Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 | The 'Verse Awakens

Ps. I think it would be great to make a list of features/systems they talked about in the past and recently to really sum up how ambitious and groundbreaking this game.

I've pretty much burned out on "ambitious" and "groundbreaking" and would happily settle for "working".

But I agree, somebody who can be bothered to watch and scrutinize all the videos should make a summarized list. Not to show how imba of a project Star Citizen is (we all know that already and don't need that point to be stressed any harder), but in order to create a traceable list of all the things to implement/fix/add that they talk about and and if/when they actually do it . With their weekly video output this must be a mammoth task, but it would be very helpful.
 
I've pretty much burned out on "ambitious" and "groundbreaking" and would happily settle for "working".

But I agree, somebody who can be bothered to watch and scrutinize all the videos should make a summarized list. Not to show how imba of a project Star Citizen is (we all know that already and don't need that point to be stressed any harder), but in order to create a traceable list of all the things to implement/fix/add that they talk about and and if/when they actually do it . With their weekly video output this must be a mammoth task, but it would be very helpful.

Honestly I've said it before but I would be happy even if they just got to an Arma in space level where we had a single player campaign and a system to create multiplayer missions and combat encounters. If mod capable even better, but I don't have nearly as massive of expectations for the PU as others here. All I know is I'm incredibly impressed with the state and what they've accomplished so far.

Just being able to fly my ship around and jump out an airlock with an EVA suit blows me away. I don't know exactly what's in store but I'm perfectly ok with waiting as long as needed. That being said as someone who hasn't followed development as close as I'd like, I'd love a list or breakdown.
 
I've pretty much burned out on "ambitious" and "groundbreaking" and would happily settle for "working".

But I agree, somebody who can be bothered to watch and scrutinize all the videos should make a summarized list. Not to show how imba of a project Star Citizen is (we all know that already and don't need that point to be stressed any harder), but in order to create a traceable list of all the things to implement/fix/add that they talk about and and if/when they actually do it . With their weekly video output this must be a mammoth task, but it would be very helpful.

The thing is that to make it working like they want it to be working, it must be groundbreaking :)
The whole talk about 'Item system 2.0' is so exciting. Basically everything is interconnected. For example all doors are connected to power sources and different have nodes that connects them to the power source, so if two nodes will fail, You have player that goes, fix the nodes and the reroute the power through the working node to the doors to make them working. And this applies to everything!
This will be mindblowing on bigger ships and stations, because stations are always working with this system!

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Have they talked much about developing weapons, ships and systems post release. I never played EVE but I does strike me as the reason it's so successful as a space sim is because not only do they have a player driven economy but also the combat and strategy metas change constantly as players are continually able to develop and improve weapons and tech. I think right? I know this doesn't compare to EVE as they are games with different outlooks but I'm wondering what kind of inspiration they've drawn. I know the general gist of what they have planned but to be completely honest I haven't spent that much time watching/reading about their plans for the continuing universe.

You dont create new items in EVE from the ground up. You make things based on predefined blueprints.
It will work in similar way in Star Citizen.
 
The thing is that to make it working like they want it to be working, it must be groundbreaking :)

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You dont create new items in EVE from the ground up. You make things based on predefined blueprints.
It will work in similar way in Star Citizen.

No I know that. I think what I meant to ask is the EVE developers add new blueprints fairly often to shake up the meta though right? They can also continue to improve their skills and the power of those systems right? Is it going to work the same way here? (Not skills i know) Or will it be more like Elite with fairly static systems? I'd love of see a video if they have one talking about that.
 
The thing is that to make it working like they want it to be working, it must be groundbreaking :)
The whole talk about 'Item system 2.0' is so exciting. Basically everything is interconnected. For example all doors are connected to power sources and different have nodes that connects them to the power source, so if two nodes will fail, You have player that goes, fix the nodes and the reroute the power through the working node to the doors to make them working. And this applies to everything!
This will be mindblowing on bigger ships and stations, because stations are always working with this system!

You see, we wanted to play around a bit with the groundbreaking seemless first person experience Star Citizen will offer eventually. This ended either in my ship or my character being hurled through space uncontrollably for no apparent reason - essentually braking the underlying game for me. When that wasn't the case, a crash to the desktop made sure things wouldn't become old.

I realize this is an early alpha and of an extremely ambitous game at that. But it's also a hot mess. The most ground breaking basic mechanic they have going for them is the seemless first person experience. Our experience of that mechanic yesterday could be likened to watching a snowboarder execute an unheard of spectacular stunt, but crashing and breaking their spine while at it. And then they keep seemingly piling high level mechanics they want to do on top of it.

