PC Community Thread

[the-pi-guy]

.

After closing 5 studios, what's left of Crytek:

Crytek Frankfurt
Crytek Kiev

Developing Arena of Fate, Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age (both Free to play).

Doesn't even look like 3 of their closed studios ever finished anything.
Arena of Fate might be gone. 

[the-pi-guy]

[Legend]

You know, Gabe Newell would actually make a really good US president.

No chance of WW3.

[the-pi-guy]

What are people's experience with learning a game engine?  

[Legend]

What are people's experience with learning a game engine?  

I've touched Unity, Unreal, PhyreEngine, Blender game engine, game maker, and stencil lol.

Unity and Blender are the only ones I actually have considerable experience with. Blender I mostly just taught myself while messing around with buttons, while Unity I followed youtube tutorials for getting started. Unity is incredibly nice for me since I can Google problems and dozens of other people have already posted their solutions.

[Legend]

It's fun how "popular" conlangs are becoming. Didn't realise Star Citizen had two even!

[Raven]

It's fun how "popular" conlangs are becoming. Didn't realise Star Citizen had two even!

They'll likely have more. The Banu and the Kr'Thak are likely to have their own languages as well. I have a feeling the Tevarin, being that they are a conquered species with no home anymore and living mostly in Human space, will speak almost entirely English but they will probably make up certain phrases in a different language. Kind of showing that the Tevarin are losing their old culture. Much the same way Native American languages are spoken less and less with each generation.

[Legend]

They'll likely have more. The Banu and the Kr'Thak are likely to have their own languages as well. I have a feeling the Tevarin, being that they are a conquered species with no home anymore and living mostly in Human space, will speak almost entirely English but they will probably make up certain phrases in a different language. Kind of showing that the Tevarin are losing their old culture. Much the same way Native American languages are spoken less and less with each generation.

Hopefully some of their languages are even more alien than the ones they showed off. Would be cool to have something humans can't speak.

[Raven]

- The maps in Star Marine are actual locations you can visit (eventually) in Star Citizen and there are backstories as to why people are fighting in them.

- Blood smear effects will be added to maps where the devs want to give you the impression that something very bad happened there.

- Effects and audio typically come into development late, so effects like zero-g blood floating around will eventually make its way in.

- Effects added into Star Marine will quickly find their way into Star Citizen and vice versa.

- Additional grenades, gadgets, stamina, oxygen, downed states, and revives are all things the team really wants to get into the game.

- With downed states and revives possible, the team could then turn off the spawn mechanism and encourage or reinforce different kinds of gameplay.

- With grenades and gadgets, the team would like to have modular components such as being able to add an EMP effect to a grenade or turret. Other possibilities would be to make things throwable or attached to drones or placed on a surface. (Not very clear on if he's talking about tools the player can use to mix and match or tools the devs can use to quickly and easily create new items as needed.)

- The team wants to add new modes to Star Marine, especially something more asymmetrical. They also want to incorporate the vehicles being made for Star Citizen.

- Different projectile types will be added as they go. Ballistic weapons could have many different types of ammo including armor piercing, incendiary, or slug rounds. Other types of more exotic projectiles will be things like plasma or white phosphorous. Some of these will be inspired from alien weapons. Laser weapons are already in the game.

- A goal for armor is to be able to have different kinds of protection that armor gives you versus the various damage types. Protection from biochemical or thermal or kinetic were some examples. It was even mentioned that armor with low thermal protection would be bad for you to wear in places that are close to a star.

- The team also wants the different armor sizes to affect movement. Light armor would be fast on the ground when compared to heavy armor but heavy armor, thanks to additional power for thrusters, would be faster in zero-g environments. Medium armor would be the middle ground between the two.

- In addition, in order to even further differentiate the armor, they might make it to where you cannot go prone in heavy armor where you can in the other two but then heavy armor could also allow you to carry more grenades and/or gadgets. Heavy armor would be able to take a bit more of a beating but, going back to run speed, you would certainly feel the movement restriction by comparison.

- These improvements to the armor system would be aimed at Alpha 3.0 instead of any earlier, thanks to a lot of balancing work and other things they need to change under the hood.

