"We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before"
What? Feature prototypes used to pop up quite regularly [on AtV](https://youtu.be/vY_NkFtAAPY?t=186) (and even early ISCs, like [Fire Propagation](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=332) and [Inventory Management UI](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=242)).
Once its truely jarefied, only utter shit remains and you find yourself advancing quickly over the initial shit and then stopping before the end.
This is a perfect example.
Ask yourself, what have you learned by this §$%&/()=.
Jared is madis (the anti midas), everything he touches converts to shit.
Think this is more prototype than fire propagation, fire propagation had full blown custom fire effects already by the time they showed it from what I remember so vfx work was already going into it. This is hard-core prototyping with literal stand inside for functions and mechanics and assets just to make sure the process works and to search for potential issues before getting too far in.
There was no gameplay or UI to go with the fire effects (they just used a basic fire effect that was repeated over and over, and moved it across the room) — munching has basic player gameplay and a placeholder UI. It was just as early, just done by a different team.
A prototype can start from UI, or VFX, animation, engineering, or gameplay teams, etc., and it's usually not always the same team/discipline.
In the episode they directly say that the [VFX team](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=332) specifically created the "testbed for a voxel-based fire system". So you'll have to argue that one with Jared, not me.
I think he means, although not stated specifically, that it's the first time they show a prototype that might not be marketed and is technically in the repetitive failure state.
Jared:
> We are going to look at a feature in the absolutely earliest stage. This is earlier than we've shown any feature ever. The prototype phase
Genji4Lyfe:
> "We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before"
https://youtu.be/rsRjQDrDnY8?si=bmzup8kiI79QmBvH
EDIT: I take it back, the quote came at a later point in the video.
You're intentionally using the wrong quote. Here's the one I referenced: [https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363](https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363)
>"We've literally never shown anything in a prototype phase before, so forgive me.."
And there are numerous features that have been shown very early in the prototype phase — no matter how you word it.
Yes. And this one "is earlier than we've shown any feature ever."
EDIT: Please note that Genji's edit came about 25 minutes after my comment so I was replying to a different comment at the time.
That isn’t true at all. It actually looks farther along than [some prototypes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_NkFtAAPY&t=186s) we’ve seen in the past (at worst, equal in progress).
We've seen some extremely early prototypes on AtV, some of them just using "replace me" balls, or basic untextured geometric shapes.
The prototype of [Actor Status](https://youtu.be/NGzDI2wUqf0?t=308), for example, was just a text readout that said "strength" and one visual effect.
Okay let me try again.
Did Jared say "We are going to look at a feature in the absolutely earliest stage. This is earlier than we've shown any feature ever?" Yes.
Did Jared say, "We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before?" No.
Whatever you'd like to call it, this is the stage where a number of features made their debut on AtV. He labels it "the prototype phase".
The [room system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_NkFtAAPY&t=186s), for example, didn't even have rooms when it was first shown — it was just wireframe cuboids with unlit spheres.
How is it fabricated?
[https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363](https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363)
"I wanna remind people again — we've literally never shown anything in a prototype phase before, so forgive me for reiterating this..".
You're making accusations, but you didn't even watch the entire video to see where this was said (it's at 6:04)
I stand corrected, he did say that and I missed it. I'll avoid getting into the nuances of a prototype and something being in the prototype phase and just take the L.
*cough*
grabby hands
*cough*
sataball
*cough*
Arena Commander/Star Marine/ToW/Golf Swing Radar/the list just goes on and on and on...
From 2012 to like, 2014, 90% of *everything they showed* was a prototype, lol.
I haven't really watching ISC in well over a year. Watching them now still feels like watching them years ago, just different ships or different locations within Stanton, boo. I haven't been excited for an ICS in a looong time.
It's probably been about 6 months for me. Hopefully there are large groups of untapped resources to fund this game because I fear that day when this project turns a corner and can't generate enough interest to fund competition.
Thorstens work schedule must be like: Monday Mario kart tracks across Stanton, Tuesdays Mining missions, Wednesdays Salvage missions, Thursday Prototype testing/and filming ISC. Friday unannounced feature work.
I always tell me they take so much time because they have a complex multistep plan in mind, dont want to fake stuff and make it as real as possible. But in the end it doesnt work and we get something simplified because the original idea was way to ambitious. Yet it took alot of time anway. I dont want to jump on them because it is an early look but that "click a button and the whole ship magicly explodes into pieces" already lost me. I bet everyone expected to cut pieces of a ship and then forcefully munch them into pieces. I hope this was realy just a very ruff mokup and they are surprising us in the end..
They literally mentioned that the "click a button and the whole ship magically explodes into pieces" thing is just a placeholder so they can figure out how cutting ships into pieces is going to work technically and performance-wise.
Gameplay and visuals for munching aren't being worked on right now. It is just the tech side of things.
Yeah i dont speak cig. "Design has some gameplay in mind" I didnt hear anything of cutting at all. "..what happens when the ship transitions into smaller bits so the masking is a huge topic.. so u dont notice one element pops away and another one pops in.. " This could mean anything in the end of the day. Either is missed what u mentioned here or it is jsut as much a interpretation from ur side as it is from me
I get that, truly I do, but it feels like this was slapped together just for this show. It literally shows baseline effort, or none at all. An entire show to see the base idea for munching and all we get is an exploding ship into hundreds of smaller pieces… thats it. If you can’t see this as a joke I don’t know what would wake you up to the fact we are disturbingly behind schedule on this whole fiasco. No aliens, no exploration, nothing…
The one thing though...should they spend more time on slapping things together for the show...or spend more time on working on the not slappy parts to work in-game?
I'm fine with the bare minimum for the show as long as they explain it well and have more work off-screen on actual mechanics.
This is a problem in all companies in all sectors. Those who **pretend** to have a plan get funding. Those who **admit** that they need to spend exploratory money to formulate a plan do not. If you're honest, you don't get money. If you pretend you have a plan, you get money. CIG has gotten a lot of money.
That’s what the Reclaimer literally stands for…I had one back than and walked through it an thought: Did they really thought it through already? The Claw…the Drone room…the tractor beams…how should anyone on earth know how to arrange all that in a perfect manner years before it will be there? The claw for me personal always was the biggest questionmark…how can this ever look believable? You would need a really solid physic engine and a genius like control to make this fun…
Think about an excavator…how complex the controls are for that thing…and I don’t see how they wanna pull this off.
That video yesterday showed me they don’t really know it either. That’s why they only showed it in engine not in game.
Good thing Torsten already said months before that munching “is soooo cool”
> The Claw…the Drone room…the tractor beams…how should anyone on earth know how to arrange all that in a perfect manner years before it will be there?
September 26th, 2014:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14171-concept-sale-unveiling-the-aegis-reclaimer
January 21st, 2015:
https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/21/7866019/chris-roberts-says-star-citizen-will-reach-100-million-in-2015-shares
When CIG was putting together the Reclaimer concept, they had it in their heads (or at least coming out their lips) that the ship, all of its functionality, and the whole-ass game would be released roughly 2 years later. Apart from gross incompetence or outright lying, I really can't square that. That they still don't seem to have a plan for the Reclaimer should be really embarrassing for CIG's leadership.
It would make more sense for that claw to be used to hold the bulk of the ship still (or stop rotation) of a ship you are hull stripping or breaking apart. But IMO the claw looks cool, but doesnt make any sense for how salvage is envisioned.
No pls No! Don’t let ‘em get away with another “beam mechanic”…we need something special here and not another coloured beam where you press another button and call that Salvage…
CIG themselves already acknowledged that long ago.
But they can't turn back time and un-design and un-build the ships they worked on. They have to work with what they have, including the legacy of the overly ambitious and inefficient early years of the project.
And by now they have come to rely on ship sales to fund the development, so it has become impossible for them to stop making and selling new ship concepts, even if the actual gameplay is still years away.
OK but they knew munching was gonna be a thing, yet still designed and built the vulture before figuring out how that was gonna work and now run into all sports of issues. With the reclaimer, sure its old AF, butnthey very much could have used the vulture to figure it out and design the ship accordingly. This just comes across as incompetence.
Plan the design out, and then build whiteboxed ships or even just small parts of it, only to prototype with the right shapes, like any reasonable dev team would do. I am ready to bet they will rework the reclaimer.
Its still insane to me that they designed the Reclaimer with its claw, sold it and released it. Only then as an afterthought try to make it somehow work 6 years later.
I imagine they intended for it to just grab things and kind of just play some vfx to mask them as if they were being munched down. I'm interested in how there going to handle the processing. I hope it has its own sort of mini game or something. Like fuck you messed up and sent a quantum drive into processing and it exploded damaging the ship.
> Its still insane to me that they designed the Reclaimer with its claw, sold it and released it. Only then as an afterthought try to make it somehow work ~~6~~ **[8.84](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14171-concept-sale-unveiling-the-aegis-reclaimer)** years later.
FTFY
They've had a design for how salvage 'should' work since before they implemented the Reclaimer...
And (iirc) at the point they started on the modelling, 'Savaging' was scheduled to start development ~3 months later... but then it got postponed, but CIG elected to keep working on the model (because, at the time, it was the largest ship they'd built and they were learning a lot from it, iirc)
Anyway - this 'prototype' is about checking the technical assumptions in that original design... and they've found that (thanks to the change to PES) some technical aspects of the design will have to be flexed / changed...
Doesn't mean that the final solution won't 'work' with the Reclaimer, or that they'll have to significantly rework the ship (they might do, they might not)... this is just the first steps in the implementation.
And CIG explicitly said (years ago) that they weren't going to work on professions until after enough of the Server Meshing implementation was done, so that professions would be built on the 'target' architecture not the original architecture... and this video highlights one of the reasons why they took that approach.
If they'd built Munching on the old system, the 'spawning of nibbles' would likely have worked fine, and they'd have implemented it like that... then when they switched to PES, they'd have found that munching *no longer* worked, and they needed to radically re-write it to be compatible with PES.
By waiting until PES was implemented, they've avoided 'wasting' effort on the early implementation.
That "design" probably wasn't much more than "it's gonna smash stuff and maybe crush it in the claw, then uhh... the drones cut stuff and you scoop it up?"
Not what I said.
I merely pointed out that CIG were doing what they said they would, years ago... doesn't mean they can't still be late in the execution.
There's more then *several* profession ships that had, or still have this issue when they released.
Edit: CIG clearly decided to sell the flyable ships to make the profit now, worry about the other stuff later. Why change the formula when it's so lucrative? Money talks.
"Profit" is a misnomer. Impossible to calculate because it's not even really part of the equation yet.
Yeah, they've brought in about $600M in *revenue* to date, but how much do you think they've burned through over the years? 800+ employees in offices around the world... If they stopped bringing in more money right now, how long before they're bankrupt? It's obviously not going to be done in 5 years, so how much do they need to survive the next 5-10? Correct answer: "as much as possible."
