Star Citizen might require 100GB of storage capacity

don't get your hopes too high though, the planetary landings will not be manual...at least not initially. the landing will be done on autopilot, while you will be able to walk around your ships and do things. they don't want people to crash into the cities or other players and also won't have the whole planet be accessible. only the landing locations will be fleshed out, so there will be boundaries which are hidden by the auto piloting.

space stations and carrier type ships will allow manual landings though...and even require them, if your ship has suffered enough damage that the automated systems won't work (don't know how that will be solved on planets yet, probably you won't get landing clearance or smth and then be shot if you try anyway).

later down the road (think 2016/17) when they got their procedural generation tech going, there will also be planets to manually land on. there's already some exploration vehicles included with some ships (lynx and ursa). you know, mass effect mako type things. there might be some pre-made locations to use those before the proc gen is in place.

so, if you're expecting seamless transitions from space to surface to be manually pulled off by yourself, you will be disappointed...initially.


and btw. elite will also have planetary landings in a future add-on (DLC).

 

This sounds really impressive. How is ship flying handled? Is it actual correct physics or is it all concessions to playability. That probably wasn't clear, let me try again. If you're flying your ship and you cut the engines, do you carry on at the same speed. Could you do that, rotate your ship and be flying "backwards"? Eh, you're smart - you know what I mean by now. What sort of simulation is it?

 

I still can't understand comments like this.

Where did this stigma around this game come from?

A couple people see that there are more expensive packages available for the game as pledges, they go online and scream "this game is a ripoff" and now all these people are under this impression that the game is super expensive when you can get a base tier Aurora for $50 and that gets you in the Alpha.

Does not compute.

 

the game uses real newtonian physics with some concessions for playability and feasibility of implementation.

so, yes you can cut your engines and the ship will go on in that direction. BUT in combat speed is limited to around mach 1-2. so it doesn't turn into a jousting battle with ships charging at each other from light years away, meeting for a fraction of a second to exchange fire and then be off again braking for a few more light years before turning around to rinse and repeat. while that would be realistic, it wouldn't be fun for most people. also you won't be able to accelerate infinitely.
all of this is explained away in the lore by material tolerances and human body tolerances. you can actually black/red out if you pull too many Gs and actually die from them if it gets too much. and your ship could also be damaged...but you'll likely die before that'd happen...
if you want to travel faster, you'll need to engage your quantum drive to go up to 0.2c (20% of light speed) in a rather straight line.
both of these are the travel mechanics for in-system travel.
you could actually use your combat thrusters to travel from, say earth to pluto, but it might take hours or days...
if you want to go to another star system, you'll need to find a jump point, essentially a wormhole (which you will need to navigate yourself, if you don't have the route data yet).

as for the flight physics apart from speeds. the game simulates forces applied to rigid bodies.
the ships don't magically move and then some animation is apllied to the thrusters to make it look pretty.
the thrusters actually apply force to the ship and thus move it. the ships have mass (and center of mass) that can change if thrusters or other parts of the ships get shot off. this influences flight characteristics. even cargo mass and distribution will affect that. and cargo will also fling around if it's not secured, again changing the mass ditribution and thus flight characterisitics dynamically.

by default the ships are on fly by wire systems that automatically make them behave like planes for the most part, but you can overide the safeties to do maneuvers like in battlestar galactica for example. although you can't completely manually control each single thruster. some ships have up to 16, so that might get too hard for someone who isn't a computer himself...

btw, if anyone's interested. right now the sxsw live stream is about to start. they might be talking about and showing off some fps and planetary content (not sure though). it's in austin, where the team responsible for the persistent universe is located, so...
http://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen/

 

My centre of mass shifts depending on cargo and velocity is not arbitrarily tied to the direction my ship's nose happens to be pointing? I can live with a few concessions on maximum speed to make it playable - I think you just sold a copy of the game. Thanks for the extensive reply!

 

you can actually try it before you buy it.
as mentioned above there will be codes distributed on sxsw, that will certainly make its way to the internet shortly after.
one week of free access to arena commander with a hornet (a dedicated dog fighter).

the whole cargo stuff is not in yet of course because there is none to carry around, but you can actually see the combat flight physics in action.

 

It's based on the same stigma that every other game is judged on when DLC is announced.

I don't think this game should be singled out for it, but it shouldn't be exempt from criticism for the same capitalistic ideals it shares with other big budget games.

 

Most PC games could fit on a BD9 and SC would fit on a single BDXL if it doesn't get much bigger, though multiple BD9s is much cheaper as far as I know.

Does anyone know if a release date for Squadron 42 has been set? That's my only interest in SC and I quit actively following news since I never saw much about it.

 

Yeah if there was ever a good reason to put a PC game out on Bluray, this is the title. I barely use my bluray drive, it would be nice to finally see some PC devs actually use it on pc. Its only been around for almost ten years now....

Going forward, this is the size we can expect for the upcoming generation of games. My BF4 install weighs in at 56GB - its not unreasonable to expect double that in the near future, particularly for a large game world with lots of content. This pattern is nothing new, we used to pop in a floppy disk with an entire game on it and look where we are now.

 

I wonder how many joysticks and wheels will I have to buy for SC

I remember I had to juggle with 8 diskettes to install Elder Scross Arena

 

Guys, it's 2015...**** will get bigger. I say allow it.

