Yep, i agree.
I also think we should rename the title, revise the OP, and make this thread the community thread.
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Star Citizen Pre-Alpha: 'Arena Commander' Dogfighting
- Thread starter MrBig
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I also think we should rename the title, revise the OP, and make this thread the community thread.
Dictator93
Member
lol You know, after all this time on GAF, I still have no idea how to thread view highest post counts. Where are the thread tools even?But this thread feels like home now! Admit it, you just don't want me surpassing you on post count in this thread.
Yeah, it is finally coming together. So great.
np, soon though I hope. Next week friday I imagine.
Interesting idea. Then again, since this is still not full-retail, does it need to be a community thread? I forget the forum rules on that.
Thanks. I thought about this too. As I understand it, only certain sized ships will be able to use certain jump-points. So the 315p may be the only ship that can use small jump points, the Aquila should have a longer range, etc.
The other thing I might be interested in is trading/cargo. Not too excited about combat only, although my friend has a Super Hornet that we can always go and use together. As I understand it, the Aquila and perhaps even the DUR is modular, so you can essentially remove some (all?) of the science equipment and turn it into a Taurus (for example) and haul lots of cargo.
In any case, it's a good point, and I will be testing them long and hard once they are flyable. The nice thing is that before the PU goes live, I can exchange the packages for store credit--or upgrade a ship--and get something else. I do hope exploring is fulfilling here--it's the reason I spent this much on this game. One of my all-time favorite games was Starflight, and if you know that game, you know what I am talking about!
Zalusithix
Member
IMO, there's no point on having a community thread and an alpha 2.0 thread. It'd just split the discussion.
Click the reply count number on the main page. Or just go here for this thread, and be prepared to see how much time we've wasted here lol.
UpDownLeftRight
Banned
Are we taking on specific roles in the GAF org? I joined a while back but have been lurking waiting for the 2.0 release and since we're getting there I figure it was time to start getting more active in the thread. Still never really even worked out what sort of role I was planning to play in SC overall but I have a Connie so should be able to morph that to fit mostly whatever with some module swaps. Have another ship too but can't remember what it's called, but unlikely to implemented for quite a while I'd guess anyway.
I know we won't be able to do much within 2.0 btw just sort of wondering for future reference.
I know we won't be able to do much within 2.0 btw just sort of wondering for future reference.
Cabbagehead
Member
Alpha testing server confirmed.
Ahh, i don't know the rules either.
That's a good point, but if the rules allow, can we still make this the community thread though. ?
Dictator93
Member
Oh my
Hi my name is Dictator, and I have a problem.
ChrisRoberts-Citizencon2015-DrunkwithStuffedAnimal.jpg
Speaking of which, does anyone have those images? They are hilarious.
UpDownLeftRight
Banned
Quantum Drive I think but could be wrong. Least you aren't citizen ID 400,000 and something.....sigh
Zalusithix
Member
You're not wrong about the jump points. The 315p will certainly be able to use jump points that large multi crew ships can't. I'm not sure there will be any difference between what the DUR and Aquila can use though. In the grand scheme of things, they're roughly the same size. I mean large ones have to handle things like an Idris or Hull D going through. I refer once again to the size comparison image and posit that the Constellation isn't really big at all. At any rate, until they nail down exactly what sized ships can fit through what jump points, there isn't much sense in planning out a full exploration fleet.
Modularity wise, not everything is interchangeable. The Taurus is a physically different hull size and no amount of changing the other Constellations will make one a Taurus. Likewise, I'm not certain if the sensors on the Aquila will be able to be swapped out for a turret. There's a chance of that happening, but we'll have to wait for the variants to be reintroduced to be sure.
And yes, you're free to swap things around with CCUs, but be careful on melts. Melting and rebuying means losing any LTI you might have. I'm assuming you did the P-72 and CCU route to get your ships with LTI in this sale, so keep that in mind.
Roles will have to wait for the PU to get advanced enough to need them. Everything right now is still just combat. We're also lacking the ability to have the org form up in one instance. So while we're closer than ever to having some real functionality for the Org, we're still far enough away that it's all hypothetical. That said, some of us larger spenders have been plugging holes that we see based on the roster so that we can attempt just about anything as an org right out of the gate when the time comes.
