Hey Chris, where's my squadron? (42) and keynote impressions

Lorddarthvik

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The title says it all. Only managed to watch some Tony Z and the keynote with the sound on, so did I miss something? Or they really didn't even mention SQ42 at all?


Demo looked cool (haha), some nice things to come!
But to be honest I was kinda underwhelmed by it as a whole.

Sorry, but idgaf about the Carrack, it's just another ship. So what if it's done or not? At this point, that's not impressive, that's minimum effort.
You may now commence throwing stones at me.
The commercial was well done though, nice imagery.

Btw, after seeing for years how the ships are made, I still don't get what takes more than a month or two to get one fully ready. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, it's the meddling from higher ups that takes ages, not the actual art or tech side as those pipelines were done and optimized ages ago. Apart from the hull mesh, most things are ready assets and it's basically building a Lego set. The Carrack is an exception as the docking tech is still in the works, but otherwise the speed at which they put out some ships is abysmal. The only "positive" explanation I can come up with is that the ships teams are doing tons of SQ42 stuff in the background while some ppl do the PU civvi ships in their spare time...

If there's any ship I would have liked to see, thats the Hull series. Those require a tech that was said to be almost done like 2 years ago maybe? Still we don't have them cos of technical issues, and that makes me sad a little.

Them still having basic stuff like the nav map and other ui elements broken is not funny anymore. It's sad. At least the demo didn't crash this time.

Showing off "stealth" gameplay felt fake. I wasn't worried for a second that they would get caught. I had the distinct feeling that Chris was worried that the Ai would break and raise the alarm or start shooting cos of some bug. Either the Ai was set up to see no farther then 2 feet or was simply switched to friendly mode, otherwise dude would have been found out like 4-5 times at least. Needs work...

Yes the planet tech looks cool, the weather effects are awesomeness! Microthech looks epic! I do like snowy environments, so I like the new planet very much. What makes me wonder though, is how fast can they build great looking hand-crafted locations like this. With still hundreds of planets to go, it will be one hell of a job to get them all done within the next 10 years lol..
At this point I'd be happy with just 5 more unique planets and the rest being proc genned based on these uniques, just gimme the game already! We already have vast amounts of space to play in, but not much to do with it yet.

The clothing/armor/temperature gameplay seems interesting, but way down the line. Finally changing clothes will make some sense, it's a welcome addition.

That cloth sim on the rover! Holy crap, you have any idea how hard that (was)is to do in real time without the whole thing just messing up, clipping through everything and randomly stretching through half the planet? Anyways, that was cool seeing it work in game after last year's tech panel.

Jump point and cloud tech was visually impressive, although the camera clipping through the wormhole has broken the magic moment, and while this supposed to be the easier kind of jump, it looked chaotic.
I didn't like the pulsating back and forth, like going through a worm... it was very disorienting to watch. This constant going fast then coming to a stop just didn't feel right to me. Too much loss of momentum, it didn't convey the feeling that I was traveling through thousands of light years of space, it conveyed the feeling that I was slowly and painfully shat out by a huge glowy space worm.
Still, it's nice to see that they are trying to put gameplay into what essentially is a loading screen. Btw, I wonder how the tech works behind it, any panels mentioned that?



Overall what got me down was that everything is "next year" and " still a lot to work out" before we get to play it. I dunno, I was expecting something a bit more tangible. Something a bit more closer to being released for testing, like the jump mechanic as a Christmas present. Looking at their pace, the big stuff like jump points proposed for middle of next year won't be here until end of 2020. That's disappointing to think about.

I was always really hyped after CitCon, last year I even bought a ship to show my support! Not this year though.
I haven't seen the battlefield game mode and anything else that was shown so maybe I'll get more hyped by those later.

What were your thoughts after seeing the demo? Did you expect something to be shown about SQ42?
 

Ezz

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Showing off "stealth" gameplay felt fake. I wasn't worried for a second that they would get caught. I had the distinct feeling that Chris was worried that the Ai would break and raise the alarm or start shooting cos of some bug. Either the Ai was set up to see no farther then 2 feet or was simply switched to friendly mode, otherwise dude would have been found out like 4-5 times at least. Needs work...
I am sure there was no real option of getting caught and the npc's just had their normal routes. As someone in the voice channel said it was basically rp (role play) to maybe showcase a kind of gameplay/mission that is stealth instead of shooting. But since the tech/AI wasn't really there it was kind of lame (to me at least). And there was no big hype moment for me. The Jump Point looked nice but it's nothing ground breaking since its basically a fancy loading screen, no? (Maybe I am wrong here and you are physically moving through a room. Chris mentioned that you will end up in no mans land if you leave the tunnel, but i have my doubts about that tbh.

