Citizencon 2017 - Star Citizen turns 5, tells alien yo mama joke

[elix]

[video=youtube;uqKXtlP3IfU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKXtlP3IfU[/video]

[video=youtube;mGcG0g7GsOI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGcG0g7GsOI[/video]
(Skip the first 12:22, it's crowd pans while the presentation got shit ready.)

[video=youtube;ZnMdQXl0vyg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnMdQXl0vyg[/video]

[video=youtube;olxI7X7eac8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olxI7X7eac8[/video]

Prior to the big presentation, there were five panels. Here are highlights and in some cases full video from them:

[video=youtube;pXR55lxmEVg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXR55lxmEVg[/video]

[video=youtube;_-OoMySD66E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-OoMySD66E[/video]

[video=youtube;RdrGvTm6xDg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdrGvTm6xDg[/video]

[video=youtube;zQLaMlg1ICY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLaMlg1ICY[/video]

[video=youtube;OSOETxLuUHo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSOETxLuUHo[/video]
Xi'An is a full-fledged conlang and they're releasing language materials and guides. Like [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/16202-Xian-Dictionary"]this dictionary[/URL] and [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/16214-A-Quick-Guide-To-SRX"]this guide to Standard Romanized Xi'An.[/URL] There's even a dedicated section of the new forums for it.

[video=youtube;QzhI6wII-40]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhI6wII-40[/video]
This one is the most boring of them all unless you [I]really[/I] like hearing about generating realistic-looking rocks for over 20 minutes, but it does cover important aspects of art direction and research when pushing for realism in a game.

[twitch]ElegantPunchySpiderHeyGuys[/twitch]
Citizencon always ends with birthday cake, and it's always this cringey one way or another.

For anyone who's just here for the yo mama joke, it's not actually [I]pronounced[/I] as "yo mama" but it's this phrase:
[t]https://i.imgur.com/yMlCxHB.png[/t]

[editline]a[/editline]

[video=youtube;eu71Dcpf3c0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu71Dcpf3c0[/video]
Here's the entire 7-and-a-half-hour event if anyone cares.

[Pandamobile]

Anyone who's ever worked with animation in a game engine is going to get rock hard from watching that Mocap and Procedural Animation talk.

That's some seriously impressive stuff.

[Ronin]

I like the $100 gray market rebate you can have by selling the ship you get when you buy the SSD.

[Tsyolin]

Am I the only one a little bothered by the fact an unfinished game has it's own convention?

[redBadger]

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;52828527]Am I the only one a little bothered by the fact an unfinished game has it's own convention?[/QUOTE]

I was skimming through some videos and the guy was like "i have never seen this planet before. You can be on a planet that no QA guy has ever seen" and got no mans sky vibes from it.

Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.

[Daemon White]

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;52828527]Am I the only one a little bothered by the fact an unfinished game has it's own convention?[/QUOTE]

It's basically a developer conference with the crowdfunders allowing them to demo the latest work unavailable to the public and directly interact with the backers in person.

Kinda like E3, but just for Star Citizen

[ulvemann43]

[QUOTE=redBadger;52828543]I was skimming through some videos and the guy was like "i have never seen this planet before. You can be on a planet that no QA guy has ever seen" and got no mans sky vibes from it.

Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.[/QUOTE]

Nothing in SC is 100% procedural. They essentially let procedural generation create a planet based on specific perimiters etc etc, and then the art team goes in and tweaks stuff, altering geographical and geological features, while adding stuff like outposts or other points of interest.

Additionally, each planet has its own story, and its own reason why everything on it is as it is.
I don't think this will be anything close to NMS, because they are doing something completely diferent.
The only reason they do procedural stuff is because hand crafting a few thousand planets is not a realistic task.

[Daemon White]

[QUOTE=redBadger;52828543]Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.[/QUOTE]

The major thing this has over NMS is that there is legit player interactions. Add that on top of the procedural generated cities allowing Corperation / Faction wars, you can also claim land for resources to make money for ingame ship purchases / upgrades / player upgrades and weapons / further increasing your claimed land, and other various in-game missions probably akin to Elite Dangerous.

[laserpanda]

[QUOTE=Pandamobile;52828439]Anyone who's ever worked with animation in a game engine is going to get rock hard from watching that Mocap and Procedural Animation talk.

That's some seriously impressive stuff.[/QUOTE]

I'm only halfway through, but it seems pretty standard so far. Lots of games use IK to make characters feet match the surfaces they're walking on.

