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

[Malo]

Just to be clear:
- there's still no release date for Squadron 42, which the developer claimed last year that the first episode would be available this year?

There's no release dates for anything yet.

 

[nutball]

Just to be clear:
- there's still no release date for Squadron 42, which the developer claimed last year that the first episode would be available this year?

Stop asking difficult questions.

This game is all about he might be. The could be and the will be are for people with a different focus.

 

[eastmen]

Just to be clear:
- there's still no release date for Squadron 42, which the developer claimed last year that the first episode would be available this year?

I don't we see it before spring .


I have a few original ships and I bet they are all worthless at this point. Looking at the page there are so many new ships that seem much better. Poor freelancer look like crud now

 

[Jupiter]

Someone made a compilation and quick tour of all significant landing zone artwork to date. Enjoy: http://imgur.com/a/OPcaX


Chris Roberts said something very interesting in the presentation:
"With our procedural tech and all the new found real estate, I think You guys will be able to buy a lot and build a home..."

Looks like orgs could build stations on planets too at some point.



This happens much faster/earlier when a game doesn't have 64bit coordinates. Start the video at 1:40:10:

If the player goes too far away from the origin of the map (0, 0, 0 is probably located near the planet) this would happen. The further the player flies away, the more violent it will be.
In a game like Star Citizen where every millimeter of precision is important. For example the helmet must fit perfectly otherwise the HUD would be moved to another place. Or without that high precision the players hand would not be at the controls etc.
A map in Star Citizen can nearly be as large as our solar system with a high accuracy where errors would not be noticed.

 

[Grall]

-Item 2.0: when the player get into his ship he can do more things with one item; he can use a water bottle, drink it, put it down etc.; picking up objects and moving them around; rapairing the ship, switching damaged objects inside the ship etc.

Heh. Since I started watching STTNG I always wanted to be a 24th century starship engineer. Maybe this is the next best thing? lol

Hoping game comes out soon so I can try it.

 

[Jupiter]

A full implemented Item system 2.0 will change the game dramatically. For Item System 2.0 large parts of the CRYENGINE needed to be rewritten. They are almost working 1,5 years on Item System 2.0.

Chris Roberts said this about Item System 2.0:

This is one of the big things that we keep talking about Item System 2.0 which is really a refactoring of the items and the entity system and will fold across into how the characters – what we call players inside the code – and vehicles will function. It’s to allow a lot more functionality and control.

So right now on the ships, especially on the multi-crew ships, a lot of the functionality isn’t there because we have a lot of the old items and we’re just moving over to the new ones not fully implemented in there – we’re in this half way state.

Each new release we add a bit more of the code although we don’t necessarily change the items themselves over to using the new code yet. When we have enough of the base code in we’ll just pass on all the items and we’ll move over to the Item 2.0 functionality which will allow a lot more – for instance, for ships in multi-crew and seats, or stations, you’ll be delegate control over different things like passive control of a turret to another seat, have different seats have control over things like engineering, power distribution and stuff like that- shield management and also just ship systems.

Some stuff that we worked on- there’s some pretty cool prototype stuff. I think at some point we’re going to be showing it. Not necessarily in this session but during some of the prototype stuff that allows you to go to a control centre and turn off lights in sections or lock down doors or turn off power- potentially even turn off the gravity generator.

There’s going to be a lot of tools for people on ships – especially the bigger ships – to be able to micromanage the systems internally which you could potentially use to slow down or thwart people boarding and vice-versa. The other side of it is that people trying to take over a ship could potentially cause havoc and damage by cutting power nodes or getting access to a control room and then shutting other people in.

All this is pretty cool, of course, certain levels of control have certain security access has to come with a card or something else but all that functionality comes with Item 2.0. All the items that are connected by pipes. We’ve talked a lot about the pipe concept where they- power goes between items or items will vent heat and it’ll go into the pipe system and then you’ll have to get rid of that heat or else it’ll start to back into the items and damage them but we have other things like data or CPU power.

For instance if you have a targeting computer and it’s trying to resolve targets and it was connected to say a single core computer well it’ll only get so many data cycles from the CPU and so maybe it takes five seconds or six seconds to resolve the target whereas if you had a dual-core CPU so you have your avionics module and then you have two processors in two of the slots then potentially that could be maybe three seconds to resolve the target.

