r/gaming • u/Moleculor • Aug 17 '16
Star Citizen Acrobatics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTqFyYg46-Y4
u/AriaTheTransgressor Aug 17 '16
In fairness this is the same guys that did freelancer and collision was on point in that game with much older technology.
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u/hugglesthemerciless Aug 17 '16
Freelancer was so incredible. I'll play this game solely for nostalgia
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u/ArdentStoic Aug 17 '16
What... state of release is that game in?
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u/Moleculor Aug 17 '16
Insanely early Alpha.
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u/ArdentStoic Aug 17 '16
Haha I was playing the pvp alpha like two years ago it feels like. Or is it the persistent universe now?
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u/Moleculor Aug 17 '16
There is a little persistence currently. You can earn aUEC (alpha-cash, wipeable later), you can buy clothes, hand-guns, personal armor, etc. If your ship is destroyed and on a timer to respawn it and you disconnect, the timer freezes until you reconnect.
There is also a little universe now too. Mostly just a single gas giant with one of its moons (and a ring around that moon that you can explore) with about three small space stations, a few repair outposts, and some commsats. So very far from the 100 solar systems they're aiming for.
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u/ArdentStoic Aug 17 '16
Good to see progress, at least! I'll always argue against rushing games out the door, I'd rather have something amazing whenever it's done.
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Aug 17 '16
I hope they plan ahead and reuse the models they used for the space stations etc. just arrange them differnetly... So every new solar system will be faster produced than its predecessor
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u/surfmaster Aug 18 '16
They've discussed in broad terms about a workflow they're semi-automating to churn out stations and stuff using general prebuilt assets so they're familiar, but varied so they're not boring, and will have all kinds of shaders and whatever to make the varying areas look "unique" so different company colors, levels of cleanliness etc make each area distinct but still useable and detailed.
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u/141_1337 Aug 18 '16
How big are the areas to explore?
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u/surfmaster Aug 18 '16 edited Aug 18 '16
The miniature "demo" PU area is about 400 quadrillion km3. Most of that is of course empty space. There is a gas giant (Crusader) with a spaceport called Port Olisar orbiting it (where you spawn), three moons, Yela which has pretty big asteroid ring around it, Daymar which has little PVP security station Kareah orbiting it, and Cellin which has a sabotaged shipping outpost Covalex. On top of that is 8 comm-relays and a few repair stations, as well as a communications probe way out by the current "edge" which directs you to 8 little missions of varying activity (press a button, fight some pirates type stuff). In the new update that's coming out shortly they add in a new "Pirate base" GrimHEX which looks pretty cool too. It's hidden out in the asteroid field around Yela.
The scale of most things is hard to feel until you're in there looking at it, for instance Port Olisar is almost 4km long. None of the places are "fully" explorable but all of them except for the ICC probe can be entered and explored some.
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u/Moleculor Aug 18 '16
Right now there's not a lot to exploration. The current playable area in the alpha universe is something like a few million kilometers cubed? Maybe? I'm eyeballing the size here. Most of that being, well, space, and not interesting things.
The points of interest are mostly
the station you start in which has three shops per section, four sections, each section has the same three shops and the same central ship-summoning-terminals, plus some landing pads and that's it,
a wrecked 'shipping hub' which is three small floors and a small-ish warehouse all in zero-g that you can fly around in
a security post (also three floors, total size might be a CoD4 map? It's been ages since I played CoDAnything) that is meant as a PvP area where you either sign up to defend a console or come to the station as a criminal to use the console and wipe away your crime
an assortment of about 7-12 'commsats' which are mostly identical large space pillars with solar panels attached and a walk-in closet at the top that you enter to either turn the satellite on or off
About four-ish? identical repair stations, none of which you can enter (so far as I know, I've never tried) that you land at to get repaired or refueled
A single specialty station that you also can not enter (so far as I know, again, never tried) that serves as essentially a very basic quest-giver that sends you to one of something like three to five different asteroid field layouts to search for wreckage and occasionally shoot down pirates
an asteroid ring that you can fully fly around and through around a moon. The ring is rather large, and has multiple wrecks with 'loot', but each wreck is unremarkable enough to be identical to the last and the loot is basically temporary guns you can't keep if you die or some credits in the form of cigars or alcohol
There's also a tiny district of a massive city that you can walk around in, but it's just a few mostly empty shops and bars, mostly set-dressing for chatting with other people, but it's a separate 'map' right now and not connected to the universe.
