Great video for those who are out of the loop (like myself). I came to this thread thinking Squadron 42 was already out.
It’s a good video to see the state of the game, which frankly, is quite attractive, if not polished. I’m tempted to play myself, if it’s not because of being lazy.
Star Citizen can definitely be played. it looks pretty, sometimes. the ships feel good to fly. it’s an intriguing concept. but when i played a few years ago (not much has changed) there just isn’t much of a game. you can do some missions for money but they are uninspired and boring. you can do “trade” but it’s equally as dull. The ships cost a lot of money so you’ll need to grind a lot. The main enjoyment or interest is making it something like “vr chat” where you make your own fun with random people
I believe most space games are like that. I remember loving Elite Dangerous to a point of giving them money for some ship decals. But after a while, the game became monotonous and I gave up completely. The vastness of space can be lonely and boring so I don’t think Star Citizen can be any better. Maybe SQ42, that single player thing, will be different. Let’s see how that turns out.
As always, edited for length but nothing added. I know I am fucking hyped for the flight academy application form improvements.
TO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS
SUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 07:06:2022
Welcome to June’s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to Human combat, Volt weaponry, and space flight mechanics.
AI (Content)
Last month, AI Content began their work on the master-at-arms behavior, which uses the same AI as the bartender but interacts with different usables and plays other dialogue options. Supporting SQ42’s numerous weapons and their varying shapes and sizes requires an extensive catalog of assets.
The landing officer is now finished and integrated into the chapter flow. The role of this AI is to help the player land safely and correctly oriented on the landing pad, with character animations playing to assist with positional and rotation changes.
The AI can now wheel a diagnostic cart towards and away from the Gladius when it lands.
AI (Features)
Last month, on the Human combat side, AI Features began implementing logic for a selection of different attack archetypes: defender, pusher, and strafer.
They also selected and processed the animations generated in last month’s mo-cap sessions, including bespoke animations for a section of stealth gameplay.
AI (Tech)
June saw AI Tech prototyping a set of fauna behaviors, focusing on the implementation of the entity class, verifying that all the components can function correctly on creatures.
Work continued on the locomotion code. This included improving the transitions between different locomotion states by further developing the initial implementation of pose matching.
For trolley use, the team focused on tasks to allow an NPC using a usable (in this case a movable object) to be dynamically attached to another usable (such as a parking spot).
Animation
They’re currently making final passes on several cast members’ facial animations.
Art (Characters)
Character Art continued to develop key outfits for the UEE Navy, including the bridge officer uniform, deck crew EVA outfit, and training gear.
Art (Weapons)
Animation worked to give life and functionality to several FPS devices, including the fire extinguisher, laser trip mine, breaching charge, and a Volt sniper rifle.
Engine
Buffer copying of sun shadow cascades was ported as well.
The atmosphere shader code was adjusted to compile well with DXC and SPIR-V.
On the core engine, entity areas now utilize tags to track what entities/areas events send to each other. This replaces the hidden hierarchy logic that caused various issues and allows for more efficient code. Work on running the entire code base through include-what-you-use (IWYU) continued. The goal is to eventually make IWYU part of the continuous integration pipeline (trybuild) to keep code clean. Furthermore, a recent integration into the main development branch saw the introduction of the cigSTL/eaSTL namespace, which is planned to become a customizable STL library for StarEngine. The entity component update scheduler received updates to avoid iterating component lists when using manual update policies (performance). Work on improving file location (IO) continued, which should eventually lead to improved loading times for small files. Also, work on an improved r_displayinfo continued. Lastly, the old FPS analytic buckets were replaced with an array-based frame time bucket that allows for more accurate profiling information.
Features (Gameplay)
Further improvement and polish tasks were also completed for the flight academy application form.
Gameplay Story
It also enabled them to deliver a new scene featuring an NPC dragging a refueling hose over to the Gladius and plugging it in. Further polish work is required but the scene is already visually interesting.
Mid-June saw a new mo-cap session, with the team preparing to work with the data when it arrives.