 

As long as you've got a 6X drive or faster the install times would be pretty decent, and faster than most connections. I don't think any of the publishers want to let their margins go down again now that they've gotten a foothold with downloads though.

 

I hope by the time SC is released, those PCI-e SSDs will be at least somewhat common. It would be a good excuse for upgrading

 

Half-Life 2 did. And the gap between it and the original was around 8 years.

 

well, to be fair, that's at least debatable. to me hl2 was that year's biggest disappointment. and i know i am not alone with this...

star citizen will of course not live up to its hype. simply because everyone has a different image of it in his/her mind. some people expect them to deliver a game with all those features they have announced to be literally implemented as initially described during the initial fundraiser period no matter if it wouldn't make sense, because most people don't understand how development works or have missed that not all features were announced to be implemented from the point the devs will consider the game to be fit for release and also that things might change around due to them discovering that sometimes a concept or design doesn't play out like initially imagined.

people need to wrap their heads around the fact that ALL games go through the back and forth we get to witness with sc. it just happens behind closed doors and we only get to see it when everything has been nailed down. in 5 years of dev time a lot can happen...


anyway...
the SXSW free fly codes have made their way to the internet (in fact they were posted in the comments section of the redemption site. and cig is fine with it, in case you worry...)

here it is: SXSWFREEFLY2K15
redeem here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/sxsw-2015

you will get access to arena commander with a f7c hornet for a week.

and in case some backers around here might have missed it. if you already have pledged your support, you will get to fly every flight ready ship available right now for this week as well. (no need to actively do anything for this)

 

No it really really didn't. Oh it was a good enough game but it certainly wasn't the blow me away title that HL1 was.

As for 100Gb install, hmmm 1 / 10th of my SSD dedicated to a single game. Gotta say if they want me to dedicate that percentage of HD space to one game it is going to have to get a hell of a lot better than it looks at the moment. Oh yeah the graphics are indeed amazing to behold but the game so far looks amazingly dull. Folk keep comparing the persistent Universe to being akin to what EVE has and so far the guys have certainly gotten the EVE vibe, amazing release and preview videos hiding a truly dull to play game.

 

at the moment the only thing you can play is combat in a limited scenario...of course it's bound to become rather dull.

here's 4 design posts of how involved some of the game's systems are planned to be and partly already are available (e.g. shields):

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14466-Design-MobiGlas

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14489-Design-Shields-Management

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14522-Star-Citizen-Careers-Mining

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14318-Design-Healing-Your-Spacemen

the mining one is especially cool, as it emphasizes that the game won't be a fly from a to b, click on asteroid and let your cargo be automatically filled, fly to origin, rinse and repeat type of affair. it is really involved and other carreers will be similarly intricate.

so no, the game will be nothing like eve. the only things both games have in common is a future setting and space ships...


also all the official videos, you might have seen so far, are all real-time, in-engine footage, nothing is pre-rendered, like eve did...just sayin'

 

Holy crap that's complicated. I hope they won't overcomplicate the game to the point of turning it into space variant of that Microsoft's plane simulator series.

 

Oh and btw, could anyone explain the website to me? They couldn't have made it any more confusing. What are all those spectrum dispatch, comm link, engineering etc. links?

 

as for your first comment, apparently they are aiming for an easy to learn, but hard to master experience. you could just jump in and play a bit, but if you really want to, you can go really deep. them managing to achieve that remains to be seen. i'm rather doubtful at least, that they'll manage to get it from really casual to overly complicated. imo they'll probably manage to start at about the middle of that spectrum...if that makes sense.

as for your question about the website. well it has historically grown to be like that and is not easy to understand, just like the game itself.
the website itself is presented in a sort of semi in-fiction way.
roberts space industries is a fictional company in the game's universe, so a lot of the content on the website is also in fiction. that's just part of their spiel presenting the game...
the actual website of the developer is cloudimperiumgames.com.

comm-link is just the news section. the sub sections are:
transmissions is the devs talking to the backers announcing videos, events, talk about development etc.
citizens is where they point to fan made stuff, videos, websites, fan fiction etc.
engineering is where concept art, other wip stuff and those design posts are to be found.
anything you find in spectrum dispatch is in game lore building.

the star citizen main category is general info about the game and is the most outdated one.
although it's still a good place to start if you're looking for info about what the game is about.
they are aware that the site is confusing and outdated and are working on improving that.
it'll just grow with the game, as they plan to have the site be integrated with it in terms of functionality and news and stuff.

the community section should be self explanatory for the most part.
organisations is their name for guilds or clans. yep, we have quite a few of those already.
the leaderboards are actually working for arena commander, they are, well, leaderboards...

under store you'll obviously find everything you can spend money on right now. virtual as well as physical goods. from game packages in different "sizes", over single add-on ships, upgrades, merchandise etc.
voyager direct is the universe's amazon equivalent. right now you can buy some equipment for your ships in there. it is the item shop of the game. (note: as i have said before, while this is a place where you will be able to buy equipment, it will only be base tier stuff. for the better and really good or rare stuff you'll have to fly around the galaxy and find it or fight for it.)

i think that should cover the basics...