Star Citizen Megathread v. procedurally-generated deadlines - Games

Taking a break from star marine, the new flight model isn't good. It's extremely boost/ab focused with ships going 160m/s normally then 800m/s under afterburner, with fuel that doesnt even regenerate on the ships i've tested unless you stay still (normal thrust uses fuel now too). The game often wastes your time and fuel by forcibly braking you because you had slightly too little to reach top AB speed. I would have preferred just getting an 800 m/s speed cap with boost quickening acceleration. Previously jousting was only a problem for players without good strafe control, now it's more than that because only the rear thruster lets you bypass both the speed cap and gain the ridiculous AB acceleration, essentially we're now just ED with higher turning speed because you can only have your top speed in the forward direction. The result in combat is a lack of interesting counterplay, everything is so dependent on fuel so it's either you have fuel left and you can still dodge/follow your enemy or you dont and they either kill you while you cant dodge or they run away while you cant follow them. It's hard to even evaluate any of the other flight model changes because the afterburner's bad mechanics forces you to fight your own ship's computer's "safety programs" while trying to outmanuver people. Aside from the fuel issue, afterburner is sloppy, the imprecision in it means while escaping is easy while pursuit is hard, if you thought cruise mode made forcing engagment with people in the PU hard after burner is far worse. Then there's the missing UI, on the avenger your target, health, radar, weapons, all invisible to you. Originally i thought afterburner was a bad idea and hoped they'd notice and return to boost focus. Now the flight model is built around it. God damnit.

[QUOTE=Ott;51584720]Oh wow. So basically concentrated fire is the way to go.[/QUOTE] It's like a first person Mechwarrior. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] Messing around a little with the flight model in Arena Commander with a Freelancer, I like how the flight model works when afterburner isn't in play. With the afterburner though, I hate how it's such a "get out of trouble free" button. I hated that about Cruise mode as well. You shouldn't be able to just press a button and then within literally seconds be going 10X your speed and flying away from anything. You can't fight effectively at those speeds either and the whole thing just turns dumb. Many of the problems I have with the AB I already had with the way cruise worked, it's just now one button instead. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] Honestly I don't really like Star Citizen's space combat all the much and I really never have. They need to commit to [I]something[/I] and go all out in that direciton, because right now it's a wishy washy mess of a traditional space sim like Wing Commander/Freespace/X-Wing, and a 6DOF arena shooter like Descent. The problem is that Chris wants the former, and (most of?) the community wants the latter.

[QUOTE=Why485;51585270] With the afterburner though, I hate how it's such a "get out of trouble free" button. I hated that about Cruise mode as well. You shouldn't be able to just press a button and then within literally seconds be going 10X your speed and flying away from anything. You can't fight effectively at those speeds either and the whole thing just turns dumb. Many of the problems I have with the AB I already had with the way cruise worked, it's just now one button instead. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] Honestly I don't really like Star Citizen's space combat all the much and I really never have. They need to commit to [I]something[/I] and go all out in that direciton, because right now it's a wishy washy mess of a traditional space sim like Wing Commander/Freespace/X-Wing, and a 6DOF shooter arena shooter like Descent. [/QUOTE] I think half the problems with the boost mode could be solved by either tying it to shields like X: Rebirth, or just making it Freelancer's cruise mode, where you press a button, and your drive starts spooling to take you up to cruise velocity. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] I haven't [I]really[/I] been able to experience the flight changes because my 300i's handling is so fucked that it turns the game into even more of a turnfighter than Elite. I spent two minutes trying to track a Scythe while we were both spinning around. It's like the original Halo CE and banshee battles.

