Around the Verse - Exploring Gravlev Technology - Star Citizen Videos - MMORPG.com

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Around the Verse - Exploring Gravlev Technology - Star Citizen Videos - MMORPG.com

The latest Star Citizen Around the Verse has been released, this time with new information about advances in Gravlev technology that will be used extensively by players when exploring terrestrial surfaces in Alpha 3.0. This tech governs the hybrid flight of the game's bikes.

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exile01

This THING gets Millions and you guys complain about Lootboxes.

blorpykins

I'm really excited for this tech.  Once it's dialed in and they put it on bigger ships like the Prowler, it's going to be awesome.

roaland

looking very good so far but the performance issue still makes me a bit nervous on a larger scale. But as a whole, I really think it could work from what I'm seeing so far. Time will tell as it gets farther into PTU. Really like what I'm hearing though.

Phaserlight

All I'm saying is:

Adventure report from the PTU tonight. My self-imposed mission: complete one in-game "Quest."

Attempt #1:
Spawned in the wank pod and despite running a whole bunch of config changes and various performance tweaks, the game was as much of a 3 fps slideshow as ever. I jittered my way out of bed and then painstakingly made my way to the ship spawn chamber. Seriously this took about 3 minutes. Every time an npc would t-pose onto the screen or stutter-dance around a corner, my whole computer would freeze up for 5-10 seconds. It was like a horror movie except instead of murdered by the uncontrollably vibrating monsters I just got kind of mildly irritated. The consolation is that at least once you get out of port Ollisar the whole experience smooths out somewhat. Why they decided to make every player spawn in a tiny area when their main server performance issue occurs due to player density, I'll never know.

Eventually managed to make it to the ship spawner and decided to spawn an "Aegis Saber Tomcat Punches Above Its Weight Edition Mk 7." No idea what it was, just one of the PTU ships they allow players to spawn, but I was guessing that it was a single seat fighter because that is everything now. It spawned on pad C07. Painstakingly janked my way to the airlock and... it wouldn't open. That's no problem, dealt with that before, the solution is to jank your way to one of the other airlocks and then laboriously work your way back to your landing pad from the outside. Went to the next closest airlock- also broken. I should point out here that this bug has been in the game since 2.0 launched in fucking 2015 and they still haven't fixed it. Eventually after checking every airlock on the level, I found one that would let me out- on the far side of the pads from my ship. Great! Ran out into space. I decided it'd be faster to jump off the pads and then nipplejet my way over to my ship. Jumped off the pads, and my character went into a tumble animation and just kind of stayed there, 2 feet away from my launch point, flailing wildly and never returning control. Eventually I found the buttons to kill myself.

Attempt #2:
Back in the wank pod. Same shaky journey to the outside, where I discovered that my ASTPAIWE Mk7 was still spawned... on a whole separate set of pads from the one I respawned on. Undeterred, I threw myself off the landing platforms again and this time the nipplejets kicked into life. With a mighty fssssshhhhhh I kicked the jets in and spent the next 5+ minutes staring boredly at chat while my spaceman inched over to my ship. I guess some other people were planning to all hop in a caterpillar and fly to one of the planets but they couldn't get the doors to work? I made a mental note to grief them if I finished my mission.

Finally arriving at the ship, I noted that it was indeed a single-seat fighter, I guess... some kind of stealth ship? I didn't really take long to think about the ramifications of a stealth ship in a world where all combat happens at WW2 dogfight ranges and everything fires bright red lasers. Got in the ship, and miracle of miracles was able to take off without any jank. Now, when I say "Without any jank" I should clarify- everything in the game sucks shit. At no point in this experience did my fps jump above 5, and my spaceman is barely controllable at the best of times. But I didn't clip through anything, and didn't die, and that is a win in a Citizen's book. That's living the fucking dream. So anyway I pop into the ship and get a notification that I now have missions waiting for me to accept them if I will only bring up my retarded wrist-mounted HUD. So I hit f1 and the spaceman begins repeatedly punching himself in the dick really hard which I guess is what happens when the "Open menu" animation bugs out and starts looping. I'd heard that the bugfix for this is to just mash f1 a thousand more times, so I do that and eventually get to a menu.

