A new gameplay trailer has been released for Alpha 2.0:
Not bad. I’m still not looking forward to the FPS portion so much. But I love the freedom to step out of the ship and do stuff out there that it brings.
Wendelius
Galadin
2544
I do love the sense of presence this game is developing. I have now gotten access to 2.0 (still VERY buggy) and walking around and seeing ships fly overhead before climbing into your cockpit is just really awesome. I think the cost that CIG has inherited for all this verisimilitude might be too high, and not what people thought at the beginning, I can see where the money is going.
It seems Alpha 2.0 is now available for all backers.
I’ve stated my contention before - it won’t peter out, it will pop. It’s boom and bust with these sorts of expectations.
As to when, who the hell knows.
So… Uh… Our own cliffski (Cliff Harris) did a thing.
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2015/12/13/hi-im-from-the-games-industry-governments-please-stop-us/
This may not be popular, but its how I feel. First, some background and disclaimers. I run a small games company making games for the PC, strategy games with an up front payment. We don’t make ‘free to play’ games or have micro transactions. Also, I’m pretty much a capitalist. I am not a big fan of government regulation in general. I am a ‘get rid of red tape’ kind of guy. I actually oppose tax breaks for game development. I am not a friend of regulation. But nevertheless.
I awake this morning to read about this:
Some background: Star Citizen is a space game. Its being made by someone who made space games years ago, and they ‘crowd-funded’ the money to make this one. The game is way behind schedule, and is of course, not finished yet. They just passed $100,000,000 in money raised. They can do this because individual ships in the game are for sale, even though you bought the game. I guess at this point we could just say ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, but yet we do not do this with gambling addiction. In fact we some countries have extremely strict laws on gambling, precisely because they know addiction is a thing, and that people need to be saved from themselves.
You know how much you hate those ads that track you around the internet reminding you of stuff you looked at but didn’t buy? That is amateur hour compared to the crap that some games companies are pulling these days. The problem is, we have NO regulation. AFAIK no law prevents a company stalking its customers on facebook. We live in an age where marketers have already tried using MRI scans on live subjects to test advertising responsiveness. You think you are not manipulated by ads? Get real, read some of the latest books on the topic.We are only a short step away from convincing AI bots that pretend to be our new flirty friends in game that urge us to keep playing, keep upgrading, keep spending.
Modern advertising is so powerful we should be legislating the crap out of this sort of thing. How bad do we let it get before we get some government imposed rules? We are in the early days of mass-population study and manipulation, the days where us, the gamers describe a game as ‘addicting’ as a positive. Maybe it isn’t such a positive after all. Maybe we need to start worrying about if a game is actually good, rather than just ‘addicting’. Maybe we need people to step in and save us from ourselves. We are basically still just hairless apes. We do not possess anything like the self-control or free-will that we think we do.
Like alcohol, gambling, smoking or eating, most of us do not find gaming addictive. Thus we fail to see the problem. it depends how you are wired.
kerzain
2549
I feel like I just watched a series of Southpark episodes about this a few weeks ago.
RichVR
2550
Yeah, Kerzain, I just watched the same episode the other day. The one with the Canadian devil, right?
Quaro
2551
Flying from space to a planet’s surface. Looks pretty cool.
I’m still giggling at this.
KevinC
2553
Their videos always look like the ships have no mass or momentum, is that how it feels while playing? It looks more like playing a FPS with noclipping than a space sim. I don’t know why it comes across to me that way.
Tman
2554
It’s not seemless. it’s been edited. Everytime they go to 3rd person it feels like I’m watching a ship on a string from Planet 9 from outer space.
Look at 3:00 mark when the ship is descending - the doors open up, then there’s a glitch, then the doors are closing, wait now they’re opening again. I smell a crash.
Anyway, I’m being nit-picky. It’s cool, but it lessens my interest. I’m the guy playing Rebel Galaxy who lets the game pull me out of warp so I don’t run into the space station to limit my travel time. This is cool the first dozen times, but after that, precious time wasted where I could be doing something else.
Watched the video out of curiosity and it looks like physics have no affect on the ship. At all.
It’s like the pilot can move in any direction on the XYZ axis without needing to worry about where thrusters are actually located, gravity, inertia, and so on.
-Todd
Here is the extended version of that video - https://youtu.be/69ck049Bg_I
My first thought watching that video was “wait, Evochron did that already, and it felt better too”.
Graphically looks great. Mechanically it still looks like the ships lack any mass or inertia. I did not watch the full video yet, but it also seems like the scale is not quite right - like there is nowhere near enough depth to the atmosphere and it is very quick to descend though as a result.
IIRC planet is the size of 2/7 of our moon; But that’s nothing compared to, say, No Man Sky’s ping pong ball sized planets.
I was wondering about technical implementation of planets, since the real planet size would be extremely demanding for both memory and creation/design (and, very likely, for flying on and off animations) - even if one starts with something as small as our pale blue dot.
Timex
2560
Heh, I got in it and was playing some tonight… I totally forget how to fly and what my key mappings were. It’s gonna take a while to recall how I have things set up. I might just scrap everything and go back to the defaults, and start remapping things from scratch.
My experience watching it is quite the opposite, but then again I played quite a bit of Squadron commander a while back.
I see a lot of inertia there, specially when the ship is nearing the peak where the base is located. You clearly can see how the ship slides a lot towards the left even though the pilot has adjusted the orientation. You can see this best at 10:50 to 11:20 of the second video (https://youtu.be/69ck049Bg_I). If that’s not a LOT of inertia and momentum, I don’t know what would be (for me it feels even too much).
However: I have not played the latest version, and it seems they have not yet improved the low speed flight feel. When the ship slows down to start landing it’s where I perceive a significant lack of inertia. A problem of the flight model where thrusters are so powerful that at such small speeds accelerations and brakes are almost instantaneous. The patch notes of 2.0 seemed to indicate this was addressed, but (judging by the video) it seems still lacking.
Also, I agree they need harsher atmosphere influence to make it feel heavier than space. Right now atmosphere seems just a visual effect. It’s also the first time we are shown this, so I won’t make much out of this.
Anyway, I’m really surprised. I did not realize space to planet transitions where going to be a thing in this game… It certainly didn’t need them, but then that’s what this design seems to be about :P
geewhiz
2562
I have a Logitech G13 so I always write down all key mappings. I even made printable sheets to record the key settings that I can place on my desk to look at while I am playing.
It would probably be great if games would allow us to print out our key settings to keep a record of them. Not certain if a lot of games do that since I never change them in options anymore. I just map the preset choices to my G13. The G13 does allow one to print out your settings but I like my own templates I made more. :)