[QUOTE=Saber15;51585419]I think half the problems with the boost mode could be solved by either tying it to shields like X: Rebirth, or just making it Freelancer's cruise mode, where you press a button, and your drive starts spooling to take you up to cruise velocity. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] I haven't [I]really[/I] been able to experience the flight changes because my 300i's handling is so fucked that it turns the game into even more of a turnfighter than Elite. I spent two minutes trying to track a Scythe while we were both spinning around. It's like the original Halo CE and banshee battles.[/QUOTE] I am a big fan of the Freelancer method of cruise engines. It makes you vulnerable for a short time, and you can't use it to instantly escape combat. Freelancer also had cruise disruptors to both prevent people from using cruise and to bring them out of it.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51578746]They've been focusing on one star system for now because building multiple systems means duplicating work if you go ahead and change some underlying thing about the system, because now you have to correct it in each instance. Make it work, then make it fancy. They intend on 100+ systems, and the way they're going about building their prop sets and engine support for procgen planets and star systems means that, once they have the tech in place and can focus on pumping out content, things should be [I]relatively[/I] rapid to move from there. This is a bit long, but to explain in more detail, SC's devs are building out multiple different architectural sets of props and set pieces. The result is that, like LEGO sets, the parts can be quickly assembled into tons of distinct shapes and produce a wide variety of structures. The system also has colour tinting and wear/tear support built in, so going from a perfectly pristine and clean space station wall piece to a grungy scuffed and spraypainted derelict station panel is a matter of a couple sliders and a vandalism spraypaint decal or two. The Revel & York luxury hangar uses pieces from the high-end luxury prop set: So does the TDD Jobwell mission center in the Area 18 landing zone on ArcCorp: Same pieces, different assembly and presentation. This same system of kitbashing sets from shared prop collections extends to building entire space stations and planetside locations. Generating unique-looking planets also takes less time than you'd expect because of their crazy powerful procedural biome and fine-detail sculpting tools. [URL="https://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen/v/94032328?t=13m52s"]Check out this ten-minute live demo of the editor from Citizencon in October.[/URL] This editor allowed [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdCFTF8j7yI"]the procedural planet used in the Citizencon demo for 3.0[/URL] to be made by one artist in a couple days. The editor is similarly powerful for establishing the conditions in space, and their procedural asteroid tech is close to coming online, allowing asteroid belts to go from thousands of tediously hand-placed roids to millions of procedurally-created rocks in the same space. [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap"]The starmap[/URL] shows the known star systems that are intended to be available at launch, with lots of lore already filled in. The lore team consults with astrophysicists and other experts to make sure the science is as accurate as possible, although it should be noted that decisions will favour cool/fun over realism if it makes for a better game. I believe that their concentration on building out both the foundations of the game as well as building powerful procedural generation tools that are meant to be artist-driven means that the star system content side of things is in good hands. Once they can change focus to the star systems and they've got things refined from practice with the Stanton system, they should be able to flood the content channel with new places to go. Chris is on-camera as stating that a month's worth of hull insurance (which I take to mean enough insurance to cover you for a calendar month of semi-casual play) will cost less than the reward for one mission. The ultimate implementation of insurance and mission rewards may not end up matching that perfectly, but I'm confident it'll still deliver on the promise of being trivially cheap. [I]Equipment[/I] insurance, which protects the aftermarket upgrades you attach to your ship to replace the bottom-tier stock equipment, now that's going to be substantially more expensive, and that is all we know about it so far. There will be some sort of method of insuring the contents of your cargo hold as well but that's entirely TBA.[/QUOTE] I wasn't fully aware they were kitbashing most of their stations/outposts. The very little I've played of the game so far (I havn't left the spawn station on the PU, and I've played much of anything else just due to the extreme lag) I thought a lot of the stations and stuff were designed to be totally unique, much like some of the ships. From some of the other trailers they have shown (an asteroid base and that crashed ship on the planet) I thought they were designing each thing from scratch. There's still the 4 or 5 other alien races they have to develop as well. While I'm sure they will get there eventually, I don't think a complete(ish) 2020 release is on the table. [editline]27th December 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51579405]That business of standing around and lining up for a shooting gallery was all "scripted" (in the sense that both sides were definitely acting out a scenario instead of playing a pure match uninterrupted), but the point is that all the footage was captured in live gameplay using the new cinematic camera. Here's random unscripted gameplay footage I found on YouTube. Match starts around 1:15 in after everyone's loaded up. [editline]24th December 2016[/editline] Golden Ticket holders (along with the rest of us) still have not yet discovered what the reward will be for holding a ticket. No additional bennies have been added to tickets, although I believe they may have had priority for getting invites to Alpha 2.0.0 PTU when CIG began opening invite waves to more than just active testers but backers by citizen number -- don't quote me on this, because my memory's fuzzy, but if [I]anything[/I] has come to ticketholders in the last two years it'd be that. All the cool stuff being shown is for everybody.[/QUOTE] I'd really like to know how someone manages to get the game to run that smooth. I've disabled Mo Blur, but it's pretty unplayable.

