5 ms·

Star Citizen's Squadron 42 is feature-complete, ten years after being announced

58 points by mdotk 3y ago

empath75 3y ago
The original announced release date was 2014.
jalino23 3y ago
the server meshing demo is technically impressive, very curious how they did that so in the example, they had 3 location authority server and 1 replication layer, so each location server can represent a physical location on 3d world, say its own solar system, and moving out from location A to location B moves you to a different server, and that was possible cause your position matrix was store in the replication layer and each server has a copy of replication layer. now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations
- Thaxll 3y ago
  In the demo they simulate everything in every servers, which is a huge waste of cpu, not sure how it's going to work in the game. There are a lof ot corner cases / problems not solved with their tech. It's pretty much the same thing Improbable did years ago with Spatial OS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLAIrm65VzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLAIrm65VzA
- dikei 3y ago
  > now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations Probably just as other distributed systems implement replication: you have a leader to broadcast instruction and other followers applied the instruction to their local copy of the state. However, there'll always be delay/stale data between the leader and followers. So, to improve performance, you can allow the followers to perform speculative decision based on their own calculation, but these local decisions will be overwritten / rollback by instructions received from the leader.
mvdtnz 3y ago
I'll believe it if and when they launch it.
- Justsignedup 3y ago
  And if it is good, great. Otherwise, it is what it is. Edit: I have heard "we're almost done" before. So I'll believe it when it installs and runs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    Also what they announced is not even the core game! I stopped caring about what games he has until it is installable and playable (full game). Last game I bought of his was probably early 2000s. It was disappointing. He has got this privateer itch he has been trying to scratch since the mid 90s. This is the 5th version of the game. This one taking the longest. Meanwhile dozens of other companies have shipped complete versions 2-3 times already. I would say to get the current gen feel of what privateer would be I would say play starfield. If all you want is trading and that sort of thing one of the X series.
- LMYahooTFY 3y ago
  I believe them now. The underlying difference in Star Citizen is they have extremely permissive shareholder obligations, and essentially no deadline. That virtually uncaps scope creep, and because they've had a fairly open development process it's plain to see the time for not delivering a product past by a while ago. The thing they can fail to do at this point is scale the player connections. If they manage to scale to thousands of players I'll be impressed. As for Squadron 42, their track record is good in terms of sheer honesty (really not the same thing as as a prediction). A single player game being "feature complete" is pretty straight forward.
s5300 3y ago
I was disabled and slated for major surgeries when I backed at under 10,000 total backers. Have a physical card something near 7500. I am still disabled and slated for major surgeries. Never know if I’ll be able to comfortably play the game. A friend of mine started medschool at the same time and is now nearly fully through medschool. He’s also a backer under 10,000. He doesn’t know if he’s never going to have any time to play, or if he’s going to fully drop out of life (likely) and only be a doctor and play Star Citizen with all of his free time in life. Bit of a neurotic asocial fellow. Anyways, I have a post history across social medias to show that I’ve never doubted this game would fully come to fruition. Around 2016 or so I concluded I might change my mind if they had nothing meaningful to show after 15 years. The hate surrounding so many things about this company/game has always been exceptionally amusing to me. There are people in the subreddit/YouTube that have quite literally been complaining on an at-least weekly basis since like. 2014 (I say this as I post shadowbanned on HN) They really devote a significant portion of their lives solely to being extremely butthurt about the company, Chris Roberts, and his wife. The disgruntled ex-employees that come out of the woodwork every now & then are wild too. They’re still not completely out of the pits yet, but I think people are going to be surprised when this ends up being a completely jawdropping(decade defining?) game. I also think I’ll probably still be disabled, even if I have surgery soon, recovery is very, very long. Life is strange.
- marknutter 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more. People seem to want to see this project fail for some reason. They're all going to be in for a kick to the gut when it finally releases, because CIG is one of the few game studios actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible in gaming. o7
- squigz 3y ago
  I hope I see you out in the 'verse some day o7
smcleod 3y ago
Would be amazing if it came to consoles for sure, maybe in another 10 years.
mnau 3y ago
Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years. Kickstarter was in 2012, so let's see if it will be released earlier than 2026. Enough time to graduate, start a family and have first child in school....
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  but was that "Duke Nukem Forever", or just a mediocre game that got the infamous title slapped on for profit? I don't remember much about the game other than it killing the Duke Nukem Brand.
darknavi 3y ago