And speaking of roles, I figure once the groundwork is in place to make it feasible, we'll have to have a sign up of sorts to coordinate multi-crew ship usage. There's plenty of members with only smaller ships, and those of us with the larger multi-crew ones. Having the ability to set up time slots where we can launch a few fully crewed Constellations/Retaliators will be nice in the near term. Likewise, I'm sure plenty of people would like to have the ability to walk around and experience the larger ships once they hit the PU without having to shell out hundreds to do so. In the long term it'll be crucial to have a system to manage ships like the Idris. Who wants to do what in a capital ship, when they'll be available, etc. Lots of logistics issues to figure out in the future.
kutthoat5150
Member
#57115 got my invite as well though the PTU still sounds somewhat buggy from what I'm hearing. Might hold off for a more stable releae
Rephin
Member
The Xbone controller is okay for the most part, you just need to learn the new tricks with this Alpha 2.0 release. For the Augmented Reality and other menus you definitely need the mouse and keyboard to navigate.
Once you're in your ship,
Press LT+A to disengage the slow speed,
Press LT+left on the Dpad to search for a jump point,
Press Y when you point to the jump point you want to travel to and jump.
I haven't figured out cruise mode for the controller yet, though. Also, yeah, the servers are way more crashtastic than before, thanks to the influx of new blood, lol. Try during a less peak time.
Dictator93
Member
hah
BTW, it is hard to get across how gob-smackingly detailed everything is. This use of light sources is rather sublime.
I had some trouble getting captures due to crashing, but what I did manage in my extremely brief time... still looks great.
obmb is back baby
Why so high res?
Thanks for the insight. One of the things I noticed between the DUR and the Connie Aquila is that the Aquila comes with a Rover and a Snub Ship. It seems even though they are the same size, that the Aquila might be better suited for on-the-surface planet (and system) exploration. It wouldn't make too much sense that a ship that can be soloed or two-manned (the DUR) would be able to do the same things as a ship that will probably need 3-5 players or NPCs to be effective, but if that turns out to be the case, I will probably upgrade either the DUR or the Aquila to a Carrack or Endeavor, assuming they come up for sale again. Both can carry cargo too, even if it's not a lot, so there's always that trading aspect available.
I used P-72s to LTI the 315p and DUR, but not the Aquila. I wanted the Aquila game package badly, that's why. But I did buy an extra P-72 to perhaps upgrade a standalone Aquila or a Carrack to LTI in the future. Frankly, I think LTI is a bit overdone. It's a nice to have, but I'll not sure it will be all that important, since CGI has said insurance will be cheap to maintain. But I think I will use the LTI DUR anyways to explore aggressively and bring out the Connie when I've discovered something of value and know the area is (relatively) safe.
The sign-ups are a good idea. I have the funds to spend on a larger ship but haven't because frankly I only have one friend that plays Star Citizen at the moment, and it didn't make sense to buy such a large multi-crew if it's going to sit in my hanger all day because I don't have the crew to man it. Also, I understand that launching a large capital ship is going to cost a lot of in-game currency to run and I'm not sure I can dedicate the time it will take to earn the funds necessary to keep that size of ship running. I view the larger capital ships as "guild" ships of sorts, where guilds or groups can take out "the fleet" when they have the right amount of members. So I thought it would be best to have small to medium ships to solo and go with 1-2 friends, then jump on a capital ship owned by GAF members or other guilds. Many things still up in the air, but with the ability to CCU ships and melt packages to buy new ones, one can always change things around before the PU goes live, which I have the feeling is still a long ways off...
Yeah, that planet panel is really nice. I make a point to walk by it on the way to my ship when I can, heh. Check out the engine cylinders on the outside of the base (at the end) when you get to fly - nice large smooth curved reflective surfaces which are nice for catching the light.
I'll make the thread for 2.0 (unless someone else had that in mind). For Shy re: community, it's better to stick with just one main thread for now, lock this one down with a link to the new one. Main reason for that vs renaming this one is giving people a clear point to start reading. Also avoids confusion with a current OP followed by many old posts.
