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

[Peachcurl]

Tetris as implemented by CIG:

 

[Perkel]

As someone who has absolutely no idea how SC works, what do you do if you can't afford a starter ship? I thought it was like Elite where you've given a babby ship to start and go from there. Do you whore yourself out to a corp to do some ground-based stuff to scrounge up creds or what?

Actually it is one of reasons i like SC despite its bugs and shit. Because systemic approach to everything shines here. And there is plenty of stuff you can do without even owning a ship.

Right now you can't lose starting ship. You can't lose any ship you buy with in game CR either. For now you can only use non default equipment you bought and kit it yourself. In full game each ship will be lost upon destruction and even if you will have insurance you will have for ship to be produced and delivered not some instant spawn.

As for what can you do without ship actually SC has answer for it even now. I actually tested it last year in one of the patches.

- i got myself hired as turret gunner for some guy, earned around 30k doing few missions together
- i got myself hired as mining laser operator on mining ship. We mined with 2 other people and i earned around 50k in few mining runs
- i got hired as marine for ground missions (bunkers, caves etc). another 50k

At this point i already had enough money to buy starter ship. 130k is cheapest ship.

Thing is that i figured out that i can just steal ships. Why grind for some big ship where you can steal big ship and use it to make big money ? So the few things i did:

I waited in the lorville city at the hangars for some big ship to arrive. I snuck on the ship when pilot was buying some stuff, he went back and got away from planet. Then i just went to cockpit and executed dude with pistol. It was bigger combat ship so i could take on medium to hard missions with it.

Then i figured out... why work ? Just steal cargo and sell it. I would myself often mine with ground vehicle called rock. So this time i just simply flied over one of the moons looking for prey. And after about 20mins i found some dude scanning left and right pinging for ground rocks which means dude had bigger ship with ground vehicle in it. It could take a while for him to load up on rocks so i waited some more and when i saw dude hauling total 4 crates of crystals i just sniped him off took his ship and his cargo selling it for 200k

Next i figured out that i don't actually need to wait. Just steal trading ship with cargo on it. So i just found outpost that was selling laranite gold etc and which was frequented by traders. Waited for trader, usually people don't expect piracy so they are just one man and ship. They go buy stuff, i go to ship, i wait for cargo to pop up in ship and fly away before dude can go back. I don't even need to kill him so no huge crime stat.

I did go to slammer for some time though few times.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

67 000 Cr which is about half of starter ship

As someone who has absolutely no idea how SC works, what do you do if you can't afford a starter ship? I thought it was like Elite where you've given a babby ship to start and go from there. Do you whore yourself out to a corp to do some ground-based stuff to scrounge up creds or what?

Everyone should have at least one ship. The game packages come with one, and the ships on your store account can't be permanently lost or sold in game.

It would be a pain in the ass to play without one because even for the on-foot missions, they require you to travel between locations. You could potentially crew up on another player's ship to earn cash. I've seen some people doing that to larp.

In the ancient texts of the Kickstarter days Chris said that he was considering either selling packages without ships or using that as a free to play demo of the game. No idea if that's happening anymore.

The thing with SC is, past all the arguments, aspersions, and so on, CIG still haven't turned off full loot PvP. I can still loot the whale's exclusive items. They are mine until the next wipe or until the items are retrieved from my corpse. This shouldn't be a big deal but this makes the whales furious with me and they make their opinions known in Spectrum chat. This alone provides me more fun than most fully released games. The only game that comes close is the recently released V Rising. Which is still reliant on the server host not being a Tranny Janny who does it for free and fucks with you.

I boot up SC and have fun just trolling the whales. Maybe that isn't intended game design but it's fun. I'm sorry to certain people that I'm having fun. But it is what it is.

 

[Perkel]

This patch i think i will go full pirate. I will try also few ground vehicle travels. I always wanted to try go to mission via ground from city rather than air.

The thing with SC is, past all the arguments, aspersions, and so on, CIG still haven't turned off full loot PvP. I can still loot the whale's exclusive items. They are mine until the next wipe or until the items are retrieved from my corpse. This shouldn't be a big deal but this makes the whales furious with me and they make their opinions known in Spectrum chat. This alone provides me more fun than most fully released games. The only game that comes close is the recently released V Rising. Which is still reliant on the server host not being a Tranny Janny who does it for free and fucks with you.

I boot up SC and have fun just trolling the whales. Maybe that isn't intended game design but it's fun. I'm sorry to certain people that I'm having fun. But it is what it is.

