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[KKRT00]

Retaliator greybox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc-7Luzbxxg

Best ship.

Also, someone at CIG has good taste in music/films.

Look great, i actually like the style of this greybox, i wouldnt say no to ship looking like that, grey and metallic, with maybe some blue like mass effect.
---

It's a severely underserved market with a ton of disposable income. Lots of whales. The hope is that CIG doesn't design the finished game and economy around the people who would gladly spend that kind of money.

People really should stop worrying about that. Expensive ships are not single-player ships, so team effort will speed up process of obtaining them greatly.
You will be able to get income by very different professions, not like in theme park MMOs only by farming or doing quests, by FPS combat, by salvage, by mining, by normal trading, by scamming and speculating other players, by pirating, by ransom, by stealing etc
And there is still two other components of this game, SP campaign and modable MP mode.

This game cant be seen as 'it will be pay to win' or 'it will be normal mmo', there are to many variables.

---

I'm trying to imagine the logistics of how the game will perform with like 10 ships on screen of the size and detail of the Retaliator and Constellation. It's going to be insane when actual Star Citizen launches.

Occlusion Culling and LoD.

 

[The Dear Leader]

Occlussion Culling and LoD.

wut

 

[elyetis]

wut

You don't render what you don't see, and you don't need to render at full detail a ship too far from you.

 

[Keasar]

Idris was $1,000 or $1,250 depending on the model if I recall correctly (two version were available at different times).

There have been people which bought the $10k Wing Commander pledge package though. Pretty crazy for me to comprehend, but it's not my money so they can choose to do it if they wish.

Oh right, it was 1000. Was there something that cost 5000?

 

[Zabojnik]

Who's the TNGS guy CIG hired?

 

[epmode]

People really should stop worrying about that. Expensive ships are not single-player ships, so team effort will speed up process of obtaining them greatly.
You will be able to get income by very different professions, not like in theme park MMOs only by farming or doing quests, by FPS combat, by salvage, by mining, by normal trading, by scamming and speculating other players, by pirating, by ransom, by stealing etc.

Yeah, I've heard all of that before. It sounds good and I'll be very happy if it works out!

But I prefer to judge CIG's actions rather than their plans. And right now, the game is absolutely pay to win and CIG is still charging illegal amounts of money for internet spaceships that exist only as concept art. Even single-seaters. Don't forget that they're also asking a lot for garbage equipment for the few ships that are actually finished, and they had no problem doing so months before Arena Commander went live.

I was OK with the prices during the initial crowdfunding phase but it gets a little more awkward with each ship they introduce.

Believe me, no one wants this game to be good more than me. I've put a lot of money in, myself. I think the the concerns are reasonable though. I mean, have you seen the forums? A significant amount of people are down $10,000+ and they're still buying! There isn't a publisher in the industry that wouldn't alter their plans to account for them.

But in spite of the crazy numbers, this is still crowdfunded so there's a chance it'll turn out well in the end.

 

[exmachina64]

wut

I love your response.

 

[The Dear Leader]

I love your response.

I was incredibly tired and tI had no idea what either of those words or acronyms meant lol.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Oh right, it was 1000. Was there something that cost 5000?

Ah, nearly forgot... The Scythe I'm pretty sure.

 

[exmachina64]

I was incredibly tired and tI had no idea what either of those words or acronyms meant lol.

I didn't notice the timestamp, but I've never seen that gif before.

 

[epmode]

Ah, nearly forgot... The Scythe I'm pretty sure.

The Scythe was $350 I think. The ridiculous resell price ($1000+) is because it's actually a limited ship. Only ~500 were sold.

 

[Akuun]

Just tried racing with my Aurora. My ship is goddamn slow, and my computer struggles with rendering the racetrack.

I think I'll just wait for the game to be developed further lol.

The Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. It works nicely enough for me, the twisting joystick is nice for rolling, it has more than enough shortcut buttons (for now) and it's very affordable.

Damn. That thing is only $40 now? I've been using a cheaper Logitech joystick that doesn't have a twist, and that cost about $30 when I got it.

 

[Danthrax]

Oh right, it was 1000. Was there something that cost 5000?

I believe you're thinking of the War Pack, which used to be called the Space Marshall package. It costs $5,000 and it comes with an Idris-P as well as an Aurora MR, 300i, 350r, Hornet F7C, Freelancer and Constellation Andromeda.

