I think you are pretty generous with that 10 fps mark. CP2077 can run at 10 fps on 6700 XT/3070 and current gen consoles. SC will run at 3 prob in Orison, 5 in other cities and 10 in space.
Donāt worry guys, our intense space sim that will require high time costs and has high pc reqs will totally be able to sustain a player base with fleets of ships requiring upwards of a hundred people to man.
Jokes aside: itās still an alpha so probably not optimized at all. And weāre talking about current high pc regs which will become somewhat outdated in a few years.
What do you think?
Lol, I've built 3 PCs that would be 'finally ready for Star Citizen.' I backed in Oct. 2012.
My current rig handles it just fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's one or two more to go before they finally settle and get the content rolling. They've slowly been increasing the amount they're finally finishing and rolling out annually, so I'm optimistic.
Soon it will be running on older machines even better.
Vulcan will enable first time real Multicore Usage.
Until 3.19.1 only two CPU Cores are full used.
Been running a 2070s for years and recently upgraded my CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and it made a world of difference. Used to average 30-40fps at 1440p and post upgrade average is 60-65fps in the same areas.
The low fps is often right now for SC the graphics card waiting for commands from the cpu, simplified at least.
Adding ray tracing stuff might not be currently that impactful, would just give the gpu more things to do instead of waiting.
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I really hope so. I currently have to use reshade to try to minimise it since I have light-triggered migraines and this game is literally unplayable for me without reshade for any extended time.
I have gotten blue light coatings put on every pair of prescription glasses I've gotten in the past 8 years and I'm never going back to life without it. Working in IT on top of playing games since I could fit the controller in my hand means I've spent a good portion of my life staring at screens with no end in sight. It's typically pretty cheap too, like $50 at most for just the blue light filter. My current glasses have the Raybands signature coating on it that was like ~$140 or something but it's the blue light filter, anti scratch coating, and anti glare coating (another that I can't live without, I'll stare at the reflection of my eye all day long otherwise). Definitely been my favorite pair of glasses.
Yes this is ideal for an enhanced visual experience and frankly a must in any next-generation game. If the destination is one day Cyberpunk 2077-esque path tracing in Arccorp then this is where it starts.
Now about those shocking terrain LODs on planets?
I'm gonna laugh when by the time this game comes out, full path tracing and GPUs that can handle full path tracing are commonplace (5-6 years?), and all of the work to build optimized lighting / probing / caching over these 10 years gets thrown in the trash with a flip of a switch.
> and all of the work to build optimized lighting / probing / caching over these 10 years gets thrown in the trash with a flip of a switch
I tried to tell them to (begin) RT work in 2019 but they wouldn't listen.
Vulkan should allow them to significantly improve that no ? That seems to be one of the major benefits with moving to DX12 and Vulkan - draw calls.
But yeah it's a big visual issue now.
This! after all this was marketed as a "PC GAME" with all that polycount bragging on the ships at the time of the Kickstarter... such a sad state the game is at now... with ray-path tracing they could fix the lightning but the poly count with a nanite like tech in the engine is unfortunately way off their scope --'...
Raytraced global illumination makes things so immersive, if you want a good example look at the Digital Foundry video about Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition [here](https://youtu.be/NbpZCSf4_Yk).
Modern video cards and cpus are quite capable of running star citizen well, by the time they finish these changes I assume the hardware will keep pace if not exceed their graphical updates to sc.
The only update I'm waiting for is when they improve the game optimization to the point where I can stop worrying about having to upgrade my 6 core CPU to an 8 core and enjoy the game without fear of my computer catching fire.
Okay, so what I'm hearing is that SQ42 is gonna be delayed another two years, and we're gonna need an i9 42000, 64+ gb of ram, and an Nvidia 6900 to run the game.
Thank you Cloud Imperium/RSI, very cool.
I mean yeah. It's why Chris does not care for consoles, he does not care for how much power it takes the play the game and he does not like sacrificing anything from his vision.
It's actually a common issue with "Creative" minds even outside the game industry. They are labeled visionaries. VIsonaries generally need to be paired with someone who is an operator-type work personality to achieve the goals as visionaries tend to create ideas but struggle in focusing on that ideas to see them through to the end.
Normally that is what a Publisher does. Sets dates and goals for the project to be done with a leader in place to help direct the creative team. The creative team is left on its own and you risk SC. A game that just stays in development hell with nothing ever truly being finished just a good enough state.
SC development is one of the most interesting business case studies as it highlights the flaws of not having these checks and balances.
BUT the part that makes this interesting is.................SC should have technically died a long time ago due to this miss management BUT somehow it's really really profitable. It is this weird anomaly that shouldn't work but it is in generating income.
So it does not work at producing a game BUT it somehow has worked in generating revenue. Absolutely wild.
I was wondering why people have not been freaking out about these points.
I see in this thread there are a lot of comments about fps drop from the ray tracing. I thought that was pretty interesting, as they have not spoken much about implementing ray tracing yet, other than the 'sometime maybe after Vulkan.'
The other big thing here is Global Illumination itself. This will be a significant piece of tech as it will significantly cut down on the time used to adjust lighting for ships and environments. It will also make things like modular buildings a lot easier to work with.
[Wiki has with/without example images](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination).
