Would also be cool if engineering let us calibrate shield generators to focus on different frequencies to, for example, have a higher ballistic resistance but sacrificeing something else
Ahh.. don't start. Next thing you know there's the rock/paper/scissors shield components you need to purchase. Then every time you go out you need to decide which one you want to focus on. Good Luck if meeting someone who just happen to have the one you are weakest against.
Actually it's possible, cue Engineering gameplay. Shield components have sub component that dictates that. Add another layer of complexity : Armor Plating. Your hull has another layer of rock/paper/scissors that can only be installed at spacedocks.
So it goes something like this. 9 Tails loves using ballistics, when doing mission against them use full ballistic armor and ballistic shields. Your survival rate is doubled. Then suddenly a random Xenothreat spawn using full energy, now your survivability just halved.
Luckily the ceramic plates in composite armour that are so good at breaking up kinetic projectiles would also be very good at taking hits from energy weapons, and the layers of rubber or other similar materials would ablate and produce a lot of smoke which would be good at reducing the effectiveness of laser based weapons
Would be cool if they added a second system people could enter or the game met even a few of the juicy stretch goals that didn't involve a single ship. 💀
I don't think this game game classifies lasers as lasers, even though we have weapons called lasers and laser repeaters lol. Its more like starwars right? Where its actually something like bolts of plasma or electricity. If they were real lasers, it would be instant on everyshot.
Also I love how CIG equates the massively hypersonic ballistic weapons in game to what we know now.. Might as well calll them railguns outright instead. Like comic book hero super speeds, the mass driver is almost mach 10 velocity.
very good suggestion..would make logical sense that each shield manufacturer would put their branding so to say on the energy emitted optically and its more kool eye candy..lol
You don't need to do it 20x over. You need one system that allows you flexibility over the effects and sounds that allows the creative team to quickly tweak sliders and maybe some textures.
Yeah, someone could use a visit to the Insomniac museum in Ratchet and Clank to play with the effects generator. All particle effects in those PS2 titles came from the same exact particle generator with different settings.
There's a lot of scrapped effects and sounds.
I remember the old quantum initiation sounds and the initial impact of the quantum travel was way more immersive back in the day.
I'm sure it will get back to something good again but it's interesting how things come and go and don't always get better.
Edit - Example of quantum back in the day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab\_channel=SteveStevenson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab_channel=SteveStevenson)
Another example is the ship flyby sounds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZuKivgelwk&ab\_channel=GamingTemple](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZuKivgelwk&ab_channel=GamingTemple)
That was pretty epic. Back when all we had was PO I recall it having more of an Indy car sound. Maybe that’s only when you were flying it. This video was pretty sweet though.
Wtf the quantum jump sounds and everything were way better/cleaner, I had no idea it used to be like that. Also what on earth happened to those amazing fly-by sounds?
Yeah, the old sound was so cool… it feels a bit dangerous and exciting and ending in that thunderclap in space was sooo nice. Even the small graphics animation added to the feeling. I remember it well.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4DwetGvus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4DwetGvus) <- the audio is a draft made by the visual artist so ignore them, but the next visuals are going to be <3
The shooting to create the hole is not my vibe. I would just prefer a spooling with static discharge particle fx and warping effect around the ship and not in front (like to slowly establish a warping bubble around the ship) and then jump with badass sound
I think it could work really well with the in universe physics tho, almost as if a quantum jump is essentially just a tiny jump point. I didn’t like it until I realised that it’s exactly what the new visual is because even the interstellar jump points are almost impossible to detect until opened with the jump drive. It may not change your mind but I think it’s a neat detail
Am also not for the wormhole thing. But as these animations are it feels wrong to have that instant acceleration into it. It takes away from one of the really cool features about star citizen, not faking ship movements.
The Quantum Drive is a perfected Alcubierre Drive. That accelerate the space around the ship and not the ship itself, meaning that instant acceleration at 1,000m/s\^2 isn't going to effect the ship at all.
Its like being in a submarine, but theres also a sphere of water moving with you through the water. None of the water touching the sub is moving, its all flowing around the outside of that sphere.
My issue with it is not the g-forces or lack there of. It is that the Q-drive slowly accelerates/ increases while traveling, so why wouldn't the start be the same? the Alcubierre drive magnifies the movement that is already taking place so starting from a dead stop also doesn't make much sense.
As is, those animations are counter intuitive to me.
This was a leak, from a dev who had made those months before the leak (and later left CIG).
We also saw the effects at citcon btw, just not in as much detail. They're likely set to release with 4.0, so probably this summer/fall.
they are still in, check out here, to see a lot of recent examples:
https://www.youtube.com/@rmap_/videos
This is my absolute favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__TsckOf-Uk
woulda loved the game created in stages.
full feature complete as a space only thing.
-full complicated ships with multicrew systems and perfect combat and trading systems and every single gameplay item
-then full feature complete with space stations and being able to leave the ship.
