Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

[AN4RCHID]

Well... yeah. It's space not an empty void dimension.

The seamless planetary landings is something I've been dreaming of in a game for basically forever. I know there are some indie games that do it but they either look like puke, or aren't real games like Space Engine.

A decent number of games did it well, see Elite, Empyrion (so and so) Star Wraith and so on, the problem is what purposes the planet walking, roaming serves at, beside another trade port... Building stuff on the planet, extracting sources, or having some kinda campy Firefly missions, or even wars and factions, well thats too complex... for todays designers...OR:

You can do a prototype that is not even embed in your project, release a mediocre trailer and ask for more money for blow.

You want every area in the game to be on a space station? I don't understand the complaint. Part of the space fantasy is travelling to new planets, seeing alien horizons, etc...

 

[Varvarg]

Sure, but if it's just a clump of rock, you'll get tired of it after 5 minutes. And they wasted how many months on it?

I looked around their website a bit but couldn't find a decent upcoming features list. soo, idk.

EDIT: double post, server error

 

[Varvarg]

Sure, but if it's just a clump of rock, you'll get tired of it after 5 minutes. And they wasted how many months on it?

I looked around their website a bit but couldn't find a decent upcoming features list. soo, idk.

 

[AN4RCHID]

Sure, but if it's just a clump of rock, you'll get tired of it after 5 minutes. And they wasted how many months on it?

I think having the background of procedurally generated landscapes gives a sense of scale that isn't achievable otherwise. The common problem in procedurally gen'd games, perfect example being No Man's Sky, is that everything is generic and there's no reason to explore the random areas. Star Citizen is supposed to avoid this problem by having custom built points of interest scattered around the worlds.

I looked around their website a bit but couldn't find a decent upcoming features list. soo, idk.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report

 

[Grotesque]

I looked around their website a bit but couldn't find a decent upcoming features list. soo, idk.

 

[Fedora Master]

You want every area in the game to be on a space station? I don't understand the complaint. Part of the space fantasy is travelling to new planets, seeing alien horizons, etc...

Release a functional space sim first, add planets later. I'm not particularly fond of EDs planetary landings either because they're all pointless barren rocks. Then again, ED is a pointless and barren game so I guess it makes sense. Seems to be SC is going down the same route.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Release a functional space sim first, add planets later.

While I acknowledge your agenda here, the fact is that all of the things that SC adds that are "unecessary" to a basic space game (NPCs, first-person combat, planet exploration with planetary bases) are exactly what set it apart from boring, barebones space traders like Elite Dangerous.

I'm not particularly fond of EDs planetary landings either because they're all pointless barren rocks.

Which is exactly why SC is putting so much work into making theirs more than that.

Elite followed the blueprint of just releasing a functional game, and functional is about all it is. While I will agree that it is somewhat worrying that SC could become (or remain) vapourware, I have to say that I find it refreshing that they are putting this kind of effort into it and I find it keeps me interested.

As soon as I saw that Elite was going to be another by-the-numbers, boring space sim with no soul, I stopped paying attention to it. Only a sale brought me back to it, but I refunded after playing it confirmed my suspicions, as you know.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Elite followed the blueprint of just releasing a functional game, and functional is about all it is. While I will agree that it is somewhat worrying that SC could become (or remain) vapourware, I have to say that I find it refreshing that they are putting this kind of effort into it and I find it keeps me interested.

As soon as I saw that Elite was going to be another by-the-numbers, boring space sim with no soul, I stopped paying attention to it. Only a sale brought me back to it, but I refunded after playing it confirmed my suspicions, as you know.

They should focus on space combat/story missions/Campaign like wing commander or X-wing/TIE fighter. Those games had a rich universe and they didn't have any planetary shit. No matter if you make an effort tos make these planets populated with installations, facilities, etc. It will be boring like every similar game which has millions of places to go and all look the same.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

They should focus on space combat/story missions/Campaign like wing commander or X-wing/TIE fighter.

Isn't that what S42 is supposed to be?

No matter if you make an effort tos make these planets populated with installations, facilities, etc. It will be boring like every similar game which has millions of places to go and all look the same.

Certainly possible depending on the effort they put into NPCs and quests, but one thing is for sure: Elite: Dangerous doesn't have any of that and it is exactly that boring. Sure it has planets you can land on, but that's it. No combat missions, no facilities to wander around populated by NPCs etc. Just another hanger or an empty planetoid.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

This guy makes a point at the end of the video that I touched on earlier:

That SC continues to develop things others would say either isn't possible or isn't worth going after.

Yes, this is dangerous from a budget perspective, but from a marketing perspective, it's perfect. This is what excites people, this is what can draw people into their "cult".

It's certainly a lot more exciting than simply giving people Space Trader #232, but with better graphics.

Giving people something entirely new, something that is too good to be true, that is what makes something an irresistible purchase.

While it is unnerving that they still don't have a fully playable game yet, you can't help but hope they succeed at the very least.


Anyway, I've been watching some LPs of SC online (since I haven't followed it closely) and it looks p kewl.

This guy's vid had a few moments that I think encapsulate what a modern space game should look like:



Obviously, there's a lot of rough moments in it, but the view of the scale of the space station compared to the character model, the bridge of the ship at the beginning, the idea of having ships vs players on-foot (which adds elements of multiplayer war games like BF1942) - all of these are things that really fill out the game.

Compare that to Elite: Dangerous, where you have none of that. You lose the sense of scale because you are always in a ship. You can never get out of said ship. You are simply a disembodied polygon wandering the galaxy, which wouldn't be so bad if there were a really tight story or characters to draw you in, but in my first 2 hours or so of gameplay with it, I didn't get to see much of that.

