Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

Hmmm…Limited Stock. Have they created an “RSI Shipyard” auction site yet where people can sell their “gently used” pixel ships to one another for real cash, of which CIG gets a percentage fee on every sale? I mean, if you’ve sold all the 2016 pixel ships you’re going to sell, then why not proclaim them “discontinued”, create perceived rarity, and profit off the demand that results?

They arrange it through a grey market on Reddit. But yes basically.

I hope you meant 2:38:00 instead, because no way am I watching 3 hours of this.
That said, I will admit the graphics in that race are a bit better than Slipstream 5000.

I don’t have 2 hours and 19 minutes to waste. What are we looking at?

or did you mean 2:38:00?

—edit—

didn’t see @Giles_Habibula post. Just read Derek’s, was going to respond and check back later lol.

What a fantastic game.

@dsmart Does your blog count as some type of self-employment? Can you deduct it off your taxes?

That video–the comments on the stream were great. “What’s the eta on this game, before or after the heat death of the universe?”

Wow that stream really puts some of the statements by Roberts at the Citizencon in perspective, namely when he starts listing off the things promised and finished. Star Marine is definitely not finished to say the least!

I wouldn’t dare try that. I have an understanding with the IRS. I pay my taxes; they leave me alone.

Today’s funnies.

"So hey I figured out how to get through the No-Fly zone at Lorevill if anyone wants to grief the poo poo out of people.

Turns out the barrier is server-side. Disconnect your internet, fly through real quick to the little deck for the habitation area or the ship dealership, reconnect your internet. Do it fast enough and you won’t get booted, and you’ll legit be able to fly around the “City” part shooting people. Good times."

So, here’s what’s going on with this. I already covered this Lorville travesty here and here.

The barrier isn’t server-side. It’s just an invisible polygonal wall with a shader.

Simply put, once the client disconnects, the server stops receiving input. Once that happens, the server knows nothing about the client. At the time the client breaches the no-fly-zone (which is just a transparent wall) via collision, the server (off-line) would have missed it. It’s not different from glitching through any other level geometry, falling through the planet surface etc.

The no-fly-zones are part of the level. They are not server side because both the client and server ARE running the SAME level. That’s how positioning works.

In some cases you don’t even need to be disconnected from the server in order to breach the barrier, since it relies on collision detect - which can fail. If the collision response isn’t fast enough before the server gets the input and responds, you can breach the world. CryEngine (and also Lumberyard) have had this problem since forever because the networking layer sux balls.

$201m + 6 yrs

hey, who remembers when I said the same thing weeks ago?

They’re likely culling things based upon the view frustrum of the camera

Well, read this developer FUD which I copied and pasted below to save you the click.

========

A game developer and programmer of considerable experience and years in the industry has offered a commentary on the current state of the SC engine. He has given permission for it to be posted here. No it isn’t Derek Smart - this is a European dev of some calibre.

Background - it was a surprise to a few folks in the industry that CIG took the decision to promote a free fly given the poor state of the builds on the PTU. A conversation took place around many of the deep technical issues that CIG’s team have been unable to address, and a layman’s commentary was requested around some specific ‘glitches’ that are present in the current build. So here it is in full.

Star Citizen Free Fly build, a developer’s commentary:

DISCLAIMER
Most of these are going to be pure, wild, stabs in the dark - what I would start with if I had to debug them. But keep in mind that I have no idea what their codebase is like (besides clearly not ideal), so plenty of them are probably far off the mark.

Glitch type: random teleportation

I don’t know what the is going on here. This is so amazingly broken, it could very well be caused by quite literally anything. So, this is going to be wild speculation: Animations often have movement associated with them. A good example of this is a walk animation cycle - animators can put in the forward momentum, so it’s perfectly synced to the animation, and can be easily sped up or slowed down while still looking right. It’s possible that there’s a tiny bit of movement during the “fidelitiously drink from glass” animation. Or perhaps the glass is a physical entity with collision detection. And either way, it added movement to the commando, which caused the commando to clip inside some other collision object (such as the nearby bar), which then caused it to freak out and deposit them elsewhere. The second jump? Who knows. That’s pure magic. It’s probably a separate, but related, issue to the first jump, where rapidly changing environments in a way that was never supposed to happen caused another system to explode. It seems to have teleported the commando far away, perhaps to another side of the moon, since they’re rotated horizontally.

Gitch type: clipping into stuff erases ships

Another physics oddity. Since this is going to come up a lot, we need to go over the basics of physics in game development. Physics is a bunch of really complex math, and one of its primary tasks is resolving and providing response to collisions. When two objects overlap, the collision must be resolved by calculating how much each object is penetrating (har har) each other and in what direction. A response can then be provided in the form of deciding how to move those objects apart so that they are no longer colliding, and then applying force to them. This prevents objects from clipping through each other, and gives them that nice, warm and fuzzy physical-y feeling that you get when you throw a heavy ball at a tower of boxes and the boxes realistically tumble and fall in response to the ball’s weight.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. In the 'verse, it is clearly not working as it is supposed to. What happens here is that the physics are failing at that resolve and response step. The objects are penetrating each other, but the physics engine can’t figure out how to correctly resolve it. What usually happens in such a case is that one or both of the objects goes flying away at an extremely high velocity - we’ve all seen this happen in games like Skyrim. A cheap way of ‘fixing’ that problem (without actually fixing what is causing the underlying problem) is to simply detect when an object is suddenly given a super huge velocity, and deleting it. Poof, problem solved. Sort of. In this case, the chariot blinks out of existence, leaving the hapless commando trapped in limbo, because it was never designed to know what to do when the chariot he was piloting no longer exists and he did not have time to perform a fidelity immersion animation to return to a not-piloting-chariot state. This looks like what is happening here.