- Todd Papy and Chris Roberts get together and discuss how they "want everything" and then they have guys who then get to tell them "no... you don't get everything".

- The team definitely feels like the infantry combat in both Star Citizen and Star Marine is too fast right now, and this doesn't translate well to Star Citizen where your character can permanently die (Don't worry. All your assets transfer to your "next of kin", which you then create).

- To tackle the speed problem, one thing they're doing is adding stamina to the game so you can't permanently sprint. This will also affect your oxygen levels, which will be another way to combat this. (Though not stated in the video, oxygen will automatically deplete from your suit when in space, once it is added to the game. So, it's likely that too much running around in normal environments will impact how long you can then be in space, or being in space too long might then greatly limit you from running once you return to a normal environment.)

- They are also looking at limb damage penalties. Currently, highly damaged body parts will simply cause you to bleed out if you don't heal yourself. Depending on where you've taken damage your vision could become blurry, your stamina could deplete at a faster rate, or the recoil from your weapon could become greater.

- Downed states and the ability to revive people is something they're really pushing on right now since it has significant impact on Star Citizen. While you CAN respawn in Star Citizen, you will only be able to so many times in a given span, respawning costs you tremendously, and thus being able to be saved by someone is incredibly preferable.

- Other big things on the list right now are mechanics for taking cover and being able to go "up-and-over" an object.

- The team feels that being able to remove spawning in Star Marine and use revives instead will go a long way to slowing the pace of the game down on top of stamina and oxygen meters and limb damage penalties. They reason that this will cause people to become much more cautious and paced versus running and gunning.

- REC, which is a rental currency to try out new equipment, will eventually be used in Star Marine just as it is used for Arena Commander now.

- Having a much larger pool of developers now compared to earlier in development has afforded them the luxury of having a team dedicated to Arena Commander and Star Marine. They are also divided between those working on short term projects that will be ready soon and those working on long term projects.

- Having AI in Star Marine is something they want as it would allow them to test AI and how it interacts with players in a more focused platform. Currently, it's just not ready yet.

- A spectator mode is not something they've actively discussed as right now they are focused on improving Star Marine's gameplay first but they like the idea, especially for streaming tournaments from home.

- The radar in the game is not actually working as intended but it is something they're going to fix. As of right now there is no in-game concept of stealth or being able to hide and those things will not be brought online until Item System 2.0 is fully implemented. Once that happens, the radar won't simply be able to pick up everyone in the area at all times. This goes for Arena Commander and Star Citizen as well.

- Armor customization will definitely be a thing as time goes on. The team fully expects to be able to allow players to not only customize the look but to customize on placing individual pieces of armor on. You could be wearing a heavy helmet and heavy chest for the added protection of those areas but decide you want the light legs to help improve movement speed. Essentially mixing and matching the advantages and disadvantages to suit your playstyle.

- Many different types of weapons will find their way into the game. One of the weapons the team really wants to get into the game soon is the railgun but weapons like that are better suited to anti-vehicle combat. Those kind of weapons will probably take about as long to really implement as having vehicles in Star Marine.

- Submachine guns, light machine guns, and heavy machine guns are also coming, as well as different weapons within the same type. So there will be ballistic and various energy variants. Such as a ballistic sniper rifle versus a laser sniper rifle.

- Special weapons like the railgun, mentioned earlier, plus rocket launchers and missile launchers will eventually be added.

- They have an extensive list of the weapons they want to have in the game. It takes roughly three weeks to a month for a weapon to be properly modeled and then animations need to be made for it, then balancing for the weapon and how it impacts gameplay needs to take place, and then the weapon effects and sound get created. Sometimes these can happen in tandem but not often.

[Raven]

 - The team is working on female animations in order to get female characters into the game soon.

- Female NPCs are ready to go as they mostly don't require as many animations as a player character does.

- It's not as simple as slapping on animations designed for males. Female animations need to be "feminized". As an example, a female character should not walk with the same center mass as a male character would.

- Tanks would be very easy to put into the game. Any kind of tracked vehicles would be. The engine already has all the parameters in place to make them.

- The devs are constantly trying to improve the game's performance. Quite often the problem is the artists are allowed to run wild in creating things but then when the tech teams come in to find out why the game is only running at 10 frames per second, they end up finding a lot of highly inefficient artist choices having been made.