400 kb/s is not fun

The Vanduul, Xi'An, and Tevarin are partially if not fully complete, leaving the Banu still needing their culture, ship designs, and character model sets to be finished. The crashed ships on planets were done by hand from stock ships manually torn down, but they also took less time than expected to put together because of the strength and flexibility of their tools and ship model process. The crashed Starfarer scene was made by one dev in one day. Development is further along than you think, I feel. It's not on the verge of completion, to be sure, but they have more going on than what is immediately visible in one demo. What are your computer's specs, Hayden?

[QUOTE=Korro Bravin;51582990]That's the outlaw armour set, the visibility is kinda bad but it looks badass[/QUOTE] Who needs good visibility when you look bad ass.

[QUOTE=CarnolfMeatla;51585895]Who needs good visibility when you look bad ass.[/QUOTE] It doesn't matter if you can look at others as long as everyone else wants to look at you :v:

Is there a way to upgrade ship component in pu? I get 1 shotted by any npc with the aurora

[QUOTE=The bird Man;51585711]400 kb/s is not fun[/QUOTE] not as horrible as never being able to fully download the update, delete, reinstall, doesn't matter.

[QUOTE=alx12345;51586185]Is there a way to upgrade ship component in pu? I get 1 shotted by any npc with the aurora[/QUOTE] The new menus have an option to customize the loadout of your ship before loading in. You can also change parts on the landing pad by walking around your ship and interacting with the blue dots on the hardpoints. Right now there isn't a way of buying ship equipment using Alpha UEC so there's no way of earning ship parts in-game yet, but it's an eventuality. In 2.5, you couldn't use REC rental gear in the PU, but I'm not sure if that's the same now. Likely, but I can't confirm. [editline]26th December 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Ithon;51586250]not as horrible as never being able to fully download the update, delete, reinstall, doesn't matter.[/QUOTE] The patch notes explicitly say to use a VPN to finish the download if it gets stuck at the very end. Which is dumb, but they clearly don't intend that to be permanent.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51585772]The Vanduul, Xi'An, and Tevarin are partially if not fully complete, leaving the Banu still needing their culture, ship designs, and character model sets to be finished. The crashed ships on planets were done by hand from stock ships manually torn down, but they also took less time than expected to put together because of the strength and flexibility of their tools and ship model process. The crashed Starfarer scene was made by one dev in one day. Development is further along than you think, I feel. It's not on the verge of completion, to be sure, but they have more going on than what is immediately visible in one demo. What are your computer's specs, Hayden?[/QUOTE] Windows 7 x64 8GB RAM Intel Core i5-4690K AMD Radeon R9 280

Your machine is almost identical to mine but with less RAM and a bit of a better GPU. You should get reasonably playable performance in Arena Commander, and the PU is going to be fairly crap but it's because of netcode and server performance so it's not tied to your hardware as much.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51586526]Your machine is almost identical to mine but with less RAM and a bit of a better GPU. You should get reasonably playable performance in Arena Commander, and the PU is going to be fairly crap but it's because of netcode and server performance so it's not tied to your hardware as much.[/QUOTE] Yeah I've given up on the PU until at least 3.0, is performance in Arena Commander also somewhat dependent on connection speeds?

