Disco Lando: “And this year of course we are fullfilling the CON in our CitizenCon”
peter gabriel
holy shit twitch chat is wall to wall brutal as fuck
HEY GUYS WE CAN WALK ON THE GROUND! DON’T BELIEVE US? HERE’S OVER AN HOUR LONG VIDEO WE MADE OF US WALKING ON THE GROUND.
The audience broke into applause when they saw the character leaving footprints with a dust effect
Empire on the Move Summary
Room was pretty much empty because everyone went to play 3.0.
First presentation:
How to make an NPC look at the player 101. (NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE!)
No seriously, this is being talked up like it’s some breakthrough.
He runs the basic IK side-by-side with their ‘enhanced’ version and the difference is negligable.
Second presentation:
How to animate walking with fidelity.
how to show characters walking/standing on slopes.
Character looks like he’s walking on two shattered ankles.
Devs show how they make a character walk on uneven surfaces, stuff that any game has been able to do for several years now.
Comment about how network-intensive a lot of the animations are.
How to walk on planetary surfaces, for some insane reason the ‘drawn’ floor doesn’t match up with the ‘physics’ floor.
More ~dreams~, “we’re not animating for a game, we’re animating for a universe”.
Honestly I can’t write much more about this, it was kind of interesting from a technical perspective, I’d imagine, but none of this is anything that hasn’t been seen before.
Crowd was unenthused to begin with but seemed to get more into it near the end.
Live ATV is boring. Where’s Sandi and Ben to liven things up with fake banter and bad jokes?
i can’t believe how fucking boring this is
“this is how we made a dude walk around on uneven surfaces”
“this is how we render a screenshot”
Beet Wagon
CIG teamed up with a shitty cellphone weather radar app to let people see moons lmao
Beyond the Cutting Edge Presentation Summary
More seats filled this time.
Brian still looks/sounds like a broken shell of a man.
They showed one snapshot, then showed how each graphical effect was layered in.
They then went on to explain how they added each individual graphical effect, one by one.
How texturing works 101.
Discord: “this is literally just how a video card works”.
Mipmapping! Bloom! It’s like a journey into the graphics card development!
All the graphical updates they added to 3.0 (basically the slide says what is in the schedule update).
Very brief mention of networking updates (no details) before quickly moving on to day/night cycles.
“Look at all the shiny effects we’ve added!”
Short-term plans: literally all the stuff they mentioned in their schedule.
They plan on using multithreading in the future.
Long-term plans: again, basically what they say in the schedule.
Q&A highlights:
Backers: “No question, but thank you for your work!”
Q: “With Render To Texture, is it possible to have a second bridge?” A: “Depends what you mean by possible”
Q: “Can you make mirrors that aren’t fake?”
This was seriously painful to watch/summarise, so I’ve probably missed a fair bit here.
I love that this entire Xi’an talk is about “exploring ideas”, and not actual game-play.
“What do they eat?”
“What do they wear?”
“How do they sleep?”
“No one knows. This isn’t final. We’re just exploring ideas.”
Star Citizen: Exploring Ideas
EDIT: HOLY SHIT. “We don’t want them to look too tribal.“
Everyday Close Encounters Presentation Summary
Brian Chambers’ shambling corpse is wheeled onstage again to introduce some people with the most made up job titles ever.
Now we’re dealing with story writing 101.
They literally spell out Tevarin = Ronin, Vanduul = warriors, Banu = Traders, Xian = Diplomats, Humans = Jack of all trades. Incredibly deep worldcrafting there.
Talked about individual aesthetics (Xian = verticle ships.buildings).
Background of the alien species.
Crowd looks totally disinterested.
Wikipedia entry of what ‘carrion’ means. Again, seriously.
A whole section dealing with Xian language. Thankfully at this point I went to make dinner.
I had to stop 30 mins in as I had to go eat, but I don’t think I missed anything unless someone wants to finish this?
Beer4theBeerGod
This is too fucking boring to even mock.
Lazy mashup of Chinese and Japanese
That’s too much effort. It’s actually 90% Korean.
C U in the verse commando
Nice 17 fps on an empty plane
The Corporate Colonies of Stanton Presentation Summary
Joined a bit late so I’m starting this a few minutes in.
