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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think even if they fail (though I prefer they succeed!), they've still done a wonderful thing. They are pushing boundaries far beyond what I thought was possible in modern games and that in itself is a great accomplishment. It's going to push more game developers to do the same and given the success of Red Dead Redemption 2 - which also pushed boundaries beyond what I expected - it seems we're going to be getting some really massive and immersive games in the not too distant future.

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As an early Star Citizen backer, I don't fully get how they pushed the boundaries of gaming. They seem to have to just wasted backer money, wasted hours of developer time that could have been used to make other games, and broke promises.

The scale of the art is the biggest thing for me. The ship designs are incredibly detailed, but then you zoom out and there’s a whole planet and several moons and it’ll only get bigger from there.

When I fire it up occasionally I honestly don’t even do missions, I just go see what new places have been added and go chasing alien sunsets.

Landing on Hurston https://i.redd.it/xyjxc15jbh421.jpg

The moons of Hurston https://i.redd.it/opk5azvmvfr11.png

Some day I’ll work my way up to a Constellation Phoenix and just cruise around the galaxy taking in the sights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzVPVDIRgK4

If you want more technical stuff, the panels from Citizen Con are a good watch, but individually I’m sure there are other games doing some of the same things.

Here's something worth reading: https://starcitizen.tools/Object_Container_Streaming

As a game developer, I don’t think this is particularly noteworthy.

I’m sure it was a very important optimisation for Star Citizen, but it’s not like some amazing tech that will be important for the game industry or anything.

Star Citizen had some awful performance problems, and because the development is quite public, optimisations that programmers are working on get important sounding names and publicity all their own. If it wasn’t for that, this would just be an implementation detail in their engine.

I didn't post that to suggest it was something remarkable or novel in game development, but it certainly wasn't a waste of time as the commenter I replied to was suggesting.

As you said, OCS was a needed optimization at the time it was rolled into the publicly facing releases, and I thought it was an interesting topic to at least share with others who are interested in the discussion (the amount of negative downvotes I see now maybe suggests folks don't find it as interesting as I do as someone who merely plays video games but doesn't develop them); at the very least I wasn't aware that it's a common technology, but it is still an interesting technology to me nonetheless.

Its just zoning combined with streaming, but under other name - its been around for a long time, at least the times of Unreal Engine because I clearly remember dealing with zones in first Unreal's editor back in 98.

As fun fact, its something you are getting for free with Unreal Engine 4.smth these days because Epic needed it for Fortnite Battle Royale ;)

I know other engines do streaming, but do they nest the same way or just load the required parts of a level?

The SC version has a star system, which has containers for areas around each planet, which has containers for moons and the planet, and you go down to the planet and it has containers for cities, which have containers for buildings which have containers for apartments. I wouldn't think Fortnite would bother rigging it up that way, but maybe arbitrary nesting is a natural way to handle it.

Of course there's the additional mess of coordinate systems on a spinning planet orbiting around a star that your average shooter doesn't deal with either.

But the really impressive part is that they managed to stuff this into an old version of CryEngine and make it work. They really lucked out with CryTek running out of money to pay their programmers with, which let CIG scoop up a bunch of the engine devs and start their Frankfurt office. When it comes down to it, that might be what makes the whole project possible.

Speaking only for myself, I contributed Kickstarter funds to get a working game, not to advance the state of the art. I realize different funders have different takes on this.

EDIT: I should mention that I haven't actually tried playing the game in quite a while. I've been waiting for the developers to stamp it as "released" before I take another look.

So perhaps in its current form, it's playable enough to satisfy what I signed up for. It's a little hard to tell from the varied characterizations of its current playability.

I've tried recently it's unplayable and none of mechanisms are remotely fun.

Then you didn't tried recently. Recently i get 30+ fps and the game is playable.

You have a very generous definition of playable. Basic things like collision detection don't work. Large ships clip through each other, they disappear randomly. Seats and other interactables glitch out stranding you, there are numerous bugs that can catapult a passenger into deep space at ridiculous speeds.

I haven't played but is this what you get after 8 years with $200m?

If the $200m came from a studio's budget, the guy is fired 5 years ago.

about RD2 , what do you mean it pushed boundaries? if are you referring at programming I want to know what you mean since I did not see anything new in it(just asking not want to contradict you).

The graphics and animations are good but I seen similar on other games.

Fair question. It was a combination of several things put together that I think qualifies as pushing boundaries for me. On their own these things may not be a big deal, but altogether and especially on relatively outdated hardware(console) they're great accomplishments.

The game is seamless - and I think God of War does this well also - basically there's really no "loading" once you're in the game; you go from gameplay to cutscene to gameplay without any interruption. The graphics are high quality and that's amazing for how huge the game is and how extremely dynamic it is (e.g. how animals interact with the environment, the weather).

