KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
Of which I think the bigger reason is that it's tied to SQ42 and no where near ready for SM which is why we haven't seen much.
I wish...
- Thread starter NaffNaffBobFace
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Unless I'm mistaken, a possible remedy might be ... more beer? Cheers!
What if instead of CIG letting him have the vehicle impala, they placed 64 impala animals into his personal HAB & what didn't fit into his various ships? That would make for a very interesting April Fools joke. A joke which would need smell-a-vision to fully stick up the experience.
What good is an NPC crew that is always t-posing? We have servers that can’t handle the number of people and ships we have, and as a result, the AI T-poses. Put in NPC crew and during xenothreat, they will just all stand around near their stations and try and look silly Without doing anything.
at this point, I a, starting to think space cows will never make it into the game because the servers will not be able to handle it. While it’s great to have entire worlds available to explore (and yes, most will be empty/unpopulated), by making it an entire world, they limit how much NPC population they can have
Thalstan, of course nobody is wishing for an NPC crew system that is borked. No doubt CIG needs to have the necessary server infrastructure, coding, etc. in place to get the NPC crew feature done right. And I believe that's still a wish worth having. Processing and server power will be adequate to handle this feature. And CIG certainly has the personnel, infrastructure, and funding to build this system as well. But I do agree with Kurupt that its likely being incubated out of sight as a major SQ42 feature. Its a good bet that we'll see it in SQ42 first, SC later.
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According to CIG, AI works just fine…when the servers are unloaded.
The problem is that CIG wants this to be an MMO. No matter how powerful the servers get, we are going to have limitations in what is possible.
even with just one world on a single server, a planet is going to need hundreds of thousands of animals to make it seem inhabited.
the surface area of. Cube is 4*pi*r*r
lets say the planet is 1000 km in diameter
500*500*4*pi =3.14 million square km
let’s round that down. 3 million square km
add water…2/3 of the planet is water (may be higher, may be lower, but for now, let’s work with that.
that is still one million square km of land.
let’s say that between outposts, Uninhabitable land, icecaps, etc. only 1/4 so the land is habitable. That’s 250,000 square km
let’s give it a top carnivore rating (things like big cats, etc) of 22 per 100 sq km. That’s about 55 thousand animals that would need to be tracked.
now herbivore would be much higher. To be balanced, you probably need 100 big herbivores per single carnivore.
So on that one planet, you have over 600k animals
even if you cut the density by a factor of 5, that still leaves 4 big predators per 100 square km (11,000 or so predators and 120k animals/mobs to trac…on just one planet
honestly, I don’t see CIG pulling it off because I don’t see them wanting (or being able to) put the computer resources into doing something like that.
full explorable spherical planets are nice, but I am starting to wonder if they might have been a mistake…
It's a feature. When you ai crew start t posing you know you can safely go and board the enemy ship and liberate it of its crew.
Ah your not thinking like a game programmer. One you don't need to track or animate everything everywhere. You only need to animate and track objects with in view of a player (normaly bound a little bigger than player view to give time for loading and other things that can delay the adding of objects into the game state) the other thing is you do not need to retain the coordinates of everything. Most things will have their default locations only updating when they can be moved and are moved by a player until reset by the clean up routine. So I can simulate a huge prairie with bison and as you walk around it UT looks like thousands if not millions of bison when in fact its just a hundred or less ai sub routines. You can play animation loops of herds of bison that is just controlled by one script.
This is exactly correct, and the way OOP is supposed to be done. I can get (professionally) brutal about this. In C++ this is relatively simple to implement. Any programmer that hasn't read and mastered all of the core design patterns in the languages they use is still a novice. I'll go back into my hole now.
KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
I would agree, but I don't think more than 90% of the player population is going to go exploring planet surfaces after doing it a few times with he exception being miners and salvagers and explorers scanning the surface from various levels. Everyone else is just likely to go straight to a PoI given on a mission.
I sort of agree with this with a few caveats. One they seem to be making the universe in such a way most people will be spending a lot of time in a solar system not traveling between. This allows lots of poi visits and different biodoms allows for visual uniqueness reducing burnout from sameness. While current missions are mostly same planet base and it's not known if this is just because of lacking multiple systems or intended but given the range limitations on most ships it would be by design.
The second would be the need for space to allow base building which brings in its own game play loops. In fact this will be a huge driver of planet exploration in both finding that perfect location to build an epic base on to finding a base to raid.
KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
For a game that is supposed to have 100 systems it is just because we only have 1 currently.
Bases aren't going to be large (km squared) but more like the size of a small town you'd see in cowboy movies like Tombstone aka large settlements. CIG is likely to require that Org structures pick an outward facade and number of areas keeping in mind what an org can pay for rent so to speak.
I recall playing PC games a decade ago with moderately controllable NPC party members.
So I have little doubt that Star Citizen will pull off an NPC crewman for a turret gun seat by Star Citizen's release date in 2030.
Consider: NPC ships already shoot at us. From one perspective, that is an NPC .... one that just needs to be programmed with a body to sit in a turrent gunner seat.
So I have little doubt that Star Citizen will pull off an NPC crewman for a turret gun seat by Star Citizen's release date in 2030.
Consider: NPC ships already shoot at us. From one perspective, that is an NPC .... one that just needs to be programmed with a body to sit in a turrent gunner seat.
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I'm looking forward to the day they bring in the "base building" side of the game... Given the land claims are either 4x4 km or 8x8 km, players will have plenty of space to use for placement of buildings, equipment (mining devices like we currently have at outposts, for example), hangars\landing areas, and decorations.
t would be nice if they'd complete the Dev work needed for the "Geotack-X" beacons (which come with the land claims), though, to allow players to place a limited number of their own beacons that only they can see.
KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
The moment they bring this in is the moment they need to make it to where I can plant a personal beacon so I can find drug labs easier!
Well, it would allow that, as well as marking sand caves, abandoned outposts, crashed ships, rivers, and all sorts of other features that players find appealing for whatever reason.
In theory it shouldn't be too hard to implement, although the likely need for a "physical" device may be a problem with PES as well as ensuring the "device" is linked to the user rather than the server shard, so it is always present for the specific user who placed it.
KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
Yeah that will likely come with SSM and being able to choose which shard you start in. Occasionally, I just like a nice smooth smuggling run, nice and quiet...
Not sure how beacons would require ssm ( static server meshing). They do enable exploring and data running as they are suppose to be physicalized items that can be transfered.
@Brictoria is right that land claims are rather large and I can imagine corps like test would be able to claim huge swaths of land on a planet even if it's not really used.
As for a game with 100 plus systems I would not garentee that the design decision is to have players visiting them all often. In fact I would wager the many systems goal is to allow the player population to spread out much like what happens in eve and elite. While it would be possible to travel from system to system and some players will indeed do so most will stay with in a few systems of their current home base.
KuruptU4Fun
Vice Admiral
I believe they require SSM because of PES and the server you are in. I understood that SSM will get you into the same server systematically (though you may have to wait), this is something PES doesn't do currently. If you can't get into the same server under PES you'll never see that beacon.