Star Citizen

[theyarecomingforyou]

Star Citizen - Arena Commander 1.0

 

These are some screenshots I took earlier that I thought I would share with the folks here on Neowin. This is a game I've been backing since the Kickstarter a couple of years ago. The game has made incredible progress this past year, with the recent 1.0 release adding fifteen ships to the game. Already the graphics are extremely impressive and the gameplay is very enjoyable. I'll follow up this post with some screenshots of the racing mode and Broken Moon map.

 

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

 

 

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

Such a pretty game. I just hope they release in a timely manner. I don't do early access anymore.

[Melfster]

Such a pretty game. I just hope they release in a timely manner. I don't do early access anymore.

Why do people care if it released in timely manner or not?   What I hate is when games are release way too early. This last year has been full of buggy and incomplete games with producers who are trying to make quick buck rather then interest of gamers or consumers in mind.  I wish most games were delayed a year or more.  It more important to get the game right then releasing it early. 

[theyarecomingforyou]

Such a pretty game. I just hope they release in a timely manner. I don't do early access anymore.

To be fair this game is never going to be released in the traditional manner. It's a continual development process, as while Squadron 42

[trag3dy]

The only reason I've stayed away from the game is that I'm concerned how well it will play on my (sorry to admit) aging system.

[theyarecomingforyou]

As promised, here are some more screenshots:
 







 

 

[+Asmodai MVC]

First let me say I backed this game both directly from Roberts Space Industries as well as in the KickStarter.  I think I've bought like 4 ships at this point and I'm very excited about the game in general.  That said, I haven't actually played it.  I did load the hanger module up on my old PC a few times when it first came out and look around my ships (at the time I only had 2 of the 4 I have now) but I haven't touched it since.  Arena Commander doesn't really interest me.  I'll probably wait until either Squadron 42 releases or enough of the MMO is up and running for you to explore/trade as dogfighting alone isn't enough to hold my interest.  I did built a new PC recently with Witcher III, Star Citizen, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance as the main motivations so I'm excited to see how things go.  All that said with respect to the screenshots:

 

The clouds in the first 3 pics of the most recent post look HORRIBLE.  They look like a simple texture of a single flat plane.  Do they move?  Heck even older 2D shooters had multiple planes with the textures moving at different speeds (parallax scrolling).  I hope it's just a strange occurrence in these particular screen shots or placeholder graphics or something but they look really bad... especially when compared to how good everything else looks.

[spaceelf]

For me I just don't think I'll be able to play it before 2016 heh.

[+Asmodai MVC]

For me I just don't think I'll be able to play it before 2016 heh.

I agree. As I said in my post: 

I'll probably wait until either Squadron 42 releases or enough of the MMO is up and running for you to explore/trade as dogfighting alone isn't enough to hold my interest.

If I had to guess when the first of those two things is going to happen I'd say sometime in 2016 as well. I'm fine with that though and I enjoy reading about the progress and seeing screen shots such as those in this thread. The game is insanely ambitious and I'm cool with them taking time to get it right. I REALLY hope they pull this off and I'm happy to support it.

[Astra.Xtreme]

The game no doubt has the best graphics or any game, to date, but I really really don't like the financial philosophy of it.

 

It looks like the biggest magnitude "pay to win" scheme I've ever seen in a game.  The people that buy the ships for hundreds/thousands of dollars are going to expect them to be considerably better against opponents, and that's going to severely wreck the game play.

 

I really hope I'm wrong with those assumptions, but I have a big problem with games that "require" you to spend a crazy amount of money in order to be competitive.

[perochan]

looks very nice and hope it plays as nice too.

 

oh and hope it plays in Mac too.

[Nagisan]

The game no doubt has the best graphics or any game, to date, but I really really don't like the financial philosophy of it.

I wouldn't say best graphics. I've seen better (more realistic) looking games, even years ago there were better looking.....this definitely has a style that makes it look like a game IMO. But it is definitely a beautiful looking game, much better than the average.

[Astra.Xtreme]

I wouldn't say best graphics. I've seen better (more realistic) looking games, even years ago there were better looking.....this definitely has a style that makes it look like a game IMO. But it is definitely a beautiful looking game, much better than the average.

Crysis?

[Melfster]

I wouldn't say best graphics. I've seen better (more realistic) looking games, even years ago there were better looking.....this definitely has a style that makes it look like a game IMO. But it is definitely a beautiful looking game, much better than the average.

 

What games do you think have better graphics?   You really have to see it motion to understand the level of graphical fidelity.    It's going to have 4k and 8k textures. It is built on the  updated crysis engine. What they are showing is still the old engine.  The new one will be 64bit I believe. Right now it's by far the best looking game coming out that I have seen.