If there's a $100 million thread it would just be its own brief thing separately.
intertubes pls unclog
Oh boy! We're finally moving out of dogfighting and into the baby PU! =D
Dictator93
Member
Great
btw, it runs ultra terribly on my rig when basically doing anything other than sitting in the hab. My CPU is being destroyed. Why can't inte release new chips sooner :/
Interesting to see RAM, VRAM and page file utilization though
I think they have a single-threaded process bottlenecking the rest. Notice there's always one core at 100%. They need to parallelize whatever that's doing. I think there are Cryengine config options for dedicating different kinds of tasks to different cores, so that could help narrow down the nature of that process.
Ok, cool bean.
Vlodril
Member
i only tried it for 5 minutes to look around a bit (it looks sooo good) but yea its pretty jarring for me walking around. Not a great perfomance but hey alpha and all. still hope for a bit more smoothness otherwise fps pvp will produce a lot of vertigo
ChrisRoberts-Citizencon2015-DrunkwithStuffedAnimal.jpg
Hahahaha, i've never seen it, amazing.
Is out to about 60k backers already. In two-three weeks it will be open to everyone probably.
bee
Member
anyone tried this, people claiming it's more stable as most of the ptu crashes are server side?
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3uj93k/no_ptu_access_play_it_solo/
his screens look great
http://imgur.com/a/A4zjv
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3uj93k/no_ptu_access_play_it_solo/
his screens look great
http://imgur.com/a/A4zjv
Dictator93
Member
i only tried it for 5 minutes to look around a bit (it looks sooo good) but yea its pretty jarring for me walking around. Not a great perfomance but hey alpha and all. still hope for a bit more smoothness otherwise fps pvp will produce a lot of vertigo
Yeah for me there is always 1 cores/ thread that is always pegged at 100% (but sometimes it is two, thread 3 and 7). As they said in the last monthly update, they are jobifying the main thread apparently which should help alleviate this problem. Without considering DX12 of course.
In the mean time, I just locked the FPS to 30 with adaptive vsync and pumped up the resolution. 1620p looks pretty alright.
One thing that is cool btw, transparent surfaces can now have shadow cast on them. The highlight and shadow on the right are being cast onto the canopy glass. Very cool
Someone posted some really great impressions on that same reddit thread. Worth quoting here:
"No, seriously. Having finally had a chance to sit down and actually play the kind of experience CIG is planning without the game crashing every 5 minutes, I can see there's an actual game they're building here. They've built up mission / universe lore in the journal, a surprising number of missions you can carry out, NPCs, voice acting, exploration... etc. It still seems bare-bones because this is the first early pass, but for the first time the gameplay experience actually feels DEEP.
There's nothing like pulling up to a derelict station, parking your ship (seamlessly -- it's great knowing you can park wherever the hell you want and your ship will still be there when you come back, providing nobody blows it up), and flying in to explore an extremely creepy place. Or some missions have mini-games, where you have to trace down the source of an unexpected transmission, or rescue somebody. If you get into a pitched fight, you feel every hit your ship takes, and you'll see it afterwards the next time you park somewhere. Then you have to make the choice between flying to one of the outposts for repairs, or forging ahead with your current objective.
I can only imagine how much more incredible this will be when multiplayer is stable and you're going through all of this in a larger multi-crew ship. I can't wait!
It's official: Anybody who says this game is fluff is horribly, horribly uninformed. CIG still has a TON of work to do to finish developing things, but they absolutely haven't been sitting on their hands all this time."
Well, I woke up today to find the launcher glitched, showing graphical elements seemingly downloading the wide release version of the game and a "Ready to launch" button at the same time. I turned it off and on again. It showed 1.3 as "Ready to launch" and when I switched to the PTU tab, it had an "Update" button. Instead of hitting that, I clicked the gear and clicked "Verify."
Now it's "updating" and downloading stuff and says it'll take five days -- DAYS -- to complete.
Sigh
Now it's "updating" and downloading stuff and says it'll take five days -- DAYS -- to complete.
Sigh
CyberPunked
Member
Almost at $99M. What are peoples guesses for when $100M will be reached? I'm gonna go with Tuesday.
I think the sale finishes tomorrow and after the initial fully unlocked sale influx yesterday it is gone down, as one would expect. So it won't reach 100M on tuesday, probably only after the next stream at the earliest.
