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[Lyn Farel]

Well it's good and immersive, but I hope of course that your hired crew will do that for you. I don't see why they wouldn't..

[Silas Vitalia]

I think the point is to have the fidelity in there so it's more of a living breathing world.  You might not want to load cargo with a crane, but seeing your NPC and station crew in the background loading cargo, packing pallets, that is just pure gold for me.

Also they are doing a lot of this for smuggling purposes.  Being able to individually stack your crates or fill one of them with illegal firearms in the back, you can do that.

Also the mass and position of the crates will effect your ship flight model.  Stack 100 tons of weight on one far end of the ship and have fun with your new center of mass and thruster output, etc.

It's the kind of shit I want to see in EVE when I dock my freighter or whatever. People loading things, things happening in the background, activity for a living world.

[Silas Vitalia]

Neato ship size chart

http://i.imgur.com/6VHThm0.jpg

[Gwen Ikiryo]

While I love most of how the actual gameplay looks, I'm getting sort of worried by how much they're fleshing out every little thing, when they should really be focusing on actually making the core game functional. With how much the dates have been pushed back already, it seems like it might suffocate on it's own ambition.

The upper management seems to have a disturbing amount of dreamers versus pragamtists.

Can you elaborate? Some of these features are very much 'core game' though?

They've chopped up a lot of things among different studios.  So the guys in london are ONLY doing the single player campaign, the guys in Austin are basically ONLY working on the MMO universe and gameplay, the FPS studio is the one working on pew pew on foot, etc.   They do have to poach from each other when they have deadline crunshes, but for the most part the guys doing the FPS aren't disturbed by the guys doing ship designs.

But yes they have a lot to do.  It's a strange time right now because some of the pieces are really starting to come together but its agonizingly slow.

I would agree they they should STOP making new ships right now.  Just stop, and finish working on the backlog they have of 30 ships or whatever that aren't flyable yet.  It's getting ridiculous.  They have a lot of phase 1 ships that aren't even in the hangar yet to look at.
I understand that every time they announce a new ship they make another $5million or whatever, but they can't make them fast enough to not add more backlog.  Finish the existing ships while rest of team finishes the game.  Launch the game and keep the ship makers working constantly on new ships and making money for the company there.

I meant stuff like this cargo packing thing. Why have such a complex system for it, when a basic interface would suffice just as well? There's no point for all this complexity.

Also, I understand they have promised to stop selling ships when the game has launched.

[Lyn Farel]

Ah yes, very clever... If it means stoping to sell new ships, better financially for them to wait and keep selling ships rather than release the game and continue to work on ships that are not paid for anymore...

[Silas Vitalia]

I meant stuff like this cargo packing thing. Why have such a complex system for it, when a basic interface would suffice just as well? There's no point for all this complexity.

Also, I understand they have promised to stop selling ships when the game has launched.

Maybe more like Minecraft, they'll make the sandbox and people will find ways to use the tools? *shrug*

I 100% don't believe they will ever turn off that money faucet. Too lucrative

[Silas Vitalia]

Awesome,

our first taste of mission scripting with the new 'tutorial' flight school.

Very cool!

https://youtu.be/g8cpHypave8?t=4m23s

[Lyn Farel]

A lot of memories from old space sims came up suddenly.

I have to admit that I giggled like a kid at the (obvious!) self destruct.

[Davien Kaahtt]

Sooooo... I'm beginning to come into myself as a fighter pilot.

Several nights ago, I found myself in my mustang delta. The ship is nimble, and dangerous, but the designers gave it layered tissue paper for armor, and saran wrap for a transparent cockpit enclosure. Despite all of the lack of foresight, the designers gave it four weapon mounts and two large rocket pods.