Regarding the ship: I do think it can take some time especially with the damage states. But as someone who is more about the game itself than the ships ( I have an Arora, a Cutlass and for some reason I felt like I needed the 125A and I am more than set I feel like) I don't really need the ships right now. It's nice to see but seeing core game mechanics progress is way more important for me. The new Planet Tech was nice too see but I have to rewatch it. Not sure I understood it correctly.

Personally I would love to hear that it takes them a few days to maybe 1-2 weeks to make planets, since they plan on doing a few of those. 🤷‍♂️

But it still was a nice event, just not exactly what I wanted to see to assure me, that they make real progress and are ready to go full forth now
 

maynard

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IMO Squadron 42 didn't get any mentions because none of the new tech they were showing off is relevant to the development of a single-player game. In SQ42 there will be a finite number of paths you can take at any point in your progress through the game, and all the possibilities can be accounted for and programmed. Ho hum.

What we saw Saturday was all in support of sandbox stye play - flexibility and adaptability. I was impressed AF by the seamless transitions and the integration of ground-based FPS and ship combat.

I feel like CIG has most of their foundational tech in place now, and going forward it's mostly going to be about fleshing out the PU and gameplay mechanics like mining and bounty hunting.

Server meshing and full persistence (which will need to be designed around the server meshing mechanics) will take longer than CIG or we want, but with some debugging and crashproofing, what they've already showed us fulfills the original vision of the game and then some..
 

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Another thought...they are really close to finishing SQ42, and anything they show at this point will be revealing too much.

CR really wants people to experience SQ42 for themselves, without any spoilers.

My expectation is that, when they are ready to release it, they'll have some big Hollywood like premiere/red carpet reveal party.
 

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What we saw Saturday was all in support of sandbox stye play - flexibility and adaptability. I was impressed AF by the seamless transitions and the integration of ground-based FPS and ship combat.

I feel like CIG has most of their foundational tech in place now, and going forward it's mostly going to be about fleshing out the PU and gameplay mechanics like mining and bounty hunting.
100% this. With this, plus SSOCS coming in 3.8, we are looking at being able to add mechanics to game. That is what I'm looking forward to.

And because I've not played seriously since 3.2, by the time I can dive in in Feb, it'll be like a whole new game. Yeehaw.
 

Lorddarthvik

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Another thought...they are really close to finishing SQ42, and anything they show at this point will be revealing too much.

CR really wants people to experience SQ42 for themselves, without any spoilers.

My expectation is that, when they are ready to release it, they'll have some big Hollywood like premiere/red carpet reveal party.
True, and I hope they get to do the big reveal as you say! That's exactly why I was hoping for something about it! I can't wait to play it lol
Even just a very short 10 second clip of furiously cutting between action scenes and as the last cut, one if the main characters saying something like "we are almost there!", cut to black, sq42 logo comes in, end. That's all I wanted to see basically.
Btw, about spoilers: we still getting a beta right lol? I'm not a fan of that idea, SC community turning into a focus group and whining about how they want it changed for release... I'll try not to take part in the beta, but that's easier said then done lol.

SSOCS is awesome to finally have, but it's not a magic wand that makes everything shiny. As far I understand It has not much to do with core gameplay loops apart from enabling more places and players, and ofc jumping to other systems. We don't even have the simple missions working properly on current servers , I wonder how long will it take to get them to work with the Ssocs breaking everything apart lol (as seen in the demo with the radio head supposedly not working because of Ssocs ... it's not like it's working now anyways lol)
But, the good thing is that it was another huge obstacle in the way of persistence, and that's the really big kicker!

The sooner we get Persistence, the sooner we get real gameplay that matters! Suddenly almost everything you do will have consequences, good and bad! It's the part I'm most excited about!


Anyways, I'm gonna give it another watch, hopefully without distractions this time to see if I can get hyped about something I missed, cos 90% of what they shown we already have in some form.
 