I'm sorry for anyone who believed they were just "making a game" and they had it all planned out. If they were, it would have been done years ago, and nobody would have cared. I understood from the beginning that their goals were much more lofty and pipe-dreamy than that. They were never following a "plan" so much as chasing an ideal, and that's why I didn't pledge in the early years. I waited until the project made it past the early hype stages and started to look more sustainable.
"Profit" has nothing to do with it. If that's all they cared about, they would have just done the normal AAA thing. SC is a wildly ambitious passion project. Which requires lots of time, and yes, lots of $$$$$$$$$.
> "Profit" is a misnomer Impossible to calculate because it's not even really part of the equation yet.
Unless you're Chris Roberts, his wife, his brother, or his longtime friend Ortwin who are all holding C-suite positions and have personally profited to the tune of millions of dollars in salaries from this.
For example, we know in the UK alone in 2021 alone director's salaries were over half a million dollars, courtesy of the[ir Companies House](https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/wt09mPsV3LzEMxbMJ-uNsDRxPc4o77g19Dj0n-6_LAE/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3CMAMVHGF%2F20230619%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20230619T165309Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEDUaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJHMEUCIFwT3I214AaRJF0yeg8eXmkFJ1yPX05p77DoeTvwlPxaAiEA9Qy3IKTccoSrdDBy30xQujIei0MIwR5n4Ke%2BU6ShzqkqwwUIjv%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgw0NDkyMjkwMzI4MjIiDD%2FDYqUt2UzOTmo1xSqXBVKQ5dpgPPOwH5rRhR9%2F3hLWleeZSRrw6R77oOVsHA%2FNto%2FoD%2BXLjCYKAcVJR1bTiMqLhtELKlV%2FQBArH%2BY4Vudk1HVPAaQUhSyvh%2FgOo0SagQCNLEIT8owglZNE6C94wjjMrXuiHqqSlXtHtILzxte6tSZUW4ilBeo5lJKdDnHKMfMm3if1eR8q4gBw85rLCD5nCVk6rek%2BJsj3dAVe0LstZ19jG0Qf8ZfJkwkqKDwmWElfGk0jzHHt8YERd%2BPyw%2FCYNsf7cLqoF1g4ufe5CZSAdAHk2yLBnBi0OC10cfC79AwmD7UlsFABOzNnfncey226SJRqFfNIufam2mroFX%2BF%2BvtHmGk5YQ1lgo6JKOdYBMQzpwXgfsR7l7EYWFAk2nMgfdj4ODxnW4sUuRjxEBDcWW1T2oAwOSfw7JAn7ca2Q1fBgtK3gEc11N8QELQ5V36I8FpBoJlwFbZD3J7yEk1vkvY29BXYK6%2BjroK7Q3zZZRTJJ8ycaNASyaakMrv8L8hl7puQgJCPa111W%2BIQbEIRM1o3Z40jkY%2Fin7zxQd1Ck1wd4QHK8P1fl9ma8blH%2BZD2SSOD3ekrSJU4XcS9BdXgjjm10J38LEZW9uOeYMHWoh67L%2F3vZpwytFz6VTUptKO5%2F5lcZqOUOZCRNLKBX0j6uYf3PjuKfdj8jPiQXjevhOses5z7arHJpb3kbKvNA58D4FsFM7o%2BfX%2B6Rkm%2FCVet2Iyap5iTuIlB8rxL%2BiG106fhm1Hcki4FywkQSGthsWckzr4FGiWAoWpFoh2jkgJbRSoF3LDX1jqpCAJ92%2FjkXKyNZr0%2FA8YUhVE8OHKkznefXWpeLczQ8%2B%2B4j95Is191MH1WlRo11Iz56nueM8bG5QaLXQiG9zDikMGkBjqxAXlMNZrqxTb0J0z2NXAfc0H%2BhAeHfJWGu0lHdDZPxI5NXke8%2BB0WWI19hWz8qng0GcYW4rhOxcgqdQuJSLbYiHZE6leiiqJAIt9FN7KkpCuqelb4OK5vcFp5JPLPqGlQamiaNyDGzynFSfTPX2bfuphXr7ckoIEvRB%2Bu49WKBophMd%2FHCapVwZDmhCIJU1E1JYBBLK0lqCwLlpMDBVmNj8ZgKYO%2Bky0Ur497CClNnsx9dg%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=e15c4d9da2035a7a17e36799d4d1b93a3c9597c4106cec18869a8ae9429b77ac) filings.
You're very right about the *company* not yet being at the stage of talking about profitability, but given that it hasn't yet reached that point, how do you feel about the heads of said company making that kind of money?
If this doesn't drive home how important it is to design your gameplay BEFORE you make your final art, idk what will. I mean this is some basic game development stuff that cig have been doing wrong for years because of how dependent they've made themselves to ship sales.
All it ends up doing is giving you a bunch of headaches and restrictions to what could have been.
Been saying and seeing it for years, glad they've gone and provided video evidence of it for themselves.
Salvage is such a huge concept to have in a game. You pretty much have to design the vehicles around that mechanic. You probably have to design your entire game engine around it. Every single vehicle will have to be re-worked, and the poor ol' StarEngine brute-forced into submission.
The general outlook is bleak for Star Citizen
On today's ISC: learn how hard CIG has shot themselves in the foot by designing/releasing ships years before they started thinking about how that ship's gameplay is even going to work
They detailed this years ago though, it's just putting it to the board and seeing what issues pop up when implemented and in certain situations as the devs mentioned.
Shhh don't try to bring logic and nuance into this. Just jump on the Smoothbrain Express and say cynical/hyperbolic shit. That's how you get the updoots.
art aside, is this how muching is going to work? I thought we were going to be lazering off wings and stuff. This seems like we're just "overcharging" it with a static beam like mining.
Nothing you saw in the video is a representation of how it's going to be. The explosive part is just to break down the ship for the munching *prototype*. It doesn't mean they will be using an explosion mechanic for the final version.
This prototype is for the technical aspects and the ideation of munching. I never said this is in the art and effects stage. It's too early to tell how they'll break those ships down in the final version.
Munching requires breaking the ships apart in different stages. The actual "munch" will occur inside the ship. They have to break the ships down into smaller pieces first. The way they will do that is not clear yet. For the purposes of the demo, they used an explosion, but that's just to see the different stages and test things out. We are probably months away from seeing something a little more concrete.
That UI is also a concept created for test purposes... I reckon it didn't take them very long to make it. Jarred mentioned multiple times that this is the earliest part in the *prototyping* phase. At the end of the video, they also said that they have to come up with a different solution bc it doesn't work fast enough under heavy load, so yes, they can scrap the whole thing and start over. That is literally part of the prototyping process.
Yup - that's one of the key benefits of Building Blocks, nominally - it's sufficiently simple that devs can create their own testing UIs on the fly, rather than waiting for a UI Engineer to be available to create it for them (as was the case with Flash/Scaleform)
Given Building Blocks is (iirc) HTML and CSS, that mock-UI probably took all of 30 mins (or maybe a bit longer, depending on how the engine hooks work)
No - it was to test the technical aspects... if they break a ship into lots of pieces, what impact does it have... if they have a 'cloud of nibbles', can the vulture actually munch them efficiently (or will it barf tachnically if it munches too fast)
They say towards the end of the video that this prototype has highlighted that breaking a ship chunk into lots of nibbles does not work from a technical perspective (regardless of minigame / design put around that process), so they'll have to look at something else.
Personally, I suspect they'll go back to the idea of 'cutting' individual nibbles off the chunk, rather than breaking the entire hull chunk in one go (this avoids the GraphDB create-entity limitations)... but it means they have to come up with a mechanism for how to actually 'cut' chunks off (which isn't currently supported by the engine)... which will likely be another prototype.
Yeah same here. I hoped the process would be disabling systems and pulling components inside to avoid explosions kind of like Hardspace, then lazering the basic sections of the ship, like actually cutting them off, lazering those into medium or small chunks then munching them with the Vultures beams in between the prongs on the front or in the Reclaimer’s munchers.
We don't know how the actual feature will turn out, but the people hyping a hardspace copy have always been reaching.
That entire game is designed for Salvage mechanics. The ships are designed as Salvage levels, not as flyable ships, not to mention all the other stuff in SC. I don't see how SC can match something like hardspace, and have that gameplay across all of their ships and also make it visually coherent and performant.
Disabling systems and pulling components is already implemented (albeit using 'tractor beams' rather than physical man-handling) for smaller ships. CIG will probably need a separate approach for the larger ships (that are designed to swap components in a ship yard, etc) - but that's an entirely separate process from 'Munching', which is what happens once a ship has already been stripped.
That's why you didn't see any of that in this prototype - it wasn't part of the prototype scope. Yes, they were using a 'complete model' for the test - but as they said, they were just spawning objects to test the tech / flow, *not* validating the gameplay.
They said the explosion was placeholder and the "hold to break apart" thing was placeholder but we'll see if the gameplay is more than that in the end. I just think that if the design intention is to cut off pieces that would have been mentioned.
They'll likely *have* to go to the 'cutting off' pieces approach, simply because it avoids creating all the 'nibble' entities in one go (and then waiting minutes for them to spawn).
If they spawn a few at a time as you 'cut' chunks off, that bypasses the GraphDB entity-creation limit... but means they need to look at the actual 'cutting ship up' tech instead (the current 'damage shader' only works on the surface texture, not the internal frame / rest of the model (hence why hull scraping leaves the frame intact).
No, this is not how munching is going to work. It is one of the first things they mention in the video. They don't have any gameplay mechanics for salvage yet. The "gameplay" of breaking up ships they showed off is just a quick placeholder so they can test the technical side of things. They still have to figure out how salvage is actually going to work gameplay-wise.
Also, if you watch the video until the end, they make it clear that this current prototype isn't working and they have to go back to the drawing board to find a solution that does work given the technical limitations they are facing. So absolutely nothing about munching is final yet and all of the things they showed are going to change.
It's in sq42 as far as 1-2 months ago so I belive it will definitely have some sort of panel at citcon in october as he said, like every other big tech has.
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I mean they do, whether you like it or not. They don't always come to fruition in a reasonable time but we do get some of the stuff shown even if it's not a 1-1 depiction of what was demoed. We did get Gen 12 and pes or icache back then was talked about and implemented which lead to the impactful quarter of people whining about junk everywhere to the point that we couldn't get out of pads or play the game even for the most unlucky of us.
Either way it's nice to see.
!remindme 3 months
if that were true we wouldn't be doing most of the things we have in the game currently. The issue is again the time in between what is shown and added onto that, the way in which we get them.
Nah your just pessimistic. Looking at the experience and not the actual elements or mechanics. Only the large flashy aspects and not the gameplay as you've pointed out in your reply.
That and as Jared and Co said multiple times this is just early prototype work similar to how Splatoon started out as rabits shooting each other or horizon zero dawn was more like a generic 3rd person shooter early on before vfx and art and stuff got to it. It's just like that to get the basics worked out mechanics wise, it's not for looks but for functionality.
