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

[Jupiter]

The AI seems more lifelike and interesting than in any other game I know. In addition, there are fluid animations (others will be reworked) and transitions in dialogues, many people have their own unique gait, look at what they are interested in, the character of the game can integrate with everyone and so on. When the NPC is teaching another one and if randomly an interesting object passes by in the background (not the player) he follows it briefly and then looks back again. Everything is dynamic.

At 22:15: In the comparison between the kindly minded vs. unfriendly minded Morrow the latter was really creepy. ^^

Also the guns on these ships seem to miss all the fucking time. Even a 21st century CIWS like those mounted on destroyers could do 1000x better and that's in atmosphere and gravity.

So far there is no auto aim etc. which makes fighting in space hard and most will never be able to hit precisely.

It really boggles my mind that they're only now implementing this stuff
The MMO universe relies on this tech, it should have been among the first things done not 4yrs into development.

Yes, this is the area where they are most backward. This is even standard MMO technique. They call it a first-pass version but iteration with core technology costs a lot of time and it is expensive. The programmers will be frustrated when they have to handle the same code over and over again instead of working on something new.

 

[Grall]

The programmers will be frustrated when they have to handle the same code over and over again instead of working on something new.

On the other hand, World of Warcraft for example has seen many implementations of its netcode, for the last couple expansions using increasingly sophisticated sharding tech to handle varying concentrations of populations across different areas of the game.

Sure, WoW's a live game, where as SC really can't be said to be yet, but it's not unheard of to continuously be refining netcode...

 

[CSI PC]

Also comes down to cost and just how much budget has been allocated for the infrastructure-services, which influences the design of the netcode/mesh-hybrid design.
Has there been any articles on the cost for the AWS services as used for MMO; in the past it would had been cheap to build such backends-cloud-etc for $60m in context of a large successful MMO, benefit of AWS would be option with regards to scaling implmentation and growth, but that means quite a bit of redesigning netcode and aspects of the code/databases/etc.

 

[Grall]

I watched the Living Idris video, and it makes me scratch my head a bit; that looks like a friggin vast ship, but only just over 80 crew? Merican aircraft carriers are a few hundred meters long with a lot of the hull taken up by hangars and whatnot, with a crew of what, 5,500? Thereabouts, I think. This frigate looks a LOT bigger, making me think there's absolutely shitloads of dead space inside that model.

I feel there should be at least an order of magnitude more crew. You don't need to make real persons of them all, they could be Star Trek redshirts all of them; disposable cookie-cutter people, basically uninteractive just doing some simple behaviors and live simple lives doing their thing. You wouldn't need voice actors for them either, speech synthesis has come a very long way, so all of their lines could be written text and they'd still be able to speak a little.

 

[MfA]

I've always thought voice morphing was the more likely future of voice acting for games with massive numbers of speakers with the same lines. With markup you can get good results from a synthesizer, but why bother marking up when voice has all the data needed already? It's the more natural interface.

Even when the lines need to contain data inputs, I think in the end providing the synthesizer with non marked up text and input from voice (with a single set of known data) will give you the most bang for buck.

If you go the markup routes I think the people who can do markup well and fast (ie. without a ton of iterations) will be more expensive than voice actors are now.

 

[eastmen]

They pushed the Network Bind culling to 3.2 instead of 3.1. So instead of March it is now June. So no chance of performance updates till then it seems

 

[Jupiter]

Thats sad but there is still some performance optimization.

29/67tasks completed

Status:In Development
Ongoing performance improvements with specific quarterly goals to increase overall framerate among all PC specs.

https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen

On the other hand, World of Warcraft for example has seen many implementations of its netcode, for the last couple expansions using increasingly sophisticated sharding tech to handle varying concentrations of populations across different areas of the game.

Sure, WoW's a live game, where as SC really can't be said to be yet, but it's not unheard of to continuously be refining netcode...

It is possible but it takes much longer and it more expensive. Even the standard MMO Bind Culling has been postponed again in Star Citizen.

I watched the Living Idris video, and it makes me scratch my head a bit; that looks like a friggin vast ship, but only just over 80 crew? Merican aircraft carriers are a few hundred meters long with a lot of the hull taken up by hangars and whatnot, with a crew of what, 5,500? Thereabouts, I think. This frigate looks a LOT bigger, making me think there's absolutely shitloads of dead space inside that model.

I feel there should be at least an order of magnitude more crew. You don't need to make real persons of them all, they could be Star Trek redshirts all of them; disposable cookie-cutter people, basically uninteractive just doing some simple behaviors and live simple lives doing their thing. You wouldn't need voice actors for them either, speech synthesis has come a very long way, so all of their lines could be written text and they'd still be able to speak a little.

I'll have to see it by myself in the game because it maybe still feels like it's full. I really like the approach that every character has a meaning on the spaceship. Finally, it is the main arena of the campaign where one will return. On secondary stations such as space stations they can of course use unimportant NPCs to fill the environment.

