Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Dyvim said:

Hardware was spawned from the other one. They share some online content after a month to rake in on clicks and ads.

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Okay, thanks for the info. Still a couple interesting tidbits in there, like the subsumption tool they developed for the AI.

Sure, yet that was printed almost a month now in pc games as well, couldve uploaded it but that wouldve brought me a copyright infringement i guess

Freelancer 2 or bust.

Star Citizen: 2016 Gamescom Live Game Demo


Enjoy.

That was a lot more and a lot better than I expected. I haven't bothered playing since early, early arena commander releases but I'll almost certainly give 3.0 a try when it comes out if it looks like this.

Honestly I was surprised they got this much working so far.

Didn't expect them to merge grabby hands with animations, a fully working rover, atmospheric entry and free reign with a ship on a planet including air support for ground ops. I knew before that the game was seamless but it's one thing to know this and an entirely different animal to actually see it working with the planets/landing zones. They really aren't cheating anywhere and I think this demo is pretty good at showing that off.

So 2.5 is maybe next week, 2.6 is soon (month or two maybe) and 2.7/2.8/2.9 is now replaced by 3.0 with all previous features scheduled to go in all at once. This whole year they haven't listed a feature they planned to implement unless they were reasonably close and actually did feature lock versions so I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's likely they actually will stick to this for 3.0 but it's so big that I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong and they slipped. It would be a first for them this year so will see.

Features of 3.0 include:

Part 1:


Part 2:


This is a sizable chunk of the basic features needed for the final game.

However some features are glaringly missing. Mining, Salvage, Research, Exploration as full fledged jobs. It makes sense they left those out due to the change in direction since they got procedural planet tech working since anything they planned now has to be re-worked for this.

One last takeaway I had that Chris mentioned. What you saw here is planetary tech v1. Apparently they are close to fully implementing v2 of that but it wasn't ready for Gamescom so he says they will have it ready for CitizenCon. CitizenCon is Oct 9th so there some breathing room between this and the next big reveal.

Yeah, it's looking good

The Gc2016 demo was the first video that made me feel like the 250€ i spent in 2012(?) are maybe not a bad investment after all
Still the game has a looong way to go before it can be released, maybe beta by the end of 2017? Release 2018?

Tauro said:

The Gc2016 demo was the first video that made me feel like the 250€ i spent in 2012(?) are maybe not a bad investment after all
Still the game has a looong way to go before it can be released, maybe beta by the end of 2017? Release 2018?

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Even I'm not sure anymore so I give up predicting the release date.

Tony who is in charge of the Persistent Universe, when asked in his last interview, stated that you need a solid foundation for the end game features you hope to have and that's the game development philosophy he pushed with Chris. The more time you spend building the foundation now the more time you can sit back later and basically just make bank because you did all of the heavy lifting from the start. That's basically what their current development plan is. Like it or hate it that's what they are doing.

So we are seeing this play out in 3.0. Major changes to the foundation but not a major content push in terms of seeing multiple star systems or tons and tons of missions. Just the basics many of which have been in development or a complete revamp for the past 12 months.

With so many major basic features still missing it's obvious the game is not coming out in 2016. I expect to hear that SQ42 is delayed until next year.

If you want to predict the release date it may make more sense to track the game based on the foundation of the game. Until that foundation is built you will not see CIG spend massive resources building 100 star systems.

With that in mind they are about 2/3 of the way there once 3.0 launches. Things like the intelligent mission system which has it's first pass in 3.0 is a good indication of development progress. As you see that feature fully mature you will get a sense of how long it will take them to craft the thousands of missions people will expect to exist at launch. Like procedural planets, space stations, landing zones it's a tool designed to rapidly build content with existing assets.

If they stick to their design philosophy at some point they will reach a nexus where all game features/tools are done and all they have to do is feed it more assets and spend a significantly less time working on features.

I'll let you know when I feel they reach that nexus but I feel most people will see it themselves without any help as star systems, missions and basically just content suddenly floods the game rapidly and many will be shocked. However that will be because they pulled off their game design philosophy and reached their final milestone.

I think one star-system is fine for now. When all game-systems work and are in at least a "late beta" state, then they can add the rest of the universe. A lot of assets (models/shaders/textures/sound/music) can be done in parallel anyway, so they should have a huge pile of it ready to be added to the game by then.

