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

[Jupiter]

No problem. You said you were developing a game similar to Star Citizen. What's shown is interesting but I don't have VR (VR gives me a headache). I will link the videos in another forum in the VR category. The cockpit view is very good. No structures blocking the view.

 

[Jupiter]

First iteration of mining is solid and does not feel like a boring point and click.

 

[eastmen]

my orion isn't in the game yet (surprise surprise) so I don't know if they will give me the prospector to try out till my ship is in the game. Which is funny cause my ship was sold way before the prospector but you know wtf cares about that right CIG

 

[MfA]

Or at least a fun functional persistent economy...

Far easier said than done, it's such a small niche and I doubt their current audience has much overlap with the audience looking for an economy sim game.

"Hey, you spend 10K$ on the game, that's nice. You're just a tiny small fry compared to this this autist with management skills who build a 1000 man corp of course."

Are all their whales and pokemon collectors ready to have their investments made insignificant by the economy? I don't think they are. Unfortunately there is no game to build for those people at all, they are chasing some dream which can not exist to rationalize their spending.

 

[hoom]

Far easier said than done, it's such a small niche and I doubt their current audience has much overlap with the audience looking for an economy sim game.

"Hey, you spend 10K$ on the game, that's nice. You're just a tiny small fry compared to this this autist with management skills who build a 1000 man corp of course."

I mean its the main basis of an online persistent space game.
You can't have an economy consisting primarily of just ppl with $10k ships ganking other ppl who only spent $3k, you gotta have a heap of successful & at least moderately rewarding mining to provide the players to gank...

Dat flight model doe

 

[MfA]

You can't have an economy where 10k$ ships don't lose a ton of their value on destruction ... because ships are the main store of wealth and that value must be sunk.

So lets say that after your 10k$ ship gets blown up it requires 500 man hours worth of gameplay to get it back up and running. The corps can do that, the 10 k$ whale, not so much. Can the whales accept that? Not so much.

 

[eastmen]

You can't have an economy where 10k$ ships don't lose a ton of their value on destruction ... because ships are the main store of wealth and that value must be sunk.

So lets say that after your 10k$ ship gets blown up it requires 500 man hours worth of gameplay to get it back up and running. The corps can do that, the 10 k$ whale, not so much. Can the whales accept that? Not so much.

That's why you have to switch to fuel being the important part of the game. Get the economy going on different types of fuel which have your ships work better along with missles , bullets , lasers and so on.

The problem with the game is a lot of people have stopped buying ships , they are only buying cheap ships for lte tokens to make into bigger ships later on (although with the new way melted money is worth less than new money this wont be true anymore) and some are going in on the bigger ships. So your going to see CIG push out more and more ships of the larger bigger size

 

[hoom]

The problem with the game is a lot of people are buying US$10,000 ships.
Ships they can't use, for a game with servers that can't handle enough people simultaneously to actually crew them & primarily on the basis of a whole bunch of speculation based off of assumptions about the game being fun/interesting to play.

 

[Jupiter]

I mean its the main basis of an online persistent space game.
You can't have an economy consisting primarily of just ppl with $10k ships ganking other ppl who only spent $3k, you gotta have a heap of successful & at least moderately rewarding mining to provide the players to gank...

Dat flight model doe

It is not the flight model but the visual feedback. They should make it more like that visually

For fighting the model is very good. With XvT or X-Wing Alliance multiplayer fights are only about who reduces the thrust for the highest turning rate at the right moment, which works at once thanks to configurable settings (33% thrust, all energy on drive). And then it's all about who can see each other's tail faster. Every other manoeuvre against a good pilot immediately leads to the destruction of your own ship and that is really boring. Freelancer was already much better with penalties and the engine cutoff which allowed much more.

 

[Jupiter]

Star Citizen flight model document from CIGs Senior Physics Programmer

Video about that document

 

[Entropy]

It is not the flight model but the visual feedback. They should make it more like that visually

For fighting the model is very good. With XvT or X-Wing Alliance multiplayer fights are only about who reduces the thrust for the highest turning rate at the right moment, which works at once thanks to configurable settings (33% thrust, all energy on drive). And then it's all about who can see each other's tail faster. Every other manoeuvre against a good pilot immediately leads to the destruction of your own ship and that is really boring. Freelancer was already much better with penalties and the engine cutoff which allowed much more.

