Star Citizen (Thinly veiled 'How many Irish backing this?')

SCIE Cu Chulainn

Album of user screenshots from the 3.3.5 update.

Canis Lupus

SCIE Cu Chulainn wrote: »

Album of user screenshots from the 3.3.5 update.

About the same FPS the 'game' runs at as well. hurhurhur

TheValeyard

Canis Lupus wrote: »

About the same FPS the 'game' runs at as well. hurhurhur

Played it last night getting 30 frames on 3.5.5 was much higher on 3.4.4 so, it's only a matter of time.


Does finally seem to be coming together.

Canis Lupus

Murray TheDemonic TalkingSkull wrote: »

Played it last night getting 30 frames on 3.5.5 was much higher on 3.4.4 so, it's only a matter of time.


Does finally seem to be coming together.

Sounds like the full console experience :P

If they actually get it running what and who am I supposed to make fun of? There will be a void in my life.

TheValeyard

Canis Lupus wrote: »

Sounds like the full console experience :P

If they actually get it running what and who am I supposed to make fun of? There will be a void in my life.

I had lost faith in it a while back. Hadn't played since 3.0 cause it was an unplayable mess. But it's a lot better now. Maybe they finally have their act together. Only needed 200million to do that. Still very far away from the 100+ systems, full array of game modes, ships from 2013, etc.

SCIE Cu Chulainn

Murray TheDemonic TalkingSkull wrote: »

Still very far away from the 100+ systems, full array of game modes, ships from 2013, etc.

That kickstarter campaign was scrapped, failed or whatever you want to call it. I would be surprised if it ever reaches 100 systems. Granted in the lore, many systems would be difficult to traverse or have little/no ability to sustain life and wouldn't require anywhere near as much work as other systems, in terms of setting up human settlements etc, but it's still a tall order.

My understanding is that those 100 "systems" as originally planned would have consisted of a few landing zones that were basically self-contained levels with a loading screen, or a loading screen obscured by being "autopiloted" down to the surface.

That's not a bad thing in of itself, but how the game is being built now could end up having far more content in maybe a dozen systems. I don't include 'empty' landscapes in that.

SCIE Cu Chulainn

bnt

I don't have any actual expectation that the 100-system universe will actually happen. On the other hand, it seems to me that the major updates this year have been to parts of the application that would have prevented that kind of expansion from happening, and towards creating a more robust platform for multiplayer in a persistent universe.

We know it can be done if the system architecture permits it: how many systems are in No Man's Sky, for example? I don't know, but it's a lot more than 100, because NMS was designed from the ground up for random algorithmic system creation. The multiplayer parts of NMS are less-developed, though, while with SC, multiplater has come first and single-player (Squadron 42) is secondary to that.

If RSI really do solve the problems that limit the number of systems they can have in a single multiplayer instance (server), then of course there will be more, and Hurston is just the start. The reasons we don't have more systems now are technical.

Kirby

We've seen time and time again that a small number of well designed and curated experiences are far superior to hundreds of bland, barren and empty ones.

Sometimes less is more. This is one of those occasions or else you end up with a game a mile wide but an inch deep.

Varik

Up to recently the game had a few space stations and a few moons with some stuff on them.

You've now got them after adding a planet with a large city and a few types of region/biomes, that's being grown out and they've also got the procedural/modular space station being added which will replace the current ones. There's new planet/biomes going to be added with each patch.

That first planet, first of a biome type, or station, will take a lot longer than the following examples of it.

dreamers75

Free fly week coming up, 23rd of nov to 30th.

Should have my 9900K upgrade installed by then so maybe it will run?

bnt

dreamers75 wrote: »

Free fly week coming up, 23rd of nov to 30th.

Should have my 9900K upgrade installed by then so maybe it will run?

The GPU isn't really the bottleneck at this time - it's network and disk that cause stuttering during combat etc. That and other optimisation factors - with so much RAM required, why should any live play be held up for disk access?

bnt

PTU access expanded last night, so I'm about to try 3.5.5. now. This is the one with the Hurston system, Lorville and more = major content expansion. Check your account settings for the PTU option.

PS: I don't keep a separate PTU installation - no space on my SSD for that. Instead, I just rename the StarCitizen folder to StarCitizenPTU before updating to a PTU version.

humanji

Anyone trying to Expo? I have to say it's sucked me in more than I think it should. Lorville is pretty cool. Not a whole lot to do, but hopping on a train and travelling out to the other stations really gave me flashbacks to the train scene in Total Recall. I did at one point though, suddenly hear Dara O'Briain's voice in my head saying "Hang on, I'm feckin' communting!"