- Huge strides have been made on reducing the number of asset errors that go through the build process. Two years ago they hit a point where they had over 16,000 errors. For patch 2.6, they managed to push the build through with zero asset errors.  

- The devs look at Star Citizen's current state as one giant test environment. Even the current "Live" game is a testing ground to them.

- Anti-aliasing is something that will be worked on. Shader development is what they want to work on first and then they will implement whatever AA they decide to go for. Sean Tracy thinks that supersampling is where it's at. As of right now, they don't want to put AA in the game when some of the other graphical settings haven't even been set, nevermind optimized. The hit to performance would be too great and cause a lot of development downtime as they redo or rethink their AA solution.

- Delta patching is on the way and will be great for both devs and the players. This will dramatically decrease the time it takes the devs to send various builds across the world to their four different studios and the time it takes the player to download new patches. It was a high priority to begin with but there were other things even higher on the list. Otherwise, this would have happened a lot sooner.

- Chris Roberts sometimes mentions battlemechs. Since Sean Tracy and his brother ran a popular mod about them, Sean has threatened Chris that if he keeps it up he'll put battlemechs in the game when he's not looking.

- Sean Tracy feels that there is a layer missing in the game right now and it's power armor, similar to mechs. Right now, a ship could camp a landing pad and there isn't much you can do unless you call in for someone from elsewhere to come take the ship out. Players should thus have an option to equip a powered suit that can carry some of the smaller ship weapons in the game. Anti-personnel or even anti-vehicle weapons won't be sufficient for dealing with most ships in the game. The Titan, a powered suit, is something that has already been talked about and concept art shown for it. It will be in the game eventually.

- Pirate Swarm, one of the modes for Arena Commander, will become much more difficult in patch 2.6.1 thanks to AI improvements.

- The Mega Map tech they're working on behind the scenes will dramatically speed up loading times across the board. For some parts of the game, loading should be virtually instant.

- Your handling in the game is already affected by the size of your weapons and the amount of ammo you have. However, the relative difference in mass is so minor that it's not detected by the players in any meaningful way. Larger vessels capable of carrying tons of cargo, however, may have their handling affected. The calculations are already being done to try and make it so that what you have inside your ship, on your ship, and how much of it will impact your ship's performance.

- An updated schedule report is coming very soon. The company is at the end of its beginning-of-the-year summits where the teams get together and discuss the plans for the upcoming year. Also, HR decided that this was a fantastic time to do everyone's employee review at the exact same time... (The schedule report has since gone live, with 2.6.1 planned to be released on February 17th, 2016)

- Mega Map is also the tech the team is using to make player hangars opening up and letting them fly out into the world possible. (It would allow the player to be inside their hangar without worrying about a performance hit being taken with the game trying to consider what is going on outside. Mega Map would give the devs a tool to effectively allow the game to only concern itself with what is in your hangar and then quickly stream in assets appropriately as the doors are opened)

- The team is looking at different ways to "hand wave" the fact that potentially thousands of players could be trying to leave a hangar that exists for all of them in the same space. So instead of having no room to leave, they would find a way to make it so that, at least temporarily, you're the only one in that immediate area.

- For Star Citizen, they first push for maximum realism and then scale back certain ideas based on what is actually fun. One of the things Sean Tracy tells his guys when the topic of something being realistic pops up is to go outside, sit at a bus bench, and then come back and tell him how fun it was. They would also like everyone to know that they do not advocate ever going outside.

- There is nothing officially announced yet about planetside racing but it is something they want in the game. Because of the massive amount of area that planets have, they would like to give players the ability to create the race courses themselves.

- All kinds of races would take place. It wouldn't just be the high performance, built-for-racing vehicles. Even the Argo transport ships and Dragonfly snub fighters / hover bikes would have their own races.

- They don't know how crazy they want to get with it. Not sure if the race tracks would permanently persist or only as long as players were in the area. Would they do tournaments? Would they allow people to vote / bet on the races?

- The devs really want to give players the ability to create many things in the universe. They feel that some of the best ideas and creations have come from the community already.