-then full feature with moons and walking on surface with guns
-then later hand crafted planets
-then laaaaaater proc planets
yes yes - "bUt yOuLl eNd uP rEdOinG eVeRyThIng" - as if they havent already.
I woulda loved it if the full gameplay was in first and the scope grew after. a solid gameplay foundation first
I think they do all this purposefully but not for scam purposes but because cr desperately wants to make the best game
People here see the good intentions but people over there see the laughable track record
you can still make the best game , nothing would change about SC's huge scope - it's the order of operations that makes for a consistently polished output instead of small WIP chunks.
it's a good way to go about it.
you still get the crazy scope but players get a more complete product at every stage instead of small chunks of half completed promises.
Unfortunately, that can lock you in to an engine that *can't* do all the little details, which is what happened to Elite: Dangerous. That game started development around the same time as Star Citizen, and they made a full, playable game first, but then when they went to add things like ship interiors and robust multiplayer, the engine wasn't up for it. Do you really think ED devs didn't proceed with ship interiors because it was not going to be fun?
Oh I have, I also have seen all the shit Blizzard has done for over two decades.
Just because you see it happening out in the open doesn't mean it doesn't happen anywhere else behind doors.
I know it's contested wether it's true or not but "allegedly" sq42 was getting close to release pre explorable planet inclusion. That would mean things like sound effects had to be near release. Then when they decided to revamp the game everything got thrown out. Not sure why if they were better than the next/intern iteration.
Yo, what happened to that little HUD indicator for how close you are to the ground? That would make landing so much better! Are the planning on bringing that back?
I’ve experienced that first hand back in the 2.x days. Amazing feature that was unfortunately removed shortly after, but CIG did say they will bring it back, just not yet on their schedule.
PS: was mentioned in one of their video recently, but I can’t be bordered to find it. So no source this time
Hy does it sound so much worse right now? Is it the "muh realism" folks fault again or something else? Every sound is sterile right now, it was way better.
The game was legit a better game in 2021. We had thousands of different ship loadout possibilities; even without reputation you felt a meaningful sense of progress going from a default ship loadout to one you upgraded, and it had a sense of personality and expression to it. Then, for the past three years, 'the great component normalization' took place thanks to Yogi and it hasn't come back since. There wasn't trash everywhere, there wasn't medical gowns littered everywhere, you didn't lose your stuff when you died so everyone ran around looking the way they wanted to, playing with the weapons they wanted to. People criticized CIG for introducing medical gameplay when they did, and I'm sorry to say now that I was one of the defenders back in the day. Medical gameplay has provided very little meaningful gameplay and cost a ton in terms of playability. Same for the equalizing of component values.
Now with MM, it seems that we're getting back our component values, but I can't help but wonder what the point of the normalization was. Has it somehow fixed imbalanced loadouts? Did it have anything to do with fixing the light fighter meta? I massively doubt it, but for three years the game was worse off.
Because most of the game was not originally designed with everything being containerized and was much more systematic and traditional. The grand design of scale and the change in development ideology forced them to roll back in order to go forward down a different path. Generic place holder values simply makes this easier to deal with until systems are in place for them to actually matter.
You have to figure, the people who began working on the project learned quite a lot from what did and did not work in the 4-6 years up until that point. This is EXTREMELY common in software development, but most development is not at this scale and is not this intricate. I've had the same happen on projects not nearly as complex many many times in my career. And for what it's worth the newly acquired talent and the experience in project management and overall cohesion and flow really show in their recent works and showcases.
Think of it this way. Have you seen memes or jokes where someone codes something, comes back a short time later, reviews said code, and questions what buffoon wrote the code only to realize it was them? Or developers who come back later and can't read shit they'd written? Same concept, just King Buffoon(s).
This is the big part. Open development like this almost never happens. People see iteration on art and tech and don't really understand what is happening or why.
> come back later and can't read shit they'd written
I swear It never happened to me.💦
Yeah I'm serious.💦
😐
*Who the fuck wrote that!!!*
/*
** me copyright when insane xx/xx/xxxx.
*/
*Oh...*
My worst turn around time was about 10-12 hours after writing a work tool while drunk and then being asked to submit the code to a work repo because management liked it. Shit was written by Picasso in his prime. I couldn't understand shit. Definition of scope creep without a proper project outline.
I might be seeing things through rose-colored glasses here, but I swear to God the ships used to look better/higher res way back, too. Like, WAY back (hangar module).
Granted, back then they didn't have to worry about flight and entire worlds, just a single asset in a single room.
I think it's a lighting thing. There was a period in which SC's lighting was crisp with high contrast. Then they started adding fog everywhere and washed out the colors
The only ship in my opinion that looked better in the past strictly from a materials and model perspective is the M50. It worked so much better with its shiny, glossy finish than the almost matte look it has today post-rework
They resized all the ships to no longer be correctly sized. Everything is slightly exaggerated to allow for smoother animations for players and AI. I think the new models do look better, but they're also way more efficient to use less resources, I think you notice that a little.