[Swilly]

I'm still waiting on the performance improvements. This is all pretty but the servers still run terribly.

[dai]

[QUOTE=redBadger;52828543]I was skimming through some videos and the guy was like "i have never seen this planet before. You can be on a planet that no QA guy has ever seen" and got no mans sky vibes from it.

Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.[/QUOTE]

It's not NMS's "give the game the assets and let it sort itself out to make billions of random things" but I understand the stigma at this point

tl;dr on procgen in SC:
1: actual procgen is used to glob together a single planet [I]for further editing[/I], not as a product like NMS with "you show up at X coordinate ingame and it procgens everything right there"
2: artists shapes that ball of clay, from massive landmass alterations to creating/editing inhabited areas
3: they spend their time on a controlled number of locations so the artists can spend some decent time refining worlds

bit more:
1: they define a basic resource pack of materials and general objects (rocks, trees, etc) to propogate on a planet, divided moreso into climates when necessary. Select a size, hit generate, you've got a massive procedurally generated planet that QA has never seen. This gives the artists a canvas to work on, and isn't left alone to be a delivered product unless it's a completely useless moon or something

2: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_rSQGavuiI&feature=youtu.be&t=14m28s]artists go in[/url] and slap down anything from small points of interest ([url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AiNxbv-a9s]wrecks[/url], bases, safe landing zones, maybe the occasional chill geographic phenomena for someone to eventually discover, etc) to major population hubs (which from what I'm hearing, massive cities could be relying on procgen to build a ton of the unimportant fluff), to overall shaping the planet's continents, oceans, forests, mountain ranges, etc so it doesn't look like a homogenous blob of samey features top to bottom [like at the start of the first vid I linked]. If you want more on the editing process, this was from last year-

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKCDRyYzLtM[/media]

3: they keep tailoring up a small subset of worlds so the final result is a manicured experience that still feels pretty organic due to the scale and granular detail you can get out of visiting a planet. The goal for the player-accessible known system was to be [url=https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap]100 star systems[/url], most with like a couple planets/features that'll have a lot going on around them

[elix]

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;52828527]Am I the only one a little bothered by the fact an unfinished game has it's own convention?[/QUOTE]
It's the anniversary event and it's a big party where the devs show what they've been working on that isn't actually ready for a build yet. This year the cost was footed (at least mostly) by Intel, who sponsored it to pimp their $400-and-up Optane SSD stuff that just released today. Most unfinished games don't owe their entire existence to the crowdfunding public; SC does, so it has a duty to inform and impress its "publishers" in the same way that the average AAA-tier game has to satisfy its publisher with periodic demo builds showing off progress.

[QUOTE=redBadger;52828543]I was skimming through some videos and the guy was like "i have never seen this planet before. You can be on a planet that no QA guy has ever seen" and got no mans sky vibes from it.

Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.[/QUOTE]
The point is that the IK has to solve for arbitrary situations when they design the fixes for mocap walk cycles that are shown in the video. It wasn't "hoo boy we can generate anything we want without even seeing it".

For planets, they use procedural biome tools to paint terrain onto the map, and then they start shaping terrain where it needs to be designed in more detail. Then they can scatter rocks/foliage/etc. and start building bases, wrecks, and other points of interest. It's only procedural in that the artist has mountain-painting brushes instead of having to hand-build a heightmap for an entire 1:10-Earth-sized planet and repeating that process for the hundreds/thousands of planets and moons SC's stretch goals promise.

[paindoc]

[QUOTE=redBadger;52828543]I was skimming through some videos and the guy was like "i have never seen this planet before. You can be on a planet that no QA guy has ever seen" and got no mans sky vibes from it.

Now clearly this has a much greater budget and is larger scale than NMS but I'm just worried it will turn into another procedural generated snorefest.[/QUOTE]

To add to what others have said, I've seen some talks by NMS developers and they don't really experiment much with even the baseline procgen algorithms (generally, variations of noise). There are loads of variations that let you accurately simulate erosion, make mountains that look realistic, and generally emulate actually geological processes. It's pretty neat what you can do with a bit of work buuuuut I saw none of this in the NMS talks. They just were trying to hit too large of a scale

I forget where I saw it, but I'm fairly positive SC is using horizontal displacement, slope-based noise, jordan, decarpientier-swiss (positive on this one, it's very distinct in their mountains), and iQ noise (all variations of simplex noise), and slope-based feature placement. Its all this small stuff that adds up to make things seem less boring, and more alive.

