f13.net forums - Chris Roberts Back in your wallet

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December 22, 2024, 02:50:28 AM

we're back, baby

Odds on EA suddenly deciding that the time is right to revive the "Wing Commander" name at some point in the next year or two?
They could just give it to one of the Biowares and have them churn something out for it.

Wing Commander the Old Republic?

Quote from: Simond on October 20, 2012, 06:03:53 AM

Odds on EA suddenly deciding that the time is right to revive the "Wing Commander" name at some point in the next year or two?

They would shoehorn fighters into Mass Effect instead.

I agree. With Shepard reportedly not being in ME4, I'm curious where the series will go. If it's just post Reaper mop-up, that's years right there while alliances fall apart and enemies become strong again. But then, I didn't hate that ground truck thing from ME1 as much as apparently other people did.

I was always curious why in all the main games and DLC, there was never actually any real space in the game. I'm not sure it absolutely needed it (which I guess is one reason right there). But it woulda been nice to have been part of the final space battle over Earth, or even to have had to do some type of game-y thing to fire the BFG at the Collector ship near the end of 2.

Quote from: Darniaq on October 20, 2012, 02:58:49 PM

With Shepard reportedly not being in ME4, I'm curious where the series will go.

The obvious answer is 50-100 years in the future, when everyone's recovered from the destruction of the relays. If that's still in the neo-retro-double-plus-remix ending, I don't even know.

That's another good point. There are three possible immediate futures: no humans, no reapers/technology, or synthesis. They can't afford three different universes that reflect those three states, much less how they evolve differently in 50-100 years.

That makes me think even more of "meanwhile, elsewhere in the galaxy" type setting. Or a completely different galaxy. Or the past. Or they're forced for business reasons to hamfist a convergence that basically says whatever your choice, it all led to something else: synthesis failed, the humans weren't really detroyed (we were just kidding), and 50-100 years again we achieve roughly the same level of technology we had before oh and figured out how to reactivate the mass effect gateways because branding must be maintained.

I should say though that I'm ok with all that. I found the universe interesting and would stick with it as long as quality content continues comes along.

Donation watch, because I'm being a nerd.

$1,247,462 / 13,867 backers on RSI
$360,222 / 8,100 backers on Kickstarter

Total: $1,607,684 / 21,967 backers (+$254,627 and 4230 backers since Friday night)

With 18 days to go, RSI should feel pretty good about this. Adding the kickstarter option probably saved this project.

Quotes taken from Josh Strike, UI Designer at Cloud Imperium for HUD's as used in Star Citizen

Quote

POST 1

   Hi all, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m the designer/coder for the Star Citizen HUD and additional 2D elements. While a good deal of my work wasn’t integrated in time for the live demo, that was largely because what we’ve been doing has pushed the limits of Scaleform and CryENGINE – and is radically different from the standard game HUD formula that’s prevailed for the last decade.

   Taking inspiration from previous Chris Roberts ship controls, nothing in our work is similar to the templates you’ve seen in more recent games; it’s been engineered from the ground up to deliver an unparalleled degree of control and detail to the pilot. Chris is an inspiring guy to work for, and I’m honored to have been picked for the job. We aren’t cutting any corners.

   All the elements of the HUD systems we’ve developed are based on procedural algorithms and can be customized to different ships and styles to a huge degree of depth and flexibility, keeping the scope of the universe in mind. My task is to pack as much useful information as possible into tight, clear displays, to give pilots those crucial visual cues that can mean the difference between life and death in a dogfight.

   The HUD will be your friend, and learning to read it reflexively will shave crucial milliseconds off your reaction time. Sometimes it feels more like I’m developing an avionics package for the military than for a game! For my qualifications, I have 15 years in Flash/Flex development, including dozens of casual games and a custom gaming platform for a Bitcoin site I operate. I’m very much a DIY, self-employed developer, and this is my first team effort in over ten years. But this is a game I’m dying to play, and I couldn’t say no… I’ve been a fan of Chris’s work since I was a kid playing Wing Commander, and it’s a dream job for me to work with the team he’s assembled.