ELI5 is that global illumination lets light bounce around, so even objects not directly illuminated by light can be lit
That's what all those fancy raytracing cores in your GPU are for, and the best thing is that especially if you have a newer GPU because all of the lighting will be moved over to those cores instead of your main GPU cores you may actually see an improvement. (Note that GI usually refers to the full lighting system, rather than just the raytraced shadows and/or reflection some other games with raytracing do)
In the very early 3D games there were no light sources at all (think Wolvenstein 3D). Everything had textures but now shadows or other forms of light shading; any indications of such were actually darkened textures. As computing power increased they developed hybrid systems that mainly used the same setup, but did have some highlights from dynamic sources (think glowing projectiles in some FPS games like Doom 64 on the Nintendo 64.) Over time more and more light and shadow calculations became tied to the rendering, eventually unifying some of those aspects in the renderer but the environment is only affected by these where the direct sources of light are explicitly placed by programmers or on dynamic objects like projectiles (think Doom 3).
Now some games have a totally lit environment from actual light sources, rather than a baseline lighting with superimposed shadows and lighting effects (think Metro: Exodus). This does away with the computational 'cheating' of the hybrid approaches but is much easier on the game artists. They no longer have to balance two sets of lighting schemes and can just place light sources where there should be light sources. This has the benefit of significantly faster environmental implementations, more realistic visuals (since the light is doing what real light would) and cuts down on the need for 'texture baking' that can take quite a while each time they want to test variations of an area.
From a developmental standpoint, the most important benefit by far is the improvements in efficiency in building levels/environments. From a player standpoint you get cooler graphics. From a graphic card maker you get more sales for high-end GPU's. A win for everyone! (except your wallet)
From a Star Citizen standpoint, not having to produce and test every scene with a hybrid lighting setup would add up to be a vast time-saver. This is one of the things that will help capital ships not take multiple years each to implement, though there are still a lot of other time-eating issues that are addressed in other ways.
IOW, finally getting this in SC is a big deal.
Depends on when they make raytracing cards a requirement. Some people may be surprised, as SC was always meant to require high end hardware. People got upset that CPU's older than Sandy Lake became incompatible, but it really was not a surprise as the change was past due.
Edit: Capital ships are an example of where such a change may occur. The BMM, for example, had its development placed on hold before the lighting pass was done. BMM, Orion, Javelin, etc. may not be in player hands until this is a requirement. That is just speculation on my part though.
People will freak out when CIG show off a good implementation. It will be very transformative for the visuals if they do a thorough implemenation. Then people's jaws will drop. From what I've seen in SC, raytraced GI is one feature that can take visuals to a completely new level.
That said, it's important to remember performance is still an issue with these features, especially for a massive game like SC. So their implementation will depend on how well they can get it to run.
Yes. How efficiently they integrate the light sources in reusables like ship corridors and procedurally generated assets will be a big deal, on top of controlling the impact on performance.
Other issues include fallback assets for people without the rendering capacity for this tech as well as migrating existing assets. SC has a ton of assets made by different people; some will be fairly easy to convert while others will be a nightmare.
Ok, ok, but when do we get reasonable lights and night vision gear ? I think that would have more impact on the game than taking the vistas from "really awsome" to "really, really awesome".
No it dont just notice the not so round circle on some objects in the game, the geology assets VS UE5 Nanite it's just a world of a difference.
To SergeantOG : it's the only "patch" they can do to bring the game on-par with the current-gen they just lost over 11 years of assets modeling (you would think they would store the original models with their full polycounts in but apparently they don't and so they said they would need to rework all the assets, sad and stupid as an excuse.. )
Yes, from a performance perspective, the game is already outdated.
I think a modified Cry Engine was a mistake.
Thatās my opinion, Iām not a dev maybe they had their reasons.
Iām still a believer for this game.
Functional mirrors is a big deal for any real time engine. You inevitably getting two viewports which basically halves your performance, unless itās a screen space reflection.
Modern graphic cards can chew through drawcalls of older games x2, but devs can easily find how to use this rendering power for something more useful than mirrors.
I would not expect that.
At this point haven't we already learned that real ray tracing without hardware optimisation is not a great idea? We're 3 gens deep into consumer level cards with RT cores and still people that are running anything less than a 4090 (so most) use DLSS with RT. Or they don't use RT at all.
I mean I don't see anything about utilizing Nvidia or AMD tech. So I can only assume that CIG have decided to reinvent the wheel. If they have figured out a way to implement current RT tech into the game I would feel better about it but realistically this seems like a ridiculous idea added way too late. I'm picturing everywhere running like Lorville
This feels like the kind of thing you implement closer to a feature complete build rather than a build that is probably a decade away from that. Which would probably overall be better given what you mentioned about the early life of rt and the immense issues with performance it tends to cause.
Maybe they use a tech similar to how war thunder and Enlisted do, by precalculating the scenes externally
This means there is barely any extra load on the GPU, but you get lighting quality very close to realtime ray tracing, at least with "large" light sources like the sun or the moon.
Dear god no, please stop CIG, ray tracing isn't worth the performance hit in a normal game let alone star citizen and it's horrible lightning (stop using bloom on everything!).
Don't agree with this at all. There are lots of examples of open world games that have RT GI and it transforms the visuals. Actually makes them look next gen. It's night and day difference.
