Star Citizen Megathread - Star Marine isn't doomed after all! - Games

[video=youtube;JBpHLULgJfE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBpHLULgJfE[/video] PC Gamer's podcast covers their experiences in the freefly, starting at around 14:40. [video=youtube;Ap2XTEgY4X8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap2XTEgY4X8[/video] [video=youtube;sQEVxFS3vxw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQEVxFS3vxw[/video] [URL="http://imperialnews.network/2016/10/october-subscriber-town-hall-summary/"]INN summary[/URL] [QUOTE]- Today’s Town Hall featured Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, and Eric Kieron Davis. During the CitizenCon demo Sean said they get the colour of the sky for free, he expanded on that by saying that now there’s an actual sun that sheds light and then from there to atmosphere conditions determine what you see: Cloudy, clear, etc. - When asked about procedural generation and more exotic geometry they said it’s absolutely possible. Currently they view the procedural tech as building the canvas for them and then allowing artists to go in put in some details and create some unique places on the planets that stand out. 90% procedural, 10% Artists, but the 10% is what makes it special. - The state of the female avatar is that they’re currently working through the male clothing and fitting it for the female sculpt and the biggest thing is the animations. Sean said there’s about 6000 animations for the male, several which we either haven’t seen or aren’t in the PU yet, so it’s a lot of work to make her come to life. Sean also talked about how yeah they could simply make females the same height and boom, female avatars tomorrow, but females have different proportions and they didn’t want to take the easy way out. - The amount of cores you have will benefit you in Star Citizen now and into the future. Speed is still king currently, but as their tech comes online and their parallelization becomes more efficient, having more cores will benefit you greatly than simply having the “Fastest” processor.[/QUOTE]

Honestly, I would much prefer handcrafted worlds to procedural generation, but with the size of each planet, this seems like a good balance. I just hope they have enough stuff to do in the expanse on these planets, being mining, hunting NPCs, or even building perhaps.

[QUOTE=AnonymaPizza;51266219]Honestly, I would much prefer handcrafted worlds to procedural generation, but with the size of each planet, this seems like a good balance. I just hope they have enough stuff to do in the expanse on these planets, being mining, hunting NPCs, or even building perhaps.[/QUOTE] I'm positive that there will be more than enough handcrafted locations to balance out all the procedural generation stuff.

anything meant for players to actually visit and interact with is going to need and have human intervention to set up, the procedural just lays the groundwork of the planet's natural features since it'd be impossible to manage even a single small planet's topography with anything less. Glad they understand that as well

snip

[QUOTE=jonoPorter;51266302]I'm positive that there will be more than enough handcrafted locations to balance out all the procedural generation stuff.[/QUOTE] Problem with that is, if the scale of the planet is realistic, there is no way you'll be able to find, say, 200 different structures by walking alone. The recent trailer was only roughlly 8km. I just hope there's some form of emergent gameplay, like fighting players over resources, or perhaps building ground bases or scavenging crashed ships. I'm probably wanting too much.

They're doing procgen with brushes, which is still better for creating interesting terrain and content than procedurally generating the whole thing in one go. Procedural brushes for terrain and textures have been common for a while now, and with good reason.

[video=youtube;JqMsyLfItVw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqMsyLfItVw[/video] [vid]http://i.imgur.com/Cs39K3i.mp4[/vid] Notice the lightcasting on the distant planet. It's really not a skybox but an actual giant glowing light source in space.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51270991][vid]http://i.imgur.com/Cs39K3i.mp4[/vid] Notice the lightcasting on the distant planet. It's really not a skybox but an actual giant glowing light source in space.[/QUOTE] Came here to post this... it looks so good!

[t]http://i.imgur.com/Lzjr2WV.png[/t] Procgen planet clouds have shadowcasting. :drool:

yes they mentioned the clouds are casting shadows but also affecting light illumination ... in short they take correct approach on how utilize Cloud layer(s) vs global lightsources (like near stars) it's something I really wanted in our engine so I must applaud and nod only while envy drooling ;)

I intensely enjoy the visual detail in the game.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51270991] [vid]http://i.imgur.com/Cs39K3i.mp4[/vid] Notice the lightcasting on the distant planet. It's really not a skybox but an actual giant glowing light source in space.[/QUOTE] I was going to say that they were sprites based on the moon disappearing during citizen con, however they mentioned dynamically loading objects in, which looks like the case.

