[Megathread] Star Citizen

[kenn9530]

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And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing. If it couldnt be done they wouldnt be doing it, the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

[Edge-]

So finally checkin out the 'verse.

First blush is...holy shit performance. Running a respectable and recent rig - i5-10600k, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM, running it off a SSD. I've dropped to "low", and the resolution to 1080p down from 2K (windowed mode, because neither borderless nor fullscreen actually work, it just displays on part of my main monitor rather than filling it), grabbed the latest drivers just in case that was the issue and...still getting fps in the 20's in my room. Load times are extremely long as well, which is a minor issue but whatever.

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here? Because I want to start exploring but this is unplayable. I assume I'm doing something wrong since folks are playing at higher resolutions with higher settings/good framerates, so hoping someone here can help me out. I get it, it's alpha, but clearly others are making it work somehow.

Just tested and even at 720p I'm not able to hit 30. Can't tell what outside really looks like on this tiny window and low settings, but the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult. I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with. I'm listening to a computer tell me about August Dunlow (subtitles don't work, just placeholder text) now but have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

Man, I guess I'm gonna have to look up those new player guides first. But it's not gonna matter much if I can't figure out how to get the game to play at least at 30fps.

Edit: These NPC's are both hilarious and kinda legit freakin me out now. They just stand/sit there, a few seem to have some sitting animations but the standing ones just like...occasionally turn their head to look at you, otherwise they stare ahead blankly. Toss some horror music behind this and this is a freakin horror game.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here?

No. When the servers went up at the end of 2015 and it was just one planet, the game ran at a buttery smooth 60 FPS. Then as the patches went on and they threw in more and more stuff, the framerate began to drop massively. Nowadays, you will only ever get 50 or 60 FPS if you fly your ship to the middle of nowhere (ie, quantum travelling to another planet and then shutting off your engines to drop out of warp half way to your destination).

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the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult.

Yes, the interactive panels and the mobiglass have been bugged for years.

I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with.

They worked early on (ie didn't walk in place or T-pose in chairs and actually did their patrol routes), but when the first city of Hurston was added, they broke.

The only NPCs you can really interact with are a handful of custom questgivers.

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have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

You start the game in a hab apartment in a city on a planet. To find your ship, you have to walk out of your hab (hold F to press the button to open the door), find the elevator (again hold F to press the buttons), go down to the bottom floor of the apartment, walk out of the building, wander around until you find the train/bus/taxi ride to the city's spaceport. At the spaceport, there are monitors/consoles you can walk up to and spawn your spaceship on a hangar pad. The monitor will tell you which hangar your spaceship is now in. Then you go into the spaceport's elevators and go to your hangar. In the hangar bay, you need to walk around your ship and hold F and see if anything glows, and eventually you will find a button or a ladder you can interact with that lets you enter your spaceship. Then you get in the pilot seat, press "R" to turn your ship on. You then need to hold F to look around your cockpit and interact with the monitors. On one of the monitors, select "menu" then select "comms", then scroll through the list and find the spaceport tower. Click the button to hail the tower. The tower will then open the hangar doors. Then you press spacebar to lift off, and then hold W to go forward. And now you're flying.

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To quantum travel/warp to other planets, you need to fly out of a planet's atmosphere. Press "B" to turn on your ship's quantum computer. Align your ship towards your destination, and the ship will begin charging its drive. Once it's charge, hold "B" and the ship will begin the warp. If multiple different QT destinations are overlapping each other, you can press F1 to open your mobiglass, click on the star map, click on your target destination, and click "set destination" so that you can target that one.

[Edge-]

Thanks dude. I got outside but that's as far as I'm willing to venture until I can get performance sorted. I don't mind playing in a lowered resolution in windowed mode on low settings (but at least 1080p pls), but it's at least gotta be hitting 30fps. Lower that that just feels dreadful : (

[Rennadrel]

Are you running the game off an old SSD or NVMe? I've found it runs a lot better on the NVMe drive, personally. It definitely loads a ton quicker.

[Ausr]

And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing. If it couldnt be done they wouldnt be doing it, the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

So all you can respond with is nothing technical, just feelings and more bullshit?

I'll happily take the infraction just to prove that the mods on this board infract people who debate versus actual fucking shills promoting a fucking scam.

Prove me right by reporting me, by the way.

[Rennadrel]

Being a shill is not against the rules, and so long as the game keeps getting patches, one can consider it to still be in development, despite its snail pace. If the project were actually abandoned, that would be the point when it would actually be considered a scam and everyone would be lining up to sue CIG.