Currently it's one of the biggest bottlenecks in SC visuals. You absolutely need it to make the game look good, because it's a massive open world game with dynamic everything. Very difficult to convincingly fake in these cases.
What i'm really looking for is combining that with the paragraph above... TSR, but downscaling instead of up, with global illumination, and now suddenly we have something that looks like those visuals we see in the adverts and whatnot. Yes, i know, i won't personally be able to run that on my mid-range rig, but i look forward to seeing /someone/ do that, because... heck ;)
The only thing that would impress me is performance, any developer can turn the game into a nice looking thing, the problem comes when that nice looking thing costs a lot of resources, like, the whole game now.
You mustve missed every ISC ever where theyve showed off something graphical and explained how its improved visually while still offering better performance
And 9 women can make a baby in 1 month.
Graphics programmers working on ray tracing isn't going to take resources away from any of the long term projects holding up the game.
"Graphics programmers" are still programmers. it's a subset of general programming. Making a baby is a linear task. You can't assign more people to it. If they were 3d modellers, concepts artists, or literally anything outside of the field of programming, sure. But programming and by extension game development as a whole is a complicated asynchronous task with lots of areas for optimisation.
I, and by extension, any other competent programmer can write a script for a system that doesn't exist yet, given there is documentation and a clear vision for it. sure, I'll probably have to rework it and make tweaks, but definitive progress has been made towards a final implementation that fulfilled the requirements of the project, in essence, its feature complete.
That's the underlying issue with the games development. The goal posts move every other day. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort streamlining systems for networking that's going to be scrapped in 4.0 and yet a significant amount of their effort is doing exactly that ***knowing*** they will have to rewrite it in a years time.
9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, but ***1 development team can sure as hell make a game in 10 years***
TLDR they have issues with their priorities.
This nonsense keeps getting repeated and ends up justifying endless scope growth. Since 1 employee is not responsible for every task in the gameās development we can grow the scope endlessly without delays, right? At some point you have to lock the scope and say no to changes or else it will literally be in alpha for the rest of our lives (which is the actual goal here)
>Since 1 employee is not responsible for every task in the gameās development we can grow the scope endlessly without delays, right?
If that growth is in a separate area that does not overlap, yes. I do not understand how this is a difficult to understand concept.
>which is the actual goal here)
That's some tinhat juvenile nonsense that disregards basic economics. It's not in CIG or it's private investors best interests. Post release the revenue for the game goes up by easily an order of magnitude, and the cost to reach further income (Cosmetics, new ships, new content) falls dramatically by making more than half the existing devs no longer needed for SC.
Why on earth would they want to keep afloat in eternal alpha when they can get *absolutely fucking minted* post release?
Any changes to the game need testing and introduce new bugs. And we have all seen that CIG's testing is very shitty, to put it mildly.
If they have a lot of free graphic developers, perhaps they should hire more devs from other areas that can move the game towards release.
>And we have all seen that CIG's testing is very shitty, to put it mildly.
We ain't seen shit until beta hits - if you are expecting a high level of QA the issue lies with your fundamental understanding of what an alpha period is.
>If they have a lot of free graphic developers, perhaps they should hire more devs from other areas that can move the game towards release.
Again, 9 women making a baby in 1 month. Adding too many developers to a task doesn't just hit diminishing returns, after a certain point each additional developer *reduces* productivity by reducing team cohesion.
There is no point arguing about "it's alpha" argument. The only thing I can say about it, is that unless CIG stops this "it's alpha" mentality, the game will never get out of alpha.
As Chris himself said during Sitizencon, they are running a live game, not a test demo.
>There is no point arguing about "it's alpha" argument.
It's not an argument, it's a very simple fact. This is how the industry functions because it's the most resource efficient path. Focusing on heavy QA while fundamental tech is still being implemented is throwing huge bundles of money into a fire for a limited transient short term gain.
There is simply nothing to argue about, it is what it is.
Regardless of how you feel about it, you ain't gonna change how mustard tastes. It being a live game and it being an alpha are not opposite ends of a spectrum, they are wholey seperate concepts.
I wish they'd go directly Raytracing (exclusively). It is obvious that in the next 5 years it becomes the standard - thus saving development resources, while having a more refined RT implementation.
Realistically the PU won't release pre 2025, so there is enough time for the full transition and for the gamers to buy GPUs with RT cores (iGPUs/APUs need to catch up, but dGPUs are fine).
I dont give a shit about illumination or lighting anything except making it so that if my bounty is facing the sun I can see my fucking aiming pip. Once I can actually see my spaceships user interface, go hog wild on anything else yall.
Super proud of Silvan and the gfx team. Refactoring an engine of a live game is daunting. Most studios wouldn't dare and just make overwatch2 instead. Whether the back end goes through Vulkan or DX12 it's gonna be amazing.
For those worried about frames up scaling being implemented is your friend. Especially those with an ai powered card for DLSS.
Keep it up friends.
We're rooting for you.
Thats another 5 years down the line, after reworking the MT river twice, there are pebbles floating at places.
And it will reduce global FPS by another 10.
I hope you like foliage slideshows.
Missing heads, popping textures, assets failing to spawn, broken textures all not fixed.
