Star Citizen Megathread v. procedurally-generated deadlines - Games

It's been over a week and I'm not even close to 50% of the download. I'd rather just wait 3-4 months till I get Fiber connection, or else I'm going to just constantly download patches meanwhile.

[QUOTE=The bird Man;51701560]It's been over a week and I'm not even close to 50% of the download. I'd rather just wait 3-4 months till I get Fiber connection, or else I'm going to just constantly download patches meanwhile.[/QUOTE] Today's Happy Hour confirmed that delta patching is live (for testing) internally, and they're making it work first for the devs before they deploy it to the public. Hopefully they won't delay the launcher update until 3.0 if it's ready to go first.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51701617]Today's Happy Hour confirmed that delta patching is live (for testing) internally, and they're making it work first for the devs before they deploy it to the public. Hopefully they won't delay the launcher update until 3.0 if it's ready to go first.[/QUOTE] Please stop. My dick can only become so erect.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51701617]Today's Happy Hour confirmed that delta patching is live (for testing) internally, and they're making it work first for the devs before they deploy it to the public. Hopefully they won't delay the launcher update until 3.0 if it's ready to go first.[/QUOTE] My God, I might actually consider playing again for the first time since Arena Commander first dropped.

I bet it was high on their priority list as they realized the size of 3.0 and any following updates. I can only imagine that 3.0 will be quite sizable. And, we're supposed to get it in Q1, right? I'm not sure if I'm optimistic.

I hope if they do a physical release on launch, Star Citizen comes on an SSD, since I bet it will be at least 100gb

[QUOTE=revan740;51702355]I bet it was high on their priority list as they realized the size of 3.0 and any following updates.[/QUOTE] They've been talking about working on delta patching for like a year. It may tie in with StarNetwork 1.0, but we'll probably hear about it fairly soon, once they get things firmed up on the internal launcher builds. CIG predicted approximately three months between major patches, which would put 3.0 around the end of March. As of now, the FPCORP 2017 ship census has the following results for the question "When will Alpha 3.0 go live (not PTU)?" [QUOTE]1 - February 7 - March 5 - April 6 - May 4 - June 3 - July 5 - August 1 - October 3 - November 3 - 2018 or later --- 38 responses[/QUOTE]

So many hopeful people. I wish I had their pure belief and optimism. I wouldn't expect it before summer.

The design aesthetic for the BMM is amazing. [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/8uzp1c0906q2vr/source/Banu_Merchantman_Corridor_Habitation-2.jpg[/t]

2.6.1 is predicted for the 16th of Feb [i]at the moment[/i], but 2.6.2 is what I'm looking forward to (region servers and faster loading) Also [b]grenade indicators[/b]

In that Pirate Swarm video, they showed off hair and new faces (thank fuck), and they said they're going through some final QA. Are we supposed to be getting females/male faces and hair in 3.0?

[QUOTE=Intoxicated Spy;51702478]I hope if they do a physical release on launch, Star Citizen comes on an SSD, since I bet it will be at least 100gb[/QUOTE] Some of the original backer packages do have a physical item of the game coming on a spaceship shaped thumb drive: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/uULuVLs.png[/IMG]

I mean, there are USB Sticks with 128 GB of space so it's not unrealistic in a year or two.

So I've been trying to find a ship to 3D print for a while now, and finally decided to shoot for giving the sexy sexy Polaris a shot. I ripped the .ctm from the website, performed a lot of repair work on it using meshlab, and tried to prepare it for printing. No dice. Turns out that this is sort of a problem: [t]http://i.imgur.com/3AV2mut.png[/t] I'm doing this using our super fancy resin printer at work, so this is really a problem to print. The machine can't decide wtf to do with this region, and since resin printers use a big pool of liquid areas that liquid can pool when the part is slowly lifted out of the bath are really bad (because these can be activated incidentally, can remain in the part when its finished and the resin is toxic, and other reasons). Not sure what to do now. Most of the models that can be ripped from the holoviewer have issues like this. Some of them are just too complex and have all of their internal geometry intact, and there's no real way to fill those in. I'm trying to figure out what I can do here, but I'm not sure what I can do tbh. I'm going to take a swipe at using meshmixer to fill in the voids by hand, but that's slow and will require another few runs of cleanup + simplificiation :/ One of these days, 3D printing will be just "choose model and print" but for now its absolutely not that. And I haven't even gone into the model I'm trying to prepare for printing on our car-sized FDM machine. [editline]26th January 2017[/editline] not to mention that just merging close vertices, removing unused vertices, and merging a number of faces and performing the lightest of simplification passes cuts the complexity by 2/3. So I'm guessing its a Super-WIP model that was uploaded as a placeholder to the website.