The Anvil Valkyrie is a bit of a beast, though. Slow, but I'm looking forward to seeing one flying into a battle, guns blazing and troops jumping from the back.

dreamers75

Is the flight model going to be upgraded from what it is to umm a flight model?

humanji

Hopefully. It's still sluggish and the lack of a radar makes dogfighting more of a chore than anything else. With more responsive movement, the lack of radar wouldn't be as much of an issue to me.

Varik

Some of the changes are in for the new flight model in the current (3.3.6) rest is for 3.4 at the end of the year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V056GFJrnKo

TheValeyard

Parking a fcuking Hammerhead on Lorville is ridiculous.

SCIE Cu Chulainn

I have to say that Star Citizen, despite being in alpha still, felt like a proper game for the first time last night when I finally got a chance to try out the 3.5 Live release and the in-game ship expo.

Spawned in bed on the Port Olisar space station that is in orbit around Crusader. Got up, went downstairs to the ship console, picked out my Avenger Titan, headed to the landing pad it was delivered to and got into the ship.

How smooth the framerate was struck me immediately. I was spared most of the terrible performance a lot of people have gotten, but it was never brilliant either. The only micro-stutters I suffered were when starting the jump from Port Olisar to the planet Hurston on the complete opposite end of the system.

My frames were steady all the way into landing at Lorville for the expo. I did get some lower frames when using the elevators, but not when moving around funnily enough.

Expo was cool and trying out the ships at the expo was painless. Collected my rental ship and flew around Hurston for a bit then and visited some underground facilities. Got in a firefight with some dudes that were even worse than me with a gun, which is an achievement.

I don't know if it was a memory leak or not, but after an hour the game hung for about 2 seconds, before I was about to finish up. I was actually shocked how much it improved from the last patch I played about 10 days prior. PTU builds (semi-private) are usually quite buggy, before going to wider release but the difference still amazed me.

The building blocks for most things have been put together, but it still needs missions to be built out more to be able to call it a game, but they are well on their way.

humanji

Yeah, it's a hell of a lot smoother. Still judders and crashes, but it's really impressive. The expo is getting me all excited. It was only today, seeing the big ships up close, that you really could get a scale of things. I took a photo of the Reclaimer (it's a photo of my monitor, so sorry for the poor quality). When you compare it to the people standing below it, it's pretty staggering.



The Idris was also on display, but the industrial look of the Reclaimer made it so much more impressive (plus the Idris isn't finished yet).

I rented myself a Retalliator, but as soon as I took in the landing gear I plummeted to the ground.

Next was the Hammerhead. It took me about a minute to find the elevator into it. Then once in, and I'm not exagerating, it took me 10 minutes to find the cockpit. The game crashed as soon as I took off. :pac:

SCIE Cu Chulainn

Sorry to hear about the crashes humanji. You must have pulled the short straw this time. I had zero crashes in my couple of hours last night.

Anecdotally, performance seems to be improving since the patch bit by bit for people. Hopefully this is the last patch for a while that will cause major performance issues that needed to be fixed in PTU.

Varik

Had issues but removing the GPU driver and doing a fresh install sorted it.

SCIE Cu Chulainn

Varik wrote: »

Had issues but removing the GPU driver and doing a fresh install sorted it.

I nearly always forget to delete the user folder each time, I launch the game and have to back out of it again.

Varik

humanji wrote: »

I rented myself a Retalliator, but as soon as I took in the landing gear I plummeted to the ground.

They're planning to separate landing gear from landing mode where the engines or additional VTOL engines are used.

A lot of the bigger ships especially on the newly included higher gravity planet need to use landing mode to stay in the air until you get out of orbit.

Glebee

Reinstalled it last night for the first time in a long time. Still runs like crap on my rig and I can run everything else almost maxed out.

bnt

Glebee wrote: »

Reinstalled it last night for the first time in a long time. Still runs like crap on my rig and I can run everything else almost maxed out.

It does a lot of loading from disk when there's a change in environment, so if you have it on a standard hard disk drive, that's a known thing. Lots of RAM too - it's not optimised in that way.

SCIE Cu Chulainn

bnt wrote: »

It does a lot of loading from disk when there's a change in environment, so if you have it on a standard hard disk drive, that's a known thing. Lots of RAM too - it's not optimised in that way.

Also the extent to which it is optimised has to be tempered with the fact that it's in alpha still.

