Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]

[Jupiter]

Production Schedule Report: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report

Some points:
-Planetary Physics Grid to support orbiting and rotating planets
-Vehicles No Longer Use Lua
-Nested Physics Grids support for vehicle transportation inside large ships, i.e. DragonFly & Rover
-Physics simulation gravity vector now respects planetary gravity
-Subsumption Base Functionality - This is the initial release of the foundation technology that drives all of the AI, mission, dynamic content, and conversational logic
-Numerous types of physics simulation for all Item 2.0 attachments including hair, weapons, grenades and more.
-Dynamic Physics Grid to support sparse space areas vs. dense areas like space stations.
-Destructible component for items, props and environment assets
-Crusader Converted to Object Container Setup - With the transition to Object Containers, the Crusader map was completely re-designed.
-Persistence ensures that your vehicle state is saved between sessions.
-Will allow lower priority entities (i.e. those further away from players) to be updated less frequently, which should improve the overall framerate and allow us to add more content to the universe.
-Kiosk shopping will allow players to buy and sell various commodities with the gameworld to vendors throughout the universe
-Field of view slider - This will allow players to narrow or widen the field of view to their liking (was problematic because of the helmet HUD etc.)
-Character Costumization - Players will now be able to customize their characters heads, hair, eye color, and skin color
-Personal manager App - This App will allow players to review their inventory and customize various aspects of their suit and weapons
-AI Turrets - We are adding the ability for AI to operate turrets in Crusader, so we are working to make sure that they track and fire upon the correct targets.
-Render to texture - This will have many uses going forwards, but our focus for now is to improve UI rendering and to introduce live rendering of video communications.
-The Solar System Shop Service dictates what retail products, natural resources, and services shops are willing to buy and sell. It also decides their current level of inventory and prices, all of which may vary over time.
-The Solar System Mission Service dictates what missions are being offered at various locations and at what price. It is also responsible for specifying when and where dynamic content should be instantiated and how it should be customized.
-New message queue - Now that all our message are strictly ordered we’ve been able to really streamline the processing, allowing us to send and recieve messages with less overhead. The new message queue also has a few extra features to better handle packet loss and jitter, helping reduce average bandwidth and latency.
-Stamina


Monthly Studio Report - March 2017:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15833-Monthly-Studio-Report

You know some people think the flight model in sc is crap

Same goes for Elite Dangerous. There will always be people who don't like it. As a Evocati Star Citizen tester I saw it myself. The one group wants very agile ships. The other very sluggish.It is impossible to satisfy everyone.

And I wouldn't compare Star Citizen to Mass Effect but you did. You said "I do not know games with giant working and fully modeled vehicles (aircraft carriers etc.)" and Space Engineers, which I've been playing a long time, is one game I know does this. You can build ships from scratch as large and complex as you like, modify them in realtime and co-operate or fight with others in realtime.

Let me know when Star Citizen does this.

For me, these do not look like complex models. They are also generated by the players. The scale/quality in Star Citizen is a completely different one. A huge space ship is larger than the complete Alien: Isolation game and has a better asset/texture quality.

 

[Lefungus]

For me, these do not look like complex models. They are also generated by the players. The scale/quality in Star Citizen is a completely different one. A huge space ship is larger than the complete Alien: Isolation game and has a better asset/texture quality.

Alien Isolation has nothing to prove, it's in people hands and is master class in design & atmosphere. Care to back up your claims ?

 

[Jupiter]

I just wanted to compare them because Star Citizen and ALIEN: Isolation have many similarities.

Geometry was great in Alien: Isolation but for master class it would have needed much better textures. In the final result the player was often distracted by muddy/pixelated textures with annoying comrpessions artifacts. I do not know why it is hard to create sharp looking surfaces in such a small corridor game.

The engine itself is very good/advanced.

Geometry Alien Isolation/ Star Citizen:

 

[Deleted member 11852]

For me, these do not look like complex models. They are also generated by the players. The scale/quality in Star Citizen is a completely different one. A huge space ship is larger than the complete Alien: Isolation game and has a better asset/texture quality.

You never said 'complicated' but they are indeed complicated because they have to work in the game's astrophysically-modelled universe. You can't just shove some textured polygons onto a ship design and say it has capability X, things need to actually work and that's order of magnitude more complicated than just coming up with a layout.

