Cabbagehead
Member
Plus we don't have the customizable control over them. That was promised and detailed just yet. Which should make things more enjoyable, more so when they do some tweaking in regards to readability and panel/UI resizing.
Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 | The 'Verse Awakens
- Thread starter Raticus79
- Start date
kutthoat5150
Member
Am I the only one who wanted them to go the direction from the old iron man HUD like concepts? Yes it was rather busy but it was still going to be customization
Am I the only one who wanted them to go the direction from the old iron man HUD like concepts? Yes it was rather busy but it was still going to be customization
Lucky for you Infinite Warfare provides that look. It looks like pure movie uselessness to me.
That UI should be no surprise as the person that mocked those up was a person that did movie UIs.
staticneuron
Member
I stopped playing after about 24 hours when I couldn't get out of the ship, I am not a fan of the art design of the ships, and to me the variety and depth wasn't what I expected. I do own the expansions I just haven't reinstalled it yet. Imo, there are certain mechanics I am looking for and ED doesn't have them. It is not a bad game just not my cup of tea yet. I will give it another chance after I clear out more of my backlog. I even played more of NMS (another type of disappointment) but I guess the closest I was looking for could be described as like Starlancer. SC seems to take that idea much further, and more features than I even would have imagined. I never played the coveted freelancer series, so sorry if I gloss over that one.
I know, but that doesn't mean it's ready for 3.0.
None of us are.
AwesomeMeat
PossumMeat
I love ED by they are just going about development in a different way that SC. I know they plan on doing a lot of what SC wants to do by the end of it. What a time to be alive for space sim fans! It's awesome to have these options.
Honestly, last time I had fun in SC was in the old day when it was just a hangar module. Walking around the cosy discount hangar admiring my Aurora and looking forward to the next episode of Wingman's Hangar.
It's been meh since and my hype died a long time ago. Maybe it's just fatigue though and my hype will come back eventually. I don't know.
It's been meh since and my hype died a long time ago. Maybe it's just fatigue though and my hype will come back eventually. I don't know.
Cabbagehead
Member
Wait that was fun? that was the opposite of fun for me, at best it was a good distraction and reminder. Very odd outlook.
I mean if that was fun to you. Then you can download the client now and still do that. As for Wingman Hangar in itself, that was fun for a time but for me it wasn't bringing much to the table. Other then personality but i didn't back this project on personality alone. Now it's time to get hyped for new content.
Yes it was fun, because there was hype. Hype to someday get to fly. Which lead to dissappointment when I finally could because of the hugely unsatisfying (in my opinion) flight physics. It'll likely keep me from enjoying the finised game. Or at least put a big damper on it.
Cabbagehead
Member
The flight physics were always in flux. That was stated from the beginning that they weren't finally nor were they wanted it. Especially when you factor the model didn't have all the bells and whistles that comes with item 2.0 and the like. We were getting half the pie. So of course you were disappointed, i know i didn't play the game back then. When AC 1.0 came out nor the update after that. It wasn't until middle of last year that i touched AC and tried my hand at 2.0 subsequently. But even still i'm not getting exactly what i want.
Regardless i'm hyped maybe more so towards the next couple of months then any year in the past. That's for sure. As i never based my hype on what we got from the past given the state CIG was in and how lacking things would be at that early point. Plus i knew from the jump that getting the flight right would make or break this game and to then please the community with a great experience was going to be tricky. Because everyone has a good idea or don't want things to change on the subject, when we didn't and don't have a very good starting point to build from. Hopefully with the upcoming changes things will get more enjoyable for a lot of us. More so in regards to the new netcode and what it offers.
Uncharted 4 can't be beat m8.
It's StarEngine now, thank you.
CIG really should rename it to that. It's probably barely recognizable as CryEngine at this point.
Dictator93
Member
Maybe they will at some point? CR called it "StarEngine" in the first gamersnexus vid.
I'm not sure they can officially do that. It probably resides in the terms of whatever contract they signed with Crytek.
After all, Amazon paid 50m for full control over the IP.
You'll never not see a big Cryengine logo when you start up Star Citizen, no matter how modified it becomes.
Besides, most of the modified parts are gameplay, the Cryengine renderer is still best in class.
Xplatformer
Member
They are adding an Fps component to ED? You think they are planning to do a lot of what SC plans to do. Like?
staticneuron
Member
Seems like it is planned and on the way
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=f703580f39#2
http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u...&id=ac1081437f&e=0439f6773e#launch and beyond
So it looks similar they are just going about it in a different way.
Is it bad i kinda wished they made their own engine.