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Bambooza

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Btw, after seeing for years how the ships are made, I still don't get what takes more than a month or two to get one fully ready. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, it's the meddling from higher ups that takes ages, not the actual art or tech side as those pipelines were done and optimized ages ago. Apart from the hull mesh, most things are ready assets and it's basically building a Lego set. The Carrack is an exception as the docking tech is still in the works, but otherwise the speed at which they put out some ships is abysmal. The only "positive" explanation I can come up with is that the ships teams are doing tons of SQ42 stuff in the background while some ppl do the PU civvi ships in their spare time.
This is my opinion as well. The few teams available to make ships to the PU means either most of the teams are making ships for SQ42 and they are attempting to keep them secret or there really is not a lot of ship designers/artists and the progress is hampered by lots of review meetings.

What makes me wonder though, is how fast can they build great looking hand-crafted locations like this. With still hundreds of planets to go, it will be one hell of a job to get them all done within the next 10 years lol..
At this point I'd be happy with just 5 more unique planets and the rest being proc genned based on these uniques, just gimme the game already! We already have vast amounts of space to play in, but not much to do with it yet.
With version 4 of planet tech, they said it was only taking them a few months to polish up a planet. Of course, this doesn't take into account special places like Area 18, Hurston, New Babbage etc. But what we should start to see is the tech they created for procedural generation create planets, put points of interest on them, incorporate trading into the global marketplace and allow some customization if so desired relatively easy. Shawn has said several times that the tools and tech made it significantly easier to craft Star Marine maps then what would require to make them the traditional way which points towards the ease of creating whole planets and solar systems in the future. I still of the opinion that we will not have 100 systems at beta and launch but we will easily have more than 100 planets/stations to visit and already we have so much area to explore even if most of it is rather empty.

battlefield game mode
I am truly excited about this game mode. The PU has always been meh while I have had fun its always been lacking in gameplay loops.

It's nice to see but seeing core game mechanics progress is way more important for me.
This but I have a feeling once they are finished with Server Side Object Container Streaming then we should start seeing far more effort put into this as it is blocking/impacting all of the other teams (besides art assets). And I believe a lot of the art asset/ship teamwork is focused on ships used within SQ42 that is cloaked in mystery to keep it a surprise.
Tony showing off the tools used to flush out the economy is exciting

SSOCS is awesome to finally have, but it's not a magic wand that makes everything shiny. As far I understand It has not much to do with core gameplay loops apart from enabling more places and players, and ofc jumping to other systems. We don't even have the simple missions working properly on current servers , I wonder how long will it take to get them to work with the Ssocs breaking everything apart lol (as seen in the demo with the radio head supposedly not working because of Ssocs ... it's not like it's working now anyways lol)
But, the good thing is that it was another huge obstacle in the way of persistence, and that's the really big kicker!
SSOCS is huge and still not fully done. And as I said previously its a huge blocker to most of the other teams. While it doesn't directly impact some of the gameplay loops it does so by impacting any of the game objects like ships, npc, coffee cups and is rewriting how they work within the game world and so has a propagating effect on any code/scripts that interact with them.

The sooner we get Persistence, the sooner we get real gameplay that matters! Suddenly almost everything you do will have consequences, good and bad! It's the part I'm most excited about!
Yep. In the meantime, the new game mode can easily distract us for a year or more. It really is going to be sweet.
 

Lorddarthvik

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This is my opinion as well. The few teams available to make ships to the PU means either most of the teams are making ships for SQ42 and they are attempting to keep them secret or there really is not a lot of ship designers/artists and the progress is hampered by lots of review meetings.



With version 4 of planet tech, they said it was only taking them a few months to polish up a planet. Of course, this doesn't take into account special places like Area 18, Hurston, New Babbage etc. But what we should start to see is the tech they created for procedural generation create planets, put points of interest on them, incorporate trading into the global marketplace and allow some customization if so desired relatively easy. Shawn has said several times that the tools and tech made it significantly easier to craft Star Marine maps then what would require to make them the traditional way which points towards the ease of creating whole planets and solar systems in the future. I still of the opinion that we will not have 100 systems at beta and launch but we will easily have more than 100 planets/stations to visit and already we have so much area to explore even if most of it is rather empty.



I am truly excited about this game mode. The PU has always been meh while I have had fun its always been lacking in gameplay loops.