Wow, blast from the past. xfire was the shit back in the day.
- newsclues 3y ago
  Thresh one of the cofounders was a pro Quake and Doom player. Another founder ended up working on CapitalG
civilitty 3y ago
I recognize a lot of faces in that trailer. The game stars Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson (Scully!), Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, and some more familiar faces [1] So that's where all my money's gone since 2012! Star Citizen actually launching a finished product certainly wasn't on my 2020's bingo card. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5194726/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5194726/
2muchcoffeeman 3y ago
Can I fly with a joystick?
- jalino23 3y ago
  yes 2 joystick is popular setup because of the axis you're working with strafe up,down,left, right yaw left, right roll left, right pitch up, down
  - Justsignedup 3y ago
    The worst part is that if you were in a dedicated flight sim, set up your sticks, and enjoy. In SC, you gotta set up your sticks, you gotta then use mouse + keyboard to get to your ship. Then you can enjoy. But then like 50+% of the game is outside the cockpit, so now you're having to fiddle with trying to find a comfortable place to put that damn keyboard/mouse. This game presents its own unique physical challenges, not to mention a need for like a GTX3070 at a minimum to get decent framerate (just 60 without every cool looking thing turned off)
pixxel 3y ago
Every 4-6 months I reinstall Star Citizen in the hope it’s not a buggy low FPS mess. On paper this is my ideal game but I’ve yet to enjoy it. I have zero hype for S42. Well, almost zero…
- LMYahooTFY 3y ago
  Why would you login expecting that if it's still in development?
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    Because it's been in development for (checks notes) 13 years
    - LMYahooTFY 3y ago
      And since when does bug fixing and optimization come before the end of feature development? There's nothing shocking or strange about this company's software development procedure. Just a load of people who are very emotional about a project and don't understand what's going on.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    One would assume future development took place.
mariusor 3y ago
Was anyone else bothered by the "sound in space" trope? For a game that prides itself in simulating every avionic surface and engine, that feels like quite a glaring capitulation to cinematic requirements.
- marknutter 3y ago
  Rule of cool
- dibujaron 3y ago
  The game does a lot of plane-like physics instead of space-like physics as far as flying goes. Some of it is explained away by the ship "simulating" things for you, like drag. In practice it's just more fun/intuitive that way. Humans have a hard time with real space physics. Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway.
  - mariusor 3y ago
    > Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway I doubt that. Even in space, small vessels for last hop movement of personnel and cargo between points would probably still be necessary, and as long as those exist and there's the possibility of being intercepted in close quarters there'll be the need of single flyer attack/defense ships. Nobody expects dogfighting in the middle of a multi month acceleration/deceleration trajectory, but once you've parked your capital ship in orbit, there would be ways to get close and ambush it where maneuverability and pin point accuracy of a fighter jet would be useful. It's science fiction anyway.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
The delay is simply an issue of perverse incentives. Marketing + slow release + hype = unofficial subscription model, funding increases indefinetely. Adding new crazy scope creep instead of releasing earlier was always beneficial.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dvh 3y ago
  Pre-order is root of all evil.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    'The Strike begins Christmas 91' and I never preordered again.
bravoetch 3y ago
Star Citizen is a most impressive business model that will be studied.
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  I completely agree, the value for customers is not a traditional video-game. Far from it.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I'll never cease to be amazed that they can sell a ship for 5x the cost of the still in alpha game. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/rsi-constellation/Constellation-Aquila#buying-options https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/rsi-constell...
  - broodbucket 3y ago
    Oh that's nothing, they've sold ships in the 5 figures
bluescrn 3y ago
"Feature complete" can still be an awfully long way from "content complete", let alone "ready to ship"
CptFribble 3y ago
Star Citizen will likely never be finished, precisely because the person in charge, Chris Roberts, is notorious in the game industry for being the human embodiment of scope creep. Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction." I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing. This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced. Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Chris Roberts had a peculiar Hollywood moment with the 1999 “Wing Commander” movie that he directed. Hollywood producers won’t let you keep endlessly polishing a turd on their dime, so the movie went to theaters with Kilrathi puppets that look like constipated hairless rodents locked in green gas bubbles. It’s a marvel of terrible science fiction.
- Kye 3y ago
  >> "most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer" The first Wing Commander had almost 300k sales and ports for just about everything, 8 sequels, a TV show, and a movie years before Freelancer shipped, and then it got another game. It seems like a better candidate for his most famous work.