[Edge-]

Are you running the game off an old SSD or NVMe? I've found it runs a lot better on the NVMe drive, personally. It definitely loads a ton quicker.

Sata SSD, don't have a NVMe in my rig.

Though it shouldn't require that just to run above like, 20fps when you load into your room. That's fuckin wild.

[Kyanion]

So all you can respond with is nothing technical, just feelings and more bullshit?

I'll happily take the infraction just to prove that the mods on this board infract people who debate versus actual fucking shills promoting a fucking scam.

Prove me right by reporting me, by the way.

Also kyanion to save you some time and pointless posting you dont need to reply to me because its a waste of time. I already gave up on your one sided ignorant views a long time ago.

I mean that is the response you'll get from that one anyways.

[Rennadrel]

Sata SSD, don't have a NVMe in my rig.

Though it shouldn't require that just to run above like, 20fps when you load into your room. That's fuckin wild.

How are you on 10th gen and don't have at least one or two slots on your board? Even my bottom end MSI Z490 Pro has two. It definitely helps with all games for loading times and performance though. I haven't booted the game up in a while, I'll have to see how it runs on my system but last time I did which was a few months ago I was still getting 30 FPS at 1440p.

It definitely does run like butt though, that's for sure.

[Valerossi]

And again im going to support actual experts working on the game and knowing what they are doing over some random MMO champ poster who has not even bothered to do some basic research on what the company is actually doing.If it couldn’t be done they wouldn’t be doing it,the game will also operate just fine on the standard fixed server meshing tech available which will be the first stepping stone to the desired dynamic server meshing.

They AREN’T doing it, because they can’t do it, that’s the whole point, ffs.

[Surfd]

The game is possible, there is already tech that can render 30000 players in the same area, the game doesnt need to be able to load every single player in the same area it just has to have enough capacity to load as much as it can, CiG are going to give us the experience as large as they possibly can while still having suitable performance, so you are just talking BS about thing being impossible when certain things can already be done with current tech available.

THIRTY THOUSAND PLAYERS "at the same time"? Doing what? Standing perfectly still and still lagging like hell? Lol. ROTFL. God man, I am dying here. I assume you have a source that can actually back this up, because otherwise that's the biggest ass pull I have ever heard.

The current "king" of "mass player engagement" in single events is EvE, which holds the Guinness World Records for both "Largest Multiplayer Videogame PVP Battle" and the "Most Concurrent Participants in a Multiplayer Videogame PvP Battle", with a grand total of a little over 6500 people in one "zone" simultaneously during the battle of FWST-8.

And if you know anything about large scale space engagements in EvE, you would know that the only reason they could even do that is because:
A - EvE's server structure for ingame resource allocation allows it to dynamically assign server load to "stressed" areas. During these kinds of engagements, almost ALL of the games server power is redirected to just a handful of zones to prevent the game from actively shitting itself.
B - EvE actually has a custom designed load balancing protocol that kicks in during high volume engagements (known in game as Time Dilation) that basically takes everything happening in the zone, and slows it down to as low as 10% relative speed, effectively turning your massive firefight into a slow-mo lag simulator. Which the game literally HAS to do to even have a hope of realistically resolving 5k+ people all doing shit at once without causing stuff to straight up implode. And even WITH TiDi actively slowing shit down, most people still experience crippling lag on top of it during any serious fleet action. Also, TiDi typically can kick in with as little as 1.5k people in one zone, at 6.5k+, that fight would have been running at max TiDi (time moves at 10% relative) for pretty much the entire duration of the engagement.

6500+ people in a fight that effectively plays out like watching paint dry in the middle of a bout of crippling lag is the current world record here, and that was set just a bit over a year ago on a server handled by a dev team that is arguably the leader in it's field at what it does, on the cutting edge of this kind of server/network balancing tech. And you expect me to believe that in the time since this record was set, someone else magically pulled tech that can handle 5x that amount without being basically a pretty slideshow out of their ass and just, for whatever reason, decided not to use it in something yet? Someone be blowing smoke up your ass.

If you had access to functional tech that allowed you to put 30k players in the same relative space without causing your game to effectively implode, you wouldn't need to make your own game. You would be set for life simply by licensing the the tech to the rest of the game dev world at large.

I mean, shit, I remember the good old days of the AQ Gates event in WoW, where simply sticking ~300-400 people in Duskwood while someone was raiding the Demon Boss there had about a 70% chance of straight up crashing the entire Eastern Kingdoms shard on the server I played on, and that is literal peanuts compared to the sheer amount of shit going on in even a mid sized EvE fleet engagement. And sure, we have come leaps and bounds in the years since then, but we are nowhere near close to 30k.