The Scythe was $350 I think. The ridiculous resell price ($1000+) is because it's actually a limited ship. Only ~500 were sold.

The Scythe was sold for a mere ("mere") $200, actually.

 

[KKRT00]

I mean, have you seen the forums?

Nah i'm staying away from them.

I personally only pledged 35$ the first day of the campaign and if i pledge more, it will because i want to support them more, not to get anything in return, which will probably happen when they already release the game.
I actually like the concept of milking stupid people, i mean there will be riots in the end when the game releases and they understand that what they pledged was useless and wont give them any advantage, but hey no one forced them to do it, so i so no one should feel sorry

Ps. I believe Chris Roberts when he says that it is his dream game, so i dont worry much about quality of this title and definitely do not judge quality from the samples we have now.

 

[Onemic]

I just hope they dont keep this P2W model of paying ridiculous prices for ships when the game comes out.

 

[Dictator93]

Well I just acquired an x52 pro for €100.

Now just to wait and see how the space brick that is the auror handles with that.

edit:

also,

 

[staticneuron]

Well I just acquired an x52 pro for €100.

Now just to wait and see how the space brick that is the auror handles with that.

edit:

That is one large ship.

I want to go in for exploration so I was thinking about a Constellation Aquila but I am going to wait for the final Carrack specs before making a choice on a multicrew exploration ship.

 

[ASTROID2]

Glitched through the floor.

I had no control over the character he just continued to move backwards while in the forward walking animation.

The leg bends a little wired in the walking animation too when it's fully forward.

 

[Dictator93]

SLI patch.

Downloading, cannot wait to try it out!

edit: 1080p 60 excluding CPU limited scenarios it seems at which points it drops to 45 due to tripple buffered Vsync.

edit 2: Further test reveals that to be a lie, this game still manhandles my rig. MANHANDLES IT.

 

[Dictator93]

Gladiuuuuuuuuus

 

[Zabojnik]

Gladiuuuuuuuuus

Retaliator's little brother. Loved reading / looking at how it slowly came together in the latest Jump Point. Great first effort from freelance concept artist Gavin Rothery over in UK.

 

[Danthrax]

Soooo I'm reading the September Monthly Report and this part of Austin's report caught my eye:

Concept work for our next planetside environment – Terra Prime – is nearing completion, and full production will soon commence.

Taking into consideration that Void Alpha is conspicuously missing from this month's report, and Void Alpha is the studio that's been working on the Terra Prime environments for at least a year ... I wonder if something went wrong. Because it sounds like Void Alpha's been kicked off the payroll, all of its work has been scrapped and Austin is restarting the creation of Terra Prime.

Doing a search, it looks like they haven't even appeared on the monthly report since June. I just noticed now. In that report, they said:

Terra Prime is looking better & better thanks to some additional help courtesy of the fine folks at CiG Austin. We meet on a regular basis to review the production art in progress, specifically Centermass & the monorail station. We are given a steady flow of diverse feedback, ranging from technical advice to art direction. All that has gotten us that much closer to completing the final look of the monorail station & it is looking mighty gorgeous!

Maybe Void Alpha's quality wasn't up to Chris Roberts' standards.

If all that work has been wasted and Austin is starting Terra Prime from scratch, that really sucks. The persistent universe feels just a little farther away.

 

[The Dear Leader]

Aurora HUD concept.... oh yes.

 

[Zabojnik]

Maybe Void Alpha's quality wasn't up to Chris Roberts' standards.

If all that work has been wasted and Austin is starting Terra Prime from scratch, that really sucks. The persistent universe feels just a little farther away.

Interesting hypothesis. That Terra preview they did was looking mighty fine, considering how early it was, so maybe quality has nothing to do with it. Void Alpha are a tiny, tiny studio in any case. Maybe the planetside pipeline was set up in such a way that their services weren't needed anymore, who knows. Would be interesting to find out.

