Well, it reminds me of Star Citizen for sure -- in that it's a pretty-looking interface but overburdened with unacceptably long loading times, laggy and unresponsive feedback in the UI, and motion blur on all the things to the point of being unusable. Every few months I look into where SC is at, and am not surprised to see more flash and surface-level polish, more extra features no one was asking for, and yet core gameplay/interactions that make me cringe when trying to interact with them. Why is SC this way?
In the actual game, the FPS kills their otherwise really fun UI. I finally got to play it at 40 FPS or more recently and it makes an insane difference to how it all feels. It doesn't feel clunky or broken when it's running properly. You also start to understand some of their choices when you play for a while and feel the built in pacing of the game. It's not a flashy fast paced space call of duty. Every interaction is more drawn out, and forces you to be a bit more patient and thoughtful.
I also have to point out that it runs smoothly for me and many others, but it is an alpha game that's supposed to be cutting edge in a few years time when it releases. Expecting it to run well everywhere has been one of the huge drawbacks of open development as they have ended up doing a few performance passes that really didn't need to be done yet. It's not meant to be a released game. It also loads in less than 40 seconds for me now as they implemented level streaming.
> is an alpha game that's supposed to be cutting edge in a few years time when it releases.
It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now. Just look at the original Crysis. It's still not easy to get solid high frame rates on a decade-old game since it was designed with the assumption that CPUs would continue to evolve on the axis of fast, single threaded performance. Instead parallelism happened.
A good game engine should scale smoothly from mid-range hardware upwards, and be designed so that it can be modified to take advantage of advances in hardware when they become available, not before.
> It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now.
Dumb as it sounds, it is because the client and the server are in lock-step. The root of the issue is the hardware on their servers. It doesn't have much to do with client hardware. The fixes for this are within the next few patches (maybe year and a half away). It has a lot to do with how much junk there is floating around on the server and, when you get a pristine server, things are much better.
It's still not acceptable, especially given that their promo videos demonstrate an experience that does not exist right now (unless you hit gold with a pristine server). However, it has absolutely nothing to do with client hardware. It's a bug.
Ah, the "it's still alpha" defense. The KSP player's lament. (Or subnautica, or any other popular alpha in nrecent years.)
Problems that persist in alphas tend to never get fixed. Improvements are only ever incremental. If you arent happy with the alpha, you wont be happy with the final product.
New bugs in latest version make it unplayable for me. Faint hope that they will be fixed. Gave up on longstanding bugs ever being fixed mamy years ago.
I personally wish it was closed Alpha to be honest. I get tired of repeating myself to those expecting an alpha like what other companies release. 75% of the game isn't actually in the Alpha yet, so there is a long way to go before it's representative of the final product.
That is the lament, the prayer of the alpha customer. What will happen is that one day the money will run out. Then the game goes live regardless of its current state. Maybe you get that 75% but far more likely you will get whatever the last patch was, plus a couple bugfixes. Hope for 75 but expect 5%.
I believe they have a goal release target and they will hit it if money doesn't run out. I am not as certain about monet running out because it's nearly impossible to know how far away their target is and they just keep adding to their head count.
I can easily defend the game itself and try to, but the project management is harder. Sure, we can see huge progress is happening and they are making two games at once hence the massive head count. But everything else is a bit opaque.
You are making it sound good... I can't imagine playing any FPS at 40FPS.
And 40sec of load time on an SSD? That's a lot if you ask me. Fortnite loads in <5secs, CS:GO also in <5secs. Just few days ago I installed Quake Champions and the game needs 30+secs to load and it's really frustrating, considering matches are quite fast + their menu forces you to look at all achievements and all the crap I don't care about. Waiting is horrible.
It's great hat they are making improvements, but as another commenter said it seems like they haven't polished core gameplay enough -at least not enough for me to care.
One thing to note about Star Citizen is that you load into the universe once and that's it. Assuming no crashes (it'll happen someday) you can play for hours across multiple space stations and planets without another loading screen.
For a bit of SC terminology, there are two separate fast travel modes: "jump drive" for long distance FTL between systems and "quantum drive" for zooming between planets within a system.
We don't know a ton about the final design for system-to-system jumps yet, but the original concept is that you have to actively fly your ship through a somewhat twisty "jump point" wormhole thing and come out the other side. That would be long enough to cover the loading time, but it's all active gameplay instead of loading screens.
