Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Then you really should watch that interview I posted. Chris goes into some detail about the design philosophy and how that will play into post 3.0 production/rollout of assets/features.

But if you don't have time it's basically this;

SQ42 does not require the range of features SC does and so it has been content/feature locked for some time. It's nearly asset/art/content complete but missing some SQ42 ships going through final stages and high level AI and the infiltration system for which they have no ETA. They expect final art/asset/content (ships/characters/mission system) to be complete by end of this year or sooner. They got the ship/asset building down to a point where they are very confident with predicting timelines for them just not features. Don't expect crafting/R&D in the single player campaign. You will only have access to the features relevant to the mission/campaign so you may see and interact with say a mining ship and may even see NPCs do mining you however won't be mining anything. That goes for the entire SQ42 game. It's not going to be indicative of SC even though they share every other feature/asset. Not sure if they will let you do mining once the mining feature comes online. They expect SQ42 to be only in polish either by the end of this year or early next with a launch sometime early next year at the earliest dependent entirely on when the AI and infiltration system is fully working. Apparently early versions of the final product are just coming in now and that will need a lot of time in the oven to flesh out/fix. Chris mentioned that this and other high level milestones will be revised more often and publicly starting from CitizenCon.

SC after 3.0 will only be revealed to the community at a high level starting at CitizenCon on Oct 9th and they won't be giving any solid dates on any of the features. They explained that the high level Milestones will be shown very publicly and kept up to date in what is planned next but nothing else. It will be ready when it's ready.

So things like Crafting/R&D/Mining which are all needed for what you want to do should have public milestones but no way of knowing when they will be implemented in game.

Also SC will go into Beta soon after the core features of the game are finalized because at that point all they will be doing is pumping out star systems/missions etc and they don't want to do character wipes at that point.

SQ42 and it's related features are the #1 priority so until SQ42 launches don't expect them to put a ton of effort into the things you care about. That means you will not know anything about Crafting/R&D/Mining probably for some time. With 330+ staff and growing obviously people continue to work on the PU parallel with staff working on SQ42 but that will take a bit of a break with 3.0 to fix some of the other features that are needed working for SQ42. It sounds like they are crunching hard right now to get SQ42 out.

Variise said:

With 330+ staff and growing

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Jesus Christ, they are burning through 3.5 million a month at minimum. Considering those people are spread across 3 offices around the world it is probably even more.

That's probably reasonable. However we can't take into account the typical accounting corporations do since we only know their UK financials and not the NA financials. Beyond the tax loophole shit all corporations do the UK/German offices are setup so they get a rebate on top of that. It's why they are growing still while the other offices have not grown beyond the absolute necessity of hiring specific staff that can't be hired in the UK/Germany.

A CPA reviewed their financials over on Reddit and basically said it looks like a healthy company at least as far as the UK/German offices are concerned but it's not a full picture since you don't see the NA side of the company.

As for growing I think the German office is adding about 20 odd staff between now and Oct/Nov. So you can make that 350 staff by end of the year.

That's all we know.

New ATV today. Full video here.

Breakdown:
Light/Medium (maybe Heavy) armor coming with SC Alpha 2.6: Short clip on Final Pass on Male Marine armor sets. This should be the versions that are released with the final product. This is the modular armor system they talked about well over a year ago that allows them and eventually the player to customize the armor.
New Item Interaction system (part of Item 2.0) coming with SC Alpha 3.0: So this lets you see what Item 2.0 does. Besides the massive under the hood changes in code/asset handling it visually replaces the default CryEngine "Use" interaction system with a customizable one the designers can attach to any item in the game that looks like the inner thought interaction/decision making in Heavy Rain.
Constellation Aquila (exploration variant): Short clip on how ship variants like the Aquila are created. This is a good example of the new modular style of ships to reduce workload and be as efficient as possible in producing all these ships especially variants.
Ship Shape Caterpillar: This must be the 2nd Ship Shape on this ship. A ton of backers have been pressing CIG to complete this ship for a couple of years now and with SQ42 ship production winding down they are doing exactly that. The Style Guide is name dropped here and it's pretty important as it has a huge impact on how much time it takes CIG to create a ship. The first ship produced via a style guide takes them the longest. Subsequent ships take much less time. The simple reason is they will have created a lot of the assets which are reused but also the textures and direction of modeling are all done at that point so huge meetings spanning weeks are not required to create a single ship at that point as a direct example is now available so all those people are creating ships, not discussing what to do.
Behind the Scenes Tech Content: Sean Tracy is in this one. That guy is CryEngine's Yoda and probably the most knowledgeable person when it comes to game tech. You get to see where they are right now with faces and it looks draw dropping. They also talk about what this team is primarily responsible for. What's really cool is they show you in engine side by side the old male character model and the new one coming with SC Alpha 2.6 and the detail is insane.