At least the latter is (still) my impression. To that extend, I would absolutely love if somebody would keep a summarized bullet point style list of the fixes and features they talk about in all their videos - ideally with dates and (deep) links into the videos. For one, it would be a great reference to which new backers can be pointed. Anybody could get an overview of their scope without watching a week worth of videos. It would also faciliate discussion about specific topics relating Star Citizen tremendously, as that list could be used as reference rather than the fuzzy "they mentioned it in TFTCM between one and five months ago".

I won't do it, because it's a hell of a lot of work and I've never followed Star Citizen very closely as others have. I did such a list for the changes coming with Elite Dangerous' 2.1 update that have been discussed/announced in dev updates and newsletters since January. Without links to all sources even and it took almost half an evening. Thankfully, they have the grace to publish the information in text form, which makes searching easy compared to CIG's video overload.


I'll now just give them another good six months to fix and update before giving the alpha another go. I'd already be happy if what they have now is running stable by then.
 
Without links to all sources even and it took almost half an evening. Thankfully, they have the grace to publish the information in text form, which makes searching easy compared to CIG's video overload.

And we keep telling you to stick to their monthly reports, which are highly detailed and in text form. You keep moaning about their video overload, but you don't have to engage with that if you don't want to.
 
No I know that. I think what I meant to ask is the EVE developers add new blueprints fairly often to shake up the meta though right? They can also continue to improve their skills and the power of those systems right? Is it going to work the same way here? (Not skills i know) Or will it be more like Elite with fairly static systems? I'd love of see a video if they have one talking about that.

Oh for sure they can do that. Chris talked about how ships now are fully modular and how systemic all is, You get chassis, IFS, thrusters and power core and it works and they You add components and node them to other components.
There is nothing stopping them at making new components with completely new functionalities in future to replace current ones. I recon that EWAR will be expanded in future quite a lot because of this, same as it was in EVE.
They even talked about overclocking aspect of existing components that players will be able to do themselves.

Of course bigger ships are more modular than smaller ships, but as You can from something like Aurora that has several variants with one that is almost 50% bigger due to cargo, it can be even retrofitted to smaller ships.

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At least the latter is (still) my impression. To that extend, I would absolutely love if somebody would keep a summarized bullet point style list of the fixes and features they talk about in all their videos - ideally with dates and (deep) links into the videos.

Yeah, we should do that in some free time. I think the best way would be just start with current interviews and just add anything someone posted from the future. I'm really time constrained lately, but i'll try maybe do some core features they talked in recent interviews on Sunday.
 
Buy back tokens are refreshed as of today.

Also CIG April fools joke post: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15274-Careers-Intergalactic-Food-Delivery

Pfft, obviously should be *interstellar* food delivery.
(actually sounds pretty plausible otherwise considering some of the other planned career options)

And we keep telling you to stick to their monthly reports, which are highly detailed and in text form. You keep moaning about their video overload, but you don't have to engage with that if you don't want to.

Had to double check that I was in the right thread. Was getting some serious deja vu there.
 
I finally went inside the starfarer.

This is the best model and material work I have ever seen in a video game. Like, holy shit. Sorry for the lude image spam below.
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I was completely lost in it too. When I accidentally found the crew quarters, I legitimately gasped.
 
I finally went inside the starfarer.

This is the best model and material work I have ever seen in a video game. Like, holy shit. Sorry for the lude image spam below.

snip.
I was completely lost in it too. When I accidentally found the crew quarters, I legitimately gasped.

The one thing that is missing is the mist that they add to all their official videos. Personally I like it as it adds depth to rooms.
 
I finally went inside the starfarer.

This is the best model and material work I have ever seen in a video game. Like, holy shit.

Still enjoying the novelty of PBR metals. So good!

Once they have VR support I'll probably spend way too much time just admiring how the light plays off things in stereoscopic 3D.
 
I've pretty much burned out on "ambitious" and "groundbreaking" and would happily settle for "working".

Honestly instead of "working" I'll gladly settle for fun. They made a good step to an actual fun flight model but seem hell bent on developing against themselves to get IFCS to be handwavium at large. Not to mention the phantom thrusters just to get the ships to fly.

I don't know if they are just ignorant or clueless to what makes a dogfight fun and what they have right now. The ships don't perform as they are visually represented, and there is no reward for flying in combat. Right now we have an arcade shooter where two ships stare at each other and try to out DPS to win.

Playing DCS a lot recently and I can't tell you how poor the cockpits are in SC compared to it. Not a "touch the dials" kind of way but having 6DoF in the cockpit and having readable guages and sensible placement. It's a fine tech demo but as a game, more specifically a space combat game, CIG is constantly failing at the core dynamics.
 
I can't imagine what this would feel like in VR or 3D. Walking through the hangar and seeing the Starfarer even on just a normal screen was... well dwarfing. As you get an angle and approach the bay door where the Starfarer is held it just fills your view slowly and then becomes eclipsing. It's fraking incredible.

s1NIdGN.jpg


I'm giddy.
 
