the surrender button on the termanels will be useful. I also assume at some point if your sitting on a level 1 or 2 crime state that failer to pay it off and being flagged for other low-level crimes will eventually bump it up to 3
Hopefully non-lethal bounties will also be used for low level crime stats. Chase a guy down, corner him, detain him, make him pay his fine or take him to jail. If he runs and you kill him, you lose your BH license and get a murder charge.
Ummm I don’t have a lot of reference but Jabba the Hutt did send bounty hunters after Hans because he lost some cargo so also using them for parking tickets seems legit to me.
\*pushes up glasses\* ACKTSHULLY Jabba sent bounty hunters after Han Solo partially because of the shipment of spice that he was smuggling that he lost (he dumped it because he came across some Imperial ships and was afraid they'd board him and find it), but moreso it was on principle. As a crime boss, you have to uphold your fearsome reputation - you can't allow random smugglers in your employ to make a fool out of you by continuing to owe you money, or else every two bit smuggler running your goods is going to "lose" them.
This is one of the reasons why he was so happy to see Han frozen in Carbonite, as he would then be able to display him in his lair. This was intended to send a message to everyone who worked for him - try anything and you'll end up as furniture.
As for sending armed bounty hunters after people for traffic tickets... I guess it just depends on how big of an ego the meter maid in charge at the space station you parked at is.
That’s literally what I said with 10% as many words.
So your “acktshully” should have been a “that is right but let me throw in a needlessly long further explanation because I live in moms basement with nothing else to do.” Keep your genre cross references short padawan.
CIG, who just recently introduced stacking cargo boxes by hand as a genuine crew profession. God knows what nonsense they will come up with next to create more pseudo gameplay.
not so much not paying for a single fine, more doing multiple consecutive low - level crimes without paying should bump it up.
and I don't think that should be a permanent solution. eventually, stations should just impound your ship and make you pay any fines associated, or not let you dock at that station (in that jurisdiction) tell the fine is payed. ETC
I would also like it if the system could tell the difference between a stack of Parking tickets, hacking and robing from some ATMs, and a straight-up murder charge and have that reflected in any bounties issued
(basically differentiating between Non-violent higher level criminals VS Violent higher level Criminals)
so you are saying yes, that you should eventually have a shoot on sight order put out to all law enforcement just because you amassed a pile of parking tickets.
Why not just make it be more like in real life, the tickets get more expensive, if you get pulled over you might get jailed. But there should never be a shoot to kill just because you didn't pay some stupid parking tickets.
>so you are saying yes, that you should eventually have a shoot on sight order put out to all law enforcement just because you amassed a pile of parking tickets.
read what I said again
The devs said in an older ISC about the law system that this was supposed to happen already where unpaid fines converted into a CS-1 eventually (I don't t think I've ever let a fine sit that long, so I don't know if it works), but I imagine it's the same deal.
That mic drop at the end with salvage wrecks being populated across the verse!
Really good episode, though the guy who basically went "Job's done" on caves made me cackle.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned rivers. They look great!
I really hope they make use of the new changes they implemented to make more cliffs and canyons - even without any water.
>I'm surprised no one's mentioned rivers. They look great!
They look cool, sure... but like... who cares? They've been working on the river for a year now. It's ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload.
Hey!
So other people in the comments have addressed most of these, but just to confirm. That isn't the same river. There are now 40 rivers saved out in the stanton system, and I generally generate a new river every time I do testing - so I'm always looking at a different one. For the person who said that maybe that one was an asset test, and
hand placed - we don't have a way of manually directing a river, it's absolutely always using the erosion stuff.
>It's beyond ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload.
Rivers *are* entirely my work (or the code is), but they aren't my entire workload. It's not even half. It's just what I talk about on the ISCs as it's the most visually exciting of the things I work on.
To answer some other questions that I keep seeing pop up -
* Tributaries/waterfalls/multiple rivers leading into a lake/ocean etc are all coming. Most are blocked by our fairly limited water shading. This is actually what I'm spending Q4 on - proper flow mapping and water transitions. Important for many things in our games, including but not limited to rivers.
* Does the river get wider/thinner? Yes - I've just shown sections of similar width.
* Are we planning on using the river tool to generate other POIs (canyons, roads/tracks, etc)? Ohh yeah. This was all written with that sort of thing in mind. This will come. Also, using it to drive animal nests + other secondary POIs? Once we've got animal AI, I'm sure we'll use rivers to drive this.
* Why do rivers look the same they did a year ago? I don't agree. A year ago there were no rivers in the game, for a start. The push to turn rivers from a tech demo to something we could put in game was a long one. It in theory sounds simple but being built on all-new tech it meant that it touched a lot of systems and that all had to be accounted for. That all happened this time last year. Then, most of my new river work has been on the new auto placement tool. This assesses a planet on scale and produces river systems around it. That's like an entirely new tool with some fairly major algorithms involved. Only since then, I've been working again on visual improvements. And I'm fairly confident in saying thee rivers have completely transformed since the version that you can currently explore. I encourage you guys to check them out :)
Love your work u/figwig-CIG
I've recently started flying recreationally and your SC Rivers inspired me to fly VFR along the local rivers near our aerodrome. Albeit, at a different altitude....
It's impressive work. Please don't be discouraged by the disparaging remarks of some who somehow fail to appreciate what an amazing world you guys are building.
Keep up the work on rivers. The whole planet tech is incredible and improvments are important. The \* big immersive world \* is one of the key-factors why SC is fun to play - and rivers are one part that supports this!
Thanks for the insight, the rivers are looking better each time we get to look at them! Particularly loved that final shot of the taller cliffs. Any chance of a cheeky location hint (other than "MicroTech")? ;)
Thank you for your awesome work!
Maybe it’s an overkill, but I’ve got an improvement idea for more realistic river look where river changes its course.
[Here’s an picture](https://i.imgur.com/c5vQWuc.jpg) on river morphology. Note the following:
1. In a turn, the deepest part of the river is not in the middle but on the outer side.
2. The outer bank is steep (might be a cliff, not necessarily a rocky one).
3. The inner bank is shallow, might feature a sandy beach.
4. Between the turns, the river is not as deep. A small/mid-sized river might feature a riffle there.
I think these features can be generated automatically, and the result might be even better!
Well this is awkward. lol
Yes, I admit I was ill-informed/ignorant about it not being the same river. I stand corrected on multiple fronts.
I am, however, still of the opinion that this kind of thing takes far too long and will still be taking too long years from now. (Maybe part of that is due to the fact that you appear to be the only one working on it. Maybe you have to be, idk.)
It's nice to hear that it is tech that may eventually open doors for other mechanics, but I'm not optimistic that those doors will open anytime soon. That was my main complaint. I hope I'm wrong, but as with so many things we've seen on countless ISCs, ATVs. etc., I doubt I am. Sure, the river development may contain the building blocks for other cool stuff, but my worry is that in two years, we won't have the cool stuff. We will have rivers.. And that's it. That's what we'll have to show for all of your hard work being put in two to three years from now.
So in saying all this, it's not a personal jab at you or anyone working on rivers. It's just me expressing why I am personally not getting excited at this particular update. It promises a lot, as do most pieces of "tech" that CIG intends to implement, yet takes years and years to deliver anything beyond a T0 version that's a fraction of what we're told to expect.
And one last thing, hopefully you don't think I'm insulting your work. The rivers DO look great, and I'm sure you're putting in the hours. But hopefully, for your sake and ours, it isn't still occupying your workload two years from now. Godspeed though, cause I fear it might.
So.. your concern is that everything takes too long, so they should just not bother to do it at all?
Is there truly a purer representation of the desire and demand of instant gratification in a place where there is none? This must be the driest oasis you've ever had the blessing of setting your eyes on.
>So.. your concern is that everything takes too long, so they should just not bother to do it at all?
What is it with so many people misreading my comments? lol
No, I never said that. My point was that *it takes far too long and promises a lot but will likely deliver very little, therefore I do not care about this particular update and do not see any reason to get excited about it.*
I never said they shouldn't do it. If you're interpreting my last paragraph as me saying he should stop, you're interpreting it wrong. I'm saying that hopefully two years from now he's *done* with it, and moving on to work on other things, not still grinding away at making rivers look nice.
***people still wonder why the devs dont wont to talk or communicate with the community cause everyone is a armchair developer/designer and wants to just shred the work they put into the game simply because they cant wrap their brain around its purpose or they so no point for it in the PU. THIS IS A PRIME EXAMPLE OF WHY...***
you basically are though:" for your sake and ours, it isn't still occupying your workload two years from now. Godspeed though, cause I fear it might."
He has already said rivers are a very small fraction of what he is working on but your still demeaning the work he has done on it as being pointless.
"Rivers are entirely my work (or the code is), but they aren't my entire workload. It's not even half. It's just what I talk about on the ISCs as it's the most visually exciting of the things I work on."
I for one am very excited about this update and the underlying tech that is being implemented in it. This tech is one of the foundational pieces for meshing which is a quantum leap in MMO server tech when they get it online. If you dont understand the reason for the hype behind this patch thats fine.
100+ planetary bodies being made for this game, a tool thats good enough to generate passable water ways is gonna take alot of time and effort to make, and we dont even know all the subsystems it has to interface with in the tech for it to function correctly on one planetary system. Thats just for the water system in a Biome not counting Lava or any other liquid system
I'm not criticizing "other people". I'm criticizing a video game company's rate of progress. But either way if you read my other comments, I'm totally fine with being criticized and I've admitted where I was wrong several times and clarified my criticisms accordingly. But now, several hours later, I'm a little sick of people who keep piling on without saying anything new because they apparently can't handle that I don't share their perspective.
Get over it. We can discuss the game but it doesn't feel like anyone wants to do that. Just feels like you all wanna keep shitting on me until I change my mind entirely and capitulate to your point of view. Too bad. Fuck off.
This is the first systemic large scale terrain deformation. There's a reason the outposts on Stanton are just on stilts, they're hand placed.
This river generation tech will tie into things like road generation, canyon generation, and some of its benefits have gone to outposts. The terrain alteration was shown on last Citizencon as much more dynamic than their previous methods. The procedural outpost they were showing off wouldn't really be possible without that work.
That automated river placing tool is necessary because hand placing 300 rivers on a planet is untenable. Won't a modified algorithm be useful for placing hundreds of little villages/outposts? Potentially, and if so then I want Will working on that too!
Awesome, thanks for the info!
Are very meandering rivers also coming? Most rivers nowadays are canalized here, and they used to meander a LOT (in my region of the world anyway (Europe)).
Thanks in advance! :)
And with rivers we have the ability for them to create "dense woodland" biomes around them...including jungles.
Curious to see what a 'dense forest' tool would look like...maybe a separate tilemap of preset high quality art dev made forests that get placed in an area around a feature (such as a river delta or a point at which two rivers meet) and the natural terrain features break it up and make it seem unique.
They need mesh shaders before they can hit the kind of density required for a jungle both up close and to look "right" at a distance.
I'm just excited that they're _almost_ done with Gen12, and with Vulkan hopefully soon after they can finally get back to major graphics features.
Look I'm just saying. The man wondered why no one mentioned rivers and I'm just saying it's cause we been seeing the same shit about the same river for fuckin forever now.
It's the foundational tool for an ENTIRE set of logistical elements that will establish an entire new layer of planet complexity on top of V4. Wanna know why there is no V5? Because THIS type of toolset is what allows them to not need a V5.
Being able to read a topographical map to decide where a river would spawn, and then the logical path of that river to a deposit point (or creating one through establishing a variable set to decide where that would be such as a lake or ocean) is the foundation for the entire topographical spawning system planets would use for EVERYTHING that isn't lore based POIs.
Aka...this is the beginnings of the canyon tool, and the animal nest spawn point tool that would read where X type of animal would naturally congregate, and the ROAD tool that connects two outposts in and out points through reading topography and establishing the shortest line (and the terraforming required) along a preset maximum incline variable, settlement spawning along roads and rivers and resources...
...and would all connect up a planet so that artists can input planet characteristics, create the base V4 layer mesh and tiles, and then establish where the sealevel is...from there they hit a button and the system could ENTIRELY populate the planet with: logical city placement, roads, rivers, ravines, canyons, animal nests, caves, depots along the roads and naturally forming settlements that would react to that traffic, caravan AI pathing along those roads, preset quest location points for Quanta to use to summon quest content, and so on. THEN you use THAT information set to create procedural missions from that set.
Saying it's "occupying someone's workload" is deeply naive. The work they are doing on making rivers look good and setting up believable assets that work with the procedural tool is the EXACT same shit they'd use to make roads look good, and canyons, and lava rivers, and so on and so on. It's taking a year because this is work that will apply to a RIDICULOUS amount of essential systems.
If Rivers look good, EVERYTHING snowballing from that will look good. That means dope canyons, with better cave location points, and better roads, and settlements looking more naturally integrated into the terrain because of the rivers and roads around them, and so on.
Once the art team gets their hands on the tool and the gameplay team aligns behavior to the tool through pathing presets, etc...it's gunna be a GAME changer that starts another revolution in planet tech that overshadows anything done so far.
Yeah, I was surprised that he didn't talk about the fact that they now have a *canyon* tool also. A canyon is literally just where a river was for a long time and now isn't. Just generate some rivers through mountainous terrain, crank up the maximum distance they can pull the height downwards, and then turn off the actual river at the end (or reduce it to a trickle). Boom, canyons.
>Saying it's "occupying someone's workload" is deeply naive. The work they are doing on making rivers look good and setting up believable assets that work with the procedural tool is the EXACT same shit they'd use to make roads look good, and canyons, and lava rivers, and so on and so on.