As far as CIG it complete physicalization of game is what they just recently reconfirmed in Death of a spaceman letter so at least for now plans didn't change. They want every ship to be produced, every gun, every armor etc. Ship destroyed will be destroyed and work as salvage for someone else. Moreover from what they said they plan for players to have permament hangars of their own in cities etc. Not like now where ships are magically put into infinite hangar.

 

[Myobi]

Oh yeah, I've seen smt about it! I have no clue why they just didn't let players keep the fucking money anyway, its not worth the backlash, as they will keep wiping the servers every now and then anyway...

 

[Myobi]

This was far beyond our stated intention, and robbed the game of incentive to play and progress

We conducted some tests on internal servers and found that the program ran in just 10 minutes. Yet once we deployed the fix to live servers, we found it took far longer than anticipated, at nearly 12 hours

Simultaneously, this process exposed a variety of miscellaneous bugs in our current system that we have been plagued by in the past but didn’t know why they happened

we discovered a critical bug with our fix, that caused some players to have their in-game currency reset when logging

we will be granting a 1 million aUEC award to all accounts, regardless of play time or account age. We will be distributing this compensation early next week so as to not stress our wallet services this weekend

these issues will not be present in our new system that will roll out alongside Alpha 3.18, which has vastly upgraded services and a database scheme that is built for high data for both reads and writes

@ https://robertsspaceindustries.com/...m/1/thread/alpha-3-17-2-auec-stipend-update-1

Sooo... they gave to much money to players, so they removed it, and to make it up for it, they are giving more money to players, but only next week, because "stress".

 

[Myobi]

I've been playing for an hour or so and I think I've already had 30 or so bugs
I failed a mission, then it bugged out and registered I was in a restricted area, so the cops came and took me to jail, where I had to wait 15 minutes to play again.
Which is the shortest setence.

Now we have spent the last 45mins trying to unbug a box delivery
fun

"ItZ thE BuST SpUCe GamEh!", sounds great, yeah.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

If pirating to annoy paying players isn't the intended design, it definitely should be.
That I will definitely try. Takes me back to pirates of burning sea where I didn't bother with industry, ship building, or even saving money for bigger ships. Just take cheap free vessel and use it to steal someone's bigger ship, keep working your way up. Funnily enough most people neglected their boarding combat skills because I guess they assumed most other players didn't use it either (a vicious circle) .
SC seems to make this process even easier tho, I apparently won't even need a ship to start with at all and I can get things people paid real money for?
These are good design decisions, from the point of view of a cheapskate like me.

But honestly, seeing the state all the systems are in now, makes all their intended plans seem almost impossible to reach.
This game is supposed to be even more in depth than EVE, without the much simpler style of that game that makes it all possible.
I'm a little doubtful of the trailers as well though. The last time I fell for something like this was with Colonial Marines, of which I'm really reminded of right now, idk why..

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Literally the dumbest shit anyone has ever said.

Wow that's impressive. I've seen some people say some dumb fucking shit on the internet, but you win. You worked for that dumbass tag bro.

Maybe you're just 'pretending' to be retarded, but i get the feeling that doesn't take much acting skill on your part.

Star Citizen is a scam and is fake though.

 

[JamesDixon]

What you said was completely wrong. SC does calculate projectile trajectories, as do tons of other online games, and it does not bring games to a crawl due to being cpu intensive.

Your opinion doesn't trump the objective facts I posted. You are sucking hard on that copium pipe. What I said is the truth. It's a matter of scale when it comes to MMOs. Firing millions of projectiles a second from hundreds of players using standard ballistic models is intensive on the CPU just to do in the calculation alone. When you add in the synching of all of those objects to everyone in that area that can see it is where the lag happens.

This even happens with hitscan weapons. Hell, it happens in standard RPG MMOs that use to hit chances and skill levels. It's just another type of calculation on the server.

h huh. What do you think, did they have to program gravity forces into Tetris to make the pieces fall?

Actually, they did. Which is why the pieces can only move downward with side and rotational movement. It's simplistic, but it's there. No physics means the objects aren't moving.

Generally in games, when people talk about physics they're talking about actual simulated physics like stuff having mass or stuff being able to bounce and slide around a room. There are no such physics in, for instance, WoW. When you jump in WoW, the game puts you on an invisible railway track, the arc of which is generated at the moment of your jump. If you use a movement ability while "falling", the game generates a new railway track to put you on. Or when you use the monk's roll ability, you're not actually moving forward due to the way the game is coded. It is placing down an invisible point in front of your character and your character is being towed to that point.

