[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Edge-]

The char reset is just one page on the settings on the website, just put in a reason, put in the password and click, then wait 15 mins before you can login, you dont really have to use it much unless you want to get some of your items back.

I know that. My point being that there's no reason for this to be a process vs. a simple button in the game to delete your character and start fresh. Most of the games I've played in alpha have made it very easy to "reset" your character either in terms of their position in-game in case you fall beneath the map etc. or a completely fresh character if you've hit a progress stopping bug.

Core point being: This process appears to require someone from CIG manually review/approve these requests, hence you putting in a reason for the rest. I'm sure it doesn't take up too much time, but any developer time spent against this is a waste of time and resources. The decision making for this game is fuckin bonkers and makes no sense.

[Surfd]

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.

Ahh, right. Dual Universe. A game so impressive that I had literally never heard of it before you mentioned it. Definitely something to keep a close eye on then. I mean, they "simulated" 30k players in one location (location being "planet", where I 100% guarantee you all 30K simulated players were not actually close enough to eachother to be meaningful). Nice. Get back to me when they ACTUALLY get 30k REAL players in one location doing more than just randomly wandering around. Until they pull that off, they are still blowing smoke up your ass.

[kenn9530]

Ahh, right. Dual Universe. A game so impressive that I had literally never heard of it before you mentioned it. Definitely something to keep a close eye on then. I mean, they "simulated" 30k players in one location (location being "planet", where I 100% guarantee you all 30K simulated players were not actually close enough to eachother to be meaningful). Nice. Get back to me when they ACTUALLY get 30k REAL players in one location doing more than just randomly wandering around. Until they pull that off, they are still blowing smoke up your ass.

A simulated player is no different from an actual player, the fact is the tech already exists and you still talk BS, SC isnt even saying its going to have thousands of players in the same area at the same time, it will get as much as it possibly can and thats more than enough, whats it like having no imagination in the slightest to even think about whats possible.

- - - Updated - - -

I know that. My point being that there's no reason for this to be a process vs. a simple button in the game to delete your character and start fresh. Most of the games I've played in alpha have made it very easy to "reset" your character either in terms of their position in-game in case you fall beneath the map etc. or a completely fresh character if you've hit a progress stopping bug.

Core point being: This process appears to require someone from CIG manually review/approve these requests, hence you putting in a reason for the rest. I'm sure it doesn't take up too much time, but any developer time spent against this is a waste of time and resources. The decision making for this game is fuckin bonkers and makes no sense.

The char reset just resets the basics, you will basically get all the items you cant really get back in the game and just pick where you want to spawn at, the money is not effected or what ships you own, its still automatic the reason box doesnt do much apart from some data gathering for bugs most likely.

[Ausr]

You are the one being ignorant, im actually following and keeping up to date with what they are doing with the development of the game, its clearly not a scam and even saying it is just proves you have nothing of worth of say. Anyone who thinks this is a scam loses all credibility.

- - - Updated - - -



The char reset is just one page on the settings on the website, just put in a reason, put in the password and click, then wait 15 mins before you can login, you dont really have to use it much unless you want to get some of your items back.

You don't even understand the term appeal to ignorance so that tells me all about you.

It is a scam. You've been pushing it, almost guaranteed to be paid at this point, for many pages now.

[Kyanion]

A simulated player is no different from an actual player, the fact is the tech already exists and you still talk BS, SC isnt even saying its going to have thousands of players in the same area at the same time, it will get as much as it possibly can and thats more than enough, whats it like having no imagination in the slightest to even think about whats possible.

Yet another personal attack at someone. But hey apparently 50 is as much as it possibly can do and that is more than enough for you.

[Surfd]

A simulated player is no different from an actual player

If you actually believe that, then I have some ocean front property in central Mongolia I think you would really be interested in. A bunch of simulated bots just wandering aimlessly around an area the size of a planet isn't even VAGUELY close to what it would be like to attempt to put 30k real, actual players with real network connections into a single area and have them do something resource intensive. Their claim to fame is apparently having 30k "people" online at once in one area, but all of the "people" weren't actually in one area, they were scattered across a planet, and they weren't actually DOING anything. Just wandering around. Move all those people into the same area and have them start a combat mele, and their server cluster would have likely shit the bed completely.

