Star Citizen Megathread - Star Marine isn't doomed after all!
5,001 replies, posted
L is now a thing, hopefully stability doesn't shit the bed
Arena Commander Module:
Fixes:
Fixed an issue in Vanduul Swarm game mode, where ally weapon restocks were not happening at the end of the wave.
Social Module/Persistent Universe:
Fixes:
Gameplay
Fixed an issue where transitioning from zero-g to gravity zones would cause a player to take damage from falling or lose functionality.
Fixed an issue where the elevator terminal in ArcCorp and the Hangar would sometimes close without any player input.
Ships
Fixed an issue where the Hornet and Constellation were using the same shield set.
Fixed an issue where the Constellation Andromeda and Retaliator were not being repaired when landing on the large landing pad.
Environment
Fixed an issue where the weapons fire was drastically offset from weapons while the ship was in flight.
Technical
Fixed several server-side performance issues.
Implemented some additional fixes for the server performance bottleneck that would happen at extremely high instance activity.
I bet it will be up to zz till I get access to PTU or even 2.0.
I'd be keen to join also.
You're welcome to add me on Steam.
[url]https://www.instagram.com/p/_IgOT_zFxG/[/url]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/mNlfAVo.png[/t]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/A9yPynY.png[/t]
not sure if it's a hint we're nearing public 2.0, or just a general "hey this is in the upcoming 2.0 content!"
[QUOTE=dai;49291141][url]https://www.instagram.com/p/_IgOT_zFxG/[/url]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/mNlfAVo.png[/t]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/A9yPynY.png[/t]
not sure if it's a hint we're nearing public 2.0, or just a general "hey this is in the upcoming 2.0 content!"[/QUOTE]
In RSI chat there's some mentioned possibilities that they'll either invite more people tomorrow, or perhaps even push to Live, so I guess they're starting to feel close atleast.
I would not be surprised if they flipped the switch for everyone on Friday or Monday. That'd give them all next week to put out the fires instead of releasing and going home straight afterwards like they did last year. It'd also send the hype train through the roof for the holiday livestream, which CIG apparently really wants because they're teasing it like it's the second coming of Christ Robots.
The alternative is to roll out PTU access to another 100,000 people or so, and then either not expand it any further before new year's and leave more than half the backer base out in the cold, or roll it out to more and then flip the live switch just before going home...what they did last year. I suspect they'll try and avoid this scenario and will just drop it to everyone with the caution that, yeah, shit is gonna break, 2.0 is brand new and they're working on it.
[URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3wb20k/do_not_use_cfg_files_says_sean_criminal_tracy_on/"]Sean "Criminal" Tracy says not to use the CPU-threading shit in cfg files.[/URL] It overrides the built-in threading and can fuck up performance by misconfiguring the main thread.
AFAIK in Cryengine .cfg files anything on a line after "-- " is treated as a comment, so it's easy enough to comment out the offending lines.
The Reddit link above includes the clarification that you [I]can[/I] do it if you want, but it's likely to cause performance problems and CIG isn't going to help you if you're insisting on forcing the threading.
As much as I want to run without the cfg (because I do get a marginally better framerate) the game is much more stable with it for some reason.
[editline]11th December 2015[/editline]
Actually scratch that, this version seems to crash more no matter what.
I've commented mine out instead of removing it outright, because if having the .cfg isn't actually fucking up CIG's metrics 100% of the way, and it actually ends up being 24fps and smooth instead of 35fps with 2-second dick-gagging hitches, I will happily live with that for the time being until an optimization pass is done on 2.0.
I haven't tested L yet, so I'll try it without forced threading in the .cfg first, and then with it on. Due to my video card and me having an i5 instead of an i7, I have a modestly-competent system to test it on, so any differences from the threading should be dramatic if they present themselves noticeably at all.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/Xx15SmW.jpg[/t]
oh dear
[QUOTE=Why485;49291657]Actually scratch that, this version seems to crash more no matter what.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Sean Tracy @ PTU Discord]So what I'm saying is don't use a user.cfg IF you are crashing and you are getting bad frames with it etc..etc... that's the first thing I would check.[/QUOTE]
[URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3wb20k/do_not_use_cfg_files_says_sean_criminal_tracy_on/cxuvrx7"]He also clarified on Reddit:[/URL]
[QUOTE]Let me clarify! Should you use user.cfg? If you want to! Now having said that understand the implications. We as developers have no idea what you are changing we will eventually expose all of this but doing so in an Alpha of a game is pretty darn early we prefer the simplicity of just dealing systems spec (low/medium/high/vhigh) as a whole vs. profiling every console variable under the sun.