58 points by mdotk 3y ago

The original announced release date was 2014.

the server meshing demo is technically impressive, very curious how they did that so in the example, they had 3 location authority server and 1 replication layer, so each location server can represent a physical location on 3d world, say its own solar system, and moving out from location A to location B moves you to a different server, and that was possible cause your position matrix was store in the replication layer and each server has a copy of replication layer. now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations

Thaxll 3y ago
In the demo they simulate everything in every servers, which is a huge waste of cpu, not sure how it's going to work in the game. There are a lof ot corner cases / problems not solved with their tech. It's pretty much the same thing Improbable did years ago with Spatial OS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLAIrm65VzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLAIrm65VzA
dikei 3y ago
> now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations Probably just as other distributed systems implement replication: you have a leader to broadcast instruction and other followers applied the instruction to their local copy of the state. However, there'll always be delay/stale data between the leader and followers. So, to improve performance, you can allow the followers to perform speculative decision based on their own calculation, but these local decisions will be overwritten / rollback by instructions received from the leader.

mvdtnz 3y ago

I'll believe it if and when they launch it.

Justsignedup 3y ago
And if it is good, great. Otherwise, it is what it is. Edit: I have heard "we're almost done" before. So I'll believe it when it installs and runs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  Also what they announced is not even the core game! I stopped caring about what games he has until it is installable and playable (full game). Last game I bought of his was probably early 2000s. It was disappointing. He has got this privateer itch he has been trying to scratch since the mid 90s. This is the 5th version of the game. This one taking the longest. Meanwhile dozens of other companies have shipped complete versions 2-3 times already. I would say to get the current gen feel of what privateer would be I would say play starfield. If all you want is trading and that sort of thing one of the X series.
LMYahooTFY 3y ago
I believe them now. The underlying difference in Star Citizen is they have extremely permissive shareholder obligations, and essentially no deadline. That virtually uncaps scope creep, and because they've had a fairly open development process it's plain to see the time for not delivering a product past by a while ago. The thing they can fail to do at this point is scale the player connections. If they manage to scale to thousands of players I'll be impressed. As for Squadron 42, their track record is good in terms of sheer honesty (really not the same thing as as a prediction). A single player game being "feature complete" is pretty straight forward.

s5300 3y ago

I was disabled and slated for major surgeries when I backed at under 10,000 total backers. Have a physical card something near 7500. I am still disabled and slated for major surgeries. Never know if I’ll be able to comfortably play the game. A friend of mine started medschool at the same time and is now nearly fully through medschool. He’s also a backer under 10,000. He doesn’t know if he’s never going to have any time to play, or if he’s going to fully drop out of life (likely) and only be a doctor and play Star Citizen with all of his free time in life. Bit of a neurotic asocial fellow. Anyways, I have a post history across social medias to show that I’ve never doubted this game would fully come to fruition. Around 2016 or so I concluded I might change my mind if they had nothing meaningful to show after 15 years. The hate surrounding so many things about this company/game has always been exceptionally amusing to me. There are people in the subreddit/YouTube that have quite literally been complaining on an at-least weekly basis since like. 2014 (I say this as I post shadowbanned on HN) They really devote a significant portion of their lives solely to being extremely butthurt about the company, Chris Roberts, and his wife. The disgruntled ex-employees that come out of the woodwork every now & then are wild too. They’re still not completely out of the pits yet, but I think people are going to be surprised when this ends up being a completely jawdropping(decade defining?) game. I also think I’ll probably still be disabled, even if I have surgery soon, recovery is very, very long. Life is strange.

marknutter 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. People seem to want to see this project fail for some reason. They're all going to be in for a kick to the gut when it finally releases, because CIG is one of the few game studios actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible in gaming. o7
squigz 3y ago
I hope I see you out in the 'verse some day o7

smcleod 3y ago

Would be amazing if it came to consoles for sure, maybe in another 10 years.

mnau 3y ago

Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years. Kickstarter was in 2012, so let's see if it will be released earlier than 2026. Enough time to graduate, start a family and have first child in school....

taskforcegemini 3y ago
but was that "Duke Nukem Forever", or just a mediocre game that got the infamous title slapped on for profit? I don't remember much about the game other than it killing the Duke Nukem Brand.

darknavi 3y ago

Wow, blast from the past. xfire was the shit back in the day.

