haha that explains it. Not newsworthy at all. I'm sure there are others out there in similar situations but you simply can't have anything to do with a situation conducted by Derek Smart regarding SC.
Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]
- Thread starter green.pixel
- Start date
Exterior shot of GrimHex Station
Drake Herald
____
He is also lying in an interview. Claims that the people on reddit insulted him etc.
"It really surprised me how toxic some of the comments were"
"People responded with 'you're a scumbag', 'you're a piece of shit', 'wow you're such a bitch'"
This did not happend besides one post that was downvoted by the community and removed by moderators.
Drake Herald
____
He is also lying in an interview. Claims that the people on reddit insulted him etc.
"It really surprised me how toxic some of the comments were"
"People responded with 'you're a scumbag', 'you're a piece of shit', 'wow you're such a bitch'"
This did not happend besides one post that was downvoted by the community and removed by moderators.
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Reddit is perhaps the one single, biggest hive of scum and villainy on the entire internet.
Besides, its hierarchical thread format makes it almost impossible to overlook. It's so unbelievably shit I've no idea how it has grown so popular. Simply unbelievable...
nah , your not in the right place
https://www.reddit.com/r/running/
https://www.reddit.com/r/C25K/
both are super positive.
Anyway most of what is said about the game is true. Somethings you can live with and some things you can't. I was happy for al ong time after kickstarter , just read my posts here on the game and see my turning point.
hey @eastmen did you see about that guy who got $2250 refund from RSI (or thereabouts)? I was thinking if it was you, but I figured you would have crowed victoriously about it here if it was... 
It might be worth a shot trying again now. And according to Kotaku, some DA had contacted this guy for information since he felt the game looked scammy. Ruh-roh!
It might be worth a shot trying again now. And according to Kotaku, some DA had contacted this guy for information since he felt the game looked scammy. Ruh-roh!
I emailed. My group of friends would get like 9k back on our group accountshey @eastmen did you see about that guy who got $2250 refund from RSI (or thereabouts)? I was thinking if it was you, but I figured you would have crowed victoriously about it here if it was...
It might be worth a shot trying again now. And according to Kotaku, some DA had contacted this guy for information since he felt the game looked scammy. Ruh-roh!
Thanks!
Dynamic wear and tear (weapons)
https://gfycat.com/FatalOpulentDuck
https://gfycat.com/UnfortunateUnfoldedAuk
https://gfycat.com/ScientificIncredibleChihuahua
https://gfycat.com/IllustriousInconsequentialFiddlercrab
New explosion tech (14:49) and more of GrimHex station (18:03)
Faster entry animation for all ships
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MetallicSelfishFrillneckedlizard-size_restricted.gif
Dynamic wear and tear (weapons)
https://gfycat.com/FatalOpulentDuck
https://gfycat.com/UnfortunateUnfoldedAuk
https://gfycat.com/ScientificIncredibleChihuahua
https://gfycat.com/IllustriousInconsequentialFiddlercrab
New explosion tech (14:49) and more of GrimHex station (18:03)
Faster entry animation for all ships
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MetallicSelfishFrillneckedlizard-size_restricted.gif
New information from the german PCGames Magazine which visited the studio in Frankfurt 1 month ago
-much screenshots from Star Citizen gameplay which was played by PCGames
-screenshots of Liam Cunninghams face, looks much better now than before
-2.6 will launch Star Marine as separate module just like Arena Commander, this was also played by staff of PC Games and they are saying it's much more polished on the FPS side and feels a lot better than current rudimentary FPS in the PTU
-2.7 will bring procedural planets and you will be able to travel the whole stanton system and all planets and moons can be directly approached down to the surface
-PCG say the new lighting system as part of the procedural planets build looks much more natural
-PCG say that approaching the planet looks better than with Elite Dangerous
-You can land anywhere manually, automatic landing gets yout to fixed positions i.e. landing zones
-Trees and Animals seemingly are planned (not in 2.7)
-Microtech and Hurston comes in follow-up patches after 2.7
-They aim to have Stanton fully playable i.e. with all stations and landing zones (according to Chris Roberts about 40 locations) by end of 2016
-There will be more jobs and missions as well
-Trading will be in by then
-Chris describing that missions might be accepted up in space stations but could lead you down to planet surfaces, not clear if this is going to be in with 2.7 but seemingly something SQ42 will benefit from
-Planets and moons are revolving around suns, with naturally simulated day and night cycles
-Planetary surface details are controlled by a dynamical LOD system
-Some pop-up was visible during the planetary approach but they described it as impressive
-They were also impressed with the cloud system, which wasn't just a simple texture layer but seemingly is described as volumetric, they have deepth and height and impact visibility, leading to mountain crests piercing through clouds etc.