   There are lots of reasons to pledge to this project, but one of the best (in my view) is that the authenticity of the flying/fighting experience is going to be unparalleled. I can confirm that all the pieces are in place to ensure that it will be – and as for the avionics, I think this HUD will be the gold standard in “AAA” games for the next decade or longer. I hope to hear your feedback as we go along, and thank you all for showing your support and helping to building this awesome game!

POST 2

   I’m looking forward to showing off the design, and I’ll see if we can’t get a sneak peek in here pretty soon! You can catch a tiny bit of it in the “Immersion” video at [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVua...&>feature=relmfu which shows some of the earliest integrations of marks, radar and ship displays when you climb into the cockpit. Although this is just the tip of the iceberg, you’ll notice the screen displays there look quite a bit different from anything in the other videos. What you’re seeing (for HUD-skeptics) are functional components with a lot of data layers and controls built in, but they aren’t engaged >yet in that video.

   Mea culpa, by the way. I was trying to do something that hadn’t been done before, which was part of the reason we missed our integration target, which is most of the reason why the targeting reticles and gun pips weren’t in for the live demo (which is why Chris missed the enemy ship — and why some people seem to doubt the HUD exists). But I promise the end result is well worth it; you’ve never seen this stuff in a HUD before, because we had to rewrite parts of the CryENGINE/Scaleform integration code and roll a whole bunch of new graphics methods just to make it work.

   I’ll shut up now before I say too much, and leave it to Chris to make the big announcements

POST 3

   Thanks for such a warm welcome! Can’t believe so many people stopped by to say hi while I was sleeping. I’m by no means able to answer all the questions, and I should be getting back to work :P but I guess I can give you all another good teaser…

   I’m seeing a lot of questions about 2D vs. 3D displays, and about 3D HMDs vs. cockpit-projected HUDs. In fact, Chris made the decision to use all three types in Star Citizen from the beginning.

   There’s a fixed holographic projection within the cockpit, which overlays things that don’t move with your head, e.g. velocity, acceleration, attitude, altitude, heading and targeting data. This projection has depth for greater effect (along the lines of what you see in that Scaleform promotional video), and also uses some (non-essential) stereoscopic depth cues to assist the pilot in reading certain situations more quickly. You don’t need an Oculus to get all the same info, but I’m not saying the depth cues won’t give you a slight edge.

   In addition to that, there’s a separate projection on the inside of the pilot’s helmet which can be loaded up with with deeper data sets (e.g. ship status, weapons selection, power balancing, navigation maps, communications, etc). This HMD projection stays in your field of vision when you turn your head.

   Finally, elements from both of these projections can be shunted to the flat LCD displays or brought back up to their respective projection, and have been designed to shift shape, color and opacity, and/or break into separate elements, depending on whether they’re being displayed on a flat screen or holographically. So yeah, there was definitely some inspiration from Minority Report and Iron Man, but at the same time these elements are very much in the CR space sim style, and my primary goal is to remain true to his original vision.

   I should stress that these projection layers exist, and about 80% of the gizmos are fully functional; in tests, they have been added to the projections and screens and run successfully with dummy data. The part that’s not yet complete is the full integration that sends active environmental data to the components. The HUD is a platform in itself with 62 custom classes and a 20-page API manual so far. There are hundreds of data points that need to be connected up to the ship’s systems, so we’re still in the process of getting the cockpit fully “wired”.

   And no, we’re not deviating from the classic polar-mapped radar screen! But we’ve added some nice touches like sector heat mapping, and ship-on-your-tail alerts.