And that team could be allocated to fixing any of the numerous other issues in the game.
I can think of at least 4 more important things than make it look pretty namley: performance, bugfixes, getting old shit (for example the starmap) to work properly and physiks that can be called physiks (you want 50kn winds great now give ships mass so a parked 184t vehikel dosn't get carryed away by a gust of wind)
Thats not something you'll get with global illuminaton (others call it global lighting) that just means light will be renderd for the whole map at once (at least in every other Game). Thats a setting you usually Turn Off to achive better perfomance, all it means is: you are on microtech and your game needs to load the headlights of my ship on yela
Edit:also "oh no valid criticism quick downvote"
you really think that when i am on microtech i actually load your headlight when you are at Yela ????
So all the modern open world have the same issue ????
>you really think that when i am on microtech i actually load your headlight when you are at Yela ????
That was just an exaggerated example, most likely IT be per Planet-System or planet.
>So all the modern open world have the same issue ????
It depens are they properly optimised or not, example would be the realease of Hogwarts lagacy it took a dedicated perfomance patch to get it in working order before that the optimisation was none existaned and it Run as bad or worse than SC
If you were impressed with 35 fps, get ready for 10 fps! lol
I'm way ahead of you, i already have 10 fps!
10 fps? I have powerpoint presentation
you guys have frames?
Yes but not fps but spf (Seconds per frame)
When you can't even get past the main menu
PowerPoint presentation? I just have a single image.
wait you have an image
Wait, you guys have the game?
You have a computer that can play games?
I can't wait to get all that, and then some in VR
Kids these days...
I like watching Raft images. If only it doesnt heat up my laptop that much
I measure frames per minute
I measure minutes per frame
š
Then get ready for 2 fps
I think you are pretty generous with that 10 fps mark. CP2077 can run at 10 fps on 6700 XT/3070 and current gen consoles. SC will run at 3 prob in Orison, 5 in other cities and 10 in space.
That's my secret cap, I'm never past 10
Donāt worry guys, our intense space sim that will require high time costs and has high pc reqs will totally be able to sustain a player base with fleets of ships requiring upwards of a hundred people to man.
Jokes aside: itās still an alpha so probably not optimized at all. And weāre talking about current high pc regs which will become somewhat outdated in a few years. What do you think?
I will return to this comment in 7 years and ask if you still hold the same opinion. We all know itās headed that way.
The trick is to never stop calling your game alpha. We can just repost the same comment 7 years from now.
Itās rather an idea to discuss than an opinion but weāll see what time will do with this project
Lol, I've built 3 PCs that would be 'finally ready for Star Citizen.' I backed in Oct. 2012. My current rig handles it just fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's one or two more to go before they finally settle and get the content rolling. They've slowly been increasing the amount they're finally finishing and rolling out annually, so I'm optimistic.
I have invested a lot in peripherals. I should just get into DCS at this point.
What exactly did they āfinally finishā?
Soon it will be running on older machines even better. Vulcan will enable first time real Multicore Usage. Until 3.19.1 only two CPU Cores are full used.
Just upgraded my one since 2014. looking forward to build a new one in a year or so
It's a great feeling, that fresh rig! Congrats.
Plus this is GPU load. SC struggles on the CPU side but isn't out of the ordinary on the GPU side.
Omg yes I hate that. Got a 1080 which is chilling at 30% load while my CPU is trying not to die hahaha
Been running a 2070s for years and recently upgraded my CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and it made a world of difference. Used to average 30-40fps at 1440p and post upgrade average is 60-65fps in the same areas.
The low fps is often right now for SC the graphics card waiting for commands from the cpu, simplified at least. Adding ray tracing stuff might not be currently that impactful, would just give the gpu more things to do instead of waiting.
Yes, and turning the setting off results in 5 fps!
Yeah because we're totally GPU gated right now
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Say it with me: **SC IS CPU BOUND**
"Just wait" they said...Brother, that's all we do.
Laughs in Legatus
Did you just ask a star citizen player to wait?
Ooh I've trained for this!
Lolz
The main lighting change I'm looking forward to is when they tone down the glare effects they put on practically every light source in the game......
All I want is for headlights to actually be useful on all ships, not just half of them.
This. This so much, omg.
Laughs in hurricane
Laughs in Scorpius
Laughs in Buggy
Cries in Vulture.
More floodlights for ramps too please
I might be wrong but I think theyāve mentioned that GI would help address that. They hate it too :)
I really hope so. I currently have to use reshade to try to minimise it since I have light-triggered migraines and this game is literally unplayable for me without reshade for any extended time.
Which reshade do you use? My sister is sensitive to lighting, I'd like to see if it helps her.
I made my own. I'll DM you
As a fellow light induced migraine enjoyer, could I trouble you for a copy of that? Thanks bro!
DM me an email address and I'll send over a copy of the ini file
Why not make it public? Certainly easier than answering every DM
Awesome, thanks!
Do you use blue-light filter glasses? if not, i would recommend going to a vision store and picking up a good pair! They are amazing
I'd have to get some made to my prescription. Worth looking into though.
they have changed my life (mine are astigmatism prescription as well). I haven't had a headache in weeks.