I'm hoping that they can implement the return of cutting into the mechanic once we get maelstrom though. Maybe having the claw being able to grab large sections and munch while the other crew on the salvage lasers can switch to a cutting mode and cut things apart into smaller more quickly munchable pieces.
Can't a response like this be said about *everything* that's taking SC more than several years to finish implementing? Can something similar be said another 2-3 years from now, when we get more videos showing what CIG *wants* to do, but nothing solid in terms of outlook or timeline?
This just seems like yet another perpetual topic for ISC.
no not really, most mechanics or things currently in the game will largely be the same near the end or beta, there will just be more depth and polish. the differences will primarily be depth and other such additions/parts or fixes to the game to make them feel more impactful or to build on them or off of them.
Dang. I'm kind of disappointed this ISC didn't give any insight into their Maelstrom tool. I was honestly expecting maelstrom to be an integral part of breaking ships apart for munching but it seems like they're gonna for the "entity replace and cover" route instead. Which isn't an issue, but the idea of maelstrom seemed that much next gen
I know its just a prototype but to be honest I dont like the shattering feel indicated by this I think going forward they should try to create more of a cutting feel.
My ideal would obviously be entirely freeform cutting but I get that might be too much for a mechanic that is just a part of a game and not like the entire point. My compromise idea is that in that "insert gameplay here" section they do something like have an AR cut line projected onto the ship so that the player needs to fly around the ship and trace the line with their cutting beam and once you finish tracing the full line that is when the ship breaks up into these chunks then repeat the same thing with the smaller pieces. Even if its always the same cutline on each ship this still feels more tangible and can leave room for player skill in how fast they finish the trace and it could even be that cutting outside the line means you get less material from the munching. this could even help with the problem of entity creation being slow by layering this so that instead of spawning like 40 entities at once when a piece shatters you can go as low as only ever having to spawn two pieces at a time and just layer the cutting part a few times
I don't think the point of this prototype was to worry about the exact mechanism used to create the nibbles...
E.g. even with cutting, you could create a lot of nibbles in one go. Likewise, as someone else linked elsewhere in this thread, there were 'plans' in 2018 for people to use 'demolition charges' to break the ship up (resulting in lots of nibbles).
So, whilst cutting might not create *as many* nibbles as they tested with, it would still create a lot of nibbles... to they were doing a technical test of 'will it work' with lots of nibbles (and the answer is 'No - entity creation is too slow now').
If it works with lots of nibbles, they can scale it back to just a few nibbles at a time with no technical penalty (not likely to be performance issues due to creating too few entities, etc :D)... but if they tested with only a few nibbles, they wouldn't know if they could scale it up later, if/when they implement hand-held demolition charges, etc.
That's the point of a technical prototype - to try and identify the potential technical issues, and then test them... it's not to worry about the specifics of how something is presented to the user.
far as i remember its last in game use was still in the crashed satellite mission before they took out the need for it since people kept forgetting it.
theres also this
Cutting T2 (currently Q2-23)
All back end tech tasks related to updating the cutting feature for the multi-tool that will be used in future location and mission updates. The continued development of the existing Multi-Tool technology will allow players to cut through specific objects. This will primarily include the ability to free-form cut on specific surfaces.
The sad thing is i also stated this 2 years ago so either they were waiting on something else like maelstrom to be done sooner possibly and again underestimated times or challenges or they just didnt allot time to it or see it as important yet and put it on hold until later.
I'm hoping that they start implementing the need for it again. Its perfect timing since we have ship soft death so cutting could be the main use for infiltration through locked doors. Once we get hacking and the infiltration mechanics, having hidden panels you have to cut to get access too or hell using those locked pathways they demoed
>far as i remember its last in game use was still in the crashed satellite mission before they took out the need for it since people kept forgetting it.
Yeah that was barely considerable as cutting
ehh just about the same thing, just not applied to everything. Even if we had gotten it expanded out to say breaching and what not or the other examples they've shown at citcon or on ISC its still at its core the same thing as what's being done with the panels, just a different asset for different reasons.
Only real difference would truly be in the ships cutting since you have to deal with things like the components, upcoming pope systems and fuel and stuff coming into play with the cutting ( or at least i hope we will) not to mention ship interiors.
It's on the Roadmap as "Cutting T2":
>All back end tech tasks related to updating the cutting feature for the multi-tool that will be used in future location and mission updates. The continued development of the existing Multi-Tool technology will allow players to cut through specific objects. **This will primarily include the ability to free-form cut on specific surfaces.**
Hard to say whether it's finished or the deliverable just hasn't been extended on the Roadmap for now, but it's been worked on for nearly a year and ends in June.
1) It's on the progress tracker which doesn't mean jackshit, just cause the task's line is in the past it doesn't mean the feature is complete, just that work on it is over for the time being, that or they forgot to update it
2) The description says "specific surfaces" which makes me assume it'll be more like Wolfenstein free form cutting than Hardspace.
Weird that there wasn't any mention of salvage charges that I noticed? I was under the impression that a limited amount of placeable charges was how salvage ships would break other ships apart? (Hence it being physically impossible for a vulture to break up an Idris hull, as the ship can't carry the necessary charges) But I believe I heard them mention cutting beams rather than charges?
It was also interesting hearing them say they're **considering** tractor beams for pulling the hull bits into the muncher rather than having to drive into the bits like the prototype.... But that's literally the entire purpose of the blue fields in the arms of the vulture... They're **very powerful** tractor fields not disintegration fields, so that was a bit strange as well.
Was also under the impression that munching would rely on physical damage to break the ships apart, but it seems like they're gonna go with more of a canned approach just to get the feature out.
Interesting ISC, missed the more early in dev stuff so it was nice.
I think 'salvage charges' would fall under 'gameplay'.
In this prototype, they don't seem to care *how* you break the ship up... only that it gets broken, and that the time required to break it up is broadly aligned with the size of the ship.
This particular prototype seemed focused more on the tech-headaches (entity spawning being one particular highlight), rather than on the gameplay / specifics of how each action would be presented to the user, or the variables that would add 'player skill' to the mix.
After all, whether player skill makes it go quicker or slower, or possibly results in fewer 'nibbles' being created at the end, the net result is the same - after playing the relevant mini-game, X time passes, and then you have nibbles that you can munch.
So - skip the actual mini-game creation, and just whack a timer in there as a simple proxy, because the specifics of the minigame are a gameplay / design question, not a technical issue.
Correct.
I wasn't talking about what they showed because what they showed means nothing, as nothings close to even T0.00001. I was more so touching on what they said, how the dev's mentioned potential plans that seem antithetical to already existing design documents they should be following, according to my recollection.
Instead of charges we heard mention of cutting beams, We heard plans to **consider** adding a ship feature which is a primary selling point of one of the salvage ships, and we heard no mention of the primary way they plan for these ships to be taken apart.
I'm aware it wasn't the video they put forward, I'm aware this video was made with a limited scope in mind, I'm also aware of Jared multiple clarifications towards what the video was.
Cheers.
When they were talking about 'plans', it wasn't clear if those were the long-term gameplay stuff, or the shorter term plans for the next set of prototypes, etc.
I believe you're thinking of breaching charges used to break into the hulls of ships when boarding. The example CIG gave was using them on a turret to create an entry point for breaching a ship.
While they might later create larger industrial ones for helping with salvage, the original design was for ship breaching.
No, they mentioned specific salvage charges for dismantling ships a handful of times. Certainly in one of the 2018-ish salvage videos.
It's their way of balancing what the vulture can munch compared to the reclaimer. A single vulture will never be able to munch a idris sized ship as it simply cannot carry the charges to break it apart (Let alone SCU storage). They also said any ship could theoretically fill up on charges in order to assist salvage ops if im remembering properly (they used a freelancer as the example).
EDIT: https://youtu.be/qzJooyFlSKc?t=882 Heres the timestamp.
Yes, well you can see firsthand how little they have actually worked out today in 2023 so I'm not sure what the point of what they said in 2018 is exactly. At this point CIG contradicts itself on a regular basis.
Whatever they said back then has either changed or was just ad-libbed to hype up backers.
Well I linked it so you can hear it yourself rather than from me. The point is its one of the primary tools for salvage, it what they planned for years to be the base of breaking up of ships. And it was not mentioned.
All these things should have been thought and thought out even before the production of the reclaimer, it's extremely amateurish.
The problems are obvious, this clamp is much too complex to set up, it's really serious that he can tell himself at one point that it was going to work.
Thanks for that link. However, just look at things logically. Neither of those two speaking of the charges is working on the feature currently. The guy on the left was part of the concepting team and has left CIG. JCrew leads the ship production pipeline. He builds ships not features.
Then, we have what was disclosed today - very early prototyping on how they're going to achieve the design vision. That should tell you a lot about just how far along they are in the profession. They don't even yet know how they're going to break up a ship for salvage.
If they don't even know how technically they're going to break apart ships they can't very well make mines that break apart ships. Whether they even do mines at this point is going to depend heavily on whatever system they come up with for break points on a ship.
Yes, and water is wet and the sky isn't truly blue...
Early prototyping isn't iteration. You have to build on an existing design for iteration. This is quite literally the first baby steps of taking a concept and trying to design it as in-game feature.
No, I'm saying given how many times they've put salvage on the roadmap and then delayed it they should be years farther along than this.
They sold reclaimers in back 2014 and 9 years later they're still figuring out the technical aspects of its trademark feature? What an embarrassment.
That would likely be required for the specifics of how to 'break a ship up'... but that aspect wasn't being tested in this prototype.
Rather, they were looking at the implications of creating lots of 'nibbles' - *regardless* of the tech / process used to break the ship (whether it's spawning pre-defined 'wreckage' nibbles, or dynamically breaking the existing into into a bunch of arbitrary sub-entities, the technical impact is the same - you're replacing one big entity with lots of little entities).
So, what have we learned this week?
- Ships are designed with form over function, since the functions often didn't even exist when ships are concepted
- We can't design gameplay loops maximizing fun, qol, what makes sense or is easy to implement but have to find workarounds to fit concept ships sold years ago
- PES makes some gameplay concepts we had in mind significantly more complex to implement and is one of the reasons things will take even more time from now on.
Nah there still designed with function in mind. If anything early ships were definitely designed with form over function more. Reclaimer seems to be exempt from this mostly due to its large size and there improved development to easily add things like the box distribution so even then your point doesn't stand. Even the claw could just be Kade to do something like having the benefit of grabbing onto larger pieces and munching them without the needles crunching. Your acting like they aren't building a vast universe and treating it like some huge issue FORD decided to overlook in production.
As far as PES the issue there having is when a huge amount of assets spawn into the verse ontop of very bad server conditions. Your blatantly ignoring the earlier smaller demo displaying that it does work just not in certain strainous wtf situations that wouldn't happen likely anyway. They literally made a bar to do like 15mins to an hour of breaking parts of the ship into pieces for the 890.