   Additionally, someone asked me about incorrect and/or damaged displays. Every element in our HUD responds to damage. As Chris built the fly-by-wire system to procedurally handle an infinite range of ship states based on damage to various components, that philosophy was extended to have damage also rendered procedurally in the HUD. Just as one example, text in the HUD is not pre-rendered or even generated on the fly as a block; it’s printed procedurally to the displays one character at a time, with a greater likelihood of transcription error (or garbled transmission) depending on specific damage to your avionics or communications systems. Response to damage is a bedrock feature of every element in the HUD and has a negative impact on boot times, data latency and accuracy. If this sounds like something not recommended in a scaleform project, it isn’t – and they said it was crazy – but we’ve refactored, honed and optimized it to work.

   So, I’ll end it here before I give away all my tricks, but I’ll drop back in from time to time. Meanwhile, stay tuned for the next vid!"

POST 4 (21.10.12)

   Good luck to all of us!

   I just want to say, as far as modding the HUD, a lot of things (e.g. colors, custom drawing styles) are written to be extremely moddable. I imagine custom skins will be an early addition. Totally custom HUDs that include unique ship configurations are probably further down the road. We’ve overcome some major technical hurdles with Scaleform in terms of getting all of our procedural elements to work, although the trade-off is that we had to mod the SDK a bit so it’s not as easy to compile these things in. But the HUD is made to be very, very flexible… we’ve already got some in-house programs written to ease the process of integrating new elements and new ships… so I do think community modding of the HUD is ultimately in the cards.

   Also: Personally, and not speaking for RSI, I’m a big fan of Privateer, and the exploration/trading side of things (although with some good dogfights to spice it up). Actually one of my favorite games from back in the day was Starflight, which was pretty much all about that. I still have great memories the planetary analysis that would piece together the atmospheric and mineral composition of new planets you’d orbit. My 9-year-old best friend and I (can’t resist linking to him) decided to start a software company to build an open universe after playing that game, which ended a year later with a journal full of dozens of solar systems and a bunch of hypercard stacks.

   So from my perspective, civilian uses for the HUD and ship’s systems are absolutely crucial as well, and they won’t be neglected in Star Citizen. It’s one of the reasons I’m thrilled to be part of the team.

Source

http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/forums/topic/hello-from-one-of-the-devs/

Example Vid of Scaleform

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zKDuzVbi50Q#!

Their Kickstarter has succeeded. $502,036 from 11,096 backers, with 26 days left on the clock.

The investors actually paying for the bulk of Star Citizen's development will be delighted.

It would appear that, between the official site and Kickstarter, the $2mil milestone has now been reached

I do think that the costs for adding additional ships to an existing pledge are too high though :-(

Interview: Chris Roberts Gives Us a Glimpse on Star Citizen and Squadron 42

link

Star Citizen Ships Development Document

And, the project is funded:

Quote

Hello everyone!

Less than two weeks ago, I reached out to the gaming community to help me prove that the PC game wasn’t dead. That there was still an audience for the kind of games I created with Wing Commander and Freelancer. To prove that Space Combat wasn’t finished as a genre

I hoped that the answer would be yes, that the demand would be there and that it would come together in a way that would ultimately let me build the world I have been dreaming about for many years.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly it all happened.

Last night, just four and half days after our Kickstarter campaign launched, we passed the $500,000 mark, making it successfully funded, and another Kickstarter success story.

As I write this we are less than $50,000 from reaching the RSI goal of $2 million in overall pledges that makes Star Citizen a “go”. It’s unbelievable.

I’m proud to represent this cause and I’m tremendously humbled by the incredible community that has rallied to my side. Not just the donations–which have been astounding –but also the stories and the creativity I’ve encountered interacting with you in the comments and on the message boards and elsewhere. Like me, you have all seen Star Citizen, no matter what you may have called it, in your head for many years… and thanks to your collected efforts; I’m going to build it for you.

I have two pieces of information to share with you tonight. The first is the long-awaited design document about Star Citizens five pledge ships. Time and time again you’ve asked what an Aurora or a Hornet or a Constellation is. I’m happy now to be able to share our design concepts. These are the specifications we’re building on as we create the game world and they’re the descriptions I have sent to the artists who are putting together the ship models. Normally you wouldn’t see this kind of inside information, especially not this early, but I hope you will find it interesting and get a kick out of getting an insider’s view of how game development works.