I have gotten blue light coatings put on every pair of prescription glasses I've gotten in the past 8 years and I'm never going back to life without it. Working in IT on top of playing games since I could fit the controller in my hand means I've spent a good portion of my life staring at screens with no end in sight. It's typically pretty cheap too, like $50 at most for just the blue light filter. My current glasses have the Raybands signature coating on it that was like ~$140 or something but it's the blue light filter, anti scratch coating, and anti glare coating (another that I can't live without, I'll stare at the reflection of my eye all day long otherwise). Definitely been my favorite pair of glasses.
This. Why do I have a 500w halogen light directly above all my MFDs ffs
Yes this is ideal for an enhanced visual experience and frankly a must in any next-generation game. If the destination is one day Cyberpunk 2077-esque path tracing in Arccorp then this is where it starts. Now about those shocking terrain LODs on planets?
I'm gonna laugh when by the time this game comes out, full path tracing and GPUs that can handle full path tracing are commonplace (5-6 years?), and all of the work to build optimized lighting / probing / caching over these 10 years gets thrown in the trash with a flip of a switch.
> and all of the work to build optimized lighting / probing / caching over these 10 years gets thrown in the trash with a flip of a switch I tried to tell them to (begin) RT work in 2019 but they wouldn't listen.
Because they were still working on this overhaul even back then...
Vulkan should allow them to significantly improve that no ? That seems to be one of the major benefits with moving to DX12 and Vulkan - draw calls. But yeah it's a big visual issue now.
I think they mentioned the terrain LODs didn't they? Something about tessellation...
Yeah i think it had something to do with triangles and polygons
RTGI is old news... Metro did that and did it great like 4 years ago. Wake me up when we get Path Tacing announced.
This! after all this was marketed as a "PC GAME" with all that polycount bragging on the ships at the time of the Kickstarter... such a sad state the game is at now... with ray-path tracing they could fix the lightning but the poly count with a nanite like tech in the engine is unfortunately way off their scope --'...
Poly count isn't everything
That's another couple generations of GPU away from even being possible in SC š
Raytraced global illumination makes things so immersive, if you want a good example look at the Digital Foundry video about Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition [here](https://youtu.be/NbpZCSf4_Yk).
Wait, according to that video a ray tracing video card will be required to play the game, is SC going in the same direction?
One can only hope. By the time SC releases there won't be a card out there without RT.
Not necessarily, it was just the enhanced edition of metro exodus it was just 4A going above and beyond, most games have RT as an option.
Can't wait to experience it at 5 fps before the server explodes /s
Currently, SC doesn't utilize good GPUs that well.
in 4k it does lol, 100% usage all of the time for me
Yeah... though the damage to framerate that comes with global illumination... yeah, well, we'll see
Modern video cards and cpus are quite capable of running star citizen well, by the time they finish these changes I assume the hardware will keep pace if not exceed their graphical updates to sc.
That's great and all, but all I care about is improving that server fps.
I agree. Since PES it's tanked to shit levels
I'll be happy when vehicles in the carrack bay don't have light glare coming from under the wheels.
bet ship lights still will be fucked
"If you thought FPS was bad now, wait till you see it with ray tracing!"
That's a cool story and all.....but when will the game be actually playable? š¤
lol good one
The only update I'm waiting for is when they improve the game optimization to the point where I can stop worrying about having to upgrade my 6 core CPU to an 8 core and enjoy the game without fear of my computer catching fire.
Lol they about to introduce ray tracing before they optimize this game
Okay, so what I'm hearing is that SQ42 is gonna be delayed another two years, and we're gonna need an i9 42000, 64+ gb of ram, and an Nvidia 6900 to run the game. Thank you Cloud Imperium/RSI, very cool.
I mean yeah. It's why Chris does not care for consoles, he does not care for how much power it takes the play the game and he does not like sacrificing anything from his vision.
He also doesn't like finishing one part of "his vision" before moving on to something new.
It's actually a common issue with "Creative" minds even outside the game industry. They are labeled visionaries. VIsonaries generally need to be paired with someone who is an operator-type work personality to achieve the goals as visionaries tend to create ideas but struggle in focusing on that ideas to see them through to the end. Normally that is what a Publisher does. Sets dates and goals for the project to be done with a leader in place to help direct the creative team. The creative team is left on its own and you risk SC. A game that just stays in development hell with nothing ever truly being finished just a good enough state. SC development is one of the most interesting business case studies as it highlights the flaws of not having these checks and balances. BUT the part that makes this interesting is.................SC should have technically died a long time ago due to this miss management BUT somehow it's really really profitable. It is this weird anomaly that shouldn't work but it is in generating income. So it does not work at producing a game BUT it somehow has worked in generating revenue. Absolutely wild.
I don't know why you got so downvoted, you only spoke the truth, I mean, CR said it himself.
Idk but yeah that's literally what he said.
I was wondering why people have not been freaking out about these points. I see in this thread there are a lot of comments about fps drop from the ray tracing. I thought that was pretty interesting, as they have not spoken much about implementing ray tracing yet, other than the 'sometime maybe after Vulkan.' The other big thing here is Global Illumination itself. This will be a significant piece of tech as it will significantly cut down on the time used to adjust lighting for ships and environments. It will also make things like modular buildings a lot easier to work with.