[Nautsabes]

will there be a ocmplete product i can put under the christmas tree this season?

[elix]

[QUOTE=Nautsabes;52829241]will there be a ocmplete product i can put under the christmas tree this season?[/QUOTE]
I mean if you buy a starter pack with an Aurora or Mustang both are flyable in-game now.

But, no, there's no expectation that the game will suddenly be [I]finished[/I] in the next month. They're not rushing to deadline, unlike most projects with an impatient publisher. They're doing quite the opposite of rushing to deadline and it's earned them long-term criticism, but they promised they'd take their time and do it properly and that's what they're doing, at least.

[Raidyr]

[QUOTE=Nautsabes;52829241]will there be a ocmplete product i can put under the christmas tree this season?[/QUOTE]

I doubt 3.0 is even going to hit before Christmas. Try 2022 :v:

[Nautsabes]

isnt this essentially then early access with lots of microtransactions

[elix]

Hey, so brace for a slight wall of text because nothing in Star Citizen is ever a simple answer.

[QUOTE=Nautsabes;52829343]isnt this essentially then early access with lots of microtransactions[/QUOTE]
In short, no, despite what it may look like by a first glance at the cover, it's not a typical money-grabbing microtransaction scheme. This is the disclaimer attached to the Consolidated Outland Pioneer, the current ship on concept sale (bolding mine):
[QUOTE]DISCLAIMER

[B]Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as these are what allow us to include deeper features in the Star Citizen world. Concept ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.[/B]

Additionally, please note that the Pioneer will be entering the ship pipeline now and may be released after other concept ships have been completed. All decorative ‘flair’ items will also be available to acquire in the finished game world. The goal is to make additional ships available that give players a different experience rather than any particular advantage.[/QUOTE]
Unlike any other game ever, Star Citizen is crowdfunded to the tune of $162 million and counting, and this has taken it from the original pitch of an upscaled remake of Freelancer with Wing Commander-like single-player elements to the current sprawling attempt to simulate a realistic-ish scifi universe with all sorts of effort put into unusual features like grammatically-functional alien languages, more non-combat career paths and their role-supporting ships and equipment than combat career variations, and the concept of information as a valuable resource to trade and sell.

They wouldn't have made this much money if they said "okay you've bought your game package no more money pls". Instead, they have allowed people to contribute more than the minimum at their discretion by opting to give themselves a slight (or not so slight at the very extreme end but hold on) headstart by buying a ship that fits the role they want to play. This also means there's variety built into the game at launch instead of a billion and one starter ships and nobody mining/etc. so the economy's stuck in stone for the first day or so and slowly ramps over weeks.

Now, it's easy to say "P2W!!!" after a description like that and it's something the devs are well aware of. The upgrade ladder is being set up in such a way that, in most cases, the equipment that comes default on your ship is crap-tier and upgrading it, with in-game currency, is going to be fairly fundamental before you do anything serious like tangle in a dogfight with a geared player. Roberts has also said that he hates grind in games, and intends things to not be unreasonably grindy in SC. And the devs have stressed this on multiple occasions, along with every concept sale when they release it, such as the above disclaimer.

Most ships aren't available for sale all the time, and are brought back into store maybe one to three times a year (depending) for limited periods. From the outside it may seem like this is designed to drive whale hype by limiting the windows in which ships can be purchased. However, this limiting factor is to control the ship population and maintain certain starting rarity levels for design purposes. Where the rarity of a ship is dialed into a specific figure given by design, the sale will be for limited amounts of stock, and anytime capital ships have been put up for sale they've been at sharply-limited stock numbers to ensure balance.

In other words, someone who drops $250 on a Constellation and thinks they're smarter and more powerful than everyone who opted to just buy in at the minimum with a starter has no one to blame but themselves when poopsockers who teamed up are flying in-game-purchased models of the same ship six hours after patch launch and by three to four weeks everyone who's got more than 90 minutes of playing time a week has one if they want one. It's P2NotHaveToGoBuyInGame, which is generally a minor inconvenience and a small time investment until you start getting into the capital ship range. Capships are probably going to be kind of grindy to acquire and the credit costs for equipping them with non-shit-tier gear is going to be considerable, and this is kind of as it should be.

