Colour me surprised:
In anticipation of today’s Live Stream, I did want to address one thing that I have been seeing speculation on in the forums: whether or not today’s Live Stream will feature the Squadron 42 Vertical Slice.
After we made the decision before CitizenCon that the Squadron 42 vertical slice wasn’t ready to be shown publically, we spent some time on reviewing how far off we were and what we wanted to achieve in order to be comfortable showing a full chapter of S42 gameplay. After all the effort we expended for CitizenCon, we didn’t want to spend additional developer time polishing intermediate solutions if it wasn’t going towards the final product. A slick demo isn’t that helpful if it pushes back the finished game, so we decided that the priority should be completing full systems over getting the vertical slice into a showable state.
Item 2.0, Subsumption AI, Subsumption Mission System and asynchronous Object Container Streaming are all core systems that will power Squadron 42. In addition, there is some significant low level animation and lighting tech that we need to finish up to realize the goal of real time player interactions and conversations at a level that would previously only be possible with pre-rendered cinematics. We want moving around and talking to the crew to be as fluid and look as good as pre-rendered cut scenes from other games.
…
So while it may be disappointing not to see something this year on Squadron 42, I believe it’s the best choice for the long term good of both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. It’s critical that we focus on finishing up the core systems we’ve designed to handle the needs of both games, as without them, other parts of the development team are blocked from finalizing key gameplay.
I revise my SQ42 release estimate to 2019.
After Citizencon they said they would endeavor to get it shown in one of the final livestreams of 2016, since it was so close to making it. Up there that is reneged and the story has changed to not wanting to spend anymore time on a vertical slice at the expense of actual development.
Why are they even considering vertical slices, it’s not like they have to coax milestone payments out of publishers. Or are they expecting big fund injection from the public after showing it?
We want moving around and talking to the crew to be as fluid and look as good as pre-rendered cut scenes from other games.
Which other games? I can’t recall the last time I saw a pre-rendered ingame cutscene that wasn’t just using the game engine. On PC you can tell, as suddenly the cutscene looks worse by dropping to lower resolution and framerate. ;)
Mafia 3. In fact, when they patched in the option to change the main character’s clothing, cutscenes still show the default look for the player. The devs said they’d have to render new cutscenes for each optional appearance if they wanted it to match.
Yep, still implementing core functionality. Best guess: 2018 Alpha/Beta, 2019 full release.
Apparently the livestream was a clusterfuck of production/broadcast/technical difficulties.
But don’t forget to get your holiday on!
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/Combos/Armada-Discount-Pack-Holiday-2016
Holy shit, the Holiday Livestream has been pulled from the SC Youtube page!
lol!
I still have it open in a page, so looks like it was just delisted.
It should be here:
Ha! Or not. Video has been made private.
Jazar
3530
Wasn’t SQ42 supposed to be episodic? It would reduce the time for a release but the content drip will be infuriating I bet.
Yeah,the SQ42 everyone is waiting for info or a glimpse at is technically the first installment, Chapter 1.
I am flabbergasted that they can’t show a bit of a single mission in SQ42 after all this time.
That Spaceballs edit is genius, though. Star Citizen apparently powers their livestreams through pure cringe.
I watched part of that livestream. It was balls to the wall stupid.
Holy Crap, that was almost as big a trainwreck as that legendary LA channel’s New Year’s Eve meltdown/broadcast, which was almost 4 years ago!
The meltdowns over this have been fantastic.
It was originally, but that was before their funding surge. The Squadron 42 people are currently waiting for is a self-contained AAA game, not the first episode of a Telltale game.
That Spaceballs edit was awesome, but it was still too cringe-worthy to watch longer than a minute.
I’m glad my money are in safe hands.
Derek, Derek, Derek
rei
3539
2.6 is out today. is it worth it to get in at $60usd yet?
hahaha they switched game engines too. that won’t delay things i’m sure.
rei
3540
i suspect the actual release will be the latter.
Leinad
3541
well Lumberyard is based on the latest cryengine and I guess the delays already happened because this certainly doesn’t seem to be a recent thing they did.
Timex
3542
This report is kind of misleading, since they moved to lumberyard, which is the CryEngine, which is what star citizen was already using.
But that still doesn’t make sense as RSI has had to do MAJOR changes to the CryEngine for what they’ve produced today, so the likelyhood they could just adopt Lumberyard would be fairly non-trivial.
Unless they are only taking very specific bits and pieces from Lumberyard that interact with AWS but I would imagine that would be throwing away most of what makes up Lumberyard.
EDit It’s also gauranteed they have a ton of custom tooling built up by now that even the editors and other tooling stuff is not useful to them.
Timex
3544
If I had to guess, I’d suspect that the parts they are interested in are related to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.