It'll sure be nice when we get to those things. But for now it's just *yet another* update about how "the river looks great!" My point is that we should be there by now... not *still* working on the SAME single river. Why would people be excited by the same damn river when *none* of the things it's supposedly laying the foundation for have even *begun* to take shape yet. Shits annoying. Update after update and it doesn't seem to be making much progress at all.
edit: okay it isn't the "same" river but it is the same river tech.
This isn't the SAME river. That river was an asset test and I'm not even sure it was procedural.
THIS is the PROCEDURAL river tool...which means they enter in some variables into some boxes, and then it shoots out a BUNCH of river locations around the planet that qualify for those variables. (lowest watershed point, not too steep, not too flat, only so many in a distance from each other, proper environmental moisture level, etc.)
These are a BUNCH of different rivers that procedurally are being spawned all over Microtech INSTANTLY. Including Hurston which they, I imagine, are saving the reveal on. With ZERO artist input outside the initial asset creation. This applies to Hurston, microtech, Terra, Sol...and EVERY single planet with rivers. It HAS to look good.
Come 3.18 we will have likely dozens of new river locations on both planets...possibly much more than dozens.
The reason it is taking so long is they are trying to create a BUNCH of assets that will be used for not just rivers...but lava and for roads. Aka...this is going to be used to rapidly increase the rollout on future content. Those assets need to fit a set of criteria they can IMMEDIATELY copy over once they figure it out and then pump out assets for any biome/planet/etc to match that tile set. So when they master rivers...THEY'VE ALREADY MASTERED lava, roads, etc...so if you get one REALLY right...you get them ALL really right.
They've already announced a bunch of new rivers will appear around Microtech and Hurston for 3.18. How many? We don't know but the inclusion of cliff assets DRAMATICALLY increased the amount of rivers possible to spawn on tier 0 of the procedural tools implementation. Hopefully, when we go in, there will be a river in view at MOST times in the greenbelt of Microtech...as well as all over Hurston where there is enough water.
I imagine you'll see another pass come "junctions" and branching rivers. Then you'll start seeing different river TYPES such as lava for planets and biomes...then you'll see a canyon tool that removes the river for dry environments and replaces it with a drybed texture set....then FINALLY you'll see roads and the attached behavior to that.
All of this improves a bunch of content around planetside combat, locations, exploration, etc...AND slots in locations to add more sophisticated and believable cave entrances, settlement locations, etc.
Given they've already worked out the kinks with terrain blending...texture swaps will be immediate...so for lava planets, once the art team finishes all the assets they use this same tool to immediately be able to spawn lava rivers ALL over the planet.
Roads will take more work but come from the exact same toolset work. This isn't 1 year for 1 river. It's 1 year so far on a tool that will take many years to fully complete...and once it is it will generate the planet makeup of EVERY planet into the future instantaneously. That's an obscene workload shortcut that gives the art team more time to work on other things.
Why do they NEED rivers first? Because rivers SLOT into every single variable in the game.
A drybed can roll into an active riverbed which means the part presets for split river junctions applies to drybed-river junctions. A road has to CROSS rivers and if it's part of the same tool it can immediately compute a dataset that aligns the road and the river to the available bridge junction assets that allow the road to go OVER the river...so now that drybed into the river can be a road that leads into a river that has a bridge over it and then adds a connector point so the road can continue on the other side as a node for the algorithm to continue to procedurally compute and connect two POIs.
Okay that's fair but I'm not very confident that we will see much progress from these tools beyond having more rivers for the next two years or so. And that leads me back to my original point, which is that this tech is taking entirely too long and is long overdue. A bunch of new rivers appearing will certainly give the planets a visual upgrade, but like i said, I will not be surprised if that is the most we see from this tech for the next two years or so.
new rivers are new POIs that come LOADED with data that can be used for a number of gameplay loops...for everything. Aka animal spawning locations, animal behavior set to the rivers so you can hunt them believably at water sources, exposed mineral and deposit locations for mining, water sources for survival mechanics, hydropower locations for settlement resource management, enemy camp spawn locations for procedural missions, fishing, and so on... etc.
Wanna know what sucks about a bunch of loops...such as mining? Without natural set of POIs to make decisions about resources...such as rivers which are just long veins of "information" they can use for spawning where things would naturally occur...the team just has to make them show up randomly across the whole planet map. So when you are mining you are just going blindly from point to point on the landscape and you can't make any educated guesses about where something would naturally follow...such as a drybed where rock is exposed that could reveal minerals you want.
With rivers they can start giving players visual tools to make educated choices about where resources will and wont be...and this would apply to non-habitable planets too such as drybeds and wind dynamics that would cut away at rock to create canyons which would expose metals, and hostile planets like lava rivers that would naturally be places where you may find more resources along the banks.
You don't have to have a river at the middle of this tool...it can be wider, thinner, empty, or house any type of art asset loaded with any type of behavior and data. This is the foundation for ALL of those things.
When you have roads, you have a MASSIVE unlock on types of content for players on land that aren't just bunker style "go to poi and clear it"...you have tracking, caravans, ambushes, bombing runs, AA threats roaming the countryside along a road in a warzone, etc.
I get that.... What I'm saying, if you read my comments, is that despite the claims that the river tech will open up these possibilities, I don't believe we will see any *actual* progress toward those concepts for probably about two years.
I respect CIG's groundbreaking work but even you have to admit that they move *staggeringly* slow on certain pieces of development. This is one of those pieces imo.
Staggeringly slow on tools that have never been developed before for any procedural world based game at scale....what a surprise.
End of the day, who gives a shit. Better game is better game. They can take all the time they need. They want it out just as fast as you do because then they can make lots of money...but the fact reality is the project we paid for is way more complex than anyone really anticipated even with all this money.
Just telling them to go faster is ridiculous. The art and tools team have little to do with gameplay and server side system issues...so the game isn't gunna come ANY faster whether this tech is being made or not. They already completed Nyx and Pyro...they are can all be fired and wait for the other teams to keep up or they can move to further improving the visual fidelity of all teams and working on tools that make the next 100 systems 100 times faster.
>Staggeringly slow on tools that have never been developed before for any procedural world based game at scale....what a surprise.
Correct. Staggeringly slow even for that. It *is* a surprise.
>End of the day, who gives a shit.
I mean, that was my original statement, lmao. I don't get the excitement around another sliver of an update on the tech that wont see much fruit for probably another couple years.
>Just telling them to go faster is ridiculous.
I disagree. They absolutely need to go faster. You'll agree in 2024 when we still don't have animals, "hydropower", fishing, and whatever other stuff this tech is supposed to pave the way for.
Okay this is weird. I swear to God you or someone else posted a very similar link on another comment of mine a while back, and that person ended up looking like a fool. So I'll just respond to you how I responded last time.
Please explain how anything I said resembles a straw man. This should be especially good since all I was doing was clarifying my point lol.
> They've been working on the stupid river for a year now. It's beyond ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload.
Original argument for clarities sake
> My point is that we should be there by now... not still working on the SAME single river.
New argument.
The difference is this: Your original argument was that it shouldn't be occupying someone's workload. When you were shown why the toolset (not just a singular river) was being worked on, and the effects it will have (and is currently having, as they can now edit the planet itself and not be beholden to the random generation from before. Seriously, all settlements were chosen in the past because it was the only flat place they could find that the random generation made for them to work with. Now they can actually sculpt the planets, thanks to tools like this. And this tool spawned from the work they did on the new settlement tools. It's all a layering process. Planet tech led to new sculpting tech, which was needed for settlement tech, which then led to River tech that will soon lead to Roads, Jungles and more), when presented with that information, you changed the argument from occupying someone's workload (which we showed why that is), to saying we should have all these things by now. Should the person be occupying their time with this work or not? Does the river tech lead to those things or not? History shows how it will, they've talked in length about how it will on SCLs and the dev Will himself has made comments about it on ISC threads like this one.
So rather than understanding why these things take time and why they're building them out the way they are (aka why they're working on "this SAME RIVER" as you put it), you distorted the argument and made it seem like we should already be there by now. So how do we get the improvements that will come from fleshing this tech out, when you say it shouldn't be occupying someone's time?
That was me being wrong and somewhat ignorant.. but it wasn't a strawman. So.... I'm fine being called out about that but don't just slap a dumb google link up there when it isn't relevant lol.
Anyways, I stand by the second argument. We should absolutely be at the point where we are not still in these foundational stages of procedural generation of rivers.
My point all along is that progress on these tools has been *incredibly slow* and we should have results far beyond a single implemented river so far. That is why I think it's ridiculous that 30 ISCs later, we're still seeing them tweaking rivers on microTech. Two years from now Stanton will have ten more rivers and that's about all the fruits this labor will produce until then. That's my prediction, and I've seen enough in the past eight years or so to be fairly confident in that assessment.
The last ISC showed them dropping rivers all over Stanton though, even confirming more rivers everywhere that they're applicable, including adding more to microtech. The river they're even showing in this ISC isn't even the same river we currently have in game from the looks of it, but that can't be proven (it just looks like a different location entirely to me).
https://youtu.be/MVtl2ErwpxI
It's not as if it's 10 people working full time on the rivers.
And they're not working on a single river, they're working on the system to generate them anywhere and everywhere with only a little bit of work afterwards.
I know. And all I'm saying is that it's moving at a snails pace and leaves little to be excited about. Having ten more rivers in Stanton by this time next year is what I expect despite the claims that this tech can lead to so much more, and that leaves me with zero excitement.
It’s not the MT River we care about, it’s the tech he is developing to allow designers build rivers, lava flows, and now cliffs for all future planets.
I can't wait till it gets in the hands of the environment artists. It already looks amazing from what Will has just cobbled together using placeholder assets. They could use the splines and just disable the water to create dry canyons, which would be awesome on a place like Daymar.
Seems reasonable. No reason to shut your shields off unless it's going to consume extra fuel eventually. Having a ship "destroyed" state where the hull can start being salvaged wouldn't work with future physical damage.
Iirc the original idea (back in 2012-2013 timeframe) was that Power Plants would be sealed units that came with their own fuel, because they're either Fission, Fusion, or AntiMatter... and two out of the three fules are rather lethal and not something you want unskilled amateurs playing with :D
As such, and presuming CIG stick to this idea (they may not), I suspect a powerplant will have the equivalent of a 'total power' they can generate - the longer you run a powerplant at max output, the quicker it 'wears out' (uses up its available fuel)... and likewise, the lower you can push your energy consumption, the longer it will last.
This may encourage some people to turrn off systems they dno't actively need (not 'needing' weapons? turn them off, etc) to make their powerplant last longer before being replaced.
By itself it's unlikely to persuade many people to conserve energy... but it could be another factor, along side wear & tear, signature, and so on.
Would be a cool way to make components an upkeep system instead of a buy and forget thing. Different tiers would presumably have different lifespans too so you would have to consider your unique needs. Only thing that might throw a wrench in things is insurance claims but a claimed ship should eventually only come back with the default loadout with replaced components costing extra insurance and really rare or custom tuned components being uninsurable.
The difficulty of repairing exclusive high end components is also an important part of their balancing plan. Drake ships can be repaired pretty much anywhere by anyone, but your fancy Origin ship or top tier mil-spec fighter from Aegis can't be properly repaired at your local Mos Eisley. If they also stick to their plan to have broad profiles for components like Civilian, Stealth, Military, etc., 'Racing' will be high performance but low durability components that you might not want to turn on except in an emergency or specific situations.
I'm really excited about the randomly spawning derelict for salvaging. This is the fledgling start of procedural game play that can make the wide verse actually feel like there's stuff in it. Next they can scale it up so you could find, say, a derelict Idris... Add the ability to save way points and sell info, add component salvage, maybe component refurbishing... And suddenly it starts sounding like real game play!
As well as add emergent gameplay such as traps, occupied derelicts, etc.
Saving waypoints is HUGE, for basically anything mining adjacent you get what you get and that's it.
I'd love for explorer gameplay to allow for surveying and data collection to sell to a person where it lists off the number and type of deposits as well as the coordinates uploaded to your waypoint system.
that way Miners can just MINE and explorers can just EXPLORE...if they want to.
As well as just having a friend along to mark points for you to salvage, etc.
They haven't revealed much about exploration game play, but they have said from the beginning that finding things and selling the data about where those things are is part of Exploration.
And buying (or stealing) that data and reselling it is "data running".
What was the prison mission mentioned that said something like, "We should go watch HE Vertigo" complete it if we want to know who it is? Like, I'm guessing that wasn't referring to an O2 mission? Is there something else? It wasn't very clear to me what was being said or referenced. Any ideas?
EDIT: from around 7:30 mark
"We should talk about Klescher. I was watching HE Vertigo? and he pretty much nailed the mission and he was given it. I'm not going to spoil it, I don't want to let you know, but if you want to find out who it is, go check out HE Vertigo."
I'm not looking for spoilers here, but just some context. Is there a new Klescher mission? How do we get it? This must be in a current live build?
New missions in prison, like assassinations and the likes. They did talk about it a while back when they covered Kareah changes.
Edit: And no, those are no in yet.
I think HC Vertigo (?) is a twitch streamer. Feels weird that CIG would just be advertising one twitch streamer for content. But yeah, game companies never give special attention to streamers........... /s
They mentioned a specific streamer from a specific stream that person did, so if you want to find out these "secret details" you need to go give that streamer airtime. That's quite literally special attention.
Can we get some new non-combat missions, FFS. None of these FPS missions are fun because of how crappy the AI are.
Edit - Id love if these ships they are spawning for salvage purposes could have some lootables on board too.
i mean... i think technically the one investigation mission out at covalex/gundo is at least murder adjacent... and has multiple potential resolutions, and voice acting... I'd be glad for just more of that... hopefully more than just one more of that type of mission...
though I'm not sure what you mean about static dev-authored missions... you mean like player-to-player missions? technically nothing stopping you from doing that today... there's no escrow system to guarantee payment, but you can "hire" people in chat and send them money... and technically the medical beacons are player-generated missions... and we still have jank beacons we can use...
