[hd]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCtdyNFwQWo[/hd]
[URL="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/169744415"]The Twitch VOD is here, but skip the first 44 minutes.[/URL]
[hd]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb702V4_m4c[/hd]
Fan-edited version to remove the bugs and dialogue (reducing it to 45min)
Important notes:
- The video is fairly filled with bad and superfluous scripted roleplay dialogue, and Chris Roberts talks over it half the time
- The demo has to be restarted because a client crash breaks the demo sequence
- The second run-through features the guy on stage totally going off-script and improv'ing until they catch up to where the demo crashed
- The pacing's uneven without even counting the demo having to be restarted
- The facial capture/tracking and in-game VoIP features are not coming in 3.0, but soon after
[video=youtube;REUAt0OO-2A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REUAt0OO-2A[/video]
The biggest reveal was the feature CIG is calling Face-over-IP, facial capture that's used to drive character facial animations and headset-less headtracking live in-game.
[video=youtube;gbCSQDhPOlk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbCSQDhPOlk[/video]
Clean version of the concept video at the beginning.
Gamescom also brought the following updated in-lore ship commercials for the following reworked and brand new flyable ships being added to the game in the new patch:
[video=youtube;1gdTg6vQT7k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gdTg6vQT7k[/video]
[video=youtube;fUAlEOhkdok]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUAlEOhkdok[/video]
[video=youtube;hXmbmWYF5Go]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXmbmWYF5Go[/video]
[video=youtube;A2vgYRiO07M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2vgYRiO07M[/video]
[video=youtube;t6qh1mjaPAU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6qh1mjaPAU[/video]
[video=youtube;Qoa38oaosW4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qoa38oaosW4[/video]
Really hope they go far with that faceware program. Realtime facial animations have been neglected in the games industry for too long.
I really like where they're going with the VoIP and comm systems, I want SC to be a game where you have smaller, personal interactions with players, not a 1000 player MMO with a global chat and hundreds of garish characters standing around the quest giver
That facetracking software in conjunction with the VOIP is pretty fuckin' neeto.
i really like that faceware showcase. it reminds me of la noire with the actual actors' heads put ontop of the models
[QUOTE=Hogie bear;52613731]Really hope they go far with that faceware program. Realtime facial animations have been neglected in the games industry for too long.[/QUOTE]
You wear a helmet half of the time in this game, it's not going to be very visible. The reason why other games don't do this is because facial animation is expensive, and real time image processing to convert to facial animation and then send that over the network is super expensive. In a game that really needs every bit of juice the CPU and GPU can give it, this seems like a very expensive feature for such a small detail, particularly because the benefits of having this versus assigning a couple of bones to go up and down depending on voice modulation are very small.
Oh hey face tracking I can't use because my glasses are reflective. :s:
I wonder how it will handle all the different kinds of webcams people have.
That is always the biggest problem with face tracking, oh and also lighting.
[QUOTE=Mitsuma;52615024]Oh hey face tracking I can't use because my glasses are reflective. :s:
I wonder how it will handle all the different kinds of webcams people have.
That is always the biggest problem with face tracking, oh and also lighting.[/QUOTE]
I imagine if the the game detects conditions too poor to function properly it will just disable face tracking and revert the character back to basic animations.
the segment where they're being chased by ships whilst they're in a land vehicle, it was so janky when they shot one out of the sky. he clearly missed and then the ship lagged and teleported forward a bit and exploded.
I was excited for this presentation and I'm still excited to see where the game ends up.. But this gameplay was a disappointment to be honest, so much jank and so many bugs.
[QUOTE=loopoo;52615432]the segment where they're being chased by ships whilst they're in a land vehicle, it was so janky when they shot one out of the sky. he clearly missed and then the ship lagged and teleported forward a bit and exploded.[/QUOTE]
The ship might've just ran into the rock actually.
Personally I loved the fact that they didn't sugarcoat the state of the game or even try to set up some type of zero-latency system just for the demo.