In PTU if you can't play without one, by all means use it. If it makes you uncomfortable in any way with the defaults then again go right ahead!
However, just know that we don't optimize or for that matter necessarily fix issues that might come from custom variables or other than the default "approved" settings so do so at your own risk is the gist of what I'm saying. If you want the most stable experience you're better off not, but if you are so inclined and understand the implications go right ahead :) I hope that clarifies what I'm saying.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=the_killer24;49291878][t]http://i.imgur.com/Xx15SmW.jpg[/t]
oh dear[/QUOTE]
I have a feeling that you're being teleported to the origin (0,0,0) and getting to see the results of weird bugs causing things to spawn in the origin. It's been happening to people for over a week quasi-randomly.
I can't help but feel that there has been less PTU bugfixing than there needs to be before pushing the build to live. Client stability will be a lot more solid, of course, but the actual PTU content is still absolutely riddled with bugs, more than any other previous release save for the initial release of Arena commander.
Now that stability is (maybe) here, it'll be much easier to actually make headway on fixing the rest of the bugs. It's hard to get repros with Connie bugs when you crash before even getting out the Port Olisar airlock.
they've mentioned a few times, that they're including a lot of known bugs the patches to basically triple check the causes so their actual bugfixes can put a few extra nails into them for the final live build
So I finally got a chance to get into the game and try it out for more than 5 minutes in a hanger. With that said, I could walk around the hanger, explore and enjoy the sights on Medium with a nice framerate. (What exactly my rate was I do not know, but I know it was pretty smooth so I'm guessing around 30)
Once I loaded into Arena Commander however, it basically just took a dump on me. I could barely move directions without horrible stutter and lag. I was pretty let down by this. I attempted to use a couple user.cfg files that I found when I searched for my video card, but I'm not sure I did it correctly as I didn't see any difference in performance. I ended up just dropping my settings to low, which made things better, but I still dealt with 5-10 second pauses and stuttering until after I exited the hanger. Once out into open space, things seemed much smoother, with a hiccup here or there, but nowhere as bad as inside the hanger space.
Other than that, the controls feel SO WONKY to me. Of course, I was using a m+kb, when I'm used to using my Logitech joystick with E:D. After getting past the first two enemies in combat, I finally felt I had a decent hang of controls, but the tutorial bugged out while I was following the trainer towards the spire. The last thing he said was, "I'll race you to the spire!" and then he just sat there and didn't move. I approached him, bumped him, went to the spire without him, but nothing happened. After about 10 minutes, I gave up and logged out.
Overall First impressions:
Even on low settings, space was beautiful. I was bummed that I had to run on lowest settings, when I'm used to running Ultra on everything else I play, from E:D to Battlefront, Titanfall, etc., but after playing for a bit I was OK with it since I had a better play experience.
I tried to wait when I first loaded the tutorial as instructed by Elix before approaching the trainer, but the only thing that happened was a ship entered the hanger and landed... not sure what I should've been looking for. (Might've missed something as this is the part where my system still wasn't handling the graphics well.)
Controls feel very 'loose' compared to E:D. That could be because I chose to start with M+KB as suggested vs. my joystick, or because of the mentioned differences in how the game handles space flight in general, but it definitely took more getting used to than E:D. Tonight if I get lucky again, I will boot it up with my joystick and see how things go. (Are there profiles like in E:D? For Elite, I was able to find a thread where a guy kept an updated profile for my logitech joystick with a cheatsheet image and everything. Something similar for SC would be nice.)
I didn't do anything except Arena Commander tutorial, and even with that, I didn't finish it due to it bugging out. I look forward to checking out some of the other stuff going on. One thing is for sure, the ships are gorgeous, the graphics even on low are pleasing, and the game has a sense of vastness with the FPS component that E:D will never be able to match.
For now, I will probably stick to SC until I get the hang of everything and have a chance to tinker around with what it currently has to offer before shelving it to go back to E:D. I see myself playing E:D when I want to jump into something stable, pleasing to the eye, and when I have a focus to get the 'feel good accomplishment feeling' of the grind, or I just feel like beating up on some AI pilots. I'll pick SC up when I just want to be awed by what is, what is to come, and what may eventually be. When I'm in the mood to just tool around and when something new/optimized comes along.
Thanks for getting me hooked on SC and it's universe guys, I'm looking forward to the long haul!!!