The second piece of news is the news that you can finally upgrade your pledges at RobertsSpaceIndustries.com. If you’ve decided you would like to upgrade to a higher tier of ship or if you would like to increase your support for the project for any other reason, you now have that option. In addition we have heard you loud and clear on the Forums, on Kickstarter, Facebook and on the recent poll. You want the ability to add additional ships to your base package. So we’ve given you that option too. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing our plans for these ships and then choosing the one that best fits how you want to play the game.

Tomorrow, we’re going to be adding additional information about stretch goals… more specific levels and in-game rewards that you can achieve. In the near future we will have the upgraded forums online and we will start opening additional content at the RSI website. There’s a lot to look forward to!

So, pilots: we’ve won our first furball! But, there’s plenty more work to do. Let’s knock out the $2M in overall pledges that green lights Star Citizen, then set our sights on the stretch goals. The more of these we can hit, the richer and more varied the game I can deliver. We’re less than half way through the campaign, so I know we can go much further. If you’ve already backed, spread the word. If you’re still waiting to, then please join the cause.

Thank you, truly, for your unbelievable support. We have $45,840 to go! We can get there by MORNING!

Chris Roberts

You did not think it would reach its goals?

Dial the shillage back a tiny bit.

More importantly, find another game to love. I want this one to turn out well.

Quote from: Rasix on October 25, 2012, 12:11:42 PM

Dial the shillage back a tiny bit.

How is posting articles and news about a game I am following shillage?

I think Rasix is referring more to Chris Roberts.

The "now that we're funded, so only now can I release some details about the pledge ships that are utterly meaningless in a title that is years from launch" was a nice touch though.

But now the only thing to do is to wait for Roberts to deliver on every one of his promises. awesome, for real

In an act of shameless slef promotion if anyone was planning to pledge to this and hasn't yet done so there is now a referral scheme operating, let me know if you're interested and I'll send you my referral URL

Star Citizen - FINAL WEEK PUSH

Star Citizen - Pilot AI Work In Progress

The following for me personally, has been something I have wanted clarification about.

Quote

Hi everyone!

I get a lot of questions about how the whole persistent universe works and what I mean when I talk about battle instances.

I’ve given some answers but as it keeps coming up, I thought it would be good to give all of you a longer description in how this all works and fits together.

One of my goals with Star Citizen was to create a huge open world that you could adventure in solo, with your friends, mingling with NPCs and other real people.

Freelancer was built to have up to 128 players in multiplayer, but as a few of you know that was more a theoretical maximum than something that was really practical, especially back in 2003. When I started building Freelancer, partly inspired by the work done on Ultima Online (which was in development when I was still at Origin), the fun I was having playing multiplayer games like Command & Conquer and Diablo I had wanted to bring the Privateer experience into the bold new world of multiplayer. My original vision for Freelancer was to first release a single player game and then follow it up with massively multiplayer version with a dynamic economy and a world that reacted and adapted to the players actions.

I didn’t get a chance to deliver this vision and ultimately while Freelancer was a good game, it fell short of what I was aiming for.

With Star Citizen I was determined to combine what I wanted to achieve with Freelancer, with the personal experience that I think both Wing Commander and Privateer were so strong with.

But me being me, I wanted to combine things I like about the promise of a MMO, but avoid the aspects that I’m not so keen on like splintered player groups, griefing and grinding. I also was really impressed with how Demon’s Souls merged the single player experience with the multiplayer side.

All of this helped form my thinking on how Star Citizen is going to balance the difficult balancing act between multiplayer and single player.

All multiplayer games – whether they are a persistent world massively multiplayer game (MMO) like World of Warcraft or just an online multiplayer game like Battlefield 3 – have a limit to the number of players that can be active in anyone area or level. This number is usually inversely proportional to the amount of data that needs to go between the client and the server. For a game with complex physics and a fully destructible terrain, like Battlefield 3 the number of players that can active in an instance is less than a game with less real time fidelity like WoW, or Eve on Line. But in all cases there are always more players than any one server instance can handle. For a persistent multiplayer world like WoW the solution is to split up the player base into more manageable groups called “shards”, which are a permanent instance of the universe that look after a certain amount of players.