Just think of all the cool technical vids they would making showing how the engine was made.
Just think of all the cool technical vids they would making showing how the engine was made.
Just finished watch both parts, and the older vid where Chris talked about DX12 and Vulken. Good stuff.
Aceshighhhh
Member
That Kotaku thread..... -.-
Is the gaf org still recruiting?
Is the gaf org still recruiting?
No, it's not.
It might have been among the best at the time around Crysis 3 - Ryze. But there has been almost zero progress since than, apart from maybe SVOGI, which Roberts say they can't use.
Unreal4 and Frostbyte are miles ahead in basically every department; Unity is good too.
In terms of Image Quality the current COD render for example is a lot better as well.
As everyone knows most graphics engineers have left Crytek a long time ago, some of them now work on Star Citizen now.
They had to implement a lot of stuff to catch up, even basics like COD-style bloom, proper volumetrics etc.
I am a bit hopeful for the final product though. Ever since Frankfurt started working efficiently they bring a lot of that old Crytek-Graphics-Powerhouse feeling back.
That Kotaku thread..... -.-
Is the gaf org still recruiting?
Yup: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/NEOGAF/
Just let us know your user name there.
Zalusithix
Member
The fact that you have to state this when it's quite literally the second sentence in the short blurb that shows up while applying. =P
Cabbagehead
Member
That Kotaku thread..... -.-
Is the gaf org still recruiting?
An here i thought Kotaku was banned.
There are still a lot of features in CryEngine that are not reproduced in other engines or are just worse.
Like whole shadowing tech in CE is the best of its class. Everything regarding water (shading, reflections, caustics), the volumetric fog, PoM and PADM, vegetation tech etc
Post-processing is also still the best in the industry.
Look I don't want to hate on CryEngine or anything. In fact, I used to love the engine (and the games) dearly.
Back when i was just a noob who made mods (Mechwarrior Living Legends amongst many many personal projects) I knew Sandbox in and out.
I've looked through the c_vars to find features that were not really used in the game.
I've made a long thread about a lot of Crysis 2 stuff (and later) here. The change from Crydev to CryEngine fucked a bit with the thing but yeah.
https://www.cryengine.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=355&t=69239
i just scrolled through and these are my words (on the second page)
Personal opinion:
Best realtime renderer in the world and my favorite engine
I do admit I didn't have any rendering knowledge back then.
-
But now I do. I am not a pro, but I can write a renderer and that is more fun to me than some meddling around in very advanced engines.
However, from time to time I check out the newest version of CryEngine. Or Lumberjack. Or Unreal or Unity. And I am still mad when I see stuff like Kingdom Come using the wrong SVOGI settings by default. Infuriating, it could look much better.
Most importantly I do a lot of research on new graphics tech and I seen all official CryEngine, Frostbyte and Unreal Engine presentations along with most of the other new graphic gems showing up from other devs.
Not an expert, but an addict.
-
Now let's go point by point.
Since I like to argue with random strangers on the internet I downloaded CE5.2 (the newest) and tried out everything.
So Crysis was special because they not only used PCF shadows like all the others, but they also rotated them on a poisson disk, which actually emulates some behaviour one can observe in real life when sun casting shadows from trees.
However, it's also noisy and a very coarse approximation that will "blur" always the same regardless of circumstance. That was fine for Crysis.
Another clever thing in Crysis1 was that they used VSM shadows for terrain and combined these very soft large shadows with the other shadows to great effect. That's not really relevant to anything without a map-terrain. VSMs are not effective for detail geometry.
- I checked in the current version and they still use the system. It's not bad, but it's noisy and unstable when moving the camera.
Then in the Crysis 2 update they added some form of soft penumbra shadows.
The implementation is ok for Crysis 2, but it's super limited (in terms of min/max penumbra) and has basically no grounding in any physical reality, it's merely a sort of bilateral blur. The implementation is not any better now as far as I can tell.
They have added some optimization like prerendering a large shadow map and not updating and not updating all shadow cascades every frame etc. for Crysis 2 and Ryze.
Plus some stuff like object-specific shadow maps and now some sort of Screen Space raymarched detail shadows. (They did have that in Crysis 2 already, but the reintroduction is listed as a new feature in the CryEngine 5.2 release)
I don't see how any of that is ground breaking. Meanwhile Unreal Engine introduces stuff like Distance Field Shadows.
Fair
No, that's why Cloud Imperium redid it from scratch. CryEngine has an ok implementation for sunlight, but that's not what most people want (point lights it's where it's at). Volumetric particles etc. are handled very poorly and sun-only.