The cheesy "RP" banter could've been toned down quite a bit though, ended up feeling quite a bit awkward.
highest backed game in history, countless delays, 3 years on and the only experience I've had is the alpha test that was janked out to the max. constant clipping through my ship, being teleported whilst seated out into space, instantly exploding in a ball of fire if my ship so much as tickled an obstacle.
I used to be really hype for this, but now I'm not too fussed waiting, and I'm not sure what to expect when it eventually comes out.
[QUOTE=loopoo;52615872]highest backed game in history, countless delays, 3 years on and the only experience I've had is the alpha test that was janked out to the max. constant clipping through my ship, being teleported whilst seated out into space, instantly exploding in a ball of fire if my ship so much as tickled an obstacle.
I used to be really hype for this, but now I'm not too fussed waiting, and I'm not sure what to expect when it eventually comes out.[/QUOTE]
I'm hoping this is the beauty of it, we complain daily of game companies rushing games to completion, only to be a bit shitty and disappointing, let's give these guys all the time they need, and hopefully it turns out incredible.
I find it hard to be optimistic. A shit tonne raised during the actual Kickstarter, then $150 million raised afterwards over the course of development. I feel like with that kind of money, we should have more to show for it than what they currently present to us. [url=https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-witcher-3-cost-to-make/1100-6430409/]The Witcher 3[/url] cost $81, granted it's got a much narrower scope than SC. I can't help but think the devs have overpromised certain aspects of the game, and these aspects will most definitely be under-delivered upon release. the fact their original Kickstarter only asked for $2 million, I feel like they've bitten off far more than they can chew.
Keep in mind that when their Kickstarter ended, the project had eight employees and no permanent studio leases. The first year or so was primarily spent just hiring people and finding office space for them to work and getting them set up with equipment and learning the tools. Work was certainly being done on the initial gameplay designs and they had concept art and dreams out the ass, but development didn't actually hit full steam until the beginning of 2014 when their UK studio, the largest, came online. This isn't your average AAA-tier development cycle where entire studios worth of devs were sitting at their machines waiting to be given work on the new project that'd eventually be named GTA V or Battlefield whatever, they had to first build a company and staff it with several hundred of the most talented people they could attract.
I think it's fair to be skeptical about the scope of the game, and especially skepticism on if it's actually going to be [I]fun[/I] when it comes out of beta, but considering the project has more like three years of solid development under its belt, what they have is actually pretty impressive in its scope and depth, even if it's not finished enough to be considered playable by non-rabidfans. [I]Especially[/I] considering the fuckup with outsourcing their fps stuff to Illfonic and the deliverables all being in the wrong scale and out of metric and having to be scrapped and started over by the Frankfurt studio they'd gotten up and running in the meantime - that was basically a year wasted on the fps gameplay front.
I like how they show something that looks real and not some presentation mock up.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting the game to see any sort of formal beta/full release for [i]at least[/i] another 2-3 years. I'm absolutely fine with waiting and I can also appreciate that what CIG is making has literally never been done before, and it's great that someone is trying to - even in the face of failure. What they want to accomplish can absolutely be done given enough time, it just depends on whether they have the money to support themselves for that long that's the issue.
I can't pretend to know the intimate details of their financial structure, but the following details [I]are[/I] publicly known:
a) CIG has unknown amounts of private investments from sources other than the crowdfunding campaign and as a private company they're not required to disclose them; the public crowdfunding budget of $157mil and counting is just that, the crowdfunding budget collected from the backing public, not their total budget. So they've got more runway than it might first appear, but we don't actually know by how much.