Void Alpha:
- Brian Yam, Concept Artist
- Denis Renshaw, Senior Environment Artist
- Gabriel Galaz, Level Designer
- Mark Day, President
- Miranda Marquez, 3D Artist

 

[kutthoat5150]

nice catch on that Terra Prime part, this video was from over a year ago which they put out showing an early work in progress of the Terra landing zone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UaFSd-ezQc

this recent sneak peak is from an unknown location but I think its Terra as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cC14YaZluk

But I think Terra is an entire planet with multiple landing locations so maybe some of those are farther along than others which might explain the concept stages

 

[KKRT00]

Gladiuuuuuuuuus

I have Star Wars Racer wipe from this and it makes me sad, because will never get a sequel again

 

[Dictator93]

Being a graphics dude I love this stuff:

The graphics team have been working on some of the core tech to benefit each of the art pipelines (ships, characters, environments & vfx). For the ships we’ve been continuing work on the new damage shader that will give us fine grain location specific damage. This will be crucial for capital ships where the traditional method of cutting a ship into numerous meshes won’t be practical due to their immense scale, but this will also benefit smaller ships. We’ve also started work on the shader that will enable us to create custom paint jobs. This isn’t as simple as just swapping some textures because our paint jobs need to be sharper than is possible with traditional textures to maintain our high quality bar, but the paint also needs to degrade over time and respond correctly to the damage system (e.g. bending & burning).

For the vfx team we’ve created a volumetric lighting shader for particles to approximate complex effects such as multiple-scattering of light and volumetric shadowing. To achieve this the vfx artists bake out 6 separate passes of an explosion or smoke from an offline fluid simulation, and the shader uses these to calculate how the in-game lights would bounce around inside the gas. The end result is smoke and explosion particles that are lit correctly with the in-game lights but approach the quality of an offline render.

We’ve also been working on two general pieces of tech that should benefit the whole game, the first of which is 32 bit depth rendering. We’re moving towards 64 bit physics to handle enormous maps, however rendering doesn’t require such precision because from the cameras perspective everything is actually relatively nearby. However most games actually use just 24 bit depth buffers and this isn’t enough for large space scenes and so we’ve just completed the transition to 32 bit rendering. This has allowed us to enlarge the small dog-fighting maps which we desperately needed since the recent speed increase of the ships! The other general tech we’ve been developing is the ability to combine multiple textures at run-time to allow us to dynamically combine multiple objects into fewer large objects. This will significantly improve rendering performance while maintaining the flexibility and modularity of building the characters, ships and environments out of many smaller textures, which is crucial for the persistent universe (customisable ships, clothing & hangars etc).

Finally correctly lit particle fx will be fantastic.

 

[Daedardus]

The one thing I don't like about Star Citizen is that all the ships are almost too good. How can you ever choose one to fly?

 

[Dictator93]

The one thing I don't like about Star Citizen is that all the ships are almost too good. How can you ever choose one to fly?

 

[Daedardus]

Perfect.

 

[KKRT00]

Hahahahaha, amazing

 

[Keasar]

The claaaw!

Will be interesting to see if they actually implement this and how the physics will interact with each other. Or if it will be more like just a magnetic grab of an object.

 

[Zabojnik]

The claaaw!

 

[Danthrax]

nice catch on that Terra Prime part, this video was from over a year ago which they put out showing an early work in progress of the Terra landing zone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UaFSd-ezQc

this recent sneak peak is from an unknown location but I think its Terra as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cC14YaZluk

But I think Terra is an entire planet with multiple landing locations so maybe some of those are farther along than others which might explain the concept stages

Yep, that second link is indeed Terra Prime. That's its Blocks area, which supposed to be the city's seedy underbelly. In the June Monthly Report's Void Alpha section, there are a couple pieces of art resembling that video.

So there are three areas in the city of Terra Prime, according to the Terra Galactic Guide: the landing area, the Blocks and Downtown (also referred to as City Center). Among those, It looks like Void Alpha only worked on the Blocks and the landing area, considering your first YouTube link above to the landing area and your second one to the Blocks, not to mention all of Void Alpha's monthly reports only mentioning progress on those two areas.

Although several monthly reports refer to Void Alpha working on Sherman, a city on a planet in an entirely different system than Terra (it's in Castra). It seems like they only did concept art and some design work for it, though.

I think there's the possibility that the Terra Prime work that CIG Austin is starting will be for the Downtown/Center City area and the two other cities on that planet, New Austin and Quasi. Void Alpha's work on The Blocks and the landing area may not have been scrapped, although it still seems like they've been booted off the project considering they've been missing from the monthly reports for three months now. Perhaps they went too slowly? I mean, after working for probably a year and a half, Void Alpha only got two planetside areas ready to go with a third concepted out. I always thought their reports seemed to indicate that their progress was very slow, so that's the explanation that would make the most sense to me.

 

[phoenixyz]

Maybe they got integrated into CIG Austin. They were only 5 people after all.