[QUOTE=Ithon;51271212]I was going to say that they were sprites based on the moon disappearing during citizen con, however they mentioned dynamically loading objects in, which looks like the case.[/QUOTE] During the editor demo live on stage at Citizencon Sean Tracy said "that's not a sprite" right before the Gladius jumped from one planet directly to another, atmo to atmo, to prove it wasn't being faked. We already knew this.

How is the fall 2016 free fly so far? I still have 1.5 gigs to download

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51271259]During the editor demo live on stage at Citizencon Sean Tracy said "that's not a sprite" right before the Gladius jumped from one planet directly to another, atmo to atmo, to prove it wasn't being faked. We already knew this.[/QUOTE] I thought for a while until my change in thought, that it was a sprite as part of a LOD, like a tree.

the gameplay lag is unbearable at points but the game already has a lot of polish honestly though the worst thing about the game, and i hope they do something about this, is that the menus on some ships (mainly the freelancer in my experience) are so overly complicated it's almost counter-intuitive. for example if in the freelancer if you are the only one in your ship, you can't actually see the heat or ammo counter to your cannons unless you physically turn your head to look at the menu. if you don't have a trackir or other device you pretty much have to stop everything you're doing to look secondly the game has so many needless controls that just conflict with everything else. i play with an xbox 360 controller for flight and a mouse + keyboard for space combat/fps. but if i am shooting a ship my game will just randomly say "okay time to have your mouse turn in to head movement instead of ship movement" and you have to stop everything you're doing to fix it. truly annoying but i think a lot of these problems will be fixed when fps gets improved. i think a lot of my controls are getting confused because there's such a delay from what buttons i press and the response in the game

Isn't most of the lag caused by networking? I.e. if you play the game in offline mode, it works a whole lot better?

[QUOTE=FlandersNed;51291397]Isn't most of the lag caused by networking? I.e. if you play the game in offline mode, it works a whole lot better?[/QUOTE] yeah it's some weird bottleneck that's going to be stomped out in the next update or two, only affects the 'universe' gametypes so playing multiplayer in arena commander modes will give you some smoother times. Vanduul Swarm is probably the best primer for newbies once they get the hang of flight controls

The networking stuff is weird, yeah. Also the planets in this game and the general visuals are realllllllyyyy making me want to explore writing some procedural planets in OpenGL. After seeing the tech demo videos and the sort of terrain they had on planets, I've been going down the rabbit hole of academic papers on procedural generation of planets, terrain, stars, you name it. I'm more curious how they generate their biomes now, and what sort of parameters they use. Along with wanting to know the underlying noise function, since there are a good 4-5 base noise functions and then 6-7 variants of these that each use a base function. The neatest thing I've found so far is a technique you can use on gas giants: [t]http://i.imgur.com/mqCwMeI.gif[/t] The little jump/freeze at the start is how the gas giant starts: cloud bands all separated. A 3D noise function gives you point data in 3D space: this is like a function returning positions in 3D space. The derivative of a position function is a velocity function. Similarly, the derivative of a noise function isn't a noise value its the change in the noise value at that point. A 3D set of these values is a vector field: we then find the curl of this vector field. Curl is a mathematical operator, it essentially removes discontinuities so we get a continuous noise function without any obvious skips, jumps, gaps, etc. We then use the values in this big set to define rotational force, apply it to gas particles in this gas giant, and voila! You get realistic looking gas giants with swirling, rotating, evolving cloud layers. Math is crazy, yo. Also don't tell CIG about this they may actually try to add it :v:

nice work, any code samples ? blogs ? ;)

[QUOTE=Dwarden;51308514]nice work, any code samples ? blogs ? ;)[/QUOTE] This is a reddit post about this in particular: [url]https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2f6cl5/procedural_generation_of_gas_giant_planets/[/url] Its from the game "Space Nerds in Space": [url]https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space[/url] He also links slides there, and searching for "Curl Noise" will bring up lots of talk about it.