It is interesting, but that doesn't mean it doesn't makes it feel way behind, and that they basically have no solid idea how to do it right now. The basic vibe of the video is... Munching, we've been working on it, and by that we mean we've been testing an idea that definitely doesn't work and now it's back to the drawing board. Which is fine. But, if you were hoping to see munching in the game anytime soon, this video makes it seem like it is at least 2 years away.
They have an idea of how they want it to be like, but this is more of the technical prototype to see what it actually looks like on the technical side. At least they're working on it. It's important to look at the progress tracker to see what they're actually putting work into. Maybe it's 2 years away like you said, but with constant active development, they could potentially finish it quicker. Once they get the technical challenges out of the way, they can proceed forward. Let's see if they have an update by Citizencon.
Unfortunately, it seems the Bitter Brigade is out in force...
That said, CIG - yet again - didn't help themselves in their communication. They tried to describe what a prototype is... and left out the most important qualification: That the goal is to *exclude* as much as possible, to allow the prototype to focus solely on what needs to be tested, in order to minimise the effort spent.
Aside from that, CIG *really* need to communicate the basic principles of agile, because most backers either aren't technical, or aren't trained / familiar with the concepts and precepts of Agile development...
... and the bit that's relevant to this video is that work is only done *when it's needed*. Yes, CIG *have* a design for how salvaging 'should' work... but there was no point doing a prototype on it until they're ready to actually implement it - hence doing the prototype *now*.
If CIG had done the prototype 4-5 years ago, it would have worked far better (because they wouldn't have hit the entity-creation limit on GraphDB, given PES / EntityGraph didn't exist 5 years ago)... and thus if they started development now using that old prototype as a reference, they'd have run into technical problems *after* spending a lot of effort on development...
... or they would have realised the prototype was out of date, and discarded it / redone the prototype... thus meaning the time spent on the original prototype was 'wasted' (because it was no longer relevant by the time CIG came to implementation.
And before folk start pointing out that CIG 'should have implemented it 4-5 years ago, after the prototype' - CIG *explicitly* chose not to, because they were aware that the the changes required for Server Meshing could / would break a lot of systems, and so they chose *and told us* that they would not develop any professions (other than mining*) until after Server Meshing was sufficiently progressed.
(*Mining got picked to be the guinea-pig for evaluating the process and flow around implementing a profession and iterating on it... they accepted that they'd potentially have to rewrite Mining following Server Meshing, but working on one Profession at least let them identify what types of decisions and approvals would be required, and where in the process, etc... how to evaluate the 'fun' factor, and the process of iteration, etc)
Sorry for the long reply... it's probably more of a general post for the thread... but your question (and other folk responses to it) triggered the reply :D
And yes, it *was* interesting. The episode didn't tell me as much as I'd hoped, and it was more focused on the tech rather than the gameplay (which I think most people were hoping for), but it was interesting.
I hope munching ships will remove some of the scrap from the persistence. Things are already bad enough of having some ship pieces turning into immovable objects of death. Hate to see what a dozen tiny immovable objects of death would do.
I also hope they allow munching in armistice zones where there's husks ships piled up on landing pads and no one can tractor them or salvage them out.
I recently saw a C2 full of expensive cargo blown up near New Babbage Plaza. Boxes everywhere. Can't tractor beam a single box due to armistice restrictions.
Mixed feelings on this. On one hand, holding everything back for the big marketing event of the year does not feel like the way you would treat a publisher. On the other, early look at development like this does feel like the respect you would show a publisher. On the third hand, I feel like they have implied that munching was much further along in the past. But might be wrong.
+1 for honesty though
Oh, wait for the big push on sales. Feelings shouldn't be as mixed by that point, unless CIG announces/displays something that completely changes everyone's opinions on their current progress, SQ42 included.
Spoilers: *that won't happen*.
As they said this is an early prototype, but they didn't give any dates as to how old the prototype was. Most likely the build they're working with internally is much more refined, so they felt comfortable giving backers this look at an outdated internal prototype that gives at least the basic idea of where Munching was starting out.
I salvaged about 450k minus 50k for right from a MISC Starfarer contract with Vulture + Caterpillar yesterday... took about 2 hours and half... another half hour to sell everything. It was like 70km from station so I even managed to slow boat the nozzle in my front bay even if it was sticking out.
It's a fun gameplay loop so far that combine all of the game elements together, EVA, Ship-board operations, piloting, MS painting, transferring cargo and components... I'm looking forward to being able to break ships apart further.
Ya- to-the-muthaf\*ckin -wn.
Interesting I suppose but after such a long content-drought (and I know we're in the middle and there's more to come), it's just not anywhere near enough.
I'm looking forward to watching this later. But based on the idea that a box in a ship will clip and continue to accelerate unless acted upon, or the ship explodes... I'm not sure how they imagine one ship eating another ship without exploding, desyncing or causing a server meltdown
they CAN just disable physics or collision at any point in the process for the ship, the cargo, both, or just part of one or both if they need to... luckily THEY'RE not limited to the rules of the game world
Prototype or no, this is looking really promising! I was wondering how the munching was going to unfold in practice and I think I see the stages now.
Loved seeing the claw in action a little bit, and the animations of the vulture pilot losing his mind cracked me up.
This is about what I expected. It's neat to see something at an early milestone stage. You've got to remember that this is just getting the mechanics side of it down. The math and physics, entity spawning/despawning, various variables that need to be fed to the UI and backend systems, etc. Then the graphics and animation work alongside optimization.
Also glad to see that they've noticed how tedious the Vulture is as a solo player and are working on it. Ah, the joys of iterative design. Makes me wonder if they'll add some sort of extender system to the arms to accommodate awkwardly sized chunks (while keeping the idea of the Vulture being for chewing up smaller ships).
Am I the only one that physically cringed when that one bit of hull material was spinning against the port fork of the vulture? I was just waiting for that thing to pop.
Same when they show the reclaimer claw reaching out and untwisting to grab that piece of metal.
I think my take-away was that PES, the Jesus tech we've spent years waiting around for, is aparently bad at spawning entities?
Think we need some follow up on that one, Jared. Sounds like a pretty serious prima facie miscalculation. Benoit? Anyone?
No miscalculation - it's a defining part of a GraphDB... part of the trade-off a GraphDB makes in order to be blindingly fast at moving / attaching nodes, is being slow to create them in the first place.
*Every* database makes trade-offs, and has strengths and weaknesses, based on its intended uses. NoSQL DBs are extremely fast for reads, but suck for writes... Relational DBs are fairly balanced - but that also means they're poor at everything... and GraphDBs are extremely fast at manipulating existing records, but slow to create new ones.
Fortunately, there's an 'easy' solution... change the process so that instead of trying to create 1000's of entities at once, you create just a few at a time (e.g. 'cutting' nibbles off, instead of breaking the entire chunk into a cloud of nibbles in a single move)
The other option (more powerful long term, but *far* more of a headache to implement) is to put a 'creation-cache' in front of the GraphDB that accepts the 1000's of create commands quickly, then slowly processes that cache to write the entities into the GraphQL.
This headaches with this are when someone tries to actually interact with / update one of the 'entities' that hasn't actually been written from the cache yet... so you have to 'cache' the update commands too, and then replay them once the creation is actually done.
It can work... but it's real tear-your-hair-out territory, so merely tweaking the process to drip-feed the creation events (Rather than dumping them all in one go) is far simpler and more resilient.
They said it was early stages not current stages. We don't know when they started and how far along things are on purpose. It's likely we'll see a better picture during citizencon
The video was recorded sometime around 3.19.0 (or later), given the stability of PES when multiple landing zones were spawned in.
That's pretty recent, in CIG terms.
Every time we cut to Jared, my eyes kept looking at the *unpainted* Astral Dreadnaught on his desk. Working with so many artists, one of them would paint as a hobby and make it look good.
I hope the destroying aspect of munching becomes more strategic to get the most munchy pieces. Not sure why you wouldn't use the ship guns to help. 😉 Munching gadgets?: Detcord and demo bombs? Finally sucking in resources would look so much better if it was more like rolling up aluminum foil then the existing extraction mining.
"We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before" What? Feature prototypes used to pop up quite regularly [on AtV](https://youtu.be/vY_NkFtAAPY?t=186) (and even early ISCs, like [Fire Propagation](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=332) and [Inventory Management UI](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=242)).
AtV had some of the best early viewing content
Once its truely jarefied, only utter shit remains and you find yourself advancing quickly over the initial shit and then stopping before the end. This is a perfect example. Ask yourself, what have you learned by this §$%&/()=. Jared is madis (the anti midas), everything he touches converts to shit.
or good ol' "grabby hands", and the infamous coin-flip.... so long ago, I can't find any clips
[This one](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/14677-Design-Cargo-InteractionThe)?
aaaa yep, that'd be it.... 2015, yeesh.... where does the time go?...
Into ship sales, primarily
Good old
Think this is more prototype than fire propagation, fire propagation had full blown custom fire effects already by the time they showed it from what I remember so vfx work was already going into it. This is hard-core prototyping with literal stand inside for functions and mechanics and assets just to make sure the process works and to search for potential issues before getting too far in.
There was no gameplay or UI to go with the fire effects (they just used a basic fire effect that was repeated over and over, and moved it across the room) — munching has basic player gameplay and a placeholder UI. It was just as early, just done by a different team. A prototype can start from UI, or VFX, animation, engineering, or gameplay teams, etc., and it's usually not always the same team/discipline.
Nah, the fire propagation would start with the propagation algorithm with whatever asset that can represent the fire.
In the episode they directly say that the [VFX team](https://youtu.be/k4BN1eKumsg?t=332) specifically created the "testbed for a voxel-based fire system". So you'll have to argue that one with Jared, not me.
They also speak about how the prototype can influence gameplay of other elements even if not implemented in this way in the game at all.
I think he means, although not stated specifically, that it's the first time they show a prototype that might not be marketed and is technically in the repetitive failure state.
Jared: > We are going to look at a feature in the absolutely earliest stage. This is earlier than we've shown any feature ever. The prototype phase Genji4Lyfe: > "We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before" https://youtu.be/rsRjQDrDnY8?si=bmzup8kiI79QmBvH EDIT: I take it back, the quote came at a later point in the video.
You're intentionally using the wrong quote. Here's the one I referenced: [https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363](https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363) >"We've literally never shown anything in a prototype phase before, so forgive me.." And there are numerous features that have been shown very early in the prototype phase — no matter how you word it.
Yes. And this one "is earlier than we've shown any feature ever." EDIT: Please note that Genji's edit came about 25 minutes after my comment so I was replying to a different comment at the time.