Accepting the contract and navigating to it isn't easy. I'm going on some sort of rescue mission which the text says is on Delamar, the nav beacon that pops up (but I can't warp to) says is in intergalactic space, and the star map says is on Yela. Since the only one I can actually warp to is the one on the star map, I set it as my destination and proceed to hammer the "B" button a thousand times, which is the preferred method of engaging one's quantum drive. I like to imagine that all of the spaceships in the game are basically eastern european autos and all spacemen are in a permanent drunken rage as they hammer the shit out of every control just to get any kind of response. It makes the whole thing slightly less frustrating.

Anyway I get to Yela and it turns out the "Help" beacon spawned inside an asteroid so the person I'm supposed to protect dies instantly. Mission failed.

Phaserlight

Attempt #3:
But that's okay because I'm being offered a new mission! Fly over to a wrecked starfarer and collect "The Goods." Deliver them to such and such for who cares and get like 300 credits. I know these are MMO quests and therefor basically just ways to waste your time, but it feels like if a crate is worth recovering from a wrecked spaceship you should probably pay more than the space equivalent of bus fare to whichever mercenary picks it up for you. But what do I know. Luckily the beacon for this is like 30 km away from the asteroid with the failed protection mission, so I don't have to quantum jump anywhere. I point the nose of my ship at the beacon and settle in for another 2 minute flight.

As I arrive, what to my wondering eyes should appear but another actual human being! Or at least, I assume it was. There's the wrecked starfarer, and there nestled up against its belly is a Cutlass that registers as friendly when I target it. Despite the ridiculous close-packed nature of the spawn, this is the first player I've encountered while just flying around in several hours of playing this stupid build. Naturally I set engines to full burn and just hammer those motherfucking triggers as the game devolves into a 1fps slideshow- I mean clearly he was after my loot, it's completely justified. I guess the pilot was actually in the cockpit because the cutlass begins trying to make evasive maneuvers, but either he flies in a straight line or he isn't pounding his controls hard enough because it is incredibly easy to track him and just lay on the fire until he explodes. That was... really odd, actually. Ships in 3.0 are normally completely unkillable due to lag and jank and weird balance issues. I played Arena Commander once (once) and none of the three guys on my team could kill even a single ship of the first wave, they just tanked everything. 

So anyway the cutlass is dead and with one nefarious act of piracy under my belt I try to figure out how to get out of my fucking ship to get this loot. Unfortunately entering combat has A) destroyed the server, and destroyed my hud, including the "Push F to actually use anything in the cockpit" system that everyone is so keen on. So I'm still stuck at 1FPS and now nothing in the cockpit will respond except flight controls. Eventually I remember there's a hardcoded "Exit" key, Alt-F, and hammer that two thousand times until my guy gets up. Now all I have to do is fly into the crashed starfarer and retrieve a simple box.

Let me digress here for a moment. Do games ever make you feel motion sick? Can you remember the last time a game was so completely disorienting that you had no idea what way was up? For me it was the Descent games back in the 90's. Something about those suckers would just fuck with my inner ear something fierce. Flight sims and VR can't hold a candle to that feeling.

Well, Star Citizen can. See the thing is, the Starfarer is wrecked, so it has no power. That means the inside is zero-G, pitch black, and covered in floating debris. And every time you touch any piece of that debris, your spaceman starts doing sick 360 noscopes. Within seconds I'm completely disoriented, before half a minute has passed I am actually physically nauseous. The box, literally labelled "The Goods" is only 20m away but it might as well be 200. I seriously cannot make any progress towards it down a straight line fucking corridor, my spaceman janks and spins wildly every time I touch a control. But I am undeterred. I stand up and do a shot of maalox and then inch, ever so carefully, around every fucking piece of debris and down that hallway. The final door is in sight but it is covered in other boxes. I have no choice but to nipplejet straight at it and hope that I can bust through like some kind of retarded kool-aid man. Somehow, this actually works! I find myself in front of "The Goods" and somehow, manage to engage my grabby hands! This mission is so close to being over I can taste it. Now I just have to maneuver my way back out.

I hear laser fire from outside. Well, I assume it's laser fire. I hear noises, space noises, chopped up into incomprehensibility by the 1-2 fps that I'm getting. Did Cutlass man come back? Did the game spawn pirates on me when I got the box? I can't lose now! Slowly, caaarefully I - fuck, touched some debris, time for the zero-g tilt-a-whirl from hell again. I get back out the door and to the ship- I'm guessing it is NPC pirates shooting at it, but I really can't tell. Either way they appear to be doing zero damage to my entirely stationary, powered-off ship. Sure, okay.

