The workaround to model an entire miniaturized solar system was to make everything in the engine very, very small. The entire star system is still on an island-sized map and everything in it is microscopic.
how did they think that would work long-term? wtf lol
this is so fucking funny
Each new thing I hear about Star Citizen, I think "yeah Microsoft was right about Freelancer" a bit more.
What does this mean? I'm not really up to speed on this controversy, but I have fond memories of Freelancer.
Freelancer was incomplete upon release and had a few features which were added in later by modders. Chris Roberts blamed Microsoft for it, and of course Gamers rallied against the big evil publisher.
What came out later in dribs and drabs was the narrative that Roberts was doing to Freelancer what he's now doing to Star Citizen (endless feature bloat, ridiculous perfectionism, etc) and Microsoft finally had enough and told him to get the game ready for release, or else.
Idk what exactly happened, but the more I look at Star Citizen the more I think the only reason Freelancer even made it to stores was because of Microsoft holding a gun to Roberts' head.
this is the kind of ridiculousness that feels like lenged.
Surely no one is that stupid. Right?
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but iirc, the reason he chose CryEngine was basically because Crysis looked pretty. That's it, and the reason it's never been fixed is because of what UylssesT said.
The entire star system is still on an island-sized map and everything in it is microscopic. That means weird collision and physics errors are inevitable.
oh my god even your average gamer who's never coded anything longer than
hello_world.cppknows that this is a bad idea from the simple experience of like, idk, installing a mod that makes you really small in GTA or something.(Super Monkey Ball voice) FALL OUT
this is similar to the Kerbal Space Program Kraken right? floating point errors due to the massive scale involved? At least in the KSP case they could mitigate it by moving space instead of moving the ship. In the Star Citizen case they'll have to get really clever.
Maybe you're thinking Outer Wilds. The kraken in KSP is due to a lot of stuff but it mostly comes down to the vagaries of n-body physics sims on dozens of objects that are touching too close. Mods that fuse ships together (auto struts or the like) remove most kraken attacks.
Outer Wilds does a lot of dynamic physics stuff and does indeed move the universe around the player.
Apparently KSP moves the universe now too, which caused the opposite problem of exploding nearby ships as you passed them. Which honestly is fucking rad, like you're sonic booming them to death.
Outer Wilds also I think switches to a simplified physics system for small, faraway objects, so they don't succumb to floating point bullshit while you're away from them.
KSP has a dozen tricks to sell you the illusion of traveling vast distances without actually having to deal with the consequences of putting vast distances in the game world, I remember one of the original devs HarvesteR having a website with dev diaries going back to the earliest alpha versions of the game but I can't find it now.
Outer Wilds also had the genius idea of making all the planets actually just... really small. Like, in-universe. I maintain the opinion that this is the only way to make a true open-world space game.
n-body physics
KSP never had n-body physics, but you can read about the Kraken and how it was solved here. Basically when you go above a certain speed the game will stop actually speeding up your ship and instead speed up the universe around you.
It doesn't have n-body physics on orbital simulation but every rocket part is physical to every other part on the same craft. It's how space stations get really wobbly.
I'll say it again, move this entire shit to Unity or Unreal, set a deadline of 24 months. By this time in 2025 you'll be selling DLCs and expansions instead of making excuses for yet another beta shit. The only thing realy stopping this is ego and sunk cost.
For half a billion dollars, he could have released Wing Commander: Privateer several hundred times over. I don't even think its really ego, at this point. The studio is making more money with their shitty alpha-demo status than any finished product could realistically expect.
The product is the idea that you will have this spaceship that you paid a lot of money for and that makes you better than the plebs. :so-true:
star citizen is still a thing? isn't bethesda about to release a space game, too? one that didn't take more than ten years to develop, at that?
I mean, Bethesda started concept development of Starfield in 2004, and it's been in active development for like 9 years now iirc?
elite dangerous is an extremely similar game, was announced at around the same time, and released a couple years after the announcement
Yep, that's usually what I'd recommend people play instead of Scam Citizen. Fun game!
Most immersive space trucking game and Sweet Jesus did I just fly between binary stars jump scare simulator.
Yes but it'll be a done game, and supposedly Star Citizen was "in development" for over a year before the Kickstarter.
The workaround to model an entire miniaturized solar system was to make everything in the engine very, very small
They're hard to find now, and I'm sure the oldest ones are gone forever, but HarvesteR from the original Kerbal Space Program dev team had a series of blogs about all of the custom code he had to add to Unity to make that game work. Here's one and here's another. The tl;dr was that going big introduces rounding errors which get worse the bigger you go, and the solutions included replacing the solar system with 1:6000 scale models until you actually needed a full-size planet, and moving the whole universe around the player (insteadd of moving the player through the universe) in order to keep gameplay near the origin and therefore keep rounding errors small and unnoticeable.
Building the virtual equivalent of an Alcubierre Drive so I can simulate launching a rocket to the moon.
and moving the whole universe around the player (insteadd of moving the player through the universe) in order to keep gameplay near the origin and therefore keep rounding errors small and unnoticeable.
hey, i remember that episode of futurama
I look forward to Chris Roberts rewriting the lore to explain why this has happened instead of taking any practical efforts towards fixing it.