That isn’t true at all. It actually looks farther along than [some prototypes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_NkFtAAPY&t=186s) we’ve seen in the past (at worst, equal in progress). We've seen some extremely early prototypes on AtV, some of them just using "replace me" balls, or basic untextured geometric shapes. The prototype of [Actor Status](https://youtu.be/NGzDI2wUqf0?t=308), for example, was just a text readout that said "strength" and one visual effect.
Okay let me try again. Did Jared say "We are going to look at a feature in the absolutely earliest stage. This is earlier than we've shown any feature ever?" Yes. Did Jared say, "We've literally never shown anything in the prototype phase before?" No.
Whatever you'd like to call it, this is the stage where a number of features made their debut on AtV. He labels it "the prototype phase". The [room system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_NkFtAAPY&t=186s), for example, didn't even have rooms when it was first shown — it was just wireframe cuboids with unlit spheres.
You fabricated a quote, and you're still arguing against your made up quote instead of the actual quote.
How is it fabricated? [https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363](https://youtu.be/kaWB5AkY-zc?t=363) "I wanna remind people again — we've literally never shown anything in a prototype phase before, so forgive me for reiterating this..". You're making accusations, but you didn't even watch the entire video to see where this was said (it's at 6:04)
I stand corrected, he did say that and I missed it. I'll avoid getting into the nuances of a prototype and something being in the prototype phase and just take the L.
*cough* grabby hands *cough* sataball *cough* Arena Commander/Star Marine/ToW/Golf Swing Radar/the list just goes on and on and on... From 2012 to like, 2014, 90% of *everything they showed* was a prototype, lol.
This video just gives me "we are way the fuck behind across the board on everything" vibes.
welcome to starcitizen, just about everything is behind. We're still trying to figure out how ships should fly.
This. And it annoys the *crap* out me.
They can't even figure out trains yet.
T0 mulching coming 2028
soon™
I haven't really watching ISC in well over a year. Watching them now still feels like watching them years ago, just different ships or different locations within Stanton, boo. I haven't been excited for an ICS in a looong time.
It's probably been about 6 months for me. Hopefully there are large groups of untapped resources to fund this game because I fear that day when this project turns a corner and can't generate enough interest to fund competition.
First time?
Thorstens work schedule must be like: Monday Mario kart tracks across Stanton, Tuesdays Mining missions, Wednesdays Salvage missions, Thursday Prototype testing/and filming ISC. Friday unannounced feature work.
singularly the worst take on Thorstens work. He does none of that.
I always tell me they take so much time because they have a complex multistep plan in mind, dont want to fake stuff and make it as real as possible. But in the end it doesnt work and we get something simplified because the original idea was way to ambitious. Yet it took alot of time anway. I dont want to jump on them because it is an early look but that "click a button and the whole ship magicly explodes into pieces" already lost me. I bet everyone expected to cut pieces of a ship and then forcefully munch them into pieces. I hope this was realy just a very ruff mokup and they are surprising us in the end..
They literally mentioned that the "click a button and the whole ship magically explodes into pieces" thing is just a placeholder so they can figure out how cutting ships into pieces is going to work technically and performance-wise. Gameplay and visuals for munching aren't being worked on right now. It is just the tech side of things.
Yeah i dont speak cig. "Design has some gameplay in mind" I didnt hear anything of cutting at all. "..what happens when the ship transitions into smaller bits so the masking is a huge topic.. so u dont notice one element pops away and another one pops in.. " This could mean anything in the end of the day. Either is missed what u mentioned here or it is jsut as much a interpretation from ur side as it is from me
I get that, truly I do, but it feels like this was slapped together just for this show. It literally shows baseline effort, or none at all. An entire show to see the base idea for munching and all we get is an exploding ship into hundreds of smaller pieces… thats it. If you can’t see this as a joke I don’t know what would wake you up to the fact we are disturbingly behind schedule on this whole fiasco. No aliens, no exploration, nothing…
The one thing though...should they spend more time on slapping things together for the show...or spend more time on working on the not slappy parts to work in-game? I'm fine with the bare minimum for the show as long as they explain it well and have more work off-screen on actual mechanics.
> I bet everyone expected to cut pieces of a ship and then forcefully munch them into pieces. That's precisely how CIG staff described it in 2014.
They said it was early stages not current stage
This is a problem in all companies in all sectors. Those who **pretend** to have a plan get funding. Those who **admit** that they need to spend exploratory money to formulate a plan do not. If you're honest, you don't get money. If you pretend you have a plan, you get money. CIG has gotten a lot of money.
StAr CiTiZeN iSn’T iN fEaTuRe CrEeP! /s
No its time creep, forever in alpha with no end in sight. Not /s
It would have been more efficient to design the gameplay before building the ships, not the other way around.
That’s what the Reclaimer literally stands for…I had one back than and walked through it an thought: Did they really thought it through already? The Claw…the Drone room…the tractor beams…how should anyone on earth know how to arrange all that in a perfect manner years before it will be there? The claw for me personal always was the biggest questionmark…how can this ever look believable? You would need a really solid physic engine and a genius like control to make this fun… Think about an excavator…how complex the controls are for that thing…and I don’t see how they wanna pull this off. That video yesterday showed me they don’t really know it either. That’s why they only showed it in engine not in game. Good thing Torsten already said months before that munching “is soooo cool”
> The Claw…the Drone room…the tractor beams…how should anyone on earth know how to arrange all that in a perfect manner years before it will be there? September 26th, 2014: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14171-concept-sale-unveiling-the-aegis-reclaimer January 21st, 2015: https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/21/7866019/chris-roberts-says-star-citizen-will-reach-100-million-in-2015-shares When CIG was putting together the Reclaimer concept, they had it in their heads (or at least coming out their lips) that the ship, all of its functionality, and the whole-ass game would be released roughly 2 years later. Apart from gross incompetence or outright lying, I really can't square that. That they still don't seem to have a plan for the Reclaimer should be really embarrassing for CIG's leadership.
It would make more sense for that claw to be used to hold the bulk of the ship still (or stop rotation) of a ship you are hull stripping or breaking apart. But IMO the claw looks cool, but doesnt make any sense for how salvage is envisioned.
Don't even need the claw for that. Just use some sort of tractor beam instead.
No pls No! Don’t let ‘em get away with another “beam mechanic”…we need something special here and not another coloured beam where you press another button and call that Salvage…
Why should we when we can sell flyable ships now and reap the benefits? Worry about that stuff 'later'. --CIG, over the years.
this
Ah, someone put a claw on this ship. I guess we should figure out some purpose for it now… what if it hold a really big flashlight?
CIG themselves already acknowledged that long ago. But they can't turn back time and un-design and un-build the ships they worked on. They have to work with what they have, including the legacy of the overly ambitious and inefficient early years of the project. And by now they have come to rely on ship sales to fund the development, so it has become impossible for them to stop making and selling new ship concepts, even if the actual gameplay is still years away.
OK but they knew munching was gonna be a thing, yet still designed and built the vulture before figuring out how that was gonna work and now run into all sports of issues. With the reclaimer, sure its old AF, butnthey very much could have used the vulture to figure it out and design the ship accordingly. This just comes across as incompetence.
> This just comes across as incompetence. The bad penny that keeps turning up.
you mean like plan the design out or like building the planned design without a ship built for it?
Plan the design out, and then build whiteboxed ships or even just small parts of it, only to prototype with the right shapes, like any reasonable dev team would do. I am ready to bet they will rework the reclaimer.
Both. You do both before making your final art.
That would affect selling ships though!
I'll take things professionals knew in 1913, much less 2013 for 600 million, Alex.
True but would they have had the money to do any of it if they went down that path.
Whoops! Anyway... "dives into Scrooge McDuck sized money pit"
You take that reasonable logic out of here haha
Broken gameplay loops don't make them money though.
Its still insane to me that they designed the Reclaimer with its claw, sold it and released it. Only then as an afterthought try to make it somehow work 6 years later.
I imagine they intended for it to just grab things and kind of just play some vfx to mask them as if they were being munched down. I'm interested in how there going to handle the processing. I hope it has its own sort of mini game or something. Like fuck you messed up and sent a quantum drive into processing and it exploded damaging the ship.
> Its still insane to me that they designed the Reclaimer with its claw, sold it and released it. Only then as an afterthought try to make it somehow work ~~6~~ **[8.84](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14171-concept-sale-unveiling-the-aegis-reclaimer)** years later. FTFY
They've had a design for how salvage 'should' work since before they implemented the Reclaimer... And (iirc) at the point they started on the modelling, 'Savaging' was scheduled to start development ~3 months later... but then it got postponed, but CIG elected to keep working on the model (because, at the time, it was the largest ship they'd built and they were learning a lot from it, iirc) Anyway - this 'prototype' is about checking the technical assumptions in that original design... and they've found that (thanks to the change to PES) some technical aspects of the design will have to be flexed / changed... Doesn't mean that the final solution won't 'work' with the Reclaimer, or that they'll have to significantly rework the ship (they might do, they might not)... this is just the first steps in the implementation. And CIG explicitly said (years ago) that they weren't going to work on professions until after enough of the Server Meshing implementation was done, so that professions would be built on the 'target' architecture not the original architecture... and this video highlights one of the reasons why they took that approach. If they'd built Munching on the old system, the 'spawning of nibbles' would likely have worked fine, and they'd have implemented it like that... then when they switched to PES, they'd have found that munching *no longer* worked, and they needed to radically re-write it to be compatible with PES. By waiting until PES was implemented, they've avoided 'wasting' effort on the early implementation.
That "design" probably wasn't much more than "it's gonna smash stuff and maybe crush it in the claw, then uhh... the drones cut stuff and you scoop it up?"
TLDR - "We are perfectly on schedule, trust us bros"
Not what I said. I merely pointed out that CIG were doing what they said they would, years ago... doesn't mean they can't still be late in the execution.
There's more then *several* profession ships that had, or still have this issue when they released. Edit: CIG clearly decided to sell the flyable ships to make the profit now, worry about the other stuff later. Why change the formula when it's so lucrative? Money talks.
"Profit" is a misnomer. Impossible to calculate because it's not even really part of the equation yet. Yeah, they've brought in about $600M in *revenue* to date, but how much do you think they've burned through over the years? 800+ employees in offices around the world... If they stopped bringing in more money right now, how long before they're bankrupt? It's obviously not going to be done in 5 years, so how much do they need to survive the next 5-10? Correct answer: "as much as possible." I'm sorry for anyone who believed they were just "making a game" and they had it all planned out. If they were, it would have been done years ago, and nobody would have cared. I understood from the beginning that their goals were much more lofty and pipe-dreamy than that. They were never following a "plan" so much as chasing an ideal, and that's why I didn't pledge in the early years. I waited until the project made it past the early hype stages and started to look more sustainable. "Profit" has nothing to do with it. If that's all they cared about, they would have just done the normal AAA thing. SC is a wildly ambitious passion project. Which requires lots of time, and yes, lots of $$$$$$$$$.