So we sort all sorts of stuff on how you configure ships and how we build out and configure ships that allow all sorts of nuance and control and then again if players get in there or subsystems get damaged during combat, what’s cool is that because each one of these items needs power, for instance, to operate and it needs, like I was saying, CPU cycles or perhaps it needs, for instance if you have a live support like on a ship then we have an oxygen pipe and that would go up in the life support unit and if someone destroyed the life support unit then there’d be no oxygen coming in therefore you better put on a space suit because pretty soon you would start to asphyxiate.

So it’s all systematic so if damage happens to the bigger ships as bits blow up on the outside there will be radial explosions and that potentially could hit items a little further in and those items themselves could be damaged or explode and they could hit further ones, and so you’d have a cascade of damage and it could effect- it could cut out the power node which is something that could therefore happen on a bigger ship is that you have a power plant and then power is distributed via nodes to turrets and various systems – lights, whatever – around the ship and obviously with the power plant going down you’re in trouble but even if there’s damage to the side of the- to one side of the ship, say the starboard side or something like that and takes out one of the power nodes then anything after that power node will be out of power.

Now, there might be gameplay where you would go to fix up the power nodes and reconnect the power, on the bigger ships there might be a lot of alternate ways – more than sort of one power node route and you could go to the systems management and reroute the power from one node to another node to get power going back to the remaining turret or something like that. All that functionality is going to be incredibly cool to have a massive amount of gameplay potential. It’ll make crewing and using the bigger ships – the multi-crew ships and obviously the cap ships that we’ve got – a huge fun experience.

So that’s kind of some of the stuff that we’re most excited by as far as the space adventuring combat side and I think you’ve not really seen that level of stuff in a game before and it is very much like the Sci-Fi movie, running about on the enterprise and Scotty’s trying to fix up the- the- warp drive and all the rest of the stuff. So we’ll definitely have a lot of that, and part of it will be turning of the lights and shutting the doors and that sort of stuff.

Source: http://imperialnews.network/2016/04/10-for-the-chairman-episode-83/


Because of the high in game quality of the Starfarer I have therefore enough confidence in CIG so I have pledget for the Carrack now.

More

Spoiler

EDIT:

Chris Roberts interview from Twitch yesterday: Some important talking points

• They ran the demo presentation close to 22 (perhaps closer to 30) times to various parties at the con. Two crashes happened and one hard hang.
• Unlike a lot of other games, including those with PG'ed planets, there is no specific draw distance. In 3.0 the curvature of the planet is the horizon.
• Plans for Citcon are to show off "the next level" of the PG tech. Vegetation, water, oceans. A "Crysis style" planet.
• The checkpoint on the way to Delamar is a QD beacon that also provides your EDL assisted "flight tunnels".
• The 40 stations quoted at the demo are not all planned for 3.0. We'll see more duplication and modularity of the existing stations to build it out. They are working on a modular set for stations at the moment.
• The tech allows for IRL scales but is being reduced for gameplay reasons. We're looking at a 1/10th scale of distance between planets. Planets are 1/4th scale in size.
• 40 minutes to cross Stanton. Discussed here.
• Emphasis on ship maintenance for large haulers making long trips. Coming with items 2.0
• Jobwell is coming in 3.0 along with more hand-crafted missions and those provided by actual characters.
• Some elements of the PG'ed mission system coming in 3.0.
• The last day of the shoot at Imaginarium was for the PU, not SQ42. Another shoot planned for PU mission content later in the year.
• Lots of work still to do on facial capture. Eyes, hair, skin specifically.
• Work on live facial capture (!). The plan is to release news reports in-game as quickly after the events as possible.
• The plan is for player driven events to be reported on to create a more dynamic, living game.
• Items 2.0 inlcudes ageing, wear and tear.
• Player characters are supposed to age as well (?)
• The mocap rig owned by CIG is in the UK. It was used to shoot the 3.0 stuff in the demo but at Imaginarium. The plan is to get this set up in the LA studio with smaller mocap sets at each studio as well. They might keep using professional sets in Ealing for the larger scale shoots.
• SQ42 Ch.2 planned for about two years after Ch.1 comes out.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/4yugzv/chris_roberts_interview_from_twitch_yesterday/

 

[eastmen]

so sq42 ch2 is going to take two years after Ch1 but when is chapter 1 ? If ch1 is 2017 then ch2 is 2019. Ch2 I believe was a stretch goal back in 2012 for the 6m mark.

Now if its something different we may not get that content until 2020 at the earliest. Which will make it 8 years after the pledges were taken. Heck Ch1 in 2017 would still be 5 years of game development for the single player (if it even ships by then )

 

[Malo]

I have a few original ships and I bet they are all worthless at this point. Looking at the page there are so many new ships that seem much better. Poor freelancer look like crud now

Ever considered actually playing the game to earn your way to a new ship?