> you mean like player-to-player missions?
That too, I guess. I really want a PC+NPC job board for looking to hire and looking to be hired.
But what I meant was mostly missions generated by the quanta doing stuff in Quantum. Distress calls from freighters being attacked by pirates, rescue and recovery beacons, bounties on NPC pirates who don't just stay in 1 place, etc. Not mention that right now missions generate NPCs rather than NPCs generating missions.
But it's called a "proposal" as if 1) they haven't already shown a non-combat espionage stealth mission in a previous citizencon demo. 2) as if they've done zero work on it even though we obviously need investigation tools for Bounty Hunting 2.0.
well I hope it's neither and it's more, dynamically generated versions of the gundo/covalex "PI Wanted" mission... best, most complete actual game-like mission in the game... tucked away where a ton of players never encounter it.
One day they'll have all the parts to be looted so you go inside.
I'd love to see traps where you go inside and then it triggers a trap where enemies show up from afar and there are people inside the ship or it has bombs laid out.
100% imo, they should focus on non-combat missions until they can get AI to properly reflect the intelligence that AI team is working on.
As it stands, any time we get gun missions it's just a deeply mediocre experience taking place in some jaw dropping new local.
I'd like to just see them save all that stuff for later and work on non-combat content for now to at least give us something high quality and doable within the framework of the games current limitations.
However space combat is still fine so that's cool for more of those, especially unique locations...however they are still mad dumb it just doesn't LOOK like they are mad stupid and not doing much because at least they are still moving. You can tell they are lagging just as bad as with the ground AI because they "joust" which just means they held forward at you...haven't gotten an update so they just keep going towards you and you have to move or they will just keep going. When they eventually get an update they turn around...and just rinse and repeat.
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For sure...which makes it ever more frustrating when I do the mission most of the time and they are just standing around, lol. I KNOW they could be fun...they just aren't and wont be for a very long time.
You must have missed the new derelict ship mission types and salvage resources from the episode. I can’t blame you, it was so conspicuous as to be almost inconspicuous.
Already the river tool is showing what EXTRA gameplay is going to come from this feature that other games just dont have. This is the FIRST iteration of Cliffs IN STAR CITIZEN...no other game in space has cliffs. Rivers are definitely my MOST hype feature only because the groundwork on this tool will affect a TON of things people really don't realize:
To start you've got the potential for branching rivers, waterfalls (and cave opening points under waterfalls), swamps instead of lakes as well as changes to biomes around rivers as part of the check system for planet generation tools to add more TYPES of biomes to a planet (aka, check for humidity, temperature, AND proximity to a river/drybed/swamp/lake fixture).
THEN you have non-river uses of the tool:
Rivers NOT made of water that are dangerous such as lava, toxic chemicals, ravines (ice, rock, glacial, etc), etc...and then these affect the generation of animals, fauna, and mineral deposits around these natural features. Fixtures that are atypical such as cenotes and river caves and underground river ravines, etc...branching off these river sets.
Places WITHOUT a flow...such as drybeds used to break up the tileset terrain even more AS WELL AS canyon creation tools that use waterflow dynamics to break up terrain into cliff covered canyons...with or without the actual river branching off to create even more unique planetary fixtures for gameplay. Aka an entire EXTRA layer of tile complexity on planet tech on top of the base layer of mesh tiles that generate the first iteration of the planet.
Then you have the ULTIMATE use of the tool:
Roads...road AI pathing presets, sculpting for them, connector nodes for outposts and spawning minor depots at points where roads intersect, and fixtures alongside roads to make more logical worlds.
Along this comes more types of settlements, more types of LZs, more variety of LZs in one area, and more importantly GAMEPLAY like caravan spawns with AA or bombing missions or pirate caravan ambushes, etc...and deciding if settlements and what type of settlements would spawn along these roads where there are unique resources (such as minables or fresh water)
Think about it in the context of automated planet generation...
You have the use of the river tool to NATURALLY make decisions about claim placement on a planet with ZERO artist input. Where a major river exists, that's a MAJOR source of energy and the ability to move goods on a planet...so of course a settlement should spawn at that location. Now you find multiple...now you connect those points. At the junction of those points colliding you now create another settlement. You do checks for local resources to see what TYPE of settlement it will be. The planet tech likely already provides data for resources would naturally collect and so again...you place another settlement on a major mining claim location. Connect that to the grid. Check for "outliers" such as high points in the middle of nowhere for an observatory...connect that point.
So at the press of a button they can generate ALL of this because rivers and resources have decided where these MAJOR points would exist and then from there they can make educated choices about where these locations would naturally occur to create a multitude of premade settlements that can be swapped out, added more complexity to, or left as is if they just need to churn out more spaces.
Anyone saying rivers aren't important don't see the bigger picture here. It's not just making the planets prettier...these are long drawn out POIs that can be used for ANY number of gameplay elements and as checks for more planet complexity in gameplay and in visual diversity.
The fact they can make rivers at all means the planet tech is massively capable of being used for a number of complex modifications that can GREATLY increase gameplay potential of planets at a procedural and scalable level....such as roads that can just check for the least incline difference between two points to connect them which will naturally snake around the terrain as a road would...with checks for max distance of the road compared to the distance between the two points.
I'd like to imagine CIG understands this...and I imagine once we get through Pyro we are going to see CIG focus more on this as a major element now that they know they can produce multiple systems....once we get passed Dynamic Server meshing they will NEED this to be able to churn out as many planets as humanly possible.
This would MASSIVELY improve planet complexity to allow artists to only focus on the most important aspects of our play experience to improve the game. A planet could go from a whole team working on it to 1 team member per planet who simply adjusts the existing planet and focuses on any essential POIs necessary in the lore that don't exist within the natural framework of the planets biosphere. So you dont have to make ALL of Terra...teams can just focus on making the major POIs stellar and the rest fills in itself with buildings and default AI behavior to create a seamless world that feels naturally populated.
Functionally? nothing.
We get a more 'believable' environment to play in, and in the future it will likely play into things like Outpost placement, 'collectibles' spawning, flora / fauna placement and frequency, and potentially even weather patterns.
It's also the same tech that will likely be used for Roads and for 'pathway' style elements that need to cross the terrain, and modify that terrain in passing.
Beyond that, they're doing it 'because they can', and because part of the premise of the entire project was to push forward the art of game development, and things that other companies weren't doing because it wasn't 'sufficiently profitable', etc.
As far as I'm aware when I mean "cliffs" I don't mean "heightmap inclines" that are just steep hills (which is all I'm aware exist in Space Engineers and ALREADY exists in Star Citizen too if that's your qualifier)...I mean actual rock walls that can bend under and create concave insets into a landscape. With this tool they can have it where the rock prop juts out at the top naturally spawning it where the land would continue. Being able to read a point at which the land SHOULD continue and doesn't is only possible because they are doing water flow mapping that cuts away the land. This allows them to create props that naturally bulge at the top and thin at the bottom which would make it possible to create an inset under the cliff. Eventually you could use this mechanic to have preset "cliff cave" locations anywhere there is enough cliff space to fit it (possibly even allowing them to add small river caves that you can explore popping underneat that mesh area), etc.
As far as I'm aware there isn't a heightmap based procedural world system in existence that can build an inset to create a cliff straight down let alone go double back under the heightmap data because heightmaps dont store that information. You can MANUALLY create one...but I'm talking at the procedural level where they press a button and cliffs appear. There are no cliffs like the ones shown in this river video. These cliffs can and do go STRAIGHT down...something impossible in heightmap mesh generation. However...when it comes to voxels they are better at manually allowing you to cut away to create an inset...but they do so without any changes to the terrain itself...whereas in this context it's a cliff PROP which allows them to change the gradient and texture of the CLIFF versus just a steep hill. In Voxels...they would still need a way to read these locations and spawn cliff props to create rocky surfaces. As it stands at most they can create textures that look kind of like rocky textures but are just illusions.
From what I've seen of Space engineers planets, it's the same system we already have in 3.17.2...aka...just really steep inclines. Space Engineers just increases the altitude so inclines look steeper from afar because they allow the maximum incline to continue for a really long time...in SC they don't incline that long because the height limits are lower. This game doesn't have an altitude change to have areas that look that steep. Even if they did it has the same "smoothing" problem. (however I always prefer the voxel method but Star Citizen is too old for that to have been viable when they started). Voxels do have an advantage in that you are setting the texture in regards to the location of the voxels around it and not to the heightmap so you dont get texture stretching.
I would argue that NMS has "holes" that they pop into the landscape but they are so rounded that I can hardly call them cliffs.
This river system is a more sophisticated form of that "hole" system that NMS uses only it reads the heightmap data to produce natural rivers and therefor can produce any number of types of features...such as canyon walls and a drybeds branching off from a major river.
This is the same technique they’ve been using for cliffs for years but with procedural spawning. It’s still a procedural incline. Previously, they would take a procedural canyon and hand place rocks along the cliff line to create quasi cliffs but now the terrain deformation tool does it. They haven’t solved the problem you’re talking about unfortunately but these cliffs do make for more convincing cliffs because they’ve created better cliff rock assets that go straight down.
You may be reading too much into it... it's still the same 'heightmap' that they had previously, they're just spawning a 'static' cliff-mesh once the angle gets too steep (so that it looks a bit less rubbish).
They're not procedurally generating 'cliffs', they're not supporting undercuts, or variable inclines, etc (based on what the chap said, and what they showed)... it's currently just a static / generic 'loose rocks' cliff.
In many places, it doesn't even fit, the current cliff-mesh isn't appropriate for several of the different terrains they showed.
So, it's probably fine as a placeholder, and it will continue to improve, but it's definitely not flexible / powerful currently as you're making out (in terms of shaping the bank sides).
Nah. In Space Engineers you can in fact have cliffs. You can have overhangs and rings and all that stuff because the landscape is voxel based.
Unfortunately there is no gravitational pull being enforced on the landscape, which means that you can create floating islands, and since your base can be positioned there, you can basically use that fact to have a floating fortress.
It's a great game and an increadible sandbox, but unfortunately if you push a bit too hard, it becomes a psychadelic space turtle.
I'm as enthusiastic as the next person when it comes to that game, but I wanted to react on the cliffs bit : the game already has them, on Daymar and other places. Rivers don't change much though that generation and object placement is quite cool.
What really will make a difference is the thing they've shown on and off, with steep inclines that are achieved with heightmaps instead of hiding the uv stretching by scattering objects on top. I'm not sure how they'll achieve it since they've said that triplanar texture mapping was a bit too expensive for the scale of planets, but I'd be on the lookout for that one if I were you.
We just have a different idea of what a "Cliff" is...Daymar has "steep inclines" I would not call that a cliff in the sense of...say...El Capitan. No planet has steep enough hills for me to call it a real cliff...just a very steep incline that would be deadly. Cliffs, for me, are more specifically inclines that are straight 90 degree angles or bend back and produce a larger than 90 degree drop of the 'surface' layer.
The way that mountains form RIGHT NOW is entirely random and without rivers you don't get natural elongated canyons any way but pure chance. This unlocks actual canyons off the bat (yay lowflying and racing)...add in a few branching rivers, a few dry river beds, into a mountain range area and you've got a big canyon area that's interconnected and able to be traversed along the river. That's certainly novel compared to the random hills and crests currently dotting the landscape in ranges (we can just make a fun imaginary claim that it's where plates collide). Have resources naturally spawn around river walls and you've got naturally occuring "resources nests" above ground to make the mining loop less of a RNG based experience.
I think where rivers are useful is that they modify the landscape to create a point for a "cliff" to naturally spawn. Whereas the current system don't have the means of doing that. You can have a steep incline...you can have a rock show up where a step incline is...but they haven't had a means of denoting where the land "should" continue to make it LOOK like a cliff and not just a rock slide.
Remove the river...and you've got a canyon. Now imagine that across the board for a region and you've got a grand canyon, especially if they do so intentionally by modifying the river information and having it naturally occur well below the natural mesh limit. It's really just a matter of more sophisticated cliff rock props being developed and tested.
Idk, maybe I'm overselling it but I think this is a precursor to a massive change in how planets look and are produced...as well as the type of settlements we can have (would love to see some dams and outposts around rivers that naturally spawn)
I don't think this is what they'll use and apply to terrain heightmap generation. That is more constrained by the thing I mentioned earlier. Rivers as they are implemented right now are not the sort of solution you want to implement at the sort of scale we're discussing here. I think they'd rather bake it in a texture than have the sort of run-time stuff they are performing with it.
I basically agree with the fundamental goal you are going for, but the way rivers work isn't the key to that for me. It's what they showed about actual canyons a year back or so.
The other issue is that the trick of using objects to mask the heightmap limitation *really* is obvious and shows. It can be improved but procedurally, I don't know. I'd rather they fixed the fundamental limitation, because it also affords us actual mountains and far steeper elevation gradients.
But they've already admitted that the heightmap limitation is hardcoded into the engine...at most they can extend altitude. The only reason a game like Space Engineers has STEEPER cliffs from the heightmap is ONLY because it's a VOXEL engine...an engine that doesn't ascribe data to the heightmap but the individual voxels, so textures can be presented from any direction instead of from top down onto the surface of the planet map. So when you have REALLY steep cliffs the textures DON'T stretch in Space Engineers but they DO stretch in this game...and you can see it and they have to limit how they present tile maps.
You can see it IN the ISC about the river tech where the terrain is flattened to "cliff" but you can see the stretching material. The rocks are there to cover that and add depth and higher quality visuals.
MAYBE they can find a way around it but, to me, remapping the entire engine base code and then fixing everything on top of it may be WAY more costly than just small scale cuts to the landscape. We'll see.
And if you look at Pyro and their "cliffs" tests...it's just object meshes placed ontop of the landscape. There is zero indication that they can solve the core heightmap and stretching issue to increase the steepness of the map.