Capital ships in Star Citizen require multiple crew, typically in excess of six minimum and ideally twelve or more. Eventually you will be able to hire NPCs so it's concievably possible (but a bad idea) for a solo player to hire enough NPCs to crew their $1250 Idris, but unless they're paying top dollar for really intelligent crew (NPC crew costs will scale with how retarded to not-retarded they are) they're going to be the guy who got his ship stolen from him on day 1 of the game going for-real live. Capships are intended for groups, and the grind's a lot more reasonable when you can split it among friends rather than trying to earn enough to buy it solo. A capital ship should mean something, otherwise everyone and their 14-year-old cousin will have one and what's the point of flying anything smaller when you can fire an anti-capship railgun that just fucking erases any ship with less than six crew.

Now, is it early access? More or less, but it's been the earliest of access seeing as the Kickstarter took place before the company even really existed; when the Kickstarter successfully ended the project had a mere eight employees and no permanent office space to seat devs in so they could get to work (once they'd been interviewed and hired). The upcoming alpha 3.0 patch is notable for bringing the state of foundations and gameplay framework up to a point that it's [I]complete enough[/I] to start being called Early Access and not "pre-pre-pre-pre-buzzword" that preceeds EA and denotes an even rougher state of completion.

[Mitsuma]

To be honest the way Star Citizen does their funding is pretty hardcore Pay2Win. Yes the "devs are aware of it" and everything will be available but it basically doesn't get better then already starting with huge ships and all the extras they throw in.

You mention that a lazy rich person probably gets their ship blown up by a hard working starter pack person but what if we got the same mindset on both sides? Rich guy will have his fancy ship decked out in the same time, now still having quite the edge on people, thats the nature of P2W and they actually can not redo that.
Keeping those sales to limited stock hardly does much to balance either in my opinion.

Either way, its all "if when" and some promises etc.
This probably sounds like I hate on them but in the end I don't care that much, I will see how far my $40 starter pack gets me with my fragile Aurora, how long it takes me to get up to the fancy ships a good amount of people already bought for real money and how far they will be ahead due to their headstart.

I'm a bit said they didn't give any more specific time for 3.x release, at least a PTU release or so.

[elix]

I can't disagree that, at this point, all we have are promises that they won't be evil when it comes time to set the live economy. However, their entire existence depends on the goodwill of backers; them breaking a significant promise that's been repeated on camera multiple times is going to bring bad PR on them faster than you can say backer class action. The live economy is going to be set into motion with beta, so ahead of "real" launch, and at that point ship sales are going to stop except for game access packages (much like how current starter packages give you a basic ship). If SC is a hell grind at that point, uh... well done, you've just trashed your own pre-launch hype and stunted your launch by being "the game that was crowdfunded like never before and ended up going Korean-tier abusive P2W in beta". They're not stupid enough to do that and they don't have a publisher demanding a fast return on investment.

The other thing is that just having the ship is only part of the puzzle. Player skill is the big qualifier, and the inherent balance of capital ships is that the smallest ships can't take them on directly but are also likely small enough to be hard to hit with the big guns, allowing daring boarding attempts and sabotage and the like.

There's also the fact that running away before you can come into the enemy's weapons range is a valid strategy in this game.

[QUOTE=Mitsuma;52829495]I'm a bit said they didn't give any more specific time for 3.x release, at least a PTU release or so.[/QUOTE]
This is a bit unrelated to the specific topic of Citizencon, but [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report"]every Friday, including today, this page is updated with the progress towards getting 3.0 out the door.[/URL] It used to give projected timelines but as they got features complete and into bug-fixing, those deadlines started slipping harder than a soccer mom on an icy driveway, so now they give their burndown chart, which is to say how many bugs until the build is ready to advance to the next step towards release. They also give a detailed look at how the week went in the Thursday news show Around the Verse on their YT channel, including the burndown chart as it sits on Thursday afternoon.

More to the point of your post, next week, after they've had time to get home from the show, the schedule is going to be revamped with the short-term roadmap and info about 2018, and this was stated during the show. That's ultimately why the info wasn't discussed during the show.

[dai]

all the big spenders tend to buy a handful of smaller ships, or one big ship [i]with the goal of sharing a fleet with friends and guildmates[/i], and having options to tool around with for different activities/roles. Few people talk about being some all powerful pvp monster, and when they do it's usually some idiot boasting about having a kill-on-sight policy over a brand of ships because they're probably pirates, blissfully unaware of how you get marked a pirate by every normally friendly NPC and player

the game outside of the arena shooters (which are funded with currency earned in the arenas and is super easy to accumulate and buy stuff at dirt cheap equivalent prices) isn't some win/lose situation, it's a big open world mmo kinda shebang and the only winning you do is having fun doing stuff and going places. If you wanna be a badass ace dogfighter go and do it with your sleek military fighter, you're fighting a massive battle probably against a ton of alien or pirate NPCs on behalf of a military organization and it's all fair game.