One thing I don’t like about most MMO structures is the fragmentation of the player base between these “shards”. If you had joined much later than a friend of yours, there may not be room on his world instance anymore and you have to join another parallel one and so cannot play together. This is one of the nice things about the Eve Online design – everyone plays in the same universe.

In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So you will never be separated from your friends, and if you want you’ll be able to join up and adventure together, you can. Due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation we can’t however handle thousands of players in the same area of space. Even if you had enough internet bandwidth to handle the data going back and forth and a super computer for the server there’s no PC, even with quad SLI that could render that many spaceships with Star Citizen’s fidelity.

So the “magic” of Star Citizen’s multiplayer design is how we combine a persistent universe with a more traditional (and easier to implement) temporary multiplayer “battle” instance.

The way it works is that the persistent universe server, which we’re calling the Galaxy Server, keeps track of all players’ assets, group relationships and locations inside the Star Citizen universe. As the Galaxy server isn’t handling any realtime action it can handle our complete player base, which right now would be about 45,000 players, but is designed to be able to scale to millions if need be. The other key thing the Galaxy Server does is dynamically place players based on their location, skill level, alignment and player versus player (PvP) preference into battle instances. Think of a “battle” instance like a Battlefield 3 multiplayer session or a World of Tanks Battle with the key difference that the selection of players is done transparently and is “in fiction”.

An illustration of how this would work is like this –

I start out planet side on New Pittsburg. I decide to buy a few tonnes of steel to fly to the shipyards of Terra. I’m currently in the hands of the galaxy server that communicates with my client and handles my purchases and interactions on the planet as these are not real time in the manner that the space action is. We render these in the manner of Freelancer, as detailed 3D environments where we see a third person view of our character in a location and we can click on Non Player Characters (NPCs) or terminals to buy / sell, upgrade your ship, get gossip, hear about a mission and so on. You’ll also be able to interact with other players via a chat interface. We haven’t fully worked out the player avatar handling planet side but the bar or private clubs will be where you can meet / chat to other players. Besides populating the bar with NPCs, the game will also populate the bar with other players. If there are more players planet side than there are slots of avatars in the bar the ones visible to you will be based off your friends list and then it will be based on relevance to you – a player looking for a wingman, one from a similar group, or maybe someone that you’ve been given a mission to find or hunt down. You will also be able to see the full list of players in the room if there are more players than there are slots. Default would be a drop down list for this, but as I hate anything that breaks the immersion, we’ll probably come up with a better in fiction way of seeing the list of players – maybe you tell the bartender who you’re looking for, maybe you can look at the door list for the bar.

Having bought my cargo I launch into space. If there are players already in orbit there will be an orbit instance already created. If it’s not full then I will be placed into that. If it is full then a new one will be dynamically created. All orbit (and battle) instances reserve slots for friends and persons of interest (POI), which can be NPCs or other players, so if you’ve launched and there are multiple orbit instances and you have friends already in orbit you should be placed into that instance. This is also the dynamic that will be applied if you want to follow another player – you can “tag” them as a POI and then the game will do its best to place you in the same instance as your POI. For instance if you tagged someone planet side and they launch your PDA with its future version of Siri will notify you that your POI is leaving, giving you a window to launch into space too.

