Knowing how games normally work helps to understand what it is that Cloud Imperium are doing differently... and why.
You mention "other games have option for that". How do other games work? They have scripted NPC's in the main, even those games with apparently complex 'follower' behaviours are scripted. The more involved the behaviour of the NPC the 'heavier' the scripting needs to be. Scripting an NPC (usually in Boolean code language) is laborious and takes time. Someone has to sit down and code for any behaviour they want an NPC to exhibit that hasn't already been coded for another NPC, otherwise they use the same script over and over again for each NPC. Scripted NPC's also have the limitation that they cannot break from their scripted behaviours, given certain stimuli they will always react the same way.
The approach Cloud Imperium take to this brute force manual labour in bulk that is standard for games is to write tools that make it possible to automagically create variation without the need for all that manual (expensive) bums on seats developer time stuff. Example, one guy creates a river in the game, it takes him many months to put one river onto one planet, but while he is doing that he is making a tool the level designers can use to put dozens of rivers and lakes of many types onto a planet in a mater of a few hours. The guy who made the tool is an expensive highly trained developer, however the team trained to use the tool he created can be day one school leavers on their first job by the dozen.. so now you have the ability to have dozens x dozens of lakes and rivers created in a few hours. The same with planets, moons, and space stations.
Cloud Imperium are doing the exact same thing with NPC production, but they aren't as simple as level designed environments they have many dependencies and because of that the toolset has to be more complex since it touches many other features and mechanics in the game such as:
The UI.
Animation.
AI (this is the 'universe awareness' and behavioural choice that CI are aiming for).
Scripting (yes even this game has scripting for certain AI behaviours), behaviours such as eating, drinking, going to the toilet showering as well as any specific behaviours they have enabled.
Character creation - clothing / armour styles etc
DNA - to allow every single game character to be a unique individual. "There are no background characters in Star Citizen."
Player useable dialogue interaction with NPC's
On demand facial animation to match the NPC's output dialogue.
This isn't even close to a full list of requirements. Other games have NPC's that perform a single function and have a fixed set of responses, example in GTA most pedestrians crouch and hold their hands up if there is violence nearby (this behaviour is seen in the current Star Citizen game since it comes standard with CryEngine, but it is only placeholder), this is not how NPC's will be in the game when they have all the systems ready for an NPC population. If you watch Tony Zurovec's presentations over the years you'll see Star Citizen's NPC's are going to be far more sophisticated. They will have personalities, they will have personal attachments - friends and family, they will have their own form of persistence (memory) and awareness of what is happening in the universe around them, they can make choices based upon their own preferences and experiences, they can migrate and take other types of work instead of just those they are scripted to do.
In short: The NPC population that is coming to Star Citizen is way more complex than you will find in other games, that is why it is taking so long to bring them into the game. They need persistence, they need the complex UI, they need the background services like Quanta and Quasar - to name but a few. We're going to see NPC's do things we've never seen before in any other game and the relationship the players have with those NPC's will be unlike any found in other games.
Star Citizen won't have 'gunners', barista's, bartenders, or baggage handlers, or door guards - it will have AI people doing those jobs - but those AI people will have a life away from those jobs. Just like any crew you can hire for your ship.
This is why Star Citizen has to be funded by real players and not men in suits looking to make a quick profit from investing in a product that will be old and forgotten the next time they want to push a new profit making product.
hey babe wake up its ulysses posting more star citizen slop :party-cat:
Rockstar's Bully had a "no background characters" rule in the PS2 era- every NPC was named and had some plot importance- and it pulled it off because the game had a small scope built to accommodate that sort of thing, not a sprawling grand scifi adventure taking place across multiple planets.
Hand-crafted characters and environments stay winning, outside of Minecraft-like goals in a game.
Most Star Citizen big spending true believers seem to also want focus, but they think they can have a program conjure up an entire universe where they can zoom in and see focus anyway. :lea-why:
Most Star Citizen big spending true believers seem to also want focus, but they think they can have a program conjure up an entire universe where they can zoom in and see focus anyway
The dumbest part is that for Star Citizen's budget you could probably do that on a groundbreaking scale just by using traditional procgen techniques and a small army of animators and writers. Like No Man's Sky makes a good go of it with all of a dozen people working on it, imagine what just a hundred artists making procgen parts and a team of engineers set to the task of good terrain generation could do over the course of an entire decade. There's no question the actual workers at CIG are talented, and it's a tragedy that their labor is being wasted redoing the same bullshit over and over because it ends up being outdated before anything is ever actually finished, or because they were told to do something stupid and it ended up not working.
Chris Roberts is notorious for wasteful micromanaging. One example was when months of modeling and texture work was thrown out because he didn't like the fidelity level on the boot laces of the uniforms.
Prey did that too, you can really tell when games take that approach.