Let's not disregard that CryEngine has a super rigid material system, a shader/material node editor does not exist. POM is not special, Silhoutte POM is.
The idea basically is to create a "fin" around the geometry with geometry shaders and raymarch the textures with an vector orthogonal from the camera direction in order to create the outlines. Pretty neat. Haven't seen it anywhere else.
Again, Cloud Imperium had to rewrite several parts of it. Most importantly the bloom - Star Citizen now has a state-of-the-art Call Of Duty / Unreal Engine type bloom.
But the rest of the post processing - Depth Of Field, Motion Blur are ok, but not best in class.
Also - note how eyelids and hair etc. are still handled incorrectly with a blurred background in Star Citizen footage.
-----
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room - reflections.
Believable screen space reflections are an absolute must for a modern engine. Ironically they were introduced in the DX11 patch for Crysis 2 but I'm not sure Crytek has done a lot with them.
Every other engine manages to create smooth reflections of mirror like surfaces, but CryEngine's implementation creates blocky, random artifacts as if their depth calculations are off.
Plus there is a hard cutoff for the maximum ray length, the SSR will reflect half the wall and then just stop without any sort of fade out (not talking about offscreen information).
-> see here
But it gets even worse when not using absolute smooth, but rougher surfaces.
The big push in SSR has been to include importance sampling - basically reflections become blurrier the further the reflected object is away from the reflecting surface.
CryEngine does not have that.
The others do.
-----------------------------------------------
I mean at this point the rendering of Star Citizen is pretty detached from what they originally got from Crytek. And I think it looks great, no doubt. And I'm sure we'll get many more cool effects from them until release.
But CryEngine itself is not the best renderer in 2016.
Welcome to the ORG.Is the gaf org still recruiting?
I should point out that both Unity 5 and Frostbite use Enlighten for their GI, and I think UE4 doesn't have any fully real time system other than an old LPV implementation (or their old voxel based implementation or vxgi). I've also yet to see any Unity 5 or Frostbite game not use any lightmap baking.
That is not to say you're wrong about those features, but in the fundamentals which can be built upon there were (and still are) providing some benefits. I should mention that I heard that Enlighten is one of the most expensive pieces of middeware available.
This is off-topic, but it's space related and can have some "lore fantasy" for star citizen that cna be included on in-game records
SpaceX will be revealing in less than 30min it's ICT (Interplanetary Colonial Transporter). Here is a video uploaded today showing the ship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
First ever interplanetary spaceship by SpaceX, with 60 metres long (?) with what looks like 5 floors for people (?). Capacity for 100 people and/or 100,000tons of cargo.
Star citizen is real boys
Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg
SpaceX will be revealing in less than 30min it's ICT (Interplanetary Colonial Transporter). Here is a video uploaded today showing the ship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
First ever interplanetary spaceship by SpaceX, with 60 metres long (?) with what looks like 5 floors for people (?). Capacity for 100 people and/or 100,000tons of cargo.
Star citizen is real boys
Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg
Zalusithix
Member
It's not real until it gets built and successfully launched. Right now it's just ideas and a spiffy video. It needs massive funding, building, testing, etc.
I mean, I'm excited for the possibility of his ideas coming to fruition, but for now it's just that - a possibility. Much like the Hyperloop system.
This is off-topic, but it's space related and can have some "lore fantasy" for star citizen that cna be included on in-game records
SpaceX will be revealing in less than 30min it's ICT (Interplanetary Colonial Transporter). Here is a video uploaded today showing the ship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
First ever interplanetary spaceship by SpaceX, with 60 metres long (?) with what looks like 5 floors for people (?). Capacity for 100 people and/or 100,000tons of cargo.
Star citizen is real boys
Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg
Here's the thread for it: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1284929
The WaitButWhy links are pretty interesting. Good story about breaking open a monopoly and reducing Mars colonization to an economic problem.
I'm sorry guys, couldn't hold back ^^
I don't want to derail this thread further, so if someone wants to discuss pls PM
That's quite alright, feel free to post about anything related to SC, even remotely. We've endured the graphics engine nerds that are KKRT00 and Dictator93 for years now, we're well used to it.
Love you all. <3
So like Star Citizen, amirite.
Dictator93
Member
I'm sorry guys, couldn't hold back ^^
I don't want to derail this thread further, so if someone wants to discuss pls PM
Far from a derail.
You and I have probably talked a lot on Crymod, Crydev over the years.
Yeah the SSR and all the other stuff you talk about here are easy to agree with. These things are also things I have mentioned numerous times to CIG on their forums.