You just described physics. Bravo. All physics are in a game are railway tracks based upon trajectories that fit within the physics model. Animation is combined to get the full effect.

Wow that's impressive. I've seen some people say some dumb fucking shit on the internet, but you win. You worked for that dumbass tag bro.

Maybe you're just 'pretending' to be retarded, but i get the feeling that doesn't take much acting skill on your part.

Star Citizen is a scam and is fake though.

Yes you truly are a dumb ass because you don't even know how I got the tag. I got it for talking to an admin. Bravo. You should get yourself castrated so you don't pollute the genepool you genetic reject.

 

[Myobi]

Hey Perkel, another episode came out! Bring more popcorn my dude!

 

[Zarniwoop]

Oh yeah, I've seen smt about it! I have no clue why they just didn't let players keep the fucking money anyway, its not worth the backlash, as they will keep wiping the servers every now and then anyway...

There's a Bioshock Infinite meme in there somewhere...

 

[Perkel]

Hey Perkel, another episode came out! Bring more popcorn my dude!

That is nothing. I met today dude who was playing SC on HDD. He was picking me up from one planet to get to another.
Dude would wait like 5 minutes before landing so that landing site would be able to spawn.

I asked what was going on and dude was playing on laptop with hdd and gtx960 with 4GB of ram.

Now that is a dude who you don't want to fuck in real life. Dude willpower is pure titanium.

 

[Perkel]

 

[Myobi]

insert shitpost about broken elevators

Am I still on time?

 

[Myobi]

 

[RobotSquirrel]

all use ballistic trajectories and not hitscan.

which is just a fancy word for hitscan but it bends. Most of these systems use a raycast and then calculate the ballistics using physics, those are precalculated because the projectile would be moving so fast that the game engine wouldn't be able to track it in real time. The tracer you end up seeing is actually just a fake projectile, the hit was done by a calculated ray. When the tracer reaches a certain part of the path its told "you hit a wall" or "you hit a guy so make blood go splurt" its not instant because it has a timed delay, that being represented by the position of the projectile on the path. No one minds because the projectile was moving so fast anyway that you probably don't notice it.

Now go into Unity and try to do this with a RigidBody, guess what you can't. The moment you move too fast the projectile phases through the colliders. So you make the colliders bigger, still doesn't work. This is because the object is moving so fast that its jumping from X = 0.0 to X = 10.0 and missing everything in between, its pretty much teleporting. The only way to get real precision is with a raycast and then just have the projectile simulate the path, its cheap to do and it works. This process has to be done with rays because you cannot get an AI to shoot straight without it. Physics engines are hard to predict so nearly always a raycast is used to get the heading right first and its much cheaper to have a fake projectile just move along a pre-calculated path. Most if not all AAA shooters do this now. It's surprisingly hard to get good floating point precision from game engines and do so on massive scales with good frame rate.

Just want to point out your evidence is somewhat flawed. Would be interesting to see how they're actually doing it though but given this game uses netcode I would think its definitely raycasts with fake projectiles.

 

[Lim-Dûl]

Backers should prepare for the possibility that he might one day disappear with whatever amount of money he had left.

 

[Myobi]

Backers should prepare for the possibility that he might one day disappear with whatever amount of money he had left.

Why? Backers keep giving them money. His getting his big fat salary, his brother is getting a big fat salary, his wife is getting a big fat salary, fuck my life, even his golden fish probably earns more than us combined, why would they vanish with whatever there is left, when they can just keep dragging this for decades and keep living on their luxurious lives just from roleplaying as game developers, if for whatever reason money stops, they can just sell it to some crazy ass company and give us “Sorry guys, we tried, but we are just humans!” sort of speech and move the fuck on.

 

[Lim-Dûl]

Backers should prepare for the possibility that he might one day disappear with whatever amount of money he had left.

Why? Backers keep giving them money. His getting his big fat salary, his brother is getting a big fat salary, his wife is getting a big fat salary, fuck my life, even his golden fish probably earns more than us combined, why would they vanish with whatever there is left, when they can just keep dragging this for decades and keep living on their luxurious lives just from roleplaying as game developers, if for whatever reason money stops, they can just sell it to some crazy ass company and give us “Sorry guys, we tried, but we are just humans!” sort of speech and move the fuck on.

I've seen such behavior from similar cases outside video games. Everything seems fine, people are willing to continue supporting them, but they get nervous or for whatever reason they simply leave. I'm skeptical that they would be able to drag this on for decades.

 

[Myobi]

Backers should prepare for the possibility that he might one day disappear with whatever amount of money he had left.