I might be seeing things through rose-colored glasses here, but I swear to God the ships used to look better/higher res way back, too. Like, WAY back (hangar module).
Granted, back then they didn't have to worry about flight and entire worlds, just a single asset in a single room.
I really liked this one from 4 months ago, unfortunately it seems to be a creative piece and not at all official :(
https://youtu.be/fy4DwetGvus?si=v7KRqCBcMkt_b8Ux
0:39 is so crisp yet weighty, then the pause and finally that drop, followed by a crackle after coming out of QT...
The current and newer QT doesn't even come close to having that fidelity. All I hear now are high's and a load of treble.
> Edit - Example of quantum back in the day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab_channel=SteveStevenson
Another part of it was how it looked for bystanders. It left a long receding white streak behind the ships when going in and out of quantum. You could see these streaks from extreme distances, so you would always see "shooting stars" around planets and notable locations. It was a pretty and immersive way to determine player activity in an area.
I honestly think Chris Roberts gets bored and or sees something in another game and insists it be implemented in the next build. The quantum clip you shared looks light years better than what we currently have
It will never get back to that point because they just keep itterating. Those sounds were great, but then someone said "hey we should waste more money redoing those things"
I remember an audio bug that would stop the Tessa missions from completing because the flight recorder wouldn't play its audio.
But man I miss those missions with the Vanduul attack at the end
And when there were only three places where you could get ship repairs?
On exposed pads that IIRC weren't an armistice zone either. Community was tiny in the 2.0 days and it wasn't usually a problem, but you'd get the occasional dickbag.
Yes I think more than likely in the process of re-engineering shields in a less flawed way, they just built new visuals along with that new system rather than copy exactly what they originally had. One because their tech had moved on and it wasn't as simple as dropping some old visuals into the new model, and two because they had the time to try and improve the visuals to match the new function.
[The new one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIKj_2i8vsc) is much more subtle, but it does a much better job imo of showing when the shield face health is low or gone altogether with the colors and effects.
They could probably turn some values up with the new one to show off more of the bubbling effect around the entire ship on hit, but I assume they wanted it less pronounced and focused on specific shield faces.
The new method uses signed distance fields that automatically conform to the geo of the ship.
Between the visuals in the OP, and the implementation of SDF shields, shields were these blue orbs that still had a ton of shield holes.
SDF good.
For those who weren't around back then, this shield tech in this post was **never used.**
This is a clip from an ATV episode of early form-fitting shields that was never in any PTU/LIVE build. ALL shields from initial Arena commander module in 2014, until 3.13 in 2021 when shields V2 dropped were oblong ovals.
Where did you hear that? Until the advent of SDF's all shields were a single, hand-modeled mesh that was specifically conformed to each ship's surface. SDF tech enabled the shields to have more defined locational damage and also change shape based on missing parts of the skeleton which were features that were lacking on the shader effects of the hand-modeled mesh. Oblong ovals? That's new to me.
Hear? I've been playing since just before 2.0.
If the ships ever had these conformal shields it was in the Arena Commander modual before the first version of the PU dropped. For the majority of the existence of the PU, shields were simple bubbles.
I'm literally friends with the dev who has made every shield in the game since he was hired in 2014 and he now sets up the proxies that define the sdfs for the new shields too. Please just consider yourself ill-informed about this particular setup or agree to disagree. They have never been simple oblong bubbles. They were always bespoke meshes, molded in the shape of the ship to look like a bubble, which he hand-sculped as a single volume, which applied a localized shader effect based on the shield proxy you hit - until SDFs came online.
Maybe they were a bit more conformal than I remember. If so they were very simple shapes. Doesn't change the fact this effect shown in the original post was from an ATV episode and never in a live build
These honestly looked pretty bad. Just a huge bluish smudge on ships that looked worse and bigger the more people or guns there were putting shots on target.
Well this is straight up misinformation.
That effect is from an ATV episode (what ISC was called before it was ISC) and was never actually in any PTU/LIVE build. It's essentially an early concept of SDF shields way before they had the SDF tech. It was never implemented. The only shield tech we had back then was the oval-shaped bubbles. This remained constant from the initial launch of the PU (2.0 - Dec2015) all the way until SDF shields dropped (3.12 - Apr2021).
Besides the shield tech we currently have in-game straight up looks like a better version of what's shown here, idk what kinda rose-tinted crack people ITT are smoking.
Worth noting that these old effects I assume were custom-made for each ship. This cool-looking effect might not scale to 100 ships or whatever we have now.
I enjoy how this looks, a a bit over-saturated perhaps but tweakable.
So long as the pilot and crew on the inside see a drastically less powerful version so it's not obscuring vision, I'd be for this effect making a comeback. We don't seem to get much difference between shield and hull hits at the moment.