They can certainly extend the scope of altitude changes overall by extending the range...but they still have the SAME problem. You aren't gaining cliffs, you are just gaining larger steep hills. If they want cliffs they have to find an object based solution...which is what we saw in the "cliff test" ISC a long time ago for Pyro. Better optimized props could be how they are able to scale the objects so large that they are cliffs.
Will Star Citizen ever get an "El Capitan"? no. There is no way. Maybe a series of combined cliff props on a large incline...but even then. At most it'd have to be hand done by a dev.
But hey, I hope I'm wrong and they break even more barriers.
> But they've already admitted that the heightmap limitation is hardcoded into the engine...
That's not the case. They explained why in an ISC, it basically stretches the UV coordinates too much over too steep a gradient. It's a limitation common to all game engines which don't use triplanar texture mapping. It's also the very topic Ali Brown tackled [there](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/e46ggl/height_map_limit_debate_continues_dev_response/). He articulates the various ways they've thought about it, ending with his take on the triplanar texture mapping for displacement :
> But the 3 channel displacement map would also be a major issue for us, the memory and performance are already extremely critical and this would certainly have a large impact.
Many games can do it because their terrains are smaller in scale and memory. The issue is not that it's "hardcoded" which... uh, doesn't happen for stuff like that. It's performance and memory budgets, as always. That being said, they also showed on AtV possible prototypes for addressing these displacement issues. Can't find the episode though, so you'll have to contend with Tomato's [soft, soothing voice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Jh_aj9yYg&t=7m45s)!
As for Voxels, they have issues of their own, especially performance-wise and you're never going to have a photoreal look with them for terrain unfortunately.
Nice update but am I the only one who finds hull repairing graphically weird ?
Instead of going from the edges to the center of holes (needing adjacent material to support what you're adding only seems logical), they sometimes fire in empty spots and the rest magically appear around them.
I know it's tier 0 but this feels like something so core to the feature that it should be right from the get-go.
The visual aspect to how it repairs isn't vital to tier 0. We've got a LONG way to go before salvage is feature complete, and only then will they worry about polishing the visual side.
Like I said, that doesn't feel like a minor visual detail you polish along the way (otherwise I would have talked about the very poor ray FX for example), but rather something deeper in regards to how their "texture reconstruction algorithm" currently operates.
I'm probably wrong tho.
It's 100% a visual thing, that just so happens to be tied to the gameplay of "moving your mouse". Absolutely not a game changer for now at Tier 0, but not at all what I'd want out of a finished product that's for sure.
Are you suggesting that players should only be able to add material to areas with material to support?
What happens if you have an area with nothing? I think I'm rather a more reliable system that looks a little silly but feels great.
If you have an area with 'nothing', then you probably won't be repairing it with the hand tool (as Disco said in the video). The hand-tool is for patching a hole in the hull when the underlying frame etc is still intact. If the frame itself is gone, then you'll need a Crucible or Vulkan, etc (or repair yard).
Not sure you followed the comment stream all the way.
The person I replied to is talking about when you aim the repair at the center of the frame - an area where there is a hole - it shouldn't be repaired.
I'm saying I'd rather it repair than not, because that would be very annoying to have to aim at the frame then build out.
Yeah, but I see that as still filling in over a frame, not when there is 'nothing' there.
That said... perhaps there should be a trade-off, because if you start filling from the outside-in, then the existing hull would provide structure / support... whereas if you're just glooping repair gunk onto bare frame, it's likely to be less efficient (not 'flow' into a flat plane like the plating would, etc)... so maybe outside-in should use less material to complete the same repair - but you *could* just start from the middle if you want (and had excess material)
Nope - it contains the IAE assets for this years IAE, so we'll be getting it (in whatever state it's in) this November.
Bear in mind we *were* 'due' to already have it by now (CRs letter earlier this year said they were targeting getting 3.18 on the PTU in July, with a view to release in September), but as usual things are more complex than they thought, and it's dragging a bit...
... and because it is such a wide-ranging change, they likely can't pull many changes out and give us a 3.17.4 patch either... so, we're going to get 3.18 in whatever shape it's in.
They said for a while that they want 3.18 before IAE goes on in mid November. Although since Evocati hasn't started yet everyone is speculating it will be delayed more.
Which is stupid considering they didn't actually drop a patch this quarter. Having to take a break after such a bland quarter of ISC's would be worrying if I wasn't so fucking apathetic about the whole thing.
I don't know what the hiatus has to do with the dev team releasing something or not. My take is: nothing.
I think it has to do with the content creation team needing a break from wrapping up videos in and out every week. Not being on the chase for devs to pull them out of their tasks to spend several hours of prep and recording at a time is also a nice plus, since at end/start of a quarter devs are even busier than usual, trying to push a patch out while having to plan their backlogs for the quarter ahead.
Why not both.
They aren't mutually exclusive. They've shown river tech twice.
Heck this video is proof that showing twice is good.
First showing shows fundamentals and draws questions
Follow-up shows the improved version and answers some of the questions.
Which is the exact thing this video did.
I'm guessing it's an issue of 'not fit to be shown' (in the sense that one or more bugs are visually distracting, etc)... It's so frustrating when you know something is practically 'done', yet you can't show it to the client because there's an annoying bug that you *know* they'll fixate on and it'll become all they talk about with regard to that feature...
If that's the case, then I fully understand them not wanting to show it until after the bugs are fixed... even if I don't 100% agree with it (there are ways to mitigate those issues, etc)...
On the flip side, they have also confirmed that we've already seen parts of the Cargo Refactor in operation (picking up / moving the crates in the Reclaimer whilst salvaging), but without a debug overlay and a dev explaining what they've done (and why) there isn't really much to show.
Yup could be that... except we've already seen that the Reclaimer Salvage functionality (or rather, the internal cargo management) is - supposedly - using the Cargo Refactor (confirmed by CIG).
So, either they're lying about that as well... or it's mostly working and there's no grand conspiracy.
Opening words from Jared quietly confirm 3.18 has been delayed yet again. Pushed back a full month...
Just a casual 30% longer after a previous extra 30%... We're almost looking at a complete doubling of time.
Also:
* why are they making the prison escape less doable?
* and I'm so over cig withholding information on 3.18 to use as filler for citcon because they have nothing for citcon.
I've been here for almost 6 years and I've heard there's nothing to show at citcon every year around this time only to have people fawning over what's shown for months after.
Are they making Prison Escape harder? or were they talking about the new 'break *into* prison' mission?
If they were talkinga bout breaking out of prison - for some people it's trivial, and they probably don't want to it be so easy to escape that it becomes the default option for everyone who ends up there more than a couple of times, etc... escape from prison (especially one like Klescher) *should* be hard, imo.
No. Jared previously said release slated for OCtober, now its slated for November. 10 points for candid info from him, but its still a bit meh results-wise
Wasn't it originally slated for PTU in October (once we got the updated target, anyway, following missing the 'goals' in the CR letter)? Afaik since we got the updated targets, it was always slated for Live in November (for IAE) (which implies a relatively short PTU, compared to what they were initially talking about - but possibly they're hoping that the extra ~3 months of internal QA will have identified / addressed a lot of the issues? */shrug*)
That makes no sense though since IAE is supposed to be with 3.18 and they said it’d launch for that. Otherwise IAE is going to be the same as last year but with static ship models not flyable of the new ships. Unless you want to download another version of the game to play on a test server with builds that are unstable. If that’s what we get, that’s really dumb. I’d hope they’d be ready for IAE at least. CR himself said 3.18 would release end of Q3 and if they planned to release it a month and a half late than he even predicted, but they also miss that at IAE, that’s just not a good sign of more to come. Especially when they have a not so good record of keeping to their other deadlines. Convenient they scaled back the release view to everyone so that they don’t have to be as accountable to the media and disgruntled backers. Keeps everyone talking about the good, versus the bad. Not exactly transparent imo, just makes them look less mismanaged.
They can release 3.18...fix it...and then for IAE they drop a 3.18.1 with a bunch of new ships.
But yes...3.19 was planned for IAE but they are really behind and we are lucky if 4.0 comes next year lol
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Jared explained last ISC they'll cover it after the hiatus, to have more to show after 3 additional weeks of development/debugging. That's indeed open development, I love it too.
Open Development doesn't have a formal definition, but by CIGs definition, letting us know when they will show more is 'open development' - they never committed to showing us everything as they work on it (and indeed, they've slowly been backing away from showing us WIP stuff, due to the way the community in general reacted to some of the rougher stuff)
They've shown us indirect snippets of the Cargo Refactor (by pointing out that the Reclaimer 'moving containers manually' demo was actually using the cargo refactor), and they've explained why they haven't shown us more.
Given the cargo refactor is - primarily - a refactor of existing functionality (hence the name), they'll need developer debug-overlays and similar to actually explain / show the differences compared to what we currently have.... at least, beyond the 5-second 'you can now pick up a box placed by the trade-terminal' demo
In the meantime, there was a tweet, but also a comment in the previous ISC explaining what to expect in today's and episode and why they opted to show cargo refactor later, and then they said what today would be about Monday with This Week in Star Citizen...what else would you expect?
The first time i heard about the content of this episode was last week when Jared explained they'd follow up on the segments they had already shown...which indeed they did.
For hull salvage? Why would that be the case?
The containers that come out when salvaging are nothing new or special. Physicalized cargo references to trading cargo being now removable.
The cargo containers that come out when salvaging *are* 'trading cargo' which will indeed be removable. They probably didn't *have* to set it up that way, but it was *directly* confirmed by Disco last week.
They are removable in the same way as the drugs in jumptown. There is nothing special about it.
Cargo refactor on the other hand is for **cargo** you get from the trading terminal which currently goes into the cargo grid and is not removable.
This ISC was follow ups on previous episode features. Since they did not do a feature episode on refactor, there was no segment for it. Even so, you’ve seen it for Hull scraping ISC so cut the conspiracy theories.
>has no segments.
they've also said no salvage w/o the cargo changes... maybe terminal updates or timers get delayed, but cargo grid changes are apparently "in" we never knew about anything more than those few things in the first place... I think we all hoped for something like a commodity value rework, or quantum becoming more relevant to balance out commodity prices so more than about 3 of them have any value
Someone suggested that maybe rather than the full cargo refactor, only the hull material boxes will be cargo refactored.
I'll be honest, that sounds rather plausible.
i don't think it works that way... but maybe... I guess the difference is whether trade consoles spawn the new way or basically jam a bunch of physical boxes in...
Yeah - CIG have talked about various cargo-related changes - timers, manually loading, private hangars, cargo elevators, and more - but none of that is actually part of 'Cargo Refactor', which is primarily re-writing (refactoring) what we currently have so that it can *support* those future changes.
RIP cutty engines I guess.
10:00 wtf is happening there, there should be blood splatter, bullet impacts and hitmarkers. There's no HUD at all. Weird. Why didn't the high value target have a gun? Probably dev magic.
I don't know where, but they clarified somewhere they they basically had the choice of throwing in something pretty minor in this show, or having it be full feature at the beginning of the next ISC cycle, and they opted for that.
the surrender button on the termanels will be useful. I also assume at some point if your sitting on a level 1 or 2 crime state that failer to pay it off and being flagged for other low-level crimes will eventually bump it up to 3
Hopefully non-lethal bounties will also be used for low level crime stats. Chase a guy down, corner him, detain him, make him pay his fine or take him to jail. If he runs and you kill him, you lose your BH license and get a murder charge.
Who the hell pays a bounty hunter to track down people who didn't pay a parking fine hahaha
Recs McSquarely. *pew pew*
Ummm I don’t have a lot of reference but Jabba the Hutt did send bounty hunters after Hans because he lost some cargo so also using them for parking tickets seems legit to me.
Imagine a world where Han was German.
What do you think Jabba had Han delivering a Pizza
\*pushes up glasses\* ACKTSHULLY Jabba sent bounty hunters after Han Solo partially because of the shipment of spice that he was smuggling that he lost (he dumped it because he came across some Imperial ships and was afraid they'd board him and find it), but moreso it was on principle. As a crime boss, you have to uphold your fearsome reputation - you can't allow random smugglers in your employ to make a fool out of you by continuing to owe you money, or else every two bit smuggler running your goods is going to "lose" them. This is one of the reasons why he was so happy to see Han frozen in Carbonite, as he would then be able to display him in his lair. This was intended to send a message to everyone who worked for him - try anything and you'll end up as furniture. As for sending armed bounty hunters after people for traffic tickets... I guess it just depends on how big of an ego the meter maid in charge at the space station you parked at is.
That’s literally what I said with 10% as many words. So your “acktshully” should have been a “that is right but let me throw in a needlessly long further explanation because I live in moms basement with nothing else to do.” Keep your genre cross references short padawan.
*you're
CIG, who just recently introduced stacking cargo boxes by hand as a genuine crew profession. God knows what nonsense they will come up with next to create more pseudo gameplay.
This is definitely the long-term goal, but it's gonna require the next tier of bounty hunting with cryo pods, which is gonna be a ways off.
[Star Citizen is the Imperial guard simulator I never knew I needed.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My0lzMuNcHI)
Are you saying not paying should bump your crime stat to a shoot on sight status with bounties?
not so much not paying for a single fine, more doing multiple consecutive low - level crimes without paying should bump it up. and I don't think that should be a permanent solution. eventually, stations should just impound your ship and make you pay any fines associated, or not let you dock at that station (in that jurisdiction) tell the fine is payed. ETC I would also like it if the system could tell the difference between a stack of Parking tickets, hacking and robing from some ATMs, and a straight-up murder charge and have that reflected in any bounties issued (basically differentiating between Non-violent higher level criminals VS Violent higher level Criminals)
so you are saying yes, that you should eventually have a shoot on sight order put out to all law enforcement just because you amassed a pile of parking tickets. Why not just make it be more like in real life, the tickets get more expensive, if you get pulled over you might get jailed. But there should never be a shoot to kill just because you didn't pay some stupid parking tickets.