b) CIG uses a variety of tactics and maneuvers, all legal of course, to maximize the value of a backer's dollar. The biggest example is establishing their largest studio, and EU subsidiary, in the UK to take advantage of a big tax break offered by the UK government to boost the domestic game development industry. Their UK office also allows them to do things like take out a loan on the value of the tax credit (which is delivered as a lump sum by the government months after tax season) at the UK's incredibly low interest rates and pay running costs out of that loan instead of transferring cash from the mothership in the US where they're able to get a higher interest rate on savings -- one person on Reddit with a corporate accounting background ran napkin math on the available numbers and guesstimated that the difference in interest rates could mean they'd earn well into six figures of interest by keeping cash in the US and payday-loan'ing it with Britain's most prestigious bank until the government rebate came in and they could settle the loan. Exactly how much this will yield them, I don't know and anyone who does isn't going to tell the Internet about it.
c) CIG spends very little on marketing, overall. And they have a separate pot of money for their media output and community outreach, supported by backers who choose to contribute an additional $10 or $20 per month and who get a monthly magazine plus WIP gallery dumps and other little benefits. Their weekly YouTube output is paid by subscribers, and they've used the surplus in the subscriber piggy bank to offset if not outright cover travel/accomodation expenses for big events to avoid siphoning money intended for game development into expenses that don't directly move the game forward.
They may have made some bad decisions in prioritizing or not prioritizing this or that feature or by choosing to delay release for X thing Chris decides has to be added, but somewhere on the road to $157mil they hired some accounting nerds who know what they're doing.
elix why are you like the CIG guru? you've basically propped up the SC thread on Facepunch, and seem to know your stuff about everything to do with this game. are you a shill, or are you just this invested cause you really like SC?
I probably shouldn't dignify that with a response but in the name of genuine discussion, I'm just really into SC and I follow most of their output. I wish I was getting paid to post about SC on Facepunch*. :v:
I also have a pretty good memory for large numbers of details, and often if I can't remember the exact information I can remember how to find it. With Star Citizen, this is valuable because they output a lot of information every week (50-120+ minutes of video content, weekly schedule update, varying amounts of dev forum posts, the monthly report and other monthly features) without a good way of cataloging it. There's no central repository of facts or information for an outsider or a new backer to go to and efficiently catch up to speed on what's going on. [I]Some[/I] information streams have community-made indexes/archives such as [URL="http://www.scqa.info/"]the searchable index of Chris Roberts video Q&As[/URL] and blogs with transcripts of the weekly news show, but it doesn't fill the gaps by nearly enough. In a way, this actually contributes to the notion that SC is a cult, because there is rarely a simple brief answer or a single definitive place to point the skeptic at to back up what you're saying, because you're speaking from the knowledge of months/years of accumulated statements that build a cohesive picture of a development project that, while flawed and sometimes inefficient, is genuinely working towards its goals and constantly if unevenly demonstrating forward progress. Add the funding model's more outrageous optional packages and bam you can paint a game project as a scam and its knowledgeable fans as brainwashed cultists. That spacesim nerds are more prone to autistic screeching than average does not help at all.
Star Citizen shouldn't need people to be walking wikis, but since I consume most of their news updates on a more reliable basis than most FPers and I have a good memory for keeping straight a thousand little details like "did Chris ever promise X?" or "what's the status on..." I've sort of become the local RSS feed and FAQ for the project. I'm not perfect and I can't watch/read/find [I]everything[/I] any CIG dev ever says on or off the site, of course.
Simply put, I'm passionate about the project and able to remember published statements very well, and I see it worth my time, usually, to share that information by answering questions when someone asks them on FP -- because good fucking luck finding the answer on the official website or in their hundreds of hours of video on YouTube unless it's how much money they've made or what ships are for sale right now.
It'd be great if the thread didn't become about me for a few pages tho
* I would never accept money to post promotional shit on FP pls no ban
it was a genuine question, didn't realise asking if you were a shill was rude. you seemed like you were a community manager or something for SC
Well, I guess that's fair enough, but it does kind of come across as a negative question. I mean, consider the word's meaning:
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Bkyvk4m.png[/IMG]
I'd like to think that if I was actually a paid community manager or whatever I'd disclose it in the SC megathread that I'm the OP of, if not going as far as giving full disclosure the first time I posted about it in any SC thread. CIG doesn't need to employ staff to post buzz on gaming forums, their community's large and hyped enough to do it for them. Sometimes too hyped, especially early on when there was little to go on but concept art and dreams.