-They are writing that there isn't any artificially restricted view range
-Parallax-Occlusion Maps with dynamic tesselation is used for the surface details
-GTX 980 was used with 45 fps on the planetary surface ingame
EDIT:
-Some stuff about the subsumption-AI saying NPCs might have hobbies and a virtual mind, allowing them to remember the player or be influenced in his opinions by the player. To avoid performance issues, they seemingly control the update cycles for NPC AI based on player proximitiy i.e. update cycles go to 1hz instead of 60hz if no one is around.
-They also wrote that they were positively surprised that all employees at Foundry 42 Frankfurt, of which they had a chance to talk with, seemed to be truthfuly grateful to be able to work on the project due to the challenge it represents. They specifically point out, that the enthusiasm didn't feel faked.
-much screenshots from Star Citizen gameplay which was played by PCGames
-screenshots of Liam Cunninghams face, looks much better now than before
-2.6 will launch Star Marine as separate module just like Arena Commander, this was also played by staff of PC Games and they are saying it's much more polished on the FPS side and feels a lot better than current rudimentary FPS in the PTU
-2.7 will bring procedural planets and you will be able to travel the whole stanton system and all planets and moons can be directly approached down to the surface
-PCG say the new lighting system as part of the procedural planets build looks much more natural
-PCG say that approaching the planet looks better than with Elite Dangerous
-You can land anywhere manually, automatic landing gets yout to fixed positions i.e. landing zones
-Trees and Animals seemingly are planned (not in 2.7)
-Microtech and Hurston comes in follow-up patches after 2.7
-They aim to have Stanton fully playable i.e. with all stations and landing zones (according to Chris Roberts about 40 locations) by end of 2016
-There will be more jobs and missions as well
-Trading will be in by then
-Chris describing that missions might be accepted up in space stations but could lead you down to planet surfaces, not clear if this is going to be in with 2.7 but seemingly something SQ42 will benefit from
-Planets and moons are revolving around suns, with naturally simulated day and night cycles
-Planetary surface details are controlled by a dynamical LOD system
-Some pop-up was visible during the planetary approach but they described it as impressive
-They were also impressed with the cloud system, which wasn't just a simple texture layer but seemingly is described as volumetric, they have deepth and height and impact visibility, leading to mountain crests piercing through clouds etc.
-They are writing that there isn't any artificially restricted view range
-Parallax-Occlusion Maps with dynamic tesselation is used for the surface details
-GTX 980 was used with 45 fps on the planetary surface ingame
EDIT:
-Some stuff about the subsumption-AI saying NPCs might have hobbies and a virtual mind, allowing them to remember the player or be influenced in his opinions by the player. To avoid performance issues, they seemingly control the update cycles for NPC AI based on player proximitiy i.e. update cycles go to 1hz instead of 60hz if no one is around.
-They also wrote that they were positively surprised that all employees at Foundry 42 Frankfurt, of which they had a chance to talk with, seemed to be truthfuly grateful to be able to work on the project due to the challenge it represents. They specifically point out, that the enthusiasm didn't feel faked.
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cheapchips
Veteran
Hope we see some proc gen planet stuff at Gamescom.
Typically different performance target to ED or NMS planet tech. Both those work at 45fps+ on hardware less than a third of a 980 so it'll be interesting to see what they achieve on faster kit.
Wonder how close you can get to SWBF's lovely authored terrains.
Typically different performance target to ED or NMS planet tech. Both those work at 45fps+ on hardware less than a third of a 980 so it'll be interesting to see what they achieve on faster kit.
Wonder how close you can get to SWBF's lovely authored terrains.
I have some screens but Brian Chambers said that this the procedural tech is WIP.
Procedural Planet tech
You can see GI as well.
New Character tech
This is better than I imagined.
Weapon Multi Layer Shading tech with procedural damage
I really like this tech. You can see if a weapon was used. This new shader tech will also work with clothing/armor and ships.
Dev in the UK confirmed that the head bob level will be costomisable.
Procedural Planet tech
New Character tech
Weapon Multi Layer Shading tech with procedural damage
Dev in the UK confirmed that the head bob level will be costomisable.