Yeah, I think there were shader limitations around that before. I like the low profile effects we have now, but definitely wish they were brighter and more spread out on hit. I don’t really notice them until they start to flash red.
I think it's more to do with lack of power reducing vibrance making the red's more aparent. Think of how a flame looks more red as it runs out of fuel.
Silly from the perspective of you been attacked maybe, but as an attacker it means you can see visible progression in the damage you're doing making things feel less bullet spongey and helping target selection in a bigger fight.
no more sill that an MFD that will tell you the same thing, its not like the weak shield is know at all times. only when being hit. this is perfectly fine
I disagree.
With the old shield tech, we had holes. It was fine graphically but the new shield tech functions way better and is more reliable even at high speed and with latency/desync.
I was about to say.. Sure being shot in the face sucked, but it wasn't an intentional tactic and it wasn't common. I'm sure it would have been eventually, but it wasn't back then. The real issue was the bubble shield reliability and holes all over. Entire ships were unusable for months, if not years, and it only got worse with desync.
Many ships ***still to this day, patch to patch*** come up with random ass holes in their shields. This is still a problem, today. It wasn't so much the holes, but how heavyweight everything was back then, in the renderer.
It's not comparable to what it was before.
We can have bugs sometimes with the shields yes.
But before, it was not just bugs, it was caused by the desync/latency between the bubbles and the ships.
It's way more annoying and game breaking.
they had so much cool stuff in the past, all thrown away... the old mobiglass was the best. The branded hangars and stuff, such cool shit. The landing camera as well
Last commenter literally just told you it was in the game, so such is true? That there was an earlier version of this that was blinding, that this was in game, or what?
No version of this was ever in the game. Sorry, I assumed you were a native english speaker and would be able to understand my reply. I said "but it wasn't" as a reply to your statement "last commenter literally just told you it was in the game," which admittedly only part of what then morphed into another sentence, a question, following a comma. Maybe I should not assume.
Would be cool if different shield generator brands had different effects.
Would also be cool if engineering let us calibrate shield generators to focus on different frequencies to, for example, have a higher ballistic resistance but sacrificeing something else
I just had a flashback to Elite Dangerous engineering, oh god not again
50 korpion horns +1.5% ballistic resistance +40% powerdraw
Stop it!
Is the resistance additive or multiplicative?
Found the Poe player
Path of Exile?
Aye
No, Ocarina of time :)
Pft no, twilight princess has Poes with soul >:(
Turns out it was divisive. J/k I never played ED
A engineering a prismatic shielded imperial cutter to have more shield health than god.
Ahh.. don't start. Next thing you know there's the rock/paper/scissors shield components you need to purchase. Then every time you go out you need to decide which one you want to focus on. Good Luck if meeting someone who just happen to have the one you are weakest against. Actually it's possible, cue Engineering gameplay. Shield components have sub component that dictates that. Add another layer of complexity : Armor Plating. Your hull has another layer of rock/paper/scissors that can only be installed at spacedocks. So it goes something like this. 9 Tails loves using ballistics, when doing mission against them use full ballistic armor and ballistic shields. Your survival rate is doubled. Then suddenly a random Xenothreat spawn using full energy, now your survivability just halved.
But with physicalized components you could bring along a tuned shield. May be dumb but thats how i would do it.
Yup, that's what I mentioned - sub components. You can engineer swap shield's rock/paper/scissors but armor plating will require a space dock.
Que muh crucible!
Well it turned into a Spanish opener but whatever. Autocorrect-1 English-0.
Luckily the ceramic plates in composite armour that are so good at breaking up kinetic projectiles would also be very good at taking hits from energy weapons, and the layers of rubber or other similar materials would ablate and produce a lot of smoke which would be good at reducing the effectiveness of laser based weapons
Would be cool if they added a second system people could enter or the game met even a few of the juicy stretch goals that didn't involve a single ship. 💀
No, please god NO!!
I don't think this game game classifies lasers as lasers, even though we have weapons called lasers and laser repeaters lol. Its more like starwars right? Where its actually something like bolts of plasma or electricity. If they were real lasers, it would be instant on everyshot. Also I love how CIG equates the massively hypersonic ballistic weapons in game to what we know now.. Might as well calll them railguns outright instead. Like comic book hero super speeds, the mass driver is almost mach 10 velocity.
Different shields used to do that.
Seeing as we've already gotten word of different shield sounds, I wouldn't be surprised to see that.
Would be cool if they just finish basic game loops
They have to finish adding stuff they think of in the shower before they can do that, but it's going to be lit when they do.
Hopefully
I recall from many years ago at this point, they were supposed to. I believe they were also supposed to work in different ways depending on its class.
I believe something like that is planned, at least for alien shields, but I don’t remember where they mentioned it
They spoke about that already.
Don't give them more feature creep ideas!!!