Agree that Freelancer did good things.
Personally I hate that the flight sim fans have ruined otherwise great space games by insisting that space ships should handle pretty much like WW1 fighters in order to suit their joystick preferences. I’m not saying that space ships should move realistically, because given the realistic speeds and distances involved, that would be boring from a gameplay point of view. Make it fun.

(Was an early, and substantial, backer of Elite Dangerous. Flight Simmers killed that game for me. Never got beyond the tutorial due to the flight mechanics. Hate it.)

 

[Jupiter]

Epic trailer

More trailer

Squadron 42 update

Agree that Freelancer did good things.
Personally I hate that the flight sim fans have ruined otherwise great space games by insisting that space ships should handle pretty much like WW1 fighters in order to suit their joystick preferences. I’m not saying that space ships should move realistically, because given the realistic speeds and distances involved, that would be boring from a gameplay point of view. Make it fun.

(Was an early, and substantial, backer of Elite Dangerous. Flight Simmers killed that game for me. Never got beyond the tutorial due to the flight mechanics. Hate it.)

I agree. Some games may be more immersive than Star Citizen with a Hotas in the single Player envoronment but I like the direction they generally take. I think dual joysticks are best for this game.

Besides, a little variety doesn't hurt. If you want to read more and how much changes etc. are still undergoing you can do it here. He has answerd many many questions: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/ifcs-q-a

 

[eastmen]

I think when Roberts said they aren't releasing the road map for SQ42 (dispite them promising it over 6 months ago) because production didn't feel like they were okay with letting the public know where they were … sums up this project . They have spun way out and are way behind where they should be.

 

[Jupiter]

CIG is using Ground Truth-based Ambient Occlusion by Jorge Jimenez et al (2016):
https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/s2016_pbs_activision_occlusion.pptx
http://iryoku.com/downloads/Practical-Realtime-Strategies-for-Accurate-Indirect-Occlusion.pdf

This SSAO is in my opinion physically the most accurate. Others darken far too little, too much or both, depending on the scenario. It's so new in SC that it has to be enebled with "r_SSDO = 2" in the console menu (Alpha 3.2). Later, they'll probably use it by default.


Some comparisons between SSDO and the new one:

Example 1: https://gif-erstellen.com/g/pzza5fjs
Its gets darker below the leaves.
Same in example 2: https://gif-erstellen.com/g/1anfz82z

Example 3: https://gif-erstellen.com/g/4vlcy2jt
In this case it gets darker below the stairs with the new SSAO.

Example 4: https://gif-erstellen.com/g/mdl35nty
Too much darkening at the column (or as it is called) with the old SSDO.

The overall picture is now much more homogeneous. Objects fit in better, don't stick out, etc.

EDIT:
I am impressid by how accurate and cheap this AO is (it costs as much as before and improves the image quality significantly). Of course it still has screen space artifacts but compared to all the other SSAOs I saw, I like it much better. When playing other games I miss such a good SSAO. Everything simply fits together more realistically in this one. Raytracing AO has become a little less important to me than before. Raytracing shadows would be far more important.

 

[suryad]

So I have been out of this forum and out of the loop with regards to this game...is it anywhere approaching completion or still in alpha? I think now there's 2 versions of the game - Squadron 42 and Star Citizen? Are they connected in any way?

 

[cheapchips]

Star Citizen/persistent universe is the MMO that's not even 1% of the promised game so far. SQ42 is the single player campaign that's always out at the end of the year, but somehow never is.

 

[suryad]

Star Citizen/persistent universe is the MMO that's not even 1% of the promised game so far. SQ42 is the single player campaign that's always out at the end of the year, but somehow never is.

haha thanks! That makes sense.

 

[eastmen]

haha thanks! That makes sense.

I would certainly wait till Q4's patch to see if its worth investing in. Hopefully some of the planned performance improvements happen and are not delayed again and they push enough new content out behind those improvements which they claim is holding back how many planets and stations are in the game. So yea Q4 or even early next year is a good time to check back.

 

[hoom]

Q4 what year?

 

[green.pixel]

The year before Shivans return for good.