Considering the lag I get on the PS4 with games like Witcher 3 that try to balance high quality graphics with scale, RDR2 is smooth. You can be on a train fighting 30 guys (each with dynamic facial expressions) with animals running around in the distance, explosions, the wind is blowing the trees around you and it's changing from sunshine to pouring rain - all this and more without a hiccup. That's a lot of detail processing at one time.

EDIT: one other thing I found impressive and i'm not sure I've seen this in other open-world games or if they intentionally programmed it this way: during one of the missions I slaughtered about a dozen or two guys and traveled a considerable distance away from the scene. Normally when you come back to something like this, the world around you has pretty much re-rendered, but 30 minutes later when I arrived back, all the dead bodies were in the same place as before.

> The game is seamless - and I think God of War does this well also - basically there's really no "loading" once you're in the game; you go from gameplay to cutscene to gameplay without any interruption.

Lots of games have had "no loading" (after a large load in the beginning and hidden loads throughout the game), dating back at least to the PS3.

What God Of War did differently is that there's no camera cuts; the whole game is one continuous camera shot.

RDR2 is definitely a great game, with more detail and nuance than I’ve ever seen, nevermind the gkorious visuals and music. But I agree with the previous commenter’s sentiment — there’s not a lot of game design innovation. The mission structure is linear and restrictive as a straight-jacket. There’s no way to progress that doesn’t involve murdering an immersion-breaking number of outlaws and cops alike. Even the detail you mention — corpses being present (and even decaying) — is as much an illusion (due to memory constraints) ad it is in any other game. Humans disappear as soon as you move into a nearby zone (especially after a mission). Some corpses of certain infrequrntly-spawning animals do remain, but only for awhile.

Again, the overall package and detail is incredible, especially the amount and variety of voiceover work. But it’s not particularly innovative.

I think the innovation is entirely focused on making the narrative of game more cinematic. The way dynamic gameplay lines up perfectly with cut scenes... and stuff like that.

I can understand why those innovations don't really count for a lot of hardcore gamers. You are typically looking for innovations in AI, persistent world features (memory optimization), game decisions that effect the world and game play (branching trees).

RDR2 isn't a revolution from a technology perspective. But it's revolutionary from an artistic one.

The attention to detail in animal behavior is my favorite part about the game. I'm sure there are many geniuses at Rockstar but what made this game was beautiful craftsmanship.

I think when this game eventually gets the VR remake like Skyrim recently did, people will be able to appreciate how much went into this game. People will be revisiting it for a long time.

Thanks for the reply, seems to me that is a natural evolution from the previous game, the new hardware is more powerful and they had the money and time to add those details and polish it. I 100% agree the graphics and details are great, I was wondering if they brought something revolutionary since the last games that I missed in the reviews and gameplays I watched.

The graphics and animations are more or less on par, it's the underlying mechanics where new ground is being driven. Star Citizen has taken the "simulation" approach to insane levels. There are so many things you can do in Star Citizen that just aren't possible in other games because of how they're designed.

In a lot of games, each interior of a spaceship would be a map, and then you would have a map of each location you could exit the spaceship, and then you would effectively teleport at a doorway when you "exit the ship". (Think about how this works in Mass Effect. The "ship" that you run around on never actually "moves". It's much easier and more efficient to make a game this way for a lot of reasons. In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.

By keeping everyone and all objects "in space" all the time, Star Citizen allows some insanely different experiences that other games would have to specifically program functionality for.

>In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.

This doesn't sound special or ground breaking at all. Heck there are decade old MMOs like shores of hazeron that combine survival game elements, sim city style planet construction with complex resource simulation and minecraft style construction of your own custom designed spacecraft. At all times you're playing single character seamlessly without any loading screens. There is one exception though. Traveling to another solar system via a wormhole opens a loading screen, however if you don't have a warp drive you can just accelerate to light speed and travel within 10 minutes to another solar system without a loading screen.

However it's developed by a single guy and pretty much dead nowadays with 5 active players but it wouldn't surprise me if star citizen can't reach the complexity of that game within the next few years despite having significantly more resources.

http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Shores_of_Hazeron

Sometimes I am not sure if people are serious. It's not to say that graphics = complexity, by any means, but supporting the complexity Star Citizen is trying to with the sort of graphics that Star Citizen has is a very, very different thing.

Another commenter wondered why more Star Citizen backers weren't interested in the 2D game he founded. Again, hard to tell if people are serious, or they just don't understand what the draw is.

Images: https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov... https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov... https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov...

I mean, Shores of Hazeron is a 10+ year old game at this point. You can't, with any shred of genuineness, actually compare the graphics between it and Star Citizen. Same with Star Sonata (it's really not that hard to scroll up and actually be respectful and use the name of the game instead of belittling it to a "2D game") which is almost 15 years old now.