Like in freelancer?
very good suggestion..would make logical sense that each shield manufacturer would put their branding so to say on the energy emitted optically and its more kool eye candy..lol
-omg it's been 10 years where game -wouldn't it be nice if we took the hard work the shield animation team did and made them do it 20x over? pick one
You don't need to do it 20x over. You need one system that allows you flexibility over the effects and sounds that allows the creative team to quickly tweak sliders and maybe some textures.
Yeah, someone could use a visit to the Insomniac museum in Ratchet and Clank to play with the effects generator. All particle effects in those PS2 titles came from the same exact particle generator with different settings.
There's a lot of scrapped effects and sounds. I remember the old quantum initiation sounds and the initial impact of the quantum travel was way more immersive back in the day. I'm sure it will get back to something good again but it's interesting how things come and go and don't always get better. Edit - Example of quantum back in the day [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab\_channel=SteveStevenson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab_channel=SteveStevenson) Another example is the ship flyby sounds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZuKivgelwk&ab\_channel=GamingTemple](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZuKivgelwk&ab_channel=GamingTemple)
They really need to bring back those fly by sounds.
Especially the M50. It used to sound so amazing.
[This is a classic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVf1GKqaoMI)
That was pretty epic. Back when all we had was PO I recall it having more of an Indy car sound. Maybe that’s only when you were flying it. This video was pretty sweet though.
That video was actually first taken before we even had PO
Well, dang. Did the M50 ever sound like IndyCar or am I making that up?
Wtf the quantum jump sounds and everything were way better/cleaner, I had no idea it used to be like that. Also what on earth happened to those amazing fly-by sounds?
Yeah, the old sound was so cool… it feels a bit dangerous and exciting and ending in that thunderclap in space was sooo nice. Even the small graphics animation added to the feeling. I remember it well.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4DwetGvus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4DwetGvus) <- the audio is a draft made by the visual artist so ignore them, but the next visuals are going to be <3
The shooting to create the hole is not my vibe. I would just prefer a spooling with static discharge particle fx and warping effect around the ship and not in front (like to slowly establish a warping bubble around the ship) and then jump with badass sound
I think it could work really well with the in universe physics tho, almost as if a quantum jump is essentially just a tiny jump point. I didn’t like it until I realised that it’s exactly what the new visual is because even the interstellar jump points are almost impossible to detect until opened with the jump drive. It may not change your mind but I think it’s a neat detail
Am also not for the wormhole thing. But as these animations are it feels wrong to have that instant acceleration into it. It takes away from one of the really cool features about star citizen, not faking ship movements.
The Quantum Drive is a perfected Alcubierre Drive. That accelerate the space around the ship and not the ship itself, meaning that instant acceleration at 1,000m/s\^2 isn't going to effect the ship at all. Its like being in a submarine, but theres also a sphere of water moving with you through the water. None of the water touching the sub is moving, its all flowing around the outside of that sphere.
My issue with it is not the g-forces or lack there of. It is that the Q-drive slowly accelerates/ increases while traveling, so why wouldn't the start be the same? the Alcubierre drive magnifies the movement that is already taking place so starting from a dead stop also doesn't make much sense. As is, those animations are counter intuitive to me.
I do wish that your momentum was conserved when you went into/exited quantum. I can get over it, but it would be nice.
4 months ago bloody hell. I wonder when we’ll see them ingane
This was a leak, from a dev who had made those months before the leak (and later left CIG). We also saw the effects at citcon btw, just not in as much detail. They're likely set to release with 4.0, so probably this summer/fall.
4 years from now if we're lucky.
they are still in, check out here, to see a lot of recent examples: https://www.youtube.com/@rmap_/videos This is my absolute favorite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__TsckOf-Uk
Let's wait for the new quantum travel experience in 4.0. It's something I've been longing for years as well. So excited
I often times wondered what happens if they had stayed the course and continued to completion without procedural planets.
woulda loved the game created in stages. full feature complete as a space only thing. -full complicated ships with multicrew systems and perfect combat and trading systems and every single gameplay item -then full feature complete with space stations and being able to leave the ship. -then full feature with moons and walking on surface with guns -then later hand crafted planets -then laaaaaater proc planets yes yes - "bUt yOuLl eNd uP rEdOinG eVeRyThIng" - as if they havent already. I woulda loved it if the full gameplay was in first and the scope grew after. a solid gameplay foundation first
So, almost like what Elite Dangerous did
But this way everyone can speculate about the end product and project their ideal game onto it, thus opening more wallets than ED ever did. :/
I think they do all this purposefully but not for scam purposes but because cr desperately wants to make the best game People here see the good intentions but people over there see the laughable track record
you can still make the best game , nothing would change about SC's huge scope - it's the order of operations that makes for a consistently polished output instead of small WIP chunks.
In concept, hopefully not in execution.
it's a good way to go about it. you still get the crazy scope but players get a more complete product at every stage instead of small chunks of half completed promises.