I think KKRT is mentioning the voxel grid used for lighting and shadowing fog in CE 3.8 and up. CE 3.7 and what CIG use only supports the old Tobin method of a directionally shadowed volumetric fog, or a separate system for ray marched volumetrics from spotlight casters. The 3.8 method is a bit more hollistic and plugs into other systems rather nicely in comparison to the 3.7 method. It also allows for point lights to locally colour the volumetric fog... something that the 3.7 one cannot do.
What you are talking about though is how particles are lit, shaded, and shadowed though. That is where CIG ripped out the old SH system and put in their new one that Ali demo'd on AtV a few months back now. And yeah, that looks way better.
I actually do not see this as something very problematic, rather as a benefit from preventing artists from creating an unmanagable amount of custom shaders. The shader materital node editor in UE4 is one of the reasons why it runs quite a bit heavier than CE.
Agreed. And thankfully CIG is implementing improvements to POM based upon their work for proc planet stuff.
I love that CIG re-wrote bloom and flares. So yeah, definitely agree here.
For 3.8 and above I actually think the mb and DOF are now the standard stuff you see, albeit with more samples than something like in COD. DOF uses the scatter as you gather approach (you can flick between the old method and see how much more expensive it is with a cvar). And MB, based upon what I have seen in Ryse is quite fantastic. ANd according to Tiago Sousa in those siggraph slides, the obmb and dof in doom is basically that which was implemented in Ryse.
CIG are still using pre-Ryse DOF AFAIK, hence why it does not do the depth-look up stuff for hair and transparencies. Then again, a lot of games do not do that (heck even doom does not).
You betchya.
Definitely not. But I still think its SVOGI, volumetric fog, and clouds are right up there with the state of the art. Other systems have fallen behind.
One thing that I would like to particularly mention where CIG had a great advantage from using CE is from already having a working forward shading part of the engine. CE already had separate shading models for hair, transparencies, eyes, skin, etc. along side a system for hooking up performance capture. Sure CIG improved on it heavily from what they say and what we can see (and it is only going to get better), but not having to start from scratch there was a big boon I imagine to getting everything rolling. If you read about the most recent Ninja Theory stuff or about UE4's newer focus on character shading, the lack of forward rendered materials hurts the quality there and Ninja Theory basically had to start from scratch regarding getting perfcap'd characters into the game.
Zalusithix
Member
Haha... I was about to draw that comparison, but decided not to. The scales just aren't comparable. The ambitions for that rocket make developing Star Citizen seem absolutely trivial. It'd require billions of dollars in funding and it'd push humanity's science and engineering to the limits.
I wont quote everything, because it will just bloat the threadstuff
Regarding fog, i meant exactly what Dictator mentioned already.
About SSR i throught they implemented it in Ryse already. I think i remember they talked about it in PDF regarding Ryse rendering. Strange.
About post-processing, they still have best perf/quality ration from any engine. Others are getting up there sure and there is Doom which basically has CE post-processing thanks to Tiago
Regarding shadowing, they still have the best shadowing i've experienced in games, even though Frostbite is getting close. A lot of shadow casting lights with good quality and great performance + penumbra based shadows from area lights. There are also techniques like ones from Ryse regarding cache'ing distance static shadows or something they havent implemented but talked about in the past presentations voxel based AO.
And i know how detached CIG's CE versions is from original CE and i agree that CE is getting stagnant, at least in public builds, but its still top of its class in many features and on par with most others
Definitely regressing lately, thats for sure.The other engines, especially UE has a lot of community high end development that just enables imagination how it could have been if everything was implemented in one game.
CryEngine was like that in the past, but its more like optimized high end features first and foremost and some research stuff later.
They need high end AAA project that drive some tech down, thats for sure. VR is not that, VR is getting already existing tech to work way, way faster.
staticneuron
Member
So....umm.... Just like Star Citizen Right?
Dictator93
Member
The SSR in CE post-ryse just works upon surface gloss levels. No change based upon view angle and it is not importance sampled (so it does not technically respect fresnel). So there is no streaking, no contact hardening, etc. It just has a linear fall off at best... and sometimes can just have a completely hard cut off in places like a water. puddle It is really darn basic in comparison to other more modern techniques. Also the way it ramps up the gloss is based upon a gaussian downsample I am pretty sure, so that means "kinda shiny" surfaces have really strangely bloated reflections that look super-imposed. It just does not look right most of the time IMO. It would really help SC's visuals if SSR was revampled.
Interestingly though, the SSR used for water volumes (not the ocean, mind you) in CE is better than the one that applies to illum shader objects. It has streaking for example.
exmachina64
Banned
Good.
So how many of these are we buying for the ORG. ? 😝