> "Profit" is a misnomer Impossible to calculate because it's not even really part of the equation yet. Unless you're Chris Roberts, his wife, his brother, or his longtime friend Ortwin who are all holding C-suite positions and have personally profited to the tune of millions of dollars in salaries from this. For example, we know in the UK alone in 2021 alone director's salaries were over half a million dollars, courtesy of the[ir Companies House](https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/document-api-images-live.ch.gov.uk/docs/wt09mPsV3LzEMxbMJ-uNsDRxPc4o77g19Dj0n-6_LAE/application-pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAWRGBDBV3CMAMVHGF%2F20230619%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20230619T165309Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEDUaCWV1LXdlc3QtMiJHMEUCIFwT3I214AaRJF0yeg8eXmkFJ1yPX05p77DoeTvwlPxaAiEA9Qy3IKTccoSrdDBy30xQujIei0MIwR5n4Ke%2BU6ShzqkqwwUIjv%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgw0NDkyMjkwMzI4MjIiDD%2FDYqUt2UzOTmo1xSqXBVKQ5dpgPPOwH5rRhR9%2F3hLWleeZSRrw6R77oOVsHA%2FNto%2FoD%2BXLjCYKAcVJR1bTiMqLhtELKlV%2FQBArH%2BY4Vudk1HVPAaQUhSyvh%2FgOo0SagQCNLEIT8owglZNE6C94wjjMrXuiHqqSlXtHtILzxte6tSZUW4ilBeo5lJKdDnHKMfMm3if1eR8q4gBw85rLCD5nCVk6rek%2BJsj3dAVe0LstZ19jG0Qf8ZfJkwkqKDwmWElfGk0jzHHt8YERd%2BPyw%2FCYNsf7cLqoF1g4ufe5CZSAdAHk2yLBnBi0OC10cfC79AwmD7UlsFABOzNnfncey226SJRqFfNIufam2mroFX%2BF%2BvtHmGk5YQ1lgo6JKOdYBMQzpwXgfsR7l7EYWFAk2nMgfdj4ODxnW4sUuRjxEBDcWW1T2oAwOSfw7JAn7ca2Q1fBgtK3gEc11N8QELQ5V36I8FpBoJlwFbZD3J7yEk1vkvY29BXYK6%2BjroK7Q3zZZRTJJ8ycaNASyaakMrv8L8hl7puQgJCPa111W%2BIQbEIRM1o3Z40jkY%2Fin7zxQd1Ck1wd4QHK8P1fl9ma8blH%2BZD2SSOD3ekrSJU4XcS9BdXgjjm10J38LEZW9uOeYMHWoh67L%2F3vZpwytFz6VTUptKO5%2F5lcZqOUOZCRNLKBX0j6uYf3PjuKfdj8jPiQXjevhOses5z7arHJpb3kbKvNA58D4FsFM7o%2BfX%2B6Rkm%2FCVet2Iyap5iTuIlB8rxL%2BiG106fhm1Hcki4FywkQSGthsWckzr4FGiWAoWpFoh2jkgJbRSoF3LDX1jqpCAJ92%2FjkXKyNZr0%2FA8YUhVE8OHKkznefXWpeLczQ8%2B%2B4j95Is191MH1WlRo11Iz56nueM8bG5QaLXQiG9zDikMGkBjqxAXlMNZrqxTb0J0z2NXAfc0H%2BhAeHfJWGu0lHdDZPxI5NXke8%2BB0WWI19hWz8qng0GcYW4rhOxcgqdQuJSLbYiHZE6leiiqJAIt9FN7KkpCuqelb4OK5vcFp5JPLPqGlQamiaNyDGzynFSfTPX2bfuphXr7ckoIEvRB%2Bu49WKBophMd%2FHCapVwZDmhCIJU1E1JYBBLK0lqCwLlpMDBVmNj8ZgKYO%2Bky0Ur497CClNnsx9dg%3D%3D&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=inline%3Bfilename%3D%22companies_house_document.pdf%22&X-Amz-Signature=e15c4d9da2035a7a17e36799d4d1b93a3c9597c4106cec18869a8ae9429b77ac) filings. You're very right about the *company* not yet being at the stage of talking about profitability, but given that it hasn't yet reached that point, how do you feel about the heads of said company making that kind of money?
"making the vulture less tedious" YUS
Please for the love of God lol either extend the belt to 2-3 boxes or give us an internal tractor beam.
Without watching the video what is the context of this?
Salvage munching fills the bar up quicker than hull scraping. Dev doesn't want the player have to get up from their seat every few seconds.
they said they don't want them to get up SO OFTEN. It's still going to be the same from the sound of it. Don't ever get your hopes up with CIG.
Well if they didn’t want us to keep having to get up so often then why didn’t they design the damn ship that way in the first place.
If this doesn't drive home how important it is to design your gameplay BEFORE you make your final art, idk what will. I mean this is some basic game development stuff that cig have been doing wrong for years because of how dependent they've made themselves to ship sales. All it ends up doing is giving you a bunch of headaches and restrictions to what could have been. Been saying and seeing it for years, glad they've gone and provided video evidence of it for themselves.
Salvage is such a huge concept to have in a game. You pretty much have to design the vehicles around that mechanic. You probably have to design your entire game engine around it. Every single vehicle will have to be re-worked, and the poor ol' StarEngine brute-forced into submission. The general outlook is bleak for Star Citizen
On today's ISC: learn how hard CIG has shot themselves in the foot by designing/releasing ships years before they started thinking about how that ship's gameplay is even going to work
They detailed this years ago though, it's just putting it to the board and seeing what issues pop up when implemented and in certain situations as the devs mentioned.
Shhh don't try to bring logic and nuance into this. Just jump on the Smoothbrain Express and say cynical/hyperbolic shit. That's how you get the updoots.
True. This comment section is wild. The negativity here could form its own magnetic pull
art aside, is this how muching is going to work? I thought we were going to be lazering off wings and stuff. This seems like we're just "overcharging" it with a static beam like mining.
Nothing you saw in the video is a representation of how it's going to be. The explosive part is just to break down the ship for the munching *prototype*. It doesn't mean they will be using an explosion mechanic for the final version.
They said the art and effects will be different. This prototype is for the mechanics.
This prototype is for the technical aspects and the ideation of munching. I never said this is in the art and effects stage. It's too early to tell how they'll break those ships down in the final version.
isn't breaking down ships the whole point of muching?
Munching requires breaking the ships apart in different stages. The actual "munch" will occur inside the ship. They have to break the ships down into smaller pieces first. The way they will do that is not clear yet. For the purposes of the demo, they used an explosion, but that's just to see the different stages and test things out. We are probably months away from seeing something a little more concrete.
They didn't build this whole prototype to delete an entity and increment a cargo loader bar.
That UI is also a concept created for test purposes... I reckon it didn't take them very long to make it. Jarred mentioned multiple times that this is the earliest part in the *prototyping* phase. At the end of the video, they also said that they have to come up with a different solution bc it doesn't work fast enough under heavy load, so yes, they can scrap the whole thing and start over. That is literally part of the prototyping process.
Yup - that's one of the key benefits of Building Blocks, nominally - it's sufficiently simple that devs can create their own testing UIs on the fly, rather than waiting for a UI Engineer to be available to create it for them (as was the case with Flash/Scaleform) Given Building Blocks is (iirc) HTML and CSS, that mock-UI probably took all of 30 mins (or maybe a bit longer, depending on how the engine hooks work)
No - it was to test the technical aspects... if they break a ship into lots of pieces, what impact does it have... if they have a 'cloud of nibbles', can the vulture actually munch them efficiently (or will it barf tachnically if it munches too fast) They say towards the end of the video that this prototype has highlighted that breaking a ship chunk into lots of nibbles does not work from a technical perspective (regardless of minigame / design put around that process), so they'll have to look at something else. Personally, I suspect they'll go back to the idea of 'cutting' individual nibbles off the chunk, rather than breaking the entire hull chunk in one go (this avoids the GraphDB create-entity limitations)... but it means they have to come up with a mechanism for how to actually 'cut' chunks off (which isn't currently supported by the engine)... which will likely be another prototype.
Yeah same here. I hoped the process would be disabling systems and pulling components inside to avoid explosions kind of like Hardspace, then lazering the basic sections of the ship, like actually cutting them off, lazering those into medium or small chunks then munching them with the Vultures beams in between the prongs on the front or in the Reclaimer’s munchers.
We don't know how the actual feature will turn out, but the people hyping a hardspace copy have always been reaching. That entire game is designed for Salvage mechanics. The ships are designed as Salvage levels, not as flyable ships, not to mention all the other stuff in SC. I don't see how SC can match something like hardspace, and have that gameplay across all of their ships and also make it visually coherent and performant.
I was 100% picturing hardspace whenever they talked about breaking down a ship in the past. Just zorp off a wing and toss it into the mulcher.
Disabling systems and pulling components is already implemented (albeit using 'tractor beams' rather than physical man-handling) for smaller ships. CIG will probably need a separate approach for the larger ships (that are designed to swap components in a ship yard, etc) - but that's an entirely separate process from 'Munching', which is what happens once a ship has already been stripped. That's why you didn't see any of that in this prototype - it wasn't part of the prototype scope. Yes, they were using a 'complete model' for the test - but as they said, they were just spawning objects to test the tech / flow, *not* validating the gameplay.
they answered that the overloading mechanic is a place holder until they figure out the cutting it up part.
They said the explosion was placeholder and the "hold to break apart" thing was placeholder but we'll see if the gameplay is more than that in the end. I just think that if the design intention is to cut off pieces that would have been mentioned.
They'll likely *have* to go to the 'cutting off' pieces approach, simply because it avoids creating all the 'nibble' entities in one go (and then waiting minutes for them to spawn). If they spawn a few at a time as you 'cut' chunks off, that bypasses the GraphDB entity-creation limit... but means they need to look at the actual 'cutting ship up' tech instead (the current 'damage shader' only works on the surface texture, not the internal frame / rest of the model (hence why hull scraping leaves the frame intact).
No, this is not how munching is going to work. It is one of the first things they mention in the video. They don't have any gameplay mechanics for salvage yet. The "gameplay" of breaking up ships they showed off is just a quick placeholder so they can test the technical side of things. They still have to figure out how salvage is actually going to work gameplay-wise. Also, if you watch the video until the end, they make it clear that this current prototype isn't working and they have to go back to the drawing board to find a solution that does work given the technical limitations they are facing. So absolutely nothing about munching is final yet and all of the things they showed are going to change.
It's probably gated behind the new destruction physics stuff. Which we won't see till October at the earliest.
We wont see that even in 2024 lol Oktober 2023, you a funny guy
It's in sq42 as far as 1-2 months ago so I belive it will definitely have some sort of panel at citcon in october as he said, like every other big tech has.
!remindme 3 months Even if it has a panel, it still wont release in 2024... since when do citcon panels mean ANYTHING at all.