The fact that you think CIG somehow might have access to magical tech that would allow them to put 30k people in the same space and have them actually be something more than just pretty decorations when the company apparently hasn't even figured out how to properly do collision detection yet is goddamned hilarious.

[MrAnderson]

So finally checkin out the 'verse.

First blush is...holy shit performance. Running a respectable and recent rig - i5-10600k, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM, running it off a SSD. I've dropped to "low", and the resolution to 1080p down from 2K (windowed mode, because neither borderless nor fullscreen actually work, it just displays on part of my main monitor rather than filling it), grabbed the latest drivers just in case that was the issue and...still getting fps in the 20's in my room. Load times are extremely long as well, which is a minor issue but whatever.

Am I doing something obvious/wrong here? Because I want to start exploring but this is unplayable. I assume I'm doing something wrong since folks are playing at higher resolutions with higher settings/good framerates, so hoping someone here can help me out. I get it, it's alpha, but clearly others are making it work somehow.

Just tested and even at 720p I'm not able to hit 30. Can't tell what outside really looks like on this tiny window and low settings, but the digital display windows are loading infrequently which makes interacting with them difficult. I see some NPC's staring around blankly but nothing to interact with. I'm listening to a computer tell me about August Dunlow (subtitles don't work, just placeholder text) now but have no idea what the heck I'm even supposed to do or where I go to find a ship and shit.

Man, I guess I'm gonna have to look up those new player guides first. But it's not gonna matter much if I can't figure out how to get the game to play at least at 30fps.

Edit: These NPC's are both hilarious and kinda legit freakin me out now. They just stand/sit there, a few seem to have some sitting animations but the standing ones just like...occasionally turn their head to look at you, otherwise they stare ahead blankly. Toss some horror music behind this and this is a freakin horror game.

First things first. Welcome to the Verse

Performance will suck in the very first log in for 2 main reasons. First is because the first time we enter the game it will be loading in all the shaders of the respective area into our computer. 2nd is because cities are the most taxing areas in the game and run bad for anyone. With your specs you'll have better fps everywhere else.

3rd one, and this is very important, put your Gfx settings always on HIGH as that will tax your GPU more and alleviate your CPU load, putting settings on LOW gives worse performance (yes counter-intuitive) because the load will shift more to the CPU. Also disable all the visual effects: Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Sharpening, Film Grain.

Star Citizen is very CPU intensive and benefits immensely from fast SSD and RAM.

4th: You can try this tricks bellow as they've been proven to work well for some players:





Starting out is highly recommended to watch ask for help ingame chat, or watch a Tutorial to get the basics:

That's the best and recent one I could find.

[Proskill]

two questions: why am i getting only group bounty contracts in 3.16? i got cert up to MRT, then completed the pro-term contract allowing me to do group missions, but i get ONLY them, not a single solo MRT mission. it actually bothers me since i tend to die sometimes with my avenger titan and instead of dropping 8k aUEC or whatever it is for solo target i drop 26k.

also, how to prevent switching between waypoint/point of interest/whatever u call it? i mean, i got a contract for some bounty target at a certain place. when i mouse over it in order to QT it switched between TARGETS LOCATION and the place it is in, say SHUBIN MINE or whatever, preventing me from QTing, cuz it resets the spool each time. it drives me crazy

[Beefhammer]

It's really disappointing. On top of CIG not even being able to deliver on key stuff like salvage or creatures or NPC crewmembers, they can't even deliver on the little stuff.

I mean that's the point. Chris Roberts has always been a liar and a grifter. Why does anyone think this time he would be any different. He's just raking in millions for himself.

[kenn9530]

So all you can respond with is nothing technical, just feelings and more bullshit?

I'll happily take the infraction just to prove that the mods on this board infract people who debate versus actual fucking shills promoting a fucking scam.

Prove me right by reporting me, by the way.

I dont need to provide anything, CiG have already provided plenty of information on what they are doing and how they are doing it when it comes to server meshing, it takes 5 mins to search and do some basic research which can stop you from being embarassed by not having a clue what you are talking about.

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They AREN’T doing it, because they can’t do it, that’s the whole point, ffs.

They are doing it, everything they are doing has already been done in one way or another, they are just combined methods and creating a dynamic server mesh where everyone else uses a static server mesh option. You cant prove they are not doing it.

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CiG are doing a similar thing to dual universe where that game has simulated 30k players in one area, all CiG are doing is going a step further and we dont need 1 server to handle thousands of players, star citizen will spread out hundreds of servers, so a battle of 1000 could be 5-10 servers all spread around each other, why dont you spend 5 mins of doing some research so you dont embarass yourself from lack of knowledge.