As I said before, EvE is the current record holder for this shit. Anything these people have tried, the EvE team has already considered. From the sounds of it, the guys at Dual Universe have basically pinned their hopes on distributed Cloud computing architecture to solve the problem: IE, Just throwing more computing power at it and hoping that it works. Simply shoveling more CPUs at it isn't going to actually be the wonder fix most people imagine unless there is some pretty decent code behind it managing the communication between server clusters.

The EvE guys tried something similar a test project called Aether Wars, and they could barely get 10k "simulated" players active in a combat situation without everything imploding. And that was back in like 2019. Ever wonder why EvE hasn't flipped all their shit to Distributed Cloud Archetecture if it's such a Magic Bullet solution?

So call me highly skeptical when some company I have never heard of that has barely been around for 1/3rd of the time EvE has is claiming to have pulled magical super tech out of their ass that's 3x better than anything the current industry leader has ever attempted. Until they can actually pull that off in a real world situation, not just a bare bones in house simulation, I will remain skeptical.

whats it like having no imagination in the slightest to even think about whats possible.

I think it should be fairly obvious right now, but you have no idea what you are talking about. The thing is that I do know what's possible, and I know that nobody out there has even come close to what you are claiming these people are actually capable of under anything remotely approaching an actual real-world situation.

Also, again, call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing a CiG is going to be able to pull off a magical Cloud Computing load balancing solution to getting boatloads of people in one location to work smoothly when they apparently are barely even capable of figuring out how to get collision detection to function properly in their game.

[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

pls respond

[Wilian]

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?

This might be one of the few legit points Kenn has made in his entirety of SC shilling career, some games DO make wonky things like that with their settings ( I do not know if Star Citizen actually does)

For example in Arma 3 if you turn your Shadow settings lower than High for some reason it offloads all of it's calculations onto CPU instead of GPU (or whatever the technical term is) and it'll grind the game's performance down especially if you have older and slower CPU

[MrAnderson]

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.
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.
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?
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...

Most games use instancing/loading screens and Star Citizen doesn't so things have to be streamed in and out. Crusader/Orison is the most taxing planet/city because of the Volumetric clouds. Changing them to medium/low/off should give FPS improvements.

This link show's the expected performance of your PC build by comparing it with other players similar builds: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/telemetry

It's a true alpha not a demo, as in the top priority is still making the game/testing things and not player experience. So, one of things they need to test are City areas so that they can find ways to optimize them. Making players spawn in a space station would make for a much better experience yes indeed, but at the same time it could also give a false sense into thinking the game is further polished that it is. Spawning in cities show's the ugliest performance wise right off the bat, that way you should understand what to expect from then on. Fortunately it only gets better from that city onwards.

With that said, you should GTFO of the city and go land in a space station and find a medical area to save your spawn there. I'd suggest GrimHex, it's not easy to land there but if you ask around in the game's chat for some guidance and sure enough someone will help ya.

[Edge-]

This link show's the expected performance of your PC build by comparing it with other players similar builds: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/telemetry

Currently showing me well above the minimum recommendations, insanely so on the GPU front and just shy of recommended on the CPU front. No clue why I'm getting a slideshow.

It's a true alpha not a demo

Except it's really a demo, too. That's why they've put a fair amount of polish work into Stanton vs. working on getting a lot of other systems pushed out so they can start testing those, for example. It's why they have free fly events to attract new players to spend money. They're using the alpha as a demo to generate additional revenue.

Again I've repeatedly stated that I get that it's in alpha and I'm not expecting buttery smooth performance. But I'm expecting much better than what I'm seeing, and some of the design decisions I'm seeing right out of the gate - like defaulting new players to Orison or whatever which just happens to have the worst performance of any starting location - aren't instilling much confidence.

So, one of things they need to test are City areas so that they can find ways to optimize them.

