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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The reason Star Citizen will take forever to make

SvennoJ said:
Pemalite said:

No, you don't need to rebuild an engine for that. - Game engines tend to be fairly modular, it's not uncommon for engine developers to overhaul a singular aspect of a game engine... I.E. Physics whilst leaving the rest of the engine the same... Bethesda does it all the time.

But like I said... Lumberyard, the game engine that StarCitizen operates on already has support for voxel-based global illumination which is a form of Ray Tracing... And it has done so for years now. - Ray Tracing isn't a new thing... And just like everything else you listed, StarCitizen already supports it, it is literally the closest thing to a next-gen game today.

I'm going to be disappointed then next-gen as every new SC video looks a bit more dated to me :)

Of course you don't need to rebuild the whole engine, just the rendering pipeline... Chris Roberts won't let tech get ahead of his game and voxel-based whatever is not going to be good enough. Hopefully all the textures don't have to be redone for new material shaders.

Hard to take you seriously when you make statements like: "Voxel based whatever" is, either you don't care or you don't understand what it is and it's implications. - So please do elaborate on why it isn't "good enough" and what an appropriate alternative might be.

In some cases you don't need to rebuild the entire rendering pipeline either, just an aspect of it like lighting.

HylianSwordsman said:
It's just another case of an overpromising game going through development hell. Usually that turns out poorly, but not always. No Man's Sky overpromised and massively underdelivered, but then over time eventually became the promised game, more or less.

The promises have pretty much stopped and in recent times the game has made some impressive strides in it's development process, so I think they are steering the ship in the right direction now. Pun intended.

What we can play right now is damn impressive from a simulation standpoint.. But unlike No Man's Sky... StarCitizen has the number of employees, cash and technology to create their vision, it's just going to take time.



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Pemalite said:
HylianSwordsman said:
It's just another case of an overpromising game going through development hell. Usually that turns out poorly, but not always. No Man's Sky overpromised and massively underdelivered, but then over time eventually became the promised game, more or less.

The promises have pretty much stopped and in recent times the game has made some impressive strides in it's development process, so I think they are steering the ship in the right direction now. Pun intended.

What we can play right now is damn impressive from a simulation standpoint.. But unlike No Man's Sky... StarCitizen has the number of employees, cash and technology to create their vision, it's just going to take time.

If No Man's Sky could eventually do it with their tiny team and the struggles they had, then Star Citizen can probably do it too, just probably not as fast as I'd like. Like I said, I think the project's biggest fans will be pleased with the outcome. I, on the other hand, probably won't get all that invested in it until its vision has been more fully realized, by which point I suspect I'll have moved on anyways. But I won't completely dismiss it either. I think Squadron 42 might restore a bit of faith in the project for me, if it can release in 2020 as planned.



While the video was impressive, I also feel this is a major disaster waiting to happen.



Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:

I'm going to be disappointed then next-gen as every new SC video looks a bit more dated to me :)

Of course you don't need to rebuild the whole engine, just the rendering pipeline... Chris Roberts won't let tech get ahead of his game and voxel-based whatever is not going to be good enough. Hopefully all the textures don't have to be redone for new material shaders.

Hard to take you seriously when you make statements like: "Voxel based whatever" is, either you don't care or you don't understand what it is and it's implications. - So please do elaborate on why it isn't "good enough" and what an appropriate alternative might be.

In some cases you don't need to rebuild the entire rendering pipeline either, just an aspect of it like lighting.

It won't be good enough for Chris Roberts as it's old tech, no longer next gen tech. It's been 7 years since the original design of the rendering pipeline. New ways to render things more realistically will get his attention.



SvennoJ said:
Pemalite said:

Hard to take you seriously when you make statements like: "Voxel based whatever" is, either you don't care or you don't understand what it is and it's implications. - So please do elaborate on why it isn't "good enough" and what an appropriate alternative might be.

In some cases you don't need to rebuild the entire rendering pipeline either, just an aspect of it like lighting.

It won't be good enough for Chris Roberts as it's old tech, no longer next gen tech. It's been 7 years since the original design of the rendering pipeline. New ways to render things more realistically will get his attention.

No problem, he can add new tech after the release of the game. World of Warcraft and other MMOs also had several graphical overhauls over their years.

For now they have roadmaps for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 where they aren't adding new features. The only adjustments are delays (which happen for most games, but aren't as visible for the public). It is only natural that crowdfunded projects are more transparent in its development than publisher-funded projects.

Many people don't want to see "how the sausage is made", they only want the final product. I personally find the insights of game development with all the problems open on the table very entertaining and interesting. It is part of the reason I supported some Kickstarter games.

So far there are hundreds of hours of (mostly) interesting and/or entertaining videos about Star Citizen: https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd/videos



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SvennoJ said:
Pemalite said:

Hard to take you seriously when you make statements like: "Voxel based whatever" is, either you don't care or you don't understand what it is and it's implications. - So please do elaborate on why it isn't "good enough" and what an appropriate alternative might be.

In some cases you don't need to rebuild the entire rendering pipeline either, just an aspect of it like lighting.

It won't be good enough for Chris Roberts as it's old tech, no longer next gen tech. It's been 7 years since the original design of the rendering pipeline. New ways to render things more realistically will get his attention.

There was an engine change just a couple of years ago from CryEngine to Lumberyard (Lumberyard is a fork of CryEngine anyway). - StarCitizen is also updating it's engine in accordance to it's needs and Amazons engine update cadence.

Point is, the engine is already using advanced techniques, many of which won't be seen until the next console generation.



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While it is really annoying it also is kinda admiring. There is nothing wrong with taking forever on a game but they just have the luxury that basically no other game has and that is a seemingly endless flow of money before it's even released. Though it really does make me wonder what's gonna happen after release. It's gonna be a huge game and will need some manpower to maintain it and I'm correctly assuming that the producers are already way too used by the constant money flow. While I don't think they'll go as far as gambling I do expect quite aggressive monetization.



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SvennoJ said:
They'll have to start over soon to rebuild the engine for ray tracing, 8K and dynamic HDR.
It's quickly becoming a last gen experience in the making.

While I don't think they have to rebuild their engine for ray tracing, I do agree that the assets they are using and the quality of their rendering isn't outshining anything current in terms of graphical fidelity and artistry. The most impressive part is the consistency and scale which outmatches everything we have seen. But depending on the game, that alone doesn't matter much at all. I am personally more impressed by the large vistas in RDR2 or just the character models and gun models we saw in the latest TLOUpt2 footage. I expect next-gen to look better than Star Citizen does now, almost universally. Maybe Star Citizen is a "this gen.5" in some respects. A jack of all trades but not a master of all trades.