I don't know what the maximum ship size is but you can download 1:1 recreations of TV sci-fi ships like the Battlestar Heracles (1km) and the Babylon 5 Omega destroyer (1.7km). I prefer smaller ships myself and half the fun is making them work.

And you're seriously comparing SC to A:I ?? They are nothing alike.

 

[Ike Turner]

And you're seriously comparing SC to A:I ?? They are nothing alike.

Exactly. Jupiter please

 

[Davros]

The one group wants very agile ships. The other very sluggish.It is impossible to satisfy everyone.

then dont claim the flight model is perfectly balanced

ps: a question what things can you buy in game

 

[Jupiter]

Banu race

They have not copied Groot because their first Banu concept image was from 2012/2013. Still it's interesting to see that CIGs "Character Art Director" worked at many Marvel movies including Guardians of the Galaxy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-herman-00bba54/de

then dont claim the flight model is perfectly balanced

ps: a question what things can you buy in game

Wrong term I meant rebalanced.

Weapons, clothing and armor. Ships and ship weapons/items can be lent.
Many mechanics/ shopinterfaces will come with 3.0

EDIT:

Current 3.x shedule (I think this it's clear)

Source:
CREATIVE 3.0 Info-graphic schedule V2 - A collaborative effort! by myself and /u/mrpanicy

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize...fographic_schedule_v2_a_collaborative_effort/

 

[Jupiter]

All ATVs from last and this month were outstanding in my opinion. Here are a few scenes from the last one:

They changed the lighting and fog system (game does look completely different from CRYENGINE)

Hangar: https://gfycat.com/ForkedEntireAoudad
Reclaimer: https://gfycat.com/SlimyLeanDaddylonglegs
Alert lighting effects: https://gfycat.com/OpenWeeklyIndianpalmsquirrel
Light system (every light can be destroyed) https://gfycat.com/AlarmedEveryBluet
Hangar 2: https://gfycat.com/InferiorPiercingIcterinewarbler
Anamorphic Flares und Bloom: https://gfycat.com/FlakyGentleIcelandicsheepdog


Heavy Outlaw: https://gfycat.com/KindlyWigglyGangesdolphin
Female Walking animation: https://gfycat.com/LeanPoisedJohndory
Some multiplayer faces plus eye options: https://gfycat.com/BestHugeHookersealion

Redesignd starter ship (Aurora): https://gfycat.com/MerryFirsthandAsiantrumpetfish

This is interesiting too (projections in the fog): https://twitter.com/klumaster/status/865329802810728449

 

[Jupiter]

But it is not only about graphics. Last week they showed how the games interaction system will work (starts at 13:00). This will define a big part of the experience.

A door is just not a door just because the 3D artist makes it look like a door. Even the animations are not enough. The door needs states like open, closed, broken, without power etc. and it has to interact with other systems (electricity, fire or vacuum, safety/permissions) etc. and it needs an UI for the Player.

Especially the interaction possibilities in a cockpit could work extremly well with eye tracking from Tobii Eye cooperates.

I share the opinion of this person:

"That input revamp seriously impressed me. Star Citizen is becoming more like a real Adventure game with this. That it has this, integrated in this manner, creates a lot of possibilities moving forward. I'm very passionate by UI and UX so it's good to see.


The old input system looked like something you'd see in Elder Scrolls / Fallout 3-4. I feel Elder Scrolls is the closest but much more limited, and it's certainly true that those Bethesda games make it annoying and a lot of work to pick up things.
I loved what Bethesda tried to do with the sandbox elements in Fallout 4 with building your own sanctuary. But the hassle and manner of how you did it, felt counter intuitive and I lost interest in the process because of all the extra steps and trial and error.

You have to walk directly up to an item, look at it specifically and then hope you can pick it up, and then move it and put it down somewhere else- if you can put it down correctly. Which is often hard, because virtually all FPS are a floating camera.

These are the things that excite me about Star Citizen. A lot of other people are into the Sim aspects of flight or shooting or exploration, but for me, these are the narrow details that have never been done in gaming before, and I personally see SC as a benchmark to move other games forward.