Literally every bit of that is either not novel or is something that isn't done because it's a bad idea. Like NPCs have had fluid terrain traversal and climbing tech for I don't even know how long - I know it was already established enough that L4D did it 15 years ago, and the whole "but what about stopping in the middle of it to do something else?" bit is just a "literally why bother" sort of thing. Full NPC simulation is also a thing in everything from The Sims to Cities: Skylines, and doesn't get done in MMOs or shooters because "literally why bother." Even the procgen tool stuff is just industry standard at this point - they might be good tools, but they're not novel tools.
Everywhere Star Citizen set out to be cutting edge it's been beaten to the punch by other games and engines. And I've said this before, but I'd swear the actual devs responsible for doing real work at CIG are just doing whatever pointless bullshit they can to avoid having to deal with the management's ever-shifting and inane gameplay mechanic ideas, when they're not being made to redo a system that turned out to be a bad idea from the start. The fact that they've managed to fix the shambling shitheap that is CryEngine to the point that Star Citizen's silly real-scale simulationist bullshit works at all is an amazing technical achievement, and I can't help but wonder what those engineers would have managed without being undermined by the bizarre and constantly changing demands of CIG's management.
Even the procgen tool stuff is just industry standard at this point - they might be good tools, but they’re not novel tools.
Even as a hobbyist and the small time I had with Unity a few years ago and the procedural/random stuff is everywhere, with tons and tons of assets that you can buy(conveniently) from their asset store. I'm sure such tools exist for Unreal as well.
I mean you can go on YT and type "procedural [anything] Unity tutorial" and who knows how many videos you'll find.
And that is for amateurs/indies at a relatively very small price. The actual professional AAA industry is probably wasting millions on this stuff a year and I'm sure all the studios have varying degrees of this tech available.
SC is the definition of sunk cost fallacy, they keep going because the can't turn back around(rationalization, not actual truth). Scratch everything and start over 3-4 years ago using Unreal/Unity, the game would've been done already and they'd be selling DLCs/expansions right now.
Scratch everything and start over 3-4 years ago using Unreal/Unity, the game would’ve been done already and they’d be selling DLCs/expansions right now.
Honestly not even that, if they went with established methods for doing "good enough" instead of reinventing the wheel to do things in a pointlessly simulationist way (like I don't know if they ever gave up on it, but one of their big stumbling blocks was trying to make ships that flew through physicalized forces generated at their thrusters with the idea that then if one was destroyed it would "realistically" fuck up its maneuverability directly, instead of just abstracting this into a few numbers and then moving the ship directly by controlling its vector of movement based on the fact that faking it like that would yield indistinguishable end results from their absurd simulationist approach) they could have shipped the single player game with working systems and gotten the "MMO" side of it into a beta with all its core gameplay systems working and in place.
Still unclear what "NPC DNA" actually means aside from them all being theoretically unique, but even then it just sounds like advanced bethesda shit.
And like in Bethesda games a lot of it would if even real go unnoticed by players because they fundamentally do not interact with the world as an inhabitant of it would, so its just gonna be appreciated in youtube essays about it.
Still unclear what “NPC DNA” actually means aside from them all being theoretically unique,
That's all it means. It means each NPC is supposedly earmarked with attributes and that makes them a big deal. You know, how samples of petrochemicals in Star Wars Galaxies used to have a lot of weird attributes that varied widely between each name they had and it was a massive drum full of database spaghetti.
They will have personalities, they will have personal attachments - friends and family, they will have their own form of persistence (memory) and awareness of what is happening in the universe around them, they can make choices based upon their own preferences and experiences, they can migrate and take other types of work instead of just those they are scripted to do.
If they are supposedly so smart and aware, maybe they'll be like the rest of and just laugh at the actual real players and do everything to grief them.
MF'ers thinking they are making replicants or some such shit.
Right, like even if this were sort of true and not a ridiculous embellishment.....who cares? This isn't going to make the game fun.
But wait there's more!
It is incredible what Evo has been doing, as I've said before he is no mere human, he is a god among men. The attachment problem we've seen in other games has always had a cheat work-around, 3Laterals' work on DNA is revolutionary but without solving that attachment problem it would have been a tech curiosity waiting for a limited application. Like many research projects taking years to reach mainstream games.
The stuff they are doing is so 'out there' in terms of standard game development it is hard to describe even to those who have some experience, for the majority it just goes over their heads sadly.
If you ask players of most RPG's can the player use a rope or a ladder in the game? They'll say yes there are games like CoD or Splinter cell where you can do this... OK are there multiplayer games where you can do this? Can you do it in GTA for example, yes they have player ladder climbing.
OK. now.. how many games are there where the NPC's can climb ladders or even ropes (not counting where it it is scripted cut-scene type behaviour)? Now it's head-scratching time, there aren't so many of those, but they do exist.
How many games are there where the player can pause on a ladder to turn and shoot at something? Ok now we're narrowing the pack down, there are only a few out that that have that facility. Are there any games where NPC's can choose to climb a ladder or rope and be able to shoot from a ladder? I don't know of any, I certainly don't know of any multiplayer games that have it. There may be some but most don't have it.
