Citizencon 2022

wmk

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The description for the JOURNEY TO 4.0: THE NEED FOR (MULTIPLE) SPEEDS presentation leaves me wondering whether that was the reason for the ground vehicle speed nerfs?
Yeah, I was wondering what's the reason of the recent max speed changes. The only thing which is coming to my mind is some very low gravity... But as far as I remember, there are no astronomical objects with extremely low gravity in Pyro... (correct me if It'm wrong)
 

LurchLord

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Just don't tell me we will be getting the Cutlass Chrome and Cutlass Lavender.....
From what I have seen so far, we are getting more elevators that will not work and kill players, AI that will stand on chairs and t-pose for 5 years again and concept art to stare at for the next 10 years as nothing gets finished and no significant progress is made in any department other than marketing.

Everything so far has been "we want to make" and "we are planning to make" and "we hope to make", not a single "We have finished this" or even "We will introduce this with the next patch"

Oh, and we get a digital goodies pack with a grenade launcher, a onesie and a stuffed animal.
To be more precise, we are getting a reskin of a weapon that is in game, clothing that is already in game and of no use and a plush whale that is already in game with a party hat added.

Since 2014 the presentation of this marketing event has gone up, and the results presented have gone down.

Aunt Edith says:
New Concept ship: Crusader Spirit (2 person transport / bomber / luxury passenger) Link
Spirit.jpg

New LTI Token: Greycat STV (Small racecar) Link
Greycat.jpg
 
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Lorddarthvik

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It does seem a little cruel that the "loan" ship for the luxury Crusader passenger ship "Spirit E1" is... The Cutlass Steel.

A1 (bomber) gets the Freelancer MIS.
C1 (Cargo) gets the Cutlass Black.
THat should have been a 400i.

Thanks for that, I was just about to ccu my hullA to a C1 without knowing the loaner. I already wanted a Cutlass instead soo, here we go! *clicks PAY NOOOOOWW!!!!!!! button*
 

LurchLord

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And this just in, contrary to what we have been led to believe for the past 10 years of development, we are now getting stats to level up so we can unlock moves and abilities.

So on top of getting nothing done, another fine decision to do the opposite of what the original backers wanted when backing a fucking decade ago.
 
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Richard Bong

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One other thing I noticed in the planet tech segment. They are still building tech I was using for planets and terrain 15 years ago with better results.

This was rendered January 2012.

Recon-Patrol-2.jpg
 

Sky Captain

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I appreciated Citizencon, but also saw it as a report from the 50-yard line, not the goal line, for a bunch of stuff I hoped to see more progress on.

I thought Pyro was rolling out in 4.0 soon. It looked like all they had to show, largely, was landscapes, a city scape, and caves. I was unclear on the real 'Pyro game play' associated with it.

(Did I take a leak at the wrong time and miss something?)

To be fair, they did hit on 'investigation' missions. But that seems like MMO questing 101, right? But they are still building game systems (not necessarily expansive content) for that?

The new Crusader Spirit is cool. Though community excitement for it was muted on the CIG forums. It might have generated more excitement with an e-war variant. Why release another executive passenger variant of something without any evidence, or even talk, of NPC passenger game play to fill the E1 variant's exclusive passenger seats? Hmmm....

And Chris talking about the PU's AI losing its way ... 10 years in .... because the PU AI was never more than basic anyway. Wowza! At least they showed they have first person ground combat AI like all other FPS ground combat games in the world. But the unanswered question remains -- does Squadron 42's spaceship AI work if the same AI is in the PU and they are saying it lost its way?

The real honesty came at the end when Chris spoke on how he had planned to build the next Wing Commander and Freelancer back in 2013, and now has a bigger project. He planned on a smaller project, but now has accepted so much money that he has to build something that meets bigger expectations. Makes me wonder what a 'win' is for Star Citizen vs. community expectations in the end at this point. Will CIG focus on continuing to generate more backer dollars to generate a bigger and bigger and bigger game because expectations are so high, and take many more years at it.

On whole, it sounded to me like five more years for Squadron 42 and ten for the Persistent Universe to go gold. Anything better than that is an upside.

Parting thought: Gotta love how backer dollars paid for a functioning martini bar on set for Jared. A cool .... and decadent (if not irresponsible) .... use of backer-provided funds? It took some balls to do that with backer dollars, even though it does look good.
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Hey Bossmang! @Montoya ! Where's me 9 minutes of SQ42 leaked video in 8K HDR with proper sound that you hyped up on YT?

Well, as expected, this was disappointing. And slightly infuriating. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK WERE THEY THINKING BUILDING THAT BAR SET!
moving on...

