Chris Roberts Back in your wallet - STAR CITIZEN

[Samprimary]

That looks beautiful! Wouldn't it be great if one day someone made a videogame like that?!

right??

[Margalis]

People who don't understand how video game engines work probably should not write about how video game engines work.

[Lucas]

Third (written) Q&A session about the Endeavour ship:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14994-MISC-Endeavor-Q-A-Part-3

I highlighted the last portion of the following excerpt because it made me chuckle:

he Hope-class Endeavor opens up an entirely new range of possibilities for the aspiring healer. As previously noted, Endeavors with an attached Medical Bay may serve as respawn points for players that have died, and the associated Hangar Bay allows those players to – for a price premium – have one of their existing ships or a new purchase delivered quickly so that they can get right back into the action. The greatest demand for Hope-class Endeavors will therefore be in those areas where lots of player deaths are occurring, but of course a valuable and unescorted medical ship in a dangerous area will be a tempting target for pirates and other less savory types. In addition to respawn services, an Endeavor that has enabled its ID Beacon – thus broadcasting to others its position, services offered, prices, and reputational information – can also serve as a field hospital for any player or NPC requiring urgent medical attention. In such cases, the party in need would attempt to quickly close the gap with the Endeavor and then either request access to dock in its landing bay or simply EVA into the external hospital pressure lock. Upon arrival in the hospital it’s up to the Endeavor’s crew to employ their expertise to try and save the patient, with the ultimate outcome contributing to their medical reputation.

YES, I definitely want XxxSheepMastahXxx and his nice medical team to employ their 'expertise' on me!!! 

Q&A goes on talking more in detail about the respawning mechanic (and possible exploits) and Gardening Commander

[tmp]

All of what you're describing were faked in sim games. Clever illusions. The missiles that fire are just polys that toggle off and on depending on what your status is. There's no physics of actually flying the missile from aircraft to aircraft. No rendering of bullets and modeling the impact. It's all rendering based on mathematical models, hit boxes and/ or probability tables.

What do you believe is the difference between "rendering based on mathematical models and hit boxes" and "physics of actually flying missile from aircraft to aircraft'? Because in my eyes the latter is simply implemented through the former, and they're effectively one and the same. For games like World of Warships throwing that handful of bullets/torpedoes onto their paths and doing movement/checkbox calculations to determine whether they hit stuff and what exactly parts of the virtual ships they hit, that's a practical way of doing what they're attempting to simulate, and perfectly within capabilities of today's PCs. And what Roberts is attempting isn't really any different from this imo, once we discard the obligatory intrawebs hyperbole.

Even in Multi-vehicle craft in FPS games you're just along for the ride. You're in viewer mode attached to a camera or a turret on a vehicle that's being piloted by one other person. Your travel is determined by that pilot person and reported back to where you're at and that's complex enough.

It's also not what Roberts is offering up. It's a series of nested rooms that gets crazy complex.

What Roberts is really offering up (other than Kool-Aid) is Archeage (which in turn is just refinement of earlier games) with one extra dimension.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYbFo7UNj58

Just having a model parented to another is nowhere near "complex enough" for games to handle. If you don't see more than that in a game, more often than not it's because it'd be just pointless, unnecessary complexity added to the design/gameplay (that yes, someone would need to implement/test/debug/etc)  At the same time advancing from "having character parented to a ship" to "having character move around while parented to a ship" isn't exactly rocket science, per se. You're merely changing over time the offset at which your model is attached to its parent, and doing collision detections with relevant geometry. It's additional computations, sure. But crazy complex? No, far from it.

[tmp]

YES, I definitely want XxxSheepMastahXxx and his nice medical team to employ their 'expertise' on me!!!  

At this point adding Operation to their selection of virtual spaceship mini-games appears perfectly logical and in line with the earlier plans

They should totally take it further, btw. Emergent gameplay: become undercover agent for your virtual corporation, infiltrate the crew of mobile hospital and then at the crucial moment poison drinks/swap the operation table server blades with broken ones, leading to operation failure and death of your competitor's CEO.

[HaemishM]

Exclusive Gameplay Footage of the Medical Module

[MahrinSkel]

I actually worked out an architecture for this problem once, essentially you have "contexts" (systems where the interactions occur according to the relevant rules, some of them explicitly spatial and physics-oriented), and "agents", which register their scope of interests (types of events they are interested in), and inform the contexts of the actions they are taking that will register within the mutual scope. So a 'ship management' agent would inform a 'space volume' context of what the ship was doing.