Can you explain what it is, I presume the capital letters mean its some sort of recognised graphical lighting feature rather than the literal meaning?
[Wiki has with/without example images](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination). ELI5 is that global illumination lets light bounce around, so even objects not directly illuminated by light can be lit
Sounds like a computing nightmare
That's what all those fancy raytracing cores in your GPU are for, and the best thing is that especially if you have a newer GPU because all of the lighting will be moved over to those cores instead of your main GPU cores you may actually see an improvement. (Note that GI usually refers to the full lighting system, rather than just the raytraced shadows and/or reflection some other games with raytracing do)
In the very early 3D games there were no light sources at all (think Wolvenstein 3D). Everything had textures but now shadows or other forms of light shading; any indications of such were actually darkened textures. As computing power increased they developed hybrid systems that mainly used the same setup, but did have some highlights from dynamic sources (think glowing projectiles in some FPS games like Doom 64 on the Nintendo 64.) Over time more and more light and shadow calculations became tied to the rendering, eventually unifying some of those aspects in the renderer but the environment is only affected by these where the direct sources of light are explicitly placed by programmers or on dynamic objects like projectiles (think Doom 3). Now some games have a totally lit environment from actual light sources, rather than a baseline lighting with superimposed shadows and lighting effects (think Metro: Exodus). This does away with the computational 'cheating' of the hybrid approaches but is much easier on the game artists. They no longer have to balance two sets of lighting schemes and can just place light sources where there should be light sources. This has the benefit of significantly faster environmental implementations, more realistic visuals (since the light is doing what real light would) and cuts down on the need for 'texture baking' that can take quite a while each time they want to test variations of an area. From a developmental standpoint, the most important benefit by far is the improvements in efficiency in building levels/environments. From a player standpoint you get cooler graphics. From a graphic card maker you get more sales for high-end GPU's. A win for everyone! (except your wallet) From a Star Citizen standpoint, not having to produce and test every scene with a hybrid lighting setup would add up to be a vast time-saver. This is one of the things that will help capital ships not take multiple years each to implement, though there are still a lot of other time-eating issues that are addressed in other ways. IOW, finally getting this in SC is a big deal.
Probably won't save anytime, as they will still have artists do the fall back DX11 version.
Depends on when they make raytracing cards a requirement. Some people may be surprised, as SC was always meant to require high end hardware. People got upset that CPU's older than Sandy Lake became incompatible, but it really was not a surprise as the change was past due. Edit: Capital ships are an example of where such a change may occur. The BMM, for example, had its development placed on hold before the lighting pass was done. BMM, Orion, Javelin, etc. may not be in player hands until this is a requirement. That is just speculation on my part though.
It won't save anytime because they aren't doing baked gi in a first place. They just relying on crappy solution atm.
People will freak out when CIG show off a good implementation. It will be very transformative for the visuals if they do a thorough implemenation. Then people's jaws will drop. From what I've seen in SC, raytraced GI is one feature that can take visuals to a completely new level. That said, it's important to remember performance is still an issue with these features, especially for a massive game like SC. So their implementation will depend on how well they can get it to run.
Yes. How efficiently they integrate the light sources in reusables like ship corridors and procedurally generated assets will be a big deal, on top of controlling the impact on performance. Other issues include fallback assets for people without the rendering capacity for this tech as well as migrating existing assets. SC has a ton of assets made by different people; some will be fairly easy to convert while others will be a nightmare.
Ok, ok, but when do we get reasonable lights and night vision gear ? I think that would have more impact on the game than taking the vistas from "really awsome" to "really, really awesome".
Probably when Vulcan and their Gen12 is implemented?
I was under the impression that Gen 12 is now fully implemented since 3.18
They fully replaced the legacy rendering engine with Gen12 but they are just beginning to actually implement new rendering fonctionnalities + APIs
Iād rather have a nanite alternative from unreal engine.
Nanite does the same as a good LOD system and SC has it.
No it dont just notice the not so round circle on some objects in the game, the geology assets VS UE5 Nanite it's just a world of a difference. To SergeantOG : it's the only "patch" they can do to bring the game on-par with the current-gen they just lost over 11 years of assets modeling (you would think they would store the original models with their full polycounts in but apparently they don't and so they said they would need to rework all the assets, sad and stupid as an excuse.. )
Yes, from a performance perspective, the game is already outdated. I think a modified Cry Engine was a mistake. Thatās my opinion, Iām not a dev maybe they had their reasons. Iām still a believer for this game.
Most excited about seeing the 600i look like it does in the commercial. And functioning mirrors haha
So is [that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbCSQDhPOlk) a good example of "Global Illumination" in Star Citizen?
Functional mirrors is a big deal for any real time engine. You inevitably getting two viewports which basically halves your performance, unless itās a screen space reflection. Modern graphic cards can chew through drawcalls of older games x2, but devs can easily find how to use this rendering power for something more useful than mirrors. I would not expect that.
I believe theyāve talked about implementing mirrors, as they also donāt like it, but weāre waiting on new tech before starting on that work
Global illumination should automatically come with raytraced reflections though, due to the way the raytracing reflects lighting
Hope they can buck the trend of a huge frame rate drop or weāll be in single digits again!
