LAST EDITED ON May-09-14 AT 03:47 AM (EDT) by Gryphon (admin)
 
[N.B. That's not how linking works in DCForum land. See the HTML Reference link to the left of the edit window for details. --G.]

It's been a long time since I posted here, but I felt I wanted to share some news with the community.

There's a crowd-funded space-simulator MMO-and-single-player game in the works for almost a year now that has completely ran away with the concept: Star Citizen, put together by a studio founded for creating this game, Roberts Space Industries.

If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because RSI's chairman is Chris Roberts, the man behind Wing Commander, Freelancer, and a whole bunch of other space Sims.

It's been in the works for a while, but the development team showed off the work in progress at PAX East 2014, their 'dogfighting' module (which in-universe is a combat simulator) called Arena Commander.

Here's a youtube video of some of the footage, demoed by the Chairman himself.

--kylone
I think I was sold at the fly-by-wire controls.

>If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because RSI's chairman is
>Chris Roberts, the man behind Wing Commander, Freelancer, and a whole
>bunch of other space Sims.

Hey, cool. Has he shed his old habit of writing games that expect consumers to have more advanced hardware than most game development labs? :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Hey, cool. Has he shed his old habit of writing games that expect
>consumers to have more advanced hardware than most game development
>labs? :)

HA!

No, of course he hasn't.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>Hey, cool. Has he shed his old habit of writing games that expect
>consumers to have more advanced hardware than most game development
>labs? :)

Well, he's using the CryEngine, so...

...no.

OTOH, I expect we'll be able to turn the final version down to something reasonably acceptable.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

LAST EDITED ON May-10-14 AT 05:34 AM (EDT)
 
>
>Hey, cool. Has he shed his old habit of writing games that expect
>consumers to have more advanced hardware than most game development
>labs? :)
>

Heh, probably not. That being said, hardware has kinda flat-lined the the last few years, and the team is experimenting with the Oculus Rift development kit and 4K monitors, so I suspect that he'll be targeting something like 60 frames/sec with the Nvidia Geforce 760 ti / AMD Radeon r280x/7970 for the 1080p high end. Maybe the step below that (Geforce 760 / Radeon r280/7950), but there's AMD's Mantle and DirectX 12 to think about...

Whoops, geeking out about current hardware. ^^;

I recall him (Chris Roberts) mentioning that in 2009, computer hardware had gotten to the point where he could make the game he's always envisioned, which rather supports your comment. :)

In trying to wring some kind of conclusion out of my rambling, I think current mid-ranged gaming systems could run this game just fine--unless you want to play on a 4K screen. Then you'll probably want (to take a loan out for) Nvidia's GTX Titan Z when it comes out.

--Chris Stevenson

Several of us what hang around these parts are either backers or have pre-purchased stuff already; we got access to the Hangar, which is exactly what it says on the tin. (The Hangar only lets you wander around the, well, hangar, and gawk at your pretty pretty ship.)

I'm running a decent but by no means cutting-edge rig, and even given that it's a demo (the Hangar, I mean) and that it's unpolished and none of the options are coded in yet, I was still able to run reasonably well.

Once the full game is released I'm expectant that I'll be able to turn off some of the glitter (this is CryEngine, after all) and get really good performance out of it.

For reference, I'm running on a showing-it's-age NVidia GeForce GT 530 and an i7-2600 based box with 8GB RAM.

--sofaspud
--

Looking at that makes me wonder how cool an EPU fighter sim would be. Yes, I know it's 100% impossible because of all the copyrights, but imagine it. Being able to fly everything from a Y-Wing to a VF-1. It would be glorious.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

LAST EDITED ON Aug-05-15 AT 05:05 AM (EDT)
 
With all the mods out there to Freespace (and/or XWA), you could probably take a shot at it.

(edit 5/14/14) (touch-ups 8/5/15)
Meanwhile... turns out that I'm still mad at Chris Roberts for what he did in WC3. I've often half joked that the gaming thing is just a sideline for him, and what he's always really wanted, "in the worst way", was to be George Lucas ... and sometimes he's succeeded at doing exactly that. :p Certainly his handling of WC3 was very much in the style of prequel-era Lucas, on par with "midichlorians" and other infuriating missteps.

What did he do, you ask? Well, he wanted to end the game and the trilogy with a sequence very similar to the classic Death Star trench run. With Mark Hamill in the pilot's seat, even. Only this time, instead of blowing up a military space station, the player is blowing up a whole planet - the Kilrathi homeworld. A planet inhabited by billions.

Nor was it acceptable that this act, like the atom bombing of Japan, be presented as controversial but necessary. Like OSC, Roberts wanted his genocide to be blameless. So he stacked the deck further, with a whopper of a retcon that reached all the way back to the first game of the trilogy, and declared that Kilrathi would never, under any but the most extraordinary circumstances - like having their sacred homeworld and more than half their race wiped out at a stroke - surrender. That they literally did not understand the concept. And in so doing, he made one of the most sympathetic and best written characters of the series - written mostly by others, in fact, and here's that Lucas touch again - into a lie, a sleeper agent, someone who never really was. No Kilrathi can really be sympathetic, really be open to negotiations, unless it's a trick and a lie. Because that would mean you, the player, couldn't kill them all with a clear conscience.

Never mind that an aggressive species with no concept of surrender would never be able to form a society, let alone an interstellar empire, when every quarrel must be to the death. Never mind that this invalidated (or at least made into a hollow mockery) some of the best bits of the second movie, I mean game in the trilogy. Never mind that an officer who defected in the first place because his superiors had acted dishonorably might have some legitimate objections to his new allies wanting to blow up his homeworld and everyone on it. Nope, Chris Roberts wanted his nice clean black-and-white ending.

And he got it. And all he had to do was assassinate one character and reduce the rest of his people to "orcs."

It's oddly pleasing, at least to me, that it's 25 or so years later and certain patterns are still visible in Roberts's work. Looking at the current state of affairs on the Star Citizen website, it appears that the only thing that's actually working at the moment is a space combat simulator which is a simulator inside the game. This means that, in practical terms, Star Citizen is currently a bleeding-edge 21st-century version of what Wing Commander would have been like if the only thing about it that worked was the Wing Commander arcade game in the pilots' lounge. It's all so circular. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.