What is Star Citizen?
Star Citizen is, to quote the creator, a “massively multiplayer space simulator.” It’s a mouthful, but highly accurate. Most games have a plot, but Alex Battaglia was a bit vague on the overall mission of the game. Being a simulator instead of an RPG, Star Citizen has a very open-world with undisclosed, but seemingly infinite, freedom. The defining characteristic of this space epic is its revolutionary technical standard.
A Technological Prodigy
Star Citizen is, beyond any shred of doubt, the most ambitious and advanced game to date. The game runs at such a high capacity that it is beyond the processing power of modern game consoles. Your Playstation or Xbox seems primitive compared to the sheer minimum PC requirements. Whether tech-savvy or not, you essentially require a computer that can outperform NASA. I’m serious.
For example, one of the game’s features has FTL travel where the player is hopping across star systems. The player sees the typical sci-fi blurring of hyperspace, but the same is true for others. The player is literally moving so fast, that they appear to vanish to other players. This isn’t a loading screen, but the player actually at such an extreme speed that it can hardly fit into a single frame.
Star Citizen’s Remarkable Details
I’m going to go on more about the incredible attention to detail because the technology is Star Citizen’s main selling point. The player sees their character using complex animations for most actions while only basic ones are seen by the outside world. Say, for example, that the player aims. Others will actually see the player hunch over and look into the scope of their gun with the player being at exact eye-level. Whatever recoil the player experiences, others see them shake and react in the same way. If those animations aren’t enough, the character’s mouth will move in real-time and lip-sync perfectly to whatever the player says if using a mic for chat.
Expected Release?
There’s not a concrete date available for the official release. However, the game is in an advanced Alpha stage and mostly playable. There are a few hiccups remaining in regard to minor bugs and server accommodations. In a game of such high quality, the errors are hardly noticeable. Given that the game has been in development for seven years, the final product will be an incredible, never-before-seen, technological marvel that will be an industry leader for years to come. To see more details, or view these features for yourself, visit Alex’s YouTube video here.
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“In a game of such high quality, the errors are hardly noticeable.”
lmfao this is gold. So is the idea that you can spin a buggy unoptimized game that runs like shit into a positive (You have to have a NASA SUPERCOMPUTER TO RUN IT!!!) but I like the “You won’t even notice the bugs!!!” part best. This PR blitz seems right on track lol
I think Domicon was saying that ambition and visual fidelity of the project help to seriously tune down most visual bugs. Of course,when server crashing you client even in an Alpha, this is hard to not notice it 🙂
Quote: You have to have a NASA SUPERCOMPUTER TO RUN IT!!!
Not really @Beet.
Here is a picture of telemetry from a PC with I5 (5 years old 4 cores 3.7Ghz) + GTX1070 + SSD. Which give 50 to 59 fps in max settings on a 2560 x 1440… I hope Nasa do have better “mainframe” 🙂
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/967dee1feaefd4ae1ed1fffaf9996bd0610deae63eb56eb0d28b994d3451d586.jpg
This link will help backer (or anyone with a free account) to evaluate a PC configuration versus current last Alpha patch
Quote: “buggy unoptimized game that runs like shit”
Alex’s 15 mn video give a rough idea of what is Star Citizen right now, with 5 more patch to be delivered till end of 2020.
Besides bugs that are impacting any Alpha and get mostly fixed or prioritized till a next quarterly patch add new bugs, the project did improve at every patch, knowing optimization is the last step of development, done during Beta.
Due to the very crowdfunded nature of the project, Backers are able to help play/test SC since 2013 and participate to a true Triple-A development from scratch.
For instance OCS (Object Container Streaming) added few quarters ago did double or even triple FPS.
SOCS (same thing but on server side, is going to be implemented in upcoming quarters, that will severely reduce if not completely alleviate stuttering.
Last but not least, the Stability Score) from the same telemetry link do indicate 3.7.0 do have a score of 0.1
3.7.1 currently in PTU for extra stability did allowed to remove 90% of bugs so far.
Note: Stability Score is calculated by disconnections per hour per average concurrency. A lower Stability Score is a reflection of a more stable branch. As a general rule a patch is considered stable when it reaches a stability of 0.2 or less.
That infamous CIG shill, Lord Haw Haw / Tokyo Rose (a.k.a. Joe Blobers) will be along shortly to tell you that everything is fine and Squadron 42 will release in “4 quarters” and that anyone who doubts this is a Derek Smart alt FUDster who doesn’t understand game development! Squadron 42 – Answer the call 2015/2016/2017!!! Or whenever it gets released!!! (Never). Scam Citizen.
BAD INFORMATION ABOVE
1. A supercomputer to run it. do your research, your confused. at 60 fps on a £900 PC is fine.
2. Unoptimised? It runs like a dream. Just understand if your specs are on par with an xbox one (s or x) then yeah, the hardware would start to cry and you would get bugs.
My PC which is 3 years old, the guts being a £60 motherboard off Amazon and this:
CPU: Intel i5 6600k
GFX: Nvidia GTX1080 (8GB GDDR5X)
A £200 CPU and a £500 Graphics card. Plus RAM, plus cables, plus a shiny case.. All for under £900. This is definitely within NASA’s budget. If I borrowed their supercomputer and set everything too max, it might do 2 trillion fps but it’s pretty wasted on me cos my monitor only refreshes 60 times a second and for my eyeballs is ample.
I’ve played it since release basically, and trust me, from 3.0 to 3.7 things are all coming together – thick and fast. OCS which was developed by CIG has made the term open world obsolete. Say hello to open universe, where the transition from space to a planet sized planet is seamless, right down to the smallest rock. How is it that I can fly to one planet that is covered in city (think star wars) with uncompromising graphical fidelity and once in the game you will NEVER see a loading screen. HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE I ASK MYSELF! I have only x amount of memory and I haven’t encountered a loading screen? HOW! ..fly up, up, up and look down from space at the city planet that is arc corp. The detail is ALL there? how can you not see the technological ability to do this has been a puzzle since the idea was concieved!
No other Developers even attempt to make a game that has no boundaries. CIG are working tirelessly to avoid any of this. this and the reason people need to have a little more faith is this! the experiment is done! the key techs have been needed to enable this huge universe have been implemented successfully and are constantly being optimised. And people say it’s fake, it’s a scam? People are not seeing the big picture.
What they said they would do, they did. the rest of it is on the road map, and if history is anything to go buy, they stick to their promises.
So it’s just bugs and what game doesn’t! SC bugs are surprisingly NOT an issue considering it’s complexity, I play for hours without trouble. If it crashes, the game puts you back where you were.. I encounter very little, but with something of this scale in alpha I have NO complaints here.
If it did all come to nothing, the tech they’ve created has broken ground regardless.