Interview with CR

[TeaLeaf]

http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/3/2/8131661/star-citizen-chris-roberts-interview

Some nice (estimated) timelines given:

March: FPS simulator

April: Planet side

June/July: Multicrew ships playable

Near end of year: Squadron 42

End of year: Persistent universe

2016: Polish

[OldBloke]

Looks great to me.

[albert]

I'm concerned that we have to play through Squadron 42 in a raw unpolished state similar to the Hangar module which is unusable IMHO on my 12 month old card. If they keep the same level of quality that the hangar module delivers then it'll be a train wreck. So really I hope citizens put pressure on CIG to make the modules work smoothly as they are released rather than turf out beautiful but unplayable mods.

[smilodon]

I do think your train wreck experience is very specific to your hardware and the general feedback from the community is that while it's pre alpha and clippy and buggy in places, it runs generally runs very smoothly. RSI aren't going to do anything revolutionary to fix a problem that simply doesn't exist for everyone else.

I don't think anyone has to play through Alpha and pre Alpha content. We're only seeing this content because we're backers and RSI is giving us unprecedented access to some very early content. The problem is that very few other games release content so early in the development cycle. There is Steam Early Access but even that tends to be for games that are fairly far down the development road. If RSI release an early build of Squadron 42 and I seriously doubt they will then no one needs to play it. They can wait until the complete single player game is released.

However there will be a minimum spec for Star Citizen, as there is for many games. I'm running an Nvidia GTX 760 and Arena Commander glides along without a problem, in fact I would go as far as to say it's the best looking Space environment I've ever seem in a game. So I don't think the hardware specs will be prohibitively high.

I am waiting to see what the best spec for playing the game will be in the future, but that's nearly a year away so I'm holding fire before I upgrade my GPU and/or CPU. However if the new content runs as well as the hanger and Arena Commander are doing I may not need upgrade at all for Squadron 42, we'll see.

[Gorion]

Arena Commander is fine.  Hangar module is a train wreck, and really is unusable.

I can run Arena Commander on ultra with all the bells and whistles.  Hangar Module is barely usable on medium settings, and is an unoptimised mess.  SQ42 will probably be high on Hangar scenes, and quite a worrisome issue if they don't fix it up before SQ42 is released.

[smilodon]

I'm sorry you both have issues but your experience isn't going to be the same as other peoples. As mentioned I do not have any problems with the Hangar Module apart from some very minor clipping issues. It runs smoothly and everything works. Granted there isn't much to actually do in there but what there is works for me. It clearly works for plenty of other players as well, as You Tube is full of walk rounds and ship reviews made in the hangar module and they all seem free from problems. I'm sure they will continue to bug fix and tweak the modules as the game develops, so hopefully by the time the game gets close to completion you'll be getting the same experience the rest of us are enjoying.

[albert]

I've never had a single problem with any other game I've installed Smilo, I've spent literally hours trying to optimise the hangar for my nVidia 675m. It might actually be running the ways its meant to on my PC but I would more correct to say the feel and experience is horrible. It's a chore to go through the hangar. I've read many CIG forum pages with others making the same comments.

Same as Gorion, Arena Commander aside for the over complex controls is superb.

[TeaLeaf]

I think the hangar has come up quite often as an area where some people definitely have problems.   SLI and high resolution is one example and so my 2560x1600 hangar running on 2 x GTX770 in SLI is literally horrible.   Most others, often on single cards or lower resolutions or both, seem to have fewer or no problems whatsoever.  However the AC game itself is fine for me.

The way I look at it is that they are going to release an FPS that works like AC, but the hangar at the moment is something that is relatively low priority as far as I can tell.   It was originally introduced early to keep backers happy by letting them see the ships that they had bought, not because it was destined for release at that point!

My head tells me that they will worry about this 'unimportant stuff' once they get closer to having completed the really important stuff.   We're still Alpha, nothing is optimised and we still don't have the important chunks of the game in place, so the hangar as we know it may change dramatically before release.