[Nagisan]

Crysis?

At full settings, that's one of them, but I suspect that has to do with the graphical style rather than the quality of the graphics.

 

What games do you think have better graphics?   You really have to see it motion to understand the level of graphical fidelity.    It's going to have 4k and 8k textures. It is built on the  updated crysis engine. What they are showing is still the old engine.  The new one will be 64bit I believe. Right now it's by far the best looking game coming out that I have seen.

In addition to Crysis (on full settings), Skyrim with the proper mods looks considerably more realistic, even more-so when you add in an ENB.

 

I am only basing this off the images I've seen in this thread though the games looks great, but as I said earlier it looks more stylized and less realistic than some other games IMO. If that's on an old engine (and the new one will look better) than it may improve, but I don't think the game looks as realistic as some others....the textures look too clean/perfect to look realistic.

[theyarecomingforyou]

First let me say I backed this game both directly from Roberts Space Industries as well as in the KickStarter.  I think I've bought like 4 ships at this point and I'm very excited about the game in general.  That said, I haven't actually played it.  I did load the hanger module up on my old PC a few times when it first came out and look around my ships (at the time I only had 2 of the 4 I have now) but I haven't touched it since.  Arena Commander doesn't really interest me.  I'll probably wait until either Squadron 42 releases or enough of the MMO is up and running for you to explore/trade as dogfighting alone isn't enough to hold my interest.  I did built a new PC recently with Witcher III, Star Citizen, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance as the main motivations so I'm excited to see how things go.

The FPS module is rumoured to be released in March and will feature zero-G gameplay. The planetside module isn't far away, at which point you'll be able to explore a few locations and invite other people into your hangar. The first episode of Squadron 42 is due this year, almost certainly towards the end of the year.

 

The clouds in the first 3 pics of the most recent post look HORRIBLE.  They look like a simple texture of a single flat plane.  Do they move?  Heck even older 2D shooters had multiple planes with the textures moving at different speeds (parallax scrolling).  I hope it's just a strange occurrence in these particular screen shots or placeholder graphics or something but they look really bad... especially when compared to how good everything else looks.

They're just a placeholder, part of a 2D skybox. If you look at the clouds below you'll see they're volumetric and closer to the standard one would expect. The racing mode was put together quite quickly. The game is currently in pre-alpha, so it's to be expected.

 

I wouldn't say best graphics. I've seen better (more realistic) looking games, even years ago there were better looking.....this definitely has a style that makes it look like a game IMO. But it is definitely a beautiful looking game, much better than the average.

Most of the engine features haven't even been implemented yet, like anti-aliasing (rather important), DX12 / Mantle support, 64bit double precision (required for larger levels), etc. I'm not aware of any game with better graphics and we're still two years away from release. The quality of the assets far exceeds that of any other game - you're talking about ships with in excess of 7 million polygons, in comparison to a game like Ryse where characters have 'just' 80,000.

 

Please do tell us which games had better graphics two years ago.

 

At full settings, that's one of them, but I suspect that has to do with the graphical style rather than the quality of the graphics.

 

In addition to Crysis (on full settings), Skyrim with the proper mods looks considerably more realistic, even more-so when you add in an ENB.

Ha... I really don't have any serious response. 

[theyarecomingforyou]

Here's a reminder of what Crysis looked like:

 

 

And here's the pre-alpha of Star Citizen (which doesn't support anti-aliasing):

 

[+Asmodai MVC]

The FPS module is rumoured to be released in March and will feature zero-G gameplay. The planetside module isn't far away, at which point you'll be able to explore a few locations and invite other people into your hangar. The first episode of Squadron 42 is due this year, almost certainly towards the end of the year.

I have almost zero interest in the FPS module. It might be kind of cool to show people my ships in my hanger and/or as a "lobby" of sorts to hang out with others between missions (read glorified chat room) but I HATE FPS games. I hope I don't HAVE to do any FPS combat when the game releases to enjoy the game as it wasn't one of the advertised features of the game when I backed it. (it was added much later in a stretch goal) I know A LOT of people enjoy those games but I'm not one of them so I don't mind it being there but I hope it's something I can safely ignore if I choose to.

As for Squadron 42 I'm really excited about it but I don't think I'll be doing the "first episode" until more is released. I'm not sure what exactly "first episode" means but if it's only a few hours of play and doesn't wrap up it's story then I'll wait until the whole story arc is ready to start. Last thing I need is another thing to end in a cliff hanger and have to wait for the next chapter to come out. (I'm looking at you George R. R. Martin!) I really don't mind waiting to start though if it's worth the wait and by all indications it seems to be.

