Digital Foundry: Star Citizen's Next-Gen Tech In-Depth

[Kadath]

And here we go again... We have the privilege of not only having a group of passionate people who are able to give us detailed tech analyses of various games, sometimes even flying out to get the information from developers themselves, but also the privilege of having them on our forum so we can share our excitement and our reaction is to respond with increasing hostility and skepticism.

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Yes, but there's a big theme here about the tension between industry and journalism.

What you said could as well be read as the "privilege granted to Digital Foundry" to produce this insight into the tech of an unreleased game. If it's a privilege then we are quite close to advertising, again.

The tension is there and will always be there: the journalist needs to preserve his integrity, but on the other hand he directly depends on establishing a positive relationship with the developers (unless you have your own peculiar gig, like Jim Sterling, with its own peculiar advantages and disadvantages). If you piss off a developer, then no more "privilege" of insight, previews and everything else you depend to produce your content.

There's no way to "solve" this rebus.

At least you know what to expect from Digital Foundry, whether it's a video about Destiny 2, Star Citizen or most of everything they cover. You know what's good in their work, and you know what the side effects are too.

 

[Nekyrrev]

Exactly! "Evil corporations" sell you product, CI sells you a pitch. Investors of "Evil corporations" get a piece of a profit, investores of CI will maby someday get a game or a refund. Interest free loan.

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So you're just against the concept of crowd-funding passion projects but big corporations that aim to give the maximum profit to their investors that's cool ?
Ok then

 

[Box]

A new low from Era, keep it up.

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Ikr? Holy fucking shit this thread. It's a tech video not a fucking audit.

 

[z1ggy]

People aren't going to like this but I feel Alex really doesn't like the fact next-generation consoles have features like hardware ray-tracing and comparable CPU/GPU. I've noticed his sniggering in other Digital Foundry video's when mentioning technologies in the PC space in context to consoles.

Recently he's been ramping up the whole 'look at how great PC's are' narrative.

I like Digital Foundry video's but I wish there wasn't as much sniping along the way. After all, we all like games and the technology that powers them.

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Wow, and here we reach a new low. Of course, its ALWAYS about platform warring.

 

[Deleted member 11276]

Another great video, DF keeps going all out these days. I played SC for free a while ago and I was very impressed by the tech, given the early stages and huge scale of the game already, I was actually surprised how well it ran on my PC.

The game will probably still take a while, but that's fine. I'm excited for new videos from DF on SC!

 

[Shini42]

CI sells you a product. You can play it right now. It's not finished because the scale and ambition of the product surpass anything that has ever been done before in the gaming industry.

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What you "can play right now" is a shadow of a shadow of what they are promising. Would you argue that?

 

[Dark1x]

Because it is perceived as somewhat biased to present all the good stuff while ignoring the giant amount of bad (it's like looking at a car that completely falls apart after one mile, but look at how great was the rear mirror).

All your videos have a certain goal of presenting the product for what it does best, it doesn't matter if it's Anthem, RDR2 or Star Citizen, so I guess it's fair. You make advestise-friendly videos in all cases, and even when you touch on the bad you make an effort to minimize it. But there's this side effect that makes who watches your videos realize that one can't trust them to get a balanced picture.

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Hey, we don't review games. This isn't buying advice. These videos are designed to educate and entertain. This is not telling you to buy Star Citizen. Nobody cares. The degree to which people get offended over this never ceases to amaze me.

There's just too much negativity around the internet these days - so many videos made that are designed to make people ANGRY. We're trying to do the opposite. To help people appreciate the medium.

So what is it that you want critiqued then? What is the problem with Red Dead 2, for instance, as it relates to technology?

 

[Corine]

What you "can play right now" is a shadow of a shadow of what they are promising. Would you argue that?

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Keep moving them goalposts.

 

[Deleted member 44371]

That's exactly what they are.

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Nice driveby shit post. Seriously what is wrong with you?

 

[Shini42]

So you're just against the concept of crowd-funding passion projects but big corporations that aim to give the maximum profit to their investors that's cool ?
Ok then

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Never said "that's cool". Said "that's cooler than..." Huge difference.