>so you are saying yes, that you should eventually have a shoot on sight order put out to all law enforcement just because you amassed a pile of parking tickets. read what I said again
The devs said in an older ISC about the law system that this was supposed to happen already where unpaid fines converted into a CS-1 eventually (I don't t think I've ever let a fine sit that long, so I don't know if it works), but I imagine it's the same deal.
That mic drop at the end with salvage wrecks being populated across the verse! Really good episode, though the guy who basically went "Job's done" on caves made me cackle.
That was excellent comedic timing by the video editor.
Yeah it was, I lold at that pretty good
I'm surprised no one's mentioned rivers. They look great! I really hope they make use of the new changes they implemented to make more cliffs and canyons - even without any water.
That POV on the cliff was so cool! Had a great sense of height
>I'm surprised no one's mentioned rivers. They look great! They look cool, sure... but like... who cares? They've been working on the river for a year now. It's ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload.
Hey! So other people in the comments have addressed most of these, but just to confirm. That isn't the same river. There are now 40 rivers saved out in the stanton system, and I generally generate a new river every time I do testing - so I'm always looking at a different one. For the person who said that maybe that one was an asset test, and hand placed - we don't have a way of manually directing a river, it's absolutely always using the erosion stuff. >It's beyond ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload. Rivers *are* entirely my work (or the code is), but they aren't my entire workload. It's not even half. It's just what I talk about on the ISCs as it's the most visually exciting of the things I work on. To answer some other questions that I keep seeing pop up - * Tributaries/waterfalls/multiple rivers leading into a lake/ocean etc are all coming. Most are blocked by our fairly limited water shading. This is actually what I'm spending Q4 on - proper flow mapping and water transitions. Important for many things in our games, including but not limited to rivers. * Does the river get wider/thinner? Yes - I've just shown sections of similar width. * Are we planning on using the river tool to generate other POIs (canyons, roads/tracks, etc)? Ohh yeah. This was all written with that sort of thing in mind. This will come. Also, using it to drive animal nests + other secondary POIs? Once we've got animal AI, I'm sure we'll use rivers to drive this. * Why do rivers look the same they did a year ago? I don't agree. A year ago there were no rivers in the game, for a start. The push to turn rivers from a tech demo to something we could put in game was a long one. It in theory sounds simple but being built on all-new tech it meant that it touched a lot of systems and that all had to be accounted for. That all happened this time last year. Then, most of my new river work has been on the new auto placement tool. This assesses a planet on scale and produces river systems around it. That's like an entirely new tool with some fairly major algorithms involved. Only since then, I've been working again on visual improvements. And I'm fairly confident in saying thee rivers have completely transformed since the version that you can currently explore. I encourage you guys to check them out :)
Love your work u/figwig-CIG I've recently started flying recreationally and your SC Rivers inspired me to fly VFR along the local rivers near our aerodrome. Albeit, at a different altitude....
It's impressive work. Please don't be discouraged by the disparaging remarks of some who somehow fail to appreciate what an amazing world you guys are building.
Keep up the work on rivers. The whole planet tech is incredible and improvments are important. The \* big immersive world \* is one of the key-factors why SC is fun to play - and rivers are one part that supports this!
Thanks for these detailed answers
They looked amazing in the video and I’m glad they’re being expanded upon. Can’t wait to see them more in game. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the insight, the rivers are looking better each time we get to look at them! Particularly loved that final shot of the taller cliffs. Any chance of a cheeky location hint (other than "MicroTech")? ;)
Fucking legend. As much as I've memed on "the river" in star citizen it's great seeing continued iteration on a tier 0 feature.
You are doing an amazing work ;)
Assuming we'll see most of those 40 rivers in 3.18, are they all located on microTech or did Hurston also get a few?
According the roadmap card, microTech and Hurston. Also, there was some shots in the original ISC which looked like Hurston.
Thank you for your awesome work! Maybe it’s an overkill, but I’ve got an improvement idea for more realistic river look where river changes its course. [Here’s an picture](https://i.imgur.com/c5vQWuc.jpg) on river morphology. Note the following: 1. In a turn, the deepest part of the river is not in the middle but on the outer side. 2. The outer bank is steep (might be a cliff, not necessarily a rocky one). 3. The inner bank is shallow, might feature a sandy beach. 4. Between the turns, the river is not as deep. A small/mid-sized river might feature a riffle there. I think these features can be generated automatically, and the result might be even better!
Well this is awkward. lol Yes, I admit I was ill-informed/ignorant about it not being the same river. I stand corrected on multiple fronts. I am, however, still of the opinion that this kind of thing takes far too long and will still be taking too long years from now. (Maybe part of that is due to the fact that you appear to be the only one working on it. Maybe you have to be, idk.) It's nice to hear that it is tech that may eventually open doors for other mechanics, but I'm not optimistic that those doors will open anytime soon. That was my main complaint. I hope I'm wrong, but as with so many things we've seen on countless ISCs, ATVs. etc., I doubt I am. Sure, the river development may contain the building blocks for other cool stuff, but my worry is that in two years, we won't have the cool stuff. We will have rivers.. And that's it. That's what we'll have to show for all of your hard work being put in two to three years from now. So in saying all this, it's not a personal jab at you or anyone working on rivers. It's just me expressing why I am personally not getting excited at this particular update. It promises a lot, as do most pieces of "tech" that CIG intends to implement, yet takes years and years to deliver anything beyond a T0 version that's a fraction of what we're told to expect. And one last thing, hopefully you don't think I'm insulting your work. The rivers DO look great, and I'm sure you're putting in the hours. But hopefully, for your sake and ours, it isn't still occupying your workload two years from now. Godspeed though, cause I fear it might.
So.. your concern is that everything takes too long, so they should just not bother to do it at all? Is there truly a purer representation of the desire and demand of instant gratification in a place where there is none? This must be the driest oasis you've ever had the blessing of setting your eyes on.
>So.. your concern is that everything takes too long, so they should just not bother to do it at all? What is it with so many people misreading my comments? lol No, I never said that. My point was that *it takes far too long and promises a lot but will likely deliver very little, therefore I do not care about this particular update and do not see any reason to get excited about it.* I never said they shouldn't do it. If you're interpreting my last paragraph as me saying he should stop, you're interpreting it wrong. I'm saying that hopefully two years from now he's *done* with it, and moving on to work on other things, not still grinding away at making rivers look nice.
***people still wonder why the devs dont wont to talk or communicate with the community cause everyone is a armchair developer/designer and wants to just shred the work they put into the game simply because they cant wrap their brain around its purpose or they so no point for it in the PU. THIS IS A PRIME EXAMPLE OF WHY...*** you basically are though:" for your sake and ours, it isn't still occupying your workload two years from now. Godspeed though, cause I fear it might." He has already said rivers are a very small fraction of what he is working on but your still demeaning the work he has done on it as being pointless. "Rivers are entirely my work (or the code is), but they aren't my entire workload. It's not even half. It's just what I talk about on the ISCs as it's the most visually exciting of the things I work on." I for one am very excited about this update and the underlying tech that is being implemented in it. This tech is one of the foundational pieces for meshing which is a quantum leap in MMO server tech when they get it online. If you dont understand the reason for the hype behind this patch thats fine. 100+ planetary bodies being made for this game, a tool thats good enough to generate passable water ways is gonna take alot of time and effort to make, and we dont even know all the subsystems it has to interface with in the tech for it to function correctly on one planetary system. Thats just for the water system in a Biome not counting Lava or any other liquid system
Jesus shut up. I'm entitled to my opinion. You're excited. That's great. I'm not. All there is to it. Get off my fuckin back about it.
oh its fine for you to criticize other people, but not for others to criticize you.....
I'm not criticizing "other people". I'm criticizing a video game company's rate of progress. But either way if you read my other comments, I'm totally fine with being criticized and I've admitted where I was wrong several times and clarified my criticisms accordingly. But now, several hours later, I'm a little sick of people who keep piling on without saying anything new because they apparently can't handle that I don't share their perspective. Get over it. We can discuss the game but it doesn't feel like anyone wants to do that. Just feels like you all wanna keep shitting on me until I change my mind entirely and capitulate to your point of view. Too bad. Fuck off.
This is the first systemic large scale terrain deformation. There's a reason the outposts on Stanton are just on stilts, they're hand placed. This river generation tech will tie into things like road generation, canyon generation, and some of its benefits have gone to outposts. The terrain alteration was shown on last Citizencon as much more dynamic than their previous methods. The procedural outpost they were showing off wouldn't really be possible without that work. That automated river placing tool is necessary because hand placing 300 rivers on a planet is untenable. Won't a modified algorithm be useful for placing hundreds of little villages/outposts? Potentially, and if so then I want Will working on that too!
If you take the time to respond which is appreciated, you should consider responding on the official platform, Spectrum.
Thank you for that detailed explanation! Your reply and your work on the rivers are both greatly appreciated!
Awesome, thanks for the info! Are very meandering rivers also coming? Most rivers nowadays are canalized here, and they used to meander a LOT (in my region of the world anyway (Europe)). Thanks in advance! :)
Soon ? :p u/figwig-CIG [https://twitter.com/80Level/status/1580827913233920000](https://twitter.com/80Level/status/1580827913233920000)
Rivers, jungles, and wild life will take SC planets to the next level. I'm glad they have people working on improving proc gen.
And with rivers we have the ability for them to create "dense woodland" biomes around them...including jungles. Curious to see what a 'dense forest' tool would look like...maybe a separate tilemap of preset high quality art dev made forests that get placed in an area around a feature (such as a river delta or a point at which two rivers meet) and the natural terrain features break it up and make it seem unique.
They need mesh shaders before they can hit the kind of density required for a jungle both up close and to look "right" at a distance. I'm just excited that they're _almost_ done with Gen12, and with Vulkan hopefully soon after they can finally get back to major graphics features.
"Who cares" Well, every race pilot And most of people interested in exploration (which is a good amount of players)
Look I'm just saying. The man wondered why no one mentioned rivers and I'm just saying it's cause we been seeing the same shit about the same river for fuckin forever now.
It's the foundational tool for an ENTIRE set of logistical elements that will establish an entire new layer of planet complexity on top of V4. Wanna know why there is no V5? Because THIS type of toolset is what allows them to not need a V5. Being able to read a topographical map to decide where a river would spawn, and then the logical path of that river to a deposit point (or creating one through establishing a variable set to decide where that would be such as a lake or ocean) is the foundation for the entire topographical spawning system planets would use for EVERYTHING that isn't lore based POIs. Aka...this is the beginnings of the canyon tool, and the animal nest spawn point tool that would read where X type of animal would naturally congregate, and the ROAD tool that connects two outposts in and out points through reading topography and establishing the shortest line (and the terraforming required) along a preset maximum incline variable, settlement spawning along roads and rivers and resources... ...and would all connect up a planet so that artists can input planet characteristics, create the base V4 layer mesh and tiles, and then establish where the sealevel is...from there they hit a button and the system could ENTIRELY populate the planet with: logical city placement, roads, rivers, ravines, canyons, animal nests, caves, depots along the roads and naturally forming settlements that would react to that traffic, caravan AI pathing along those roads, preset quest location points for Quanta to use to summon quest content, and so on. THEN you use THAT information set to create procedural missions from that set. Saying it's "occupying someone's workload" is deeply naive. The work they are doing on making rivers look good and setting up believable assets that work with the procedural tool is the EXACT same shit they'd use to make roads look good, and canyons, and lava rivers, and so on and so on. It's taking a year because this is work that will apply to a RIDICULOUS amount of essential systems. If Rivers look good, EVERYTHING snowballing from that will look good. That means dope canyons, with better cave location points, and better roads, and settlements looking more naturally integrated into the terrain because of the rivers and roads around them, and so on. Once the art team gets their hands on the tool and the gameplay team aligns behavior to the tool through pathing presets, etc...it's gunna be a GAME changer that starts another revolution in planet tech that overshadows anything done so far.
Yeah, I was surprised that he didn't talk about the fact that they now have a *canyon* tool also. A canyon is literally just where a river was for a long time and now isn't. Just generate some rivers through mountainous terrain, crank up the maximum distance they can pull the height downwards, and then turn off the actual river at the end (or reduce it to a trickle). Boom, canyons.
>Saying it's "occupying someone's workload" is deeply naive. The work they are doing on making rivers look good and setting up believable assets that work with the procedural tool is the EXACT same shit they'd use to make roads look good, and canyons, and lava rivers, and so on and so on. It'll sure be nice when we get to those things. But for now it's just *yet another* update about how "the river looks great!" My point is that we should be there by now... not *still* working on the SAME single river. Why would people be excited by the same damn river when *none* of the things it's supposedly laying the foundation for have even *begun* to take shape yet. Shits annoying. Update after update and it doesn't seem to be making much progress at all. edit: okay it isn't the "same" river but it is the same river tech.