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cheapchips
Veteran
Thanks for the pics.
I wouldn't say they're disappointing as such, but they're not showing off anything substantially better than EDs geography or Infinity's atmosphere at present.
Really nice interactive clouds and wind/dust are what I want to see based on the article.
I guess 2.7 is end of the year/early 2017 so plenty of time left yet.
I wouldn't say they're disappointing as such, but they're not showing off anything substantially better than EDs geography or Infinity's atmosphere at present.
Really nice interactive clouds and wind/dust are what I want to see based on the article.
I guess 2.7 is end of the year/early 2017 so plenty of time left yet.
That's just the beginning. They have to create assets too. Anyway, there will be interesting places like ruins, stations, hidden artifacts, wrecks etc on these planets.
They want whole Jungle and City planets. After they finished the tech, they "just" need to build assets.
Their assets have normally a very good quality. PCGames talked in the tech check that they saw a shoulder-mounted anti-vehicle weapon which had 60,000 Tris. While very little details like small labels would be illustrated trough POM.
Important main characters in The Witcher 3 would have 40 000 polygons in comparison.
They want whole Jungle and City planets. After they finished the tech, they "just" need to build assets.
Their assets have normally a very good quality. PCGames talked in the tech check that they saw a shoulder-mounted anti-vehicle weapon which had 60,000 Tris. While very little details like small labels would be illustrated trough POM.
Important main characters in The Witcher 3 would have 40 000 polygons in comparison.
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Starfarer - Interior Focus Video 4k (video done by the level lead on the Starfarer)
CIG's Geoff Birch on damage shader programming
Here's the original question he's responding to and I'll follow it with the reply:
Dictator said:
In the same vein... will the damage shader for ships ever be ported to personal armours / human bodies? In that case - and since SC / SQ42 uses 3rd + 1st person merged assets and animations - I imagine it would also be perfectly visible on 1st and 3rd person assets.
i.e. Bullet hole / scuff / wound directly on the forearm or hand after being shot? Or looking down and seing a ruined limb or combat damage on your chest plate?
If so, what are the challenges of transfering said ship damage shader (in a theoretical capacity) to skinned geometry? Furthermore, are the extensions to the damage shader as mentioned in the GDC presentation still on the table (geo deformation, shrunken asset / tessellation, GPU particles?)?
geoffbirch said:
Ok, 1st: the damage tech working on the characters isn't quite so simple as it was created specifically for metals e.g. we have a thickness, burn, denting and temperature set of values we work with to evaluate how to render it and characters don't work in the same way. However character impacts are normally rendered with decals (I'm guessing projected) and that usually ends up looking pretty nasty, now rendering the character damage into a object space would certainly work and wouldn't look so nasty; that's a good possibility. The Character crew are super hard at work at the moment but they have got a unique UV set which could be used for damage stuff and they use a layer blend shader already, so we could do something like increase wear and dirt values and localise that using a damage map system.
2nd: (In relation to the GDC talk) So when we started the damage tech we were working with a very talented Vehicle Artist Neil McKnight who was working on the Gladius (still my favourite ship) and we were moving away from a damage state system to a more procedural system, however there was still debate as to whether we needed any form of state in there, or more specifically a sort of 100% destroyed ship carcass which would be an artist created asset; we decided against it in the end because it added more unnecessary work for the artist as the procedural damage system was more than capable of creating the look we were going for. So because we had this carcass at the time of development, we had access to its relevant data so we could do vertex manipulation to move the standard assets vertices towards those of the carcass when damage was taken. In the end we settled on using a screen spaced perturbed normal technique, which gives a great result.
3rd: (Again, in relation to the GDC talk) The ideas about GPU particles rendered off when we do damage and could also link with our concept of the removal of metal (thickness level in the damage map) so the more metal lost we could spawn off an amount and size of GPU particles which signify how much metal came off. And because we use an object space position map we could spawn them off at the impact location without having to feed back damage visualisation information to the CPU to produce the effect and location of spawning we want. We should probably get around to making a GPU particle system first though, I'm sure that's on the VFX list of requests.
