Found this amusing tidbit on PC gamer about bedsheets deformation. What about the "Bed making" game play I need for my immersive experience damn it!
While I really want to agree with your level-headed and reasonable comments here, I'm struggling to understand how a person got assigned to work on that aspect - or any aspect - of fabric animation when there is so much else to be done for either SQ42 or SC to be playable. As a player I want good gameplay, plenty to do in each profession, a variety of well balanced ships (maybe we don't need so many new ones; we've got a LOT already), good-enough graphics to feel immersive (graphics don't have to be exceptional but they do have to look good and have a steady framerate in all zones), a usable user-interface that is intuitive and easy to navigate (there's a LOT of different user interfaces in SC: the inner-thought menu, mobiglass, control panels/terminals, the starmap) and for SQ42 a great story that really engages you with the characters motivations and needs, and entertains without being annoying. All those things are really hard, and there's so much ambition in the dev plan to build a game which might have to be an order of magnitude more complex than anything before it if it is to achieve that ambition.I saw this article and a few others like it. They are laughable.
First: CIG outs out SO much info that some of them are going to be a bit underwhelming. they cherrypicked one part of one article in the hundreds of hours of articles and videos to try to bash on Star Citizen. Second, they didn't stop to think about it for five seconds. When I first read the bedsheets bit, I was a bit . Only when I thought about about it for a second did I really understand what was being talked about. Hi-quality fabric animation and physics effects. CIG is doing one thing very very well. That is pipelines. as soon as they get a pipeline built they can run so much though it so fast it is really mind-blowing (look at ship pipeline). So what does that have to do with bedsheets? Simple, fabric pipeline. When CIG can make two or three different fabrics all play together and work well we will start seeing really well done fabrics in the game (hopefully more of them). Bedsheets are not the point. they are the example of a complex fabric interactions that will enrich the game.
The fabric physics engine has been around for about 3 years now:My point is, there's a LOT to do, and I really want CIG to keep cracking on with work they've already said they intend to do. (Promise isn't the right word - enough disclaimers and grumpy people complaining to avoid words like that). But out of all that vast array of things that need work doing - and things that ARE being worked on by the dev teams, I think fabric deformation is both difficult (thus expensive in man-hours and in compute load) and adds relatively little to the sense of immersion or gameplay. It sounds more like someone at CIG who is an expert on fabric modelling (perhaps studied it in post-grad course or got hold of a cool physics library) and decided to prioritise their personal hobby at work, instead of putting their shoulder into a more relevant development objective set by a team lead with a clear vision of what their wider team ought to be delivering.
Nothing to get overly worked up over. Repeatedly reworking/replacing/discarding parts of the game is arguably more expensive and wasteful. But bed sheet deformation gets a big eye-roll from me, even if it does lead to a pipeline that produces other deformable fabrics in-game.