4 ms·

Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try s

Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I'm privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me. While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience. The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today! I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet! There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :) In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations. Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.

throckmortra 4y ago
> but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?
- ZeroCool2u 4y ago
  The main things that come to mind are somewhat related. The big one, especially in comparison to a game like NMS, which is similar at a high level, is that much of the game is fully 'physicalized'. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology or just a term popularized by CIG, but the goal is that, while meeting the rule of fun, all entities are represented physically in game. This includes things like ship components/modules. Your radar, cooler, or shield components should all be physically moveable. Ship parts are one of the more complicated outcomes for this goal, but cargo and items, their precise physical location is stored by this hierarchical graph database in real time and persistent. Another example is you can put one ship inside of another and act as a large scale transport. The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet! Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship. The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before. Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.

throckmortra 4y ago

> but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?

ZeroCool2u 4y ago
The main things that come to mind are somewhat related. The big one, especially in comparison to a game like NMS, which is similar at a high level, is that much of the game is fully 'physicalized'. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology or just a term popularized by CIG, but the goal is that, while meeting the rule of fun, all entities are represented physically in game. This includes things like ship components/modules. Your radar, cooler, or shield components should all be physically moveable. Ship parts are one of the more complicated outcomes for this goal, but cargo and items, their precise physical location is stored by this hierarchical graph database in real time and persistent. Another example is you can put one ship inside of another and act as a large scale transport. The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet! Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship. The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before. Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.