 

[molnizzle]

What you "can play right now" is a shadow of a shadow of what they are promising. Would you argue that?

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What they are promising is unprecedented. It has never been done before. Many don't even believe it is possible.

...yet here they still are, quarter after quarter, releasing steady updates that bring the game ever closer to that promise. Weekly dev diaries, deep dives into the issues and how they are tackling them, open communication to customers at a level that few others developers bother with.

I once thought as you do. I was wrong.

 

[Kyuuji]

I'll throw a hat tip to Dictator considering some of the dumb shit in this thread - appreciate the work you guys put out.

 

[z1ggy]

Never said "that's cool". Said "that's cooler than..." Huge difference.

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So you have the bullshit business practice meter, nice to know!

 

[TheRulingRing]

This game genuinely looks so cool but I just can't bring myself to be interested in it with how pay2win it currently seems.

 

[Raide]

As developer/tech videos go, this show off some fascinating stuff. Scale wise, it feels like a massive jump from something like NMS. Just so much damn details. A truly next-gen showcase, to be sure.

 

[Dark1x]

What you "can play right now" is a shadow of a shadow of what they are promising. Would you argue that?

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I don't think this has anything to do with its technology, now does it? Stop going off topic.

 

[Arsene no Kiseki]

Not really interested in Star Citizen from a gameplay standpoint but damn the tech in this game is incredible.

 

[Deleted member 25117]

People aren't going to like this but I feel Alex really doesn't like the fact next-generation consoles have features like hardware ray-tracing and comparable CPU/GPU. I've noticed his sniggering in other Digital Foundry video's when mentioning technologies in the PC space in context to consoles.

Recently he's been ramping up the whole 'look at how great PC's are' narrative.

I like Digital Foundry video's but I wish there wasn't as much sniping along the way. After all, we all like games and the technology that powers them.

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You know... maybe, just maybe as we're nearing the end of the console generation, and are currently in a bit of a drought when it comes to strong 1st party graphical powerhouses, whilst on PC we've just gotten brand new tech, that would explain why we've recently seen more enthusiastic PC related content from Digital Foundry? I dunno, just a thought.

 

[Kadath]

Hey, we don't review games. This isn't buying advice. These videos are designed to educate and entertain. This is not telling you to buy Star Citizen. Nobody cares. The degree to which people get offended over this never ceases to amaze me.

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Wait, I don't see why anyone should get offended.

You WILL sell the game, whenever you put the game in a positive light. It would be naive thinking otherwise. And you DO review the tech of these games.

There's just too much negativity around the internet these days - so many videos made that are designed to make people ANGRY. We're trying to do the opposite.

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"Angry" is the reaction and is not the point here. The point is the information you give.

For example, right now, information about Warcraft remaster is information that makes people angry. But it's still valid information as long it's accurate.

What people might complain about your videos is not so much you make angry or happy videos, nor that the information is inaccurate. The problem is solely that sometimes it seems like the information you offer is partial.

(Partial about the tech itself, not everything else in the game. Tech can both work and not work. It is also about execution, coherence and consistency.)

 

[Flandy]

How do these spheres help exactly? Didn't really understand that bit

 

[TissueBox]

Don't worry people, Star Citizen will come out eventually!

 

[Dark1x]

Wait, I don't see why anyone should get offended.

You WILL sell the game, whenever you put the game in a positive light. It would be naive thinking otherwise. And you DO review the tech of these games.

"Angry" is the reaction and is not the point here. The point is the information you give.

For example, right now, information about Warcraft remaster is information that makes people angry. But it's still valid information as long it's accurate.

What people might complain about your videos is not so much you make angry or happy videos, nor that the information is inaccurate. The problem is solely that sometimes it seems like the information you offer is partial.

(Partial about the tech itself, not everything else in the game. Tech can both work and not work.)

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You're going to have to provide examples. I feel like I always hit on the issues in a game when they exist. Remember Control? That was seriously broken at launch on consoles. When have we missed issues or glossed over them?

 

[Raide]

I must admit, the scale of things kinda boggles my mind. Makes me think about what a next-gen Mass Effect could be like.