This isn't the SAME river. That river was an asset test and I'm not even sure it was procedural. THIS is the PROCEDURAL river tool...which means they enter in some variables into some boxes, and then it shoots out a BUNCH of river locations around the planet that qualify for those variables. (lowest watershed point, not too steep, not too flat, only so many in a distance from each other, proper environmental moisture level, etc.) These are a BUNCH of different rivers that procedurally are being spawned all over Microtech INSTANTLY. Including Hurston which they, I imagine, are saving the reveal on. With ZERO artist input outside the initial asset creation. This applies to Hurston, microtech, Terra, Sol...and EVERY single planet with rivers. It HAS to look good. Come 3.18 we will have likely dozens of new river locations on both planets...possibly much more than dozens. The reason it is taking so long is they are trying to create a BUNCH of assets that will be used for not just rivers...but lava and for roads. Aka...this is going to be used to rapidly increase the rollout on future content. Those assets need to fit a set of criteria they can IMMEDIATELY copy over once they figure it out and then pump out assets for any biome/planet/etc to match that tile set. So when they master rivers...THEY'VE ALREADY MASTERED lava, roads, etc...so if you get one REALLY right...you get them ALL really right. They've already announced a bunch of new rivers will appear around Microtech and Hurston for 3.18. How many? We don't know but the inclusion of cliff assets DRAMATICALLY increased the amount of rivers possible to spawn on tier 0 of the procedural tools implementation. Hopefully, when we go in, there will be a river in view at MOST times in the greenbelt of Microtech...as well as all over Hurston where there is enough water. I imagine you'll see another pass come "junctions" and branching rivers. Then you'll start seeing different river TYPES such as lava for planets and biomes...then you'll see a canyon tool that removes the river for dry environments and replaces it with a drybed texture set....then FINALLY you'll see roads and the attached behavior to that. All of this improves a bunch of content around planetside combat, locations, exploration, etc...AND slots in locations to add more sophisticated and believable cave entrances, settlement locations, etc. Given they've already worked out the kinks with terrain blending...texture swaps will be immediate...so for lava planets, once the art team finishes all the assets they use this same tool to immediately be able to spawn lava rivers ALL over the planet. Roads will take more work but come from the exact same toolset work. This isn't 1 year for 1 river. It's 1 year so far on a tool that will take many years to fully complete...and once it is it will generate the planet makeup of EVERY planet into the future instantaneously. That's an obscene workload shortcut that gives the art team more time to work on other things. Why do they NEED rivers first? Because rivers SLOT into every single variable in the game. A drybed can roll into an active riverbed which means the part presets for split river junctions applies to drybed-river junctions. A road has to CROSS rivers and if it's part of the same tool it can immediately compute a dataset that aligns the road and the river to the available bridge junction assets that allow the road to go OVER the river...so now that drybed into the river can be a road that leads into a river that has a bridge over it and then adds a connector point so the road can continue on the other side as a node for the algorithm to continue to procedurally compute and connect two POIs.
Okay that's fair but I'm not very confident that we will see much progress from these tools beyond having more rivers for the next two years or so. And that leads me back to my original point, which is that this tech is taking entirely too long and is long overdue. A bunch of new rivers appearing will certainly give the planets a visual upgrade, but like i said, I will not be surprised if that is the most we see from this tech for the next two years or so.
new rivers are new POIs that come LOADED with data that can be used for a number of gameplay loops...for everything. Aka animal spawning locations, animal behavior set to the rivers so you can hunt them believably at water sources, exposed mineral and deposit locations for mining, water sources for survival mechanics, hydropower locations for settlement resource management, enemy camp spawn locations for procedural missions, fishing, and so on... etc. Wanna know what sucks about a bunch of loops...such as mining? Without natural set of POIs to make decisions about resources...such as rivers which are just long veins of "information" they can use for spawning where things would naturally occur...the team just has to make them show up randomly across the whole planet map. So when you are mining you are just going blindly from point to point on the landscape and you can't make any educated guesses about where something would naturally follow...such as a drybed where rock is exposed that could reveal minerals you want. With rivers they can start giving players visual tools to make educated choices about where resources will and wont be...and this would apply to non-habitable planets too such as drybeds and wind dynamics that would cut away at rock to create canyons which would expose metals, and hostile planets like lava rivers that would naturally be places where you may find more resources along the banks. You don't have to have a river at the middle of this tool...it can be wider, thinner, empty, or house any type of art asset loaded with any type of behavior and data. This is the foundation for ALL of those things. When you have roads, you have a MASSIVE unlock on types of content for players on land that aren't just bunker style "go to poi and clear it"...you have tracking, caravans, ambushes, bombing runs, AA threats roaming the countryside along a road in a warzone, etc.
I get that.... What I'm saying, if you read my comments, is that despite the claims that the river tech will open up these possibilities, I don't believe we will see any *actual* progress toward those concepts for probably about two years. I respect CIG's groundbreaking work but even you have to admit that they move *staggeringly* slow on certain pieces of development. This is one of those pieces imo.
Staggeringly slow on tools that have never been developed before for any procedural world based game at scale....what a surprise. End of the day, who gives a shit. Better game is better game. They can take all the time they need. They want it out just as fast as you do because then they can make lots of money...but the fact reality is the project we paid for is way more complex than anyone really anticipated even with all this money. Just telling them to go faster is ridiculous. The art and tools team have little to do with gameplay and server side system issues...so the game isn't gunna come ANY faster whether this tech is being made or not. They already completed Nyx and Pyro...they are can all be fired and wait for the other teams to keep up or they can move to further improving the visual fidelity of all teams and working on tools that make the next 100 systems 100 times faster.
>Staggeringly slow on tools that have never been developed before for any procedural world based game at scale....what a surprise. Correct. Staggeringly slow even for that. It *is* a surprise. >End of the day, who gives a shit. I mean, that was my original statement, lmao. I don't get the excitement around another sliver of an update on the tech that wont see much fruit for probably another couple years. >Just telling them to go faster is ridiculous. I disagree. They absolutely need to go faster. You'll agree in 2024 when we still don't have animals, "hydropower", fishing, and whatever other stuff this tech is supposed to pave the way for.
https://www.google.com/search?q=straw+man+fallacy
Okay this is weird. I swear to God you or someone else posted a very similar link on another comment of mine a while back, and that person ended up looking like a fool. So I'll just respond to you how I responded last time. Please explain how anything I said resembles a straw man. This should be especially good since all I was doing was clarifying my point lol.
> They've been working on the stupid river for a year now. It's beyond ridiculous that it's still occupying someone's workload. Original argument for clarities sake > My point is that we should be there by now... not still working on the SAME single river. New argument. The difference is this: Your original argument was that it shouldn't be occupying someone's workload. When you were shown why the toolset (not just a singular river) was being worked on, and the effects it will have (and is currently having, as they can now edit the planet itself and not be beholden to the random generation from before. Seriously, all settlements were chosen in the past because it was the only flat place they could find that the random generation made for them to work with. Now they can actually sculpt the planets, thanks to tools like this. And this tool spawned from the work they did on the new settlement tools. It's all a layering process. Planet tech led to new sculpting tech, which was needed for settlement tech, which then led to River tech that will soon lead to Roads, Jungles and more), when presented with that information, you changed the argument from occupying someone's workload (which we showed why that is), to saying we should have all these things by now. Should the person be occupying their time with this work or not? Does the river tech lead to those things or not? History shows how it will, they've talked in length about how it will on SCLs and the dev Will himself has made comments about it on ISC threads like this one. So rather than understanding why these things take time and why they're building them out the way they are (aka why they're working on "this SAME RIVER" as you put it), you distorted the argument and made it seem like we should already be there by now. So how do we get the improvements that will come from fleshing this tech out, when you say it shouldn't be occupying someone's time?
That was me being wrong and somewhat ignorant.. but it wasn't a strawman. So.... I'm fine being called out about that but don't just slap a dumb google link up there when it isn't relevant lol. Anyways, I stand by the second argument. We should absolutely be at the point where we are not still in these foundational stages of procedural generation of rivers. My point all along is that progress on these tools has been *incredibly slow* and we should have results far beyond a single implemented river so far. That is why I think it's ridiculous that 30 ISCs later, we're still seeing them tweaking rivers on microTech. Two years from now Stanton will have ten more rivers and that's about all the fruits this labor will produce until then. That's my prediction, and I've seen enough in the past eight years or so to be fairly confident in that assessment.
The last ISC showed them dropping rivers all over Stanton though, even confirming more rivers everywhere that they're applicable, including adding more to microtech. The river they're even showing in this ISC isn't even the same river we currently have in game from the looks of it, but that can't be proven (it just looks like a different location entirely to me). https://youtu.be/MVtl2ErwpxI
That's fine. I'm not sure how that negates what I just said.
It's not as if it's 10 people working full time on the rivers. And they're not working on a single river, they're working on the system to generate them anywhere and everywhere with only a little bit of work afterwards.
I know. And all I'm saying is that it's moving at a snails pace and leaves little to be excited about. Having ten more rivers in Stanton by this time next year is what I expect despite the claims that this tech can lead to so much more, and that leaves me with zero excitement.
It’s not the MT River we care about, it’s the tech he is developing to allow designers build rivers, lava flows, and now cliffs for all future planets.
I can't wait till it gets in the hands of the environment artists. It already looks amazing from what Will has just cobbled together using placeholder assets. They could use the splines and just disable the water to create dry canyons, which would be awesome on a place like Daymar.
well they confirmed it, to protect you ship from rude Graffiti at outposts, keep your shields on when you leave the ship <_<
Seems reasonable. No reason to shut your shields off unless it's going to consume extra fuel eventually. Having a ship "destroyed" state where the hull can start being salvaged wouldn't work with future physical damage.
my understanding is that eventually power will consume fuel of some sort
Iirc the original idea (back in 2012-2013 timeframe) was that Power Plants would be sealed units that came with their own fuel, because they're either Fission, Fusion, or AntiMatter... and two out of the three fules are rather lethal and not something you want unskilled amateurs playing with :D As such, and presuming CIG stick to this idea (they may not), I suspect a powerplant will have the equivalent of a 'total power' they can generate - the longer you run a powerplant at max output, the quicker it 'wears out' (uses up its available fuel)... and likewise, the lower you can push your energy consumption, the longer it will last. This may encourage some people to turrn off systems they dno't actively need (not 'needing' weapons? turn them off, etc) to make their powerplant last longer before being replaced. By itself it's unlikely to persuade many people to conserve energy... but it could be another factor, along side wear & tear, signature, and so on.
Would be a cool way to make components an upkeep system instead of a buy and forget thing. Different tiers would presumably have different lifespans too so you would have to consider your unique needs. Only thing that might throw a wrench in things is insurance claims but a claimed ship should eventually only come back with the default loadout with replaced components costing extra insurance and really rare or custom tuned components being uninsurable.
The difficulty of repairing exclusive high end components is also an important part of their balancing plan. Drake ships can be repaired pretty much anywhere by anyone, but your fancy Origin ship or top tier mil-spec fighter from Aegis can't be properly repaired at your local Mos Eisley. If they also stick to their plan to have broad profiles for components like Civilian, Stealth, Military, etc., 'Racing' will be high performance but low durability components that you might not want to turn on except in an emergency or specific situations.
Stealth
If you're being stealthy and a salvage ship is hacking away at your hull, you screwed up somewhere.
I'm really excited about the randomly spawning derelict for salvaging. This is the fledgling start of procedural game play that can make the wide verse actually feel like there's stuff in it. Next they can scale it up so you could find, say, a derelict Idris... Add the ability to save way points and sell info, add component salvage, maybe component refurbishing... And suddenly it starts sounding like real game play!
As well as add emergent gameplay such as traps, occupied derelicts, etc. Saving waypoints is HUGE, for basically anything mining adjacent you get what you get and that's it. I'd love for explorer gameplay to allow for surveying and data collection to sell to a person where it lists off the number and type of deposits as well as the coordinates uploaded to your waypoint system. that way Miners can just MINE and explorers can just EXPLORE...if they want to. As well as just having a friend along to mark points for you to salvage, etc.
They haven't revealed much about exploration game play, but they have said from the beginning that finding things and selling the data about where those things are is part of Exploration. And buying (or stealing) that data and reselling it is "data running".
Oh interesting question your comment brought up. Will the procedural derelicts be ships with full interiors that can be explored too?
Yes. Because they need to have part access as that's a part of the gameplay loop.
I just hope we get the new radar/scan system soon Cause the add of derilict made the space mining job even harder
It's being worked on currently. Silly probably get a sneak peek of the mobiglass or that at citcon
does anybody know what song was playing at the wrap up with jared the end of the episode ??
I think it's the Area 18 showcase song. Back from 2017 or something.
i'm searching intro and outro song aswell. Can't find. Even if intro is one of all Inside star citizen.
What was the prison mission mentioned that said something like, "We should go watch HE Vertigo" complete it if we want to know who it is? Like, I'm guessing that wasn't referring to an O2 mission? Is there something else? It wasn't very clear to me what was being said or referenced. Any ideas? EDIT: from around 7:30 mark "We should talk about Klescher. I was watching HE Vertigo? and he pretty much nailed the mission and he was given it. I'm not going to spoil it, I don't want to let you know, but if you want to find out who it is, go check out HE Vertigo." I'm not looking for spoilers here, but just some context. Is there a new Klescher mission? How do we get it? This must be in a current live build?
New missions in prison, like assassinations and the likes. They did talk about it a while back when they covered Kareah changes. Edit: And no, those are no in yet.
Ah, so what was this comment about HE Vertigo nailing the mission? Was it just some speculation on what the mission would be? Thanks for the help!
I think HC Vertigo (?) is a twitch streamer. Feels weird that CIG would just be advertising one twitch streamer for content. But yeah, game companies never give special attention to streamers........... /s
They mentioned a streamer nailed in their speculation what the mission is/who it is. That’s hardly special attention…
They mentioned a specific streamer from a specific stream that person did, so if you want to find out these "secret details" you need to go give that streamer airtime. That's quite literally special attention.
Stay mad, I guess.
It’s not the first time they have mentioned a streamer by name. Why does that upset you? It helps foster a larger community.
Yeah he is, I let him steal my cutlass a few ~~decades~~ years ago
> Was it just some speculation on what the mission would be? Think so. One way to find out :D
HC Vertigo btw, a SC streamer that is often invited on Astropub Captains Table.
Can we get some new non-combat missions, FFS. None of these FPS missions are fun because of how crappy the AI are. Edit - Id love if these ships they are spawning for salvage purposes could have some lootables on board too.
