Me normally: games should focus more on physics simulation, they haven’t evolved past the PS360 era and in some cases regressed. How is it that a 2006 Bethesda game is ahead of the curve in this compared to modern titles?
Me after seeing this video: Please make every object stactic and uninteractible.
The F I D E L I T Y zealotry in Star Citizen is very selective in places. It has “bedsheet wrinkle physics” yet the spaceship gameplay is just WW2 dogfighting with internet spaceships that have “noclip” style floating, even at ground level.
I vaguely recall they went to great efforts to develop a proper flight model for the ships, realised that combat was just flying past other ships at speed and none of the ships were very flyable because the models were developed without thinking how they would move, and so they stuck a bunch of thrusters on everything to make it like a bad imitation of WW2 dogfighting
I vaguely recall they went to great efforts to develop a proper flight model for the ships, realised that combat was just flying past other ships at speed and none of the ships were very flyable because the models were developed without thinking how they would move, and so they stuck a bunch of thrusters on everything to make it like a bad imitation of WW2 dogfighting
That is true, yes. The developers (that are not the Roberts family and their immediate cronies) did their best with what they had to work with but the aging gamedad playerbase found the “FIDELITY™” that they demanded to be unacceptable in the spaceship combat, so it was removed by popular demand and now the FIDELITY™ is about bedsheet wrinkles.
Isn’t No Man’s Sky what star citizen is trying to be?
No Man’s Sky is almost Star Citizen in reverse: it launched, was full of empty promises and outright lies, but over time, patch after (free!) patch, it became a much, much better game closer to what was originally promised.
NMS gets capitalized star citizen doesn’t deserve it
I remember in 2014 there was a lot of hype around star citizen so I decided to check it out on youtube. However all I could find were videos of middle-aged men soy facing while walking around an empty hanger. That was the moment I realised star citizen fans are completely delusional
Ever see CitizenCON pictures, or that notorious le epic steak dinner?
It’s the same aging bunch of increasingly divorced cishet white male gamedads, almost 15 years now and running.
This is too good
What’s the steak dinner?
It was a steak dinner, like the kind you’d get from any franchise restaurant, except this one costed thousands of dollars and was mostly there to coerce the steak dinner guests to buy another internet spaceship that was exclusively offered while they were there.
The cool end of that demographic plays MechWarrior Online instead and basically subsidizes it for the F2P players.
They are the cool end. I know this because when the grifting fucks at Piranha (particularly the CEO that pushed that “Star Citizen but worse” grift with MWO’s kickstarter funds called “Transverse”) peddled stupidly expensive gold-plated 'Mechs, that same playerbase playerkilled them so consistently out of disgust that I almost never saw them in actual matches after a few weeks.
(particularly the CEO that pushed that “Star Citizen but worse” grift with MWO’s kickstarter funds called “Transverse”)
Okay so that’s flat out wrong, like not even close to what happened. Now before you make an ass of yourself, Transverse was an absolutely terrible tone deaf idea from Russ, but it wasn’t made from the money that was gotten from the Founders packs. That honor goes to Mechwarrior Tactics, something that PGI had really nothing to do with as IGP who was PGI’s publisher at the time decided to funnel a lot of the money gotten from the MWO Founders packs into MWT.
peddled gold-plated 'Mechs
Again that was IGP who pushed them to do that.
Also good lord I didn’t have seeing actual 2013 MWO dead game nonsense on my bingo card this year.
Okay so that’s flat out wrong, like not even close to what happened. Now before you make an ass of yourself, Transverse was an absolutely terrible tone deaf idea from Russ, but it wasn’t made from the money that was gotten from the Founders packs. That honor goes to Mechwarrior Tactics, something that PGI had really nothing to do with as IGP who was PGI’s publisher at the time decided to funnel a lot of the money gotten from the MWO Founders packs into MWT.
I misheard, then, if what you say is true. The word in the old MWO forums was that the funding was lifted from the kickstarter budget, but if they were wrong (I won’t demand you provide evidence of that; you’re just as believable as they were and you are coming on strong about this and I have no more horse in that race either way), they were wrong.
I didn’t say MWO was dead. I only talked about the pleasant sort of solidarity where playerkills discouraged those gold 'Mechs from being trotted out after a while.
I didn’t say MWO was dead.
To be fair here, your post was about 95% indistinguishable to the group of people that went around in late 2013 to early 2014 that MWO was a “dead game”. I’ve been playing MWO since closed beta, and was pretty active in the community then (and still am now), so I remember a lot of the major stuff that happened back then and throughout the years. Like there’s a lot I can give shit towards PGI, but at the end of the day I can’t be too hard on the people that finally told Harmony Gold to legally fuck off.