Jimbostein
Neo Member
I think you're glossing over the most important part of this reddit post.
This method of renaming the persistant universe map from Crusader to one of the DFM maps, and changing the ruleset of arena commander to behave like the persistent universe, allows ANYONE to play the 2.0 patch offline.
This method, although tedious, works...and it works fantastically! I don't have PTU access, but following the steps of the post allowed me to download the 2.0 patch and play it offline using Arena Commander. I played for about 1.5 hours straight without any crashes.
It behaves just like you were on the PTU server. You spawn in the station, can select your ships (one of the steps involves logging into the launcher so you can get the latest "token" that tells the game you have an account) that you own in 1.3, and fly.
All the features work. The missions work. Random encounters work. Pirate attacks and AI works. The only thing that is annoying (and apparently this is a 2.0.0e thing) is when you want to use quantum travel, the names of the destinations don't show up. You're QT'ing to a new area in the blind.
Plus, it's much, much more stable (since there's nobody else around you running into crashes that takes down the entire server) than the current PTU.
I can't stress this enough. EVERYONE that can currently log into the current star citizen launcher, can use this method to play version 2.0, alone. Right Now.
This method just became public last night, the day after a US holiday, so I have no idea what CIG's stance is on this way of accessing the current PTU content. Technically 100% of the downloaded files are from CIG servers, and although CheatEngine is used...it's only used to rename files and is offline-only. But the obvious caveat is that the offline mode is completely unsupported, and you shouldn't expect the game to behave as if it would if it was still online. Any bugs you encounter in offline (like the missing quantum travel destinations) could likely be the result of your jury-rigging the game to work in unintended ways.
Have fun!
Dictator93
Member
my x52pro is currently broken under win10, and I find other people and posts on the internet that have the same prolbem. But no one has posted a working solution / thread communication stopped. Sigh.
Zalusithix
Member
The one major downside is that I have no idea when we'll see updated org management tools, or even what is planned for them. I could start implementing a system, but it would be a waste of time if they're going to fold that sort of functionality into the site proper. Even if I assume the functionality wont exist, tying an unofficial system into an official one isn't trivial. Things like google sheets are free for all anonymous stopgap measures. A real system would have to have identity verification and such, but having people make a second account, and then manually verifying and linking it to the respective official member account is a pain.
I've toyed with the idea of having a chatbot system using a dummy account that's constantly in the Neogaf chat channel listening. Such a thing should make it possible to auto generate verified accounts by people just requesting access in chat. It would then private message the account access details back to the requester. It could ultimately also provide in game functionality without having to alt tab out to a browser since it would exist in the chat system.
It'll ratchet back up again before it ends. Most likely not to the same levels it was when the floodgates opened, but much like a Kickstarter, there's an uptick to be expected when people are faced with either committing to a purchase or having to wait until the next time something goes on sale which could be a year (or more) from now. I'm not certain it'll bring us to the 100 million milestone, but it's looking like we'll definitely hit it before the end of the year.
Have you tried unistalling the drivers and seeing if it works as a standard HID?
Either way, Saitek is the worst...
Dictator93
Member
To get it to work, I had to bypass auto install (which just freezes and does nothing) and their own .exe and instead manual search for non-win10 drivers.
wut
I have no idea what happened, it was working not even 2 weeks ago. Then I plug it back in and the device was not even getting recognized...
Try disabling power management.
hah
BTW, it is hard to get across how gob-smackingly detailed everything is. This use of light sources is rather sublime.
I had some trouble getting captures due to crashing, but what I did manage in my extremely brief time... still looks great.
obmb is back baby
Why so high res?
Textures look stunning! But it's missing AO isn't it?
This seems to have AO. Weird
Dubbedinenglish
Banned
There is s way to disable the driver integrity check forW10. Had a similar problem with the xinput wrapper to get my PS3 controller working for W10. On my phone now but the instructions should be out there.
Dictator93
Member
It has AO, it is just CryEngine's AO actively avoids to have halo'ing and over-darkening based upon lighting conditions (which is something that most AOs do and most people expect from it). But if you were to go into a dark corner, where there are no point lights around, it would be as dark as any other AO.
It uses two techniques. Colour bleeding & G-buffer light awareness.