I missed like 80% of the talking heads "review what we should've done in a week we actually done during last 1 to 5 years" segments, but whenever I could glance at my phone all I saw was the same thing they've shown over and over again.
Landscapes, concept arts of landscaped, drawings of landscapes, greyboxes of landscapes... Seriously? These things should be done in a WEEK at most. For the last 3 years all citcon was was tech talks about the amazing tools you built where you set some parameters, click a button and BOOM, you get a fully populated planet with all the shit you need, including caves and outposts and whatnot! And you try to sell me a fucking greyboxed cave base and a couple of drawings of the levels from an intern? Really that's the best you can do???? And talk about how this one flower is such high-tech modular oooh so shiny we are so proud of this....
Fuck off CIG.
How in all hell do we expect them to complete another n+1 star systems if they can't make the most simple of assets in Months!?!?! The implications are ridiculous. TBH at this point I'm fine with having the one single star system and just make it bigger, add a planet or tow during the next 10 years, spruce it up with more interesting outposts and spacebases and shit and let this whole "universe" thing go. With this level of fucking about with absolute nonsense tasks like making sure Loreville looks better... It's never fuckin happening.

That's the other thing I saw a glimps of, the Loreville rework.
Why? What's the point? We can't go near enough to any of those except when the dammned autopilot yanks all controls away from you and crashes you into them!
So you put in a couple of buildings we can fly through? Which we already had on Microtech and And that's taken how long???? My effing god, this is just sooo stupid. And before the smarty pants among you chime in with "but that's just an artist, it's not holding up anything" lemme tell you that that artist could've worked on ANYTHING else that's in holdup, including your favorite ship! The skillset is the exact fucking same!!!! Just someone at CIG decided that it was a good waste of time and money to make those (yes multiple ppl) work on that instead of something actually meaningful.
I distinctly remember seeing someone talk about I presume was the exterior of the building, probably boasting about how proud they are (of this 20+ year old tech). Also. Making a normal map for the wall of a building is the EXACT SAME process as making a normal map for the interior of the BMM. Think about that for a minute...

The only good looking thing was the Pyro station thingy, although it was looking really pre-rendered and not in-game realtime. Anyways it was kinda cool. IF WE HAD IT TOMMORROW!!! *insert many swearwords said out loud... * fuck I almost woke up the family, the more I think about it the worse it gets!



Then CR came on with the surprise of willing to talk about HOW THEY ARE STILL NOWHERE NEAR DONE with SQ42. Release 2020 am I rite?

Cos CR played Doom (2018) and now we need to have that traversal system added to the already insanely janky one we have, and how they plan to make it not that bad, soonTM. Cos now they have this very expensive very cool mocap set that is so much better than the actually WORLD CLASS N1 set they used to shoot mocap on for years, cos now this was paid from our money upfront I guess and not just rented like any sane company would do. YAY!

We saw some very hilariously impossible animation of a guy in EVA hand-skipping along that same satellite station that took em like 3 years to make (which would take 3-4 talented artist and an engine guy about a week or two at most). Aciudad or whatever unfitting name it has. We had seen the grab and push off mechanic demoed like, I dunno, 5 years ago?
Anyways the point is WE LOOSE ALL EVA TRAVERSAL capability from our suits!
CR
decided that we now gonna need Separate Rocket backPacks to move around in space or we just float wherever Newton says we should float.
Cool! Great addition to the already non-existent clothing and armor system we have with the lockers that we use all the time right? Especially paired with the convoluted unreliable inventory system, it will be a dream come true! All the while they keep talking about lowering the barrier of entry for everyone, so even your grandma can play it 100% perfectly no questions asked, the first time she sits in front of the glowy box with the typewriter! What a great plan!
Cos the current system where these things actually made sense and worked have to be made more complicated and require a much steeper learning curve, cos apperently that's lowering that barrier so hard! Fuck yeah!
(I do kinda like the idea of proper newtonian movement in EVA but boy, this is stupid. This is just another thing to add instead of what was already done and accepted and fine and anyone who managed to get to their ship AKA knows how to control on the ground could already do. Imo just add fuel for the suit, even make it use the O2 supply without a booster pack just don't make this elaborate new system instead of working on something meaningful)

And then the guy next to him talked about scrapping the AI as a whole... but they didn't, just the stuff that actually matters to gameplay cos the AI was a 100% unpredictable and useless. Oh, and just the Ground Combat AI. Cos that's the most important thing in a SPACE sim.
So they went back to the drawing board and came up with a new combat AI that is still dumber than the original AI from Crysis 1, but it's getting closer to it. Which they already had a much more advanced version of built right into the engine they are using but obviously that would have been time and cost efficient so fuck it, why not. Well fucking done guys, Huge applause, Champaign all around!