I jet to the ship, pilfered goods in hand, and at last the moment is upon us. "Enter pilot seat" I tell my character, and he does just that- immediately chucking the box into the void of fucking space as he enters his pre-canned animation god DAMN IT. So apparently if you have single seat fighters, you should basically not do any mission that involves moving any kind of good because you literally have to physically stuff that shit in your ship, I guess? CIG I feel that you perhaps did not think any of this through very well. 

In order to complete the mission I'd have to fight off the two basically invincible npc's, fly back to jankbase prime, spawn a ship with a cargo area, come back and redo the starfarer carnival ride bullshit a second time. I want to emphasize, this is a starter mission, paying 300 credits, and to complete it you're going to need 1+ hour and a ship that costs more than 100 bucks- one that can fight and carry cargo.  

Mission abandoned.

There is a fair bit of roadwork ahead.  Don't fall into the trap of 'maybe it's going to have feature X, and it will be like Y, or Z!'  Star Citizen leverages this aspect of the human psyche suscepto munere.

I wish them well, but this project needs to be approached soberly and with a healthy dose of skepticism.  There is a lot of propaganda surrounding this, here and elsewhere.  No, there are not "two sides".  Look at what they have today; I mean really look.  Consider how much has been given to them, how much time has elapsed, and what is still being promised.

Octagon7711

A lot of people talk about concepts like they're already in the game.  They use present tense statements for things shown in concept videos.  

roaland

Phaserlight said:

All I'm saying is:

Adventure report from the PTU tonight. My self-imposed mission: complete one in-game "Quest."

Attempt #1:
Spawned in the wank pod and despite running a whole bunch of config changes and various performance tweaks, the game was as much of a 3 fps slideshow as ever. I jittered my way out of bed and then painstakingly made my way to the ship spawn chamber. Seriously this took about 3 minutes. Every time an npc would t-pose onto the screen or stutter-dance around a corner, my whole computer would freeze up for 5-10 seconds. It was like a horror movie except instead of murdered by the uncontrollably vibrating monsters I just got kind of mildly irritated. The consolation is that at least once you get out of port Ollisar the whole experience smooths out somewhat. Why they decided to make every player spawn in a tiny area when their main server performance issue occurs due to player density, I'll never know.

Eventually managed to make it to the ship spawner and decided to spawn an "Aegis Saber Tomcat Punches Above Its Weight Edition Mk 7." No idea what it was, just one of the PTU ships they allow players to spawn, but I was guessing that it was a single seat fighter because that is everything now. It spawned on pad C07. Painstakingly janked my way to the airlock and... it wouldn't open. That's no problem, dealt with that before, the solution is to jank your way to one of the other airlocks and then laboriously work your way back to your landing pad from the outside. Went to the next closest airlock- also broken. I should point out here that this bug has been in the game since 2.0 launched in fucking 2015 and they still haven't fixed it. Eventually after checking every airlock on the level, I found one that would let me out- on the far side of the pads from my ship. Great! Ran out into space. I decided it'd be faster to jump off the pads and then nipplejet my way over to my ship. Jumped off the pads, and my character went into a tumble animation and just kind of stayed there, 2 feet away from my launch point, flailing wildly and never returning control. Eventually I found the buttons to kill myself.

Attempt #2:
Back in the wank pod. Same shaky journey to the outside, where I discovered that my ASTPAIWE Mk7 was still spawned... on a whole separate set of pads from the one I respawned on. Undeterred, I threw myself off the landing platforms again and this time the nipplejets kicked into life. With a mighty fssssshhhhhh I kicked the jets in and spent the next 5+ minutes staring boredly at chat while my spaceman inched over to my ship. I guess some other people were planning to all hop in a caterpillar and fly to one of the planets but they couldn't get the doors to work? I made a mental note to grief them if I finished my mission.

Finally arriving at the ship, I noted that it was indeed a single-seat fighter, I guess... some kind of stealth ship? I didn't really take long to think about the ramifications of a stealth ship in a world where all combat happens at WW2 dogfight ranges and everything fires bright red lasers. Got in the ship, and miracle of miracles was able to take off without any jank. Now, when I say "Without any jank" I should clarify- everything in the game sucks shit. At no point in this experience did my fps jump above 5, and my spaceman is barely controllable at the best of times. But I didn't clip through anything, and didn't die, and that is a win in a Citizen's book. That's living the fucking dream. So anyway I pop into the ship and get a notification that I now have missions waiting for me to accept them if I will only bring up my retarded wrist-mounted HUD. So I hit f1 and the spaceman begins repeatedly punching himself in the dick really hard which I guess is what happens when the "Open menu" animation bugs out and starts looping. I'd heard that the bugfix for this is to just mash f1 a thousand more times, so I do that and eventually get to a menu.