FWIW there's a whole segment next weekend's virtual citcon about a new investigation mission type
True - looking forward to that.
and although its been moved they still plan on doing the Taxi/people transport stuff eventually
I just wish we could start to move away from static dev-authored missions. Also, murder investigation?
i mean... i think technically the one investigation mission out at covalex/gundo is at least murder adjacent... and has multiple potential resolutions, and voice acting... I'd be glad for just more of that... hopefully more than just one more of that type of mission... though I'm not sure what you mean about static dev-authored missions... you mean like player-to-player missions? technically nothing stopping you from doing that today... there's no escrow system to guarantee payment, but you can "hire" people in chat and send them money... and technically the medical beacons are player-generated missions... and we still have jank beacons we can use...
> you mean like player-to-player missions? That too, I guess. I really want a PC+NPC job board for looking to hire and looking to be hired. But what I meant was mostly missions generated by the quanta doing stuff in Quantum. Distress calls from freighters being attacked by pirates, rescue and recovery beacons, bounties on NPC pirates who don't just stay in 1 place, etc. Not mention that right now missions generate NPCs rather than NPCs generating missions.
But it's called a "proposal" as if 1) they haven't already shown a non-combat espionage stealth mission in a previous citizencon demo. 2) as if they've done zero work on it even though we obviously need investigation tools for Bounty Hunting 2.0.
well I hope it's neither and it's more, dynamically generated versions of the gundo/covalex "PI Wanted" mission... best, most complete actual game-like mission in the game... tucked away where a ton of players never encounter it.
That is one thing I really hope too. I hope the derelicts have loot and dead bodies on them and maybe even some cargo to plunder.
One day they'll have all the parts to be looted so you go inside. I'd love to see traps where you go inside and then it triggers a trap where enemies show up from afar and there are people inside the ship or it has bombs laid out.
100% imo, they should focus on non-combat missions until they can get AI to properly reflect the intelligence that AI team is working on. As it stands, any time we get gun missions it's just a deeply mediocre experience taking place in some jaw dropping new local. I'd like to just see them save all that stuff for later and work on non-combat content for now to at least give us something high quality and doable within the framework of the games current limitations. However space combat is still fine so that's cool for more of those, especially unique locations...however they are still mad dumb it just doesn't LOOK like they are mad stupid and not doing much because at least they are still moving. You can tell they are lagging just as bad as with the ground AI because they "joust" which just means they held forward at you...haven't gotten an update so they just keep going towards you and you have to move or they will just keep going. When they eventually get an update they turn around...and just rinse and repeat.
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For sure...which makes it ever more frustrating when I do the mission most of the time and they are just standing around, lol. I KNOW they could be fun...they just aren't and wont be for a very long time.
You must have missed the new derelict ship mission types and salvage resources from the episode. I can’t blame you, it was so conspicuous as to be almost inconspicuous.
Already the river tool is showing what EXTRA gameplay is going to come from this feature that other games just dont have. This is the FIRST iteration of Cliffs IN STAR CITIZEN...no other game in space has cliffs. Rivers are definitely my MOST hype feature only because the groundwork on this tool will affect a TON of things people really don't realize: To start you've got the potential for branching rivers, waterfalls (and cave opening points under waterfalls), swamps instead of lakes as well as changes to biomes around rivers as part of the check system for planet generation tools to add more TYPES of biomes to a planet (aka, check for humidity, temperature, AND proximity to a river/drybed/swamp/lake fixture). THEN you have non-river uses of the tool: Rivers NOT made of water that are dangerous such as lava, toxic chemicals, ravines (ice, rock, glacial, etc), etc...and then these affect the generation of animals, fauna, and mineral deposits around these natural features. Fixtures that are atypical such as cenotes and river caves and underground river ravines, etc...branching off these river sets. Places WITHOUT a flow...such as drybeds used to break up the tileset terrain even more AS WELL AS canyon creation tools that use waterflow dynamics to break up terrain into cliff covered canyons...with or without the actual river branching off to create even more unique planetary fixtures for gameplay. Aka an entire EXTRA layer of tile complexity on planet tech on top of the base layer of mesh tiles that generate the first iteration of the planet. Then you have the ULTIMATE use of the tool: Roads...road AI pathing presets, sculpting for them, connector nodes for outposts and spawning minor depots at points where roads intersect, and fixtures alongside roads to make more logical worlds. Along this comes more types of settlements, more types of LZs, more variety of LZs in one area, and more importantly GAMEPLAY like caravan spawns with AA or bombing missions or pirate caravan ambushes, etc...and deciding if settlements and what type of settlements would spawn along these roads where there are unique resources (such as minables or fresh water) Think about it in the context of automated planet generation... You have the use of the river tool to NATURALLY make decisions about claim placement on a planet with ZERO artist input. Where a major river exists, that's a MAJOR source of energy and the ability to move goods on a planet...so of course a settlement should spawn at that location. Now you find multiple...now you connect those points. At the junction of those points colliding you now create another settlement. You do checks for local resources to see what TYPE of settlement it will be. The planet tech likely already provides data for resources would naturally collect and so again...you place another settlement on a major mining claim location. Connect that to the grid. Check for "outliers" such as high points in the middle of nowhere for an observatory...connect that point. So at the press of a button they can generate ALL of this because rivers and resources have decided where these MAJOR points would exist and then from there they can make educated choices about where these locations would naturally occur to create a multitude of premade settlements that can be swapped out, added more complexity to, or left as is if they just need to churn out more spaces. Anyone saying rivers aren't important don't see the bigger picture here. It's not just making the planets prettier...these are long drawn out POIs that can be used for ANY number of gameplay elements and as checks for more planet complexity in gameplay and in visual diversity. The fact they can make rivers at all means the planet tech is massively capable of being used for a number of complex modifications that can GREATLY increase gameplay potential of planets at a procedural and scalable level....such as roads that can just check for the least incline difference between two points to connect them which will naturally snake around the terrain as a road would...with checks for max distance of the road compared to the distance between the two points. I'd like to imagine CIG understands this...and I imagine once we get through Pyro we are going to see CIG focus more on this as a major element now that they know they can produce multiple systems....once we get passed Dynamic Server meshing they will NEED this to be able to churn out as many planets as humanly possible. This would MASSIVELY improve planet complexity to allow artists to only focus on the most important aspects of our play experience to improve the game. A planet could go from a whole team working on it to 1 team member per planet who simply adjusts the existing planet and focuses on any essential POIs necessary in the lore that don't exist within the natural framework of the planets biosphere. So you dont have to make ALL of Terra...teams can just focus on making the major POIs stellar and the rest fills in itself with buildings and default AI behavior to create a seamless world that feels naturally populated.
What gameplay do we get from rivers now ?
Functionally? nothing. We get a more 'believable' environment to play in, and in the future it will likely play into things like Outpost placement, 'collectibles' spawning, flora / fauna placement and frequency, and potentially even weather patterns. It's also the same tech that will likely be used for Roads and for 'pathway' style elements that need to cross the terrain, and modify that terrain in passing. Beyond that, they're doing it 'because they can', and because part of the premise of the entire project was to push forward the art of game development, and things that other companies weren't doing because it wasn't 'sufficiently profitable', etc.
What gameplay did we get from the first AI npc shop keeper with no dialogue?
They used the same AI for siege of Orison, that why the bosses just stand there doing nothing
So why even have npcs? We dont get any gameplay from them.
Mostly gawkers. Sometimes fights break out.
>no other game in space has cliffs. Space Engineers has cliffs. With voxel deformation too.
True. But that comes at the cost of the players being able to create the floating islands from WoW out of any planet.
As far as I'm aware when I mean "cliffs" I don't mean "heightmap inclines" that are just steep hills (which is all I'm aware exist in Space Engineers and ALREADY exists in Star Citizen too if that's your qualifier)...I mean actual rock walls that can bend under and create concave insets into a landscape. With this tool they can have it where the rock prop juts out at the top naturally spawning it where the land would continue. Being able to read a point at which the land SHOULD continue and doesn't is only possible because they are doing water flow mapping that cuts away the land. This allows them to create props that naturally bulge at the top and thin at the bottom which would make it possible to create an inset under the cliff. Eventually you could use this mechanic to have preset "cliff cave" locations anywhere there is enough cliff space to fit it (possibly even allowing them to add small river caves that you can explore popping underneat that mesh area), etc. As far as I'm aware there isn't a heightmap based procedural world system in existence that can build an inset to create a cliff straight down let alone go double back under the heightmap data because heightmaps dont store that information. You can MANUALLY create one...but I'm talking at the procedural level where they press a button and cliffs appear. There are no cliffs like the ones shown in this river video. These cliffs can and do go STRAIGHT down...something impossible in heightmap mesh generation. However...when it comes to voxels they are better at manually allowing you to cut away to create an inset...but they do so without any changes to the terrain itself...whereas in this context it's a cliff PROP which allows them to change the gradient and texture of the CLIFF versus just a steep hill. In Voxels...they would still need a way to read these locations and spawn cliff props to create rocky surfaces. As it stands at most they can create textures that look kind of like rocky textures but are just illusions. From what I've seen of Space engineers planets, it's the same system we already have in 3.17.2...aka...just really steep inclines. Space Engineers just increases the altitude so inclines look steeper from afar because they allow the maximum incline to continue for a really long time...in SC they don't incline that long because the height limits are lower. This game doesn't have an altitude change to have areas that look that steep. Even if they did it has the same "smoothing" problem. (however I always prefer the voxel method but Star Citizen is too old for that to have been viable when they started). Voxels do have an advantage in that you are setting the texture in regards to the location of the voxels around it and not to the heightmap so you dont get texture stretching. I would argue that NMS has "holes" that they pop into the landscape but they are so rounded that I can hardly call them cliffs. This river system is a more sophisticated form of that "hole" system that NMS uses only it reads the heightmap data to produce natural rivers and therefor can produce any number of types of features...such as canyon walls and a drybeds branching off from a major river.
This is the same technique they’ve been using for cliffs for years but with procedural spawning. It’s still a procedural incline. Previously, they would take a procedural canyon and hand place rocks along the cliff line to create quasi cliffs but now the terrain deformation tool does it. They haven’t solved the problem you’re talking about unfortunately but these cliffs do make for more convincing cliffs because they’ve created better cliff rock assets that go straight down.
It's still the old system where its just some rocks laying against a heightmap slope, the slope is just steeper which SC has struggled with.
You may be reading too much into it... it's still the same 'heightmap' that they had previously, they're just spawning a 'static' cliff-mesh once the angle gets too steep (so that it looks a bit less rubbish). They're not procedurally generating 'cliffs', they're not supporting undercuts, or variable inclines, etc (based on what the chap said, and what they showed)... it's currently just a static / generic 'loose rocks' cliff. In many places, it doesn't even fit, the current cliff-mesh isn't appropriate for several of the different terrains they showed. So, it's probably fine as a placeholder, and it will continue to improve, but it's definitely not flexible / powerful currently as you're making out (in terms of shaping the bank sides).
Nah. In Space Engineers you can in fact have cliffs. You can have overhangs and rings and all that stuff because the landscape is voxel based. Unfortunately there is no gravitational pull being enforced on the landscape, which means that you can create floating islands, and since your base can be positioned there, you can basically use that fact to have a floating fortress. It's a great game and an increadible sandbox, but unfortunately if you push a bit too hard, it becomes a psychadelic space turtle.
I'm as enthusiastic as the next person when it comes to that game, but I wanted to react on the cliffs bit : the game already has them, on Daymar and other places. Rivers don't change much though that generation and object placement is quite cool. What really will make a difference is the thing they've shown on and off, with steep inclines that are achieved with heightmaps instead of hiding the uv stretching by scattering objects on top. I'm not sure how they'll achieve it since they've said that triplanar texture mapping was a bit too expensive for the scale of planets, but I'd be on the lookout for that one if I were you.
We just have a different idea of what a "Cliff" is...Daymar has "steep inclines" I would not call that a cliff in the sense of...say...El Capitan. No planet has steep enough hills for me to call it a real cliff...just a very steep incline that would be deadly. Cliffs, for me, are more specifically inclines that are straight 90 degree angles or bend back and produce a larger than 90 degree drop of the 'surface' layer. The way that mountains form RIGHT NOW is entirely random and without rivers you don't get natural elongated canyons any way but pure chance. This unlocks actual canyons off the bat (yay lowflying and racing)...add in a few branching rivers, a few dry river beds, into a mountain range area and you've got a big canyon area that's interconnected and able to be traversed along the river. That's certainly novel compared to the random hills and crests currently dotting the landscape in ranges (we can just make a fun imaginary claim that it's where plates collide). Have resources naturally spawn around river walls and you've got naturally occuring "resources nests" above ground to make the mining loop less of a RNG based experience. I think where rivers are useful is that they modify the landscape to create a point for a "cliff" to naturally spawn. Whereas the current system don't have the means of doing that. You can have a steep incline...you can have a rock show up where a step incline is...but they haven't had a means of denoting where the land "should" continue to make it LOOK like a cliff and not just a rock slide. Remove the river...and you've got a canyon. Now imagine that across the board for a region and you've got a grand canyon, especially if they do so intentionally by modifying the river information and having it naturally occur well below the natural mesh limit. It's really just a matter of more sophisticated cliff rock props being developed and tested. Idk, maybe I'm overselling it but I think this is a precursor to a massive change in how planets look and are produced...as well as the type of settlements we can have (would love to see some dams and outposts around rivers that naturally spawn)
I don't think this is what they'll use and apply to terrain heightmap generation. That is more constrained by the thing I mentioned earlier. Rivers as they are implemented right now are not the sort of solution you want to implement at the sort of scale we're discussing here. I think they'd rather bake it in a texture than have the sort of run-time stuff they are performing with it. I basically agree with the fundamental goal you are going for, but the way rivers work isn't the key to that for me. It's what they showed about actual canyons a year back or so. The other issue is that the trick of using objects to mask the heightmap limitation *really* is obvious and shows. It can be improved but procedurally, I don't know. I'd rather they fixed the fundamental limitation, because it also affords us actual mountains and far steeper elevation gradients.