They're just a placeholder, part of a 2D skybox. If you look at the clouds below you'll see they're volumetric and closer to the standard one would expect. The racing mode was put together quite quickly. The game is currently in pre-alpha, so it's to be expected.

The clouds below what? (were there supposed to be images attached?) I don't see any other in-atmosphere screen shots besides the first three that look awful. All the rest are in space or inside buildings (FPS) unless I'm missing something.

[HawkMan]

There's a major difference between "hard" spaceship models with at best simple animations most often in a space enviroment with very few other ships, and when thy're there unless you're crashed into them they're going to be LOD models with a tiny fraction of that polycount, heck you'll most likely only ever see the 7 million poly ship in the hangar or on your own ship in a chase view(though it would actually be pointless, so I'd ager it'd be mostly a hangar and "cutscene" thing. 

 

you can't compare that to organic soft models with a combination of morph target animation(face) and skeletal IK deformation. Skeletal IK skinning is an order of magnitude more complex and in performance could potentially make a 7 million spaceship model about as "expensive" as a 80k softbody model with Morph targets, skeletal IK, Cloth sim, Hair Sim, hair shaders, and I believe they even used Sub Surface Scattering in the shading on that particular game, or simulated it, either way, very expensive in rendertime.

 

I'm looking forward to SC myself, though I think there's been some weird choices that's been made and they're suffering bad from feature creep and not developing the game in a top down fashion but still. Even with what they have now, I have a hard time seeing a finished, polished and playable relatively bug free game by the end of the year. 

 

In the meantime though, I can enjoy Elite:Dangerous which looks pretty much as good, but is a very different game within the same genre. Space games have always had the benefit of being able to have much higher graphics quality that others. you already see this in the test shots and demonstrations they have shown of the FPS module where the graphics aren't nearly the same as the space game. 

Here's a reminder of what Crysis looked like:

 

 

And here's the pre-alpha of Star Citizen (which doesn't support anti-aliasing):

 

 

From a purely renderer point of view, the crysis scene is the one that is by far more costly. 

[Nagisan]

Here's a reminder of what Crysis looked like:

 

 

 

And here's the pre-alpha of Star Citizen (which doesn't support anti-aliasing):

 

 

I've seen better renders of Crysis.

 

I suppose it has something to do with the setting of the game though, while the graphics are great they cannot really be realistic because we don't have spaceships traveling through space (like we do jeeps traveling through jungles and what not), so we have no real point of reference as to what it should look like, just reference of what we think it should look like. In your example, the Star Citizen shot looks cleaner, but not necessarily more realistic IMHO. It's a beautiful game, but I wouldn't go as far to call it the best looking game to date myself, especially when it's not complete. Clean and beautiful style, yes, best graphics ever? No...maybe when it's complete and all features are running, but not right now.

 

Skyrim for example can look incredible:

 

 

There's better images too, I just haven't taken the time to track them down.

[theyarecomingforyou]

I have almost zero interest in the FPS module. It might be kind of cool to show people my ships in my hanger and/or as a "lobby" of sorts to hang out with others between missions (read glorified chat room) but I HATE FPS games. I hope I don't HAVE to do any FPS combat when the game releases to enjoy the game as it wasn't one of the advertised features of the game when I backed it. (it was added much later in a stretch goal) I know A LOT of people enjoy those games but I'm not one of them so I don't mind it being there but I hope it's something I can safely ignore if I choose to.

There will be FPS sections in Squadron 42. Most will be non-combat (exploring planets, getting to your ship, etc). When it comes to the Persistent Universe you'll be able to choose your own play style, so you'll be able to avoid it for the most part. 

 

As for Squadron 42 I'm really excited about it but I don't think I'll be doing the "first episode" until more is released. I'm not sure what exactly "first episode" means but if it's only a few hours of play and doesn't wrap up it's story then I'll wait until the whole story arc is ready to start. Last thing I need is another thing to end in a cliff hanger and have to wait for the next chapter to come out. (I'm looking at you George R. R. Martin!) I really don't mind waiting to start though if it's worth the wait and by all indications it seems to be.

The talk is that it will be longer than the episodes for the Telltale games, which were a couple of hours each. Certainly if you wait until all the chapters are released you will have a much more polished experience.

 

The clouds below what? (were there supposed to be images attached?) I don't see any other in-atmosphere screen shots besides the first three that look awful. All the rest are in space or inside buildings (FPS) unless I'm missing something.

In the screenshots I posted earlier you can see volumetric clouds underneath the ship, in the lower parts of the image.

 

From a purely renderer point of view, the crysis scene is the one that is by far more costly. 