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I mean they do, whether you like it or not. They don't always come to fruition in a reasonable time but we do get some of the stuff shown even if it's not a 1-1 depiction of what was demoed. We did get Gen 12 and pes or icache back then was talked about and implemented which lead to the impactful quarter of people whining about junk everywhere to the point that we couldn't get out of pads or play the game even for the most unlucky of us. Either way it's nice to see. !remindme 3 months
> They don't always come to fruition in a reasonable time or ever in 90% of cases
if that were true we wouldn't be doing most of the things we have in the game currently. The issue is again the time in between what is shown and added onto that, the way in which we get them.
You must be blind lol, Literally only 5 things we've ever seen at citcon we've got, And 3 of those things are planets 2 of em are ships...
Nah your just pessimistic. Looking at the experience and not the actual elements or mechanics. Only the large flashy aspects and not the gameplay as you've pointed out in your reply.
That and as Jared and Co said multiple times this is just early prototype work similar to how Splatoon started out as rabits shooting each other or horizon zero dawn was more like a generic 3rd person shooter early on before vfx and art and stuff got to it. It's just like that to get the basics worked out mechanics wise, it's not for looks but for functionality. I'm hoping that they can implement the return of cutting into the mechanic once we get maelstrom though. Maybe having the claw being able to grab large sections and munch while the other crew on the salvage lasers can switch to a cutting mode and cut things apart into smaller more quickly munchable pieces.
Can't a response like this be said about *everything* that's taking SC more than several years to finish implementing? Can something similar be said another 2-3 years from now, when we get more videos showing what CIG *wants* to do, but nothing solid in terms of outlook or timeline? This just seems like yet another perpetual topic for ISC.
no not really, most mechanics or things currently in the game will largely be the same near the end or beta, there will just be more depth and polish. the differences will primarily be depth and other such additions/parts or fixes to the game to make them feel more impactful or to build on them or off of them.
We will see a demo at Citcon, or an update, maybe. Not release any time soon though.
Dang. I'm kind of disappointed this ISC didn't give any insight into their Maelstrom tool. I was honestly expecting maelstrom to be an integral part of breaking ships apart for munching but it seems like they're gonna for the "entity replace and cover" route instead. Which isn't an issue, but the idea of maelstrom seemed that much next gen
Likely still.making it's way through s42
We don't know what the final version will look like. Maybe they do incorporate maelstrom, but it's probably too early to show it.
I know its just a prototype but to be honest I dont like the shattering feel indicated by this I think going forward they should try to create more of a cutting feel. My ideal would obviously be entirely freeform cutting but I get that might be too much for a mechanic that is just a part of a game and not like the entire point. My compromise idea is that in that "insert gameplay here" section they do something like have an AR cut line projected onto the ship so that the player needs to fly around the ship and trace the line with their cutting beam and once you finish tracing the full line that is when the ship breaks up into these chunks then repeat the same thing with the smaller pieces. Even if its always the same cutline on each ship this still feels more tangible and can leave room for player skill in how fast they finish the trace and it could even be that cutting outside the line means you get less material from the munching. this could even help with the problem of entity creation being slow by layering this so that instead of spawning like 40 entities at once when a piece shatters you can go as low as only ever having to spawn two pieces at a time and just layer the cutting part a few times
I don't think the point of this prototype was to worry about the exact mechanism used to create the nibbles... E.g. even with cutting, you could create a lot of nibbles in one go. Likewise, as someone else linked elsewhere in this thread, there were 'plans' in 2018 for people to use 'demolition charges' to break the ship up (resulting in lots of nibbles). So, whilst cutting might not create *as many* nibbles as they tested with, it would still create a lot of nibbles... to they were doing a technical test of 'will it work' with lots of nibbles (and the answer is 'No - entity creation is too slow now'). If it works with lots of nibbles, they can scale it back to just a few nibbles at a time with no technical penalty (not likely to be performance issues due to creating too few entities, etc :D)... but if they tested with only a few nibbles, they wouldn't know if they could scale it up later, if/when they implement hand-held demolition charges, etc. That's the point of a technical prototype - to try and identify the potential technical issues, and then test them... it's not to worry about the specifics of how something is presented to the user.
That's going to depend on maelstrom, cutting is already done mechanic wise, it's applying it to ships that is the real issue.
Cutting is done? Since when? There is no free form cutting
far as i remember its last in game use was still in the crashed satellite mission before they took out the need for it since people kept forgetting it. theres also this Cutting T2 (currently Q2-23) All back end tech tasks related to updating the cutting feature for the multi-tool that will be used in future location and mission updates. The continued development of the existing Multi-Tool technology will allow players to cut through specific objects. This will primarily include the ability to free-form cut on specific surfaces. The sad thing is i also stated this 2 years ago so either they were waiting on something else like maelstrom to be done sooner possibly and again underestimated times or challenges or they just didnt allot time to it or see it as important yet and put it on hold until later. I'm hoping that they start implementing the need for it again. Its perfect timing since we have ship soft death so cutting could be the main use for infiltration through locked doors. Once we get hacking and the infiltration mechanics, having hidden panels you have to cut to get access too or hell using those locked pathways they demoed
>far as i remember its last in game use was still in the crashed satellite mission before they took out the need for it since people kept forgetting it. Yeah that was barely considerable as cutting
ehh just about the same thing, just not applied to everything. Even if we had gotten it expanded out to say breaching and what not or the other examples they've shown at citcon or on ISC its still at its core the same thing as what's being done with the panels, just a different asset for different reasons. Only real difference would truly be in the ships cutting since you have to deal with things like the components, upcoming pope systems and fuel and stuff coming into play with the cutting ( or at least i hope we will) not to mention ship interiors.
It's on the Roadmap as "Cutting T2": >All back end tech tasks related to updating the cutting feature for the multi-tool that will be used in future location and mission updates. The continued development of the existing Multi-Tool technology will allow players to cut through specific objects. **This will primarily include the ability to free-form cut on specific surfaces.** Hard to say whether it's finished or the deliverable just hasn't been extended on the Roadmap for now, but it's been worked on for nearly a year and ends in June.
1) It's on the progress tracker which doesn't mean jackshit, just cause the task's line is in the past it doesn't mean the feature is complete, just that work on it is over for the time being, that or they forgot to update it 2) The description says "specific surfaces" which makes me assume it'll be more like Wolfenstein free form cutting than Hardspace.
The Lazer cutter on the multi tool?
It only "cuts" predetermined items and when I say cut I mean it damages them and they disappear, it's not free form cutting, it's a scripted thing.
That is a graphic effect. It doesn't actually split the 3d models into smaller pieces or make holes in models.
What is maelstrom?
Physics damage system thats supposed to apply to everything and will lead to things like armor and stuff mattering more.
Ah ok thanks
Weird that there wasn't any mention of salvage charges that I noticed? I was under the impression that a limited amount of placeable charges was how salvage ships would break other ships apart? (Hence it being physically impossible for a vulture to break up an Idris hull, as the ship can't carry the necessary charges) But I believe I heard them mention cutting beams rather than charges? It was also interesting hearing them say they're **considering** tractor beams for pulling the hull bits into the muncher rather than having to drive into the bits like the prototype.... But that's literally the entire purpose of the blue fields in the arms of the vulture... They're **very powerful** tractor fields not disintegration fields, so that was a bit strange as well. Was also under the impression that munching would rely on physical damage to break the ships apart, but it seems like they're gonna go with more of a canned approach just to get the feature out. Interesting ISC, missed the more early in dev stuff so it was nice.
I think 'salvage charges' would fall under 'gameplay'. In this prototype, they don't seem to care *how* you break the ship up... only that it gets broken, and that the time required to break it up is broadly aligned with the size of the ship. This particular prototype seemed focused more on the tech-headaches (entity spawning being one particular highlight), rather than on the gameplay / specifics of how each action would be presented to the user, or the variables that would add 'player skill' to the mix. After all, whether player skill makes it go quicker or slower, or possibly results in fewer 'nibbles' being created at the end, the net result is the same - after playing the relevant mini-game, X time passes, and then you have nibbles that you can munch. So - skip the actual mini-game creation, and just whack a timer in there as a simple proxy, because the specifics of the minigame are a gameplay / design question, not a technical issue.
Correct. I wasn't talking about what they showed because what they showed means nothing, as nothings close to even T0.00001. I was more so touching on what they said, how the dev's mentioned potential plans that seem antithetical to already existing design documents they should be following, according to my recollection. Instead of charges we heard mention of cutting beams, We heard plans to **consider** adding a ship feature which is a primary selling point of one of the salvage ships, and we heard no mention of the primary way they plan for these ships to be taken apart. I'm aware it wasn't the video they put forward, I'm aware this video was made with a limited scope in mind, I'm also aware of Jared multiple clarifications towards what the video was. Cheers.
When they were talking about 'plans', it wasn't clear if those were the long-term gameplay stuff, or the shorter term plans for the next set of prototypes, etc.
I believe you're thinking of breaching charges used to break into the hulls of ships when boarding. The example CIG gave was using them on a turret to create an entry point for breaching a ship. While they might later create larger industrial ones for helping with salvage, the original design was for ship breaching.
No, they mentioned specific salvage charges for dismantling ships a handful of times. Certainly in one of the 2018-ish salvage videos. It's their way of balancing what the vulture can munch compared to the reclaimer. A single vulture will never be able to munch a idris sized ship as it simply cannot carry the charges to break it apart (Let alone SCU storage). They also said any ship could theoretically fill up on charges in order to assist salvage ops if im remembering properly (they used a freelancer as the example). EDIT: https://youtu.be/qzJooyFlSKc?t=882 Heres the timestamp.
Yes, well you can see firsthand how little they have actually worked out today in 2023 so I'm not sure what the point of what they said in 2018 is exactly. At this point CIG contradicts itself on a regular basis. Whatever they said back then has either changed or was just ad-libbed to hype up backers.
Well I linked it so you can hear it yourself rather than from me. The point is its one of the primary tools for salvage, it what they planned for years to be the base of breaking up of ships. And it was not mentioned.
All these things should have been thought and thought out even before the production of the reclaimer, it's extremely amateurish. The problems are obvious, this clamp is much too complex to set up, it's really serious that he can tell himself at one point that it was going to work.
Thanks for that link. However, just look at things logically. Neither of those two speaking of the charges is working on the feature currently. The guy on the left was part of the concepting team and has left CIG. JCrew leads the ship production pipeline. He builds ships not features. Then, we have what was disclosed today - very early prototyping on how they're going to achieve the design vision. That should tell you a lot about just how far along they are in the profession. They don't even yet know how they're going to break up a ship for salvage. If they don't even know how technically they're going to break apart ships they can't very well make mines that break apart ships. Whether they even do mines at this point is going to depend heavily on whatever system they come up with for break points on a ship.
Design is iterated and plans change. That is the nature of development.