It's only recently they have decided to work on quality of life issues, with most of the major tech needed in a working state.

MOH

SCIE Cu Chulainn wrote: »

I have to say that Star Citizen, despite being in alpha still, felt like a proper game for the first time last night when I finally got a chance to try out the 3.5 Live release and the in-game ship expo.

Spawned in bed on the Port Olisar space station that is in orbit around Crusader. Got up, went downstairs to the ship console, picked out my Avenger Titan, headed to the landing pad it was delivered to and got into the ship.

I tried it out for the first time last night and was massively disappointed with it.
Interface is ... clunky. The focus on realism is great, but things like a two second animation of looking at my wrist every time I want to consult my whatever-they-call-a-datapad gets old fast.

The "hold F and stuff you can interact with will be highlighted if you mouse over it" didn't work either. It's too easy to either miss stuff you can click on, or waste time on stuff you can't that looks like it should be interactive.

And looking at shop screen but having to turn my head/mouse to look from the left selection screen to the right detail screen - again, realism vs gameplay.

I spent a good five minutes trying to work out how to get into my ship, because the rear of it was in shadow, in the dark, with no indicatio there was a door there. I'd walked around and found both side doors but couldn't get in either, nothing at the front, then accidentally triggered the rear door. (Amusingly, it hit me on the head the first time and the ramp stopped in mid air).

On the plus side, I picked up a delivery mission to collect a package some guy was waiting on which hadn't been delivered. (Not sure if we're doing spoilers, but just in case)

Spent ages trying to dock with the first station with no comms option, before noticing the station blurb had something about the station being abandoned after a catastrophe. Was right beside the waypoint but couldn't work out how to board the station. Eventually had a brainwave and got out of the ship, floated in through a broken window. Found a comms terminal with increasingly frustrated messages from somebody trying to get a guy to call them back about some energy issue, who clearly didn't know about the catastrophe. Realised that the whole thing - the messages about an energy source issue, a disaster many people didn't know about, and my client wondering why the hell his package hadn't been delivered were all connected. Spent half an hour wandering through maze of lift shaft and broken doors to get the package, picking up occasionally worldbuilding messages building up little glimpses of life on the station.

The whole thing was really well done, there was a load of little details I haven't seen in anything apart from Witcher 3.

Then I got the package back to home base for delivery. Placed it on the desk in the marked "Delivery" spot. Tried the terminal and the lifeless NPC. Tried the office behind. Googled. Nothing. Then asked on global chat and discovered delivery missions are mostly bugged.

Seven years of development and basic delivery missions don't work? The map frequently just failed to appear, and using it was awful. I'm still not entirely clear how the quantum drive works when you don't have a target set (I mean, I know how it works, just not the exact combination of tapping/pressing B to trigger it). The MFDs seem to reset every time you start your ship, and trying use them while flying is a pain.

There's a ton of pretty basic stuff that doesn't work properly (basic as in needs to be there, not necessarily as in to implement). I know it's an Alpha, and also unoptimised, and I'm not even commenting on performance issues because of that. But it's stuff that I'd expect to have been functional in 0.1 that's not there. And there's nothing particularly notable or unique that would prompt me to sign up.

To be honest, if it was any other game I'd probably be more forgiving, and maybe I'm being too harsh. But for something with this much funding that's been in development this long, it's streets behind where I'd expected it to be.

bnt

The bugginess is annoying, for sure. In the last week I rented some of the larger ships, and two of them (Constellation, Starfarer) still have basic UI bugs that cause the quantum drive to work improperly or not at all, or the UI elements vanish and you can't tell what's going on. The third (Caterpillar) is one of those ships that should stay in space, it does not really belong anywhere there's gravity and/or an atmosphere. Except that you currently have to land to buy and sell cargo.

The delivery mission bugs - I see some missions now use a delivery/pickup machine instead of interaction with NPCs. I don't know if that's to fix the NPC problems, but so far that works OK. I'm encouraged by the progress they've made in recent months, and after the initial cost a few years ago, it's not costing me anything more now than a bit of optional time, maybe a few grey hairs from trying to get stuff done in the PTU.

bnt

Free Fly weekend coming up on alpha 3.5. Which is better in many ways, but also has some horrendous bugs. Like, land on a R&R station and your ship gets "stored" too quickly ... and then you find that it's not actually there, but at the last location you landed at, from which it might not be retrievable at all ... so you lose whatever was on board. I expect they will fix such things first, or else it will not look good at all.