It's almost like they can have players travel to cities once they've gotten their wits about them elsewhere, and they can host specific in-game events (actual events or just "events") in cities to bring in the active players and get a lot more server/client data. In that there are better ways to do this that don't greet new players with a slideshow.

Making players spawn in a space station would make for a much better experience yes indeed, but at the same time it could also give a false sense into thinking the game is further polished that it is. Spawning in cities show's the ugliest performance wise right off the bat, that way you should understand what to expect from then on. Fortunately it only gets better from that city onwards.

I...what? Do you realize how contradictory and fairly nonsense this is?

"They're smartly giving new players a horrid, dreadful experience that's likely to make them quit early unless they're already mentally or financially invested in this game."

Are players generally not aware the game is in alpha? How could they not be aware when it's clearly messaged all over the place throughout the process of getting access to, downloading, and playing the game? I'm not sure how showing the worst of the games performance - a literal slideshow - is helpful in attracting or retaining new plaers and would be curious to hear more on this.

Because as I've said, this is a great example of the kind of design decisions that make me question how long the team has been drinking their own cool-aid.

With that said, you should GTFO of the city and go land in a space station and find a medical area to save your spawn there. I'd suggest GrimHex, it's not easy to land there but if you ask around in the game's chat for some guidance and sure enough someone will help ya.

If I can ever figure out how to get the game to stop looking like a slideshow and for stuff like mobiglass to work consistently, absolutely. But I can't even really get around/explore until I get around to resetting my character so I can see if performance is better elsewhere.

[Proskill]

we’re not really going to tell you what we’re doing anymore
unless it’s pretty much almost finished and about to come out
Did it finally happen? Did we get scammed?

[Edge-]

we’re not really going to tell you what we’re doing anymore
unless it’s pretty much almost finished and about to come out
Did it finally happen? Did we get scammed?

No, they're just still trying to figure out how to do roadmaps after a decade of development. Because they can't hit their own internal milestones and anything beyond the upcoming patch is a complete guess.

They'll still have progress on features/systems/content being worked on, they're just not going to project patches beyond the immediate next one to avoid running into issues like they did with 3.16 where most of the planned updates were cut from the initial launch with a handful being added back in.

This goes back to my concerns I've voiced throughout the thread about project management. They're still fucking about with roadmaps and are still grossly unable to hit many of their own internal deadlines. I get it, gamedev is messy and stuff changes, but I've worked on games in early development and have never seen anything remotely like this.

But at the end of the day it doesn't matter. As long as crowdfunding money keeps pouring in, they have no incentive to change development practices or how they manage the project.

[loras]

Is this game still the second coming lf space-Christ in eternal beta? Or is it anythkng close to its ambitions now?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Seems like the money won't be pouring in forever. Fewer and fewer new backers are buying into SC, and more and more of the revenue is coming not from new backers, but from whales... and there has been a sharp increase in the number of backers trying to cash out. r/StarCitizen_Trades has doubled in size over the past two years. Keramz is getting so many people asking him to help them sell their accounts that he has said he will no longer help you if you have a small account under $1,000. The fact that reselling SC accounts has become a fulltime business should be alarming.

[Aliven]

No, they're just still trying to figure out how to do roadmaps after a decade of development.

Thats the optimistic guess.

If they know, right now, they will never be able to deliver a product and still take money then yes, it is a scam.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Is this game still the second coming lf space-Christ in eternal beta?

Yup. Still capped at a measly 50 players... who now almost never see each other because they are spread out across 4 planets and dozens of spacestations and moons. Also the NPCs are broken now. Oh and you lose your inventory upon death now and there are more ways than ever to die through no fault of your own.

is it anythkng close to its ambitions now?

Being able to seamlessly wake up in a city, take a train ride to the spaceport, get into your ship, fly out of atmosphere, warp to another planet, fly down through the atmosphere, and land in the woods is technically pretty impressive. That said, it doesn't make for a very fun game.

The project is nowhere near close to fulfilling basic promises like a singleplayer campaign or a massively multiplayer online game, let alone the other big promises like 40+ star systems or colonizing planets or capital ship battles and such.