But the ship management agent would itself be simple reporting the results of a ship simulation context, which itself was responding to the actions of player proxy agents. And contexts could act as agents towards each other, to reconcile overlap (where one 3D physics context was overlapping with another, for example).

The point is that if you found that certain types of tasks were overloading your hardware, you subdivide your context either spacially or thematically. Your limiting factor becomes network bandwidth to communicate between contexts on different physical hardware, rather than cycles of CPU or memory space (but this is tractable with careful planning and throwing more NIC's on the hardware).

--Dave

[satael]

CitizenCon presentation 2015 Saturday October 10th 7pm utc on twitch.
I am tempted to watch to see the hype machine in (live)action. 

[Lucas]

It will be fun no matter what, I guess 

128 cultists in chat right now. Join us 

[Sir T]

Allow me to summarise the chat at the stream, 1 hour 30 mins before go time.

SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART SERECK DMART
 IS EEEEVIL
I WENT TO DMARTS STREAM TO TROL HIM!!
I DOWNVOTED SD!
SD IS UGLY
HHOHA I LAUGH AT SD!!
I PROVE MY FAITH!
ROBERTS ACKBAR!

[jakonovski]

Who is this elusive mon calamari Roberts Ackbar?

[satael]

In a true Star Citizen(tm) fashion the stream start is now delayed at least 30mins according to their website. 

[HaemishM]

Incoming web page selling the SS Delay for $600 each.

[Lucas]

Starting in 20 minutes....Maybe.

16,600...err, viewers and counting  

[satael]

There's a magical countdown clock to keep people entertained: it was at 42:42 and started counting, then reseted to 50:00 and started counting after a while, then reseted to 29:46 and stayed there for a while before starting to count, then reseted to 50 and currently it's counting down at 12:26 though no idea if it will get to 0 or will it reset to some magical number. 

edit:before I managed to hit post it flashed to 50:00 and then to 7:20 and is now counting down at 6:50

[Lucas]

Started. "Sandra Roberts" on stage 

[jakonovski]

Is she reading an obituary?

[satael]

Started. "Sandra Roberts" on stage  

From the start Sandra's speech is more like a cult leader's than for a game.  

edit: like how fans have been telling her how she has made their lives better etc
edit2: she even got flowers from the fans because....fans?

[jakonovski]

Oh jesus this is creepy.

[Pennilenko]

They are giving her fucking flowers on stage. The way it is being filmed is ridiculous and strange.

Edit: You know, now I remember what I have seen before that is like this shit before, Scientology gatherings.

[jakonovski]

edit: misheard so never mind :P

[Lucas]

Playground for SC Alpha 2.0 sounds interesting...setting aside the "WHEN" portion :D

EDIT: ah, here comes the live demonstration.

[Samprimary]

eh

this don't look too bad

[jakonovski]

Yeah, it looks like early Elite Dangerous.

But all that fps shit is such a huge mistake.

edit: also the chat people are continuing to obsess over Serek.

[Lucas]

The Starmap!!!

EDIT: Live here:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap

[satael]

It was funny to see some of the players get ganked in the fps portion and getting their ship stolen. Can you imagine the amount of hurt and whine it would cause if they actually left that in game when the persistent universe actually launches?

[jakonovski]

Eh, the map is just smoke and mirrors because it will never exist ingame. Waste of resources.

[Lucas]

Eh, the map is just smoke and mirrors because it will never exist ingame. Waste of resources.

Shut up you or I...OOOH, LOOK, A SHINY BRANDED JOYSTICK!!! 

[jakonovski]

That joystick is pretty great if you're into peripherals. Also it will likely actually exist, so that's a plus.

edit: HAHAHAHAHA pyramid scheme! Only with fake money for the marks.

edit: there's your burn rate, motion captured expensive actors.

[Lucas]

That joystick is pretty great if you're into peripherals. Also it will likely actually exist, so that's a plus.

edit: HAHAHAHAHA pyramid scheme! Only with fake money for the marks.

Let me recruit you, I need to test dat system!!!  

Looks like Smart was wrong about the new ship? Sabre instead of Vindicator (it would be hilarious if a suspected "leaker" inside the office was fed that wrong info)
----------
Squadron 42!!!

[Lucas]

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42

[Shannow]

Wait is that an actual game that will be released? Or are they just trying to snag pre-order dollars to prop up the sinking ship?

[jakonovski]

Well, how many AAA games have only a cgi video to show a year before release?

[Lucas]

lots of glitches and still very early, but that was a nice intro sequence, reminded me of the good old WC days :)

[jakonovski]

5 minutes of early exposition at super rough level of quality. This is not coming out in 2016.

edit: WE NOW SING THE PRAISES