I've been accused of being a shill for SC before because I'm passionate and knowledgeable about the project and willing to post lengthy answers for complicated questions. Apparently using a forum for its intended purpose is suspect. :v:
Been a long time since I checked in with SC. Is there something playable running at the moment?
[QUOTE=Im Crimson;52618037]Been a long time since I checked in with SC. Is there something playable running at the moment?[/QUOTE]
The current live build is Alpha 2.6.3 and it doesn't have the procedural gen planets and stuff; that's what's been shown at Gamescom and is slated for release as soon as they burn the last of the bugs out (they're at ~65 must-fix-before-players-can-have-it-for-testing bugs, and this number decreases every week).
The 3.0 build represents about a year of internal dev work that pushed ahead of the 2.6.x branch, so huge amounts of the game will change when it goes live. Delta patching is also FINALLY coming, no more redownloading 24GB every time there's a hotfix.
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;52618430]Delta patching is also FINALLY coming, no more redownloading 24GB every time there's a hotfix.[/QUOTE]
I would think that delta patching would be one of the very first things they implemented, once they had a build ready to go live.
Especially since I'm sure they fully expected having to push a lot of fixes and updates.
So my friend tried to play it today and got 25 fps on lowest settings on pretty beefy PC.
[QUOTE]
Your 15-25 FPS is not because of your computer. It's the server communicating with your PC and the amount of information it is trying to pass. Your computer is bored waiting for it.
The details behind it all:
Current Performance in Star Citizen Persistent/Universe whether you have a Beastly Rig or a Budget build will largely be the same. It is not tied to your PC it is instead tied to the current netcode that the servers are running.
In short, when you spawn a new ship (e.g. at Port Olisar), the ship is actually created on the server and 'Streamed' to every client. This requires (iirc) about 5mb of data being sent to every client when someone spawns a Retaliator (and probably a lot more for e.g. a Starfarer). CIG are working on a 'Spawn Bundle' concept, where the server will identify every item that needs to be spawned, and assign it a global ID etc - but not actually spawn it. Instead, this 'Spawn Bundle' will be sent to each client (about 1kb, iirc) so that each client can spawn it for themselves, whilst still having the correct global IDs etc.
The physics calculations for everything that moves (and has a physics proxy) is processed by the server - including your ship (server verification to ensure your client isn't 'cheating'), or so I understand. The problem is that the sheer volume of processing is killing server performance, because the CryEngine Physics engine wasn't designed for this number of entities all being active at once.
What this means for us is whether you are running an i7 with a GTX 1080 or an i3 GTX 960 you are going to range between 15-25FPS un the current PU. Arena Commander is a different story. That usually runs 30+ on even budget builds and looks Gorgeous.
[/QUOTE]
As a person who's been around programming for more than 10 years I will never understand people who defend this piece of garbage...
The current netcode in the game is practically bone-stock CryEngine. It sucks donkey dick, it was never intended to be used this way and as the playable area in multiplayer has expanded, performance has taken a nosedive. This has been known for a long time. Performance gets worse and worse as more players join an instance and for the longer it runs. Obviously this is untenable for an MMO and nobody with two brain cells to rub together would think the netcode as it is is meant to be a done deal, you are playing an alpha. My [I]laptop[/I] will play the game at near-max settings at a smooth 50+ on a fresh instance or in Arena Commander.
I think 3.0 is bringing the first pass of improved netcode when it drops soon.
Keep in mind that when they started working on the game, options like UE4 were not out there, the scope was smaller, and they had a very small team. CryEngine made a lot of sense at that time, but the game has grown a lot since then. There are still assets from that time period hanging on, like the current, horribly unoptimized model for the Cutlass Black (due to be replaced in 3.0).