I'm sick of shooters being a floating camera with fake animations during 1-3 person transitions. I'm sick of all the bullshit context sensistive bullshit we still see in all games, where you interact with something with one button ("press X to Awesome") and that being the depth and breathe of the gameplay.
The fact that you can micro manage things at such a level- the way you flip on and off controls, buttons, hinges, hangars, switches, locks- This is what immerses you in the world and makes you feel like you have a visceral control.
People should be up in arms over this, but I think (unfortunately) for a lot of gamers, they do not think about these subtilties, but are more easily responding to flashy graphics or upsetting drama news. Which is a shame.
We all know that graphics and presentation is not the problem; It's the stagnation in interface design, AI, input and navigation that has held gaming back, but these elements are not easily visible or explained to the masses, and as a result, you end up with hordes of gamers who complain about games being more of the same with flashier graphics, but who still only click and watch things activated by pretty graphics and slick presentation.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=236786421&postcount=8722

 

[Grall]

Hey @Jupiter... What's going on in the SC universe, you still keeping track of it?

Haven't bought SC myself yet - my mate that I hope to play with some day (who owns at least one large-ish ship already) hasn't got a decent PC, the game runs like ass even with everything turned down to minimum - so clearly no fun at all! He's looking at buying a new computer so he can play modern games, hopefully he'll find the cash for that some day.

I also need a new graphics card for SC, I think. The fans are shot on my current one even if they could run the game well with features dialed up - they rattle like mad and have difficulty revving up when the GPU starts to heat up. *sigh*

 

[Malo]

I'd wait for 3.0 to come out before you take a look another at SC. One thing is for sure though, you'll need to sell some children/parents/cousins to build a PC to run the thing at high quality levels.

 

[Jupiter]

I could tell a lot but since the annual GamesCom presentation is this Friday, I will make it very short. Then you may have even more surprises on Friday/Saturday.

3.0 took much longer than expected but the engine is much more advanced than planned for 3.0. Alpha 3.0 will be another game compared top the current version. How the performance will be is still uncertain. Since this game is often bound to the server performance I would not expect framerates of 60fps for Alpha 3.0. In this respect, they are slower because they have only a few programmers who are working on the network architecture. There are not many network programmers in the business.

I am personally a bit annoyed that 3.0 comes this late. I would have prefered smaller patches but probably this would have been more inefficient.

Alpha 3.0 status. What is finished and what is not: https://www.diffchecker.com/IHZVKDdv

Because the majority of the core tech for Squadron 42 is finished with 3.0 I personally do not expect Squadron 42 this year. CIG should announce this as soon as possible.

 

[green.pixel]

One thing is for sure though, you'll need to sell some children/parents/cousins to build a PC to run the thing at high quality levels.

Recommended hardware reqs might be akin to Roberts' days at Origin: something will come out soon, just wait until then! WC3 ran at about 15 fps in SVGA on the fastest 486.

 

[Malo]

Recommended hardware reqs might be akin to Roberts' days at Origin: something will come out soon, just wait until then! WC3 ran at about 15 fps in SVGA on the fastest 486.

Yeah but I'm planning on getting a 486 DX4 100Mhz to play Star Citizen. I should be good right?

 

[Rodéric]

Should run fine on Intel® Core™ i7 6950X + 64GiB DDR4-3600 + GTX 1080Ti 8GiB in 1080@60Hz !
;p
(Yes his games ran fine on computers released after them, they were ground breaking though.)

 

[eastmen]

I could tell a lot but since the annual GamesCom presentation is this Friday, I will make it very short. Then you may have even more surprises on Friday/Saturday.

3.0 took much longer than expected but the engine is much more advanced than planned for 3.0. Alpha 3.0 will be another game compared top the current version. How the performance will be is still uncertain. Since this game is often bound to the server performance I would not expect framerates of 60fps for Alpha 3.0. In this respect, they are slower because they have only a few programmers who are working on the network architecture. There are not many network programmers in the business.

I am personally a bit annoyed that 3.0 comes this late. I would have prefered smaller patches but probably this would have been more inefficient.

Alpha 3.0 status. What is finished and what is not: https://www.diffchecker.com/IHZVKDdv

Because the majority of the core tech for Squadron 42 is finished with 3.0 I personally do not expect Squadron 42 this year. CIG should announce this as soon as possible.

Coming around to what the rest of us already know huh. 2012 kickstarter , 2015 project completion goal ... 2017 and still no release date in site

 

[Jupiter]

CGI graphics programmers think that shadows are a problem in space sims due the large scale.