Caterpillar is looking nice. With the way the ships seem to keep growing in size as they go through development, the Merchantman is gonna be huge.

On a related interesting note, in terms of patching, one of the internal builds of SC hit 200GB in one branch according to the August Studio Report. 40GB was the smallest internal branch build. For comparison in May of last year the leak that included the lion's share of the assets for SC was 40GB.

This week's ATV: Full video here.

Audio Design: Various sounds in space created to communicate action to players.
DevOps: They discuss what we talked about here before regarding size of patches and what's coming to reduce patching faster. This one is critical to me personally cause my internet is shit so I often skip patches. They claim some builds may be reduced to 10% of what they are now.
Ship Shape Drake Herald: The Herald is an info runner ship and the first one released in the game to make use of the Communications / E-WAR Job. The ship, not the job pass as far as we know, is coming in SC Alpha 2.6.
Sound Design: They discuss the interactive music system for both space and ground. What the music does as you transition from different states in the game and the various sub states within each major state based on your actions hitting various peaks and valleys in the music. This is also coming in SC Alpha 2.6.

Also tomorrow's newsletter has one of the German office guys discussing head stabilization for FPS with an apparent 60fps short video showing it off. I know this is a major issue with some people so I'll post a link once it's up.

Sneak Peek: Vision Stabilization 60 FPS video.

Well... it's debatable of this is better or not. I like some aspects of it but I think it's too smooth. Would have to play it to be able to tell really. Not sure if this is going into 2.6 or not but it kind of sounds like it.

Variise said:

Sneak Peek: Vision Stabilization 60 FPS video.

Well... it's debatable of this is better or not. I like some aspects of it but I think it's too smooth. Would have to play it to be able to tell really. Not sure if this is going into 2.6 or not but it kind of sounds like it.

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Maybe debatable to your personal tastes, but the overwhelming response from community and critics is that it is MUCH better than the last publicly shown version of the FPS.

Mr Creed said:

Variise, what's the state of the cutlass? I got that for backing years ago but haven't kept up with the game after installing the alpha for a walk through the hangar when that came out. I just know that a few months back I got an E-Mail that sounded like the ship sucks and they make a new one instead (which I bought with my store credit). What's the deal behind all that?

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Looks like the Cutlass is going in for its rework now. There are a shit load of dev replies in this reddit thread about it: Cutlass Entering Rework • /r/starcitizen

You might find it interesting. Looks like it's good hands. The guy who designed the Drake Herald is going to be doing the rework, and he seems pretty enthusiastic about bringing the Cutlass up to standard.

I'm not circle jerking over other people's opinion, I have my own, otherwise I would be just like the other people here or on Reddit and just say whatever makes me popular. Here I'm called a Shill there I'm called a Hater. Nobody likes me because I go against establishment opinion? Perfect that means I'm not stuck in group think and I'm free to say things without that baggage.

If you are a die hard FPS fan you cannot judge an FPS game without playing it with a proper PC and interface. Once you play it you will know instantly if it's good or shit. I could always tell within the first 60 seconds of playing if an FPS was good or bad simply by going through all the various movements you can do, aiming, firing, strafing and all kinds of stupid shit I do in FPS normally people don't expect.

It's also possible for the FPS to be shit in single player and amazing in multiplayer. That's exactly how it was with Soldier of Fortune II. MP was amazing in that but single player felt like someone cut its balls off. SC is not like that however where each gameplay is individually balanced so whatever you get in one it's the same in the other.

Again I'm talking about the FPS elements not the level design or the rest of the game. That's an entirely other can of worms.

That's why I refuse to judge it one way or another until I feel like they are near final and it seems like they are getting very close with 2.6/3.0 so I'm looking forward to actually judging it instead of dismissing it as place holder Alpha which is exactly what has been in game for a long time.

Variise said:

I'm not circle jerking over other people's opinion, I have my own, otherwise I would be just like the other people here or on Reddit and just say whatever makes me popular. Here I'm called a Shill there I'm called a Hater. Nobody likes me because I go against establishment opinion? Perfect that means I'm not stuck in group think and I'm free to say things without that baggage.

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Yeah, like I said, it could be debatable based on your personal tastes. I wasn't attacking you...

I'm not taking it personally I'm just trying to get a point across. As are you. I get it.

However personal taste has nothing to do with evaluating an FPS for how good it is. I'm not saying there is some sort of science to FPS but if you played as many as I have, and I played a huge chunk of what's out there since Wolfenstein 3D, there is definitely a formula for what feels natural vs artificial. There is nothing inherently wrong with either and it can be good for that specific game.