[QUOTE=Roninjinn;49293532]I tried to wait when I first loaded the tutorial as instructed by Elix before approaching the trainer, but the only thing that happened was a ship entered the hanger and landed... not sure what I should've been looking for. (Might've missed something as this is the part where my system still wasn't handling the graphics well.)[/QUOTE]
That's exactly what you were supposed to see. A Gladiator landing. And then Gilly telling you off for dawdling, that may have been my ulterior motive. :v:
I guess that was a lot more impressive before 2.0 hit the PTU and doing that kind of shit was actually something we could do in multiplayer (except not with player asteroid hangars). The idea is that this is kind of what the game's "supposed" to feel like, although obviously the tutorial's still a rough cut. Sometimes the tutorial stages can bug out like that, and they try and fix completion blockers like that often enough; you can select intermediate stages of the tutorial when loading in so you can skip taking off/etc. to save time.
There are community-made device profiles and such but, again, this is not my area of expertise and I could not give you a reliable good-quality source for HOTAS help. It's not quite an exact science yet in SC land. Also, the disparity is smaller than vocal segments of the community would have you believe, but there is in fact an imbalance in the various input schemes.
In SC, gymbaled weapons are not autoaim at all (this [I]may[/I] change in the future, the devs have already floated the idea past the community for comment, but that doesn't prove it's happening) and must be aimed. For a stick user, this is basically impossible unless they map it to a thumb hat and they're very good at multitasking with fine manual dexterity.
A ship with free gymbaled weapons and mouse aiming is objectively superior in damage potential compared to the same ship and same tactical conditions piloted by a stick user (without optional pro-skills hat gymbal action going) or by a mouse user in relative mode (gymbaled weapons locked to the centerline as if they were fixed, negating the benefit of gymbals).
The devs are aware of the imbalance in the input devices, but they don't plan on making a serious pass at equalizing the input methods until beta. They do emphasize that the difference is smaller than people think, though, and it's worth remembering that they're the ones with the full statistics of every Arena Commander player/session, while the community is only able to access limited public-match leaderboard data and self-selected reporting from forum participants. (Reminder, 75% of people who play SC in any capacity don't even play online, so the leaderboard numbers are not globally representative.)
But, all in all, that's all kind of normal for an alpha, and I'm glad that you're overall enjoying it! Remember that you can walk into the elevator in the back of your hangar and you'll be able to take it to visit ArcCorp. F12 is the button to reveal the chat, which can be useful, but sometimes cringe-worthy too. F10 opens an AR overlay that lets you see players' names over their heads when up close.
I know it sounded like I was underwhelmed, but that part was pretty cool. I liked watching it land!
I'm totally understanding of the alpha stage and how these things work for now. I will definitely check out ArcCorp once I get in game again.
On a separate note, I've done some research, and I'm getting such mixed signals from what I'm reading in regards to my GPU and it's performance within the game. Some posts I see say running the game on Medium shouldn't be an issue, others say that the card is crap and can't do anything with this game. I found a couple threads with further info to look into other bottleneck possibilities, so I'll be doing some trouble shooting next time around as well... hope I can find a sweet spot to where I get nice performance and decent visuals. The difference between Medium/Low was noticeable, but if I weren't able to ever get good performance with Medium I would be OK with Low until my next GPU upgrade.
Looking forward to my next go with the game! I will try to see if I can get used to the mouse controls... just so weird compared to what I'm used to. Moving my mouse just a hair seemed to get response quickly at times, and no reaction at all others... this should be fun!
If you hit the screenshot key (print screen by default), and then open the console with ~, the console should display the fps you had when the screenshot was taken. That's the simplest way to find out, then there's setting up some kind of overlay like FRAPS/MSI Afterburner/etc. to monitor performance constantly. Also, on this topic, SC forces vsync on and a user.cfg override is needed to turn it off. If you're unable to achieve 60fps (or whatever your monitor refresh rate), it will drop the game's fps to half refresh, and that can be highly noticeable, even if you'd actually be getting a reliable 45-50.
To turn off vsync, put this in user.cfg in the normal file location:
[QUOTE]r_VSync = 0[/QUOTE]
As far as your expected performance range, what are your system specs? CPU, GPU, RAM are primarily the important things. Also if you have the game installed on an HDD or an SSD, and if an HDD what rpm.
Sometimes graphics levels don't make a difference, sometimes they make all the difference. In the current PTU build, I can walk around in Port Olisar on Very High and have about the same performance as on Low, except for when it comes to assets streaming in from disk - the choking is a bit harder on VH than Low for obvious reasons. This was not true in every PTU build.
If you're used to E:D, everything in Star Citizen is going to feel like a wonky hunk of shit when it comes to flight. It gets a little better in 2.0, but the fundamental reasons for it are still there.