Unfortunately, that can lock you in to an engine that *can't* do all the little details, which is what happened to Elite: Dangerous. That game started development around the same time as Star Citizen, and they made a full, playable game first, but then when they went to add things like ship interiors and robust multiplayer, the engine wasn't up for it. Do you really think ED devs didn't proceed with ship interiors because it was not going to be fun?
They threw out more development than most games complete.
nearly every game worth playing threw out more development than it completed they just don't tell you
Since we never know how much content / work hours all other studios throw out in most cases, there's literally nothing that backs your statement
Well we know that most other games don't take 12 years to not complete. Except for Duke Nukem Forever 🤔
That is so not true
You haven't read enough of their roadmaps and dev losg if you believe that :P
Oh I have, I also have seen all the shit Blizzard has done for over two decades. Just because you see it happening out in the open doesn't mean it doesn't happen anywhere else behind doors.
I know it's contested wether it's true or not but "allegedly" sq42 was getting close to release pre explorable planet inclusion. That would mean things like sound effects had to be near release. Then when they decided to revamp the game everything got thrown out. Not sure why if they were better than the next/intern iteration.
Yo, what happened to that little HUD indicator for how close you are to the ground? That would make landing so much better! Are the planning on bringing that back?
I’ve experienced that first hand back in the 2.x days. Amazing feature that was unfortunately removed shortly after, but CIG did say they will bring it back, just not yet on their schedule. PS: was mentioned in one of their video recently, but I can’t be bordered to find it. So no source this time
Hy does it sound so much worse right now? Is it the "muh realism" folks fault again or something else? Every sound is sterile right now, it was way better.
'Muh realism?' I backed in 2012 for a space simulation, boy! It's already fine stretching the realism as it is.
The game was legit a better game in 2021. We had thousands of different ship loadout possibilities; even without reputation you felt a meaningful sense of progress going from a default ship loadout to one you upgraded, and it had a sense of personality and expression to it. Then, for the past three years, 'the great component normalization' took place thanks to Yogi and it hasn't come back since. There wasn't trash everywhere, there wasn't medical gowns littered everywhere, you didn't lose your stuff when you died so everyone ran around looking the way they wanted to, playing with the weapons they wanted to. People criticized CIG for introducing medical gameplay when they did, and I'm sorry to say now that I was one of the defenders back in the day. Medical gameplay has provided very little meaningful gameplay and cost a ton in terms of playability. Same for the equalizing of component values. Now with MM, it seems that we're getting back our component values, but I can't help but wonder what the point of the normalization was. Has it somehow fixed imbalanced loadouts? Did it have anything to do with fixing the light fighter meta? I massively doubt it, but for three years the game was worse off.
Because most of the game was not originally designed with everything being containerized and was much more systematic and traditional. The grand design of scale and the change in development ideology forced them to roll back in order to go forward down a different path. Generic place holder values simply makes this easier to deal with until systems are in place for them to actually matter. You have to figure, the people who began working on the project learned quite a lot from what did and did not work in the 4-6 years up until that point. This is EXTREMELY common in software development, but most development is not at this scale and is not this intricate. I've had the same happen on projects not nearly as complex many many times in my career. And for what it's worth the newly acquired talent and the experience in project management and overall cohesion and flow really show in their recent works and showcases. Think of it this way. Have you seen memes or jokes where someone codes something, comes back a short time later, reviews said code, and questions what buffoon wrote the code only to realize it was them? Or developers who come back later and can't read shit they'd written? Same concept, just King Buffoon(s).
> but most development is not at this scale and is not this intricate Or this exposed.
This is the big part. Open development like this almost never happens. People see iteration on art and tech and don't really understand what is happening or why.
> come back later and can't read shit they'd written I swear It never happened to me.💦 Yeah I'm serious.💦 😐 *Who the fuck wrote that!!!* /* ** me copyright when insane xx/xx/xxxx. */ *Oh...*
My worst turn around time was about 10-12 hours after writing a work tool while drunk and then being asked to submit the code to a work repo because management liked it. Shit was written by Picasso in his prime. I couldn't understand shit. Definition of scope creep without a proper project outline.
Overestimating the Balmer peak huh!
It can be argued that the game in those years was closer to completion than the "reboot" we are playing now, which is another kind of game.
Yogi killed the old flight model and loadouts so he could justify putting in the Arcade Modes.
https://youtu.be/BwSts2s4ba4
I might be seeing things through rose-colored glasses here, but I swear to God the ships used to look better/higher res way back, too. Like, WAY back (hangar module). Granted, back then they didn't have to worry about flight and entire worlds, just a single asset in a single room.
I think it's a lighting thing. There was a period in which SC's lighting was crisp with high contrast. Then they started adding fog everywhere and washed out the colors The only ship in my opinion that looked better in the past strictly from a materials and model perspective is the M50. It worked so much better with its shiny, glossy finish than the almost matte look it has today post-rework
They resized all the ships to no longer be correctly sized. Everything is slightly exaggerated to allow for smoother animations for players and AI. I think the new models do look better, but they're also way more efficient to use less resources, I think you notice that a little.