Even then I don't think people buying the big junk are even gonna be able to do much with them out the starting gates, til they accumulate dosh and reputation to operate and get missions relevant to the ship and its costs. So many of the buggers are gonna be garage decorations to hang out with friends in, which to be fair is still pretty fun to do when you're not up to anything else

[Arnold]

I thought he was gonna climb out of the crate in the first video, disappointed.

[dai]

after several introductions and still no appearance, they discover someone forgot to put holes in the box

[waylander]

There has been so much feature creep with SC I think it's probably going to be a disaster when it finally launches with major overhype among the backers, glad I didn't back it I can enjoy it for what it is eventually

[paindoc]

[QUOTE=waylander;52829796]There has been so much feature creep with SC I think it's probably going to be a disaster when it finally launches with major overhype among the backers, glad I didn't back it I can enjoy it for what it is eventually[/QUOTE]

i mean it has feature and scope creep like a [I]motherfucker[/I], and that's why the date keeps getting pushed back since it's Chris "Scope Creep" Roberts leading the show

that being saiiidd, they've been super transparent throughout the dev process and part of the delay is really due to them seemingly really taking the time to nail down core "boring" systems like player-environment interaction, how artists can design levels, how animation is handled, how netcode is handled (not fucking awful), etc.

i can't think of any games of this scale that have had transparent dev processes. smaller games can take 5-6 years, so I'd say being at 5 years and getting ready to release a solid open-world demo is pretty okay. especially given how much rewriting of their engine they've had to do.

[editline]28th October 2017[/editline]

also despite seemingly shitting on Chris, his being able to actually pursue all the features we want may be really good. he's been neutered more than once by studio execs pushing for a release.

[Why485]

[QUOTE=Oicani Gonzales;52830043]this is star citizen's business model. the game is already "released", they just keep farming whales by releasing new ships.

the game will only actually come out once this is no longer profitable and it enters maintenance mode

:tinfoil:[/QUOTE]

Or Microsoft buys it, Chris ragequits the industry to make B movies, and then they tell everybody to stop what they're doing, polish what they have, and release a game.

[ulvemann43]

[QUOTE=Oicani Gonzales;52830043]this is star citizen's business model. the game is already "released", they just keep farming whales by releasing new ships.

the game will only actually come out once this is no longer profitable and it enters maintenance mode

:tinfoil:[/QUOTE]

When does an available alpha built constitute something being "released"?
They've never once defined the current SC PU as the game being released. It is a pretty early alpha build made out of very loose coding in order to give the backers something to sink their teeth into while the devs work on actually imlpementing their ideas in properly, which is what we will be getting the proper beginning of in the 3.0 patch that right now is going through QA and testing by a small portion of the community.

Someone on reddit even mentioned that they are pretty ahead of schedule right now, since some of the stuff shown off yesterday was not supposed to be started until the end of this year/start of next year, aparently.

[Splarg]

Is there a good source that summarizes what you can do in this game at the moment and also what their goal is?

The stuff in the keynote was cool but have they said how many city areas like that there are going to be and what all you can do in each of them? Will they be unique and created by hand or are there going to be a lot of them so that they need a certain degree of procedural generation?

Sorry if this is in the videos but it seems like a lot of stuff and I'm having trouble getting an idea of the scope of the game.

[paindoc]

[QUOTE=Splarg!;52831208]Is there a good source that summarizes what you can do in this game at the moment and also what their goal is?

The stuff in the keynote was cool but have they said how many city areas like that there are going to be and what all you can do in each of them? Will they be unique and created by hand or are there going to be a lot of them so that they need a certain degree of procedural generation?

Sorry if this is in the videos but it seems like a lot of stuff and I'm having trouble getting an idea of the scope of the game.[/QUOTE]

to answer the cities question, afaik it looks like the approach is like what they do with planets: procedural content designed to assist the artists and designers in making more content, but not to be the sole generation method. it'll probably still appear a bit procedural, but not in a remarkably plain and boring way

[Splarg]

The procedurally generated coruscant-looking stuff in between places where you can land is fine is cool as the places where the gameplay is are hand-crafted and there's actually stuff to do there.

So that's why I'm wondering like, are these unique places and you'll be able to know about all of them, or is the populated area the size of the bubble in Elite? Cuz if there are too many gameplay areas to make them unique that gets a lot less compelling.