Accepting the contract and navigating to it isn't easy. I'm going on some sort of rescue mission which the text says is on Delamar, the nav beacon that pops up (but I can't warp to) says is in intergalactic space, and the star map says is on Yela. Since the only one I can actually warp to is the one on the star map, I set it as my destination and proceed to hammer the "B" button a thousand times, which is the preferred method of engaging one's quantum drive. I like to imagine that all of the spaceships in the game are basically eastern european autos and all spacemen are in a permanent drunken rage as they hammer the shit out of every control just to get any kind of response. It makes the whole thing slightly less frustrating.

Anyway I get to Yela and it turns out the "Help" beacon spawned inside an asteroid so the person I'm supposed to protect dies instantly. Mission failed.

got a link instead of a copy and paste? would be nice to see the full page instead of a copy and paste version.

Viper482

exile01 said:

This THING gets Millions and you guys complain about Lootboxes.

Millions is an understatement lol.

Tiamat64

exile01 said:

This THING gets Millions and you guys complain about Lootboxes.

Apples and oranges.  At most, even if both hypothetically were legal shenanigans (hypothetically), they'd be different legal cans of worms.  And that's before you get into all the other differences like how loot boxes are ruining games that exist whereas Star Citizen meanwhile is about a game that doesn't exist and their crowdfunding process.

That said, complaints about Star Citizen aren't exactly rare either.

MaxBacon

Octagon7711 said:

A lot of people talk about concepts like they're already in the game.  They use present tense statements for things shown in concept videos.  

Uhhh, then you realize this is already released in the 3.0 PTU. What exactly is the "concept that is not in-game" about this dev update?

Phaserlight said:
There is a lot of propaganda surrounding this, here and elsewhere.  No, there are not "two sides". 

Yes there are, you are in one of them the moment you go pick someone struggling in the PTU test phase to indeed complete a mission or has something negative to say and present that to make your argument, experiences there's many, bad and good. This speaks by itself for the propaganda argument as you yourself mentioned. 

Then I doubt you even watched the dev update, that talks about a feature that IS there in the released PTU, quite clear as water when you bring the "maybe it's going to have X feature" argument here. Oh well...

roaland

Phaserlight said:

Attempt #3:
But that's okay because I'm being offered a new mission! Fly over to a wrecked starfarer and collect "The Goods." Deliver them to such and such for who cares and get like 300 credits. I know these are MMO quests and therefor basically just ways to waste your time, but it feels like if a crate is worth recovering from a wrecked spaceship you should probably pay more than the space equivalent of bus fare to whichever mercenary picks it up for you. But what do I know. Luckily the beacon for this is like 30 km away from the asteroid with the failed protection mission, so I don't have to quantum jump anywhere. I point the nose of my ship at the beacon and settle in for another 2 minute flight.

As I arrive, what to my wondering eyes should appear but another actual human being! Or at least, I assume it was. There's the wrecked starfarer, and there nestled up against its belly is a Cutlass that registers as friendly when I target it. Despite the ridiculous close-packed nature of the spawn, this is the first player I've encountered while just flying around in several hours of playing this stupid build. Naturally I set engines to full burn and just hammer those motherfucking triggers as the game devolves into a 1fps slideshow- I mean clearly he was after my loot, it's completely justified. I guess the pilot was actually in the cockpit because the cutlass begins trying to make evasive maneuvers, but either he flies in a straight line or he isn't pounding his controls hard enough because it is incredibly easy to track him and just lay on the fire until he explodes. That was... really odd, actually. Ships in 3.0 are normally completely unkillable due to lag and jank and weird balance issues. I played Arena Commander once (once) and none of the three guys on my team could kill even a single ship of the first wave, they just tanked everything. 