I misheard, then, if what you say is true.
Everything I said there only came out shortly after PGI bought themselves back from IGP so around 2015 I think it was, and they stopped just short (but still absolutely were) of throwing IGP under the bus.
To be fair here, your post was about 95% indistinguishable to the group of people that went around in late 2013 to early 2014 that MWO was a “dead game”. I’ve been playing MWO since closed beta, and was pretty active in the community then (and still am now), so I remember a lot of the major stuff that happened back then and throughout the years. Like there’s a lot I can give shit towards PGI, but at the end of the day I can’t be too hard on the people that finally told Harmony Gold to legally fuck off.
I never saw it as a dead game even after I played it. I can tell that the apparent similarity set you off enough to call me an ass and so on, but again, I am willing to accept I had heard incorrectly (and possibly heard from the doomposters you mentioned) but either way I only lurked those forums and only occasionally to begin with.
I can’t be too hard on the people that finally told Harmony Gold to legally fuck off.
It’s too bad I’m not likely to ever get to fly a Phoenix Hawk LAM outside of the Advanced BattleTech fan mod because of the lingering meat hooks that Harmony Gold has in the IP, that have long made LAMs themselves just about a forbidden concept.
@UlyssesT@hexbear.net is only Star Citizen reporter I trust.
The guy that made the Sunk Cost Galaxy series far surpassed me there, but he hasn’t made a new video in years
Watched that b/c it was posted here last week. Incredibly disappointed they stopped making that series, it was really getting good.
I see Chris Robert’s retirement fund shows no signs of stopping. It’s unlikely it will anytime soon anyway. The other day I saw a clip of last year’s CitizenCon with Chris entering the stage, with a giant ass CitizenCon logo behind him, and the crowd going apeshit when he appeared and screaming: “Chris! Chris! Chris! Chris!
” He couldn’t help but smirk and revel in his status as God of 
universe.CitizensConned
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Chris Roberts is the
of a small but wealthy corner of the 
universe. There’s even some crossover: the marketing video (yes, they do hours of space-car commercials as part of the advertising!) for this internet spaceship blatantly presented it as a LE ZYBERTRUKKK in space.Or as an aging Top Gear reference.
we gotta get in on this grift and sell these idiots some “my other cybertruck is a spaceship” stickers or something
The motion capture in that video of Jeremy Clarkson from temu is not great…
Trump in order to secure the g*mer vote should promise to finish Star Citizen, its probably more realistic than Biden promise to cure cancer
add star citizen funding to the pentagon bill
Chris Roberts missed his calling as a Boeing or Lockheed executive
That would be genuinly better use of money than current though. Like the Pentagon budget chart goes like that, from best to worst use:
Anything useful for people (impossible) -> slop -> embezzlement and corruption -> actual working weapons
I’m definitely no expert but I’m pretty sure a big reason the physics are always so borked is because Chris Roberts insisted (and insists) on it using a weird, heavily modified version of the Crysis engine where everything has to be super tiny which is peak Bazinga brain
I’m definitely no expert but I’m pretty sure a big reason the physics are always so borked is because Chris Roberts insisted (and insists) on it using a weird, heavily modified version of the Crysis engine where everything has to be super tiny which is peak Bazinga brain
You heard correctly. At an engine level, the “star system” in Star Citizen (yeah, still just one, even if 100 were promised) is just a CryEngine island map, like in Crysis, but super stretched and deformed at a physics calculation level and for the most part, underwater to fake spaciness.
That’s why just walking suddenly causes physics deaths, clipping, or blowing up the ship.
Star citizen was doing NFTs before NFTs.
Come to think of it, considering how aging gamedads on the official forum talked about how their nerd chariots would generate them passive income (as in, dollar income) once the game became some DAE LE OASIS everything for everyone virtual world, they were NFTs at least in rent-seeking ambitions from the rubes buying them.
Is this good ol’ floating point error? I don’t know much about game development, but I remember hearing that in Outer Wilds they keep the origin at the player’s location to prevent a situation where floating point error gets progressively worse as you move further away from some fixed origin.
Found the video! If you haven’t played Outer Wilds this one minute segment is spoiler-free (which is crticial for full enjoyment of the game), but make sure to stop watching once the screen goes black. And then go play Outer Wilds, it’s great!
Is this good ol’ floating point error?
Sure is!
Old versions of KSP had the same issue iirc.
they’ve spent most of the money a long time ago. since then they’ve been on the death spiral, in order to keep going they have made stretch goals ane ship packs that are increasing the scope, therefore increasing the budget, which they need money for, down the spiral they go.
i don’t follow the game but my impression is that the huge amount of money they raised is shackling them to the wrong technical decisions they made many years ago. they can’t start over otherwise that would be millions of donor money wasted. if this was a normal company they would’ve either cancelled the project or salvaged what they can and start over.
it also looks like most of the experienced people quit due to mismanagement and most of the staff are new hires. all i can say is i wouldn’t wanna work on a project like that.
it also looks like most of the experienced people quit due to mismanagement and most of the staff are new hires. all i can say is i wouldn’t wanna work on a project like that.