This but I have a feeling once they are finished with Server Side Object Container Streaming then we should start seeing far more effort put into this as it is blocking/impacting all of the other teams (besides art assets). And I believe a lot of the art asset/ship teamwork is focused on ships used within SQ42 that is cloaked in mystery to keep it a surprise.
Tony showing off the tools used to flush out the economy is exciting



SSOCS is huge and still not fully done. And as I said previously its a huge blocker to most of the other teams. While it doesn't directly impact some of the gameplay loops it does so by impacting any of the game objects like ships, npc, coffee cups and is rewriting how they work within the game world and so has a propagating effect on any code/scripts that interact with them.



Yep. In the meantime, the new game mode can easily distract us for a year or more. It really is going to be sweet.
Ah eff this, I just did a box run in a Connie Phoenix I rented after checking out the expo. Damn I love this game! And I really like that luxury Connie, the seats, the rooms, and ofc the bar is pretty sweet!

Still didn't have time to watch any of the presentations, I'm sure there's lots of interesting stuff I missed.

Watched a short boredgamer vid on the ship development and he said that most ship ppl are indeed working on SQ42.
(It was mentioned on the second stage ship dev panel)

Thought a bit more on what bothered me about this years CitCon, and I think it was in part the lack of a big reveal, and that the game is close to a state where for me it's enough.
I mean, it's so close to being an actual playable "game" with enough things to do, places to go, that I just want it to work properly and have my stuff persist for more then a few weeks, so I can play it every day!
Because of this, being told that all the great stuff is still years away just feels like a huge let down. It's not anyone's fault, just mine lol.
 

Bambooza

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Ah eff this, I just did a box run in a Connie Phoenix I rented after checking out the expo. Damn I love this game! And I really like that luxury Connie, the seats, the rooms, and ofc the bar is pretty sweet!

Still didn't have time to watch any of the presentations, I'm sure there's lots of interesting stuff I missed.

Watched a short boredgamer vid on the ship development and he said that most ship ppl are indeed working on SQ42.
(It was mentioned on the second stage ship dev panel)

Thought a bit more on what bothered me about this years CitCon, and I think it was in part the lack of a big reveal, and that the game is close to a state where for me it's enough.
I mean, it's so close to being an actual playable "game" with enough things to do, places to go, that I just want it to work properly and have my stuff persist for more then a few weeks, so I can play it every day!
Because of this, being told that all the great stuff is still years away just feels like a huge let down. It's not anyone's fault, just mine lol.

Honestly, once SSOCS is finished we should see a significant improvement in the amount of stuff that is coming online. Bounty Hunting and the prison system should be available with the next patch. Then there is repair and salvage followed by refueling so the midpoint of next year we should have a number of professions in the game even if they are only version 1.

Each patch has increased the number of missions and when the back end economy comes online that Tony was demonstrating should make trading a challenge.

But honestly, in the meantime the new game mode is where the action is. That should have been given a huge amount more time as it's going to be fun.
 

Sirus7264

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True, and I hope they get to do the big reveal as you say! That's exactly why I was hoping for something about it! I can't wait to play it lol
Even just a very short 10 second clip of furiously cutting between action scenes and as the last cut, one if the main characters saying something like "we are almost there!", cut to black, sq42 logo comes in, end. That's all I wanted to see basically.
Btw, about spoilers: we still getting a beta right lol? I'm not a fan of that idea, SC community turning into a focus group and whining about how they want it changed for release... I'll try not to take part in the beta, but that's easier said then done lol.

SSOCS is awesome to finally have, but it's not a magic wand that makes everything shiny. As far I understand It has not much to do with core gameplay loops apart from enabling more places and players, and ofc jumping to other systems. We don't even have the simple missions working properly on current servers , I wonder how long will it take to get them to work with the Ssocs breaking everything apart lol (as seen in the demo with the radio head supposedly not working because of Ssocs ... it's not like it's working now anyways lol)
But, the good thing is that it was another huge obstacle in the way of persistence, and that's the really big kicker!

The sooner we get Persistence, the sooner we get real gameplay that matters! Suddenly almost everything you do will have consequences, good and bad! It's the part I'm most excited about!


Anyways, I'm gonna give it another watch, hopefully without distractions this time to see if I can get hyped about something I missed, cos 90% of what they shown we already have in some form.
The weather effects were pretty nice i didnt watch the full thing but from the short period i did i was very impressed by that.
 

Blind Owl

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Ah eff this, I just did a box run in a Connie Phoenix I rented after checking out the expo. Damn I love this game! And I really like that luxury Connie, the seats, the rooms, and ofc the bar is pretty sweet!

