I remember when I saw an indie game showcased its ability for planetary landings almost a decade ago. That was Evochron: Mercenary. It was trading on being Freelancer, but grander: a greater vision than what was possible back in the day.
Watching Star Citizen’s latest livestream reminded me of that moment, where you start to believe for a second that things beyond the current scope of possibility might actually be possible.
The Pupil to Planet video, which you can view below, is responsible for that. It starts from the iris of an in-game character and continues to zoom out, showcasing the scale and depth of the game’s procedural generation without a single hitch.
The seamless transition throughout the procedurally generated worlds kicks off at the beginning of the video, but from 3m:18s in you can also see a seamless transition from space to landing on a planet, from the standard perspective you’d have if you were flying a craft.
It’s a double-whammy: the first video shows the theoretical possibilities, the “hey this is what our engine can do” moment.
And then the second, which is a live demo running on an internal build of Star Citizen, showcases how possible it actually is.
There’s a lot of questions that remain unanswered and people are starting to wake up to the fact that procedural generation can result in lifeless, uninteresting worlds. Cloud Imperium Games certainly has their work cut out for them — and this applies to Elite: Dangerous a lot as well — in making these planets feel as interesting to explore as they are to discover.
But for now, there’s something a touch breathtaking about all this. I wonder how powerful the PC they had on stage was — and how powerful again it’d have to be to replicate that performance and fidelity in VR.
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14 responses to “Star Citizen’s Scale And Scope Continues To Astonish”
Bought a starter pack and a flight stick this week. I’m going deep.
Which stick did you get?
Unfortunately it is just a crash-fest for me, Windows 8.1Pro, x99, 32GB RAM and a TitanX, but just can’t get SC to run for more than a minute.
I went for the Thrustmaster t.flight hotas. Basically the cheapest hotas you can get.
My rigs a lot weaker than that, but had a crack at the alpha on the weekend, no crashes . A lot of stuttering though.
Going to set up the stick this w/e and have another go.
Edit: I’ll let you know how the stick goes too.
A rather exotic combination, which may or may not be the cause. I think I’ve seen some test showing that CryEngine doesn’t like TitanX very much, plus if I recall Win 8.1 is not the default system for SC at the moment so they may have not yet optimized Alpha 2.0 for it. I run on Win7U, i7 4771, 16GB RAM and XFX 6870 and do experience an occasional crash but I can usually run the game for at least 20min before one happens.
All stuff thats come out has got to have royally pissed off Derek Smart now
Smart’s the kind of person that, if you gave him a game that was 95% excellent, would fixate on the 5% and pretend the rest didn’t even exist. At the moment he seems to be gloating that the alpha game froze for Roberts during a livestream, while completely ignoring the actual substance of the build.
Ironic he seems to do the exact opposite when it comes to his own games. I watched some “gameplay” videos from Line of Defence yesterday and couldn’t stop laughing. Not only is a complete mess but there’s barely any players in it while the intended mechanic seems to depend on their being thousands of players. Effectively even if you were somehow able to look past how bad it is you still wouldn’t be able to actually play, just run around empty maps…makes you want to photoshop the John Travolta gif into it 🙂
Contributing in some small way to Derek Smart’s jealous, petulant raging is well worth the cost of a starter package. At this point the game is just a bonus.
For me it seems the cockpit isn’t that great looking. Unless its just the class of ship they chose to preview.
Yeah they are actually redoing that ship (cutlass) as they want to polish it more.
Here’s a link to the newly updated constellation: https://youtu.be/oC17567Zg8Y?t=1m30s
What do you think of that one?
Also, the Cutlass is supposed to be a cheap as chips ship.
You buy an Origin if you want style.
Yeah that Heads Up Display is so much better then the junk they showed in that clip. Obviously a different ship and like @jocon said its a cheap ship so I guess I need to an expensive ship if I don’t want a god awful HUD.
Holy shit…
Pretty impressive for supposed Vaporware.
Maybe making huge ass games just takes time, who’d have thunk it.
Just needs a few performance passes.
I really should jump in and give this a shot. But the 33gig outlay would take me a week to download and that’s not happening given Melbourne’s current temp!
An update on July 2017:
DS was wrong (as usual not a big surprised as he failed whatever he attempted to do)
The honeymoon is going fine thank you: +155M$ and growing. SC 3.0 patch adding seamless from space to moon landing and much more…
Clearly the end… the end for DS who predicted the Doom next quarter… since 3 years 🙂
Without surprise, the exact opposite is happening. Wrong prophecies coming from a proven incompetent devloper like DS is not a huge surprise but rather refreshing news for all Space lovers players.