Current ship size where the Idris is down left.

I think an aircraft carrier is much bigger and has more decks. However, with the Idris every metre of space is used as well.



Some ships and stations are so vast they even have a transportation system.

I've always thought voice morphing was the more likely future of voice acting for games with massive numbers of speakers with the same lines. With markup you can get good results from a synthesizer, but why bother marking up when voice has all the data needed already? It's the more natural interface.

Even when the lines need to contain data inputs, I think in the end providing the synthesizer with non marked up text and input from voice (with a single set of known data) will give you the most bang for buck.

If you go the markup routes I think the people who can do markup well and fast (ie. without a ton of iterations) will be more expensive than voice actors are now.

CIG said they can combine the animations. For example they can use the blink of Gary Oldman and the mouth movements from Liam Cunningham for one charakter. Theoretically each character can have access to almost all animations of the database. That would create a good starting point because the voice morphing you are talking about should really be concidered in the future.

 

[Jupiter]

"We decided it was necessary to push Bind Culling back for the following reasons:

1) Progress has been slower than we had hoped, partly due to taking longer than anticipated to convert the last few places in the code that were using old-style Aspects and RMIs to Serialized Variables and Remote Methods, and then completely strip those legacy systems from the network code. That was a necessary step because we didn't want to have to implement Bind Culling for both the old and new systems. I'm not embarrassed to tell you there was some dancing and a few air-punches on my part when the last line of that old code was deleted.

2) There wouldn't have been enough time left before 3.1 for the network and gameplay programmers to deal with the issues we’re expecting the introduction of Bind Culling to cause.

3) Bind Culling would result in clients streaming entities in and out based on distance, but without asynchronous Object Container Streaming it was always a gamble whether the resulting synchronous loading stalls would be worse or better than what players experience now. The plan was to get Bind Culling working, see what the impact on player experience was and then make the call whether to turn it on for 3.1.

4) Range-based Serialized Variable Culling was our backup plan in case Bind Culling didn't make it into 3.1. You may remember that we were working on SV Culling for 3.0 but that it wasn't quite ready in time. Well, it was the first thing we tackled when we came back at the start of the year, and has been working in our development branch for several weeks now (not the branch 3.0.1 was taken from). SV Culling already gives us a lot of the performance gain we would expect from Bind Culling so the urgency for the later has dropped significantly.

5) The network team is needed for other tasks that have increased in priority since they were first added to our schedule."


https://robertsspaceindustries.com/...technical-reason-to-push-bind-culling-/977329

 

[eastmen]

They are really far behind , they were promising it for 2.6 updates and apparently some say even longer than that. Hopefully this Range based stuff helps performance

 

[cheapchips]

The worst part is it's not even a solution to their ambitions. It's not going to support 100's to 1000's of players in the same instance. It's just going to make performance for 10's of players a bit less rubbish.

 

[hoom]

But 80 player ships!
80 player ships that get disabled in 30secs of combat & need to wait for a big repair ship to man up, launch, travel across space to help you.

 

[eastmen]

But 80 player ships!
80 player ships that get disabled in 30secs of combat & need to wait for a big repair ship to man up, launch, travel across space to help you.

well I'd imagine you'd keep your repair ships a few jumps away .

Anyway , I've done the off line hack and I can get over 60fps with my current set up at 4k and the highest settings. So at least for SQ42 these issues wont be a problem. For the PU who knows... but hopefully we can have Sq42 next year

 

[Jupiter]

For comparison: Horizon Zero Dawn development time

Jason: You guys were in development for six years? Seven years?
Hulst: We started the pitching process late in 2009. So 2010 we started concepting. We should probably acknowledge the fact that for five, six months when we were finishing Killzone: Shadow Fall there was hardly any activity on Horizon: Zero Dawn. I would say all in all about six years, maybe six and a half, is the full production cycle of Horizon: Zero Dawn. So it’s been a very long time. But that’s kind of what you need when you do your first game in a new genre, it’s a new IP, it’s your first open-world game. It takes time. But we didn’t always work on it with a full team—we started with a few guys and scaled that up to maybe 20 people for the first few years. I don’t want to make it sound more expensive than it was.

https://kotaku.com/the-magic-formula-behind-horizon-zero-dawns-success-1823647530

 

[Grall]

For comparison: Horizon Zero Dawn development time

There's no need to make apologies for RSI; they can speak for themselves.

