Star Citizen - Squadron 42 - Upcoming PC Space Sim.

Come on 'good headway' really? Anyway pointless jab at CIG mis-management aside, that 160mil you mentioned I wonder how many of the backers would be happy to hear that their cash is being used to fight a suit that should never have been allowed to come to pass... then again CIG mis-management, so not shocked to see that they made a mess and have given Crytek a way in. Better yet how would you feel knowing that your money is going to be spent on this lawsuit knowing that no matter what happens that money will never be seen again?

If CIG lose the money goes to Crytek, if CIG wins it finishes Crytek off they declare bankrupcy and any chance of CIG recouping their legal fees and damages goes up in smoke with Crytek.

 

Show me evidence of mis managment by CIG?

They had to set up studios, hire people, rewrite cryengine entirely, etc. Not like they were a studio that had offices and people ready to go out the gate.

Plus they have to have a playable something for backers to play during the entire course of development, which of course leads to some stuff having to be redone as they got their pipelines and systems in place.

5 years out from 0 to the first serious work on the MMO side of the game. Where some studios have a full actual studio game engine and staff and still take 5 years to put out a game.

I say that for them taking 2 years to fully build their studios and get people in them, rewriting the cryengine to handle what they needed it to do, they making perfectly good progress.

Nevermind that they are making 2 games at the same time not just one title. The single player story driven stuff which is 90% done if not more. And the MMO side building an entire universe.

Considering to takes bethesda 5 years to make a small game world with a buggy engine and mediocre story, throwing shade because the project has taken this long shows a complete lack of any sense of game development at all, nm a studio trying to do it wo a publisher or a company behind them.

 

Have you played 3.0? since its wider release, there have been nearly daily updates and tweaks. Very active scene, and most of all, seamless interplanetary travel,
I'm having a blast watching this take shape.
Best part is its cheap to get started.

 

The fact that they have not once met a single promised deadline? Seems pretty much like mis-management to me.

 

The average person doesn't know much about the development process or that the game has even been available to play in various forms for a few years now...

There are a lot of people "one in particularly" who just get off on hating this game simply because of it's popularity...

 

It is easy to point out delays as they get touted a Lot at the moment online by people quick to bash, but I bet there are a Lot of things that come out not only on time, but Far ahead of schedule, for example atmospheric flight, seamless transitions from space to landings, whole planets getting built out so you can not just land at set points, but near enough Anywhere in most cases.

Also that really nice blend of procedural generation for planets mixed with great tool so that the artists can quickly create non-generic feeling planets at a reasonably fast pace.

Alot of that stuff was not meant to arrive until several years after PU public full release !


That's just a few major things off the top of my head.
All in all I am feeling pretty damn happy with progress.

(don't forget the original planetary landings would be been what you get in Freelancer - Isometric views of Bar, Ship sales etc with a few NPC's you can click on for missions or to buy/sell stuff. Would not have even been able to walk around planet side or on stations, delays building up from something So Basic are hardly surprising lol)

 

Fair enough but you are patting them on the back for providing an aspect of the game while failing to actually provide the game itself. If they said the game was to arrive 2 years ago and that planetary landings would arrive a year after that as an expansion or continuation of the games development then your point would be valid but what they have done is provided the planetary landings ahead of schedule but failed to actually provide the game to go with it. Would you say well done to EA for providing the DLC to the latest version of The Sims a year ahead of the games actual release?

Constant changing of goals, constant missing of deadlines, focusing on additional feature that are not core to the original project goals and importantly allowing them to steal resource and time away from the core project are all classic signs of mis-management.

 

I didn't know Henry Cavill was going to be in Squadron42... when did this happen?

Spoiler

 

That is why chris roberts stopped giving timelines and dates he is horrific at estimation. practically every time he has done it he has been massively off, and give fuel to the "its a scam" people.

Some of the things they are working on that were to be done after game launch, procedural generation, of planets, of fauna, maybe of animals. A bunch of ships that were to be done later, 300 series, cutlass, banu, because they thought they would push out the game sooner. Landing zones were to be fully scripted, now we got free flight and landing outside core uee worlds.

And instead of a dozen systems at launch because they had to build all the planets by hand they can have a scaled up launch.

They likely could have shoved s42 out the door long ago scripting much of it, if they had a need to, but at this point they are working on systems for the universe they are going to use in 42 to make a more sandbox experience.

Beyond that i think the only thing out of the scope of the OG stretch goals, is colonization ships and planet base building, which is tied to PG since they designed a modular building system to use in generating bases and the like.

Everything else was on the to do list eventually.

We got s42 slice coming up soon anyway, after what having that intro thing and some gameplay year before last? And they had 42 plans for gamescom i think this year but focused on 3.0 instead.

Maybe 42 for xmas this year? i think q1 q2 next year but maybe they could do it and stfu people that keep saying where is the game.