SSDO 1, SSDO 2 (page 16)
I did try that before, but it did not work for some reason.
Will give it an attempt when I get back later in the evening.
Just according to CIG's / Saitek's keikaku.
CyberPunked
Member
I think when 2.0 is released not in PTU, they'll be a surge.
Zalusithix
Member
Fund counter rolled back too. Saying 98.2 million now when it was on the verge of 99 earlier in the day. So there's close to a million dollars worth of transactions in unprocessed limbo land. Congrats everybody, we've broken their game servers and their payment servers!
For real or just facetious? It is hard to tell, for obvious reasons.
So the patcher's "update" function has conked out twice now. I checked it after leaving it alone for a while only to find it not downloading anything but rather displaying a message about how there's a new launcher version and I should restart the launcher. Which was bullshit, of course; it seems to be just a default message that appears when something goes wrong and its connection to the Internet is severed.
The problem appeared to be with my old DSL modem, so I switched to the new one I got this week. Set it up and got turned the patcher back on. The modem seems to be doing great. The patcher has ... many hours of "file verification" (downloading) to go. It's like it downloaded almost nothing during the 10 hours I let it go Friday evening into Saturday morning.
The last time I could see the patcher's progress was about 15 minutes ago when it was a little more than halfway done, with about 14 GB left to download. I can't see it anymore because randomly my screen went blank for several seconds before everything reappeared. Now the patcher window is just a black box. Right-clicking on its icon in the taskbar brings up nothing and I can't minimize or un-minimize it by clicking its icon on the taskbar. But I can drag the window around by left-click-holding, and when I mouse over the window, sometimes the cursor changes to a text-selection cursor, as if the patch notes text and whatnot is still there, my video card just doesn't want to show it or anything else in the window.
Firefox's tab bar is giving me graphical glitches now, too. I guess Radeon Crimson doesn't play nice with Windows 10? I just installed that lovely thing on Friday.
Task Manager shows that Star Citizen is still downloading shit over the network and writing shit to the hard drive, so ... I guess I'll leave it be for now? Last I saw, it estimated that it would be finished by about 11 p.m. (it's almost 5:30 right now).
What a pain. This is why I never signed up for the PTU before now.
[edit] Screen just derped out again and went black for a second, then came back, and now I can see the Star Citizen window again. 13.5 GB to go. I should have bought a GeForce, shouldn't I have?
The problem appeared to be with my old DSL modem, so I switched to the new one I got this week. Set it up and got turned the patcher back on. The modem seems to be doing great. The patcher has ... many hours of "file verification" (downloading) to go. It's like it downloaded almost nothing during the 10 hours I let it go Friday evening into Saturday morning.
The last time I could see the patcher's progress was about 15 minutes ago when it was a little more than halfway done, with about 14 GB left to download. I can't see it anymore because randomly my screen went blank for several seconds before everything reappeared. Now the patcher window is just a black box. Right-clicking on its icon in the taskbar brings up nothing and I can't minimize or un-minimize it by clicking its icon on the taskbar. But I can drag the window around by left-click-holding, and when I mouse over the window, sometimes the cursor changes to a text-selection cursor, as if the patch notes text and whatnot is still there, my video card just doesn't want to show it or anything else in the window.
Firefox's tab bar is giving me graphical glitches now, too. I guess Radeon Crimson doesn't play nice with Windows 10? I just installed that lovely thing on Friday.
Task Manager shows that Star Citizen is still downloading shit over the network and writing shit to the hard drive, so ... I guess I'll leave it be for now? Last I saw, it estimated that it would be finished by about 11 p.m. (it's almost 5:30 right now).
What a pain. This is why I never signed up for the PTU before now.
[edit] Screen just derped out again and went black for a second, then came back, and now I can see the Star Citizen window again. 13.5 GB to go. I should have bought a GeForce, shouldn't I have?
Crimson has been working really nicely for me in just about any way possible. The thing about the SC patcher is that it uses torrents, so it will be very connection intensive i.e. it will spawn lots of connections and beat at your HDD if it isn't very fast. Lots of connections have a tendency to saturate routing tables in cheaper networking devices. The other thing about torrents is that they saturate bandwidth in both directions really easily.
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