Still didn't have time to watch any of the presentations, I'm sure there's lots of interesting stuff I missed.

Watched a short boredgamer vid on the ship development and he said that most ship ppl are indeed working on SQ42.
(It was mentioned on the second stage ship dev panel)

Thought a bit more on what bothered me about this years CitCon, and I think it was in part the lack of a big reveal, and that the game is close to a state where for me it's enough.
I mean, it's so close to being an actual playable "game" with enough things to do, places to go, that I just want it to work properly and have my stuff persist for more then a few weeks, so I can play it every day!
Because of this, being told that all the great stuff is still years away just feels like a huge let down. It's not anyone's fault, just mine lol.
Your post just got me extraordinarily excited to play this game when I'm done this deployment. I'm starting to get that hype back that I felt when the game was first announced!

Lol, thank you.
 

maynard

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I've been holding off on building a gaming PC to let more capable parts get cheaper

but what I saw this weekend has me thinking it's time to pull the trigger and start playing
 

Blind Owl

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I've been holding off on building a gaming PC to let more capable parts get cheaper

but what I saw this weekend has me thinking it's time to pull the trigger and start playing
Yeah man. The galaxy suddenly doesn't feel empty. With SSOCS and the mechanics that will bring, I'm thinking the time is right. I may wait long enough for the new NVIDIA Ampere cards to drop, then get my system.
 

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Yeah man. The galaxy suddenly doesn't feel empty. With SSOCS and the mechanics that will bring, I'm thinking the time is right. I may wait long enough for the new NVIDIA Ampere cards to drop, then get my system.
You're going to love that card, but seriously I wouldn't wait. You can always upgrade. Unless you have a fat bank account with nothing else to spend money on.
Curiously both of the manufacturers Nvidia is using for their GPU are also thought leaders in the 5 nm space. There are a few notable other companies getting into the market now. Intel Xe Graphics, for example. That's going to drive pricing over the next few years, and I don't think it will look like "generally downward direction" to us.
 

Blind Owl

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You're going to love that card, but seriously I wouldn't wait. You can always upgrade. Unless you have a fat bank account with nothing else to spend money on.
Curiously both of the manufacturers Nvidia is using for their GPU are also thought leaders in the 5 nm space. There are a few notable other companies getting into the market now. Intel Xe Graphics, for example. That's going to drive pricing over the next few years, and I don't think it will look like "generally downward direction" to us.
Really? So I'm not going to be facing an issue of buying a system now, and having to upgrade my motherboard in order to install a new GPU?
Because the system I've been checking out has an RTX 2080 Titan, lol.
I also heard that the amperes were supposed to be cheaper.
I have no idea about these things, so expert advice is very much appreciated
 
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Bambooza

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Really? So I'm not going to be facing an issue of buying a system now, and having to upgrade my motherboard in order to install a new GPU?
Because the system I've been checking out has an RTX 2080 Titan, lol.
I also heard that the amperes were supposed to be cheaper.
I have no idea about these things, so expert advice is very much appreciated
Lol... the dreams of the owl not having to upgrade the cpu, memory, and gpu on the next hardware release. When the market seems to all collectively agree that ever third release needs to add or remove a pin to make it incompatable with the last generation.
 

Blind Owl

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Lol... the dreams of the owl not having to upgrade the cpu, memory, and gpu on the next hardware release. When the market seems to all collectively agree that ever third release needs to add or remove a pin to make it incompatable with the last generation.
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. So what iteration of releases is the Turing architecture? 1, 2, or 3?
 
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Lorddarthvik

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With video cards the slot shape itself (pcie) hasn't changed in the last what, 10-15 years? You should be fine on that front.
As for the CPU and ram, thats another thing entirely, and gets changed around a lot. The good thing is that the next iteration of ram and CPUs are not that much more powerful, there is no point upgrading every 1-2 years, the benefits are just not worth the money.
 

Blind Owl

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With video cards the slot shape itself (pcie) hasn't changed in the last what, 10-15 years? You should be fine on that front.
As for the CPU and ram, thats another thing entirely, and gets changed around a lot. The good thing is that the next iteration of ram and CPUs are not that much more powerful, there is no point upgrading every 1-2 years, the benefits are just not worth the money.
Yeah, I'll be going i9 9900 I do believe, and the Ampere Card when she drops next year. At least, that's my thoughts so far.
 
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