Some of the Glassdoor entries are an adventure to read. Stuff like “as long as the boss isn’t bumbling around and making you undo all your work for arbitrary reasons, you can just fuck off and get paid. It’s bearable as long as you don’t care about actually completing the project.”
A job creation program as effective as the army and not nearly as evil
“zero gravity” does NOT mean “zero mass”
Chris Roberts demonstrated his understanding of space physics once, on camera, by doing a “swimming” motion to show how he’d maneuver in space. It was with Richard Garriot sitting next to him with a very
face because even if he’s a grifting piece of shit, at least Garriot’s actually been in space and knows that’s silly.I guess he slept through class when they were studying Newton’s three laws
Really. I cannot get over what you said. he pretended to “swim”. What a ridiculous notion. You may have to be an Einstein-level genius to have thought for the first time in human history about the free-falling elevator shaft vs the elevator shaft with thrust that provides 9.8m/s^2 acceleration, but you don’t have to be an Einstein-level genius to understand an explanation of the idea.
And if you’re making a game set in space maybe a cursory understanding of these things would be of interest to you?
Really. I cannot get over what you said. he pretended to “swim”. What a ridiculous notion.
Well, Chris Roberts also came up with this le epic scene in his personal cinematic labor of love:
I missed your star shitizen posting ulysses
That’s like a million a week jfc
Have an excerpt from one of the loudest and biggest spending true believers on the official forum:
This year was set out at CitizenCon. For the first time we had some fuzzy estimate of when the final tech pillar would go in. Dynamic Server Meshing is not something that will affect the players experience hardly at all, DSM is about streamlining and reducing the cost of game service delivery for CIG. I’m getting older now and don’t feel the need to be ‘first’ for every single feature addition. I knew after watching CitizenCon I’d be mostly sitting it out until after Server Meshing goes in. Call it the deep breath before the plunge, I’d be happy to forego the boiled frog experience after so long. I am happy that I now know how this particular sausage gets made, a sausage many didn’t believe would ever get made. The PU was always supposed to come after the players experience of Squadron 42. It’s that ‘connectedness’ that I’m interested in seeing how they do it now.
For me it has always been about the ‘how’, not the ‘when’. I leave the ‘when’ questions to those much much younger than me, which is ironic since I have much less time left to see that eventual ‘when’ than they do. Many of CIG’s team are in the same position, Chris Roberts is only 7 years younger than me.
Many features people are still asking for are in Squadron 42, so the answer to ‘when’ for those features is… after Squadron 42 release. Because. No spoilers.
As Chris says, it’ll be done when it’s done - great! See you (all) then! I have other things to think about right now. Keep up the good work. The run up to Squadron 42 starts in Q4 (hopefully), in a years time people will be no more interested in Server Meshing than they are interested in Object Container Streaming or full persistence today, when it ‘just works’ you can forget about it. That race has been run. 4.0 means the end of the ‘will they do it’ patch watch cycle. The ‘how’ only matters when you can’t do, once you can do no-one will even bother to think about ‘how’.
Am I better off with 3.24? Not really, didn’t expect to be. As Richard Tyrer said, for 95% of a games development time you are playing a broken game, we aren’t near 95% yet. They are still building the game engine the whole game is based on.
There is no more mystery to chew over endlessly about ‘how’, only the ‘when’. I have experience in building things, it’s always the most frustrating time between knowing the ‘how’ and waiting for the ‘when’. There are plenty of ‘why’ questions to ask, but Chris won’t address those until the full and final picture is made known and they are only just thinking about what that final picture will look like… so… not for a good while yet, hence all ‘why’ questions are treated as ‘when’ questions by CIG. Many don’t like it. I don’t like it, but you can’t answer all the ‘why’ questions until you’ve finished putting all the pieces in place, so I at least understand it.
This year was set out at CitizenCon
Someone please tell me they don’t have an annual convention for a game that is over 10 years in development with no release date, please.
Someone please tell me they don’t have an annual convention for a game that is over 10 years in development with no release date, please.
They have more than an annual convention.
They also had a le epic steak dinner with thousands of dollars per seat where each le epic steak enjoyer had the rare privilege of early access to buying an internet spaceship (that is STILL NOT IN THE GAME ALMOST A DECADE LATER!). I had pictures of the le epic steak dinner on my old computer; it was like this emoji aged up 30+ years.