4th: (Finally, in relation to the GDC talk) There is a new piece of GPU technology which we could take use of with DX12/Vulkan which is tiled resources. There's a possibility we could use this to split up the Damage maps and Position/Bone maps with tiled resources and stream the data about when needed. However since the GDC article we have made plans to improve the Damage Tech system to get around some mesh streaming issues we have and also make the Position/Bone Map quicker to render so that we don't need to store them on the GPU whilst they're not being used (we only need them when rendering the damage into the damage map) and we can render them just in time when an impact pushed to the GPU. The plan is to use a proxy mesh to render these position/bone maps instead of LOD0 or LOD1 of the actual geometry, that will make them cheap to render and in terms of memory will be equally as cheap PLUS they'll always being available in system memory (which fixes our streaming issue), unlike the current geometry which gets stream in and out as required. So yeah the damage tech is cheap for performance (it barely even registers as a GPU performance dip) and substantially lower VRAM usage than the old damage state system (so you can stop calling it Damage States because there's no states any more) but we can reduce the VRAM usage by half with this new technique of just in time rendering of one of the maps.
AND FINALLY, we have recently (not that recent, but stuff becomes a blur after a while so I can't remember when any more) done a little bit of fix up for the damage tech to get the glow to seat a bit better so now the cool down decay is more reminiscent of the laws of thermal dynamics (I said reminiscent, because in reality they're nothing like the calculations of thermal dynamics, I only had 8 bits to do the glow calculations alright! I'm no physicist but I don't think it's possible to do any thermal dynamics calculations using only 8 bits of memory storage. However what it was reminiscent of was, hot stuff cools down quicker than warm stuff < I'm sure you can tell we're super technical here in the render team) and whilst doing this improvement noticed that as the glow goes down towards the cool end of the spectrum and it blends in with the metal colour, stuff gets a little, well....erm....green! So yeah, we have to fix that at some point because it'll be super noticeable on cap ships when they take damage. To put it simply, damage tech never sleeps because we've got too many ideas
CIG's Geoff Birch on damage shader programming
Here's the original question he's responding to and I'll follow it with the reply:
Dictator said:
In the same vein... will the damage shader for ships ever be ported to personal armours / human bodies? In that case - and since SC / SQ42 uses 3rd + 1st person merged assets and animations - I imagine it would also be perfectly visible on 1st and 3rd person assets.
i.e. Bullet hole / scuff / wound directly on the forearm or hand after being shot? Or looking down and seing a ruined limb or combat damage on your chest plate?
If so, what are the challenges of transfering said ship damage shader (in a theoretical capacity) to skinned geometry? Furthermore, are the extensions to the damage shader as mentioned in the GDC presentation still on the table (geo deformation, shrunken asset / tessellation, GPU particles?)?
geoffbirch said:
Ok, 1st: the damage tech working on the characters isn't quite so simple as it was created specifically for metals e.g. we have a thickness, burn, denting and temperature set of values we work with to evaluate how to render it and characters don't work in the same way. However character impacts are normally rendered with decals (I'm guessing projected) and that usually ends up looking pretty nasty, now rendering the character damage into a object space would certainly work and wouldn't look so nasty; that's a good possibility. The Character crew are super hard at work at the moment but they have got a unique UV set which could be used for damage stuff and they use a layer blend shader already, so we could do something like increase wear and dirt values and localise that using a damage map system.
2nd: (In relation to the GDC talk) So when we started the damage tech we were working with a very talented Vehicle Artist Neil McKnight who was working on the Gladius (still my favourite ship) and we were moving away from a damage state system to a more procedural system, however there was still debate as to whether we needed any form of state in there, or more specifically a sort of 100% destroyed ship carcass which would be an artist created asset; we decided against it in the end because it added more unnecessary work for the artist as the procedural damage system was more than capable of creating the look we were going for. So because we had this carcass at the time of development, we had access to its relevant data so we could do vertex manipulation to move the standard assets vertices towards those of the carcass when damage was taken. In the end we settled on using a screen spaced perturbed normal technique, which gives a great result.
3rd: (Again, in relation to the GDC talk) The ideas about GPU particles rendered off when we do damage and could also link with our concept of the removal of metal (thickness level in the damage map) so the more metal lost we could spawn off an amount and size of GPU particles which signify how much metal came off. And because we use an object space position map we could spawn them off at the impact location without having to feed back damage visualisation information to the CPU to produce the effect and location of spawning we want. We should probably get around to making a GPU particle system first though, I'm sure that's on the VFX list of requests.
