Author Topic: Star Citizen  (Read 8216 times)

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Offline Hawkeye (OP)

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Star Citizen
« on: June 15, 2014, 09:11:23 AM »
Anyone into that?

For those who have no clue what the hell I am talking about :)

It is the new game Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander/Privateer/Freelancer fame) is/has been making for the last 18 months or so as a Crowd funding endeavor.

It´s actually two games in one, a Wing Commander-ish 50+ mission single player (with multiplayer co-op) campaign and a MMO (You play through the campaign, earning some cash (depending on how good you do) and transfer your character over to the persistent universe (if you want, you can also skip the campaign, and start right with the MMO part, but will not have made contact with the people you meet in the campaign and stuff).

Flying is skill based in both the campaign and the PU (i.e. no classes or levels or such stuff, how good you are as a pilot/gunner depends on how good you are with the stick/mouse/controller)

There is not only the flying of space ships (single seater fighter, multi-crew ships you can fly with NPCs or your friends and capital ships with crews into the dozens (the larger ones are only viable for large groups, as they will be persistent, i.e. they stay in-universe, no matter if you are online or not)), but there will also be first-person combat on the ground and in boarding actions (ARMA style has been confirmed) and a NPC driven - player influenced economy (NPCs will outnumber players about 10:1).
Professions are to include:

Pirating
Bounty Hunting
Mercenary
Trading
Mining
Salvaging
Exploring
And probably a couple I have forgotten :)

They have just (a week ago or so) released the Dog Fight Module (now re-named Arena Commander) which is a combat simulation within the game to test your ships/weapon load-outs and test your skills vs. the AI and other players.

Have a look at:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/
Ralph Hoenig, Germany
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2014, 05:08:37 PM »
I think Elite: Dangerous will be much more my cup of tea, and should be released about a year earlier than Star Citizen (which I believe has already missed 2 deadlines?)
The boggosity of the universe tends towards maximum.
 

Offline Hawkeye (OP)

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2014, 11:38:26 PM »
Well, yes and no :)

The DFM (Dog Fighting Module) was initially scheduled to be released in Dec 2013, but that version would have been single-player only using the stock Cry Engine and was intended to spark more interest and bring in more money. After the people threw 30+ millions at Chris, that wasn´t really necessary anymore, so they decided to push that back and release it with the customized Cry Engine back end and not waste time and effort on a build, that had to be discarded later on.
A sensible decision, imo.

As for a second dateline, well, they announced to release the DFM on the 29th of May _if everything goes according to plan_. Of course, people won´t read past "29th of May" and would go apesmeg when they wouldn´t get the DFM on the 29th.

The fun thing is to be able to watch a AAA game being made from the get-go (and I mean _watch_ as in, really see it being made with news/videos/reports on what is going on every few days and stuff) - That´s also a reason for the "missed deadlines." We are told the _internal_ time tables which no-one outside the production team would know a thing about in a publisher made game.
Of course, people are not used to this and tend to go crazy as soon as anything changes.

But yes, Elite Dangerous is supposed to be about a year (at least - I really don´t expect Star Citizen to be released before late 2016) earlier to be finished.
Ralph Hoenig, Germany
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #3 on: June 16, 2014, 04:13:33 AM »
I'm also really looking forward to Elite Dangerous. I remember playing the original (a lot!) on the BBC Micro. Checking their forums every day :). If I wasn't away from home so much in the next month I would have probably joined the beta by now. I'll probably join in mid-July and that's when I will have to explain to my wife why a joystick is worth £300 (seriously tempted by Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog).
 

Offline Hawkeye (OP)

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #4 on: June 16, 2014, 09:51:57 AM »
I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen and man, I can tell you, you won´t regret it. The feel of this piece of massive steel (well metal anyway, not sure it is steel but it sure has the mass :) ) is incredible.

I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s and that thing has been with me through about 10 years of MechWarrior and Wing Commander without a hitch (and it could be used to hammer nails into the wall too), so my argument was:
I can either buy a new stick for 50 or 80 bucks every 2 or 3 years or I can buy this extremely solid stick for 300 bucks and never have to buy another one for the rest of my life.
Ralph Hoenig, Germany
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #5 on: June 16, 2014, 04:48:38 PM »
I'm just holding back from Beta until I come back from the UK in August,  then there will be much grovelling to get a new joystick.  I've been using OOlite to keep my Elite jonesing to a minimum in the meantime!

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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2014, 10:43:17 AM »
As for a second dateline, well, they announced to release the DFM on the 29th of May _if everything goes according to plan_. Of course, people won´t read past "29th of May" and would go apesmeg when they wouldn´t get the DFM on the 29th.

Not even close.

First it was promised to be released "Early 2014" instead ( quarter 1 so before end of March ).
Then it was postponed to be released at the same time as the announcement demonstration at PAX east ( April 13:th ).
At PAX East they told us that they still needed 1-2 more weeks work to finish it up.
Then they went silent for about a month
After that we were told they "need one more week".
THEN they announced the release on 29:th of May ( which they also failed to deliver on ).