Once in orbit I can pull up my Navigation computer and set a course for my destination. If its several systems away like Terra, the nav computer will chart a course through the relevant jump points. You will be able to adjust this like on Google maps, so if you click a different jump point on the system map it will then re-route you on the shortest path to your destination with that jump point as the first “jump”

Once I’ve plotted my nav course I would then engage auto-pilot and head towards my first “way” point on the path to my destination (a jump point, an interim space feature, like an asteroid belt and so on). At this point I’ve been handed back to the Galaxy Server, which is determining whether I will encounter a hostile, someone that has tagged me as a POI, or a predetermined encounter on the way, or if I’m going to run across ongoing battle instance that is relevant to me (some members of the instance are aligned against or with me). These encounters could be with an NPC or a live player(s) and are sorted on skill level and also – which is important to all of you that like a more single player experience and don’t want to deal with griefers – based on your player versus player (PvP) preference. So if you’ve set your game settings to be low PvP and you’re in a relatively safe area, you’ll likely have an NPC (PvE) encounter as opposed to a PvP one. Of course your ranking and any reputation you earn won’t be the same with a PvE encounter versus a PvP. My hope for this dynamic is that it will allow people to first play Star Citizen in a safer more single player open world style, but as they grow in confidence and want to test their mettle against other real players they can take the training wheels off and get into battles with real players. There will also be areas of the universe that no matter what your PvP setting is, will be PvP. These will be systems that are on the fringes of the policed galaxy and will be notorious for pirate and other illegal activity. They will also be the most lucrative areas – if you can survive.

Now if you’re flying with your friends, who you can link to via the game POI “tagging” system, they will be with you when you’re pulled into a battle instance, whether it is against NPCs, real players or a combination of both.

Once the Galaxy Server has determined that you will have an encounter based on the above criteria it either dynamically creates a battle instance, or puts you in one if one already exists at the encounter point, and that instance has room for new players. To exit this instance you either have to resolve the hostilities by defeating who’s targeting you, negotiating an exit or just outrunning them. Once in an instance you can put out a distress call to your friends. There are two ways people on your friends list (or squadron as we’re going to call it) can help. We save slots in all instances for friends to warp in to fight. To do this they need to be in the same system. If they are they can autopilot in to your rescue and will be dropped into the instance. If they’re not in the star system, if they can get to your system before the battle is over then they can join (but will only be able to join once they’ve reached your system). The second way for your friends to help out is by “dropping in” on your ship. This only works if it’s a multi person vehicle like the RSI Constellation. In this scenario they don’t need to be in your system, they just will drop in inside your ship and will be able to move around in first person, climbing into a turret to man it, or jumping in you P52 to fly it in combat while you fly the main ship (or they could fly your main ship and you pilot the fighter)

Once the hostilities or the event (sometimes you could be pulled into an instance because you came across a derelict ship or space station and we want to give the player a chance to explore) that triggered the drop out of auto-pilot has been resolved, you can hit auto-pilot again, get handed back to the Galaxy Server and go about your way on the nav course you’ve plotted.

You will always drop out at jump points and planets, where you will need to either make a jump to another system or land.

This process is continued until you reach your final destination, which in my example would be Terra, where I would use my comm system to negotiate a landing slot, which would take me down to the planet’s surface via an in-engine cinematic. Once planet side I’ll be able to sell my cargo, replenish my supplies and look for new opportunities via the third person planet side interface.

The advantage of this system is that is allows you to tailor your experience towards your preference – solo, co-op or full PvP. It also doesn’t partition you into different, parallel versions of the Star Citizen universe as everyone is kept on the persistent server. Because our battle or orbit / space instances are temporary, you’re never stuck

with one group over the long term and due to our heavy emphasis on friends and co-op, there will always be room for your friends to join you on your adventure; whether it’s against other players or NPCs.

The same instance system underpins the single player Squadron 42. If you’re playing off-line, your computer will be acting as the server and client, there will be no opportunities for friends to join and everyone will be an NPC. But if you play Squadron 42 through the Galaxy Server, even though your missions and space areas are pre-determined (you don’t get to pick where in the galaxy you are flying if you’re in the military) we will allow your friends to drop in / drop out to take over NPC wingmen and if you want extra skill ranking you can allow other players to drop in and take over enemy ace characters. This system is pretty similar to the Demon’s Souls setup where people could drop in as a Blue Phantom to help you kill a boss monster or fight off another invading player, or you could drop in as a Black Phantom to someone else’s world and try and kill them for XP and other gamerewards.