 

Some valid points, they definitely have missed many deadlines, and as a result they have been trying to be more open about what caused those misses during this last year in Burndown videos + Monthly reports etc.

Some because of moving goalposts for sure, others because of bugs and new unexpected bugs arising from add from added content.

They have tried to make sure additional aspects are done by teams not taking away from progress of other areas of the game.
The biggest delays, the SC community voted for - perhaps while not knowing how many extra years of development time would be added.

Probably, I think, the biggest delay aside from that is Chris Roberts worry that releasing a half baked version of his vision for Star Citizen too early would damage overall public perception of the game.


Grudgingly I believe he is right too, too many people form an opinion, perhaps while not knowing the plan, and walk away with a set perception going forwards.

Some time back I was expecting to see the PU launch in 2017, now I guess it will be late next year or 2019.
Squadron 42 I feel may launch March+ next year at the moment (really based on just a feeling that could be far wrong lol )

Things are accelerating in apparent progress, but they still have a Lot to do, the important thing though, it is clearly happening as best they can do it on their chosen approach to realising the game.

 

The issue that he is now running in to though is what could be called the HL3 expectation. I.e the game has taken so much longer to arrive than expected that it will never live up to expectations. The unique thing though is while HL3 has made no promises on which it can fail to meet SC and S42 have made a ton of promises and they keep moving the goals, it's almost as if he wants to make the job as hard as himself and yes while it is very nice for him to keep asking the 'community' what they want the reality is 90% of people have no clue what it is they want. A vast world of endless explorable planets sounds like it should be awesome but No Man's Sky showed that sometimes having much fewer designed and scripted locations is usually often better.

The face animation stuff is another great example of expectation building leading to massive time waste, really honestly how often do you actually look face to face with an Avatar in a game? You very rarely if ever do mostly because when you're talking to a mate via a headset you're usually busy doing something a lot more important and focused than looking at their avatar's ugly mug and yup for the first few hours people will go oooo that looks cool right up until they see that when you're actually playing the game you don't actually use it.

 

Love my gladius glad it will be a part of 42.

Looking forward to flying my hurricane also.

And REALLY hoping they give us an option on the mk2 hornet rework. Teasing that and not offering a upgrade kinda lame in my book.

Oh and the tank reveal today, kinda a generic looking tank but our first full on ground attack armored vehicle reveal.

 

Oh shitttt i didn't know !

 

Squadron 42 has 16GB RAM minimum requirement, and SSD is strongly recommended.

I honestly can't say I'm too surprised by this, as there's never been a game with the size and scope of Star Citizen. And although Squadron 42 is the single player version, it will still have the same assets as the former, just in a more limited manner. Those assets might be higher quality as well, as is usually the case with the single player campaigns of multiplayer titles.

This game is going to hammer midrange rigs, much like Assassins' Creed Origins does, but even more so due to how much data being constantly streamed and decompressed from storage. I predict this game (and Star Citizen) will be a major factor behind system upgrades when it launches.

This actually might be the first title (at least that I'm aware of) where the developer optimizes the streaming algorithm for SSDs rather than HDDs.

Field – Requirement
OS: Windows 7 (64bit) with Service Pack 1, Windows 8 (64bit), Windows 10 – Anniversary Update (64bit)
GPU: DirectX 11 Graphics Card with 2GB RAM (4GB strongly recommended)
CPU: Quad Core CPU
RAM: 16GB+
Drive: SSD strongly recommended

 

I don't think software developers can do any optimizations for storage hardware. All they can do is ask OS for data, then it up to OS to fetch data.
Reason for SSD is that lots of models, texture, sounds, etc... is being loaded on the run. So with slower storage, you will get to empty location and only then models and textures start to catch up.

Recommending SSD is just a cheap get away, cause game is NOT optimized for slower storage (by throwing a bunch of heavy models, textures, etc...).

 

I would assume optimized for SSD just means it uses streaming a lot...

 

SSDs have higher queue depths, greater bandwidth and faster access times than HDDs. Developers can tune their engines to stream a certain amount of data in a certain amount of time. I remember the Frostbite 3 engine developer Repi once bragging that the Frostbite engine could stream up to 500MB/s, which is much higher than any HDD can accomplish, and quite a few SSDs as well. That's just an example of how a developer could conceivably optimize for SSDs compared to HDDs.

 

What is this fancy word "streaming" for games? Is it using file from RAM as soon as it's loaded?
Is it like Ajax on web? Have basic platform loaded and then fetch remain data on fly?

 

Instead of loading all the data from disk when you "load a level", the game instead loads what it needs and then as you play the game it continues to stream in new data that is needed as you play the game, this could be textures for example... and then offload data that is no longer needed freeing up memory.... this is my understanding of it at least, someone correct me if I am wrong.