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51586252] In 2.5, you couldn't use REC rental gear in the PU, but I'm not sure if that's the same now. Likely, but I can't confirm. [/QUOTE] you could always use REC equipment in the PU, but not ships since persistence 2.0 or whatever that was

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;51586571]Yeah I've given up on the PU until at least 3.0, is performance in Arena Commander also somewhat dependent on connection speeds?[/QUOTE] Not that I'm aware of, at least not significant enough to impact performance compared to graphics and CPU. The reason the PU has such terrible performance is that the PU has such a large volume that tracking the players, AI, and debris across the whole space, while Arena Commander has a very small space and limited amounts of objects to simulate. Make sure you shut down as much as possible so Windows isn't having to shove other programs to disk swap to make room. If I'm dumb and leave Chrome open for days and then run SC without shutting Chrome down, the game will bog down to one frame every six seconds while swapping shit to disk.

I'm a little uninformed here, but can someone explain why speed caps are a good idea for gameplay? I mean, isn't the whole allure to space travel in general is that there's 0 drag and velocity is irrelevant? I mean, Earth is moving 170-280 km/s relative to the Milky Way, and its galaxy cluster is moving at 0.2% the speed of light. Really the only limit there should be is acceleration.

Because combat flat out wouldn't work anymore and people would all just be zipping around at 1km/s at a minimum, jousting at best, never really getting into combat of any sort at worst because it'd be such an inconvenience to slow down for it. [editline]27th December 2016[/editline] You'd have to make Star Citizen a [I]completely[/I] different game with weapons that work very differently from now to make such an idea even workable. Think missiles and beam lasers fired from beyond visual range. It could be done, but it's not the kind of game Star Citizen is trying to be.

[QUOTE=Why485;51587780]Because combat flat out wouldn't work anymore and people would all just be zipping around at 1km/s at a minimum, jousting at best, never really getting into combat of any sort at worst.[/QUOTE] Says people who haven't played the ICP. Jousting only becomes a real issue when the speed cap is different for each direction as it forces people to use their rear thrusters to reach top speed which are by necessity pointed in the opposite direction as the guns. jousting in other situations is a controls/learning to play issue. One issue with coupled mode in the default keybindings is a lack of reverse thrust, for example.

I [I]did[/I] play ICP. I followed that game daily, posted on the forums, and played ICP for the length that it was up. It's a very different game from Star Citizen and what Star Citizen is trying to be. Don't get me wrong, it was fun and I liked it, but I don't want Star Citizen to be about shooting target boxes with ultra fast bullets kilometers away from each other and neither does Chris Roberts. [editline]27th December 2016[/editline] To be honest, Star Citizen was already approaching that due to the speed creep and the way the ships/weapons used to be before this patch, and it's a part of the reason I stopped playing. Maybe you have different expectations of this game than I do, but that's not what I signed up for.

[QUOTE=Ott;51587751]I'm a little uninformed here, but can someone explain why speed caps are a good idea for gameplay? I mean, isn't the whole allure to space travel in general is that there's 0 drag and velocity is irrelevant? I mean, Earth is moving 170-280 km/s relative to the Milky Way, and its galaxy cluster is moving at 0.2% the speed of light. Really the only limit there should be is acceleration.[/QUOTE] Too fast and you break the engine. Too fast and everything is relativistic jousts with no time to react. Too fast and you can't be interdicted. Too fast and you have no chance to see the lovingly-made terrains and atmospheres as you blast past. Too fast and you have no chance to avoid shit in the way (and you may be going so fast that the next frame the server's able to calculate and physicalize you in, you're already inside the obstacle). It's a mix of balance, fun, and technical limitations. The caps may not be at their best places, but there's gotta be one somewhere.