 

[Dictator]

How do these spheres help exactly? Didn't really understand that bit

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This is to make sure, just as a sanity check, that something is not broken in your build. So they are material test spheres, showing off a pure white albedo, black albedo matte, and a purely reflective sphere. The purely reflective sphere shows how well the image probe/cube map is working in the build you are in. So you can use it to make sure nothing is broken while building the game level incase things start looking weird and you are not sure why.

It is actually a crutch of using common rasterised techniques :D A lot of game devs do something similar.

The neat thing is though, that changing the time of day insanely rapidly, you can see how the reflection in the fully reflective sphere takes about 30 frames to completely update.

 

[steejee]

Cool video DF. Regardless of the drama that surrounds the game the tech is undoubtedly interesting and ensures I keep rooting for it to achieve its goals.

 

[gozu]

Cool tech demo, though it is disappointing to see all the pop-in despite the SSD requirements of the game and all the fancy talk of object containers. Is this even new tech?

It tells me that next-gem games will still suffer from a lot of pop-in :(

More broadly, I remain convinced that procedurally generated worlds are boring and useless. Give me small, detailed, polished worlds any day.

Procedural techniques are best used on something like individual tree or rock generation. Not space and research stations.

 

[Flandy]

This is to make sure, just as a sanity check, that something is not broken in your build. So they are material test spheres, showing off a pure white albedo, black albedo matte, and a purely reflective sphere. The purely reflective sphere shows how well the image probe/cube map is working in the build you are in. So you can use it to make sure nothing is broken while building the game level incase things start looking weird and you are not sure why.

It is actually a crutch of using common rasterised techniques :D A lot of game devs do something similar.

The neat thing is though, that changing the time of day insanely rapidly, you can see how the reflection in the fully reflective sphere takes about 30 frames to completely update.

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Would you not use the spheres then if you were using ray tracing or am I misunderstanding?

 

[Lashley]

Another Star Citizen thread shat up by pissing crybabies

 

[Deleted member 55966]

Happy to reply. Tech videos should not just be showcases, that's the role of PR.

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If you're being truthful then this is the problem. Your expectations for the content are not the expectations of the content creators as seen below.

Hey, we don't review games. This isn't buying advice. These videos are designed to educate and entertain. This is not telling you to buy Star Citizen. Nobody cares.

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Maybe this series isn't for you?

 

[Adnor]

Another Star Citizen thread shat up by pissing crybabies

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It's not even Star Citizen thread that people have been shitting on, it's almost every single Digital Foundry thread for some reason.

 

[Chairmanchuck (另一个我)]

If you're being truthful then this is the problem. Your expectations for the content are not the expectations of the content creators as seen below.

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You could provide examples then what you would have shown in the video regarding negative tech issues in one of the first videos about scale.

 

[Kadath]

You're going to have to provide examples. I feel like I always hit on the issues in a game when they exist. Remember Control? That was seriously broken at launch on consoles. When have we missed issues or glossed over them?

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Well, you made a 22 min video on Star Citizen. I suppose you could make hours explain everything that doesn't work or is poorly designed and planned.

But that's not really my own point. I was simply trying to say that I believe you will keep getting those kind of reactions from your audience, that's all. I'm not invested in this or that game. You noticed this reaction especially in this thread because Star Citizen is generally negatively perceived for many reasons. So the negative response is emphasized since your video goes against the flow.

Once again, the fact that you explore tech exclusively doesn't mean it's mandatory to only observe the way everything is supposed to work. Technical analysis is also about what doesn't work and why. Knowing that, you judge for yourself whether or not this video presents a balanced view of that tech, or if it cherry picked only the good.

 

[Skade]

More broadly, I remain convinced that procedurally generated worlds are boring and useless. Give me small, detailed, polished worlds any day.

Procedural techniques are best used on something like individual tree or rock generation. Not space and research stations.

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The produral techniques are used to populate most of the game, yes. But then, "hero" location are added by artists over it. Planets all have a city (or will soon) whose interior and exterior layout is completely unique, there is outposts on the surface of the panets and moons that are hand placed as well. The entries of the caves are also hand placed while the caves themselves are procedural. Etc etc.