I realize this is an early [I said:
alpha[/I] and of an extremely ambitous game at that. But it's also a hot mess. The most ground breaking basic mechanic they have going for them is the seemless first person experience. Our experience of that mechanic yesterday could be likened to watching a snowboarder execute an unheard of spectacular stunt, but crashing and breaking their spine while at it. And then they keep seemingly piling high level mechanics they want to do on top of it.

In this case a bullet annotation of whats actually added to the games alpha and whether or not its actually functional, would be more productive than whats said to be in the works. The games scope changes on a weekly basis and occasionally they mention somethings a priority and then they mention that its not a priority anymore. For instance VR, which is no longer a priority after saying early in the year that they were refocusing on it. Or how procedural tech was just a far off stretch goal and now apparently is one of their main focuses.

Stick to whats actually available for the player, it'll be much shorter and easier to maintain than whats proposed.
 
For instance VR, which is no longer a priority after saying early in the year that they were refocusing on it. Or how procedural tech was just a far off stretch goal and now apparently is one of their main focuses.
They never said that they were refocusing on VR.
Procedural tech was a far off stretch goal, but this changed after opening Frankfurt office, because old Crytek engineers they hired had a procedural codebase that they've been working on since Crysis 2, then till The Hunt, so a lot of work was already done. Chris never forced procedural generation on the project, it just happened due to people they hired in Frankfurt.
In recent interviews they actually talked about this.

Of course it makes total sense to push it now, when they have so much of base tech done, because its a big changer for a project.
 
Please there was a thread right here about this

http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1165196

And the article misunderstood what it meant. Instead of quoting second hand information, perhaps something written in context of more than a single sentence.

Also I'll let you in a on a secret of (game) development, priorities change, scheduling matters. Additionally it should be noted that the engine isn't in a condition where VR makes sense. They're still doing a lot of plumbing and optimization, that stuff matters more for everybody. VR would be pointless currently.
 
And the article misunderstood what it meant. Instead of quoting second hand information, perhaps something written in context of more than a single sentence.

"In an end-of-year livestream by Roberts Space Industries in December, the question of VR support was posed to CEO Chris Roberts who said that the company would be refocusing efforts on VR support in early 2016. "

And some in the thread even went back to stream to verify and indeed it was what Chris Roberts said. So if it is miscommunication, then all the more reason to not focus on what they say and instead focus on what they make and is available for testing.
 
"In an end-of-year livestream by Roberts Space Industries in December, the question of VR support was posed to CEO Chris Roberts who said that the company would be refocusing efforts on VR support in early 2016. "

And some in the thread even went back to stream to verify and indeed it was what Chris Roberts said. So if it is miscommunication, then all the more reason to not focus on what they say and instead focus on what they make and is available for testing.

I took it to mean that they were thinking about it. In contrast to previous statement that they weren't even thinking about it. People have to understand that when these questions are posed, everything is subject to change. They are forthcoming with what they think.

Contrast this to other threads here where people are applauding Phil Spencer on exquisitely crafted PR non-answers.
 
"In an end-of-year livestream by Roberts Space Industries in December, the question of VR support was posed to CEO Chris Roberts who said that the company would be refocusing efforts on VR support in early 2016. "

And some in the thread even went back to stream to verify and indeed it was what Chris Roberts said. So if it is miscommunication, then all the more reason to not focus on what they say and instead focus on what they make and is available for testing.

You can watch Chris Roberts explaining it all here -> https://youtu.be/b9u9yPDNI1o?t=3300 (55:00-57:52)
He said maybe early 2016, but it depends of the workload and they want to get all other stuff done first. He never said its a priority for them right now or that they are refocusing.
 
I can't imagine what this would feel like in VR or 3D. Walking through the hangar and seeing the Starfarer even on just a normal screen was... well dwarfing. As you get an angle and approach the bay door where the Starfarer is held it just fills your view slowly and then becomes eclipsing. It's fraking incredible.

s1NIdGN.jpg


I'm giddy.

Oh man, the scale of some of these ships... :0
 
We'll find out sooner or later, especially if they allow people to spawn Idrises in 2.4

In 2.4 they definitely wont. They still have not decided if they will implement Idris in PU before launch of S42 to not spoil it. I think they will be against releasing it in the end.
 
In 2.4 they definitely wont. They still have not decided if they will implement Idris in PU before launch of S42 to not spoil it. I think they will be against releasing it in the end.

I don't care about waiting... Hopefully it'll give them time to get the P version sorted out. Everything we've seen so far has been the M, as that's the version in SQ42. There's only a few people with an M in the game, so I think the P is of more interest to the player base at large. I mean, if you're going to see or play on an Idris in the PU, chances are high that it's going to be a P variant. Knowing what exactly we're getting in trade for losing the the heavy artillery would be nice. (Spec pages and old concept art are useless trash at this point as far as that goes.)
 