 

[MrBig]

Maybe they got integrated into CIG Austin. They were only 5 people after all.

Void Alpha is a contract studio based in the Bay Area - they probably finished their project and moved on. As CIG is itself is expanding there would be less need to keep small contract studios on call than when VA was first hired.

 

[RK9039]

Aurora HUD concept.... oh yes.

O
M
G

I want it right now.

 

[Shrike Alvaron]

I read on the forums that CGBot's contract expired and, presumably due to the continued hiring at CIG's own studios, they didn't see a need to renew the contract when they could bring the work in house. It might be the same for Void Alpha as well. As for the comments on finishing the concepts for Terra, it might just mean concepts for other areas that hadn't been gotten to yet while it was in Void Alpha's hands.

 

[kutthoat5150]

Being a graphics dude I love this stuff:


Finally correctly lit particle fx will be fantastic.

Awesome to the max stuff right here, another favorite was from the fps team report saying that in his 10 years in the industry he has never worked on a game as detailed as star citizen, really can't wait for that reveal at pax

 

[KKRT00]

Awesome to the max stuff right here, another favorite was from the fps team report saying that in his 10 years in the industry he has never worked on a game as detailed as star citizen, really can't wait for that reveal at pax

Yep, monthly report was awesome in terms of technical inside.

I cant wait for new commercial next week.

 

[Daedardus]

AnythingFPS is on a roll these days. Those EMP grenades and radar scanners are over the top.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3Krj5_lHXw&

 

[Danthrax]

Wow, those look really cool.

 

[MrBig]

While pretty, I don't feel like they fit the grounded aesthetic of SC. They look like something I'd expect to see in unreal tournament. The effects are certainly incongruent with what is currently in arena commander.

 

[Dictator93]

So I was messing around with a friend in AC and you can totally get out of your ship and mag boot to other surfaces (like other ships... lol).

 

[KKRT00]

Flight acrobatics DLC confirmed!

 

[Zabojnik]

While pretty, I don't feel like they fit the grounded aesthetic of SC. They look like something I'd expect to see in unreal tournament. The effects are certainly incongruent with what is currently in arena commander.

Putting aside the fact that they're far from being the final FPS reveal version, let alone the final final version of the explosions, this is the beauty of SC's development. If enough people complain about it, they'll change it for the better, like they always do. They'd probably improve it anyway, given Chris Robert's standards for ... anything, really.

I'll be disappointed if this game comes out before 2018. /Daedardus

 

[Dictator93]

56 Million.

obligatory:

 

[RK9039]

So I was messing around with a friend in AC and you can totally get out of your ship and mag boot to other surfaces (like other ships... lol).

Lmao, that is awesome.

AnythingFPS is on a roll these days. Those EMP grenades and radar scanners are over the top.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3Krj5_lHXw&

Yeah he's on fire, there are more grenades in this module than Destiny.

 

[Tommyhawk]

The 890 Jump will be on sale on Friday for the small sum of 600$.

Hey guys! I promised to keep the forums informed when we lock down plans for a concept ship sale. So, here goes: the Origin 890 Jump luxury spacecraft will be available starting on Friday. This will be a wave 3 concept sale, including the in-game items and LTI. The ship will run $600, and a limited number will be made available. The first allotment of 890 ships will go on sale during the CitizenCon livestream on Friday, followed by three additional allotments to cover backers in other time zones (specific times to be announced later in the week.) Tune in later in the week to hear more about the 890 Jump itself; we'll have stats, holoviewer, concept art and more ready for Friday... it's a big, sexy ship that would make a great organization headquarters.


https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/186116/890-jump-concept-sale-plans/p1

 

[Smiley90]

The 890 Jump will be on sale on Friday for the small sum of 600$.

Hey guys! I promised to keep the forums informed when we lock down plans for a concept ship sale. So, here goes: the Origin 890 Jump luxury spacecraft will be available starting on Friday. This will be a wave 3 concept sale, including the in-game items and LTI. The ship will run $600, and a limited number will be made available. The first allotment of 890 ships will go on sale during the CitizenCon livestream on Friday, followed by three additional allotments to cover backers in other time zones (specific times to be announced later in the week.) Tune in later in the week to hear more about the 890 Jump itself; we'll have stats, holoviewer, concept art and more ready for Friday... it's a big, sexy ship that would make a great organization headquarters.


https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/186116/890-jump-concept-sale-plans/p1

Obligatory