[albert]

I think the only problem is that the hangar is the hub of the game and with the social module coming out and entering other hangars etc. I would hope, the hangar would get some real work. After all if you can't get past the menu in a game then everything else feels wrong.

[TeaLeaf]

Perhaps that's what the social module will be?  We don't know that the hangar in its current format will be the hub.  It could be totally replaced.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[smilodon]

Agreed. As individual standalone modules I'm taking them as they come. Sometimes things work perfectly and others are broken and it's not consistent across hardware. I had no issues with the hangar but until very recently Arena Commander was horrible as my 325a was broken and my controller setup wouldn't work. Others can play fine in AC but the hangar doesn't work for them.

It's all very early stuff and we are getting this content specifically to feedback to RSI. The Hangar status page does say

Please remember that this is an extremely early build intended as a reward for our dedicated backers. The QA process has only just begun; many bugs have yet to be ironed out and many features will be added in future revisions. Please report any issues in the Hangar Bug Report Forum.

But as soon as one module starts to be dependent on another it gets more serious. If you can't experience the Social module or the multi crew module because you can't get into the Hangar module then that's not going to be good. I also don't imagine we'll see some huge changes and all the problems disappear in one patch. It's going to be incremental. So RSI do need to sort out the Hanar if it's going to be the gateway to the social and multi crew part of the game.

Thinking about the earlier questions I don't think Squadron 42 should be released as anything but a very polished Beta and then I would still probably wait till full release before I played it. I certainly wouldn't want see the Single Player mission in a rough buggy state. It would be like watching a blockbuster movie after just the first rough edit had been done. It would ruin the experience. I'd want to see the film with all the CGI, music and polish so I would get the very best experience from it. I'm assuming that as the single player will most likely use all the same assets, motion capture, environments, physics etc. from the multiplayer game. So we can test them as modules and help iron out the bugs without having the single player storyline and experience ruined for us.

[Obsydian]

I have to agree with smilo in that I haven't experienced any problems with the hangar other than the time it takes to load, and I'm running a single GTX770 on Very High at 1920 x 1080.
 

I've heard that there are still issues with SLI and, unfortunately Albert, that GTX675m is very under-powered for use with Star Citizen.

i do recall reading a recent dev post (forget which one) where they stated that CIG are working on optimising the loading of the hangar to reduce the wait times that players will have when transitioning between the modules that are coming up, so hopefully that will include some performance benefits for those running lower-end GPUs.

[albert]

I think a hint to when the game starts to get some speed attention will be when the loading time drops by 50%. I think the Hangar is the perfect place to start the game and then wherever you are in the PU going forward through life as a space dweller.

[smilodon]

Yep I timed it and 2 minutes to load the hangar plus another one minute forty seconds to get into Arena Commander isn't exactly speedy

[TeaLeaf]

Afaiaa, at the moment SC has not been optimised for multi-core, so it uses one core only to unpack assets when loading.    That's the major bottleneck for load speeds at the moment, not the HDD or more generally the CPU itself.   Later in development they will start optimising it as the Cryengine does support multi-cores.  

Some (not all) hangar lag/judder/bad frame rates, particularly if experienced immediately after loading, will also be down to this unpacking process.  However hangar lag is also highly dependent on the amount of vram you have available.   The texture library for SC is huge and the HDD is loading textures to and from the disk because it has not got any more vram to use.  This adds to the choppy feel.

SLI has already mentioned, as has high resolutions and the obvious load they place on the system.  

There are other factors, but these hit the bulk of the hangar performance problems people mention.  Keep in mind that SC is designed to run on a decent spec PC, with 'decent spec' being assessed at some point in the future, and imo will probably be based on 'due in 2016' hardware which is usually announced and engineering samples issued in Q3/4 2015.  I'm certainly intending swapping my 2 x 2MB GTX770's for at least 4MB cards nearer SC launch.  

Anyone after a couple of water-cooled GTX770? :narnar: