[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Antipathy1018]

Oh look, what a surprise this Friday May 16th, 2020 is for the road map update. Weeks, upon weeks of cards getting removed, not just for the upcoming patch but for every patch since at least 3.7, yet nothing removed this week. They even last week or so, pushed back 4.0 because they feel unless they have more than 1 system going to 4.0 is not momentous enough to change the iteration from 3 to 4.

But oh wait a minute, what is coming up in the next 6 days? Oh it is "Fleet Week" one of several sales they have for the ships they sell.

Now I wonder why 6 days before May 22nd, 2020 (when Fleet Week Starts, and sales prices for ships starts) they would not remove cards from the road map like they have been constantly for 6 months to a year. I wonder when CR will realize he has gone to the well 1 too many times before he sees sand instead of water.

[MrAnderson]

Oh look, what a surprise this Friday May 16th, 2020 is for the road map update. Weeks, upon weeks of cards getting removed, not just for the upcoming patch but for every patch since at least 3.7, yet nothing removed this week. They even last week or so, pushed back 4.0 because they feel unless they have more than 1 system going to 4.0 is not momentous enough to change the iteration from 3 to 4.

But oh wait a minute, what is coming up in the next 6 days? Oh it is "Fleet Week" one of several sales they have for the ships they sell.

Now I wonder why 6 days before May 22nd, 2020 (when Fleet Week Starts, and sales prices for ships starts) they would not remove cards from the road map like they have been constantly for 6 months to a year. I wonder when CR will realize he has gone to the well 1 too many times before he sees sand instead of water.

Complaining about a company giving a Free2Play to everyone for a whole week, now that's peachy.

Hyped for ToW Evocati testing later today!

[Wilian]

Lets play. How many of these kenn can fill?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I said I was going to take a break from the game. Welp, I was too determined to try to do some bounty hunting, so I came back.

I decided to upgrade from the 315p to the 325a. I realized that I wasn't really using by 8 SCU of cargo space anyway, and I'd get more use out of the extra turret slot and the missiles. It was only $5 to upgrade so no biggie. (I briefly toyed with going to the Anvil Arrow, since I had a lot of fun when I rented it last year. Unfortunately, the Arrow simply has too many downsides. No internal cabin space to put stuff or carry passengers, no bed to log out from, and only a single shield generator).

I once again began doing delivery missions to save up the UEC to buy the best loadout for the 325a. Fortunately I only had a single 30k this time. I mainly had problems purchasing the components from the terminals. When I clicked "confirm" to purchase the items, the terminal would sit there spinning for several seconds, and then it'd time out and tell me that my purchase didn't go through. Looking at the UEC counter in the top right, my balance didn't change... but when I backed away from the terminal to check my mobiglass, it showed that the cost had been deducted from my balance... even though sometimes it didn't buy the component so I had to go back and try again.

Anyway, so I got my gimballed NDB-30, my gimballed Scorpion GT2-15s, my Palisade and Mirage shields and my slipstream powerplant and my ZeroRush and SnowBlind coolers and my Spark I missiles and my Arrestor missiles. All set to do some bounty hunting around Hurston. Fortunately it seems like the bounty missions actually worked this time around, with the correct criminal mob spawning at the destination. With my gimballed weapons I easily tore the bounty target apart, and with my shields I didn't get so much as a scratch. I took on several more bounty targets, but I never got a contract that was for more than 3.5k. What happened to the 8k bounties that took you to Delamar? Anyway, I tried using my missiles, but they wouldn't lock on for some reason. Yes, I checked my keybinds and I was pressing the correct button (rebound it to mouse button 4, on the side of my mouse, rather than the mouse wheel, which was awkward to press). When I pressed the button, I'd here an error sound, so it seems like I'm not meeting the proper conditions to lock on to the target? I tried at different ranges, from 5,000 meters out down to within 1,000 meters. Didn't work.

Bounties seem like a waste of time ATM. Seems like the delievery missions that earn you 15,300 UEC per dropoff are the fastest and most reliable way to make money ATM, since FPS combat is finnicky due to the latency and trading is a bad idea since your cargo will be eaten by 30ks.

I decided to go to New Babbage to take that picture, but there was a snowstorm so I couldn't get a good looking picture. I landed the ship and logged out in my bed, then logged on, hoping to get another server at a different time of day (in retrospect, I think the rotation of the planets are synced across all of the servers anyway). When I logged back on, however, my ships was in the middle of the sun, so I had to quantum drive all the way back to New Babbage. Fortunately I didn't explode exitting the sun's surface (unlike the situation with planets where if you try to fly out from inside a planet you will explode).