Of course the graphics of S:C are going to be more complex. But that says nothing about the underlying technology, which you claimed is so incredibly groundbreaking but were immediately disproven by other games managing the exact same thing a decade ago.

It's really not as insurmountable of a challenge as you make it seem to support prettier graphics on the same technologies used 10+ years ago with the massive CPU and GPU upgrades we've had in the last decade.

In Battlefield 1942, you can steer a full aircraft carrier while other player spawn on it and small boats and aircrafts are taking off of it. And yes you can walk on it too. It was more than 16 years ago.

Now add space travel in three-dimensions, moving between variable gravity and atmosphere environments, make the map the size of a solar system with fairly massive planets that you can fly down to any part of freely. Try to get hundreds or thousands of people in that at one time, then throw tons of NPCs down on top of it to make sure things really seem lively. Etc. Add not just the fully-modeled interior of one or two aircraft carriers, but several of varying size and scale from various manufacturers (and species), add multiple professions for mining, salvaging, refining, etc. which each have mechanics far beyond "press key to do action".

This is a non-exhaustive comparison. There are an insane number of aspects where Star Citizen is trying to take it to another level. Trying to compare Battlefield 1942 to an approach like Star Citizen is like comparing a deck of playing cards to Battlefield 1942. You're trying to compare a first-person shooter which allows for a handful of straightforward game loops to a game that attempts to include the full scope of MMOs and sandbox games with the graphical and environmental fidelity of a first-person shooter.

I would love all of that but so far none has been delivered.

When you play what has been delivered, it feels like a shitty side project put together in a hurry. Game crashes. Current art is ugly. Interiors are empty and feels fake. Performance is sluggish even on top of line PCs. Physics are no fun. Collisions are not properly implemented. Every ships and players look the same.

They should call this project a failure and release the resources currently being stuck in this project.

> I would love all of that but so far none has been delivered

This is objectively false, and you seem to have a serious chip on your shoulder.

I played their last open play session, and I definitely jumped in a ship with multiple friends, flew to several different planets, flew down to their surface, transitioned between different atmospheric environments.

I had a lot of fun with it.

It's one thing to say, "I don't like what they've done." It's another to say, "They haven't done something." when they objectively have.

I just took a look at the roadmap of SC [0].

3 underwhelming gameplay features and 11 ship designs? Other games like Warframe tend to suffer from feature creep because they keep adding dozens of features which do not integrate deeply with the rest of the game. (I'm looking at you Archwing mode) StarCitizen's development pace in comparison feels rather anemic and primarily focused on all the damn ships people have preordered for thousands of dollars.

[0] https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...

But is it fun?

You need friends and your group needs to be motivated to find fun. Doing that has resulted in completely new game experiences, and I've been a gamer for 22 years. I've sat with a buddy stranded in a satellite, while our other friend organized a rescue, shooting shit. I've infiltrated a capital ship in order to shut down the shields, so that the rest of my group can board it (after destroying the rest of the fleet). I've participated in the Jump Town shenanigans, on both sides of the law. If you have friends who play it, it is a kind of fun that has been impossible to experience until now.

If you don't have anyone to play it with, I can't recommend it at all. You will not have fun. Maybe once there's more to the game.

That's a very subjective question, and answers to it will obviously vary based on who you ask. I have fun with it every time I play it, now that it's more or less stable and gameplay sessions don't end with "it crashed and I don't want to spend five minutes loading in again". (This was my 2.x or so experience with Star Citizen.)

3.x builds are a ton of fun and there's a lot of places to see and stuff to do. I've heard about all sorts of features and landmarks I've not yet trekked out to see or tried to do, and this is on a game which "barely has any content" according to some people.

The biggest issue right now is that there's no solid incentive to put a lot of time into it. Since it's still in "we reset everything each major patch", I don't want to put time into running missions and accumulating crud that might not be there next time I sit down to play. I personally hesitate to play most MMOs on beta servers for this reason, I feel like I'd rather accomplish things when it "matters".

Note that that's just the persistent universe portion, and there's effectively three "competitive modes" in the game as well, with which the leaderboards are shared in the newsletters each week: Arena Commander has both dogfighting and racing game modes and Star Marine has a first person shooter which has some fairly neat mechanics.

To put it another way: I think you almost nailed it in your previous reply, though I don't think you meant to.

> Trying to compare Battlefield 1942 to an approach like Star Citizen is like comparing a deck of playing cards to Battlefield 1942

A deck of playing cards isn't inherently fun. A game is, though. There's a much better comparison of Star Citizen to the deck of cards here, and of BF1942 to a game.

You can, and have, created some fun by bending Star Citizen into game-like situations. I have, too! That's totally valid. That doesn't happen as often in BF1942—not never, but many people simply play BF1942 as designed.