I wasn't talking about from a purely technical point of view, though even then the poly count and texture detail in SC far exceed anything in Crysis and it uses significantly more VRAM.

 

 

 

Skyrim for example can look incredible:

 

You and I have very different definitions of "incredible".

[HawkMan]

Polycount while it logically for anyone not familiar with modeling and rendering sounds like it would be the most important aspect of a model for rendertime cost, really is one of the least. an then you get into diminishing returns, And again why are you even comparing soft body dynamic models to hard spaceship models it makes zero sense. 

 

And of course a model/game that has soft body dynamics in and especially hundreds of morph targets will use more ram. 

 

And ah, when you where talking about ships before you basically only mean the capital ships, which basically translates to "scenery". Same as the city of paris in AC or even just the Notre Dame ? what do you think the poly count of that is the whole cathedral, interiors, furniture, animated stuff that hangs down inside and outside and all this is ?

 

OF course most of the time when you see the church from the outside, you'll be far away when you see the whole church and it'll use a much lower LOD model, just like the cruisers, When you're close to it, only the parts you're close to and can see will be the high poly count parts, and at most you can only see 1/6 to 1/4 of the model anyway (you know you can't see the backside, top, bottom, front or back from the side you're looking at).

 

So they're both scenery objects, sure the cruisers moves around and can probably(maybe? not sure if this is possible yet) be destroyed, but it's still essentially scenery even if it fires guns and all that. 

 

SC is looking to be an awesome game, but it's space scenery can't be compared to a FPS game. 

 

If you're going to compare graphics, compare to games it realistic to compare with, Eve, E:D, well that's pretty much it, and E:D is just launched and is like SC and ever developing game. It's a genre that has pretty much been dead for the last decade or so outside of some very small and generally failed games and the niche group of Eve masochists

[Lingwo]

I really hope this game is a success as it is highly ambitious and would like to see it live up to the hype.

 

I just feel we'll be talking about this game in a few years and how it failed completely and didn't deliver.

Every time i read something about this game it just makes me think it'll go to development hell and never be finished.

[Astra.Xtreme]

Man, what kind of rig (or should I say Titan server farm) is going to be required to handle a 7M poly count density? 

[+Asmodai MVC]

There will be FPS sections in Squadron 42. Most will be non-combat (exploring planets, getting to your ship, etc). When it comes to the Persistent Universe you'll be able to choose your own play style, so you'll be able to avoid it for the most part.

I played the old Wing Commander games and they let you move around the ship (go to the hanger, the bridge, the briefing room, etc.) I'm fine with that being replaced by a FPS view and in fact I'd say that's a natural evolution of those types of games. I'm not saying I don't want any first person in the games... I don't want any First Person SHOOTER. I'm not sure what exactly "exploring planets" entails but I don't want to play some Halo minigame in the middle of my Wing Commander++ experience. Now in single player if it's only a tiny part of the overall experience I guess that's fine assuming the actual ship stuff is great but I don't want to be playing with the Call of Duty crowd.

In the persistent Universe I likewise don't mind being able to walk around the station. Bringing friends to the hanger to show my ship, hanging out at the bar chatting with other players, etc. What I don't want is some FPS goons to burst into the bar and kill me while I'm chatting up my friends. I don't want to HAVE to land my ship and get out and do some FPS style mission to get the good ship upgrades. I don't want to be mining or trading and be boarded and have to defend my ship in a FPS shooter style inside the ship. I guess that means I may have to stick to the smaller ships (I can't imagine doing inside ship fighting in any of the little ships I have) and I'm ok with that. I don't really want to explore the surface of planets though, I want to explore space (find new systems, planets, nebulae, asteroid belts, etc) from inside my ships. Again I am looking for is a Wing Commander (Privateer/Freespace really) sequel not a FPS game.

 

The talk is that it will be longer than the episodes for the Telltale games, which were a couple of hours each. Certainly if you wait until all the chapters are released you will have a much more polished experience.

Yeah, I'm cool with waiting for the polished experience. I don't do epesodic games. I've never played and have no desire to play any of the Telltale games and if I ever did I'd wait until they were all out and then play them through. There are so many good games coming out now with Kickstarter, the Humble Bundles, etc. that I really don't need to rush to play anything. If it's not done yet, I'll just wait and play something else until it is. I already own more games then I'll probably ever be able to play in my lifetime so it's not big deal to me. I'll play Squadron 42 when the story arc is done. I suspect in the future they'll add new story arcs as well and that's great. Likewise the persistent universe will continuously evolve no doubt so while it will never be "done" I plan on waiting until one can make a living in the game through trade and/or exploration (not that I have a problem with ship combat, just that I want there to be MORE than JUST that).