It was while flying to microTech that I realized the 325a had a flaw. It has a tiny quantum fuel tank! I had to make a stop at a Rest & Relax station to refuel (thankfully the refuelling button actually worked this time around). In my 315p, I never had to worry about fuel. I could fly from Crusader to Hurston to ArcCorp without having to worry about fuel. Guess if I'm going to have to stop to refuel a lot anyway, I mind as well make use of those ballistics and missiles.

Made it to New Babbage. Took a picture (it was nighttime but I'm not waiting until daytime). I think I'm well and truly done for now until they retune the payout from bounties, or PvP heats up (I haven't seen a single player bounty contract, seems like everybody learned their lesson from prison. Then again, it's hardly lucrative being a criminal right now due to how finnicky the FPS combat is). If an explorable Idris (or, possibly... an IDRIS EVENT?!?!) shows up during the fleet week, I might check it out.

[Majestic12]

Chris is probably sweating over Unreal Engine 5 now. If and by the time CIG is done with their tech, it will be obsolete.

[Proskill]

Chris is probably sweating over Unreal Engine 5 now. If and by the time CIG is done with their tech, it will be obsolete.

lumberyard looks at least as good as UE5. ive never seen textures so sharp in any other game than SC

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Chris is probably sweating over Unreal Engine 5 now. If and by the time CIG is done with their tech, it will be obsolete.

You seem to misunderstand. An engine is a base to build off of. The developer still has to build everything else that their game requires, and the tech CIG has developed for Star Citizen is incredibly impressive. If the team switched to Unreal, they would have to spend years rebuilding this tech all over again. But I won't repeat what others have said far better.

[Rennadrel]

Epic Games also doesn't have the financial resources to fund the development of the game further even if they managed to get Chris Roberts to switch engines, even though they've already done it once before and look at where it's gotten them. Because I can assure you that he would demand money as compensation, and considering the costs already incurred by SC's development over the last 7 years, it would have to be at least double what they've crowd funded.

[Majestic12]

lumberyard looks at least as good as UE5. ive never seen textures so sharp in any other game than SC

Looks, indeed. That's the only thing SC has. It's a screenshot simulator. Meanwhile, they have insane difficulty putting together any sort of game.

For context, Star Citizen as a project came about in the UE 3 days. UE5 shows that now there's not much CryEngine and Lumberyard has left to boast about.

If and by the time SC gets out, it will be dated as hell. It's just another example of how the project has failed to deliver. It should've been out years ago, then we had something to talk about, yet we're in 2020 and it's likely even the SQ42 beta will be pushed out of this year. That alone tells you how SC is doing as a project.

[Edge-]

Epic Games also doesn't have the financial resources to fund the development of the game further even if they managed to get Chris Roberts to switch engines, even though they've already done it once before and look at where it's gotten them. Because I can assure you that he would demand money as compensation, and considering the costs already incurred by SC's development over the last 7 years, it would have to be at least double what they've crowd funded.

Uh...yeah, they do. Epic is rolling in money, dude. As for the switch, I'm not sure how the revenue share would work with crowdfunding, but if they weren't actively taking money for the game they could freely use UE5 to build it, there's no licensing fee and Epic only starts taking a cut after $1M in sales now.

This is nonsense. There won't be a switch to begin with, you don't switch from an engine you've been working with and customizing for 7+ years to something completely different and have to start all over again. But if it was something like that was possible it the payments to Epic would only be in the form of royalties from using their engine.

For context, Star Citizen as a project came about in the UE 3 days. UE5 shows that now there's not much CryEngine and Lumberyard has left to boast about.

If and by the time SC gets out, it will be dated as hell. It's just another example of how the project has failed to deliver.

Yes, but with qualifications. UE4 was shown off in mid 2012 and was released in 2014, so your timeline is accurate but at the same time UE3 was at the end of its lifecycle and IIRC was less licensed at the time. With the new generation of consoles a lot of the bigger publishers moved to in-house engines for the most part.

Beyond that, engines aren't just for pretty pixels and lighting. There's a ton under the hood that players never see, from tools for the devs to backend networking etc. etc. (shit that's way over my head), and while we know that UE5 is capable of some insanely impressive visuals we don't know how it might work for SC/SQ42 beyond "it could make it look pretty".