Is Star Citizen fun, or are you and the people you play with fun? You can list features and functionality all day, but is the enjoyment coming from the game, or is Star Citizen primarily a medium for you to create your own enjoyment?

It's maybe a subtle difference. You might even consider it a meaningless one. But seriously: is Star Citizen fun?

By that definition, sandbox games are not games, and just something you can make fun in if you bend them the right way. EVE Online is apparently no longer a game, and perhaps someone should tell CCP that.

> By that definition, sandbox games are not games

Even as a little kid, when playing in actual sandboxes, I never considered that kind of playing a "game". Playing tag or hide and seek or checkers was always distinct from just running around in the woods or playing in a sandbox. Even filling up balloons with water and looking for targets on our BMX bikes, even though it was trickier than many games, wasn't a game. Making a bet, having a competition or playing a game, that has additional elements to just having fun with whatever.

Not that there's anything "wrong" with "just having fun", or that "just having fun" can't get crazy very complex and tricky! With most games, certainly if they're multiplayer, you can have the sandbox element, too. That is, you can just ignore the rules and turn gameplay features into derpmanship tools. For example, this movie is from clips recorded when a new TF2 map came out, I joined a nearly empty public server, and along with others managed to do everything BUT the objective for 15-20 minutes. I'm the pyro doing the impossible at 3:11 ^^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQlz7kFoXSc

None of these people knew each other. Eg. at 0:58 a guy shows up who isn't in on it yet, ruins the fun, then switches to soldier to shoot projectiles that don't do damage, for even better ping pong. No voice chat, hardly any text chat; all this basically just happened, and it was more fun than many "real" TF2 matches I had. In a normal match you just think "how can our team score", when the objective is "have fun", the feasible permutations for what do you increase by a lot, it's a whole other level of complexity.

After watching that movie again I totally forgot what I was arguing, sorry. I agree with games having win/loose conditions, and usually a way to measure better/worse performance, roughly, and therefore sandbox games "not being games in that sense" -- but I think there's nothing wrong with that, and that ideally, you'd have the option for both. I never played Star Citizen so I have no clue how the universe is set up, but I could imagine some regions being more active and contested, where money and/or weapons establishes a pecking order, whereas you can always just fly off to some moon in the middle of nowhere and hold races there, or spell out obscene messages with ship wrecks or whatever.

Yes? Literally? They've both embraced that, and successfully. CCP says as much: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/179811/EVE_Online_and_th...

Wait, are you arguing something? If so, what?

Just some corrections(I did not downvote you), Mass Effect is an old game, Mass Effect Andromeda for example had the ship appear on the actual planet so you can see outside the windows.

Btw I was not criticizing RD2 , a good game can use old boring techniques, I was wondering if I missed some revolutionary thing they did since previous games.

The new X game also looks interesting, Space Engineers is also a game that I follow it's progress

Andromeda uses all of the same limitations though as the original Mass Effect trilogy, for the most part. While the ship "appears on the actual planet", it is in a fixed position. This means they know exactly what will be displayed out the windows, for instance, and it can likely be pre-rendered or otherwise heavily optimized. You cannot move on and off the ship without a "cut", because you are moving from one map to the other. There is also no real movement of the ship with respect to a planet, as transitions such as landing are done via cutscene.

Andromeda moves Mass Effect forward here and there, but it's still more or less limited in the same ways, and I think my comment still mostly applies. I didn't intend to specifically refer to "Mass Effect 1", but the franchise as a whole.

Sure, my comment was purely informative , I am not a Star Citizen critique because I am not following this game since I am playing single player games. I am curious if you tried the X games from EGOSOFT (for some reason I could not get into them but the latest one looks better) , or if you tried Space Engineers (this one appeals to me because I could create or import Star Trek ships and create my own thing , though I am waiting to be done before I get back into it.

Seriously? They've done a TERRIBLE thing. They've shown that you can get ridiculous amounts of money for...pictures and empty promises. I hope this idea will never catch on because this is far worse then every loot box business model out there.

It also hurts everybody else attempting to do something like that. Just imagine what a capable director could have done with those amounts of money...

Agreed. I would also add they are completely rewriting what is the size of project approachable by “indie” game devs. A success changes the rules of the game dev ecosystem.

I think "indie" starts to mean very little when you apply it to a studio with $200M.

Roberts was already a big budget producer by the time SC came around...calling someone 'indie' when they've hired Nicolas Cage for a project is stretching the term well beyond its limits.

Henry Cavill is SC’s more notable get [0]. Nicolas Cage is unfortunately mired in mostly VOD projects to deal with his reported financial problems.

0: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/63481/superman-star-henry-cav...

> done a wonderful thing

That's the least you expect from a $200m project. It's a massive failure if they don't deliver with that amount of money. It's just that they lose nothing but reputation because it wasn't their money.

Bad management so far.

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