The key to all this is to allow player choice – you want to play alone you can, want your friends to join you in co-op we allow that and if you want to be challenged by other real players you can do that. The special part is that it can all happen in the same holistic universe.

I hope this helps in terms of understanding how we’re balancing the aspects of multiplayer as well as making the game fun.

I'm still not sure how seamless this will be in practice. Some of what he says reminds me more of "Final fantasy" random encounters rather than freelancer trade lane disrupting.

Sounds like Pirates of the Burning Sea. Not a bad thing, but not really the omg-how-many-people-are-here?! that Eve can sometimes deliver.

Massive space battles are neat to see on rare occasion. If they're the rule rather than the exception, I can do without the slide show. Give me small dogfights any day.

Hm. I'd be more interested with a rich freelancer-style galaxy on a privately hosted server with centralized authentication, more like minecraft.

I'm holding off on this one until release. Obsidian doing an infinity game? Sure. Roberts returning from retirement to do an mmo? Skeptical.

I'll second the private server preference. That is where all the modded in ships from other IPs will be available, so that's where I'll be.

Quote from: Darniaq on November 14, 2012, 04:34:17 PM

Sounds like Pirates of the Burning Sea. Not a bad thing, but not really the omg-how-many-people-are-here?! that Eve can sometimes deliver.

I'm currently playing the Discovery Freelancer mod. I have no need of Eve Numbers in a battle. 100 can feel epic enough. Current Discovery mod server limit is around 200. Star citizen? 100 per sector. ( Supposedly )

Quote from: Sky on November 15, 2012, 08:05:30 AM

Hm. I'd be more interested with a rich freelancer-style galaxy on a privately hosted server with centralized authentication, more like minecraft.

Players can run their own in star citizen. Everything above applies to personal servers too. As I understand it.

To add, Freelancer Vanilla server, and Discovery freelancer are, already basically MMO's. Discovery however, has removed the limitations of Vanilla. In Vanilla, you got the top tier ship or whatever on the server, there was nothing to do. Discovery has added a factional and corporate war. Its much more dynamic. So, other than the matchmaking outlined above...Hes made this game before, at least twice.

Quote from: Mrbloodworth on November 15, 2012, 10:49:47 AM

I have no need of Eve Numbers in a battle.

I have enormous respect and admiration for what EVE is capable of. Given a choice, though, I'd prefer an FPS-like online environment with 128 concurrent players, flight sim reactivity over server-saving "time dilation," and the possibility of regularly fighting alongside 10 people I know and 20 people I see regularly around the server. Less anonymous zerg blobs, more fun with friends.

A couple of years back I wanted to get a group together to discuss the MMORPG concept I've been working on since 2004. I never managed to get a forum going, so... fail. Chris Roberts appears to have been reading the doc off my hard drive, because Star Citizen is at least 70% of what I wanted.

Quote

Wing Commander and Freelancer creator Chris Roberts has been busy. Though he took some time off from game design to work in the film industry, he recently announced his return with a new space sim called Star Citizen. After showing an initial demo and releasing an early trailer, Roberts started crowdfunding to get Star Citizen off the ground, securing more than $3 million dollars between Kickstarter and his own website. Many fans donated $250 or more, often to secure themselves a space ship they didn't know the look of or function, acting simply on faith that Roberts and his team could deliver something special. To learn more about the RSI Constellation (the first big ship to be revealed), the team's approach to ship design, and Star Citizen overall, we interviewed Game Director Chris Roberts and Lead Conceptual Artist Ryan Church.

"Who doesn’t want their own Millennium Falcon?," responds Roberts when I press him about why the Constellation has been a common pledge level despite its $250 price tag, "What’s been interesting is that people have been signing up for the Constellation just on the promise without knowing what it will look like. I’m guessing that now people can see the attention to detail they may just want to upgrade."

