[Mongoose]

Looks like a Vasudan got caught in a blender.

[NGTM-1R]

Tragic Headz-preparation accident kills innocent Vasudan, film at 11.

[Unknown Target]

Ok, so here's a little more positive light.

I hopped into Arena Commander, which wasn't laggy as ****, thankfully. Of course I still couldn't use my joystick, but the game makes a reasonable showing with just the mouse and keyboard. Yes, I checked, you have to hold Alt-S to go backwards, which is dumb, but whatever.

I made it through about 8 waves on my first try. The enemy AI is very dumb, but hey, so is most AI, so I can't knock SC for that. What I can say is that the shooting was pretty fun. It's nowhere near as polished or tight as E:D or Freespace, but it's serviceable.

Positives:
- Pretty, even on low it's not terrible looking.
- Newtonian flight capability.
- Fun and serviceable, if very basic, combat.
- Ships can be damaged in individual components, which can affect weapon systems.
- Complex system controls, adjusting radar range and differential shield management is cool.

Negative:
- HUD is a mess - hard to read, doesn't convey information well, just overall pretty bad.
- Radar is usable but bad.
- Sound is annoying and bad. Pew pew pew pew, quite literally.
- Ships felt a little floaty.
- Ship damage does not seem to otherwise affect performance.
- Stupid controls.
- Complex system controls that don't really have relevance in AC.
- Still haven't figured out the energy management system. Do I only get to set priority to one system or equalize it?

I feel like AC is a serviceable example of what Star Citizen was trying to be. It's like they got about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way to creating a space combat game, then got distracted and let it languish. If they put maybe another 6 months of development into it, they would have a nice game that could rival Elite Dangerous: Arena.

Basically it's the first 3/4 of what CRoberts originally pitched: a no-nonsense space combat game with realistic thruster locations affecting ship design. Unfortunately, the thruster thing didn't really make it in. I like how ships can be chewed apart with location based damage. But...yea, unfortunately I don't think this area of the game will ever be finished, because they're so intent on making this ****ty MMO and motion captured cutscenes.

[Luis Dias]

It's nowhere near as polished or tight as E:D or Freespace, but it's serviceable.

It's quite telling that a 117 million dollar game in 2016 hasn't got the shooting polish of a 1998 almost indie game developed by a skeleton crew with almost zero libraries and two, three year tops of development.

It'd be like saying that the latest COD isn't quite as polished in the "shooting aspect" as Quake 2. It's irredeemable. Unforgivable. Madness.

[666maslo666]

In a pre-alpha release, it is normal that the game is unpolished. Polish comes last in development. And it is doubly true for Arena Commader, which is (rightly IMHO) not the focus of current development efforts.

As for the "****ty MMO", that was the originally pitched idea, not mere arena commander, and also why I and most other people backed. If I wanted to play a simple space combat only game with my ass glued to my seat, Id go play Elite or any other space combat game. SC earned 117 million because it is supposed to be more than that. And Id rather have them fail than to deliver a mere arena shooter game.

[Spoon]

Tell us more about gamedevelopment.

[Unknown Target]

Maslo:

If you were making a Freespace mod like, say, Diaspora, do you think it's a better or worse idea to refine the way the ships fly before you start developing missions?

IIRC wasn't Squadron 42 what was originally pitched, and then the rest of the stuff was added on top of it?

[Luis Dias]

The MMO was indeed the core of the pitch, Squadron 42 was just a part of the game.

[Unknown Target]

Oh. I backed it because he talked about making a space game with physically accurate thrusters. That has obviously gone by the wayside, since shopping is more important these days.

[Phantom Hoover]

rogue system!

[666maslo666]

Maslo:

If you were making a Freespace mod like, say, Diaspora, do you think it's a better or worse idea to refine the way the ships fly before you start developing missions?

In a game as complex as SC, both should be done at the same time, iteratively. Because SC does not use a "press D to go right at 30 m/s" flight model, but something much more complex, affected by all massive parts of the ship in a physical manner, and still WIP. You cant truly polish it until late in the game, IMHO. But yeah, I agree that it should be more polished at this stage of development (particularly small ships turn too quickly and overshoot acceleration, IMHO).