Not as fast, nor as dangerous as any of the main line combat ships, I had to outsmart my targets. Attacking those not paying attention to me, and weaving through asteroids and space debris for those paying attention to me. I ended the night with a neutral K/D ratio. Putting guns on targets already engaged, running from targets engaging me (and causing them to crash into debris on the way to maim me, for which, I receive no points)

Tonight I entered squadron battle (team vs team) in my recently acquired Gladius. Two super hornets spawned on the other side of the arena. They were not as fast or nimble as me, but with more, and much bigger guns. Not being able to engage either of them in a head on fight, and neither of them wanted to play dogfight, so I had to draw them into a pocket of asteroids, where I used their lack of maneuverability and situational awareness to my advantage. Should one of them hit a rock, I'd launch missiles at him while he spun out of control. Should the second one get a firing angle on me, I'd violently change direction, and launch more missiles at him.

After all was said and done, I died four times, got three kills, yet somehow managed to win the points game.

This is seriously the most fun in a spaceship game I've ever had, and I don't know why all of you arn't playing it right now.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

This is seriously the most fun in a spaceship game I've ever had, and I don't know why all of you arn't playing it right now.

Because the severs are down 50% of the time, it's completely unoptimized for any machine that doesn't have RAM leaking out of it's ears, it's near-impossible to actually play with your friends, the flight model routinely glitches out, and even if everything else goes right the balancing is completely screwed, with Superhornets able to kill basically anybody with way less difficulty...?

I mean, I'm not trying to spoil your fun, but let's not drink the cool-aid, here. At present, there are plenty of games you could pick up for less money that would provide a similar and much less buggy experience, even if they didn't look quite as pretty.

[Davien Kaahtt]

Because the severs are down 50% of the time,

That's hyperbole. I haven't encountered any serious server down time, and I play a few hours a day, nearly every day.

it's completely unoptimized for any machine that doesn't have RAM leaking out of it's ears,

I don't disagree with that. I've got 16g of ram, and I've heard that is a lot.

it's near-impossible to actually play with your friends,

I fly with my friends every night. The only problem we experience is that some times one of us gets dropped during boot up. Exit, rejoin, load, play!

the flight model routinely glitches out,

I pretty much just fly the Mustang series and Gladius, I have no idea how the other ships fly. The only time I have flight glitches is when I loose engines, wings, thrusters due to collisions--with rocks, lasers, and missiles.

and even if everything else goes right the balancing is completely screwed, with Superhornets able to kill basically anybody with way less difficulty...?

I bagged three of them tonight. I've seen the gladiator easily take out super hornets with those absurd size 5 missiles. M50s do a great job of chewing them up, bit by bit as well. Yes, it requires more skill, but I welcome the practice.

Now that you can rent any weapon, or ship, the game is on its way to balance. If you don't like loosing to those Super Hornets, rent one of your own. I can tell you though, it isn't a fun ship to fly. Furthermore, it doesn't stack up to a skilled m50 or gladius pilot. In fact, the top three guys on the battle royale leader board fly ships other then the Super Hornet.

Not perfect, not by any means, but a blast to play none the less.

I mean, I'm not trying to spoil your fun,

Don't hate.

but let's no drink the cool-aid, here.

Why not? Its delicious and sweetened with cane sugar. Fly on my wing and I'll provide the red solo cup.

At present, there are plenty of games you could pick up for less money that would provide a similar and much less buggy experience, even if they didn't look quite as pretty.

I would have to disagree.

I haven't found any great flying/racing games, outside of that arcade game by midway--Hyperdrive? and F-Zero GT.

I got about 10 hours into X rebirth and couldn't continue playing. There wasn't any real art to the dog fighting. No clever maneuvers to cause unattentive enemies to crash into space junk.

Though fun, Ace combat is a bit to arcade-y to keep my attention, and I can't play it with my friends in SPAAAAAAAAAACE

I'd love to play Elite, but everything I've seen of it is so watered down in comparison to star citizen. And the entry fee is 45 bucks.

I guess what I'm saying is, for 5 bucks its a great value (arena commander pass, and free fly weekend. You can still earn REC and your rentals only tick down in time when you use them) Give star citizen a shot every few weeks, they are always upgrading and updating it. And if you still don't like it, you've only lost five bucks.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

I've pledged like $250 to the game, dude. I'm criticizing it not because I don't like it in concept, but because it is seriously kind of crazy to be calling it the best game ever at this point. That kind of culture is what's led to it's staggering and still growing feature-creep that could result in it becoming a mess, like so many other projects that have swallowed their own hype to the point they've drowned on it.