It also won't need to load the whole system when you jump in, only the "low poly" versions of planets and moons and whatever large scale spacescaping objects (gas clouds, etc.) are visible from where you come out. The more detailed versions of planets and moons only need to stream in once you pick where you're going within the system spool up your quantum drive to get there.
If Elite is anything to go by, they 'hide' the loading by showing you flashy 'jump' animations. IMO it takes far too long to get anywhere - and I've traveled in a similar way in Eve Online.
Yes, travel from one place to another isn't instantaneous, and they "hide" the loading while you travel. But the game's not supposed to be a fast paced space shooter (check out Everspace for that!), and I don't think they'd take out the travel times even if they could. Trips between moons are maybe 10 seconds, and trips between planets will be longer. But it's very pretty, and the visual effects make it feel fast. Canonically I believe quantum drive around a system is moving about 0.2c.
If you don't want a "quantum drive" scene going from one place to another, you're also free to make a seamless flight using regular engines! Port Olisar to Daymar takes a bit under 10 hours.
And if you're in something bigger than a single seat fighter, you can get up and do other stuff around your ship while it's traveling, but it's not a good idea in areas with pirates. Still, more options than a Mass Effect elevator.
Flying around a planet/moon all the way down to the surface, getting out of your ship and walking around, and going inside the various outposts happens completely seamlessly. I've only fired it up a couple times since beta 3.1 came out, but my first trip down to Yela was pretty mindblowing.
I hope they do stream assets on the fly and loading is masqueraded by stuff like travel time. 99.99% of the universe will be invisible at any given time conservatively speaking, likely more. Loading the whole thing doesn't seem the right direction.
I believe that falls under the "object container streaming" system slated for 3.3 (end of Q3), which a new engine system for efficiently nesting containers. Situations like a room in a ship in a hangar in a space station in a planet's orbit in a star system, such that the parts you need can load in and out seamlessly.
There's also related work with getting things like ship spawning off the main thread and improving the networking so that it only sends you data that's relevant to areas you're in.
Hopefully this stuff doesn't get pushed further down the schedule because it should make a big difference to performance.
30 seconds of initial load time is nothing for a game where you can spend hours floating around a galaxy. It's not a "load game -> play 5 minutes -> do something else" type of game.
As for not being able to imagine playing any FPS at 40hz -- I grew up playing FPS on computers which really couldn't handle playing FPS, pushing "entry level" $25 nvidia cards past their limits because I wanted the pretty graphics, 40 frames per second sounds amazing when you got accustomed to 15 ;)
About going from 15 to 40 I can totally relate. Been gaming on my laptop for past few years and have finally decided to buy a new rig. ~25->120FPS in Fortnite. I wasn't really enjoying it at 25FPS, but I'm living quite far away from friends so I used it to hangout. I wouldn't play otherwise, it's frustrating when everybody else is twice as good just because of FPS.
Wait times alone do not degrade my gaming experience much, just wanted to say that 40seconds does not sound good. It makes me a bit more frustrated, helping me quit the game sooner than I would otherwise. FPS are the true killer of joy.
Some context; as someone who pledged in 2012. I'd hope the OP doesn't come off as dismissive to the "hard unglamorous" stuff, since I see this as a separate issue. For me at least, the problem is largely that in the last 6 years, we've gotten PILES of UX revisions, all of which favor form over function to a laughable degree. This map, while pretty, is fractionally as useful as a flattened stretchy-grid-auto-layouted hairball. It lacks basic features like being able to _zoom out to actually see the whole volume without rotating_, let alone functionality in companion apps to competitor games[0], not to mention that to render the UX my significantly overpowered dev box is chugging away quite hard. Meanwhile, the core gameplay systems have, by many fans perceptions, degraded in quality, and prior deliverable dates have been slipped to levels that would get me fired in my position.
Again, I don't want to sell short the difficulty of the engine work they're trying to do, and frankly I should probably keep separate my grievances about deadline-meeting (although that certainly throws salt on the metaphorical wound). But to my eyes this is in the same vein as the complaints I see about other web products, "you have something good, polish but then don't fix what aint broke", while echoing a trope Star Citizen inflicted on itself from its very first "Iron Man" HUD design.[1] (reviled for being piles of overdesigned spinny widgets, and very little functionality).
> This map, while pretty, is fractionally as useful as a flattened stretchy-grid-auto-layouted hairball. It lacks basic features like being able to _zoom out to actually see the whole volume without rotating_, l
I can zoom out and see the whole volume just fine. Don't select a specific system, use the mouse wheel.