- They will absolutely give the players long campaigns, scripted and unscripted events, and whatnot but they feel that the players can often create better experiences for themselves than even game designers can.

- Items 2.0 will allow the team to turn individual entities into components of other entities. So cargo, weapons, ships, and even people will become a part of any larger entity that they are inside of or attached to. This greatly reduces the system's need to constantly track every single entity in the game as if it is separate. Other games have had this tech before but it's such a huge deal for Star Citizen to work properly. (As an example, if you came across a ship with cargo in it, there would be no reason for the game to have to render that cargo and send all the information on it until either you're now a part of that entity as well or the cargo suddenly becomes separated from the ship. It's the idea of taking potentially thousands of entities and turning them into hundreds or less that the game needs to constantly concern itself with. As of right now, every entity in your immediate area is being rendered at every frame, which is incredibly inefficient)

- Sean Tracy's favorite planet in the game so far is something he can't actually talk about but will be arriving in 3.0. Tyler Witkins' favorite is MicroTech. Jared Huckaby really likes Nyx.

- A new snow component is being added to the engine to replace the old one from CryEngine.

- When asked what Sean Tracy is looking forward to doing the most in Star Citizen his answer is "finishing it".

[Legend]

 - The team is working on female animations in order to get female characters into the game soon.

- Female NPCs are ready to go as they mostly don't require as many animations as a player character does.

- It's not as simple as slapping on animations designed for males. Female animations need to be "feminized". As an example, a female character should not walk with the same center mass as a male character would.

- Tanks would be very easy to put into the game. Any kind of tracked vehicles would be. The engine already has all the parameters in place to make them.

- The devs are constantly trying to improve the game's performance. Quite often the problem is the artists are allowed to run wild in creating things but then when the tech teams come in to find out why the game is only running at 10 frames per second, they end up finding a lot of highly inefficient artist choices having been made.

- Huge strides have been made on reducing the number of asset errors that go through the build process. Two years ago they hit a point where they had over 16,000 errors. For patch 2.6, they managed to push the build through with zero asset errors.  

- The devs look at Star Citizen's current state as one giant test environment. Even the current "Live" game is a testing ground to them.

- Anti-aliasing is something that will be worked on. Shader development is what they want to work on first and then they will implement whatever AA they decide to go for. Sean Tracy thinks that supersampling is where it's at. As of right now, they don't want to put AA in the game when some of the other graphical settings haven't even been set, nevermind optimized. The hit to performance would be too great and cause a lot of development downtime as they redo or rethink their AA solution.

- Delta patching is on the way and will be great for both devs and the players. This will dramatically decrease the time it takes the devs to send various builds across the world to their four different studios and the time it takes the player to download new patches. It was a high priority to begin with but there were other things even higher on the list. Otherwise, this would have happened a lot sooner.

- Chris Roberts sometimes mentions battlemechs. Since Sean Tracy and his brother ran a popular mod about them, Sean has threatened Chris that if he keeps it up he'll put battlemechs in the game when he's not looking.

- Sean Tracy feels that there is a layer missing in the game right now and it's power armor, similar to mechs. Right now, a ship could camp a landing pad and there isn't much you can do unless you call in for someone from elsewhere to come take the ship out. Players should thus have an option to equip a powered suit that can carry some of the smaller ship weapons in the game. Anti-personnel or even anti-vehicle weapons won't be sufficient for dealing with most ships in the game. The Titan, a powered suit, is something that has already been talked about and concept art shown for it. It will be in the game eventually.

- Pirate Swarm, one of the modes for Arena Commander, will become much more difficult in patch 2.6.1 thanks to AI improvements.

- The Mega Map tech they're working on behind the scenes will dramatically speed up loading times across the board. For some parts of the game, loading should be virtually instant.

- Your handling in the game is already affected by the size of your weapons and the amount of ammo you have. However, the relative difference in mass is so minor that it's not detected by the players in any meaningful way. Larger vessels capable of carrying tons of cargo, however, may have their handling affected. The calculations are already being done to try and make it so that what you have inside your ship, on your ship, and how much of it will impact your ship's performance.

