Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K
Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K
Since I haven't seen anyone post this, I thought I'd share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
I booted it up yesterday. Flew around at 10 FPS and gawked at some pretty locations. Bought armor and weapons for my allotted alpha money and crashed.
Booted it back up today, all gone. FPS was better. Took an elevator and got stuck in an ether-world. Respawned. Had to wait 10 real-time minutes for my ship to be "delivered" to the station it should've already been at. Flew to a lagrange point just to see the volumetric gas clouds. Couldn't find any stations. RTB, quit, uninstalled.
I'm going to be brutally honest; if they do not start designing their ship cockpits with at least input from a real pilot then I'm gonna start being upset about it. You can't see anything! Huge canopies in fighter cockpits, can't see shid. I would accept this if they had implemented synthetic vision so you could just x-ray through the ship hull, but you can't, and I've never heard them talk about it so I assume it's not on the table.
Waiting 10 whole minutes to get your ship back is the devs not respecting the player's time.
I know why they do it though, they want people to buy more ships so that they have one ready while the original is in a cool down period. This is also a similar tactic used by shitty mobile phone games.
Disagree. The intention is for SC to be a space sim sandbox, so I'm surprised they're only making you wait 10m.
When you take your car into the shop and have to wait a few hours for it to be repaired, you don't think "the solution they want me to go with is to buy a second car for this moment", right? But that's the argument you're making here. If this is the lens you see all games through, then it's impossible for anyone to make a game that's just literally normal life.
Conversely, I could argue that mobile games are built around instant dopamine rushes. Any 10m wait is explicitly accompanied with an option to pay the wait away immediately. Afaik, that's not an option here, if you're a new player, you have to wait that 10m no matter what. Correct me if I'm wrong. But that's not a very good job at capitalizing on the wait time.
The only time you have to wait for the ship is if it's destroyed or lost. If you fly it to the station or landing zone and stow it, the delivery is immediate.
And you can buy and rent ships in-game, using in-game money. This is about preventing you from instantly jumping back in the same ship repeatedly which could have huge implications for PvP, for instance.
Real pilots rely more on the instruments than the window
"A lot of the ship hud is dense with useless information."
Yeah but they have a useful instrument panel. The panels in SC are not particularly useful except for combat. There's 3 separate graphs that display your power usage in the Cutlass, not counting the HUD.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but landing in hangars or on pads in SC requires third person mode. You have no tools to check your clearance except experience. I have no issue landing F-35s in VTOL VR without autopilot assistance, or flying IFR/VFR in MSFS, but in SC I feel like I'm piloting a brick through a tank-commanders vision slits. Even dedicated fighters place the pilot so low in the cockpit that the entire bottom half of the screen is just interior and MFDs. Real fighter pilots can look down at a decent angle, because visual is essential in dogfighting which is the only kind of fighting this game has.