Glitch type: bind culling on objects that are visible for player

Haha. Bad math. They’re likely culling things based upon the view frustrum of the camera, but forgetting to keep it in sync when switching between camera views and environments. Lots of things can affect the camera’s state like that, especially cramped environments - and I’m sure that they’re forgetting to keep the version of the camera’s position/rotation/view matrix updated properly before culling with it.

Glitch type: animation glitches

Holy stimperor that’s disturbing. And what happens when animation states go bad. The commando was presumably supposed to use a immersion mocap to exit the chariot, but instead, somehow got into the “nah, let’s just walk forwards lol” state due to extremely good programming. But, his legs were all ready to be part of that fidelity animation… But then were told to do a bog-standard walk animation instead, so they did the best they could and split the difference. Basically, the code that handles animation was trying to go in two directions at once, like the creepy guy with each eye pointing in a different direction. The result was Fidelity™ to make the stimperor proud.

Glitch type: weapon fire curves when strafing

So they’re adding the chariot’s velocity to the projectile’s velocity as it’s fired. Makes it easier to lead shots when you’re aiming, in the worst, brokenest possible way that immediately falls over when anyone who has touched a flight sim tries to play it. Revisit trig, this is stuff that is both simple enough that it should have been covered in a college course and stuff that has been solved so many times over that you could have found a complete solution in ten seconds of searching. I award you no points.

Glitch type: going too fast into planet breaks collision detection

https://giant.gfycat.com/JitteryImpe...gurbuzzard.mp4

He’s clipping through the planet’s ground before the collision detection has a chance to stop him. Their coordinate system was obviously not intended to function underground (sorry, anyone looking forward to hot subterrainian mining action), and promptly had a panic attack, breaking everything simultaniously. Only God knows what happened in the final few moments of that commando’s short, painful life.

Glitch type: Tposing multiple characters in 1 spot

https://clips.twitch.tv/EmpathicAver...tmullinsLitFam

A t-pose happens when the animation data for the commando becomes corrupted, and it reverts to its default state. Some of the fidelity immersion animations that were supposed to happen likely get corrupted when they try to resolve collision with another commando occupying the same space, as described previously. Apparently they just turn off collision detection with the offending object in that case, since you can’t very well delete a commando like you can a ship.

Glitch type: rubber banding on NPC

Rubber banding can happen in most any multiplayer game that uses network prediction - that is, predicting that if a commando is running to the left, he’ll probably continue running to the left until the network tells him otherwise - and the networking starts slowing down so those new packets saying “hey wait, I’m actually going right now” don’t come through until several seconds later, leading to the commando rubber banding back to its correct, not-based-off-of-old-predictions position. This is usually caused by a bad connection that’s suddenly dropping a lot of packets or getting a far higher ping than usual. It can also be caused by terribly written netcode.

Glitch type: latency issues/manipulation

A combination of all of the above, plus the wonderful fact that their clients are fully trusted and you can freely hack the poor thing to smithereens, as has been discussed many times before. Zany hijinks ensue in the more lethal than COD e-sports sensation!

BONUS COMMENTARY:

As much as they like to claim that they’re the Best Damn Space Simulator Ever, they’re not. Like, at all. Nothing about the game is a simulation, it’s a bunch of parlor tricks hacked together to create the illusion of a coherent world, which, as we’ve seen, is not doing a great job of hiding the fundamental, structural cracks behind the cheap curtains. It’s not inherently a bad thing because almost every game is made just like this - cheap as much as humanly possible in order to give the best possible experience to the players, most of which will never be the wiser anyway.

AI is a great example of this because it’s blatantly obvious that they have not designed the game to be an NPC simulation first, game second - which they need to in order for it to work as they claim for the reasons described above. Whatever AI they put in immediately gets released-state Radiant AI-esque handcrafted stuff pasted on top of it. Just look at how many iterations a single mission giver has been through. No amount of jackets is going to magically tip the switch and turn glorified handcrafted pathfinding waypoint lists into something that shatters the Turing test and ushers us into a brave new world of I, Robot existential crisis.

I don’t understand why they didn’t just start by cloning freespace 2 or privateer. Build the space sim part and have a single screen to represent planets. Like, you know, the way privateer did it. Once you have that, start slowly fleshing out planets etc.

I think we can say that E:D was planned along those lines. But they got lost into a high fidelity simulation of space itself and/or hoped that 1983 style gameplay would hold players interest long enough until getting it right and incite them to fund development by buying decorations for their starships dashboards.

I am starting to get the feeling that these massively crowdfunded games based on nostalgia are pretty much like bad concept albums of coked up 1970 rock stars. Great covers, boring music.

…and the problem is wot exactly? :)

You’re right too that here I am whining a little bit - I clocked a LOT of hours on E:D before moving on.

Yet it is interesting to remember that I only jumped onto that boat when they produced a playable alpha which was pretty flash.

It’s funny but I recall agonising over whether or not to support Star Citizen over Elite… and decided to go for the former, before anything playable was ever produced.

So I got to play a lot a game which I didn’t want, and I don’t get to play the game I wanted (Squadron 42 actually).

I don’t think E:D got lost, particularly, except maybe in how development has slowed to a crawl. I think they made exactly what they (Braben anyway) intended to make — Elite in a modern engine, with multiplayer bolted on. It’s just not necessarily what people other than me wanted.

This post is so good I just love it https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=5500#post490266035
It’s like a scam on top of a delusion in a con sandwich.

Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can destroy your game design

rofl.

Yeah they made what they set out to make. Also, I don’t know what you mean by dev has slowed to a crawl. Have you see the data on the latest update?

Yeah, he’s not wrong :)