Take MGSV and Overwatch as an example. They couldn't possibly be any more different. Each one has a very specific set of gameplay requirements that people who like those games will enjoy. However neither one is a good FPS. They are good individual games but neither one feels natural. Both of them are fucked with (hit box, aim assist etc) and IMO rightly so to get a certain feel out of the game. One suits a style of tactical gameplay and the other suits eSports.

As much shit as some of us give EA they do try pretty hard and their Battlefield / Battlefront games generally feel right. They have a whole other host of issues that lower my opinion of those games because again they fuck with things to get a certain play style out of it plus they are lazy fucks that don't innovate.

Some COD games were ok but again not exactly right. I never felt comfortable. Hell even Crysis wasn't perfect. It felt just a bit off like the scale of the game was... off. Later on we found out why. They fucked with the camera position but most games do.

It's been so long since I played an FPS game I felt comfortable with that I can't even give you a direct example of a good one. Maybe the original TRIBES or Quake II would be close.

IMO the console cancer ruined FPS for decades.

Personal taste, for sure. The movement and aiming seem to be a lot smoother in that vid, however I still perceive a slight delay in the movement, as if turning in molasses. I like my view to react instantaneously to my mouse movements, with immediate and constant speed. Like Quake and Half Life. I guess this is not entirely realilstic but it's the only thing I can stomach.

I think they got rid of the super-annoying litthe shake of your head at the end of every turn, and with every stop. That's a big improvement for sure in my book. Now if they get rid of your viewpoint going all over the place when you are seating yourself in your pilotseat, then I am getting more optimistic. I am pretty sure that when I seat myself in my deskchair, that I keep my eyes fixed on my monitor already, and not look at the seat of the chair first, then the left wall, right wall and then my crotch, before I finally settle down my view on the instruments. Besides, my brain supresses any redundant and trivial visual input anyway, and this is what first person views in games should mimick.

I don't think we are going to see the delay in movement go away. The simple reason being they did what ARMA did which is combine the 1st person camera directly with the character animation. The difficulty of that is 11 so developers simply don't do it and instead chat.

You really don't want to split the camera either so this is not something anyone should cheer lead simply because they are used to playing neutered FPS games. It's like a domestic assault victim going back to their abuser.

In virtually all games the camera is typically in your chest and not directly attached to the character's animation at all. What this means is you have no way of knowing in 1st person view where your body actually is. It's why you get shot in most of these games while in first person you look like you are 100% in cover. People accuse each other of hacking and using exploits but really it's just a lazy solution to a complex problem. Crysis did the same thing.

Hell in most games the hit box isn't even entirely connected to the art asset. For some games like Blacklight Retribution's female character that's done on purpose to balance gameplay. Overwatch however does it to "help" console players and is by far the biggest abuser of this in recent memory.

I will however back you up 100% on where they point your head while sitting down or doing anything. We have spacial awareness as Humans so we don't need to see where we are going or sitting half the time because we saw it before. Seriously how often do you look at your chair once you grabbed it before sitting? 1 out of 100? I just mindlessly reach for the arm rest with one hand and I instantly know where the rest of the chair is. We don't need to look at it.

I'll give another example that will matter a lot more in the coming months. If you are in a clinch while wrestling and you put your head up against the other person to prevent being choked/hit you immediately know where the majority of that person's body is positioned without ever looking especially if your arms/legs are touching the other person which they are. So we don't need to pull our heads back and look at someone's neck/face to know where it is.

Ok why am I saying this? Because infiltration is going into Star Citizen with SQ42's release and that will likely require hand to hand combat. Virtually every game cheats at this or does it poorly. It really depends on the community as well because they will have certain expectations. Go to the Battlefield forums and you will see non-stop bitching about the knife mechanic and generally upset people that hate QTE. However QTE is just a solution, a simple one, to yet another complex problem.

So what would be an ideal solution for that? I honestly don't have an answer.

Just because something is difficult to do doesn't mean you don't try. Yeah it's hard. If it was easy everyone would have done it already.

You may not know this but SC already had this feature implemented and working around this time last year. It vanished, along with some other FPS features like mag boots, because they had to break it when pushing out a new skeleton, new animations etc. after they weren't happy with what was in game. This was right before Star Marine was supposed to come out.

This Vision Stabilization is not new. It's just the recent incarnation of an already existing solution they came up with a year ago.

There are a huge number of problems with not connecting the camera to the player properly and I described some of them. Hell you can google it and find many examples from recent games like CS:GO. So if a game company is willing to throw money into a black hole that is R&D to try and solve an issue CryTek, Valve, EA, Activision and countless others failed to do and actually make progress I'm all for it.

Shaky cam is one of the first things I always turn off if a game allows me. That shit is retarded.