Steak dinner
rare privilege
I’m not gonna lie, when I first heard about this game, I was a bit hype about it but like I basically parked it in my mind and only really caught a few updates on it, like Scott Manley showing off a ship he had one time on his YT channel.
I figured it was gonna take a few years to make but after a this much time and almost a billion dollars later, a tragedy ends up becoming a comedy.
Meanwhile, I just want a goddamn space truck driving simulator.
Cosmoteer is more like Dwarf Fortress than an actual sim, but if you just wanna take apart asteroids and move stuff between space stations, it has lots of that. Despite being a dev team of exactly one (1) guy, it left early access years ago and is still getting updates. Recently he added a larger mining laser and some kind of new missile system. I haven’t been playing it as much lately because of Against the Storm and Balatro, so I’m not fully up to date on what’s new.
I could never really get into DF honestly. I might give it another go since it was released on Steam with a UI I won’t struggle as much with sometime lol. I played a bit of Rimworld and it felt a lot like DF and I did enjoy that. There is a first person space ship salvage game out(I forget the name) that I’ve been seeing a bit of and sort of wanna check out some day. So instead of rocks, it’s busted up ships.
DF’s learning curve is still pretty steep. It’s come a long way and the devs finally added mouse support and moved beyond ASCII graphics (only took like 20 years). I never got into Rimworld cuz the devs are Gamergate chuds.
devs are Gamergate chuds.
Wasn’t aware of this. I can do without playing it ever again after all lol.
For such an expensive game that’s supposed to run on some crazy high spec PC, I hate to say it, but the graphics aren’t even as good as I expected. Like yeah it looks very good, great even, but so do most exclusive PS4 and PS5 games, that run on consoles that cost a fraction of what a top of the line gaming PC does. This isn’t some revolutionary leap in graphical fidelity. And looking at videos like this, you can’t say that the physics are any better either. What’s the point of spending so much money on stuff like this?
What’s the point of spending so much money on stuff like this?
They are simulating an ENTIRE UNIVERSE. The janky physics are actually because they’re correctly adjusting for the gravitational influence of billions of stars. Or something.
Is there even a need to simulate the physics of every single object? Sure it sounds super cool to do so, but Star Citizen is a videogame at the end of the day, not a Formula One simulator or Airbus A380 pilot simulator… Even really expensive commercially available simulation games like iRacing and DCS don’t simulate the physics of every single object. Doing so sounds like major feature creep, which has been the story of Star Citizen for as long as I’ve known about it.
I think those are supposed to be mobile cargo crates that can be moved around and packed onto ships? One of the things they were really hellbent on doing was physicalized cargo that had to actually go somewhere and take up space in cargo bays and that could be moved around on forklifts and shit.
Because they fundamentally do not understand that simulationism and the actual needs of gameplay and development are a balance that needs to be struck, that making gameplay mechanics is all about smoke and mirrors to capture a feel and that in a very real sense making something “feel” realistic means shooting more for the concept of it and how we think of it than it means trying to simulate exactly what something truly is, and then finding ways to paper over all the stuff you reasonably cannot get done in time so that people don’t think about them.
Like “packing and moving physicalized cargo, in space!” is a pitch for a whole ass indie game about space trucking that dedicates all its resources and attention to doing that and making it feel good and satisfying despite the drawbacks, not for an omni-present minor aspect of a tacticool FPS simulation that will never get the sort of dedicated attention and resources it needs to not suck because it’s less important than the shiny spaceships.
Kojima would disagree and think that the cargo is a great idea but then he also made Death Stranding.
I’m not against the cargo, the toolbags making it are bad at it though.
Death Stranding made that one of its core pillars and gamified it enough to work, while also constraining the design to basically human scale. That’s the sort of thing I mean, that systems like that need attention and abstraction and have to not just be a neglected afterthought tacked on to an archetype that it clashes with.
An even more simulationist approach than that needs the sort of attention and priority that it could only get from a dedicated game that’s like Hardspace: Shipbreaker but about being a space teamster/stevedore instead of a space wrecker.
Shipbreaker is an entire game purely about taking ships apart in exactly the fashion Star Citizen wants its infantry boarding to work, with running concerns about pressurization, gravity, radiation, and sensitive parts like power and fuel. It’s a perfect example of that balance of gameplay and concept. I don’t think star citizen could do it better even if they wanted to because it turns out that even a gamified simulation has parts that wouldnt be fun in any other context. Pop open a door with air behind it in Star Citizen with Shipbreaker gameplay? You’re going flying, and in pitched space combat that means you, the player, get to spend fifteen to thirty minutes waiting for your air to run out, to be picked off by the enemy, or to be eventually scooped up by friendlies.
