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Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

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Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#71

Post by ehnto »

sandworm101 wrote: post #67
ehnto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally wish it was closed Alpha to be honest. I get tired of repeating myself to those expecting an alpha like what other companies release. 75% of the game isn't actually in the Alpha yet, so there is a long way to go before it's representative of the final product.

That is the lament, the prayer of the alpha customer. What will happen is that one day the money will run out. Then the game goes live regardless of its current state. Maybe you get that 75% but far more likely you will get whatever the last patch was, plus a couple bugfixes. Hope for 75 but expect 5%.

I believe they have a goal release target and they will hit it if money doesn't run out. I am not as certain about monet running out because it's nearly impossible to know how far away their target is and they just keep adding to their head count.

I can easily defend the game itself and try to, but the project management is harder. Sure, we can see huge progress is happening and they are making two games at once hence the massive head count. But everything else is a bit opaque.

Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#72

Post by skohan »

ehnto wrote: post #27
DanAndersen wrote: post #3

Well, it reminds me of Star Citizen for sure -- in that it's a pretty-looking interface but overburdened with unacceptably long loading times, laggy and unresponsive feedback in the UI, and motion blur on all the things to the point of being unusable. Every few months I look into where SC is at, and am not surprised to see more flash and surface-level polish, more extra features no one was asking for, and yet core ga…

In the actual game, the FPS kills their otherwise really fun UI. I finally got to play it at 40 FPS or more recently and it makes an insane difference to how it all feels. It doesn't feel clunky or broken when it's running properly. You also start to understand some of their choices when you play for a while and feel the built in pacing of the game. It's not a flashy fast paced space call of duty. Every interaction i…

> is an alpha game that's supposed to be cutting edge in a few years time when it releases.

It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now. Just look at the original Crysis. It's still not easy to get solid high frame rates on a decade-old game since it was designed with the assumption that CPUs would continue to evolve on the axis of fast, single threaded performance. Instead parallelism happened.

A good game engine should scale smoothly from mid-range hardware upwards, and be designed so that it can be modified to take advantage of advances in hardware when they become available, not before.

Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#73

Post by wlesieutre »

ponyous wrote: post #51
wlesieutre wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to note about Star Citizen is that you load into the universe once and that's it. Assuming no crashes (it'll happen someday) you can play for hours across multiple space stations and planets without another loading screen.

That's a good point about loading times. I haven't played it yet and was just assuming it needs a load screen from system to system.

For a bit of SC terminology, there are two separate fast travel modes: "jump drive" for long distance FTL between systems and "quantum drive" for zooming between planets within a system.

We don't know a ton about the final design for system-to-system jumps yet, but the original concept is that you have to actively fly your ship through a somewhat twisty "jump point" wormhole thing and come out the other side. That would be long enough to cover the loading time, but it's all active gameplay instead of loading screens.

It also won't need to load the whole system when you jump in, only the "low poly" versions of planets and moons and whatever large scale spacescaping objects (gas clouds, etc.) are visible from where you come out. The more detailed versions of planets and moons only need to stream in once you pick where you're going within the system spool up your quantum drive to get there.

Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#74

Post by existencebox »

sgift wrote: post #39
existencebox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some context; as someone who pledged in 2012. I'd hope the OP doesn't come off as dismissive to the "hard unglamorous" stuff, since I see this as a separate issue. For me at least, the problem is largely that in the last 6 years, we've gotten PILES of UX revisions, all of which favor form over function to a laughable degree. This map, while pretty, is fractionally as useful as a flattened stretchy-grid-auto-layouted…

> This map, while pretty, is fractionally as useful as a flattened stretchy-grid-auto-layouted hairball. It lacks basic features like being able to _zoom out to actually see the whole volume without rotating_, l I can zoom out and see the whole volume just fine. Don't select a specific system, use the mouse wheel. It works exactly as I expect a star map to work and it looks beautiful. > Meanwhile, the core gameplay s…

> I can zoom out and see the whole volume just fine. Don't select a specific system, use the mouse wheel. It works exactly as I expect a star map to work and it looks beautiful.

I was using the scroll wheel, nothing selected (from first load), but from most angles systems at the edge are clipping on my system. From the initial view, for me, min, hades, taranis are all below the bottom, and a bunch off to the left. I can take a screenshot if it's really in doubt. (I'm on a new machine now than my initial post, but still chrome. Unfortunately this also gave me a chance to realize a nauseating back and forth swaying in the background if I leave this open too long in my peripheral... I can't honestly understand why one would chose that)

> I really have my doubts that the people who cry the loudest...

From a relatively disinterested point of view (Having slowly fallen out of interest over the last few years, from a point of playing every patch with anticipation) yes there's a lot of love to hate on SC, hell, even EvE has an "unofficial war" with them recently because of some ship design hubbub. That being said, there's also a lot of defensiveness about it, despite some very real issues. Back when I was far more involved, the subreddit could get QUITE cheerleady. Like many things nowadays there's a wonderful bit of polarization involved, I'd (riskily) make the sober statement of "They made enough questionable judgement calls, and had enough of a bad trend of meeting goals that I lost interest, and in that context this is both preconception-reinforcing and underwhelming." As said in my OP, just giving my own context, others are free to disagree.

As an addendum, the stretch goals thing is a good example of the reality distortion field, since yes, there aren't "nth new stretch goals" now, but some of their older, more ad-hoc stretch goals (100 systems at launch) are looking to be... interpreted flexibly, shall we say; so honestly I don't think it's super black and white. (I do think the claims that it's outright fraud are disingenuous)

A fun bit of history as well, lest I fall under accusation of not being a fan, the first post on this account and my reason for upgrading from just reading HN was to ask community opinion of pursuing a risky "dream job" over a stable corporate bigCo job, the dream job was at CIG. If you're curious, THAT context adds even more flavor, as with hindsight some warning signs from 2013 ended up being apocryphal to my current perception.[0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294786

Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#75

Post by jvanderbot »

Very cool! Where can I get a playlist for work that sounds like this spacey atmospheric music so I don't have to leave this tab open?

Does anyone else work to this type of sound?

I sometimes listen to the original diablo soundtrack, homeworld and homeworld 2, and sometimes even starcraft.

Also the voyager radiosounds are pretty good too!

https://soundcloud.com/josh-v-17/sets/working/s-ALPrL

Re: Star Citizen's ARK Starmap

#76

Post by zamalek »

skohan wrote: post #72
ehnto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the actual game, the FPS kills their otherwise really fun UI. I finally got to play it at 40 FPS or more recently and it makes an insane difference to how it all feels. It doesn't feel clunky or broken when it's running properly. You also start to understand some of their choices when you play for a while and feel the built in pacing of the game. It's not a flashy fast paced space call of duty. Every interaction i…

> is an alpha game that's supposed to be cutting edge in a few years time when it releases. It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now. Just look at the original Crysis. It's still not easy to get solid high frame rates on a decade-old game since it was designed with the assumption that CPUs w…

> It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now.

Dumb as it sounds, it is because the client and the server are in lock-step. The root of the issue is the hardware on their servers. It doesn't have much to do with client hardware. The fixes for this are within the next few patches (maybe year and a half away). It has a lot to do with how much junk there is floating around on the server and, when you get a pristine server, things are much better.

It's still not acceptable, especially given that their promo videos demonstrate an experience that does not exist right now (unless you hit gold with a pristine server). However, it has absolutely nothing to do with client hardware. It's a bug.

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