Question from Oberscht
"Will eclipses be "real" shadows?
An eclipse is basically a giant shadow cast from a celestial body moving itself in between a star and another celestial body. If this happens ingame, would it be rendered in the same way as any other shadow cast by an object, or would that be too inefficient, and if it is, what would be the solution? Please no non-dev answers, unless it's a link to a dev statement regarding this."

Answer from Ben Parry (CIG):
"So, standard shadow-map shadows tend to be a really bad way to do planet-sized shadows on account of a few things, one of the most important being that they don't get accurately calculated soft edges, so even if they have ultra high res and high-poly meshes casting the shadow, they'll have a pretty hard outline. The other big problem to overcome is that conventional shadow cascades only go out to a fixed distance, so you might see the eclipse shadow fade out halfway across, or not even be visible from a long distance away.

To get past that limitation, the renderer keeps a list of analytical shadow spheres that match the size and position of planets, and a simple scale for the soft edge (it would be more accurate to work out penumbra size based on distance, and easy enough to change if we decide it helps). On opaque objects, the shadows from these spheres are blended into the screen's shadow mask image on top of any other shadows, so you should easily see the shadow of a moon on its parent body. For transparent geometry, we calculate a single analytic shadow value for each entire object, which doesn't present a problem because there are lots of other reasons not to create transparent objects hundreds of kilometres long."


Question from Oberscht:
"What if a moon isn't perfectly round? Mars' moons for example are more potato shaped. Also, what's the distance limit of shadows, would one be able to seet he shadow of a spaceship flying around in the atmosphere of a planet?"

Answer from Ben Parry (CIG):
"Non-roundness: We'd have to approximate. We might be able to extend the range of shapes we can approximate, or we might have to cast round shadows from them.

Distance limits: Analytic shadows can pretty much cast from anywhere to anywhere. Things like ship shadows are a little more difficult - if you're up near the ship, chances are the shadow range won't be great enough for you to see anything you're casting down to the surface. If you're on the surface, we can theoretically grab every object between you and the sun, but there may be performance considerations and you'd have the issue I mentioned earlier that the shadow won't soften the way it ought to, so it might mean you'd get rather jarring moments where the crisp outline of a battle taking place in high orbit suddenly zooms past you. This week, we were discussing the problem of how to blend/blur/whatever them away at the point we want to remove them, but there isn't a solid answer yet."


Question from bagelswitch:
Objects have to be both low and large (or the principle source of illumination small and far away) for this to even matter:
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-International-Space-Station-throw-a-shadow-on-the-Earth
ie. using the Earth/Sun system as an example, an object in LEO would have to be 3.2 km across (and opaque to light across that area) to cast a noticeable shadow on the surface, and 312 km across if in a higher geosynchronous orbit.

So even a very low distance limit for ship shadows on surface would approximate reality, eg. the largest ships at 10 km may produce a shadow, so if local star light is approximated as a point source, it's more realistic in effect to just fade/cut off the shadow at a relatively short distance.

Answer from Ben Parry (CIG):
"Indeed, it's just that process of making them blur or fade before they vanish that's technologically annoying. Generally, shadow maps store a single depth value for the thing that's nearest to the sun - this unfortunately means you don't know what other objects it's in front of so it's hard to fade off in a way that won't break the shadows underneath it. A dissolve is clumsy but might be the least intrusive thing."

https://www.robertsspaceindustries....9/thread/will-eclipses-be-real-shadows/373123


In any case, more performance could be used for shadows than other games with hard shadows do.
Ray tracing approaches for ultra settings would be nice to have.

 

[Rodéric]

I implemented analytical celestial bodies shadows in BGE2 a while ago [before E3 2017], only spheres atm but it's good enough really, and quite spectacular.
Forgot to mention I made it with a penumbra region which looks better, even though real space photos show sharp shadows.

 

[eastmen]

welp gamescon came and went and while the demo was impressive we are still on a planet with one space station , when a player sat in a co pilot chair it all crashed. Considering its the end of august and what they showed is so ruff I am not expecting 3.0 till early 2018 . The facial stuff with the web cam was impressive but thats beyond 3.0 as he said.

Of course it hasn't stopped them from putting out more expensive ships

Oh and just incase

STAR-NT3J-HPTV

use this code to sign up. If I get 10 people to use this code when signing up and they all purchase a $40 + package I will get a free gladius . which is a $90 virtual ship all for getting a minimum of $400 of new backers into the game.... Hmm where have i heard this from before

 

[Kyyla]

Roberts needs a new boat to get to his yacht?