It works exactly as I expect a star map to work and it looks beautiful.
> Meanwhile, the core gameplay systems have, by many fans perceptions, degraded in quality, and prior deliverable dates have been slipped to levels that would get me fired in my position.
I really have my doubts that the people who cry the loudest are really "fans" or even pledged. There are real problems (e.g. the deliverable date thing, which they now reigned in a bit by doing a new feature release every three month), but many of the so called criticisms are just crying wolf or repeating old accusations which don't even fit anymore (see one of the posts below which states that they add stretch goal after stretch goal with new money ... there hasn't been a new stretch goal for a long time and they made clear that there won't be. All new money goes to existing targets)
> I can zoom out and see the whole volume just fine. Don't select a specific system, use the mouse wheel. It works exactly as I expect a star map to work and it looks beautiful.
I was using the scroll wheel, nothing selected (from first load), but from most angles systems at the edge are clipping on my system. From the initial view, for me, min, hades, taranis are all below the bottom, and a bunch off to the left. I can take a screenshot if it's really in doubt. (I'm on a new machine now than my initial post, but still chrome. Unfortunately this also gave me a chance to realize a nauseating back and forth swaying in the background if I leave this open too long in my peripheral... I can't honestly understand why one would chose that)
> I really have my doubts that the people who cry the loudest...
From a relatively disinterested point of view (Having slowly fallen out of interest over the last few years, from a point of playing every patch with anticipation) yes there's a lot of love to hate on SC, hell, even EvE has an "unofficial war" with them recently because of some ship design hubbub. That being said, there's also a lot of defensiveness about it, despite some very real issues. Back when I was far more involved, the subreddit could get QUITE cheerleady. Like many things nowadays there's a wonderful bit of polarization involved, I'd (riskily) make the sober statement of "They made enough questionable judgement calls, and had enough of a bad trend of meeting goals that I lost interest, and in that context this is both preconception-reinforcing and underwhelming." As said in my OP, just giving my own context, others are free to disagree.
As an addendum, the stretch goals thing is a good example of the reality distortion field, since yes, there aren't "nth new stretch goals" now, but some of their older, more ad-hoc stretch goals (100 systems at launch) are looking to be... interpreted flexibly, shall we say; so honestly I don't think it's super black and white. (I do think the claims that it's outright fraud are disingenuous)
A fun bit of history as well, lest I fall under accusation of not being a fan, the first post on this account and my reason for upgrading from just reading HN was to ask community opinion of pursuing a risky "dream job" over a stable corporate bigCo job, the dream job was at CIG. If you're curious, THAT context adds even more flavor, as with hindsight some warning signs from 2013 ended up being apocryphal to my current perception.[0]
They have said in an interview that they intend every dollar pledged to go into development, so in some ways what you are saying makes sense.
They do have an actual roadmap now though so that's promising. Also SQ42 will come out at some point between now and the Star Citizens launch so they will have a hype cycle they need to release at the right time for.
I loved to be able to attack with 32k ships as it felt more realistic than current games where you have a very limited number.
Master of Orion 1 also got me to reverse enough of its save format to move planets around so I could make a crude scenario editor, leading to my current career in infosec.
On Edge and Safari it's just an interface over a black screen. For a video game to reach a wider audience, should this not be a little more compatible with us boring old vanilla users?
I don't think it's meant to be run on a phone. It uses 580 MB of RAM in a Chrome tab and quite a lot of CPU when rotating, zooming or moving around. I just tried it and on this Linux laptop, in Chrome, on an Intel iGPU, it performed well enough.
What it is, is the star map for the PC game Star Citizen. This will be in game eventually.
The Star Citizen web site also does some neat ship models and wireframes using WebGL.
Looks good and loads fast. Kind of annoying in terms of usability, though. If you click on a planet it just zooms in and you can't do anything. You have to go back to the system view, then hover (but not click) on a planet, then click on the "control disk" label that appears.
Incredibly it blocks my phone. It's really invasive. It started playing sound even on background. Had a hard time until I got to close the tab on the phone browser...
Still underway and seems to be quiet. Crytek demanded an outrageous discovery reach and got dismissed. I believe cryteks intentions are nefarious and vindictive and I suspect this will all be quite drawn out, I doubt it will affect Star Citizens development though.