If you had watched the videos of what CiG are doing with server meshing and such you may understand a little more.

[XDurionX]

First is because the first time we enter the game it will be loading in all the shaders of the respective area into our computer. 2nd is because cities are the most taxing areas in the game and run bad for anyone.
.

At least you're finally admitting it.

[Edge-]

Performance will suck in the very first log in for 2 main reasons. First is because the first time we enter the game it will be loading in all the shaders of the respective area into our computer. 2nd is because cities are the most taxing areas in the game and run bad for anyone. With your specs you'll have better fps everywhere else.

First bit should go away but doesn't seem to. Usually games will preload shaders rather than do it on the fly, but whatever, it's alpha. Second bit...so why on earth would they give you the option to spawn yourself into such a poorly performing area of the game? Like, I get it, alpha and all, but this is a great way to turn folks away before they even get a chance to see what Star Citizen is about.

Straight up, this is embarassing. I'm not expecting buttery smooth performance, but at least understand the game you're working on and its limitations and leave spawn locations in less hardware taxing areas.

I'm hoping there's something I can change in settings somewhere that will have an impact, because this is beyond a joke and completely unplayable.

3rd one, and this is very important, put your Gfx settings always on HIGH as that will tax your GPU more and alleviate your CPU load, putting settings on LOW gives worse performance (yes counter-intuitive) because the load will shift more to the CPU. Also disable all the visual effects: Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Sharpening, Film Grain.

Not sure how "high" would tax the GPU more than the CPU, it shouldn't alter the CPU load in the slightest. Like, technically how does that even bloody work? Why not just rename options so it's not confusing and contradictory for players while it's currently borked?

Why do the post effects which have next to 0 performance impact in other games have a bad impact here?

Just tried changing the "quality" setting to high, everything else is still at the lowest/off in 1080p windowed mode and I'm in my room and still looking at 20ish FPS. Legit, changing the settings seems to have absolutely zero impact on performance. I might get an extra 1-2 fps going from "high" to "low" settings but it's so low I can barely tell.

Star Citizen is very CPU intensive and benefits immensely from fast SSD and RAM.

Running it off a SSD and I forget my RAM frequency but it's plenty fast. I'll have to double check but I shouldn't be bottlenecked by my CPU, and if I am in just this location how the hell is the rest of the game supposed to run when the CPU is actually taking on meaningful loads with other players around and a lot more intensive simulations?

4th: You can try this tricks bellow as they've been proven to work well for some players:

Thanks, guess I'm spending another 2-3 hours trying to get the game to even in a remotely playable state. This is an immensely poor and frustrating new user experience for a game.

Again, I get it, alpha and all and I'm not expecting a super polished experience with guided tours and stuff. But I would expect them to figure out that spawning new players somewhere they're going to be playing a slideshow due to poor performance isn't a good idea.

I mean, you'd think...

[Val the Moofia Boss]

First bit should go away but doesn't seem to. Usually games will preload shaders rather than do it on the fly, but whatever, it's alpha. Second bit...so why on earth would they give you the option to spawn yourself into such a poorly performing area of the game? Like, I get it, alpha and all, but this is a great way to turn folks away before they even get a chance to see what Star Citizen is about.

Dunno. Probably because they want to show off their cities and the "immersion" of waking up in a futuristic city, going to your ship, and flying out of atmosphere. Personally I find it very annoying, because waking up and then going into space and then going to Port Olisar or Grim Hex is a process that takes at least 30-40 minutes, even longer if you have a lot of items you need to transport and if you have a small ship, that means a lot of trips going back and forth. Could easily take hours to set up your base after a server wipe.

I preferred when I could wake up on the space station of Port Olisar. I could wake up my hab, run downstairs and spawn my ship, and run out the airlock to my ship. Within 90 seconds of logging into the game I could be flying. And Grim Hex is only 60 seconds away from PO. Waking up in PO allows newcomers to get straight to flying around with minimum hassle.

[Edge-]

Dunno. Probably because they want to show off their cities and the "immersion" of waking up in a futuristic city, going to your ship, and flying out of atmosphere.

Does anyone at CIG think this is a fun experience at 13fps? Like, I honestly can't make heads nor tails of this, it's just incredibly terrible design. Dreadful.

I think the game looks nice, but honestly it's hard to tell since graphical settings don't appear to have a huge impact on either image quality or performance.

Can you make a character and spawn elsewhere? I might just do that in the hope that the sky city is simply "no-go" for me and other areas run fine.