If you fly with a mouse, press Ctrl-G to toggle between locked gimbals and mouse flight. The reason this is useful is because regular mouse flight (the one where you can aim gimbals) has an abhorrently large dead zone for no discernible reason that makes flight feel so much more awkward than it already is. You get a terrible on/off feeling and all turns become very jerky as a result. I use the locked mode with no dead zone when I'm just flying around because it's so much smoother and more comfortable, and only use the regular mode when I need to aim gimballed guns at stuff.
I've suggested to remove this many times, but I always get shot down on the forums by joystick players that think that because I want to remove this stupid arbitrary and awkward shit (make it configurable, really) means I want the mouse to be the bestest control scheme ever and should I go back to War Thunder and leave Star Citizen to the [I]real[/I] space sim fans.
On the topic of controls and the PTU, 2.0.0L has a few kinda-janky but minor performance issues and a bit of hitching when not using the CPU threading overrides, but it was making more effective use of my cores than the overrides were, from what I could tell. I was regularly near-maxing out all four, and that's rarely been the case with the full user.cfg. Obviously, my baseline for performance only goes so high, but it was fairly smooth, if a bit more liable to hitching than my typical overrides-enabled experience.
Stability was actually pretty good, for the most part. I had a random crash 2 minutes into a session after recovering from a different crash, but other than that one I was in for about 45-60 minutes each time and got to experience several fun bugs, including capturing video of the "my Connie's airlocks and bulkhead doors and local physics grid are being stolen" bug. :v:
I also shot a guy's Avenger up because he'd been killed and had respawned at Port Olisar. After a few hits the ship's cockpit and all its weapons components separated away from the main body as one single unit, remaining locked in formation as if it was attached to an invisible Avenger, and then the fuselage started spinning like a demented gyroscope as I pelted it with lasers. It didn't blow up but finally despawned without warning. After it despawned, the floating cockpit/attachments remained and retained their collision physics. Gotta love alpha.
The second-order motion, or "jerk" physics, that was talked about recently is now in, and at least in the Mustang, it feels that much better, instantly. Have not tested every ship I have yet.
Connie's handling is still wonky, but it's not quite so made of feathers anymore. I'm also going to try and see if I can reproduce the unusual behaviour I experienced where it's almost as if second-order motion was inappropriately too strong on forward velocity. I attempted to get my Connie to sloooowly approach the Covalex Shipping Hub so me and my two crewmates could get out. Nothing happened for a moment and then the Connie suddenly popped the clutch and leapt forward, smashing my face into the side of the station and killing us all. Also known as any weekday for fpcorp.
Suddenly, snowpunch.
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;49293850]As far as your expected performance range, what are your system specs? CPU, GPU, RAM are primarily the important things. Also if you have the game installed on an HDD or an SSD, and if an HDD what rpm.
[/QUOTE]
AMD Black Edition A8 Series A8‑6600K 3.9 GHz
Sapphire Radeon R9 270X 2GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/DP Dual-X with Boost and OC
8gb RAM (I'm thinking this might be a bottleneck, might need to upgrade to 16?)
HDD is a SATA... I honestly don't know RPM's. I can check when I get home. I also assume this is a bottleneck of sorts. Would it cause the stutters/pauses when flying in an environment already loaded?
Not the beefiest specs, but I honestly didn't think it would be the lowest tier either.
On the long term that R9 270X is not going to hold up against the game at anything but low; and I have probably the exact same card as you but not overclocked. I intentionally lowballed my GPU when building this computer last winter to stay in budget, with the notion of buying a beefy card in, say, a year from now. As much as you probably weren't interested in spending ~$350 on your machine so soon, I'd suggest considering that if it's an option, now or later.
8GB of RAM is more or less the minimum for SC, as scary as that is. 16 would be better but 8 should be more than manageable as long as you're careful about closing other things - Firefox and Chrome love to hog memory if there are tons of tabs open, etc.
The HDD would contribute to I/O bottleneck, but I/O performance strikes in very particular ways, typically around asset streaming when you load in, and especially long loading times during startup. Not quite the issue you're having.
Minor stutters and pauses can be chalked up to alpha issues. Significant, 5-second-plus painful stutters may be Windows shoving something else out of memory and into disk swap, which is going to chunk you hard. If performance tanks really badly when this starts happening, the game is possibly itself being shoved onto swap in part in order to fit everything -- only happens to me if I forget to close Chrome after it's been open for 4 days with a billion tabs open and it's devoured my RAM, and that's me being an idiot.