- An updated schedule report is coming very soon. The company is at the end of its beginning-of-the-year summits where the teams get together and discuss the plans for the upcoming year. Also, HR decided that this was a fantastic time to do everyone's employee review at the exact same time... (The schedule report has since gone live, with 2.6.1 planned to be released on February 17th, 2016)

- Mega Map is also the tech the team is using to make player hangars opening up and letting them fly out into the world possible. (It would allow the player to be inside their hangar without worrying about a performance hit being taken with the game trying to consider what is going on outside. Mega Map would give the devs a tool to effectively allow the game to only concern itself with what is in your hangar and then quickly stream in assets appropriately as the doors are opened)

- The team is looking at different ways to "hand wave" the fact that potentially thousands of players could be trying to leave a hangar that exists for all of them in the same space. So instead of having no room to leave, they would find a way to make it so that, at least temporarily, you're the only one in that immediate area.

- For Star Citizen, they first push for maximum realism and then scale back certain ideas based on what is actually fun. One of the things Sean Tracy tells his guys when the topic of something being realistic pops up is to go outside, sit at a bus bench, and then come back and tell him how fun it was. They would also like everyone to know that they do not advocate ever going outside.

- There is nothing officially announced yet about planetside racing but it is something they want in the game. Because of the massive amount of area that planets have, they would like to give players the ability to create the race courses themselves.

- All kinds of races would take place. It wouldn't just be the high performance, built-for-racing vehicles. Even the Argo transport ships and Dragonfly snub fighters / hover bikes would have their own races.

- They don't know how crazy they want to get with it. Not sure if the race tracks would permanently persist or only as long as players were in the area. Would they do tournaments? Would they allow people to vote / bet on the races?

- The devs really want to give players the ability to create many things in the universe. They feel that some of the best ideas and creations have come from the community already.

- They will absolutely give the players long campaigns, scripted and unscripted events, and whatnot but they feel that the players can often create better experiences for themselves than even game designers can.

- Items 2.0 will allow the team to turn individual entities into components of other entities. So cargo, weapons, ships, and even people will become a part of any larger entity that they are inside of or attached to. This greatly reduces the system's need to constantly track every single entity in the game as if it is separate. Other games have had this tech before but it's such a huge deal for Star Citizen to work properly. (As an example, if you came across a ship with cargo in it, there would be no reason for the game to have to render that cargo and send all the information on it until either you're now a part of that entity as well or the cargo suddenly becomes separated from the ship. It's the idea of taking potentially thousands of entities and turning them into hundreds or less that the game needs to constantly concern itself with. As of right now, every entity in your immediate area is being rendered at every frame, which is incredibly inefficient)

- Sean Tracy's favorite planet in the game so far is something he can't actually talk about but will be arriving in 3.0. Tyler Witkins' favorite is MicroTech. Jared Huckaby really likes Nyx.

- A new snow component is being added to the engine to replace the old one from CryEngine.

- When asked what Sean Tracy is looking forward to doing the most in Star Citizen his answer is "finishing it".

Any word on when 3.0 is to release?

[Raven]

Any word on when 3.0 is to release?

No. Patch 2.6.1 is coming mid-February and there was a recent interview with Chris Roberts that said there will be one more incremental patch, 2.6.2, after that which adds the MegaMap tech to speed up load times and asset streaming. I'm going to guess that patch will drop sometime in March. I'm also going to guess that 3.0 will probably hit just before or right at the beginning of June. We won't know for sure what their plans are until the schedule report for 3.0 lands and that won't happen until after 2.6.2 is out.

[Aura7541]

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 8 Core CPU Benchmarks Leaked - Giving Intel's $1000+ 8-Cores A Run For It

I think Ryzen is shaping up to be a good competitor against Intel.

[BasilZero]

Just finished Dear Esther and Dear Esther Landmark Edition.


Short and decent.

67 out of 100 on the original

74 out of 100 on the remake


My first walking simulator! (Unless you count The Stanley Parable as a walking simulator)

[darkknightkryta]

Just finished Dear Esther and Dear Esther Landmark Edition.


Short and decent.

67 out of 100 on the original

74 out of 100 on the remake


My first walking simulator! (Unless you count The Stanley Parable as a walking simulator)

Go play Life is Strange you woman! ;o