who is constantly taking advantage of people so deep in at this point that they would be pained to back out, and so continually sets new goals to drum up hype despite never realistically being able to achieve everything they're promising or even close.
If you went back to 2014/2015 and told everybody thinking of backing this project that a decade later, the game would still be in a rough alpha with no sort of proper 'full game' release in sight, including the complete absence of the single player campaign, it would gotten a fraction of the initial support it did, largely killing it.
The ray tracing difference to me is enough from what they have shown to make the game look a lot better. I think that stuff is something they can add on later or improve upon later on. The engine already performs like shit imo and they should focus on it not performing like shit. Now if SQ42 is another half a decade out from release that might not be a problem as few people will be using todays hardware and would likely be considering upgrades at that point anyway. I'd hope that 4080/4090 performance of today is low end performance of 5 years from now. Of course I could be horribly wrong about that lol.
That is a huge feature for playing with friends. I find area 51 or whatever it is called very hard to navigate , perhaps overly so. It's complicated for the sake of complexity instead of for ease of game play
I find a lot of small things in this game to be like that. At one point in that video they go up to a kiosk and there is a light from the celling shinning on it ruining visability on the screen they are trying to use. Now is that what would actually happen ? Yes , but is that the best for game play? Of course not. They need to go and fix most of that
Some chairs , but some chairs have an animation where the chair has to slide back and spin around. Not only that but if you are actively in a fire fight when would you actually have time?
The other option is to have a friend handle that but to give an example if they are in my star runner's turret they have to exit it and wait for the animation of the elevator moving down back out of the turret and spin around and exit it. Then they have to get to the actual fire or damage. So is it going to be expected to have a third person who just sits around hoping that the ship gets damaged but not damaged enough to blow up? Then what do they do if it doesn't happen. Just sit there waiting ? Doesn't seem fun at all.
Anyway here is the ship video
Lots of new ships coming
They start with the Zeus
I actually find this very under priced. This is the same price as the freelancer and is so much better
THe cutter scout
This is just a scout version of the cutter that I posted previously is on sale as a starter package for the same price. They go into some of the scouting features that are coming down the pipe
The banu merchantman was shown off
Then they announced some upcoming ships in a video at the end of what i posted above.
I think the zeus shows an issue the game currently has. The freelancer is a 100-150 ship but is absolutely crushed in terms of features by the zeus at a 125-175 price point.
I mean, sure. If the only goal is 'what makes me money', then this is simply capitalism at work. I guess some of us have higher standards for the world than that? And certainly dont like seeing such an exploitative setup being successful, even if I do concede it's not likely a repeatable situation.
Personally, I'm speaking as a giant sci-fi/space fan myself. I was quite hyped over the initial Star Citizen project, even though being led by Chris Roberts was still something of a red flag for me. But I kind of expected that being crowdfunded would be its own kind of check - that even though there was no publisher demands or deadlines, they'd still have a limited amount of money to work with to make the game. But then they started selling ships. And for huge amounts of money. I was honestly flabbergasted that it not only worked, but that they could push even further with it to genuinely obscene levels.
It's a working business model for them no doubt, but it's one I find reprehensible personally. And it makes this project I'd have loved to actually see come to fruition at some point basically become a perpetual scam instead. And it puts a seriously sour taste in my mouth because of it.
When you look at this all that is really different from something like BG3 in early access is that this took money earlier. Year 0 instead of year 3. BG spent 3 years in development then another 3 years while being part of early access. Hopefully this completes well and becomes as big of a success as that game.
Squadron 42 footage
What I don't like is that unlike in Cyberpunk 2077 the whole story is not told in the first perspective. The player loses control. Cutscenes are backward and reducing the immersion.
It's a waste to ship the game without pathtracing. As a result, the play with light and shadow is very limited and the good assets don't come into their own as well. The lighting can't compete with rt heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077, where almost every object blends perfectly into the world. It still has the "gamey" look. However, it doesn't look like the new RT GI was activated. Then it would look more advanced.
I will report on the other presented thing later today. Much of it was very very good.
What I don't like is that unlike in Cyberpunk 2077 the whole story is not told in the first perspective. The player loses control. Cutscenes are backward and reducing the immersion.
It's a waste to ship the game without pathtracing. As a result, the play with light and shadow is very limited and the good assets don't come into their own as well. The lighting can't compete with rt heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077, where almost every object blends perfectly into the world. It still has the "gamey" look. However, it doesn't look like the new RT GI was activated. Then it would look more advanced.
I will report on the other presented thing later today. Much of it was very very good.
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To add to this , they sent out an email saying this
So perhaps we will see the game in 2024 but I would imagine they will announce a date at the next citizen con and release it in 2025 unless this is all just the same bullshit as 2016 was.
Anyway Jupiter I think after 12+ years and less face it more likely 13 or 14 years of development its time to shit or get off the pot as they say. So what if pathtracing isn't in the game. They really need to get a game out at this point.
Some new videos
Some great info about hangars and freight elevators. I think it's great that hangars are finally going to be persistent. Kinda like home base if you will. Also a good thing that you can get ground vehicles/ ship components and other things directly into your hanger via the elevator
base building looks good. I just feel like if this is going to be attackable by other gamers in a pvp setting it's going to be impossible for anyone but larger org's to do.
Some great info about hangars and freight elevators. I think it's great that hangars are finally going to be persistent. Kinda like home base if you will. Also a good thing that you can get ground vehicles/ ship components and other things directly into your hanger via the elevator
base building looks good. I just feel like if this is going to be attackable by other gamers in a pvp setting it's going to be impossible for anyone but larger org's to do.