Moons have a ‘mood’ (cold, dry, etc.)- more incredible development by designers.
How they designed the 3 moons, as if they haven’t been leaning on this topic for the past 6 months.
MORE info that, again any fool could see from a cursory glance: Yela and Cellin have mountains outwards, Daymar is valleys cut into the planet.
How the planets were crafted.
Space Baobab trees.
SO MANY GROUND TEXTURES.
Ooooh, look at us zoom out of a planet… Again! (Audience clapped here, despite this being a thing they’ve been doing for over a year now).
Concept art!
That is all…
… or is it?
Weather app! .
All it does is just give you a 3d view of each planet.
Dude’s crazy swole though.
Again more of a whole load of nothing new. These are all shows that could’ve been ATVs.
yeah gamescom was non-stop funny
this is the equivalent of the bataan death march in comparison
wait wait wait did they really try to present a picture of Enceladus as their own work?
So after almost six hours of this complete bullshit, here’s some things I’m taking away:
They sell a contradictory message. You’ll explore planets alone and claim them. And at the same time, you’ll have to claim land (with a BEACON) on a planet you have to share with others. Contradictory messages like these are get-outs, the citizens will only hear the positive message and ignore or discount the negative. They’ll trumpet the space-to-assets zoom in on a planet and discuss how labour-intensive the work is. And then tell you there’s hundreds of planets out there to explore.
All the partnerships are marriages of convenience. A useless app for weather on imaginary planets. An over-expensive SSD from a hardware company trying to get into the SSD market is the only way you can get another imaginary ship.
moisture farming.
really really obvious discussions of game tech problems that have already been solved with other engines. To the point I’m actually wondering are they trying to “white room reverse-engineer” unity or unreal engines, because that’s what it looks like. They would discuss these in excruciating detail in the powerpoint presentations/panels, and then discuss them AGAIN in interviews with Lando afterwards.
mutant chinese spaceship turtles.
Getting citizens to vote on the top 10 broadcast moments. All of which were terrible.
There’s more but my brain is trying to stave off the horror long enough to make it to the WAVY HANDSES keynote address.
Pioneering the Future Presentation Summary
Canned presentation by Not Elon Musk about the development of technology in SC’s universe.
Pioneer introduced, when seen in motion it looks like an even bigger Homeworld ship rip-off.
Brian zombie update: still a zombie.
Tony Zurovec makes an appearance after being stored underground for a year by CIG.
Show is about how the planetary landing mechanics will take place.
“This is for Orgs or a single player”
Stats that will almost certainly change.
Built for 4-8 players (or one player and 3-7 AI).
Limited amount (1,000), unless cash-buys are unlimited?
Tony Z explains how mechanics work: You can buy plots of land to build on!
More mechanics; they might as well be arguing over what colour unicorn they want, given how far out this mechanic is.
How they plan on having players build outposts.
Plenty of concept art ‘ideas’.
Moisture farming!
Q&A:
-Can I land my dream chariot on it?
Yeah it was all just a ship sale. I’m not going to do a summary for the keynote since most people will likely be watching it and it’ll be on Youtube.
Forgot to mention moisture farming.
Intermission from the stream while they download the build.
Hahaha, are you kidding? They did NOTHING on either planet!
Beet Wagon
lol there’s already a couple citizens smugposting about procedural cities on the refunds subreddit. Thanks for the fuel, CIG.
ship is floating off the ground
i cant even tell if that thing is a guard or monster
oh dear me these guys have no faces
Whoever did gamescom 2016 and then the sandworm one definitely did this one too. Things have a very different feel when they have nothing to do with the janked to fuck nightmare that is cig’s actual product.
Chris seemed more than ever to be spouting complete blatant bullshit. Like saying ‘it’s all real’ about the city and the shit about waves and just everything. He was in full dream selling mode and has to know his ability to harvest whale blood is gonna take a blow when people understand that 3.0 is the fucking mvp and the fantasy finally comes into contact reality:
>! the money is gone and this disastrously performing tech demo is the game
If you’re new to this whole thing you might be missing out on a large portion of comedy. You see, Chris did a presentation on ArcCorp (the procedural/hand-crafted city/moon/planet from yesterday’s presentation) back in 2014.
