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

[Unkillable Cat]

CCP responds:

Presenting The Venture Capitalist SKIN Bundle!

Love the Venture? Enjoy mining and salvaging? Have we got a SKIN bundle for you!

Head on over to the New Eden Store and pick up the “Venture Capitalist” SKIN bundle, which contains three Venture SKINs that are ideal for mining below the belt. Just beware of sneaky vultures attempting to swoop in and loot your assets!

The best part about this SKIN bundle is that it won’t cost you $120 – You can get all three of these SKINs for just 120 PLEX – that’s more than 50% off their total value when they’re sold separately!

Did You Know?

You can play EVE Online for free, and you’ll receive a free Venture once you complete the new player tutorial.

Alternatively, if you do feel you’d like to support the continued development New Eden, $120 will buy you the PLEX to run an Omega subscription for more than 6 months …or buy a little over 36,500 Ventures at current market price in Jita.

That’s a shitload of mining right there!

Fun Venture Facts!

• 36,500 Ventures – at 133m in length each – makes a mean 4,800km long conga line that would stretch all the way from Reykjavík, Iceland to Washington DC, USA.
  
  
• If we’re looking at sheer mass, 36,500 Ventures at their unloaded gross operating tonnage of 1200T is the equivalent mass to more than 16,200,000 African forest elephants, which weigh in at an average of 2.7T each!
  
  
• In terms of volume, 36,500 Ventures at an average of 29,500m3 – unpackaged, of course – is roughly the equivalent volume of 538,375,000,000 500ml bottles of everyone’s favorite soft drink – Quafe Ultra.

 

[Deathsquid]

Hahah, that's some sick burns :D

 

[Aildrik]

Just pulled my old Wing Commander box off the shelf. Remember the days when Chris just made fun games?

 

[Xor]

With how things have turned out I'm guessing that was another case of one man getting way too much credit for something built by a team.

 

[Dayyālu]

With how things have turned out I'm guessing that was another case of one man getting way too much credit for something built by a team.

Tbh, Wing Commander isn't that different from Star Citizen in a weird way.

Both were supposed to push the tech limits of the era as far as they could in a package that focused on cinematic experience and somewhat good gameplay (Wing Commander is not the best space sim ever, in none of its incarnations). WC pushed for the Awesome Above All, with the attempts at cinematic plot in the first games and the Hollywood-lite FMV approach of later WCs. The apex of that was of course the Wing Commander movie, where Chris tried his best to become a Real Hollywood Guy instead of a random game guy.

With the results we all know.

WC had the advantage of being developed by a far better team, being in a far better "game era", of being a single player game and most of Robert's retardation was spent in the FMVs and his larping being a movie director. SC has none of those saving graces, and we all see the results.

 

[Deathsquid]

Wing Commander also had this thing where they shipped it before they could fix this one bug that crashed it dead, so instead of having the game give a real error message, Chris had it print "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING WING COMMANDER" instead.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Chris is a failed wannaby Hollywood director, that's all he ever was.
Dude has got his priorities completely wrong. One of the first things he did with the KS millions was to hire a bunch of expensive Hollywood stars to do voice work and motion capture.

Get the basics like gameplay and network code right first before you start to record voiceovers? Nah, I wanna play director NOW!

 

[Raghar]

Didn't they supposedly hire well-paid professionals with experience in development?
Viewport culling is like the first thing you would implement in an engine, way before stuff like animations

In some situations it's more expensive to use than actually drawing all objects.

 

[thesheeep]

Didn't they supposedly hire well-paid professionals with experience in development?
Viewport culling is like the first thing you would implement in an engine, way before stuff like animations

In some situations it's more expensive to use than actually drawing all objects.

Only in situations where you have hundreds or thousands of instances of the same object and use hardware instancing to render them fast - in such a case, yes, the CPU time spent to reduce the number MIGHT be more than the GPU time saved (as hardware instancing is blazingly fast, but also severely limited).
Or in a situation where there is extremely little to render.
For all other cases, no, it isn't.
Especially not for games like SC that contain extremely high-poly objects everywhere.