 

[Lightman]

Today I went back into Star Citizen after few months of not launching it at all and I must say there is huge progress visible to all game components. This makes me a bit more positive about chances of playing this game at some point in 2017. Yes, it will be much later than promised, but I take that over not playing it at all!
Starship systems, damage models, star-bases, etc are all done very well and to a level I was hoping for. There are still plenty of issues to resolve like character movement and minor glitches with animations but in general I could live with them.

BTW I was planning on starting with small ship and if game turns out to be interesting, earn better ships in the SC universe.

 

[Malo]

BTW I was planning on starting with small ship and if game turns out to be interesting, earn better ships in the SC universe.

Exactly. I still have my starter ship and haven't considered buying any to make life easier when I start out. I'd much prefer the struggle and sense of achievement to earning these in-game. Buying ships is optional and always has been. Other players starting out with massive ships doesn't bother me in the slightest, I'm not there to compete with them.

 

[eastmen]

Ever considered actually playing the game to earn your way to a new ship?

I bought ships to help with funding of the game back when it was struggling to meet its first few million. I'd want those purchases to still be valuable . I don't find myself having fun with the ship combat so I wanted to do more exploration and minning. But it may be the ships I have are eclipsed by other newer ships that can be purchased

 

[homerdog]

-Item 2.0: when the player get into his ship he can do more things with one item; he can use a water bottle, drink it, put it down etc.; picking up objects and moving them around; rapairing the ship, switching damaged objects inside the ship etc.

Is this like fixing something on the ship that is stuck down in a hole where you can't quite reach it with your fingers? "Cap'n I was rapairing the fusion core and now she's overheat'n!"

 

[Jupiter]

Ever considered actually playing the game to earn your way to a new ship?

I have already much fun in flying around with a Starfarer or Constellation. Already over 100 hours I have spent in the Crusader system.
No spaceship can be earned at the moment. The first parts of perstistance came with Alpha 2.4. Weapon, armor and clothing etc. can be purchased. But that earning can be reseted with every patch in the Alpha. They just try to find a good price balance. The game pricing is a major challenge. A pistol may cost 500 USD in reality. An F16 military jet already 20 million USD (which would be comparable to an Anvil Hornet in Star Citizen) and large ships and aircraft carriers up to 3 -10 billion USD.

It should also be said that large vessels actually have a "better value for money" compared to smaller ships. The current price scale is not representative for the final game.
For very large ships like destroyers you will definitely need an organization. Large ships but also have very high operating costs. They also cost more when they are not used.

Is this like fixing something on the ship that is stuck down in a hole where you can't quite reach it with your fingers?

I do not know if I understand your question correctly.

Components having different functions and they are physically represented in the game. You can see them inside or outside of the ship. Something like a power generator, shield generator, coolers, power plants, CPU, pipes (data, energy), (avionics), weapons.
If parts are damaged they should be repaired or replaced by crew members. These parts can also be replaced by higher quality and better ones. A ship can significantly be improved trough better components.

This is a point which should make multi crew gameplay more interesting. Item System 2 is necessary for this.

 

[homerdog]

I do not know if I understand the question correctly.

I am seriously cracking up in my office right now

Carry on if the bar gets raised too high again I'll be here to lower it. Like the opposite of James Cameron.

 

[hughJ]

Considering how few legitimately large, forward looking projects there are focused on the PC market in the last decade or so, the fact that there's not only a developer willing to try and deliver something like this, but a community will to pay in advance to try and make it happen makes me happy. I'm trying to remember the last PC game that would have felt at home with the likes of magazine technical previews of early builds of Quake, Quake 2, Doom 3, etc and I realize that it's been a very long time since I've been the least bit enthusiastic about a PC title in that same way. I'll be surprised if the thing ends up delivering, but I'd rather have a failed attempt at something like this then the entire catalog of published and shipped content out of EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc.

 

[Rodéric]

The problem you mention comes from the fact that you need a lot more money now to impress the audience, look at the budget of the games you cite and you'll notice the major cost growth...

But yes, it's nice to have someone say and try to do something else than tweaking the old mold and releasing yet another me too game.
(Indies nonwithstanding.)

 

[green.pixel]

The problem you mention comes from the fact that you need a lot more money now to impress the audience, look at the budget of the games you cite and you'll notice the major cost growth...