Tauro said:

I think one star-system is fine for now. When all game-systems work and are in at least a "late beta" state, then they can add the rest of the universe. A lot of assets (models/shaders/textures/sound/music) can be done in parallel anyway, so they should have a huge pile of it ready to be added to the game by then.

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Parallel development is how computer games are built so we may only see the obvious stuff, like new ships added, during the down time months between major feature rollouts like 2.0 to 3.0 but tons of features are worked on all at once.

What isn't being worked on at once is some unique features mostly because the people who do the R&D for it also do the R&D for other things which are a higher priority. They are now past 330 staff but based on what the Foundry 42 interviews mentioned these are mostly entry level positions that are meant to work on basic game assets. It sounds like they are gearing up for major content creation but outside of that we know nothing.

The most interesting feature to me is grabby hands. Nobody guessed gabby hands would make it. I honestly thought they would roll out the mechanic/repair feature instead but nope. Its obvious that Tony convinced Chris that grabby hands needs to be a foundational feature of the merchant/trading/piracy mechanic. Originally even just six months ago they talked about it maybe making it into the game post launch with no indication of it being a core feature of the game. Clearly the ability to physically move cargo around got top R&D priority and here we are. It has major implications. Chris mentioned that grabby hands is now also part of the full ship/planet interaction. Moving switches, powering on a ship, changing broken parts in a ship. This will lead into the mechanic/repair job.

Seems like common sense that you need grabby hands as that feature is suddenly used in almost everything but nobody had a hint they progressed this far. So some of the decisions they make are clearly ones that we don't fully appreciate until long after they made them. That thing was in R&D for probably 6-12 months and literally nobody had a clue. Makes you wonder what else they are keeping close to the chest.

I think it will be worth keeping an eye on CitizenCon on Oct 9th to see what drops. Besides Planetary Procedural Tech v2 we know nothing.

Pretty decent interview:


That dude's microphone is like a fairly large hairy animal...

Interview with Todd Papy from Gamescon:

There was another interview with Brian Chambers, but not too exciting - one interesting tidbit is that he estimates that they've modified at least 50% of the base Cryengine so far, and they aren't taking drops from Crytek anymore because their engine is too different.

I am encouraged by seeing the video. I got $80 bucks into this project but that includes both games (Star Citizen and Squadron 42) plus an Orion 315p. I will feel bad if this project doesn't come to fruition. Not so much for the 80 bucks but for all the dreams and effort so many people have put into it.

So watching all these interviews it's obvious that they reached the initial content creation stage but aren't quite there yet. There are still a large number of features that they haven't even started working on that will need to be in the game like Jump Points.

It's very interesting hearing them talk about the challenges they are running into with the procedural planet tech like how do you handle ArcCorp which is a planet sized city similar to Coruscant in Star Wars or how do you handle people walking up or driving up to landing zones. The latter seems obvious. You add entrances that connect the surface with the landing zone which they have not done yet. At least that's a challenge they can tackle by 3.0 but how the hell do you tackle ArcCorp. At least they admit they don't know yet but it's slated for 3.0 so I hope they can pull a rabbit out of their ass like so many times before.

Wouldn't be surprised if landing is restricted around ArcCorp for 3.0 simply because that thing is going to be a massive challenge they don't have enough time to solve yet.

And ship pricing finally got a nod instead of a vague comment. Makes sense to go for realism. 500 credits for a handgun and a couple of billion for the largest aircraft carrier and missions scaling with your ability (ship/equipment/crew) to complete them. Anyone buying large ships now get a nice head start but it also takes away a progression goal so that's a double edged sword. Nothing really new but it's nice to get confirmation on what everyone already assumed would happen.

My god, the amount of fanboy/cult/whiteknight of this game is still making me laugh.

Sure, the 50 mins Gamescom demo looks interesting. But that's just the dump down version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare 22 mins demo. Ground FPS, planetary travel, space dog fight, zero G FPS, enter/exit spaceship. The CoD demo does it MUCH better, and I am sure CoD will offer multiplayer verison of it.

So at this point, beside selling all kind of virtual ships for ridiculous amount of $$$, and that promised so call "persistent universe", which I haven't seen any of it, nor I believe they can make it work technically. This is the biggest gaming scam I have ever seen.

Best to not get your analysis from someone with mental illness Tearofsoul. Just saying. Peace.

Best to not starting personal attack with mental illness when you can't prove anything Variise. Just saying. Peace.