It's not like you have to go through every instance to check if it is visible.
Just using the simplest of octrees will allow you to almost instantly remove most objects from being rendered.
This is an ancient technique used in games basically since forever and it remains mostly unchanged until today. Why? Because it is simple and it pretty much always works.

The only general problem are very objects that are only visible to a very small part. Only seeing 1% or less, but you still have to render the entire thing.

An alternative is to mash everything visible together (kinda merging it into one mesh) and rendering that - I heard somewhere Unity does that, but I'm not certain. Sounds quite problematic and limiting, too.

My theory about SC is that they tried to reinvent the wheel somewhere in their rendering pipeline and fucked up.

 

[Raghar]

Well, when they use low polygon models for distant stuff, they are fine. Insertion and removal from a list would be more costly than rendering low polygon models around. And wrong shadowing and popping issue isn't pretty either.

But, are they selling ships as a game package for horrible amount of money? Well, then this game would be bit pointless right...

 

[Deathsquid]

Well, when they use low polygon models for distant stuff, they are fine.

Ah but there's the other problem - they don't, Chris wants his high fidelity everything. And there's also no LOD scaling. By design.

 

[Dayyālu]

Chris is a failed wannaby Hollywood director, that's all he ever was.

The Wing Commander Movie experience is an interesting thing to know about, ya see.



If you are a retarded bastard like me and love reading interviews an' shit you get from old guides and "feelies" (and Origin was top tier in that) it was clear for decades that Roberts truly truly wanted to be a movie guy and not a game guy. People working with him were rather clear in interviews that he far preferred larping director with FMVs than the gritty details of game making. Also insane casting choices (hell, I still laugh thinking he got Ginger Lynn in WC3. He could at least have taken Traci Lords, goddammit)

The Wing Commander movie is also fascinating in that sense. I plead guilty: I've seen it three times (two before even playing any Wing Commander and one after, to evaluate properly). It's a very peculiar movie, done by a man that clearly loves other movies and loves their ideas (the WC movie is chock-full of references to "great movies" like Das Boot, that make no sense whatsever and are there just because Roberts has seen a cool idea and needs to "integrate" it in his own creation, much like SC). It's also a very puzzling movie, as half of the plot makes no sense and it is the result of a massive rewrite that burned the version they actually filmed (if you are retarded like me, you can find a scan of the Wing Commander movie guide and realize that nothing of what it's written here has any role in the movie).

Roberts always had the same modus operandi: dream and shoot big, ignore the gritty details of making things work as the WC movie's postmortems tell us (costumes, special effects, actual writing), reference what he thinks it's cool and hope the people around him are good enough to make it work.

Do we see a recurring pattern?

 

[Deathsquid]

Not all is well in the Stimpire:

Oops?

Also seems like the sperglords of EVE are still quite incensed about the HOMAGE that Star Citizen GRACED their stupid dead game with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/8sl8z3/breaking_sc_devs_are_not_happy_with_rstarcitizen/

(Sorry, no idea how to link reddit video embeds here and how to use that shit site anyway)

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Also seems like the sperglords of EVE are still quite incensed about the HOMAGE that Star Citizen GRACED their stupid dead game with:

(Sorry, no idea how to link reddit video embeds here and how to use that shit site anyway)

He who is without sin, and all that.

Don't worry, Star Citizen will join EVE in death soon... and then only one of the games will be playable.

 

[Deathsquid]

Also seems like the sperglords of EVE are still quite incensed about the HOMAGE that Star Citizen GRACED their stupid dead game with:

(Sorry, no idea how to link reddit video embeds here and how to use that shit site anyway)

He who is without sin, and all that.

Don't worry, Star Citizen will join EVE in death soon... and then only one of the games will be playable.

Can't kill what never lived!