So anyway the cutlass is dead and with one nefarious act of piracy under my belt I try to figure out how to get out of my fucking ship to get this loot. Unfortunately entering combat has A) destroyed the server, and destroyed my hud, including the "Push F to actually use anything in the cockpit" system that everyone is so keen on. So I'm still stuck at 1FPS and now nothing in the cockpit will respond except flight controls. Eventually I remember there's a hardcoded "Exit" key, Alt-F, and hammer that two thousand times until my guy gets up. Now all I have to do is fly into the crashed starfarer and retrieve a simple box.

Let me digress here for a moment. Do games ever make you feel motion sick? Can you remember the last time a game was so completely disorienting that you had no idea what way was up? For me it was the Descent games back in the 90's. Something about those suckers would just fuck with my inner ear something fierce. Flight sims and VR can't hold a candle to that feeling.

Well, Star Citizen can. See the thing is, the Starfarer is wrecked, so it has no power. That means the inside is zero-G, pitch black, and covered in floating debris. And every time you touch any piece of that debris, your spaceman starts doing sick 360 noscopes. Within seconds I'm completely disoriented, before half a minute has passed I am actually physically nauseous. The box, literally labelled "The Goods" is only 20m away but it might as well be 200. I seriously cannot make any progress towards it down a straight line fucking corridor, my spaceman janks and spins wildly every time I touch a control. But I am undeterred. I stand up and do a shot of maalox and then inch, ever so carefully, around every fucking piece of debris and down that hallway. The final door is in sight but it is covered in other boxes. I have no choice but to nipplejet straight at it and hope that I can bust through like some kind of retarded kool-aid man. Somehow, this actually works! I find myself in front of "The Goods" and somehow, manage to engage my grabby hands! This mission is so close to being over I can taste it. Now I just have to maneuver my way back out.

I hear laser fire from outside. Well, I assume it's laser fire. I hear noises, space noises, chopped up into incomprehensibility by the 1-2 fps that I'm getting. Did Cutlass man come back? Did the game spawn pirates on me when I got the box? I can't lose now! Slowly, caaarefully I - fuck, touched some debris, time for the zero-g tilt-a-whirl from hell again. I get back out the door and to the ship- I'm guessing it is NPC pirates shooting at it, but I really can't tell. Either way they appear to be doing zero damage to my entirely stationary, powered-off ship. Sure, okay.

I jet to the ship, pilfered goods in hand, and at last the moment is upon us. "Enter pilot seat" I tell my character, and he does just that- immediately chucking the box into the void of fucking space as he enters his pre-canned animation god DAMN IT. So apparently if you have single seat fighters, you should basically not do any mission that involves moving any kind of good because you literally have to physically stuff that shit in your ship, I guess? CIG I feel that you perhaps did not think any of this through very well. 

In order to complete the mission I'd have to fight off the two basically invincible npc's, fly back to jankbase prime, spawn a ship with a cargo area, come back and redo the starfarer carnival ride bullshit a second time. I want to emphasize, this is a starter mission, paying 300 credits, and to complete it you're going to need 1+ hour and a ship that costs more than 100 bucks- one that can fight and carry cargo.  

Mission abandoned.

There is a fair bit of roadwork ahead.  Don't fall into the trap of 'maybe it's going to have feature X, and it will be like Y, or Z!'  Star Citizen leverages this aspect of the human psyche suscepto munere.

I wish them well, but this project needs to be approached soberly and with a healthy dose of skepticism.  There is a lot of propaganda surrounding this, here and elsewhere.  No, there are not "two sides".  Look at what they have today; I mean really look.  Consider how much has been given to them, how much time has elapsed, and what is still being promised.

still waiting to see a date of that book you copy and pasted. It mentions one date of 2015. So it was obviously after that lol but a date would lend more to the argument your trying to make. You do realize the current version that's on PTU, performance was one of the things they were working on and has been aknown problem. Did you watch the vid? It touches a little on performance. I'm not saying what you posted is wrong. But I am saying that could be old for all anyone knows. Without a date, that's just food for the massive amount of hate this game has generated.

MaxBacon

roaland said:

still waiting to see a date of that book you copy and pasted. It mentions one date of 2015. So it was obviously after that lol but a date would lend more to the argument your trying to make. You do realize the current version that's on PTU, performance was one of the things they were working on and has been aknown problem. Did you watch the vid? It touches a little on performance. I'm not saying what you posted is wrong. But I am saying that could be old for all anyone knows. Without a date, that's just food for the massive amount of hate this game has generated.