The thing with Chris Roberts and Star citizen is that they promised so much that anyone with the slightest clue about how game development works knows that it will be extremely tough to even do a quarter of it on the lined out time-plan.

So basically he is trying to pull off a self fulfilling prophecy, if people keep throwing more money at these impossible promises he just might be able to scale up the studios and contractors enough to almost finish half of it.

And on the other hand even if they only do deliver 25% of everything they promised it will still be one hell of an amazing game...



IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #7 on: June 24, 2014, 04:54:24 PM »
IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.

Or doing what Braben is doing (and did with the original Elite) Procedurally generated universe.

right from the first announcement I thought that they were promising too much with Star Citizen,  I wish them lots of luck, and will undoubtedly play, but Elite is where it's at as far as I'm concerned,  hell those guys already had a working game when they started their kickstarter.
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Offline TallTroll

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #8 on: August 07, 2014, 04:35:03 AM »
I've been Following E : D for a little while now, and it is right on the cusp of exploding. Beta 1.03 is out at time of writing (with 1.04 probably arriving this week some time), and the love it is getting on YouTube and especially Twitch is just amazing. There are several YT vids / Twitch streamers who have bought it, knowing absolutely nothing about it, and they are being blown away, almost without exception.

SC is getting some quite unfair blowback as a result. A lot of people don't realise that Elite has been in dev since 1998, on and off, so it is unsurprising that they have a pretty solid codebase, and are able to rapidly roll new stuff out. A lot of it has been in the can for some time. There is a persistent strain of "why can't it be more like EVE?" from a certain section of the audience, and a lot of pointless ED / SC fanboi-ism, and people not knowing why certain design decisions have been made, like the criticisms of the Elite ship designs, which are direct descendants of the old wireframe models in many cases.
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #9 on: August 07, 2014, 04:36:43 PM »
Thanks TallTroll,  you've made my jonesing so much worse, and I'm getting on a damn plane in 23 hours so have to wait til I get home :P

Matt
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Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #10 on: August 11, 2014, 04:26:07 PM »
I've signed up for the Standard Beta of Elite Dangerous and bought the HOTAS Thrustmaster Warthog :)

Very impressed so far - just wish I had some more free time to play around with it.

Also been playing Divinity: Original Sin with my son when we are both not working at the same time (which is about one evening a week) and that is an excellent game too.
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #11 on: August 12, 2014, 07:18:39 PM »
I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen and man, I can tell you, you won´t regret it. The feel of this piece of massive steel (well metal anyway, not sure it is steel but it sure has the mass :) ) is incredible.

I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s and that thing has been with me through about 10 years of MechWarrior and Wing Commander without a hitch (and it could be used to hammer nails into the wall too), so my argument was:
I can either buy a new stick for 50 or 80 bucks every 2 or 3 years or I can buy this extremely solid stick for 300 bucks and never have to buy another one for the rest of my life.

"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.

IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations. They should be working at a framework and assets here instead so that players can design most of the stuff with player owned/run shops and houses in the same planetary themes. That would allow them to have 10 times more content in the final game, for 10 times less work.
Or doing what Braben is doing (and did with the original Elite) Procedurally generated universe.
I think a combination of those 2 would work better, use procedural generation as a placeholder with varying amounts of predesigned enviroment thrown in where needed, but allow the modding community to contribute, either making frameworks for the porcedural generation or for the predesigned stuff, then allow players to interact with the preexisting enviroment and alter it to their own whim, to an extent.
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Offline TallTroll

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #12 on: August 13, 2014, 05:52:48 AM »
>> IMO they are doing one big thing wrong though, and that is trying hand craft unique 3D model environments for 300-400 landing locations.

There's hand-crafting and hand-crafting. If you watch the Gary Whitta / David Braben / Chris Roberts interview, Chris and David mention that they have had some back and forth on procedural generation. A given city only needs certain areas to be hand crafted, as suburbs / commercial districts etc IRL all feel a bit samey... ideal for PG treatment. There's no need to make every dwelling or office block a unique, special snowflake. Similarly, many large scale farms IRL are just huge areas of fields, all growing a very limited number of crops. You could model millions of acres, entirely "realistically" with very simple PG routines.


 

Offline Hawkeye (OP)

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #13 on: August 14, 2014, 01:41:04 AM »
"never have to buy another one for the rest of my life"
"I had a Thrustmaster FCS stick back in the late 80s"
"I got myself a Warthog for Star Citizen"
Er, so what happened to the warthog? I understand getting a second joystick but use of the word was makes me think you did actually wear the FCS out or something.


LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".
Ralph Hoenig, Germany
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Star Citizen
« Reply #14 on: August 14, 2014, 03:20:36 AM »
LOL, no, the FCS stick/throttle (and TM pedals) are still very much alive, but they use a game port to connect and my new PCs don´t _have_ a game port anymore.
I could probably work around that, but also had problems with the programming software from TM on new-ish Windows, so I finally decided it was time to "upgrade".

Yes, exactly same problem here. I also used to have the FCS.