Why? Backers keep giving them money. His getting his big fat salary, his brother is getting a big fat salary, his wife is getting a big fat salary, fuck my life, even his golden fish probably earns more than us combined, why would they vanish with whatever there is left, when they can just keep dragging this for decades and keep living on their luxurious lives just from roleplaying as game developers, if for whatever reason money stops, they can just sell it to some crazy ass company and give us “Sorry guys, we tried, but we are just humans!” sort of speech and move the fuck on.

I've seen such behavior from similar cases outside video games. Everything seems fine, people are willing to continue supporting them, but they get nervous or for whatever reason they simply leave. I'm skeptical that they would be able to drag this on for decades.

The similar cases you have never grown to something like SC, and always come from a bunch of nobody’s, a guy like Chris Roberts can’t just brush something like SC under the rug and vanish, we are talking about half a billion dollars without counting with the private investments, this fucking thing will be on development for the rest of his fucking life.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

all use ballistic trajectories and not hitscan.

which is just a fancy word for hitscan but it bends. Most of these systems use a raycast and then calculate the ballistics using physics, those are precalculated because the projectile would be moving so fast that the game engine wouldn't be able to track it in real time. The tracer you end up seeing is actually just a fake projectile, the hit was done by a calculated ray. When the tracer reaches a certain part of the path its told "you hit a wall" or "you hit a guy so make blood go splurt" its not instant because it has a timed delay, that being represented by the position of the projectile on the path. No one minds because the projectile was moving so fast anyway that you probably don't notice it.

Now go into Unity and try to do this with a RigidBody, guess what you can't. The moment you move too fast the projectile phases through the colliders. So you make the colliders bigger, still doesn't work. This is because the object is moving so fast that its jumping from X = 0.0 to X = 10.0 and missing everything in between, its pretty much teleporting. The only way to get real precision is with a raycast and then just have the projectile simulate the path, its cheap to do and it works. This process has to be done with rays because you cannot get an AI to shoot straight without it. Physics engines are hard to predict so nearly always a raycast is used to get the heading right first and its much cheaper to have a fake projectile just move along a pre-calculated path. Most if not all AAA shooters do this now. It's surprisingly hard to get good floating point precision from game engines and do so on massive scales with good frame rate.

Just want to point out your evidence is somewhat flawed. Would be interesting to see how they're actually doing it though but given this game uses netcode I would think its definitely raycasts with fake projectiles.

I mean yeah, the computer isn't referencing an actual giant arena in space where actual projectiles are fired at actual spaceships. But if there's projectile delay, physics, and the location of the entity matters at the time the projectile should have collided with them, that ain't hitscan.

Hitscan is, I have my gun aimed at you, I pull the trigger, you get hit. Even if you're going 5 trillion feet per second, as long as you were there when I pulled the trigger, I hit you. If I pull the trigger, the game knows I hit you, but then waits some amount of time based on distance to tell you, that's still hitscan. But if your actions after I pull the trigger matter, then it's not hitscan.

For example, mechwarrior online has hitscan weapons in the lasers. You cannot dodge them, I can only miss. However it also has ballistic weapons, I can fire my sniper rifle at you, and even if I was perfectly aimed at you, if you move away in the meantime before the bullet arrives, you don't get hit. Or, alternatively, I can aim somewhere, fire, then a player could walk into the bullet trajectory and get hit.

"hitscan but it bends and checks entity positions at a delayed time of collision" isn't a thing. That's called not hitscan. I'm sure there are computational tricks used that lead to some unrealistic behavior, but that isn't the same thing as hitscan.

 

[AN4RCHID]

For example, mechwarrior online has hitscan weapons in the lasers. You cannot dodge them, I can only miss. However it also has ballistic weapons, I can fire my sniper rifle at you, and even if I was perfectly aimed at you, if you move away in the meantime before the bullet arrives, you don't get hit. Or, alternatively, I can aim somewhere, fire, then a player could walk into the bullet trajectory and get hit.

Amusingly, in Star Citizen some of the most obviously non-hitscan weapons are "laser" guns where the laser is a particularly slow projectile with the most noticeable bullet drop.

 

[Myobi]

"laser" guns where the laser is a particularly slow projectile with the most noticeable bullet drop

Ah, the true Star Citizen experience...

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

So they use star wars "lasers" that are way, way slower than bullets. It's not an unheard of sci-fi trope but I always find it dumb. I really found the fact that mechwarriors lasers were actually lasers to be quite interesting, and satisfying. You actually have to hold them on target to do their full burn, otherwise you just kinda sweep them over all the components and do minimal damage.