Graphics & VFX Programming (and PTT)
Significant progress was made on the hair shader too, including updates to greying controls, variation tiling, and melanin selection.
Level Design
Social Design worked closely with Social AI to implement some of the expanded systemic content that will bring life to the levels. For example, engineers going about their daily schedules and crew on downtime in the mess hall.
Tech Animation
They also continued work on a new system that puts fidelity above all else. Although rarely used in gaming due to its expense and limitations, this type of system is ideal for performance pieces.
UI
For the new Starmap, the team worked on navigation and began preliminary work to show space clouds.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked on a key cutscene involving significant amounts of destruction.
“Due to the extra complexity of this scene, we spent some R&D time trying different ways to convincingly animate metal structures bending and tearing as opposed to simply shattering like in lots of real-time destruction simulations.” VFX Team
Ah, remember those heady days when SQ42 was ‘nearly finished’?
Things everybody wants in their spaceship combat game…
Says you I’ve been dying for Thief in space.
Well, I guess I can’t complain.
Just wait until they add their brand new Innuendo™ tech.
Isn’t Squadron 42 supposed to be a space combat game? Did I miss when it became a shooter instead? Nothing in that update sounds like a game focusing on spaceships pewpewing each other.
Sorry, I omitted the two references to space:
The landing officer is now finished and integrated into the chapter flow. The role of this AI is to help the player land safely and correctly oriented on the landing pad, with character animations playing to assist with positional and rotation changes. This routine can now be viewed on the ship’s cockpit display, as solely seeing the AI through the cockpit visor proved challenging.
Alongside the other Level Design and System teams, the Space/Dogfight team continued to focus on getting a large part of the game fully playable with functioning mechanics.
This is a great example of Chris Roberts having no idea what good gameplay is:
- Is there interest in an open world spaceship combat game with planetary and shooty parts? Sure. Even if they’re not great, having them be part of an open-world game means there’s variety in gameplay experiences.
- Is there any interest whatsoever in a spaceship game that’s mission based that also has crappy shooter parts and stealth elements? Hell no. Get that thing outta here.
I will settle for nothing less than visually stunning.
He made a video about Star Citizen but the background music in the video is from Mass Effect. My brain is so confused right now.
It’s good to hear that they have a Space/ Dogfight team, but their “focus on getting a large part of the game fully playable with functioning mechanics” seems like it ought to be the most important part of company’s work and probably deserves more detail. Maybe that’s why the rest of the update sounds like just fiddling around the margins?
They do give more details. It’s called the roadmap / progress tracker. It’s a constantly updated project management tool which goes into more details into what teams are working on what tasks. It doesn’t necessarily help you know when a feature will need completed, but it does tell you which parts of the engine or the overall gameplay are being worked on.
The monthly updates are a more high level view and terms to be fuzzier. Small features given to newer devs can appear best as important as bigger workpieces. But it’s not the case.
Maybe that roadmap isn’t displaying properly on my phone, but it really doesn’t give me useful details either. I guess I know now that they worked on Chapter 22 for 79 weeks and apparently finished last month. I would have expected a mention of it in the development update, but maybe they had more important things to mention like polishing the flight application form. Or maybe the lack of progress tracker updates on Chapter 22 since January 26, 2021 is a sign that the progress tracker is not actually an accurate view of the project…
I’m just cranky tonight, so I don’t really mean to be getting into it with you. I’ll just say that I’d never get away with such low information status updates at my job and leave it at that.
To be fair it’s shit on mobile but on desktop it’s quite expansive.
If only they’d put the effort into the game itself rather than this – admittedly impressive – tool.
Remember when SQ42 was supposed to be aiming for a beta in Q3 2020?
Compare that to some of the incredibly basic things they are still working on in mid-2022, and decide if you think they were just talking out of their asses.
Oh wow. CIG had temporarily enabled 100 players per server on the PTU.
Here is what close to 100 ships on atmosphere re-entry looks like.
And here are 50 Vs 50 ish battles.
Nice.