Realistic Star Citizen Update – February 24th, 2018
Another End of The Week Update – Because of course it would snow for the weekend, who wants to go out and fun after the workweek right?
Calling All Devs Show
Video here.
-Persistence for 3.1, log back in where you logged out. Missed 3.0.
-No plans for character slots at this time, planning for character slots and that sort of stuff later in development.
-Scanning, long answer, lots of words with some details, boils down to that just the basics are in development.
-Carrack and Banu Merchantman are not seeing any work this year (despite stageshow schedule). Ship team is fully booked and at 100% capacity for the year.
Around the Verse – SQ42: The Living Idris
Video here.
I’ll be very blunt with this one because CIG seems to be greatly trying to oversell what they’re doing with the AI.
The AI has a daily scheduled routine like going to work and then getting off work, and the AI has a job class that determines the AI job package they’re running.
CIG is using a ton of words to make it sound like there’s more to it, and there is to some degree, but to you as a player that’s what matters.
The Idris is now up to 80 NPCs, NPCs will talk to you about objects the character stares at, NPCs will comment about things in the environment, NPCs will be able to like or hate the player, tons of little detail things.
Basically if you have a hard time interacting with people and make friends with AI characters in videogames then CIG has you covered.
Sorry for the cynicism, NPCs are cool and all, but CIG’s attempts at heavily overselling their AI feature set and pretending many of those features haven’t been present in games like Skyrim (and mods) for years is a bit annoying.
Reverse the Verse
Video here.
BUY OUR NEW SHIP! FOR THE LOVE OF SPACE JEEBUS BUY OUR SHIP! WHY ARE YOU STILL WATCHING THIS BUY OUR SHIP!?!
It’s a Q&A session all about CIG’s new ship and why you should want it.
Y’know, in case all the previous coverage didn’t make you aware you just absolutely need to buy this ship. /s
Production Schedule Update
Bind Culling has been delayed and moved from 3.1 to 3.2.
3.1 was a performance and optimization patch, but now its biggest feature that would have partially fixed the awful netcode has been delayed until mid-year.
Oh did I say delayed to mid-year I meant “delayed yet again” as this was supposed to be releasing with 2.0 back in 2016.
I won’t beat around the bush here either, Star Citizen even as it stands currently isn’t going to be a viable multiplayer game if CIG can’t get bind culling working, the games design has become absolutely reliant on it.
This is a cornerstone technology to the project and is has seen a year and half of delays before it will even make its first public outing.
Even after this CIC still needs to tackle the physics thread issues where large ships and high physics entity counts fuck other players performance into the ground.
The TL;DR of this? Don’t expect 3.1 to be much more playable than 3.0 because the critical stuff for the future of the game is now in 3.2 and that assumes it doesn’t just get delayed for another year.
Addendum – CIG has given an update about bind culling. It’s disappointing, gives some hope, but honest at least.
It boils down to this; development is hard, CryEngine sucks so basically everything important needs to be rebuilt, CIG ran out of time to test before 3.1 is due, they don’t actually know if bind culling would’ve help much because the things that make it fully effective are coming at the end of the year, serialed variables is the new hotness and is coming with 3.1(?), bind culling has been dropped in priority, and the network team is needed for other tasks so bind culling is less of a priority.
So maybe 3.1 won’t be a total loss and those of us that still even give a shit about this rolling software failboat can try hoping for an unstable 30-40 FPS, with only occasional hitching multi-second lagspike, experience.