That to me is the worst thing about this performance art piece - particularly if actually they wanted it to ultimately be a playable MMO. Over the years I have played a few MMO’s, and the prerendered demo yesterday contained all of the timesink travel problems that ultimately led to abandonment from boredom.
Walking around from point A to point B with no waypoints or objectives available and visible (particularly for a new player).
Vanilla WOW was my first MMO. Saw a video of an early Onyxia kill and decided to give it a try. Valley of Trials went OK, then when they kicked me out, I wandered blindly out of the Valley and immediately took a hard right, wound up on the other side of the river in the Barrens - and got repeatedly owned by level 13 giraffes.
After about 20 hours and many deaths, and talking to a guy at work who showed me the Onyxia video, I found out about mounts. So I toughed it out. Over the years, WOW has improved the travel experience - realizing that doing stuff at Point A or Point B is more fun to more people that getting between the two points.
Complicated mount summoning rituals -
SWTOR is a good example of this. The first time you go to your instanced hangar and get in your ship, walk around, ‘talk’ to your crew, travel (instantly) to your destination, then go through destination starport hangar, the starport, find a taxi stand and go to your next quest-giver was cool. The 12000th time was tedious. But at least travel between planets was fast.
Slow travel in space -
EVE is a good example of this. Even barring null, and low-sec travel, which is hard by design. It takes forever to get to someplace to (maybe) do something interesting. I did Red Frog freight hauling for a stretch, which was a fairly safe way to build up what at the time I felt was a lot of spacebux. But there was one system that took two or three minutes (maybe it was more but I don’t want to exaggerate. It felt like forever) in warp to get from one gate to another - and I soon learned to pass on any contract available that included that system.
And these are all things that Chris seems to emphasize as the COOL PARTS of a potential MMO.
Hard pass. Thanks.
Beer4theBeerGod
One of the nice things about Star Citizen at this point is that things have pretty much calcified into their existing properties. Nobody here is magically going to be impressed and decide that, indeed, Star Citizen is good and will impress the world. Similarly nobody on the other side is going to see that and magically go “wow, they didn’t show any gameplay” and decide to get a refund. People will see what they want to see, especially given how good Chris is at providing just enough rope for people to hang themselves on their own dreams. What I saw was a lot of really impressive work for a game that nobody actually paid for. I see planets that would look fantastic as flyovers during a cutscene, art assets that would be really great in localized encounters, and plenty of generic (but still nice) content. If CIG had maintained the original concept of instances linked by cutscenes, or if it was for a single player Squadron 42, then I’d be pretty impressed. But since the content they revealed has minimal impact on the expected gameplay, they steadfastly failed to show any kind of multiplayer interaction (or any real gameplay to speak of), and since Star Citizen is supposed to be a MMO and not a single player game there isn’t much to be excited about.
What I saw was basically yet another indication of the things that actually matter to Chris Roberts; grandeur, scale, and derivative content. Look at how many times he talked about things that sound impressive like all those NPCs, the size of various buildings, provided a reference to a superior work of fiction like Blade Runner or Star Wars. Look at how little he talked about gameplay loops, or introduced mechanics that players have been waiting years for, or addressed core issues like networking, performance, or the flight model. Look at how a game that was meant to be a space simulation barely even touched space; indeed the only relevant discussion regarding actual space travel was how Chris apparently thinks that waiting eight minutes to travel between planets is somehow good game design. Look at how he thinks that showing hundreds of “procedurally generated” city blocks will somehow enhance the player experience, or how having millions of square kilometers of empty territory will lead to a better experience than what you can already get with Elite.
Star Citizen is not a scam, it’s an ego trip. It’s hundreds of people working on something, and doing what looks to be some good work doing it, to stoke the narcissism of a failed developer who is more interested in maintaining the appearances of producing a AAA title than actually delivering it. What we saw today was absolutely an indication that they are burning millions and using up a lot of personnel, and they are delivering on things. The problem is that what they’re delivering has no bearing on what people are paying for.
for 6 hours - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/185493179
Weather app!