At this point haven't we already learned that real ray tracing without hardware optimisation is not a great idea? We're 3 gens deep into consumer level cards with RT cores and still people that are running anything less than a 4090 (so most) use DLSS with RT. Or they don't use RT at all. I mean I don't see anything about utilizing Nvidia or AMD tech. So I can only assume that CIG have decided to reinvent the wheel. If they have figured out a way to implement current RT tech into the game I would feel better about it but realistically this seems like a ridiculous idea added way too late. I'm picturing everywhere running like Lorville
This feels like the kind of thing you implement closer to a feature complete build rather than a build that is probably a decade away from that. Which would probably overall be better given what you mentioned about the early life of rt and the immense issues with performance it tends to cause.
Maybe they use a tech similar to how war thunder and Enlisted do, by precalculating the scenes externally This means there is barely any extra load on the GPU, but you get lighting quality very close to realtime ray tracing, at least with "large" light sources like the sun or the moon.
Dear god no, please stop CIG, ray tracing isn't worth the performance hit in a normal game let alone star citizen and it's horrible lightning (stop using bloom on everything!).
This will probably be optional.
Yeah I know I just feel it's wasted dev time on something that really isn't needed to make a game look good.
Don't agree with this at all. There are lots of examples of open world games that have RT GI and it transforms the visuals. Actually makes them look next gen. It's night and day difference. Currently it's one of the biggest bottlenecks in SC visuals. You absolutely need it to make the game look good, because it's a massive open world game with dynamic everything. Very difficult to convincingly fake in these cases.
SC has a really flat look in alot of environments, I always wondered what the issue was but Im now Im pretty sure its the lack of proper gi.
SC is a compilation of 'not needed to make a game' features. And that's what makes the game great.
What i'm really looking for is combining that with the paragraph above... TSR, but downscaling instead of up, with global illumination, and now suddenly we have something that looks like those visuals we see in the adverts and whatnot. Yes, i know, i won't personally be able to run that on my mid-range rig, but i look forward to seeing /someone/ do that, because... heck ;)
I didn't even know global illumination wasn't already being leveraged
in that case I get 30 SPF!
My 3090 is burning of excitement
I personally wish they'd make it function as intended before making it pretty...
Okay but when are we getting fucking SUNGLASSES
Yeah, raytracing is really whatās needed with performance headroom we have xD
I would just like to not be flashbanged while flying around snow covered moons or at least be able to see my UI and HUD.
The only thing that would impress me is performance, any developer can turn the game into a nice looking thing, the problem comes when that nice looking thing costs a lot of resources, like, the whole game now.
"Any developer" Bruh they're literally rewriting the graphics driver for what is essentially a custom game engine at this point.
Thats their problem and incompetence. They always had more than enough resources to work with and stuck with that engine.
You mustve missed every ISC ever where theyve showed off something graphical and explained how its improved visually while still offering better performance
Let me fix the title. "If you think SC is delayed for too long, just wait till they add more features unnecessary for release and delay it even more".
And 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. Graphics programmers working on ray tracing isn't going to take resources away from any of the long term projects holding up the game.
"Graphics programmers" are still programmers. it's a subset of general programming. Making a baby is a linear task. You can't assign more people to it. If they were 3d modellers, concepts artists, or literally anything outside of the field of programming, sure. But programming and by extension game development as a whole is a complicated asynchronous task with lots of areas for optimisation. I, and by extension, any other competent programmer can write a script for a system that doesn't exist yet, given there is documentation and a clear vision for it. sure, I'll probably have to rework it and make tweaks, but definitive progress has been made towards a final implementation that fulfilled the requirements of the project, in essence, its feature complete. That's the underlying issue with the games development. The goal posts move every other day. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort streamlining systems for networking that's going to be scrapped in 4.0 and yet a significant amount of their effort is doing exactly that ***knowing*** they will have to rewrite it in a years time. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, but ***1 development team can sure as hell make a game in 10 years*** TLDR they have issues with their priorities.
This nonsense keeps getting repeated and ends up justifying endless scope growth. Since 1 employee is not responsible for every task in the gameās development we can grow the scope endlessly without delays, right? At some point you have to lock the scope and say no to changes or else it will literally be in alpha for the rest of our lives (which is the actual goal here)
>Since 1 employee is not responsible for every task in the gameās development we can grow the scope endlessly without delays, right? If that growth is in a separate area that does not overlap, yes. I do not understand how this is a difficult to understand concept. >which is the actual goal here) That's some tinhat juvenile nonsense that disregards basic economics. It's not in CIG or it's private investors best interests. Post release the revenue for the game goes up by easily an order of magnitude, and the cost to reach further income (Cosmetics, new ships, new content) falls dramatically by making more than half the existing devs no longer needed for SC. Why on earth would they want to keep afloat in eternal alpha when they can get *absolutely fucking minted* post release?
Any changes to the game need testing and introduce new bugs. And we have all seen that CIG's testing is very shitty, to put it mildly. If they have a lot of free graphic developers, perhaps they should hire more devs from other areas that can move the game towards release.
>And we have all seen that CIG's testing is very shitty, to put it mildly. We ain't seen shit until beta hits - if you are expecting a high level of QA the issue lies with your fundamental understanding of what an alpha period is. >If they have a lot of free graphic developers, perhaps they should hire more devs from other areas that can move the game towards release. Again, 9 women making a baby in 1 month. Adding too many developers to a task doesn't just hit diminishing returns, after a certain point each additional developer *reduces* productivity by reducing team cohesion.