Basically, they use the procedural generation to paint a background on wich they then add hand made unique details. Even the stations whose layouts are indeed entirely generated procedurally went under an artists pass afterwards to add some details here and there. Not much as there is a lot of stations already but still.

It's meant to be the solution between Skyrim and No Man's Sky world spaces basically. (and even them, i'm pretty sure the basic land masses of Skyrim where procgen too).

 

[Chairmanchuck (另一个我)]

Once again, the fact that you explore tech exclusively doesn't mean it's mandatory to only observe the way everything is supposed to work. Technical analysis is also about what doesn't work and why. Knowing that, you judge for yourself whether or not this video presents a balanced view of that tech, or if it cherry picked only the good.

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Did you even watch the video?

Alex said its one of many videos and this one has the topic "scale" and "world generation".
You can provide tech examples what negative issues SC has when it comes to scale.

 

[borntoulouselautrec]

If you're being truthful then this is the problem. Your expectations for the content are not the expectations of the content creators as seen below.

Maybe this series isn't for you?

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Congrats on ignoring all the other aspects (and examples!) of how this kinda 'in-house showcase' situation can get sketchy I've given in that post.

 

[Deleted member 25117]

It's not even Star Citizen thread that people have been shitting on, it's almost every single Digital Foundry thread for some reason.

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Quoting because I noticed this as well and it shouldn't be happening. Probably falls under platform warring but sometimes it's hard to tell.

 

[Mindtaker]

Amazing video from DF as always, thanks for the hard work!

 

[z1ggy]

Quoting because I noticed this as well and it shouldn't be happening. Probably falls under platform warring but sometimes it's hard to tell.

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I have no doubt its about platform warring.

 

[LabouredSubterfuge]

Another Star Citizen thread shat up by pissing crybabies

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Another DF thread shat up by pissing crybabies too.

 

[Firefly]

Sounds like people criticizing DF either consider themselves as some experts who know more or just want to hear DF piss on video games all the time to strike some weird scale of "balance" they have made up.

 

[Lobster Roll]

Another Star Citizen thread shat up by pissing crybabies

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Why do some people on this forum have a problem with people discussing negative aspects of a game? Is it really surprising that when people see a Star Citizen thread that they're going to comment on the problematic development of the game? Do you want a bunker or an echo chamber where people just high-five and celebrate and repeat optimistic sentiments?

 

[fanboi]

Why do some people on this forum have a problem with people discussing negative aspects of a game? Is it really surprising that when people see a Star Citizen thread that they're going to comment on the problematic development of the game? Do you want a bunker or an echo chamber where people just high-five and celebrate and repeat optimistic sentiments?

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You think it is constructive to post "This is an ad" for the game?

 

[Dictator]

Would you not use the spheres then if you were using ray tracing or am I misunderstanding?

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You would need to rely less on them to make sure things controlling light are working, as they would systemically work. But I would still personally want them there to make sure something ELSE did not break in the build I am working on for the level.

Like, the shading could break for some reason.

 

[Flandy]

You would need to rely less on them to make sure things controlling light are working, as they would systemically work. But I would still personally want them there to make sure something ELSE did not break in the build I am working on for the level.

Like, the shading could break for some reason.

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Gotcha. Thanks for the education! lol

 

[martincrimson87]

Yeez the sodium chloride regarding this game on this forum is insane. I even suspect many folks actually WANT this project to fail. You are going to hear "experts" worried about the susteinability of SCs business model or how the milestones were handled when there's a roadmap and you can play the game NOW
Curious nobody panics when:

1 Yet another entry of Japanese racing game takes eons to get to market and with substandard car models or without SP campaign. That's according to plan.

2 emotional game of a boy and his winged dog you can beat in a weekend takes a decade to be released. When it does comes with rudimentary controls and abysmal performance. That's according to plan

3 Billion dollars Cops and robbers/cowboy simulator franchises take between 6 to 8 years while having crunch levels that would make Charles DIckens blush. All that to have abysmal online capabilities and quest design straight from 2001.