[video=youtube;sMD-t1OjGys]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMD-t1OjGys[/video] [video=youtube;P6OhbNnoPKY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6OhbNnoPKY[/video] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/15684-Showdown-Economic-Imbalance"]This week's lore post is economy talk.[/URL]

Holy shit, those planetside outposts. Just seeing planets in this game makes it look so much cooler. It's like Mass Effect but with a lot less stuff faked. God I can't wait. On that note, I also kind of wish there was some equivalence to Biotics from Mass Effect.

@elixwhitetail damn the landscape at 2:50 in the first video looks awesome. I'd play this game just to explore the different planets, a lot more interesting than flying a ship around in the dark void of empty space imo. =P

The planetside outposts look really blocky, and if a majority of smaller settlements are going to be using that same set I think it's going to get old really quickly.

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;51763326]The planetside outposts look really blocky, and if a majority of smaller settlements are going to be using that same set I think it's going to get old really quickly.[/QUOTE] Freelancer copy/pasted stations all over the place and it was fine and makes sense in the context of the universe as those things are prefabs that get put together in different ways. Unless a game takes it to a completely ridiculous degree I don't think I've ever had much of a problem with that.

[QUOTE=Why485;51763407]Freelancer copy/pasted stations all over the place and it was fine and makes sense in the context of the universe as those things are prefabs that get put together in different ways. Unless a game takes it to a completely ridiculous degree I don't think I've ever had much of a problem with that.[/QUOTE] I think the absolute best use of prefab stuff is X: Rebirth's stations. They're all made of prefab parts slapped together, but they're [I]fantastically[/I] detailed and there's a huge array of parts including parts for specific station types (i.e. steel fabs have giant heat radiators and molten metal refineries), so everything looks totally unique. There's also one-off stations with bespoke geometry for important or plot-relevant areas. [t]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/538502649161459177/BC9B56E8641BB59AB5AE3A2121DC7198119D06BE/[/t][t]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/710780552623889232/0088001AA9472C8628CB5109CB0CE81782571EE2/[/t][t]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/23990199388866702/6630210593DF30CC2596FEC626B8B7BFBFDABECC/[/t][t]http://i.imgur.com/KYtYz1P.jpg[/t] If there's anything that XR excels at, it's making stations feel alive. They all feel like cities that grew organically, and have dynamic 'flying car' traffic that moves around them like in The Fifth Element. If SC can get even half that detail, I'll be happy. As long as you have enough bits and pieces, prefab is fine.

[QUOTE=Why485;51763407]Freelancer copy/pasted stations all over the place and it was fine and makes sense in the context of the universe as those things are prefabs that get put together in different ways. Unless a game takes it to a completely ridiculous degree I don't think I've ever had much of a problem with that.[/QUOTE] Stations are a bit different and from what I can see they're doing a good job on those, but the planetary bases they showed in the videos pretty much look like high poly, sci-fi Minecraft cubes that I can just imagine having super generic interiors that just snap together and every room feels the same. If the interiors reflect anything like the exteriors look, they'll feel very copy/paste. And I'm not arguing the fact that they're all made of prefabs, that's fine from a lore perspective, artistically I just think they're a bit bland as opposed to a lot of other Star Citizen things. [editline]2nd February 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Saber15;51763493]I think the absolute best use of prefab stuff is X: Rebirth's stations. They're all made of prefab parts slapped together, but they're [I]fantastically[/I] detailed and there's a huge array of parts including parts for specific station types (i.e. steel fabs have giant heat radiators and molten metal refineries), so everything looks totally unique. There's also one-off stations with bespoke geometry for important or plot-relevant areas. If there's anything that XR excels at, it's making stations feel alive. They all feel like cities that grew organically, and have dynamic 'flying car' traffic that moves around them like in The Fifth Element. If SC can get even half that detail, I'll be happy. As long as you have enough bits and pieces, prefab is fine.[/QUOTE] Rebirth had a great art style and no matter where you went it never felt 'same-y', I just hope they carry the art style on to X4 but ditch the terrible gameplay. One thing I found lacking in Rebirth was alien architecture, which I am sure SC is going to deliver on.