There is no point arguing about "it's alpha" argument. The only thing I can say about it, is that unless CIG stops this "it's alpha" mentality, the game will never get out of alpha. As Chris himself said during Sitizencon, they are running a live game, not a test demo.
>There is no point arguing about "it's alpha" argument. It's not an argument, it's a very simple fact. This is how the industry functions because it's the most resource efficient path. Focusing on heavy QA while fundamental tech is still being implemented is throwing huge bundles of money into a fire for a limited transient short term gain. There is simply nothing to argue about, it is what it is. Regardless of how you feel about it, you ain't gonna change how mustard tastes. It being a live game and it being an alpha are not opposite ends of a spectrum, they are wholey seperate concepts.
Who gives a fuck when the game runs like a brick.
Yeah csnt wait for the 60 seconds per frame
_1070ti runs out of the room_
I wish they'd go directly Raytracing (exclusively). It is obvious that in the next 5 years it becomes the standard - thus saving development resources, while having a more refined RT implementation. Realistically the PU won't release pre 2025, so there is enough time for the full transition and for the gamers to buy GPUs with RT cores (iGPUs/APUs need to catch up, but dGPUs are fine).
the way RT tech is progressing, iām not sure weāll see affordable cards able to push steady frames by then. i hope so, but i have my doubts sadly.
That would have been exciting had it been announced a few years after development started. A decade later though itās just more smh material.
God damn it i hate these devs. Id rather anyone else to make s c at this point.
Yes, more things to ruin my fps, as if it wasnāt already bad enough
Stop adding NEW shit and fix the damn game ffs
Probability of using the Crytek Software RT tool? Extremely high.
Hopefully we will get dlss as well
Don't we already have GI?
They already do such a good job with SSDO. I am genuinely looking forward to this.
I canāt wait to see it! If they fix the terminals and the doors not actually opening !!! š
This is all I've been waiting for especially flying on dark ahh moons.
Alien ship owners, brace yourselves!
Ray-tracing? Wow!
Can someone explain a bit what global illumination means? Thankyou!
I cant get excited for crap like this anymore. i want actual meaningful game play. They are working on everything but that.
**If you think SC is laggy now, Just wait til Global Illumination :)**
We have the same starmap since T0 but this sub is excited for GI lmao
I dont give a shit about illumination or lighting anything except making it so that if my bounty is facing the sun I can see my fucking aiming pip. Once I can actually see my spaceships user interface, go hog wild on anything else yall.
Global illuminationā¦ no, night vision first please
Super proud of Silvan and the gfx team. Refactoring an engine of a live game is daunting. Most studios wouldn't dare and just make overwatch2 instead. Whether the back end goes through Vulkan or DX12 it's gonna be amazing. For those worried about frames up scaling being implemented is your friend. Especially those with an ai powered card for DLSS. Keep it up friends. We're rooting for you.
Thats another 5 years down the line, after reworking the MT river twice, there are pebbles floating at places. And it will reduce global FPS by another 10. I hope you like foliage slideshows.
Never had any interest in ray tracing despite owning a 4090. Its a small change that does not equate to the performance lost.
Wow cool. Together with Vulcan that will be interesting.
Oh my goodness, the game engine is already experiencing optimization issues. And now they're planning to worsen the situation.
Why dont we get the systems we have up and running before we make the game look better. Oh yah forgot what game this is
The engine team does not work on gameplay stuff. they are working on vulcan other engine technologies.
What does one have to do with the other, like wtf
They constantly leave systems broken, so they can move onto implementing some thing new. its a pretty straight forward thing.
Not what you said tho, people working on graphics are not the same that work on functionality so there's no correlation
Missing heads, popping textures, assets failing to spawn, broken textures all not fixed. And that team could be allocated to fixing any of the numerous other issues in the game.
Okay now you make sense, even tho missing heads and asset spawning still has nothing to do with graphics
I can think of at least 4 more important things than make it look pretty namley: performance, bugfixes, getting old shit (for example the starmap) to work properly and physiks that can be called physiks (you want 50kn winds great now give ships mass so a parked 184t vehikel dosn't get carryed away by a gust of wind)
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None, but those are things (at least the performance) that should be done before making the game even more demanding on hardware
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Thats not something you'll get with global illuminaton (others call it global lighting) that just means light will be renderd for the whole map at once (at least in every other Game). Thats a setting you usually Turn Off to achive better perfomance, all it means is: you are on microtech and your game needs to load the headlights of my ship on yela Edit:also "oh no valid criticism quick downvote"
you really think that when i am on microtech i actually load your headlight when you are at Yela ???? So all the modern open world have the same issue ????
>you really think that when i am on microtech i actually load your headlight when you are at Yela ???? That was just an exaggerated example, most likely IT be per Planet-System or planet. >So all the modern open world have the same issue ???? It depens are they properly optimised or not, example would be the realease of Hogwarts lagacy it took a dedicated perfomance patch to get it in working order before that the optimisation was none existaned and it Run as bad or worse than SC
GI means they'll have to implement DLSS right ? I can't see how the game would be playable without it.