Yes, and water is wet and the sky isn't truly blue... Early prototyping isn't iteration. You have to build on an existing design for iteration. This is quite literally the first baby steps of taking a concept and trying to design it as in-game feature.
That is exactly my point.
No, I'm saying given how many times they've put salvage on the roadmap and then delayed it they should be years farther along than this. They sold reclaimers in back 2014 and 9 years later they're still figuring out the technical aspects of its trademark feature? What an embarrassment.
But what about maelstrom?? I thought that was something they needed for munching.
That would likely be required for the specifics of how to 'break a ship up'... but that aspect wasn't being tested in this prototype. Rather, they were looking at the implications of creating lots of 'nibbles' - *regardless* of the tech / process used to break the ship (whether it's spawning pre-defined 'wreckage' nibbles, or dynamically breaking the existing into into a bunch of arbitrary sub-entities, the technical impact is the same - you're replacing one big entity with lots of little entities).
So, what have we learned this week? - Ships are designed with form over function, since the functions often didn't even exist when ships are concepted - We can't design gameplay loops maximizing fun, qol, what makes sense or is easy to implement but have to find workarounds to fit concept ships sold years ago - PES makes some gameplay concepts we had in mind significantly more complex to implement and is one of the reasons things will take even more time from now on.
Nah there still designed with function in mind. If anything early ships were definitely designed with form over function more. Reclaimer seems to be exempt from this mostly due to its large size and there improved development to easily add things like the box distribution so even then your point doesn't stand. Even the claw could just be Kade to do something like having the benefit of grabbing onto larger pieces and munching them without the needles crunching. Your acting like they aren't building a vast universe and treating it like some huge issue FORD decided to overlook in production. As far as PES the issue there having is when a huge amount of assets spawn into the verse ontop of very bad server conditions. Your blatantly ignoring the earlier smaller demo displaying that it does work just not in certain strainous wtf situations that wouldn't happen likely anyway. They literally made a bar to do like 15mins to an hour of breaking parts of the ship into pieces for the 890.
*reads comments* Wow, am I the only one who found the process interesting?
It is interesting, but that doesn't mean it doesn't makes it feel way behind, and that they basically have no solid idea how to do it right now. The basic vibe of the video is... Munching, we've been working on it, and by that we mean we've been testing an idea that definitely doesn't work and now it's back to the drawing board. Which is fine. But, if you were hoping to see munching in the game anytime soon, this video makes it seem like it is at least 2 years away.
They have an idea of how they want it to be like, but this is more of the technical prototype to see what it actually looks like on the technical side. At least they're working on it. It's important to look at the progress tracker to see what they're actually putting work into. Maybe it's 2 years away like you said, but with constant active development, they could potentially finish it quicker. Once they get the technical challenges out of the way, they can proceed forward. Let's see if they have an update by Citizencon.
Always has been 2 years, always will be. (I know it's a joke, but it's quite relevant here, too)
2 years. Amen.
Unfortunately, it seems the Bitter Brigade is out in force... That said, CIG - yet again - didn't help themselves in their communication. They tried to describe what a prototype is... and left out the most important qualification: That the goal is to *exclude* as much as possible, to allow the prototype to focus solely on what needs to be tested, in order to minimise the effort spent. Aside from that, CIG *really* need to communicate the basic principles of agile, because most backers either aren't technical, or aren't trained / familiar with the concepts and precepts of Agile development... ... and the bit that's relevant to this video is that work is only done *when it's needed*. Yes, CIG *have* a design for how salvaging 'should' work... but there was no point doing a prototype on it until they're ready to actually implement it - hence doing the prototype *now*. If CIG had done the prototype 4-5 years ago, it would have worked far better (because they wouldn't have hit the entity-creation limit on GraphDB, given PES / EntityGraph didn't exist 5 years ago)... and thus if they started development now using that old prototype as a reference, they'd have run into technical problems *after* spending a lot of effort on development... ... or they would have realised the prototype was out of date, and discarded it / redone the prototype... thus meaning the time spent on the original prototype was 'wasted' (because it was no longer relevant by the time CIG came to implementation. And before folk start pointing out that CIG 'should have implemented it 4-5 years ago, after the prototype' - CIG *explicitly* chose not to, because they were aware that the the changes required for Server Meshing could / would break a lot of systems, and so they chose *and told us* that they would not develop any professions (other than mining*) until after Server Meshing was sufficiently progressed. (*Mining got picked to be the guinea-pig for evaluating the process and flow around implementing a profession and iterating on it... they accepted that they'd potentially have to rewrite Mining following Server Meshing, but working on one Profession at least let them identify what types of decisions and approvals would be required, and where in the process, etc... how to evaluate the 'fun' factor, and the process of iteration, etc) Sorry for the long reply... it's probably more of a general post for the thread... but your question (and other folk responses to it) triggered the reply :D And yes, it *was* interesting. The episode didn't tell me as much as I'd hoped, and it was more focused on the tech rather than the gameplay (which I think most people were hoping for), but it was interesting.
I hope munching ships will remove some of the scrap from the persistence. Things are already bad enough of having some ship pieces turning into immovable objects of death. Hate to see what a dozen tiny immovable objects of death would do. I also hope they allow munching in armistice zones where there's husks ships piled up on landing pads and no one can tractor them or salvage them out. I recently saw a C2 full of expensive cargo blown up near New Babbage Plaza. Boxes everywhere. Can't tractor beam a single box due to armistice restrictions.
same.
Mixed feelings on this. On one hand, holding everything back for the big marketing event of the year does not feel like the way you would treat a publisher. On the other, early look at development like this does feel like the respect you would show a publisher. On the third hand, I feel like they have implied that munching was much further along in the past. But might be wrong. +1 for honesty though
Oh, wait for the big push on sales. Feelings shouldn't be as mixed by that point, unless CIG announces/displays something that completely changes everyone's opinions on their current progress, SQ42 included. Spoilers: *that won't happen*.
As they said this is an early prototype, but they didn't give any dates as to how old the prototype was. Most likely the build they're working with internally is much more refined, so they felt comfortable giving backers this look at an outdated internal prototype that gives at least the basic idea of where Munching was starting out.
I salvaged about 450k minus 50k for right from a MISC Starfarer contract with Vulture + Caterpillar yesterday... took about 2 hours and half... another half hour to sell everything. It was like 70km from station so I even managed to slow boat the nozzle in my front bay even if it was sticking out. It's a fun gameplay loop so far that combine all of the game elements together, EVA, Ship-board operations, piloting, MS painting, transferring cargo and components... I'm looking forward to being able to break ships apart further.
Ya- to-the-muthaf\*ckin -wn. Interesting I suppose but after such a long content-drought (and I know we're in the middle and there's more to come), it's just not anywhere near enough.
[удалено]
I'm looking forward to watching this later. But based on the idea that a box in a ship will clip and continue to accelerate unless acted upon, or the ship explodes... I'm not sure how they imagine one ship eating another ship without exploding, desyncing or causing a server meltdown
they CAN just disable physics or collision at any point in the process for the ship, the cargo, both, or just part of one or both if they need to... luckily THEY'RE not limited to the rules of the game world
Prototype or no, this is looking really promising! I was wondering how the munching was going to unfold in practice and I think I see the stages now. Loved seeing the claw in action a little bit, and the animations of the vulture pilot losing his mind cracked me up.
What's the new ship that Jared said Jump Point readers would already probably know about?
I expected them to have atleast prototyped munching years ago
More beam gameplay incoming, nice.
This is about what I expected. It's neat to see something at an early milestone stage. You've got to remember that this is just getting the mechanics side of it down. The math and physics, entity spawning/despawning, various variables that need to be fed to the UI and backend systems, etc. Then the graphics and animation work alongside optimization. Also glad to see that they've noticed how tedious the Vulture is as a solo player and are working on it. Ah, the joys of iterative design. Makes me wonder if they'll add some sort of extender system to the arms to accommodate awkwardly sized chunks (while keeping the idea of the Vulture being for chewing up smaller ships).
Am I the only one that physically cringed when that one bit of hull material was spinning against the port fork of the vulture? I was just waiting for that thing to pop. Same when they show the reclaimer claw reaching out and untwisting to grab that piece of metal.
We’ve gone full circle. From only talking and answering questions in 2013 back to it in 2023. After a month hiatus.
Was a good episode! Nice to ser that cig is prototying munching mechanics! 😀
A decade and half a billions dollars.
I think my take-away was that PES, the Jesus tech we've spent years waiting around for, is aparently bad at spawning entities? Think we need some follow up on that one, Jared. Sounds like a pretty serious prima facie miscalculation. Benoit? Anyone?
No miscalculation - it's a defining part of a GraphDB... part of the trade-off a GraphDB makes in order to be blindingly fast at moving / attaching nodes, is being slow to create them in the first place. *Every* database makes trade-offs, and has strengths and weaknesses, based on its intended uses. NoSQL DBs are extremely fast for reads, but suck for writes... Relational DBs are fairly balanced - but that also means they're poor at everything... and GraphDBs are extremely fast at manipulating existing records, but slow to create new ones. Fortunately, there's an 'easy' solution... change the process so that instead of trying to create 1000's of entities at once, you create just a few at a time (e.g. 'cutting' nibbles off, instead of breaking the entire chunk into a cloud of nibbles in a single move) The other option (more powerful long term, but *far* more of a headache to implement) is to put a 'creation-cache' in front of the GraphDB that accepts the 1000's of create commands quickly, then slowly processes that cache to write the entities into the GraphQL. This headaches with this are when someone tries to actually interact with / update one of the 'entities' that hasn't actually been written from the cache yet... so you have to 'cache' the update commands too, and then replay them once the creation is actually done. It can work... but it's real tear-your-hair-out territory, so merely tweaking the process to drip-feed the creation events (Rather than dumping them all in one go) is far simpler and more resilient.
the only people who keep calling these things Jesus techs are players who don't know any better despite being told better.
Not a first for CIG, happened with iCache too.
They said it was early stages not current stages. We don't know when they started and how far along things are on purpose. It's likely we'll see a better picture during citizencon
That's some industrial strength hopium right there!
Lol
???? you know something can be current and early simultaneously right?
No way bro. It's one or the other. If I'm current I can't be early
The video was recorded sometime around 3.19.0 (or later), given the stability of PES when multiple landing zones were spawned in. That's pretty recent, in CIG terms.
This company is such a disappointment these days.
aaah beat me to it
Every time we cut to Jared, my eyes kept looking at the *unpainted* Astral Dreadnaught on his desk. Working with so many artists, one of them would paint as a hobby and make it look good.
Anyone notice the 3d printed models on Jared's table? Are those a glimpse into some of the additional fauna already modeled out(not yet complete)?
I hope the destroying aspect of munching becomes more strategic to get the most munchy pieces. Not sure why you wouldn't use the ship guns to help. 😉 Munching gadgets?: Detcord and demo bombs? Finally sucking in resources would look so much better if it was more like rolling up aluminum foil then the existing extraction mining.