[QUOTE=Megalan;52619472]So my friend tried to play it today and got 25 fps on lowest settings on pretty beefy PC.
As a person who's been around programming for more than 10 years I will never understand people who defend this piece of garbage...[/QUOTE]
Same, netcode streaming has nothing to do with actual FPS.
They're doing something really really wrong if the game is getting that hammered to produce a FPS count that low.
The excuse "Your computer is bored waiting for it." means nothing, if your computer isn't doing shit to the scene then it shouldn't be 25fps max, it should be shitting out the most it can.
Now if you took what was said and basically applied it to just the server side, then it'd start to make sense, but for a client - server model? I'm sorry but netcode shouldn't be impacting the processing power of your gpu and cpu, that's server and connection bound, not client.
It really sounds like a load of bullshit, and considering it comes from a reddit post, I'll take it as pure bullshit.
[editline]27th August 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=Grenadiac;52619498]The current netcode in the game is practically bone-stock CryEngine. It sucks donkey dick, it was never intended to be used this way and as the playable area in multiplayer has expanded, performance has taken a nosedive. This has been known for a long time. Performance gets worse and worse as more players join an instance and for the longer it runs. Obviously this is untenable for an MMO and nobody with two brain cells to rub together would think the netcode as it is is meant to be a done deal, you are playing an alpha. My [I]laptop[/I] will play the game at near-max settings at a smooth 50+ on a fresh instance or in Arena Commander.
I think 3.0 is bringing the first pass of improved netcode when it drops soon.
Keep in mind that when they started working on the game, options like UE4 were not out there, the scope was smaller, and they had a very small team. CryEngine made a lot of sense at that time, but the game has grown a lot since then. There are still assets from that time period hanging on, like the current, horribly unoptimized model for the Cutlass Black (due to be replaced in 3.0).[/QUOTE]
What also likely isn't helping them is the fact CryEngine its self has basically jackshit documentation, they're working on it as it goes and I would assume, rebuilding parts of the engine as they're working on it (I remember them talking about rebuilding the entire section related to world handling to remove the limits that CryEngine has with world handling, which obviously makes sense).
But the whole netcode effects FPS makes no sense, it's just data responses.
That shouldn't be effecting the GPU and it really shouldn't be hitting the CPU that hard either, so even if they're using the stock netcode, I don't really understand how its crippling performance, at most it'd be bottleneck on processing the data, especially if they've got no form of compression or interpolation currently, but even then thats something of a cakewalk for the CPU to do, it's just handling and sending responses afterall, its not actually doing calculations and if it is, its not related to the netcode.
Keep in mind how primitive CryEngine really is. It's not much newer than Source, which has similar issues with multiplayer performance. Having run a gmod server with a script-heavy gamemode, I can say that after a few days of uptime with 40+ players, FPS definitely tanks.
They are rewriting large swaths of the engine and have hired a lot of original CryTek devs to help reverse engineer it.
I still wish they had had the foresight (and its not even really their fault) to see that with the funding thrown at them, and the challenge they're facing, that writing their own engine would've been a safe bet. They've already invested a fuckload of time rebuilding what seems to be the majority of CryEngine, and I wonder if building their own engine (at this point) would've actually saved them time tbh. Or it might not have mattered: CIG seems pretty bad at project and scope management, and that's part of why the game's so delayed.
The netcode in CryEngine is currently really bad because of how much it updates: if someone is off fighting and playing with physics props way off in the distance from you in the current PU, you get those packets and those updates. This applies to nearly everything on the server, iirc, including things like NPCs and events that other players are involved in. This is a tremendous fucking quantity of overhead, and is why performance tanks as players join.
[URL="https://forums.starcitizenbase.com/topic/20145-netcode-theorycraft-why-did-cig-donate-2500-to-a-retired-network-engineer/"]I found this fairly old post illuminating some possible choices CIG has made for getting their netcode improved[/URL], and it bodes well imo.
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