newsclues 3y ago
Thresh one of the cofounders was a pro Quake and Doom player. Another founder ended up working on CapitalG

civilitty 3y ago

I recognize a lot of faces in that trailer. The game stars Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson (Scully!), Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, and some more familiar faces [1] So that's where all my money's gone since 2012! Star Citizen actually launching a finished product certainly wasn't on my 2020's bingo card. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5194726/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5194726/

2muchcoffeeman 3y ago

Can I fly with a joystick?

jalino23 3y ago
yes 2 joystick is popular setup because of the axis you're working with strafe up,down,left, right yaw left, right roll left, right pitch up, down
- Justsignedup 3y ago
  The worst part is that if you were in a dedicated flight sim, set up your sticks, and enjoy. In SC, you gotta set up your sticks, you gotta then use mouse + keyboard to get to your ship. Then you can enjoy. But then like 50+% of the game is outside the cockpit, so now you're having to fiddle with trying to find a comfortable place to put that damn keyboard/mouse. This game presents its own unique physical challenges, not to mention a need for like a GTX3070 at a minimum to get decent framerate (just 60 without every cool looking thing turned off)

pixxel 3y ago

Every 4-6 months I reinstall Star Citizen in the hope it’s not a buggy low FPS mess. On paper this is my ideal game but I’ve yet to enjoy it. I have zero hype for S42. Well, almost zero…

LMYahooTFY 3y ago
Why would you login expecting that if it's still in development?
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  Because it's been in development for (checks notes) 13 years
  - LMYahooTFY 3y ago
    And since when does bug fixing and optimization come before the end of feature development? There's nothing shocking or strange about this company's software development procedure. Just a load of people who are very emotional about a project and don't understand what's going on.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  One would assume future development took place.

mariusor 3y ago

Was anyone else bothered by the "sound in space" trope? For a game that prides itself in simulating every avionic surface and engine, that feels like quite a glaring capitulation to cinematic requirements.

marknutter 3y ago
Rule of cool
dibujaron 3y ago
The game does a lot of plane-like physics instead of space-like physics as far as flying goes. Some of it is explained away by the ship "simulating" things for you, like drag. In practice it's just more fun/intuitive that way. Humans have a hard time with real space physics. Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway.
- mariusor 3y ago
  > Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway I doubt that. Even in space, small vessels for last hop movement of personnel and cargo between points would probably still be necessary, and as long as those exist and there's the possibility of being intercepted in close quarters there'll be the need of single flyer attack/defense ships. Nobody expects dogfighting in the middle of a multi month acceleration/deceleration trajectory, but once you've parked your capital ship in orbit, there would be ways to get close and ambush it where maneuverability and pin point accuracy of a fighter jet would be useful. It's science fiction anyway.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

The delay is simply an issue of perverse incentives. Marketing + slow release + hype = unofficial subscription model, funding increases indefinetely. Adding new crazy scope creep instead of releasing earlier was always beneficial.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dvh 3y ago
Pre-order is root of all evil.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  'The Strike begins Christmas 91' and I never preordered again.

bravoetch 3y ago

Star Citizen is a most impressive business model that will be studied.

waynesonfire 3y ago
I completely agree, the value for customers is not a traditional video-game. Far from it.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I'll never cease to be amazed that they can sell a ship for 5x the cost of the still in alpha game. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/rsi-constellation/Constellation-Aquila#buying-options https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/ships/rsi-constell...
- broodbucket 3y ago
  Oh that's nothing, they've sold ships in the 5 figures

bluescrn 3y ago

"Feature complete" can still be an awfully long way from "content complete", let alone "ready to ship"

CptFribble 3y ago

Star Citizen will likely never be finished, precisely because the person in charge, Chris Roberts, is notorious in the game industry for being the human embodiment of scope creep. Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction." I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing. This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced. Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.

pavlov 3y ago
Chris Roberts had a peculiar Hollywood moment with the 1999 “Wing Commander” movie that he directed. Hollywood producers won’t let you keep endlessly polishing a turd on their dime, so the movie went to theaters with Kilrathi puppets that look like constipated hairless rodents locked in green gas bubbles. It’s a marvel of terrible science fiction.
Kye 3y ago
>> "most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer" The first Wing Commander had almost 300k sales and ports for just about everything, 8 sequels, a TV show, and a movie years before Freelancer shipped, and then it got another game. It seems like a better candidate for his most famous work.