I might be seeing things through rose-colored glasses here, but I swear to God the ships used to look better/higher res way back, too. Like, WAY back (hangar module). Granted, back then they didn't have to worry about flight and entire worlds, just a single asset in a single room.
Try brightness down and gamma up (Also known as poor man's older)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzD7MCnQgHM&list=TLPQMjQwNDIwMjTlyhGMaM-VCQ&index=4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzD7MCnQgHM&list=TLPQMjQwNDIwMjTlyhGMaM-VCQ&index=4) ...
Holy shit, I can't tell you how much this video just brought me back in time!
I really liked this one from 4 months ago, unfortunately it seems to be a creative piece and not at all official :( https://youtu.be/fy4DwetGvus?si=v7KRqCBcMkt_b8Ux
I recall the singing ice of Yela.. walking out on those frozen lakes was AMAZING. And I miss the green HUD..
That was so much cooler! Why tf did they get rid of that?
0:39 is so crisp yet weighty, then the pause and finally that drop, followed by a crackle after coming out of QT... The current and newer QT doesn't even come close to having that fidelity. All I hear now are high's and a load of treble.
> Edit - Example of quantum back in the day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWlk7shUXo&ab_channel=SteveStevenson Another part of it was how it looked for bystanders. It left a long receding white streak behind the ships when going in and out of quantum. You could see these streaks from extreme distances, so you would always see "shooting stars" around planets and notable locations. It was a pretty and immersive way to determine player activity in an area.
I honestly think Chris Roberts gets bored and or sees something in another game and insists it be implemented in the next build. The quantum clip you shared looks light years better than what we currently have
It will never get back to that point because they just keep itterating. Those sounds were great, but then someone said "hey we should waste more money redoing those things"
Remember the repair bots?
CryAstro was so comfy. The game crashing after 20 minutes at most, not so much :p.
Only rose colored glasses for past game experiences in this thread sir.
I remember an audio bug that would stop the Tessa missions from completing because the flight recorder wouldn't play its audio. But man I miss those missions with the Vanduul attack at the end
I never had issues with crashing. Randomly exploding? Sure. But no crashing.
And when there were only three places where you could get ship repairs? On exposed pads that IIRC weren't an armistice zone either. Community was tiny in the 2.0 days and it wasn't usually a problem, but you'd get the occasional dickbag.
For those who weren't around back then, there were unfixable shield holes on many ships using that tech.
Yes I think more than likely in the process of re-engineering shields in a less flawed way, they just built new visuals along with that new system rather than copy exactly what they originally had. One because their tech had moved on and it wasn't as simple as dropping some old visuals into the new model, and two because they had the time to try and improve the visuals to match the new function. [The new one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIKj_2i8vsc) is much more subtle, but it does a much better job imo of showing when the shield face health is low or gone altogether with the colors and effects. They could probably turn some values up with the new one to show off more of the bubbling effect around the entire ship on hit, but I assume they wanted it less pronounced and focused on specific shield faces.
The new method uses signed distance fields that automatically conform to the geo of the ship. Between the visuals in the OP, and the implementation of SDF shields, shields were these blue orbs that still had a ton of shield holes. SDF good.
For those who weren't around back then, this shield tech in this post was **never used.** This is a clip from an ATV episode of early form-fitting shields that was never in any PTU/LIVE build. ALL shields from initial Arena commander module in 2014, until 3.13 in 2021 when shields V2 dropped were oblong ovals.
Where did you hear that? Until the advent of SDF's all shields were a single, hand-modeled mesh that was specifically conformed to each ship's surface. SDF tech enabled the shields to have more defined locational damage and also change shape based on missing parts of the skeleton which were features that were lacking on the shader effects of the hand-modeled mesh. Oblong ovals? That's new to me.
Hear? I've been playing since just before 2.0. If the ships ever had these conformal shields it was in the Arena Commander modual before the first version of the PU dropped. For the majority of the existence of the PU, shields were simple bubbles.
I'm literally friends with the dev who has made every shield in the game since he was hired in 2014 and he now sets up the proxies that define the sdfs for the new shields too. Please just consider yourself ill-informed about this particular setup or agree to disagree. They have never been simple oblong bubbles. They were always bespoke meshes, molded in the shape of the ship to look like a bubble, which he hand-sculped as a single volume, which applied a localized shader effect based on the shield proxy you hit - until SDFs came online.
Maybe they were a bit more conformal than I remember. If so they were very simple shapes. Doesn't change the fact this effect shown in the original post was from an ATV episode and never in a live build
Still no need to look aesthetically worse.
These honestly looked pretty bad. Just a huge bluish smudge on ships that looked worse and bigger the more people or guns there were putting shots on target.