It's part of the testing phase of alpha 3.0, there are people with better and worse experiences depending on what goes on. But for this specific post what matters is the ones with bad experiences or something negative to say, not the opposite haha

roaland

MaxBacon said:

roaland said:

still waiting to see a date of that book you copy and pasted. It mentions one date of 2015. So it was obviously after that lol but a date would lend more to the argument your trying to make. You do realize the current version that's on PTU, performance was one of the things they were working on and has been aknown problem. Did you watch the vid? It touches a little on performance. I'm not saying what you posted is wrong. But I am saying that could be old for all anyone knows. Without a date, that's just food for the massive amount of hate this game has generated.

It's part of the testing phase of alpha 3.0, there are people with better and worse experiences depending on what goes on.

But for this specific post what matters is the ones with bad experiences or something negative to say, not the opposite haha

lol I hang out on to many political forums to believe anything without a date haha force of habit lol

MaxBacon

roaland said:

lol I hang out on to many political forums to believe anything without a date haha force of habit lol

Anyway aside from the usual narratives, in the performance matter of 3.0 is to be tested new code in a future PTU build, not sure when but the culling updates on the network should be tested soon in the and that is important to mitigate the worse of the performance.

So depending on the server you play on the 3.0 PTU right now, you might fall in extremes, a good stable instance or one completely messed up one, things go downhill on those very quickly.

roaland

MaxBacon said:

roaland said:

lol I hang out on to many political forums to believe anything without a date haha force of habit lol

Anyway aside from the usual narratives, the performance matter of 3.0 is something to be tested with new code in a future PTU build, not sure when but the culling updates on the network should be tested soon in the and that is important to mitigate the worse of the performance.

So depending on the server you play on the 3.0 PTU right now, you might fall in extremes, a good stable instance or one completely messed up one, things go downhill on those very quickly.

ya that's what made me nervous about the vid. It touches on performance but didn't go into enough detail for my taste. I do like the way they are handling the issues so far and really think if they can nail 3.0 down, the rest of the game should happen faster

Octagon7711

General posting from testers is that it's currently far from ready and are looking at 6 months.  I'd be interested to hear from tester here when the soonest estimate of 3.0  would be based on current testing experience. 

MaxBacon

roaland said:

ya that's what made me nervous about the vid. It touches on performance but didn't go into enough detail for my taste. I do like the way they are handling the issues so far and really think if they can nail 3.0 down, the rest of the game should happen faster

It's the network culling, it was cut from 3.0 like early this year and now they are pushing to get it in to get improvements.

But I guess they can't commit before it's tested first, I hope that goes well would be very good if the servers and FPS performance can be mitigated, they've increased the player pop so wondering how will that turn out.

Godini

Phaserlight said:

Attempt #3:
But that's okay because I'm being offered a new mission! Fly over to a wrecked starfarer and collect "The Goods." Deliver them to such and such for who cares and get like 300 credits. I know these are MMO quests and therefor basically just ways to waste your time, but it feels like if a crate is worth recovering from a wrecked spaceship you should probably pay more than the space equivalent of bus fare to whichever mercenary picks it up for you. But what do I know. Luckily the beacon for this is like 30 km away from the asteroid with the failed protection mission, so I don't have to quantum jump anywhere. I point the nose of my ship at the beacon and settle in for another 2 minute flight.

As I arrive, what to my wondering eyes should appear but another actual human being! Or at least, I assume it was. There's the wrecked starfarer, and there nestled up against its belly is a Cutlass that registers as friendly when I target it. Despite the ridiculous close-packed nature of the spawn, this is the first player I've encountered while just flying around in several hours of playing this stupid build. Naturally I set engines to full burn and just hammer those motherfucking triggers as the game devolves into a 1fps slideshow- I mean clearly he was after my loot, it's completely justified. I guess the pilot was actually in the cockpit because the cutlass begins trying to make evasive maneuvers, but either he flies in a straight line or he isn't pounding his controls hard enough because it is incredibly easy to track him and just lay on the fire until he explodes. That was... really odd, actually. Ships in 3.0 are normally completely unkillable due to lag and jank and weird balance issues. I played Arena Commander once (once) and none of the three guys on my team could kill even a single ship of the first wave, they just tanked everything. 