Don't hate on "older" engines, even, because some can be impressively updated. I think WoW is still running on the skeleton of the OG WC3 engine, and that's supposedly getting freakin ray-traced shadows for Shadowlands. CoD was originally built on a modified id Tech 3 engine until 2005, after which point they used the same engine (with updates) up through 2018.

Just based on visual fidelity that the game is capable of delivering alone (regardless of if you need a quantum computer to render it at max settings), its visuals are looking to be on-par/better than the early installments for next-gen. If you're going on visuals alone, we've still got quite a few years before it might start looking dated.

[kenn9530]

Looks, indeed. That's the only thing SC has. It's a screenshot simulator. Meanwhile, they have insane difficulty putting together any sort of game.

For context, Star Citizen as a project came about in the UE 3 days. UE5 shows that now there's not much CryEngine and Lumberyard has left to boast about.

If and by the time SC gets out, it will be dated as hell. It's just another example of how the project has failed to deliver. It should've been out years ago, then we had something to talk about, yet we're in 2020 and it's likely even the SQ42 beta will be pushed out of this year. That alone tells you how SC is doing as a project.

New engines that have yet to be properly tested are not always a good thing and could lead to a ton of work to make a game work, it will be a long time before games start coming out with the UE5 engine, you use any reason at all to insult the game, also its reasonable to assume there may be a delay on SQ42 by maybe 6 months due to whats going on.

[MrAnderson]

Chris is probably sweating over Unreal Engine 5 now. If and by the time CIG is done with their tech, it will be obsolete.

Yeah right... Whenever a new shiny comes out your ilk always says that...

Just change NMS/COD/MassEffect with whatever new shiny comes out.

Seems you're the ones sweating year after year for seeing Star Citizen engine do everything you said to be impossible.
Oh the irony.

[Xeenith]

don't ME andromeda used Frosbite, owned by EA ? ^^

[MrAnderson]

don't ME andromeda used Frosbite, owned by EA ? ^^

Yeap... they tried going the Star Citizen way making procedural planets for exploration but eventually abandoned it.

[Xeenith]

as much as the game interest me, I'll be waiting until SQ42 is out. I had way too many games I was hyped about, bought my way into beta and never played much the final version. lots of times I lost 60-70€ for a short beta and not much more.

a friend of mine went in 6 monthes from "base beta acces" to "spent 1500€ at least" and I find that crazy... mostly because the big ship need a lot of people to really work as intended from everything I read from the alpha.

[kenn9530]

as much as the game interest me, I'll be waiting until SQ42 is out. I had way too many games I was hyped about, bought my way into beta and never played much the final version. lots of times I lost 60-70€ for a short beta and not much more.

a friend of mine went in 6 monthes from "base beta acces" to "spent 1500€ at least" and I find that crazy... mostly because the big ship need a lot of people to really work as intended from everything I read from the alpha.

good chance there will be a free fly event on friday so you can try it, you dont need to spend anything more than the base starter package and if you have a few friends you dont even need a ship.

the current version is just as much a game now as many others currently available but there will be lots more added to it.

[sabe]

I believe its better that it gets dated. More people will be able to play it with their hardware by the time game is released.
It can be improved again years after release.

Not everyone can renew their parts every year. I won't pay for what I can't play.
I don't want a mmo that only GTX 10080ti super uber OC GPU owners can play. Need as many players possible.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

good chance there will be a free fly event on friday so you can try it

I'm not sure if trying to bring in new players right now with a free fly event would be a good idea. The patch is too buggy and too unstable. 30ks every half an hour, many missions are broken, ships destroyed and unable to be reclaimed, and so on. Just a couple minutes ago, me and dude were taking off from Port Olisar in Pieces and then we spontaneously exploded (no, we did not collide with the station or a ship). While within the armistice zone. Using the free fly event to give non-backers a look into the game right now is just going to give bad first impressions and drive people away. They need to until the servers have been stabilize and most of the gamebreaking bugs have been fixed.

[kenn9530]

I'm not sure if trying to bring in new players right now with a free fly event would be a good idea. The patch is too buggy and too unstable. 30ks every half an hour, many missions are broken, ships destroyed and unable to be reclaimed, and so on. Just a couple minutes ago, me and dude were taking off from Port Olisar in Pieces and then we spontaneously exploded (no, we did not collide with the station or a ship). While within the armistice zone. Using the free fly event to give non-backers a look into the game right now is just going to give bad first impressions and drive people away. They need to until the servers have been stabilize and most of the gamebreaking bugs have been fixed.