But when there's an ambitious project to resurrect a dead (at the time) genre while pushing the medium forward tech wise everyone loses their minds!

 

[Grimminski]

A new low from Era, keep it up.

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Between this thread and the ray tracing one, this forum is so fucking embarrassing anymore.

Bunch of maladjusted fuckwits coming out the woodwork in every single DF thread.

 

[Nekyrrev]

Why do some people on this forum have a problem with people discussing negative aspects of a game? Is it really surprising that when people see a Star Citizen thread that they're going to comment on the problematic development of the game? Do you want a bunker or an echo chamber where people just high-five and celebrate and repeat optimistic sentiments?

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People on this forum don't have a problem with others discussing negative aspects. But some have a problem (I know I do) when the discussion ALWAYS revolves around negativity. To the point it becomes toxic. Would it kill some posters to see positivity on this forum just for once ?

There's a metric tone of threads talking about the negative side of this project, so when a thread about its technical side pops up, it would be nice to talk about the actual subject of the video.

Don't play dumb.

 

[KKRT]

The problem they'll eventually face is storing the world's dynamic information. They'll need to store everything on servers. If they go as far as weather changing and so on, you need to store where snow fell, that there was a massive ship preventing snow from falling on the ground in some place, and so on. On the short term this won't happen, but on the long term we're talking about insane amounts of information to be stored for every universe instance, or at least the information that isn't the same as the default information.

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Actually they are currently heavily working on storing information about all objects in the game (its called iCache) on global DB, so every server has access to it, as server will be 'unified' into one mega structure they call Server Meshing. Basically you will be able to take any pick-able object and place it anywhere on planet or moon and all other players that visit that spot will see it and be able to pick it up and move somewhere else.

I dont think there ever will be a simulation of snow accumulation on ship instead of ground and passing it via server to other players, but its not really that hard to do.
They just need to track where the ship stands, which they already do, and how long the ship was on the ground. Then they pass that information to other clients in vicinity and engine calculates how much snow is on the ship and how less snow is on the ground and adjust shader for both ship and the ground underneath based on 2d representation of ship geometry (like ship shadow map directly from above).

 

[Kadath]

Yeez the sodium chloride regarding this game on this forum is insane. I even suspect many folks actually WANT this project to fail.

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...Or "expect", given the information available and observation of certain patterns.

I personally don't think in terms of what I "want" or "don't want" in regards to things I have no powers on. Star Citizen eventually becoming a good or bad game won't depend on what I want.

But I can say I will be very surprised if they can pull it off. If they can, great. I just don't see it probable.

And my opinion depends *especially* on the tech, because I think there's a lot of tech in this game, none of which is well done. So I see it primarily as a tech problem. The tech itself is very poor. The game does too many things, and not a single one that is well done. And then you have this collection of broken systems, all held together with duct tape (plus they started with a horrible engine, for a game that was horribly suited for that type of game, and they'll never recover from this genesis).

If it survives, even in the current shape, it's because it essentially has no competition. So everything is bleeding edge simply because there's a lack of direct comparison. But not because it's "well done and well executed."

 

[Dark1x]

Well, you made a 22 min video on Star Citizen. I suppose you could make hours explain everything that doesn't work or is poorly designed and planned.

But that's not really my own point. I was simply trying to say that I believe you will keep getting those kind of reactions from your audience, that's all. I'm not invested in this or that game. You noticed this reaction especially in this thread because Star Citizen is generally negatively perceived for many reasons. So the negative response is emphasized since your video goes against the flow.

Once again, the fact that you explore tech exclusively doesn't mean it's mandatory to only observe the way everything is supposed to work. Technical analysis is also about what doesn't work and why. Knowing that, you judge for yourself whether or not this video presents a balanced view of that tech, or if it cherry picked only the good.

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Which we most certainly do. You just don't seem to like this video Alex made due to issues with Star Citizen. You can't throw out a blanket statement like this without evidence. You mention Anthem and RDR2. We were super harsh on Anthem and RDR2 is a technical masterpiece but we still demonstrated how it ran poorly on certain consoles while discussing its flaws.

The main issues with Star Citizen seem unrelated to the technology to me. They have no place in a video like this.