Are there any games where you can climb a ladder and at any time jump off that ladder or rope in any direction you want to? Very very rare! Are there any games where NPC's (not a scripted cut-scene type behaviour) can do the same, decide to jump off a ladder or rope mid climb to carry out a behaviour like chase the player?
Have you ever played a game where the NPC will come along and know to cut the rope you are using to climb?
This is just one example of pushing those bounds, there are many more like it that Cloud Imperium are doing. We're going to see activities and behaviours that will shock people used to playing these types of first person experience games.
The thing I'm most looking forward to seeing, is another of those hard to describe features that in the normal world seem so mundane hardly worth commenting on but are close to miraculous in a game - the first time I see a shop vendor go off on holiday to another planet in another star system, just because he can.
But wait there's more!
It depends upon your influences. how you feel about a ship is partly as a result of your cultural memory. If you grew up with Star Wars or Babylon 5 then you'll instinctively understand what the Scorpius is about. If you're more of a Star Trek fan then the larger multi-crew ships like the Carrack or Endeavor will scratch that itch.
I am always interested to see new ships, but I wouldn't say excited. They are tools to do a job, or several jobs. If you haven't considered living a life in the game universe where you don't own (or use) your own ships then you tend not to really appreciate the freedom that having your own ship brings if it's always 'just there'.
I like to see the aesthetics of a ship, where some appeal to me and others don't. I don't like the Prowler, but I get why others would, I prefer the Valkyrie - not just because it can carry cargo and a vehicle - but also because that experience of being a helicopter door gunner resonates with my previous gaming experience in CoD or ArmA.
I have played games where there is not much else but dog-fighting and I like it for a while, especially if it has a purpose other than just 'Go Kill!', but I want variety.I want to be able to come alongside another ship and wander around it's corridors. I like the idea that each ship has it's own little community aboard it, with their own reasons for going where they go and doing what they do. I like the fact that this game, unlike any other game I've known, is just as fulfilling for the sight-seeing tourist. Where can you get that experience of looking at the calendar and knowing to book your flight to a star system that has the IAE going on, the Murray Cup Racing events, or some other event to come? Who ever thought there would be a game made where all you ever want to do is be a tourist or spectator / fan?
I played Freespace (all versions) for many hundreds of hours and it gained more life when the modders could add to it, but it always had the limitation that you were either in a flat screen briefing or cockpit bound. All those cap ships are just hulks with guns, laser turrets and missile launch bays. What we would have given to have been able to have boarding actions, or walk around our own fighter carrier! A lot of the features we dreamed of while playing Freespace are now a reality (with more to come) in Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
What I also like is to see the team get better at making ships, the Drake Cutter is way better than any ship of similar class 5 or more years ago. I like it. I much prefer the Corsair to the Constellations which are showing their age. I can see better choices are being made now, I could never wrap my head around the idea that you enter a ship through elevator doors that open and close while you are stood on them! That just breaks all immersion for me.
The aim of the game has always been that your ship would be your home, customised and filled with what you collected on your journey through your life in the verse. Not liking to rely on others I want my ship to allow me to do many things, like hold a vehicle, hold a party, use as a mobile shop. I also like the idea of having a fighting ship with a crew full of unique individuals so that when it arrives others in their little ships will see it and say 'Holy poo poo! We're for it now!' I want to be Admiral Adama sometimes!
In a nutshell it is as Chris Roberts described, actually living that cinematic experience of every sci-fi movie you've ever watched, playing in a living breathing universe that will go on around the players whether they interact with it or not, always dynamic, always changing.
I wanted to help fund a dream game I knew wouldn't get made any other way. I wanted to support it regularly so that artists could go to work without having to constantly worry if they needed to find another job next month, that their kids would be fed and bills paid. That's why I gave all the money I have over the years, the fleet of ships I've amassed are just a consequence of that, they were never the ultimate goal. I'd be just as happy to leave them in the hangar and set out on foot into the verse.
My goal is as it always was, to give other gamers better choices in the future.
Literally everything they listed has been around since HL1 at least.
You’re just baiting the SC treat defenders at this point and I’m here for it. Uncritical support to UT and pissing of cultists for a vapor ware game of all things.
You’re just baiting the SC treat defenders at this point and I’m here for it.
When someone here on Hexbear started calling me names and got really weird because I criticized Star Citizen, I decided that it was time to continue doing so with greater intensity from that point forward for as long as I had material to do so. That's my policy. :stalin-feels-good:
Protracted poster war, but this time it’s not a joke and seems to be inflicting actual psychic damage against the wannabe jpeg landlords.
Surrender? Never heard of the word. So they will have to try and take the ship (jpegs)! :bugs-stalin:
I don't name names, but considering how often that one particular treat defender has popped out to rage at me in threads not even about Star Citizen to remind me that I criticized that particular treat, sometimes days or even weeks later, meaning that that person follows and reads my posts on a regular basis...
Hi there! :mao-wave:
What?
Where did you hear that? I know the big spenders have cultlike behavior but that's the first time I heard about that.
There were Reddit threads after his video years ago on it where people talked about how someone should kill him that’s the extent of what I know lol