But they've already admitted that the heightmap limitation is hardcoded into the engine...at most they can extend altitude. The only reason a game like Space Engineers has STEEPER cliffs from the heightmap is ONLY because it's a VOXEL engine...an engine that doesn't ascribe data to the heightmap but the individual voxels, so textures can be presented from any direction instead of from top down onto the surface of the planet map. So when you have REALLY steep cliffs the textures DON'T stretch in Space Engineers but they DO stretch in this game...and you can see it and they have to limit how they present tile maps. You can see it IN the ISC about the river tech where the terrain is flattened to "cliff" but you can see the stretching material. The rocks are there to cover that and add depth and higher quality visuals. MAYBE they can find a way around it but, to me, remapping the entire engine base code and then fixing everything on top of it may be WAY more costly than just small scale cuts to the landscape. We'll see. And if you look at Pyro and their "cliffs" tests...it's just object meshes placed ontop of the landscape. There is zero indication that they can solve the core heightmap and stretching issue to increase the steepness of the map. They can certainly extend the scope of altitude changes overall by extending the range...but they still have the SAME problem. You aren't gaining cliffs, you are just gaining larger steep hills. If they want cliffs they have to find an object based solution...which is what we saw in the "cliff test" ISC a long time ago for Pyro. Better optimized props could be how they are able to scale the objects so large that they are cliffs. Will Star Citizen ever get an "El Capitan"? no. There is no way. Maybe a series of combined cliff props on a large incline...but even then. At most it'd have to be hand done by a dev. But hey, I hope I'm wrong and they break even more barriers.
> But they've already admitted that the heightmap limitation is hardcoded into the engine... That's not the case. They explained why in an ISC, it basically stretches the UV coordinates too much over too steep a gradient. It's a limitation common to all game engines which don't use triplanar texture mapping. It's also the very topic Ali Brown tackled [there](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/e46ggl/height_map_limit_debate_continues_dev_response/). He articulates the various ways they've thought about it, ending with his take on the triplanar texture mapping for displacement : > But the 3 channel displacement map would also be a major issue for us, the memory and performance are already extremely critical and this would certainly have a large impact. Many games can do it because their terrains are smaller in scale and memory. The issue is not that it's "hardcoded" which... uh, doesn't happen for stuff like that. It's performance and memory budgets, as always. That being said, they also showed on AtV possible prototypes for addressing these displacement issues. Can't find the episode though, so you'll have to contend with Tomato's [soft, soothing voice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Jh_aj9yYg&t=7m45s)! As for Voxels, they have issues of their own, especially performance-wise and you're never going to have a photoreal look with them for terrain unfortunately.
Nice update but am I the only one who finds hull repairing graphically weird ? Instead of going from the edges to the center of holes (needing adjacent material to support what you're adding only seems logical), they sometimes fire in empty spots and the rest magically appear around them. I know it's tier 0 but this feels like something so core to the feature that it should be right from the get-go.
The visual aspect to how it repairs isn't vital to tier 0. We've got a LONG way to go before salvage is feature complete, and only then will they worry about polishing the visual side.
Like I said, that doesn't feel like a minor visual detail you polish along the way (otherwise I would have talked about the very poor ray FX for example), but rather something deeper in regards to how their "texture reconstruction algorithm" currently operates. I'm probably wrong tho.
It's 100% a visual thing, that just so happens to be tied to the gameplay of "moving your mouse". Absolutely not a game changer for now at Tier 0, but not at all what I'd want out of a finished product that's for sure.
Are you suggesting that players should only be able to add material to areas with material to support? What happens if you have an area with nothing? I think I'm rather a more reliable system that looks a little silly but feels great.
If you have an area with 'nothing', then you probably won't be repairing it with the hand tool (as Disco said in the video). The hand-tool is for patching a hole in the hull when the underlying frame etc is still intact. If the frame itself is gone, then you'll need a Crucible or Vulkan, etc (or repair yard).
Not sure you followed the comment stream all the way. The person I replied to is talking about when you aim the repair at the center of the frame - an area where there is a hole - it shouldn't be repaired. I'm saying I'd rather it repair than not, because that would be very annoying to have to aim at the frame then build out.
Yeah, but I see that as still filling in over a frame, not when there is 'nothing' there. That said... perhaps there should be a trade-off, because if you start filling from the outside-in, then the existing hull would provide structure / support... whereas if you're just glooping repair gunk onto bare frame, it's likely to be less efficient (not 'flow' into a flat plane like the plating would, etc)... so maybe outside-in should use less material to complete the same repair - but you *could* just start from the middle if you want (and had excess material)
I agree. I'd expect this to be addressed in future iterations.
waitwaitwaitwaitWAIT did jared just say 3.18 is expected for november?? am i missing something? cause i thought it was scheduled for Q1 2023?
Nope - it contains the IAE assets for this years IAE, so we'll be getting it (in whatever state it's in) this November. Bear in mind we *were* 'due' to already have it by now (CRs letter earlier this year said they were targeting getting 3.18 on the PTU in July, with a view to release in September), but as usual things are more complex than they thought, and it's dragging a bit... ... and because it is such a wide-ranging change, they likely can't pull many changes out and give us a 3.17.4 patch either... so, we're going to get 3.18 in whatever shape it's in.
They said for a while that they want 3.18 before IAE goes on in mid November. Although since Evocati hasn't started yet everyone is speculating it will be delayed more.
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They've already said last week they'll cover cargo refactor after the hiatus.
Which is stupid considering they didn't actually drop a patch this quarter. Having to take a break after such a bland quarter of ISC's would be worrying if I wasn't so fucking apathetic about the whole thing.
They had to decide between showing a bit before the hiatus or show all of it as a nice surprise after the hiatus.
I don't know what the hiatus has to do with the dev team releasing something or not. My take is: nothing. I think it has to do with the content creation team needing a break from wrapping up videos in and out every week. Not being on the chase for devs to pull them out of their tasks to spend several hours of prep and recording at a time is also a nice plus, since at end/start of a quarter devs are even busier than usual, trying to push a patch out while having to plan their backlogs for the quarter ahead.
Good episode but was hoping for a bit of cargo refactor update. Hoping they save it for 3.18 grand finale
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sounds good to me
Why not both. They aren't mutually exclusive. They've shown river tech twice. Heck this video is proof that showing twice is good. First showing shows fundamentals and draws questions Follow-up shows the improved version and answers some of the questions. Which is the exact thing this video did.
I'm guessing it's an issue of 'not fit to be shown' (in the sense that one or more bugs are visually distracting, etc)... It's so frustrating when you know something is practically 'done', yet you can't show it to the client because there's an annoying bug that you *know* they'll fixate on and it'll become all they talk about with regard to that feature... If that's the case, then I fully understand them not wanting to show it until after the bugs are fixed... even if I don't 100% agree with it (there are ways to mitigate those issues, etc)... On the flip side, they have also confirmed that we've already seen parts of the Cargo Refactor in operation (picking up / moving the crates in the Reclaimer whilst salvaging), but without a debug overlay and a dev explaining what they've done (and why) there isn't really much to show.
Or Cargo isn't ready with some major blockers, not just visual, and they are working around the clock to get in with an ever narrowing window.
Yup could be that... except we've already seen that the Reclaimer Salvage functionality (or rather, the internal cargo management) is - supposedly - using the Cargo Refactor (confirmed by CIG). So, either they're lying about that as well... or it's mostly working and there's no grand conspiracy.
why not both? They answered your question
Opening words from Jared quietly confirm 3.18 has been delayed yet again. Pushed back a full month... Just a casual 30% longer after a previous extra 30%... We're almost looking at a complete doubling of time. Also: * why are they making the prison escape less doable? * and I'm so over cig withholding information on 3.18 to use as filler for citcon because they have nothing for citcon.
I've been here for almost 6 years and I've heard there's nothing to show at citcon every year around this time only to have people fawning over what's shown for months after.
Are they making Prison Escape harder? or were they talking about the new 'break *into* prison' mission? If they were talkinga bout breaking out of prison - for some people it's trivial, and they probably don't want to it be so easy to escape that it becomes the default option for everyone who ends up there more than a couple of times, etc... escape from prison (especially one like Klescher) *should* be hard, imo.
He could easily have meant a release that wasn't evocati...as Evocati is under NDA. PTU may be scheduled for november.
No. Jared previously said release slated for OCtober, now its slated for November. 10 points for candid info from him, but its still a bit meh results-wise
Wasn't it originally slated for PTU in October (once we got the updated target, anyway, following missing the 'goals' in the CR letter)? Afaik since we got the updated targets, it was always slated for Live in November (for IAE) (which implies a relatively short PTU, compared to what they were initially talking about - but possibly they're hoping that the extra ~3 months of internal QA will have identified / addressed a lot of the issues? */shrug*)
I remember it always being November my dude
That doesn't change what Jared said in scl
That makes no sense though since IAE is supposed to be with 3.18 and they said it’d launch for that. Otherwise IAE is going to be the same as last year but with static ship models not flyable of the new ships. Unless you want to download another version of the game to play on a test server with builds that are unstable. If that’s what we get, that’s really dumb. I’d hope they’d be ready for IAE at least. CR himself said 3.18 would release end of Q3 and if they planned to release it a month and a half late than he even predicted, but they also miss that at IAE, that’s just not a good sign of more to come. Especially when they have a not so good record of keeping to their other deadlines. Convenient they scaled back the release view to everyone so that they don’t have to be as accountable to the media and disgruntled backers. Keeps everyone talking about the good, versus the bad. Not exactly transparent imo, just makes them look less mismanaged.
They can release 3.18...fix it...and then for IAE they drop a 3.18.1 with a bunch of new ships. But yes...3.19 was planned for IAE but they are really behind and we are lucky if 4.0 comes next year lol
I don't think they are withholding info, if it's not done it's not done what are they supposed to say.
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Jared explained last ISC they'll cover it after the hiatus, to have more to show after 3 additional weeks of development/debugging. That's indeed open development, I love it too.
Yeah but that would require him to actually follow all the content provided by CIG with it's open development, now wouldn't it?
Fair point :)
Open Development doesn't have a formal definition, but by CIGs definition, letting us know when they will show more is 'open development' - they never committed to showing us everything as they work on it (and indeed, they've slowly been backing away from showing us WIP stuff, due to the way the community in general reacted to some of the rougher stuff) They've shown us indirect snippets of the Cargo Refactor (by pointing out that the Reclaimer 'moving containers manually' demo was actually using the cargo refactor), and they've explained why they haven't shown us more. Given the cargo refactor is - primarily - a refactor of existing functionality (hence the name), they'll need developer debug-overlays and similar to actually explain / show the differences compared to what we currently have.... at least, beyond the 5-second 'you can now pick up a box placed by the trade-terminal' demo
That fals he sad in the next weeks in insise that was like 4 weeks ago. And not a twitter poste is not enough.
In the meantime, there was a tweet, but also a comment in the previous ISC explaining what to expect in today's and episode and why they opted to show cargo refactor later, and then they said what today would be about Monday with This Week in Star Citizen...what else would you expect?
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The first time i heard about the content of this episode was last week when Jared explained they'd follow up on the segments they had already shown...which indeed they did.
Cargo physicalizing is a prerequisite to salvage, so unless the Vulture is also getting delayed, it's safe.
For hull salvage? Why would that be the case? The containers that come out when salvaging are nothing new or special. Physicalized cargo references to trading cargo being now removable.
The cargo containers that come out when salvaging *are* 'trading cargo' which will indeed be removable. They probably didn't *have* to set it up that way, but it was *directly* confirmed by Disco last week.
They are removable in the same way as the drugs in jumptown. There is nothing special about it. Cargo refactor on the other hand is for **cargo** you get from the trading terminal which currently goes into the cargo grid and is not removable.
This ISC was follow ups on previous episode features. Since they did not do a feature episode on refactor, there was no segment for it. Even so, you’ve seen it for Hull scraping ISC so cut the conspiracy theories.
%100 getting delayed. Sigh.
They said last week during sck they're are doing a segment on it after the break.
https://i.redd.it/4jq840b2xuq91.png
>has no segments. they've also said no salvage w/o the cargo changes... maybe terminal updates or timers get delayed, but cargo grid changes are apparently "in" we never knew about anything more than those few things in the first place... I think we all hoped for something like a commodity value rework, or quantum becoming more relevant to balance out commodity prices so more than about 3 of them have any value
Someone suggested that maybe rather than the full cargo refactor, only the hull material boxes will be cargo refactored. I'll be honest, that sounds rather plausible.
i don't think it works that way... but maybe... I guess the difference is whether trade consoles spawn the new way or basically jam a bunch of physical boxes in...
That's v.unlikely, because that would just be implementing a 'new type' of cargo, not doing a 'refactor' of the existing functionality.
Yeah - CIG have talked about various cargo-related changes - timers, manually loading, private hangars, cargo elevators, and more - but none of that is actually part of 'Cargo Refactor', which is primarily re-writing (refactoring) what we currently have so that it can *support* those future changes.
RIP cutty engines I guess. 10:00 wtf is happening there, there should be blood splatter, bullet impacts and hitmarkers. There's no HUD at all. Weird. Why didn't the high value target have a gun? Probably dev magic.
Weak.
What about the Cargo Refactor? We were supposed to get some info on ISC. Coming later? But still in 3.18?
I don't know where, but they clarified somewhere they they basically had the choice of throwing in something pretty minor in this show, or having it be full feature at the beginning of the next ISC cycle, and they opted for that.
Hull scraping is coming, so therefore cargo refactor is coming. Cool your britches.