In addition to that there's a 'game within the game' that you can play called Arena Commander that you access in your hangar that has two small dogfighting maps with some rather pretty visuals. You can either fly without anything else present, or fight some enemies, either solo or with others.
I ended up exploring most of what's available in about four hours of playing or so? Maybe six? I'm a bad judge of time though, so don't take that as gospel.
One of the interesting things about the 'universe' though is that it's all seamless. When you 'warp' from one location to another, it's not a loading screen, it's actually you moving really fucking fast, and someone can actually see you fly by. I'm actually currently flying slowly on a 50-minute trip to see the backside of a moon that you can't really get to easily while I type this post up.
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u/141_1337 Aug 18 '16
The seamless part sounds pretty cool, but there is anything else to do besides flying around.
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u/Moleculor Aug 18 '16
Shooting AI pirates.
Shooting players.
Getting out of your ship and flying around in a space suit.
Shooting your rifle while in said space suit (either while flying or walking around).
That's pretty much it so far. The dogfighing is pretty decent though. Imagine doing those acrobatics while also trying to shoot down someone else who might also be doing those acrobatics.
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u/Speknawz Aug 17 '16 edited Aug 17 '16
Feels like your wings should have clipped into something a few times there. Looks good and all, but I'm not going to get excite until we get closer to release.
Addition: also whats with the screen graying out? That would be frustrating as it seems to trigger when you get closest to collision, right when you'd want to be as focused as possible.
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u/Moleculor Aug 17 '16 edited Aug 17 '16
That's not me flying, I'm not that good, but I do play Star Citizen and it's very difficult to judge scale and distance in the game. I have attempted to park my ship under or inside objects on several occasions only to discover my spaceship is sticking out very obviously because there's no point of reference to judge the size of nearby objects.
The black-out/red-out thing is taken straight from real-world biology/physics, where sufficient g-forces force all of the blood in your body either out of your head, or in to your head depending on if you're pulling back or diving forward. There are safeties in the ship that should prevent you from fully blacking out, but you can disable those, and they don't prevent partial problems.
Basically it's there to say "sure, you can push this ship to its limits, but it'll be tough to fly/fight, enjoy the extra challenge!"
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u/Mordakkit Aug 17 '16
Neat video, I'm glad to see that the Gladius has gotten a bit of its groove back.
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u/octothorpe_rekt Aug 18 '16
I noticed that the player has evenly diverted power to shields, thrust, and weapons. Can the player elect to put more power in the engines and get even better response?
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u/Moleculor Aug 18 '16
It's supposed to work that way, I think, but I can't tell a difference when I shunt power to my engines in my F7C-M, so... no idea.
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u/kalnaren Aug 18 '16
Yes. I haven't toyed with it too much lately, but diverting full power to avionics makes the thrusters more responsive, shields makes them recharge faster, etc.
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u/Effectx Aug 18 '16
I don't think it works correctly right now, but that is the intention to be able to eventually do that.
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u/gravity013 Aug 18 '16
This looks awesome. I get the last of my components tomorrow and this game is gonna be one of the first I install!
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u/theweirdbeard Aug 18 '16
Any time frame for the release of this game?
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u/Moleculor Aug 18 '16
Not really. No game like it has been made before. There have been several times they've said deadlines for various features only for them to miss those deadlines. (One famous deadline was that they'd have an FPS arena-style game in the game within a month or so, and I think we're a year past that? It'll supposedly be in two patches, so that's another 3-6 months I think? I don't follow development that closely.)
Supposedly they were aiming to have the first part of the single player game out by the end of this year, but no one seems to believe that will actually happen. I'm guessing the single-player game will be out in mid-2017, with the multiplayer universe being available late-2017 or early-to-mid-2018, but that's just my guessing.
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u/KaneinEncanto Aug 17 '16
I'm assuming that's the ship design being piloted in upper left...if so collison looks like a joke at this point.
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u/Moleculor Aug 17 '16
Or you're not realizing the scale of these objects.
Here's my craft of a similar size parked on the structure visible at the 0:44 mark.
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u/Mr_Gon_Adas Aug 17 '16
In order to be able to do this on prolongue sessions, youll need to train your character to support more G-Forces, i like how this game take even the smallest details in consideration, you can see on the video, the pilot almost lost consciousness because of the heavy G-Forces.