 

[Makabb]

 

[Perkel]

Didn't they supposedly hire well-paid professionals with experience in development?
Viewport culling is like the first thing you would implement in an engine, way before stuff like animations

If it was so easy they would just like you said implement it in no time. Delay suggest they will be probably going for custom culling instead of something like UMBRA (ready made solution).

Imho they need to do it because they use a lot physics. Meaning that for example where bullet flies is dictated by position of barrel. Can't shoot in any direction if there isn't barrel. Normally in games gun is just a prop that is aligned with gun barrel.

What does this "bind culling" do? Why it's only supposed to help the game run at more than 15 frames per second by not RENDERING OBJECTS YOU CAN'T FUCKING SEE.

From what i understand current FPS issues are not due to graphics (and lack of culling by that) but netcode. Simply put game lags because netcode is crap and was supposed to be overhauled but it was delayed.

 

[Deathsquid]

Didn't they supposedly hire well-paid professionals with experience in development?
Viewport culling is like the first thing you would implement in an engine, way before stuff like animations

If it was so easy they would just like you said implement it in no time. Delay suggest they will be probably going for custom culling instead of something like UMBRA (ready made solution).

Imho they need to do it because they use a lot physics. Meaning that for example where bullet flies is dictated by position of barrel. Can't shoot in any direction if there isn't barrel. Normally in games gun is just a prop that is aligned with gun barrel.

They do it because the studio head has no idea about modern game development and early on declared that they won't "cheat" and "cut corners" and everything will exist the way it "should". After which, from what I've heard, they all went ahead and proceeded to re-scale the default CryEngine map so they could have the entire universe on 8x8km area. Meanwhile each model has huge poly counts. Meanwhile each model is like 1/10th or 1/100th or whatever of a normal CE model of the same type. Of course now they also have to rework the engine to fudge all the distance calculations, because default solutions are meant to be used in a completely different set of conditions. And of course this then creates all sorts of hilarity with value rounding, which is why you get all the videos with hilarious jitter, clipping and sudden model deformation. It just rounded up the wrong way.

What does this "bind culling" do? Why it's only supposed to help the game run at more than 15 frames per second by not RENDERING OBJECTS YOU CAN'T FUCKING SEE.

From what i understand current FPS issues are not due to graphics (and lack of culling by that) but netcode. Simply put game lags because netcode is crap and was supposed to be overhauled but it was delayed.

It's a compounded issue from what I understand. The culling isn't there, the netcode is shit, AND because culling isn't gone, the client receives and sends WAY too much data, making the already shit netcode choke under all the weight.

 

[thesheeep]

Didn't they supposedly hire well-paid professionals with experience in development?
Viewport culling is like the first thing you would implement in an engine, way before stuff like animations

If it was so easy they would just like you said implement it in no time. Delay suggest they will be probably going for custom culling instead of something like UMBRA (ready made solution).

Imho they need to do it because they use a lot physics. Meaning that for example where bullet flies is dictated by position of barrel. Can't shoot in any direction if there isn't barrel. Normally in games gun is just a prop that is aligned with gun barrel.

That is irrelevant.
Or, let me rephrase, it should be irrelevant.
Physics are separate from rendering in every engine (since physics models can be a lot less detailed than their graphical representation). In a good engine, you can just disable an object's graphical representation (for example, for culling) and still have the physics representation around for all calculations that need it.
Not being able to do that would mean that they do not have a modular approach to this, i.e. every object HAS to have both a physical and a graphical representation - and that just doesn't make sense.

 

[AN4RCHID]

Their "network bind culling" has nothing to do with graphics. They get viewport culling for free from cryengine.

 

[Deathsquid]

Their "network bind culling" has nothing to do with graphics.

Not directly. It affects the quality of netcode, and that affects the performance. How? I don't fucking know, if I knew, I'd be working for CIG

 

[potatojohn]

So what's going on with this game?

 

[Beowulf]

There is no game. That's the joke.

 

[fantadomat]

So what's going on with this game?

10 microissues remaining.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I know this isn't in the traditional spirit of fraud laws, but do you think it's about time we added a penalty for "criminally stupid" victims of fraud? ?