And that would have been it except they dropped the S BOMB!!
SKILLS EVERYBODY!! WE GET TO LEVEL OUR SKILLS AND STATS LIKE IN SKYRIM !!!!
HALLELUJAH!!!
/s if it wasn't obvious enough

So the thing that was promised many many MANY times over the years that we will NEVER have skill-level/numbers based gameplay has gone out the window just like that. To be entirely honest I wasn't expecting this to come right now, I was expecting this to happen 5 years ago, so forgot about the possibility of this coming to bite us. But it's here and it's here to stay. We don't know anything about it other than the basics of numbers go up with use, like Strength if you haul boxes instead of beaming them with the hand tool. But we should have more on this later. When? Dunno.

They did a closing circle jerk, thanked us for giving them booze money for the fanciest bar ever, and that was it.

I was so depressed, I ended up giving them some more money so they can buy some proper drinks to fill that bar up. With all the hate that's coming (I kinda hope), they'll need it.



Fuck me, this was way more of a bad news report instead of the usual "look, shiny, bite fishies!!" type of deal I was expecting.
I thought I would have some whisky left for tomorrow but sure as hell won't...
 

Bambooza

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It was much as i figured given they had offloaded a lot of planet crafting to turbulent and didnt seem to be doing it in house anymore .

Bt honestly ts really the length of the development that is costing them the most as they have to keep going back and refactoring things. Even ships that have gold passes are missing features as they really dont know to this day what the game looks like.

Honestly im not bothered by ai scrapping as its easily applied back to actor meshes. What bothers me is the lack of building block improvements for the ui. The non finalized list of ship and player features and all the knock on effects it has. Its easy to add a new skin to a ship, its not easy to add a suit locker to all the ships because its now a gameplay requirment.
 

Han Burgundy

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Skills

I see this going one of two ways. A good way or a shit way.

Scenario:
Two pilots encounter each other while flying identical ships. They are both carrying the same loadout and their skills are evenly matched. The only difference is that Pilot A has spent 400 hours behind the stick with his character while Pilot B is using a new account with less than an hour of flight-time. As a result, Pilot A will have a better baseline ability to resist G-forces because he, lore-wise, is a veteran pilot who has trained his body to respond properly to the stresses of flight. So where does this leave Pilot B? What can he do to bridge the divide?

This is where the road forks, ladies and gents. If the "skill" buff remains restrained to a 5 to 10 percent boost above baseline, then that would serve as enough of a little treat to reward the dedicated fliers (Sort of like getting your "sea legs"). It is also a small enough blip that it can be overcome using items, such as an advanced G-suit or Stims of some sort. If they go overboard, however, and set the buff to something ridiculous like 50%; then the game will devolve into a sweat-meta. And sweat-metas are lame.

/$0.02
 

Richard Bong

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Hey Bossmang! @Montoya ! Where's me 9 minutes of SQ42 leaked video in 8K HDR with proper sound that you hyped up on YT?

Well, as expected, this was disappointing. And slightly infuriating. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK WERE THEY THINKING BUILDING THAT BAR SET!
moving on...

I missed like 80% of the talking heads "review what we should've done in a week we actually done during last 1 to 5 years" segments, but whenever I could glance at my phone all I saw was the same thing they've shown over and over again.
Landscapes, concept arts of landscaped, drawings of landscapes, greyboxes of landscapes... Seriously? These things should be done in a WEEK at most. For the last 3 years all citcon was was tech talks about the amazing tools you built where you set some parameters, click a button and BOOM, you get a fully populated planet with all the shit you need, including caves and outposts and whatnot! And you try to sell me a fucking greyboxed cave base and a couple of drawings of the levels from an intern? Really that's the best you can do???? And talk about how this one flower is such high-tech modular oooh so shiny we are so proud of this....
Fuck off CIG.
How in all hell do we expect them to complete another n+1 star systems if they can't make the most simple of assets in Months!?!?! The implications are ridiculous. TBH at this point I'm fine with having the one single star system and just make it bigger, add a planet or tow during the next 10 years, spruce it up with more interesting outposts and spacebases and shit and let this whole "universe" thing go. With this level of fucking about with absolute nonsense tasks like making sure Loreville looks better... It's never fuckin happening.

That's the other thing I saw a glimps of, the Loreville rework.
Why? What's the point? We can't go near enough to any of those except when the dammned autopilot yanks all controls away from you and crashes you into them!
So you put in a couple of buildings we can fly through? Which we already had on Microtech and And that's taken how long???? My effing god, this is just sooo stupid. And before the smarty pants among you chime in with "but that's just an artist, it's not holding up anything" lemme tell you that that artist could've worked on ANYTHING else that's in holdup, including your favorite ship! The skillset is the exact fucking same!!!! Just someone at CIG decided that it was a good waste of time and money to make those (yes multiple ppl) work on that instead of something actually meaningful.
I distinctly remember seeing someone talk about I presume was the exterior of the building, probably boasting about how proud they are (of this 20+ year old tech). Also. Making a normal map for the wall of a building is the EXACT SAME process as making a normal map for the interior of the BMM. Think about that for a minute...