[video=youtube;9Xy5pz7V7rI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xy5pz7V7rI[/video] [video=youtube;heIm1-VsZeU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heIm1-VsZeU[/video] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/15583-DataCache-Future-Business"]This week's lore post involves someone trying to get their hands on stolen Xi'An data captured by a Herald,[/URL] seemingly related to the pressurized Xi'An research station in the atmosphere of [URL="https://starcitizen.tools/Pallas"]Pallas IV[/URL], a feat the UEE would desperately love to figure out how to replicate. [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15588-Super-Hornet-Super-Sale"]There's also a weekend sale on the SH since it's been unlocked for freefly a few times recently,[/URL] with 10% discounts if you pay with new cash instead of using any store credit. CCUs from other Hornets are also $10 off. And, if you're a subscriber, you can pick up a Starfarer or a Gemini with a 10% discount. As always, this disclaimer is at the bottom: [QUOTE]Remember: we are offering this pledge ship to help fund Star Citizen’s development. The funding generated by sales such as this is what allows us to include deeper features in the Star Citizen world. All ships will be available for in-game credits in the final universe, and they are not required to start the game.[/QUOTE] Meanwhile, the sale helped push us over the edge. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/krezCaS.png[/IMG] :poot: Other news of interest: - October monthly report is probably coming out today, Ben was working on the layout yesterday - If you didn't already catch it in AtV, CIG is conducting daily internal playtests of Star Marine - The anniversary livestream is confirmed for November 18th - The Esperia Prowler concept will finally be revealed for the "Intergalactic Aerospace Expo" on November 18th (meaning, the livestream); the lore name suggests that there [U]may[/U] be one or more other ship reveals, but this is 100% my speculation Also, during RtV today, since the focus was on mocap and animation, we heard a story about mocapping animations for the PU and how there are performances mocapped for a single person coming in to a ship store to buy a ship.. and then there are several captures of a [I]couple[/I] coming in to buy a ship. :v: [editline]4th November 2016[/editline] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15587-Monthly-Studio-Report"]Monthly report's up![/URL] Here's some of the eye candy. [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/nxc1zuznjfm7sr/source/Austin1.png[/t] [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/8cqldjpq5bjo0r/source/MROctober2016_ATX.png[/t] [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/x2ppllgdawtk0r/source/Weapons_02.png[/t] There's no public documentation on what kind of grenade the PM-3 is, yet. [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/c38mgm4jehq02r/source/Austin3.png[/t] So ready for the Herald. [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/l15n4x5cy0bk5r/source/SurfaceOutpost_Greybox.jpg[/t]

Is that the moon that Kareh orbits around in the Planetary Demo?

Likely, but the Homestead demo is the procgen planets transplanted into Stanton, just like how Levski was jammed into Stanton for every PG planet demo between Pupil to Planet and Gamescom. The desert planet belongs in Leir, and Levski obviously belongs in Nyx, but it'd be a massive waste to create entirely different star systems for them right now.

What is "Star Marine"?

[QUOTE=LennyPenny;51311997]What is "Star Marine"?[/QUOTE] Half life 3

Star Marine is a standalone fps gamemode within the game, just like Arena Commander is a standalone dogfighting gamemode. It was supposed to be finished last year but due to problems with their outsourcer, Illfonic, the work they got wasn't up to scratch and they moved it in-house since they'd hired like an extra 150 people in the meantime and didn't need an outsourcer anymore. It's in patch 2.6, the hotly-anticipated next patch which will hopefully enter at least limited public testing this month. It's currently in daily internal playtests, which is usually a good sign that something's close to ready, and the anniversary livestream is in two weeks so they may be trying to get it ready for then. But we'll see.

What was the demo they were planning to show at CitizenCon but couldn't meet the deadline?

[QUOTE=Ott;51315009]What was the demo they were planning to show at CitizenCon but couldn't meet the deadline?[/QUOTE] Squadron 42.