Did you miss the massive server issues that caused like a week of downtime just recently, and the persistant lesser ones that were messing up matches routinely before that? And is still not fully fixed now? Have you not been hearing about the huge netcode issues that are still afflicting a ton of people even at this point? Have you not seen the Youtube videos of peoples ships skirting the edges of asteroids and then crumbling into bits randomly?

There are some serious problems with some of the fundmental aspects of the game that the developers haven't managed to fix in well over a year - And that's worrying, especially since what's currently playable is basically just a tech demo. If they can't get this stuff down in that long in a very small, deathmatch environment, how are they going to make it work out in an MMO? These are questions we should seriously be asking if we ever want to see any sort of actual working product within now and the next 10 years.

[Silas Vitalia]

I find your lack of faith...disturbing 

Valid criticism, but I think the truth is somewhere between you and davien. 

[Lyn Farel]

Why I am not playing it ? I guess, lack of time, other things to do in that spare time, and also, have to spend a lot of time actually configuring the controllers and the hardware (I can run the game decently, but the cpu/core hardware is still aging), and also if I didn't have to re download 25 Gb of data everytime they update the thing... It takes me 5 full nights to do so.

So usually when I find the time I hop on the game to test a few things, take a look, and that's it. That and their loading times are huuuuge. Maybe the aging core hardware and RAM though, but it was still top end RAM (12Gb), so, a bit disturbing still... That and I run it on a SSD too ! It should load a lot faster, even if I understand that it's cry engine and a resource intensive game...

I have pledged quite a lot (to my standards, like 250-300$ or something, with an early backer pledge as well), so I'm counting a lot on the game and would be rather disappointed if something went wrong with it.

But yeah currently, I really like the flight model (have yet to find glitches but I have only tried it with basic keyboard control, so half tried it would be closer to the truth). I seriously dislike their gimbal things and it really hampers my willingness to hop into pvp games right now. That and the fact that it looks all but balanced (which can be understandable since it's an alpha), but I'm a stick user and will certainly not like the fact that gimbals especially make it a lot easier to people with keyboard and mouse.

That, is the main gripe I have with the game, and since I already have another flight sim that is for now way above SC to my eyes, then I usually use my free time to play War Thunder instead for now.

No gimbals for me, thanks. Unless they downgrade the weapons you can put on gimbals or you can replace them by bigger guns.


Edit : for now i'm a lot more interested in co-op since it doesn't face nearly as much as the same issues I listed above...

[Silas Vitalia]

FYI Lyn,

If you use a gimbal you are forced to use -1 size weapon.   So a slot for a size 3 gun, if you use a gimbal you can only use size 2.

This will eventually be usefull when they stop making some of the size 1 and 2 weapons the strongest in the game

Balancing is always way behind on these releases; they haven't implemented real ship armor yet as a modifier, which will have a completely different role than shields and which weapons effect them.  You'll probably be using a combination of ballistic and energy weapons in the final game if you want to be successful.  They are also about to implement the 'physics' based weapon modeling, so instead of just saying the Omni 6 does 'x' energy damage, they will give the laser bolt a velocity and a mass, and that will interact with your ship velocity/mass/etc to compute a result.   Will be great for modeling damage from ballistics and everything else.

I'd also not worry too much about Arena Commander being impossibly unbalanced, it's a small arena with instant respawning for fighter ships to dogfight,  in the MMO you won't get respawns, space is huge, and choosing to fight someone will have consequences.

If you're out in the middle of nowhere exploring in space or mining or whatever, you aren't likely to run into a bunch of tiny fighters far from home who don't have enough fuel to make it home, let alone come after you without support.

This game is going to change fundamentally in a month or two when the bigger ships start being involved.  The way ship HP is right now fighters are just going to be shredded by these massive ships draped with large turrets.   All these excellent fighter pilots in their tiny ships are going to be obliterated by dedicated ship crews of gunners who know their stuff.