The only good looking thing was the Pyro station thingy, although it was looking really pre-rendered and not in-game realtime. Anyways it was kinda cool. IF WE HAD IT TOMMORROW!!! *insert many swearwords said out loud... * fuck I almost woke up the family, the more I think about it the worse it gets!



Then CR came on with the surprise of willing to talk about HOW THEY ARE STILL NOWHERE NEAR DONE with SQ42. Release 2020 am I rite?

Cos CR played Doom (2018) and now we need to have that traversal system added to the already insanely janky one we have, and how they plan to make it not that bad, soonTM. Cos now they have this very expensive very cool mocap set that is so much better than the actually WORLD CLASS N1 set they used to shoot mocap on for years, cos now this was paid from our money upfront I guess and not just rented like any sane company would do. YAY!

We saw some very hilariously impossible animation of a guy in EVA hand-skipping along that same satellite station that took em like 3 years to make (which would take 3-4 talented artist and an engine guy about a week or two at most). Aciudad or whatever unfitting name it has. We had seen the grab and push off mechanic demoed like, I dunno, 5 years ago?
Anyways the point is WE LOOSE ALL EVA TRAVERSAL capability from our suits!
CR
decided that we now gonna need Separate Rocket backPacks to move around in space or we just float wherever Newton says we should float.
Cool! Great addition to the already non-existent clothing and armor system we have with the lockers that we use all the time right? Especially paired with the convoluted unreliable inventory system, it will be a dream come true! All the while they keep talking about lowering the barrier of entry for everyone, so even your grandma can play it 100% perfectly no questions asked, the first time she sits in front of the glowy box with the typewriter! What a great plan!
Cos the current system where these things actually made sense and worked have to be made more complicated and require a much steeper learning curve, cos apperently that's lowering that barrier so hard! Fuck yeah!
(I do kinda like the idea of proper newtonian movement in EVA but boy, this is stupid. This is just another thing to add instead of what was already done and accepted and fine and anyone who managed to get to their ship AKA knows how to control on the ground could already do. Imo just add fuel for the suit, even make it use the O2 supply without a booster pack just don't make this elaborate new system instead of working on something meaningful)

And then the guy next to him talked about scrapping the AI as a whole... but they didn't, just the stuff that actually matters to gameplay cos the AI was a 100% unpredictable and useless. Oh, and just the Ground Combat AI. Cos that's the most important thing in a SPACE sim.
So they went back to the drawing board and came up with a new combat AI that is still dumber than the original AI from Crysis 1, but it's getting closer to it. Which they already had a much more advanced version of built right into the engine they are using but obviously that would have been time and cost efficient so fuck it, why not. Well fucking done guys, Huge applause, Champaign all around!

And that would have been it except they dropped the S BOMB!!
SKILLS EVERYBODY!! WE GET TO LEVEL OUR SKILLS AND STATS LIKE IN SKYRIM !!!!
HALLELUJAH!!!
/s if it wasn't obvious enough

So the thing that was promised many many MANY times over the years that we will NEVER have skill-level/numbers based gameplay has gone out the window just like that. To be entirely honest I wasn't expecting this to come right now, I was expecting this to happen 5 years ago, so forgot about the possibility of this coming to bite us. But it's here and it's here to stay. We don't know anything about it other than the basics of numbers go up with use, like Strength if you haul boxes instead of beaming them with the hand tool. But we should have more on this later. When? Dunno.

They did a closing circle jerk, thanked us for giving them booze money for the fanciest bar ever, and that was it.

I was so depressed, I ended up giving them some more money so they can buy some proper drinks to fill that bar up. With all the hate that's coming (I kinda hope), they'll need it.



Fuck me, this was way more of a bad news report instead of the usual "look, shiny, bite fishies!!" type of deal I was expecting.
I thought I would have some whisky left for tomorrow but sure as hell won't...
There is a piece of software called Astrosynthesis, by NBOS, it works with another piece of software called Fractal Terrains by ProFantasy, which, in turn, works with a piece of software called Bryce, by Daz3D. You could have 1000 fully fleshed out, complete with height maps for every planet, moon and space stations, star systems, in a week. Then take the height maps into Carrara, also by Daz3D, use it's procedural tools and you come up with better looking planets in days, not years.

Stupid point, this software, and the workflow, has been available for more than 10 years before the Star Citizen Kickstarter was launched. The licenses for these pieces of software specifically allow the output to be used for games.
 

Richard Bong

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Almost every panel whined about the quarterly release schedule, which they never hit anyway.

Then there was the constant, "we've got it, we've personally played it, we love it, you can't have it and we won't really show it to you, but trust us," crap.

As long as people keep buying shiney ships, it will never release, and even if people stop buying ships, it still won't release.
 
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