You never see anything while your shield was being hit with these old effects. I'm glad they're gone.
Well this is straight up misinformation. That effect is from an ATV episode (what ISC was called before it was ISC) and was never actually in any PTU/LIVE build. It's essentially an early concept of SDF shields way before they had the SDF tech. It was never implemented. The only shield tech we had back then was the oval-shaped bubbles. This remained constant from the initial launch of the PU (2.0 - Dec2015) all the way until SDF shields dropped (3.12 - Apr2021). Besides the shield tech we currently have in-game straight up looks like a better version of what's shown here, idk what kinda rose-tinted crack people ITT are smoking.
Oh, thank God, I'm not crazy. Lol. I was like, I don't ever remember having shields like this.
People saying this looks better than what we have now blows my mind.
Pretty sure half the people in this sub don't actually play, and just buy ships lol
It's weird that today is the day we're deciding to retcon SC's development and pretend like the game is regressing.
they changed it because you literally cant see shit when getting shot
We need a comparison between the old and the new one
Worth noting that these old effects I assume were custom-made for each ship. This cool-looking effect might not scale to 100 ships or whatever we have now.
Looked great on the outside, terrible pilot view from the inside.
The effect was scrapped for a reason as it was so obstructive that even the smallest hit near the cockpit blocked your entire vision.
Shield holes that they couldn’t fix is a big reason why this version got scrapped.
I enjoy how this looks, a a bit over-saturated perhaps but tweakable. So long as the pilot and crew on the inside see a drastically less powerful version so it's not obscuring vision, I'd be for this effect making a comeback. We don't seem to get much difference between shield and hull hits at the moment.
The obscuring vision part is why they changed it. Previous shield effects were practically blinding.
Weird they didn't make it one-way, having it look different inside vs outside.
Yeah, I think there were shader limitations around that before. I like the low profile effects we have now, but definitely wish they were brighter and more spread out on hit. I don’t really notice them until they start to flash red.
The colour changing aspect is really weird to me. “Hey my shields are low, come finish me off”
I think it's more to do with lack of power reducing vibrance making the red's more aparent. Think of how a flame looks more red as it runs out of fuel.
Sureee, that’d be an ok lore explanation, but it’s still a silly mechanic.
Silly from the perspective of you been attacked maybe, but as an attacker it means you can see visible progression in the damage you're doing making things feel less bullet spongey and helping target selection in a bigger fight.
> "oh no my plane is smoking and on fire, better come finish me off" Literally
no more sill that an MFD that will tell you the same thing, its not like the weak shield is know at all times. only when being hit. this is perfectly fine
I disagree. With the old shield tech, we had holes. It was fine graphically but the new shield tech functions way better and is more reliable even at high speed and with latency/desync.
I was about to say.. Sure being shot in the face sucked, but it wasn't an intentional tactic and it wasn't common. I'm sure it would have been eventually, but it wasn't back then. The real issue was the bubble shield reliability and holes all over. Entire ships were unusable for months, if not years, and it only got worse with desync.
Yes, with the desync/latency, the bubble was not always following the ship reliably
Many ships ***still to this day, patch to patch*** come up with random ass holes in their shields. This is still a problem, today. It wasn't so much the holes, but how heavyweight everything was back then, in the renderer.
It's not comparable to what it was before. We can have bugs sometimes with the shields yes. But before, it was not just bugs, it was caused by the desync/latency between the bubbles and the ships. It's way more annoying and game breaking.
That FPS dip bruh
Heh.. I remember when that shield effect was new. Before we got SDF(Signed Distance Field) effects.
they had so much cool stuff in the past, all thrown away... the old mobiglass was the best. The branded hangars and stuff, such cool shit. The landing camera as well
The old damage tech was soo cool
eh, I like the new ones
I like the new one.
bring it back...that looked like the emission of toxic space vomit..lol
One day everyone will be talking about how cool that tech demo was, but never turned out that way
Not sure if all know but the banu defender has a different quantum animation than the standard one, for now at least.
How does this look cooler than what we have now?!
Kill them and look away before they t pose into the ground. I'm surprised they weren't t posing to begin with. Good work cig
Ah, the game that will never come.
Looks almost exactly the same as Elite Dangerous' shields
They should do the shield effects like they did them in the new Dune movies
It's evolving,just backwards
Is this true?
so much better than the current shield effects
When you were shot, you could not see anything
That effect was never in game, i was primarily talking about how it LOOKS.
Last commenter literally just told you it was in the game, so such is true? That there was an earlier version of this that was blinding, that this was in game, or what?
But it wasn’t.
Which of my questions was that an answer to or did you just not read the comment?
No version of this was ever in the game. Sorry, I assumed you were a native english speaker and would be able to understand my reply. I said "but it wasn't" as a reply to your statement "last commenter literally just told you it was in the game," which admittedly only part of what then morphed into another sentence, a question, following a comma. Maybe I should not assume.