[QUOTE=Why485;51587877]I [I]did[/I] play ICP. I followed that game daily, posted on the forums, and played ICP for the length that it was up. It's a very different game from Star Citizen and what Star Citizen is trying to be. Don't get me wrong, it was fun and I liked it, but I don't want Star Citizen to be about shooting target boxes with ultra fast bullets kilometers away from each other and neither does Chris Roberts.[/QUOTE] You can change combat distance while maintaining the same system and gameplay feel by changing ship acceleration and bullet speed (and ship size but...). That would nullify any issue about shooting distant target boxes with fast bullets. The whole point here is that top speed isn't the relevant factor in that system. (bullet velocity)/(acceleration) = (average engagement distance) So it seems this would be compatible with your expectations unless you have a different complaint. [sp]Jousting complaints that don't understand jousting are my trigger. [/sp]

I get what you're saying because the main mod that I played and contributed to in Freelancer upped speeds across the board for everything (ships, guns, missiles, etc), as well as made space very slippery. I loved it, but I don't think it's the kind of game that plays well with a joystick or the kind of game Star Citizen wants to be. It turns into a sort of 6DOF shooter like Descent. Or, maybe that is what SC wants to be. Fuck if I know anymore. It seems to be what the community wants I guess, but CIG always seems to be making things up as they go and are tonally inconsistent in every aspect of how the game functions. That's why I say it's getting to the point where CIG needs to decide what they want this game to be and commit to it. This wishy washy mishmash of the two that does neither well is only going to continue to spiral out of control into something that nobody likes. Every aspect of this game is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

(for what its worth i don't really expect them to go the ICP route either, i just wanted to argue about JOUSTING. Just hoping they don't stick with the current afterburner focused model) [QUOTE=Mattk50;51584705]Did some testing with a buddy about star marine hp... results were not what i expected. Each body part has it's own HP pool, if any body part including arms and legs gets destroyed you die instantly. Head has 10hp, helmet type doesnt matter, torso has 30hp, arms and legs have something like 50hp each headshot is a 2 hit instant kill with every weapon in the game including laser, ballistic sidearm and uncharged sniper. My recommendation for winning every game effortlessly is using the laser rifle in burst mode and going exclusively for headshots. [/QUOTE] Recorded [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hTBj3ldZv8"]some gameplay[/URL] demonstrating how trivial it is to get a high score even if you can't aim using the laser rifle on burst. The current hitbox issues are quite noticeable in some firefights too.

Hmm, for $12 in sale it seems, I could upgrade my LTI Starfarer Gemini to a Carrack... should I? I was originally going to use her as a money earner in PU, but unsure due to operating costs and hullspace.

[URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1545588&p=51581121&viewfull=1#post51581121"]Delivering on this,[/URL] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5140Ig0.png[/IMG] Mattk50, Daemon White, and _Axel, please PM me your email address associated with your RSI account and your choice of [URL="http://i.imgur.com/D1M4zJE.png"]subscriber hangar decoration[/URL] or [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/extras"]any $5 item from this page.[/URL]

got to play a few minutes of star marine, that is janky and not as fun as I first imagined (first impression without knowing the controls). But my first kill was to float in space right above one of the exits to the outside, that was fun.

Yeah this game is really hounded by server issues. I can't wait for star network (or whatever they're calling it) to be in so it's actually reasonable to play it. I've been trying to connect to crusader for 5 minutes now :/

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/vYhLlIs.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5OuaVTo.png[/IMG] Daemon is weighing his options before deciding but has contacted me to claim his prize. Thanks for entering, everyone! [QUOTE=sabreman;51592173]Yeah this game is really hounded by server issues. I can't wait for star network (or whatever they're calling it) to be in so it's actually reasonable to play it. I've been trying to connect to crusader for 5 minutes now :/[/QUOTE] Are you on a SSD or HDD? And are you getting any particular error messages?