Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. I'm a Star Citizen fanboy, and have kept a close eye on the development process. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.) (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. Star Citizen feels like a bit of an off-topic diversion for this thread, I guess.īut see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it.I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. Which must have been a gargantuan task + also completely unnecessary if you plan out your game right. completely retooling cry-engine to use 64 bit floats. Another practice theyve had from the start is building the game backwards, Creating (extremely labour intensive) final AAA polished art assets before they've even decided what the mechanics are let alone built and tried them, god only knows how may assets they've had to scrap. The main thing is that Cry-engine is one of the worst engines I could imagine for this type of game, I imagined they'd be fighting it every step of the way and they have been. Which is grand, makes sense + it worked, they got funded.īut then they continued developing that demo-video project into the full game!!! Which is baffling. (I decided to hold off funding it, I'm so happy I did) For the initial demo videos it looked like Roberts used his own money to hire artists to make lots of assets for the demo videos in Cry-engine. I'm a game-maker and I've been following the development of star citizen since its 1st public announcement, before any crowdfunding even.Įven from the very beginning it has looked like an unmitigated clusterfuck. If anything, they both fell at the same hurdle, never really making the jump into the 3D-game marketplace that the newly emerging GPUs of the late '90s made possible. Just that Origin gave them spirited and worthy competition.)īoth series were consistent, huge sellers for their respective publishers, so it's not like one drove the other into the ground. (None of which is to say that the X-Wing games weren't innovative and great, of course. TIE Fighter brought multiplayer to that series in 1997, but Wing Commander had gotten there three years earlier with 1994's Armada ( ). ) came out the same year as TIE Fighter, but sported SVGA graphics, full-motion video segments between sequences and actual name actors playing the various characters. The two series ran concurrently and were constantly one-upping each other. I don't know that the X-Wing series really "blew Wing Commander out of the water," though.
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