As for what you should expect for specs, it's important to remember that SC is targeting 2016 or 2017's state of the art gaming hardware -- those products haven't even been built yet. Chris Roberts has stated that what would be considered a high-end gaming machine now (GTX 980 when the 980 was the best consumer-range about 9 months ago, 16GB RAM, i7 quad-core) should be able to play SC at 1080p/60fps on [I]medium[/I]. But if you want to play in 4K or VR, you'll want to hold off on upgrades until as close as possible to/anytime after SC actually launching. Upgrading before then is just giving Moore's Law more time to leave you behind.
Chris's original pitch for Star Citizen included the design philosophy of taking advantage of everything the PC platform ecosystem has to offer, as much as possible. DX12, VR, HOTAS and basically any other control scheme you can bring to the table (if you want to fly a spaceship with a steering wheel peripheral, it's probably going to go terribly but you're welcome to try!), optionally using webcams to read your lips and perform lipsync with your character for in-game VoIP, etc. He might as well simply have said that he is out to make your GPU cry. But, it's in order to try and push the boundaries of what a PC game is capable of as far as possible.
Whether this actually comes to pass remains to be seen, naturally.
Now that you say that, I'm pretty positive I had Chrome open, and it probably had been open for days. I know it is a memory leak haven, but I guess I was so into trying out the game, I didn't think about it.
Next time I boot it up, I'll do so on a fresh reboot, nothing open, and see how things go. I will definitely look into upgrading RAM soon, and will wait for closer to release before I drop the cash for a new GPU. My last one lasted me nearly 7 years on Medium to high quality for most games, and while I don't expect the same of the 270x, it does run most of what I play on highest settings without issue. It'll do for now until SC goes full release, and then I'll just go with my usual cycle of upgrading and building my PC up to spec.
Thanks for all the information and tips Elix, I greatly appreciate it!
(On another topic, we should get together in E:D sometime! I enjoy the game so much more when I play with friends and as of right now none of my friends are playing.)
I'd give a fresh reboot a try first before you really commit to purchasing hardware, but in the longer term 16GB of RAM and a new video card are definitely going to be important. CPU [I]maybe[/I], but replacing the CPU and mobo is a significant proposition so I'd hold off on thinking about that topic at all until the Persistent Universe is definitely in mid-beta and on track towards an out-of-beta launch within 6 months.
In other words, do not spend mad money on my recommendations when the performance issues are just as much caused by the unoptimized state of their highly-customized version of Cryengine as they are less-than-VIP-grade current hardware. :v:
I'm glad I could help.
That sounds good, but it means I'll have to stick around the bubble long enough to actually play with people, lol. I'm still 2500ly away in the middle of nowhere and haven't turned back yet. As soon as I got a B-rank FSD and the detailed surface scanner and advanced D Scanner, the exploration bug bit me and I've spent less than 36 hours inside the bubble since.
[QUOTE=Why485;49293869]
I've suggested to remove this many times, but I always get shot down on the forums by joystick players that think that because I want to remove this stupid arbitrary and awkward shit (make it configurable, really) means I want the mouse to be the bestest control scheme ever and should I go back to War Thunder and leave Star Citizen to the [I]real[/I] space sim fans.[/QUOTE]
What is it about these games that attract so many morons? The same shit showed up on the MWO forums, where any criticism about controls, UI design or balance was with some variation of "l2p its beta go back to mw4/cod".
I gave up posting on the SC forums pretty quick because criticism of clunky mechanics is met with a flood "it's for ~immersion~"-type comments
Egosoft has a decent community but the X-universe is also a (comparatively) tiny franchise.
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;49294060]But if you want to play in 4K or VR, you'll want to hold off on upgrades until as close as possible to/anytime after SC actually launching. Upgrading before then is just giving Moore's Law more time to leave you behind.[/QUOTE]
Well that takes the fun outta upgrading to a 980ti on black friday. My buddy said the kind of rig you're talking about should be able to run SC in VR no problem, just not at max settings (Because the kind of hardware that would be able to hasn't been built yet as far as you've said).
Also woo, snow.
EDIT: If you were wondering what I have for reference: Sabertooth mobo (dunno the exact variant), i7-4790K 4.0ghz cpu, EVGA GTX-980ti gpu, 16 gb RAM, regular WD HDD for now but in a year or so I'll reformat onto an SSD.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/QXWNe9N.png[/img]
HNNNG
[QUOTE=afromana;49294734][img]http://i.imgur.com/QXWNe9N.png[/img][/QUOTE]
Does that mean what I think it means
[QUOTE=Frosty701;49294750]Does that mean what I think it means[/QUOTE]
50% off taco tuesday