There is a high chance there will be a free fly event happening, plus many bugs will be fixed in the new patch for the event, until the game is released the servers will never be properly optimised so we all have to put up with anything that comes along in the mean time but i have not had many issues at all, even played a whole 8 hours session with a full carrack doing missions back to back and only 1 crew member got a 30k once. New babbage with the newer weather techs is likely causing some of the bugs.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

There is a high chance there will be a free fly event happening, plus many bugs will be fixed in the new patch for the event

Releasing a bug fixing patch the day before a free trial that will make or break the game to newcomers? That is ludicrous! If the patch is still buggy, bordering on unplayable after the new bug fix patch, the devs won't have enough time to fix them before the free trial. After a new patch drops, players and devs need time to find, report, and fix the bugs and make sure that the patch is in fact stable and playable BEFORE bringing in tons of new players.

The patch is more tolerable for us veterans. We know how the game works. We know what's broke. We know that the servers are going to crash within half an hour or so of logging on. We know how to maximize our time.

New players do not know any of that.

until the game is released the servers will never be properly optimised so we all have to put up with anything that comes along

No one is asking for perfect, final release build quality, but there is a bar Star Citizen has set for itself that it is now failing to reach. Prior to 3.9, we had a standard. We had an actually playable game on the live servers. The whole point of the PTU was to test new patches until a stable enough version was created, and THEN rolling that patch out to live. As of right now, patch 3.9 is far and away the buggiest patch in the game. Sure, other patches had problems during the first couple weeks of launch, but for the most part the rest of the game was playable.


Imagine being a new player. You had heard about a kickstarter project called Star Citizen. You haven't paid attention to it much, but you heard that it has been in development for 7 or 8 years or something. You have heard lots of bad things about kickstarter projects, and seen people throw around the term "vaporware" in reference to SC, possibly as a joke. But people seem hyped about it for some reason. Then you heard that they were going to have a free trial or something, where you can fly ships around that people would otherwise have to pay real money for.

You decide "alright, I'll check out what all of the buzz is about". You make an account, download the client, spend hours waiting for it to install, and then login. Looking good! You wake up, spend half an hour wandering around the city and buying stuff and getting a feel for the game. You ask how to fly a spaceship, eventually find your way to the spaceport, manage to spawn your ship and get in it. Looking good! Eventually you decide to try out one of those missions you saw in your mobiglass earlier.

You take on a mission, spend 10-15 minutes trying to do it... only then to begin suspecting that it's broken. Wasted 10-15 minutes, but okay, whatever. A different mission will surely work, right?

And then that mission is broken too. Or the server crashes. Or you do manage to have some fun, but eventually crash your ship, and when you try to reclaim your ship, you can't, because it says "DESTROYED" and the only option is to click "RETRIEVE" but it doesn't retrieve. "Wait, I bought waters and food and had minerals in my inventory before I logged out/got disconnected. Why aren't they in my inventory now that I have logged back on?". And you have an awful time.

That player isn't coming back. Nor will the other thousands who had similar experiences during that free fly event. It will only confirm in their minds what they may have heard about the so-called "Star Citizen project" before they tried it out. And that player will tell his friends about his experience, and his friends will be less likely to give SC a chance.


Look, I want more people to find out about the joys of SC too, but right now this is really not a good time to try to tell people "oh, don't worry! The game was kickstarter 8 years ago, it's still not coming out, but hey look! Isn't a game with servers crashing half the time and bugs galore so much fun? Trust us, we're totally not cultists!"

- - - Updated - - -

Maybe CIG feels like they need to strike while the iron is hot, what with the global situation right now and a lot of people indoors looking for quick entertainment. But I think showing the game as it is right now to newcomers will hurt a lot more than waiting a few weeks to show newcomers a more stable build of the game.

- - - Updated - - -

On a side note, the SC community really needs to knock it off with the "it's in alpha" excuse. The phrase has become synonymous with "I have no standards and I ignore actual, objective problems with the game because I am a fanboy". Everybody can see through it and it does not convince people to give the game a chance. If anything, it only reinforces the stereotype of SC as yet another doomed kickstarter/early access project.

Folks, we have two servers: the live server, and the PTU test server. Wasn't the whole point of the PTU was to test and debug stuff before it made it to live? Come on! We need to have standards. If we don't speak up and admit that there is a problem, nothing is going to get fixed!