Every normal space station in Crusader, and most of GrimHex, is built from the Shubin mining station prop set. [t]https://i.imgur.com/HTqSPQr.jpg[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/ZLyh2Em.jpg[/t] And Argo (the station) has got some detail and complexity, so if that's the extreme end of CIG's station-building skills, I think we'll be okay.

is there some lore behind the tethered asteroids there and at grimhex? Is it like, some sort of system that pushes them around to act as big meatshields against other asteroid impacts in these debris fields? Obviously just being a big ol' rock on a rope does nothing but eventually draw the things in (unless the entire station is keeping them at-length with centripetal force), but there's power conduits and weird armatures along the length of the cables we can see at GH

As I understand it, they're tethers to keep the asteroids in place so mining skids from the station don'thave far to go/valuable minerals don't drift off while nobody's watching. [t]http://starcitizens.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AsteroidTetherPointConcept_001.jpg[/t] Concept art's existed for years. [video=youtube;qIKH7HnIlgI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIKH7HnIlgI[/video] [video=youtube;fK5EAB8gwJM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK5EAB8gwJM[/video]

[video=youtube;ziRC5X4Sta4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziRC5X4Sta4[/video] [video=youtube;vUlKk2VfspU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUlKk2VfspU[/video] [video=youtube;ctxgVRjXtj8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctxgVRjXtj8[/video] [video=youtube;DK91ihQH5WQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK91ihQH5WQ[/video] And the previous one since I forgot to link it. [video=youtube;Q52nm5Sn1sk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q52nm5Sn1sk[/video] [video=youtube;EBbmittLvv8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBbmittLvv8[/video] Lore-wise, [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/15700-Congress-Now-The-Kossi-Amendment"]Suj Kossi starts stirring shit up about the continued plundering of Tevarin artifacts from Kabal III (which is currently UEE-military restricted).[/URL] Last week was [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/15692-DISCOVERED"]a story about the discovery of the final fate of a long-wrecked ship.[/URL] The Vault dump is the WIP of Hurston's landing zone. [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/x37d4u3sjdvqcr/source/OuterDistricts_PreVis_002.jpg[/t] [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/cd7ltjvoc44pjr/source/Hurston_OuterDistricts_v002.jpg[/t] [B]2.6.1a is on PTU for Wave 1 and 2[/B] after going to Evocati a day or so ago. [URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/5ssabq/ptu_261_patch_notes/"]Evocati build's patch notes on Reddit.[/URL] [URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/5t2h3z/261_on_ptu_wave_12/ddjm27z/"]2.6.1a patch highlights[/URL]

Yay, got a PTU invite for once

[video=youtube;ta0h_9-F_TA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta0h_9-F_TA[/video] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15704-Monthly-Studio-Report"]Monthly report's out.[/URL] Also, the PTU is now open to all backers. CIG is likely to push 2.6.1 to live next week. [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15705-February-2947-Subscriber-Flair"]The monthly subscriber flair is out:[/URL] [IMG]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/ee56fvl5l7qfvr/source/Flair_201702_tears-Of-Fire.jpg[/IMG] "Tears of Fire", depicting the remaining loyalist Tevarin fleet plunging into the atmosphere of their homeworld in suicidal defeat at the end of the Second Tevarin War.

is it just me or is the cutlass now comically large? [img]http://puu.sh/tY8z3.png[/img] I'm sure some people will appreciate the upgrade but I got this thing because I wanted [I]light[/I] multipurpose, not a competitor to the freelancer or connie [editline]11th February 2017[/editline] you could basically stand up and walk around in that turret :v:

the update feels like it's going to be a third entry that sits in the vicinity of the vanguard and higher end freelancers. Also I really hope there's an upstairs accessway like the retaliator Right now the only multipurpose oriented ships smaller than it are the avenger and reliant, and if you want to get into it the vanguard is going to have smaller space for the BUKs than the new cutlass interior provides (smaller than the current cut as well). Cut will likely rise in price to somewhere above the hoplite if they don't want to piss off vanguard owners Reliant feels like it was scaled down oddly, the interior is much smaller than the concepts showed (with space for a full airlock and spacesuit locker between a vertical habitation door and the back ramp), and definely can't carry the still-mentioned amount of cargo units. If it doesn't expand in size as they begin building the interior kits (and realizing the scale is terrible), I'd be surprised. The question would be if they'd scale the entire ship to keep its proportions (its current footprint is the size of a cutlass [rotated 90 degrees]), or if they'd actually spend the time whiteboxing it, which though obviously isn't a foreign concept with older ships, would be a terrible move for such a newly developed bugger

New update gives me nearly completely smooth gameplay now, few lag spikes here and there, but in general, it's a really enjoyable play now. Only downside thus far is that there's only 2 people in a Star Marine server here in Australia, hopefully that will change once it's out of PTU. PU is also just as smooth, and as long as they don't screw up anything when adding new content in 3.0, StarNetwork should pretty much solve the remaining lag I hope. Swapped from Medium to High graphics too and it still runs really nicely. Regional servers are awesome. Grenade indicators are also great, such a small added feature makes the game feel so much closer to completion.