Well, that's only one part of the problem. The other, much more important is the capitalist logic behind it, especially in the current financialized, managerial, short-term, maximizing shareholder value model of it. So game making is treated as a commodity/service just like any other. Especially in the case of big pubs which are the only ones with big enough funds needed for games with ambitious design.

The costs wouldn't be an issue if vastly different system was in place. SC and crowdfunding are a proof of it, but it can't easily work for other genres which don't lend themselves to buying in-game stuff like ships.

There is also the issue of audience response, i.e why aren't people protesting with their purchasing choices. Which may indicate that the audience has changed dramatically over the years and that companies are targetting people that are suitable for the goal of maximizing profits. They aren't interested in expanding to different demographics if it doesn't meet that goal.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, that's only one part of the problem. The other, much more important is the capitalist logic behind it, especially in the current financialized, managerial, short-term, maximizing shareholder value model of it. So game making is treated as a commodity/service just like any other. Especially in the case of big pubs which are the only ones with big enough funds needed for games with ambitious design.

The costs wouldn't be an issue if vastly different system was in place. SC and crowdfunding are a proof of it, but it can't easily work for other genres which don't lend themselves to buying in-game stuff like ships.

There is also the issue of audience response, i.e why aren't people protesting with their purchasing choices. Which may indicate that the audience has changed dramatically over the years and that companies are targetting people that are suitable for the goal of maximizing profits. They aren't interested in expanding to different demographics if it doesn't meet that goal.

That problem would be alleviated somewhat if gamers weren't the cheap SOBs that they are.

Realize that games created now days are not only more expensive to create but also are significantly cheaper than games released in the early 90's before publishers started to merge in order to attempt to stay profitable.

PC game in 1990 were 60-80 USD. PC games now are ~50-60 USD. Taking into account inflation that PC game made in 1990 would sell for 110-150 USD.

So basically in 1990 developers were able to fund their games with the equivalent modern USD sales value of 110-150 USD. Developers today have to fund their games on ~50-60 USD sales.

Meanwhile in the real world, food costs have gone up with inflation, board games have gone up with inflation, car prices have gone up with inflation, TV costs have gone up with inflation, etc. But nope, gamers DEMAND that developers sell their games for less than they sold for over 2 decades ago despite AAA games costing far more to develop to make those same gamers not bitch and moan about how they don't look like a AAA game.

Really, PC/console gamers have no idea how spoiled they are.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

Yeah yeah the good old days. It seems like the industry is more than just surviving today. It's just incredibly competitive, as it was in the '90s as well, but today there is such vastly higher sales volume potential. And they've figured out lots of new ways to bring in money.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, DLC and microtransactions help with the increasing cost of doing business in the games industry.

But publishers are certainly not in the greatest position. Square-Enix Eidos was in poor financial shape prior to FFXIV being released, and even now couldn't afford to fully fund either the latest Tomb Raider (financial help from MS) or Hitman (released partially finished). Ubisoft has been fighting a hostile takeover by Vivendi this year. Capcom briefly flirted with the idea of selling the company. Konami has for all intents pulled out of the AAA games business.

All of that is a symptom of why big publishers don't take big risks on new IP anymore. They can't afford to. THQ was the last large publisher to take a lot of large risks for new IP. And all it took was one large project underperforming to bankrupt the entire company.

Hence you see all the large publishers only taking risks on low budget indie-like projects. For example, "I am Setsuna" by Square-Enix Eidos or "Child of Light" by Ubisoft.

Why do I mention all of this? Because it all relates to the post I responded to. Big publishers don't treat it as a commodity and they certainly aren't short sighted. What they are doing is trying to stay in business and make a profit.

They want to experiment and fund new IP. However, with the current price of games combined with the cost of developing a AAA title, it just isn't worth the financial risk of bankruptcy. Hence you see maybe 1 or 2 attempts at a new AAA IP while they take numerous risks on a multitude of small low budget indie like titles.

Going back to how this whole thing started.

Crowd funding and personal investment dollars from individuals is the only reason a project like Star Citizen could exist. A traditionally funded publisher backed project would have had just a very small fraction of the scope of Star Citizen. And targeting just one platform for it would be virtual financial suicide unless it was almost fully backed by a platform holder. Even publishers as large as EA or Activision-Blizzard would be staking the future of their companies on the performance of this singular title. If it released and did well they'd continue doing business. If it didn't they'd be declaring bankruptcy and be put on the auction block.

Of course none of that means Star Citizen will ever be released in a state that makes everyone happy. But it is certainly the largest and most ambitious title I've ever seen that actually has some small chance of potentially succeeding.

Regards,
SB