4th: (Finally, in relation to the GDC talk) There is a new piece of GPU technology which we could take use of with DX12/Vulkan which is tiled resources. There's a possibility we could use this to split up the Damage maps and Position/Bone maps with tiled resources and stream the data about when needed. However since the GDC article we have made plans to improve the Damage Tech system to get around some mesh streaming issues we have and also make the Position/Bone Map quicker to render so that we don't need to store them on the GPU whilst they're not being used (we only need them when rendering the damage into the damage map) and we can render them just in time when an impact pushed to the GPU. The plan is to use a proxy mesh to render these position/bone maps instead of LOD0 or LOD1 of the actual geometry, that will make them cheap to render and in terms of memory will be equally as cheap PLUS they'll always being available in system memory (which fixes our streaming issue), unlike the current geometry which gets stream in and out as required. So yeah the damage tech is cheap for performance (it barely even registers as a GPU performance dip) and substantially lower VRAM usage than the old damage state system (so you can stop calling it Damage States because there's no states any more
) but we can reduce the VRAM usage by half with this new technique of just in time rendering of one of the maps.AND FINALLY, we have recently (not that recent, but stuff becomes a blur after a while so I can't remember when any more) done a little bit of fix up for the damage tech to get the glow to seat a bit better so now the cool down decay is more reminiscent of the laws of thermal dynamics (I said reminiscent, because in reality they're nothing like the calculations of thermal dynamics, I only had 8 bits to do the glow calculations alright! I'm no physicist but I don't think it's possible to do any thermal dynamics calculations using only 8 bits of memory storage. However what it was reminiscent of was, hot stuff cools down quicker than warm stuff < I'm sure you can tell we're super technical here in the render team
) and whilst doing this improvement noticed that as the glow goes down towards the cool end of the spectrum and it blends in with the metal colour, stuff gets a little, well....erm....green! So yeah, we have to fix that at some point because it'll be super noticeable on cap ships when they take damage. To put it simply, damage tech never sleeps because we've got too many ideas 
Nothing I have seen here is really new or impressive, the reason games don't use all that it the cost to generate the assets and the runtime cost.
All of that is nice, but getting everything together working fast is not trivial, and sofar RSI has not proven anything in that regard.
(Not saying it's impossible, just saying showing independent systems working is easy, getting everything together working well and fast is not.)
All of that is nice, but getting everything together working fast is not trivial, and sofar RSI has not proven anything in that regard.
(Not saying it's impossible, just saying showing independent systems working is easy, getting everything together working well and fast is not.)
Nothing is really new?
Even the current Alpha 2.4 has a lot of elements no game tried before. Like 64bit coordinates and the and zone system (former Elite Dangerous Dev said Elite has no 64bit coordinates). The zone system allows moving inside an object while it is also moving individually (not on rails). You can move in a ship which moves in a bigger ship which is also moving.
And there will come a lot of more new elements no other game tried before in the upcoming patches.
They already integrate parts of the bigger new elements in the background with each patch.
Even the current Alpha 2.4 has a lot of elements no game tried before. Like 64bit coordinates and the and zone system (former Elite Dangerous Dev said Elite has no 64bit coordinates). The zone system allows moving inside an object while it is also moving individually (not on rails). You can move in a ship which moves in a bigger ship which is also moving.
And there will come a lot of more new elements no other game tried before in the upcoming patches.
They already integrate parts of the bigger new elements in the background with each patch.
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Welp, I'm certainly looking forward to this game coming together. It's just disappointing it's taking so long for anything resembling actual gameplay to be released, I can't help think that they should have started out less ambitiously at first and then bolted on more stuff as they go.
Feature creep really is a terrible thing in software development, especially when implementing a new feature requires tearing out and re-doing work already done. It's not for nothing one of the unique mobs in Diablo II was named "Creeping Feature"... (If you wanna say hello to it, it is found in a cave somewhere under the deserts of act 2.)
Feature creep really is a terrible thing in software development, especially when implementing a new feature requires tearing out and re-doing work already done. It's not for nothing one of the unique mobs in Diablo II was named "Creeping Feature"...
(If you wanna say hello to it, it is found in a cave somewhere under the deserts of act 2.)
Would be nice to say "to your knowledge", because I do know engines who used 64bits coordinates, besides it's nothing amazing at all ; same with the second thing, and it's rather trivial to implement (although with physics there might be some tricky parts but I won't elaborate.)
We'll see what comes, I have particpated in the fund raising early, but I won't fall for the hype and sensationalism when I know better.
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