IIRC wasn't Squadron 42 what was originally pitched, and then the rest of the stuff was added on top of it?

No, the MMO was certainly the original pitch. S42 was the first stretchgoal, I believe.

[Det. Bullock]

In a pre-alpha release, it is normal that the game is unpolished. Polish comes last in development. And it is doubly true for Arena Commader, which is (rightly IMHO) not the focus of current development efforts.

As for the "****ty MMO", that was the originally pitched idea, not mere arena commander, and also why I and most other people backed. If I wanted to play a simple space combat only game with my ass glued to my seat, Id go play Elite or any other space combat game. SC earned 117 million because it is supposed to be more than that. And Id rather have them fail than to deliver a mere arena shooter game.

It's in pre-alpha since what?
Three years?
We are talking a multimillion dollar budget project with a crapton of people working on it, not a single man project like House of The Dying Sun.
It's clear the project has been marred by constant bad decisions and skewed priorities (I mean, blackouts? I a universe with FTL and sublight speeds achieved in seconds instead of years?), the core gameplay stuff (ship piloting and handling) is still **** after years, while Elite had a beta combat demo that was less buggy than a lot of finished games.
Also, the enphasis on poligons, **** that, it's not more polygons that make a better game, a spaceship doesn't require insane amounts of polygons to look good in HD, but Roberts never moved on from his lavish FMVs and needs to compensate with MORE POLYGONS (which means more emotions- Jim Sterling as David Cage).
Now guess what, No Man's Sky is coming out partly because is focused on what it wanted to do instead of being sidetracked by MOAR POLYGONS, the game might be **** enyway but at least they have something finished to show.

[Unknown Target]

In a game as complex as SC, both should be done at the same time, iteratively. Because SC does not use a "press D to go right at 30 m/s" flight model, but something much more complex, affected by all massive parts of the ship in a physical manner, and still WIP. You cant truly polish it until late in the game, IMHO. But yeah, I agree that it should be more polished at this stage of development (particularly small ships turn too quickly and overshoot acceleration, IMHO).

I have seen no indicator that the ships possess a realistic mass, though. On the contrary, the movement looks strange and very stop/start, because it seems like their acceleration values are crazy versus their visual size.

I think CRoberts had this original idea of making physically-based ships, but then over time he changed focus to have this big MMO world. Unfortunately the whole idea of keeping the ships physically simulated kind of died out...but not entirely. You can still see it in some of the logic behind making a unique HUD for every ship, or the language in how they talk about the ships as being "high fidelity". The words are there, but the reality isn't.

Also guys, chill out. It's just a game. It's a really bad, poorly managed, ever-loving-debacle of hubris on the international stage, but it's just a game.

[Phantom Hoover]

In all honesty, I don't really hold Star Citizen's development time against it that much; what makes me confident that it will be a disaster is seeing every update of the game take a dysfunctional, badly-integrated mess of broken game and feed it further through the meatgrinder in the hope that it'll all magically pull together and be perfect in a couple of years.

[Unknown Target]

You know I actually went and looked up the definition of "refactoring" because Chris says it so much:

Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring improves nonfunctional attributes of the software.

Am i reading this right? Basically refactoring means rearranging code without actually changing any of what it does?

So when he says we're going to "refactor the netcode", does that just mean they're rearranging it without actually changing how awful it is?

[The E]

What they probably mean is that they're reimplementing the netcode without changing the interface between the netcode and the rest of the engine. "Refactoring" can also mean rewriting a library without changing the way that library is used

That said, the urge to refactor is always strong in any decent coder; we all know pieces of code that we know are functional but lacking elegance that we want to fix. One of the duties of a manager on a big project is to curb that impulse, either by starting off with a solid design that makes refactoring single modules quick and painless, or by simply telling the coders to stop worrying about functional code and start implementing unfinished things.

[NGTM-1R]

To be fair (I've gone to the dark side with these words), a refactor can also involve streamlining, which can improve performance.

Not that this appears to be happening given that right now I imagine the Star Citizen code base is five billion lines of sphagetti-styled Fortran or something.

[Spoon]

This thread should get a new title

[Scotty]

This thread should get a new title

It is done.

[Spoon]

This thread should get a new title

It is done.