I have no doubt in my mind that VR support will come to this eventually. Even if they are not focusing on that at the moment. They know VR is going to be huge and that this game is screaming for VR support. It may take some time but it will happen for sure. I think the VR requirements for this are going to be absurd though which may delay proper VR support.

VR needs to get a steady framerate of 90 frames in order to work on the consumer CV1 and HTC Vive. What does Star Citizen get in terms of framerate on a 980ti?
 
In 2.4 they definitely wont. They still have not decided if they will implement Idris in PU before launch of S42 to not spoil it. I think they will be against releasing it in the end.

They said that they would. Though this was said yesterday...I dunno.
 
I have no doubt in my mind that VR support will come to this eventually. Even if they are not focusing on that at the moment. They know VR is going to be huge and that this game is screaming for VR support. It may take some time but it will happen for sure. I think the VR requirements for this are going to be absurd though which may delay proper VR support.

VR needs to get a steady framerate of 90 frames in order to work on the consumer CV1 and HTC Vive. What does Star Citizen get in terms of framerate on a 980ti?

I don't think VR is happening until foveated rendering is a thing in consumer headsets.
 
So I've finally gotten around to booting the game up. Running around the Starfarer is so damn much fun. It's fantastic to run around a ship this size in this game, and as has been pointed out, they're only going to get bigger from here.

In the room with the beds for crew, there's a big blank metal wall, and it has a reflection of the room on it, which is one of the coolest looking things to me, LoL. Too bad it's not reflecting the beds, as if the beds are vampires.
 
I have no doubt in my mind that VR support will come to this eventually. Even if they are not focusing on that at the moment. They know VR is going to be huge and that this game is screaming for VR support. It may take some time but it will happen for sure. I think the VR requirements for this are going to be absurd though which may delay proper VR support.

VR needs to get a steady framerate of 90 frames in order to work on the consumer CV1 and HTC Vive. What does Star Citizen get in terms of framerate on a 980ti?

I believe it was said in one of the RTV's but I don't remember which one.

They said VR support is definitely happening, but the problem is resources/tech management. Can't start developing VR to its full capacity because some of the tech for the game itself still hasn't been finished yet.
 
New 10 for the chair out:

Chris talks about the MISC Mining ship, here are the details:

-It's called the Prospector.
-Crew of one. (strange that they said 2 person ship a bunch but hey look at the Xi"An Scout)
-Designed for planetside prospecting. It seems that CIG is now confident enough in their procedural generation tech to commit a ship to it.
-Has limited cargo storage. This means it can either be used as part of a larger operation, or used to prospect for extra-valuable nuggets.
-It is coming sooner™ than certain other much-discussed concept ships. (Polaris or Buccaneer I am assuming)
 
Sounds like the Prospector could be another relatively cheap LTI ship for people who missed out on the last ones.

Wonder how that could work for planets in distant systems... fleet with a Hull and a ton of prospectors? They'd still need loader drones or something. Guess they could just cheat and have NPC outpost stations in place on these planets for Prospectors to sell to.
 
Sounds like the Prospector could be another relatively cheap LTI ship for people who missed out on the last ones.

Wonder how that could work for planets in distant systems... fleet with a Hull and a ton of prospectors? They'd still need loader drones or something. Guess they could just cheat and have NPC outpost stations in place on these planets for Prospectors to sell to.

Wouldn't be much fun to take away the logistical and strategic portion of supply routes though. Unless the port/station reaches capacity and requires transport elsewhere.

But then it would still effect the risk:reward portion of that endeavor.
 
I'm glad to see more diversity in the mining ships. One very large and expensive mining ship can't be the only thing trying to grab space rocks in the 'verse. And of course MISC is right there for all those menial labor needs.

I wonder, if the mining laser on the Orion is good enough to blast into an asteroid, what would it do to Shy's Merchantman a ship's hull?
 
I wish they'd show some actual mining game mechanics before dreaming up intricately distinguished mining ships.

But I guess that's par for the course here. You don't sell one colored box mining another colored box representing an asteroid. You sell super detailed ships and scramble to get some game logic integrated into your project to validate the existence of those later. At some point. Maybe. >.<

It's as if they can dream up ships faster than the actual game's development can keep up with implementing the base mechanics required to make those ships useful. When are the Hornet Ghost and Tracker supposed to be useful again?
 
Same goes for Star Marine, right? ;p I'll wait patiently then, have faith and be happy.
That's the spirit! People think I'm joking when I say SC is a 2020 game. I've fully convinced myself that it is, so now the day to day stuff doesn't really bother me. All I want is S42, which I'm fairly certain we're getting in a year / year and a half, and that's what I'm looking forward to.

Having said that, the stuff you're talking about - mining, Hornet Ghost gameplay - doesn't seem to be that far away.
 
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