Space games need to embody more of the things people like about space films - exploration (ie, finding new things, not going to X system), excitement, wonder, character interaction. Because the novelty of "space explosions" and "wew, I am in space" has long since worn off and games need actual meat on their bones.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Yeah, all the gifs are from that video.

Really looks gorgeous. They have the framework for a great game. Let's see if they can deliver.

edit: I keep looking at this and thinking that they could make a Mass Effect game that would be worth playing. Maybe they can license out the engine when it's done.

 

[thesheeep]

A big empty planet.
Awesome.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

A big empty planet.
Awesome.

Moon. And they aren't empty, unlike the dead worlds in Elite: Dangerous, where the only interesting thing to look at is the skybox.

Not to mention they are planning to add actual quests, missions, NPC quest givers to these planets:

 

[thesheeep]

Then why show off... nothing? I mean, that's just a bit weird, isn't it?

 

[AN4RCHID]

The whole point of that segment was to show off the procedural generation tech...

Looking great

 

[Malpercio]

Moon. And they aren't empty, unlike the dead worlds in Elite: Dangerous, where the only interesting thing to look at is the skybox.

Not to mention they are planning to add actual quests, missions, NPC quest givers to these planets:

Woah, some people would believe anything.

 

[Janise]

What's the Codex over/under on how long this lasts until crash and burn?
February 2018?

Here's the answer:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...rDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207



In nine days the number of backers increased by nearly 40 000 and the funds by nearly $1,350,000


Estimated totaled pleged by 2018-01-01 (ALT1)
$157,809,322

This cant be real. Where do they find the idiots?

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Woah, some people would believe anything.

So was that all fake then? From the look of it, I have my doubts as to whether AI was functioning fully in the demo (the NPCs in the ship for example behaved too human & I think they were controlled live by other devs like the ones at the end were openly), but beyond that, the tech looks sound.

edit:
Sorry, just explain to me how you bozos think this scam is supposed to work? Periodic interviews with gameplay demos, playable betas, hiring voice actors, motion capture studios, hiring modelers and other game devs full-time - how is all this supposed to work as a scam when they are spending all the money and creating an actual product?

Either these people need to start taking lessons from Cleve on how to run a proper scam or it's not a scam and is an actual game in development, albeit with risk given the scope & time it's taking.

 

[Kingston]

http://dereksmart.com/forums/topic/star-citizen-musings/#post-5501

As I’ve said before, as these things go, clearly these guys are doing their best to make a game like this with a custom engine that simply isn’t able to do it. It doesn’t matter what they do with their custom engine, they are never – ever – going to be able to pull off the game they want to build, and at the scale they are shooting for. Like at all. Their biggest problem, as I said back in 2015, is the underlying CryEngine core, which was never designed for this. And even with Amazon’s LumberYard (which they switched to late last year) having done some nifty things to CryEngine, in addition to fixing bugs etc, they’ve still got an uphill battle.

The problem is going to be compounded by the fact that, from what I can see and tell from their engine design, it is going to be a major task to have entire planets and/or moons in the game world, and which players can enter/exit as seen in games like Infinity Battlespace, Dual Universe, Universal Combat etc. Performance and memory requirements aside, that level of fidelity is near impossible with their engine. Which explains why they have since switched from that sort of talk, to now doing smaller moons and planetoids – similar to how Elite Dangerous does them. What’s left to be seen is how they end up adding them to the game world. After adding the moon|planetoid entity to the scene/level, there are only two ways of doing it:

1. Use a proximity based trigger point to signal a transition from space to surface – and vice versa – with or without a loading screen to mask the scene loading
2. Use a real entity based model which facilitates a seamless transition from space to surface – and vice versa. No loading screen needed.

To visualize the above in Star Citizen : start the game, leave your quarters, grab a ship, take off from the station, target a moon, fly to it, then seamlessly transition into it, or waiting for a loading screen after you hit the trigger point around the object which signals a transition.

While this AtV isn’t showing mostly what is coming in 3.0, it appears to be a combination of rudimentary things coming in 3.0, combined with on-going R&D for what they think they’re going to be able to pull off in the long term. I mention this because there is a frame where they were showing a cross-section cutout of a planet, in which the cutout shows an area with vegetation, despite the fact that the upcoming moons and planetoids are barren landscapes.

Also, 3.0 delayed again...

 

[Grotesque]

edit: I keep looking at this and thinking that they could make a Mass Effect game that would be worth playing

Fuck Mass Effect. The engine is perfect for an old school Deus Ex game.

Really looks gorgeous. They have the framework for a great game

but not the money because there are a lot of shit to be done.



I feel sorry for Derek Smart. Everybody quotes him for his deep insight he displays regarding Star Citizen but nobody gives a fuck when he tweets about his game. So sad.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

but not the money because there are a lot of shit to be done.

Being that I haven't seen their books and don't know where exactly they are in their development process of their two games, I can't really speak to that.

I saw that they were estimating Alpha 3.0 of SC to come out in august sometime though and they've already done the writing and a lot of the voice acting and mo cap for S42.

This is beside the point that I was making though.

As I said before, clearly there is a lot of risk here, but they are also clearly working on it and getting a lot done. So while I am not dismissing that they may be biting off more than they can chew (time will tell), I am disputing the idea that "herp derp, you guise actually believe that?" attitude that seems born more out of willful ignorance and I desire for schadenfreude than genuine skepticism.

Also, 3.0 delayed again...

Wew a video game is delayed? What a shock.

I'm reminded of how during TW3's development their were popular rumors that it was all a lie and they couldn't achieve an open-world game with their engine.

 

[Janise]

looks like they had a more feature complete game 4 years ago

 

[AN4RCHID]

What features shown in that video are missing from the current build? It looks like they didn't even have it networked back then.