 

[eastmen]

For comparison: Horizon Zero Dawn development time

Jason: You guys were in development for six years? Seven years?
Hulst: We started the pitching process late in 2009. So 2010 we started concepting. We should probably acknowledge the fact that for five, six months when we were finishing Killzone: Shadow Fall there was hardly any activity on Horizon: Zero Dawn. I would say all in all about six years, maybe six and a half, is the full production cycle of Horizon: Zero Dawn. So it’s been a very long time. But that’s kind of what you need when you do your first game in a new genre, it’s a new IP, it’s your first open-world game. It takes time. But we didn’t always work on it with a full team—we started with a few guys and scaled that up to maybe 20 people for the first few years. I don’t want to make it sound more expensive than it was.

https://kotaku.com/the-magic-formula-behind-horizon-zero-dawns-success-1823647530

Here is the issue , The horizon people didn't announce and take money for the game in 2009 and tell people it would be ready in 2011 and then release the game in 2017. So while I understand that game development takes time I am just running with what Roberts himself promised and felt he could deliver on. What they need to focus on is performance at this point and then stick to their PU schedule of putting more and more content in. That is what this should have been from the start , more of an Elite Dangrous model. The issue is they were supposed to do hanger , arena commander then SQ42 episodic and then PU . What they ended up doing is Hanger , Arena commander and then nothing . But we discuss this all the time and nothing is going to change. Neither of us know when this game is going to come out.

I think we can agree on this

They need to get multicore (greater than 4) working so we get better performance . They need to get bind culling and other network fixes implemented. They also need to hire a larger network group to tackle this.

Right now we can't get decent performance on servers with 20-25 people so scaling up into the hundreds not going to happen. Esp as they introduce mining , reclaiming , repairing and all that other fun stuff . They are a long way to getting this game going for the PU . Luckly for SQ42 they don't need server power , they just need to get it running well in a single player set up.

 

[CSI PC]

For comparison: Horizon Zero Dawn development time

Jason: You guys were in development for six years? Seven years?
Hulst: We started the pitching process late in 2009. So 2010 we started concepting. We should probably acknowledge the fact that for five, six months when we were finishing Killzone: Shadow Fall there was hardly any activity on Horizon: Zero Dawn. I would say all in all about six years, maybe six and a half, is the full production cycle of Horizon: Zero Dawn. So it’s been a very long time. But that’s kind of what you need when you do your first game in a new genre, it’s a new IP, it’s your first open-world game. It takes time. But we didn’t always work on it with a full team—we started with a few guys and scaled that up to maybe 20 people for the first few years. I don’t want to make it sound more expensive than it was.

https://kotaku.com/the-magic-formula-behind-horizon-zero-dawns-success-1823647530

For true comparison how many staff were employed by Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries Corp in the 1st few years?
So Horizon Zero dawn had up to a maximum of 20 for the 1st few.

But as eastmen says one also had a large up front funding, while Horizon Zero Dawn did have budget concerns.
Only background I have found quickly for Star Citizen/Squadron 42 was.

Cloud Imperium Games Corporation and its subsidiary Roberts Space Industries Corp. were founded in April 2012 by renowned game developer Chris Roberts (Wing Commander, Freelancer, Privateer) and his business partner and long-time international media attorney Ortwin Freyermuth. Operating from Los Angeles and Austin under Roberts’ leadership and using his long-standing relationships in the game space, Cloud Imperium quickly assembled a top tier development team for the creation of art assets, story elements, and an extensive prototype for Star Citizen. Once UK-based Erin Roberts joined in 2013 to contribute his extensive background in game production, the Roberts and Freyermuth added CIG’s international operations in Manchester, UK to develop the mission driven Squadron 42 which is set in Star Citizen’s first person universe.

Cloud Imperium has studios in Los Angeles, California ; Austin, Texas ; Manchester, UK and Frankfurt, Germany.

 

[Jupiter]

There's no need to make apologies for RSI; they can speak for themselves.

Of course but it was often said that more than 4 years would be unusual for a development and Star Citizen makes a lot of new Things because I don't know a similar video game.

For true comparison how many staff were employed by Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries Corp in the 1st few years?
So Horizon Zero dawn had up to a maximum of 20 for the 1st few.

But as eastmen says one also had a large up front funding, while Horizon Zero Dawn did have budget concerns.
Only background I have found quickly for Star Citizen/Squadron 42 was.

In the beginning, Star Citizen would have had few investors with a budget of approximately $20 million. This was then rejected by CIG and the money they have now ($180 million) came in relatively constant by the gamers. At the beginning, however, nobody expected this.



Now there are 475: https://www.dualshockers.com/star-citizen-squadron-42-staff-475-employees/


EDIT:

Chris Roberts in Kingdom Come: Deliverance

 

[Jupiter]

Star Citizens largest ship (has about 7 decks) for 3.1 (march update)

The interior reminds me optically of the Nostromo from Alien.

One can say that the landing hydraulics is too complex but it looks very good (landing at 2:25).

 

[Jupiter]

If someone is interested in the process of creating spaceship drawings for games/movies or want to know more about Jim Martin (a well-known science fiction concept Artist [Deep Space Nine, Starship Troopers etc.).

Starts at 5:23:

He's seems to be a really great guy and I found it exciting to listen.

 

[eastmen]

Do any of you guys have one of the big hull ships ?