So anyway the cutlass is dead and with one nefarious act of piracy under my belt I try to figure out how to get out of my fucking ship to get this loot. Unfortunately entering combat has A) destroyed the server, and destroyed my hud, including the "Push F to actually use anything in the cockpit" system that everyone is so keen on. So I'm still stuck at 1FPS and now nothing in the cockpit will respond except flight controls. Eventually I remember there's a hardcoded "Exit" key, Alt-F, and hammer that two thousand times until my guy gets up. Now all I have to do is fly into the crashed starfarer and retrieve a simple box.

Let me digress here for a moment. Do games ever make you feel motion sick? Can you remember the last time a game was so completely disorienting that you had no idea what way was up? For me it was the Descent games back in the 90's. Something about those suckers would just fuck with my inner ear something fierce. Flight sims and VR can't hold a candle to that feeling.

Well, Star Citizen can. See the thing is, the Starfarer is wrecked, so it has no power. That means the inside is zero-G, pitch black, and covered in floating debris. And every time you touch any piece of that debris, your spaceman starts doing sick 360 noscopes. Within seconds I'm completely disoriented, before half a minute has passed I am actually physically nauseous. The box, literally labelled "The Goods" is only 20m away but it might as well be 200. I seriously cannot make any progress towards it down a straight line fucking corridor, my spaceman janks and spins wildly every time I touch a control. But I am undeterred. I stand up and do a shot of maalox and then inch, ever so carefully, around every fucking piece of debris and down that hallway. The final door is in sight but it is covered in other boxes. I have no choice but to nipplejet straight at it and hope that I can bust through like some kind of retarded kool-aid man. Somehow, this actually works! I find myself in front of "The Goods" and somehow, manage to engage my grabby hands! This mission is so close to being over I can taste it. Now I just have to maneuver my way back out.

I hear laser fire from outside. Well, I assume it's laser fire. I hear noises, space noises, chopped up into incomprehensibility by the 1-2 fps that I'm getting. Did Cutlass man come back? Did the game spawn pirates on me when I got the box? I can't lose now! Slowly, caaarefully I - fuck, touched some debris, time for the zero-g tilt-a-whirl from hell again. I get back out the door and to the ship- I'm guessing it is NPC pirates shooting at it, but I really can't tell. Either way they appear to be doing zero damage to my entirely stationary, powered-off ship. Sure, okay.

I jet to the ship, pilfered goods in hand, and at last the moment is upon us. "Enter pilot seat" I tell my character, and he does just that- immediately chucking the box into the void of fucking space as he enters his pre-canned animation god DAMN IT. So apparently if you have single seat fighters, you should basically not do any mission that involves moving any kind of good because you literally have to physically stuff that shit in your ship, I guess? CIG I feel that you perhaps did not think any of this through very well. 

In order to complete the mission I'd have to fight off the two basically invincible npc's, fly back to jankbase prime, spawn a ship with a cargo area, come back and redo the starfarer carnival ride bullshit a second time. I want to emphasize, this is a starter mission, paying 300 credits, and to complete it you're going to need 1+ hour and a ship that costs more than 100 bucks- one that can fight and carry cargo.  

Mission abandoned.

There is a fair bit of roadwork ahead.  Don't fall into the trap of 'maybe it's going to have feature X, and it will be like Y, or Z!'  Star Citizen leverages this aspect of the human psyche suscepto munere.

I wish them well, but this project needs to be approached soberly and with a healthy dose of skepticism.  There is a lot of propaganda surrounding this, here and elsewhere.  No, there are not "two sides".  Look at what they have today; I mean really look.  Consider how much has been given to them, how much time has elapsed, and what is still being promised.

Consider the fact that most games that tries to be above "more of the same" tends to take "forever", and are buggy all the way through. This isn't new, nor are your statements insightful.

alloin

Hey guys, is this game worth buying? I see a lot of comments on the performance, but I have one of the best possible computers available and have yet to test it's full potential. This game looks like a challenge!

Vrika

alloin said:

Hey guys, is this game worth buying? I see a lot of comments on the performance, but I have one of the best possible computers available and have yet to test it's full potential. This game looks like a challenge!

It's not worth buying at its current state.

Star Citizen might become good game one day, or it might not, but currently it's not far enough in its development yet. There's too little content and many of the game mechanics are still missing. If you're looking to play now, you'll have to look elsewhere.


Star Citizen has occasional free trial evens when everyone can log in and test the game for free for a couple of days. You might want to test the game out during one of those, and if you like the game buy it after testing. Just as long as you bear in mind that it's still years away from being finished.