[Edge-]

Seems like the money won't be pouring in forever. Fewer and fewer new backers are buying into SC, and more and more of the revenue is coming not from new backers, but from whales

This should have always been the expected trajectory though, no? UA costs money, and constantly spending big against acquiring new paying users for your crowdfunded game in alpha isn't a great strategy. So while they can focus on UA during some of the free fly events and whatnot, their bread and butter is going to be improving their monetization of existing players.

This is standard throughout all models like this (usually F2P models, since that's sorta how this game works), and this kind of thing is the same thing that happened to City of Heroes after it went F2P - they saw a lot of new users and converted some to paying users, but most of what they found out was that they were just monetizing their existing players better/creating whales.

Though that's also a good thing for them since they know they've got a crowd of big spenders they can rely on without needing to spend against them since they're already in the ecosystem.

[Gorsameth]

No, they're just still trying to figure out how to do roadmaps after a decade of development. Because they can't hit their own internal milestones and anything beyond the upcoming patch is a complete guess.

They'll still have progress on features/systems/content being worked on, they're just not going to project patches beyond the immediate next one to avoid running into issues like they did with 3.16 where most of the planned updates were cut from the initial launch with a handful being added back in.

This goes back to my concerns I've voiced throughout the thread about project management. They're still fucking about with roadmaps and are still grossly unable to hit many of their own internal deadlines. I get it, gamedev is messy and stuff changes, but I've worked on games in early development and have never seen anything remotely like this.

But at the end of the day it doesn't matter. As long as crowdfunding money keeps pouring in, they have no incentive to change development practices or how they manage the project.

Your being overly generous. Even the milestones in the upcoming patch is a complete guess based on how much of it they have to scrap each time.

[Edge-]

Your being overly generous. Even the milestones in the upcoming patch is a complete guess based on how much of it they have to scrap each time.

Yes, but there's more confidence in that vs. future patches, so this limits the things "cut" from future patches.

The only downside is now the community is laser focused on the upcoming patch, so anything that gets delayed out of there will be more noticeable. Many won't care though since they're fine with the delays and shit.

It's the rock and hard place that CIG have voluntarily spent years placing themselves in.

[Koriani]

Seems like the money won't be pouring in forever. Fewer and fewer new backers are buying into SC, and more and more of the revenue is coming not from new backers, but from whales... and there has been a sharp increase in the number of backers trying to cash out. r/StarCitizen_Trades has doubled in size over the past two years. Keramz is getting so many people asking him to help them sell their accounts that he has said he will no longer help you if you have a small account under $1,000. The fact that reselling SC accounts has become a fulltime business should be alarming.

The fact that anyone would pay that for an already built account on a "pre-release alpha/beta/whatever this is" game just boggles the mind. Esp. given I've been reading from you about perma-death and the bugs taking away all your stuff - what do "older accounts" for SC get over new accounts that would justify someone paying for a 'used' account?! What do you get that someone who rolls up 'new' doesn't get or do that they can't do?

I mean I only 'barely' get why someone would pay hundreds, (much less thousands), of dollars for a max-level-geared out WoW character. But I 'get' it due to the gating of content and the desire for some people to skip the leveling in order to play with friends, etc. I still think its a bit bonkers to spend that much but I "get" why they do it.

But a game that has none of that sort of 'high level content' to jump to? A game that has perma-death and loss of stuff? What bonus does a 6 month old SC account give over a new one? Why is that worth anything at all? Much less to be an "ongoing business"?! Talk about scam on a scam!

I mean brilliant for players who can sell those accounts and make some of their lost money back (or whatever) - sure I wouldn't stop anyone from doing that. But just crazy there's so many buyers for such a broken mess (broken because no, its not finished). I'd expect a few 'one born every minute' but an ongoing business so busy that you're having to turn it away? wth?

I mean what - do you get the 1K dollar ship on the account that the previous account's owner bought (even though it doesn't exist in game space yet) is that the pull? What's the logic here?