Indeed, as a longtime fan of spaceships and science fiction universes like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, I'd say the ship looks impressive. It features a gigantic, pod-like cockpit at the front, a pair of turrets on the top and bottom of the ship, and a general aesthetic that makes Constellation look like a combination of the Han Solo's famous ship and the titular Firefly-class ship from the now defunct TV series. There are even places on the ship that Roberts and team have yet to decide the purpose. "You should be able to eat a meal or drink something in the kitchen! I don’t think we’ll go to the extreme of requiring you to do this to keep your energy up, but it is a nice texture moment. I would like the sleeping quarters play into the game the same way a bunk bed did in the original Wing Commander – which was as an in-fiction save point, but I’m not going to let you save anywhere in space. But I think when docked / landed the sleeping quarters will be where you 'wake-up' when you load your game to start a new session."

This is all part of Chris Roberts' greater vision for Star Citizen, that it earns the sim part of the space sim title. This is exemplified by the Constellation's cargo bay. Roberts says "the goal is to be able to walk back into your cargo hold while flying and actually see the cargo you’re hauling. There’s a big focus on simulating and showing everything that you would imagine to be inside and functioning on a spaceship in Star Citizen. So if you’re hauling it you should see it in your hold (if you can walk back into your hold), if you activate a system, you should see your pilot avatar lean over and switch it on, and so on."

Church and Roberts thus work together from concept to finished product, with Church beginning with Roberts' description and then figuring out how to make it functional. "It's much like designing a car or any other product," Church tells IGN, "there are the engineering requirements and then there's the feeling you want to convey -- look at a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. Both are high performance Italian sports cars but they have very different looks, different surface form languages. So I will start pretty rough and send a bunch of variations to Chris and he will weed them down and distill out what he wants. Once the shape and configuration are locked in I put on my engineer's hat and work backwards from the functional requirements to the form."

This is exactly how the Constellation came to be. Church writes, "The design brief for the Constellation was that it has a crew of three, is heavily armed and has an 'iconic' shape. That's tough to do! But I think we've succeeded- it has a very aggressive shape in attack/landing mode and can configure itself to a more benign looking cruise mode. At every stage while building it and figuring out the functionality I'm thinking about the Constellation class ship as a potential user: what would I want to fly? What would I want to be seen in? These questions resulted in not only the look of the ship but the layout of the interior and a lot of the functionality like the way the weapons can retract and change the silhouette of the ship."

Though the Constellation may be inspired by the likes of the Millenium Falcon, it has one advantage over such a craft: a deployable fighter. This small craft has no ability to navigate the warp gates that will separate the gigantic sections of Star Citizen's universe, but according to Roberts, "is important to counter act the Constellation’s lower maneuverability compared to a pure dogfighting player ship." The addition of a fighter and all the other considerable armaments of the Constellation doesn't mean it'll be everything, either. "It all comes down to how the player decides to modify and upgrade his ship and what he wants to focus on – dogfighting, trading runs, exploration," writes Roberts, "A lightly armored, but very maneuverable ship piloted by a good pilot would have a chance."

We still have yet to see the array of other ships that are being created, and as a bit of disclosure I've tossed in $125 myself for a freighter, but this first design is encouraging. There's just so much attention to detail, and if Roberts and company manage to pull off the gameplay elements detailed in our first preview, then Star Citizen could set a new standard for immersion when it releases in 2014.

A ton of images are with the article.

Funding is currently at $4.2 million with two days to go.

I think that makes them the biggest game crowd-fund ever, if you don't count Ouya - Obsidian's Project Eternity ended just short of $4 million.

It just hit slashdot so it might jump up more.

I went away for a few hours and came back to find that it had jumped up over $5 million. Currently at $5,115,675 from 73,919 backers.

EDIT: As of 6AM, $5,521,375 from 79,461 donors, with another eight hours to go. $5.5 million unlocked the final stretch goal, player-controllable Bengal-class carriers.

It's over. The last number I heard was 6.2 million. I never thought they would raise that much.