Anyone here going to CitizenCon this year? Tickets are sold out but fortunaltely all presentations can be watched from YouTube some time later.

There are some interesting presentations this year. I'm going to watch all of them but probably most interesting are 'By design' and 'The Principles of Flight' which shows some changes in flight model.

Keeping the faith alive. I hope you get your space game and it isn't a huge CitizenCon. The joke is "Con" also means rip-off or scam so it's a double entendre.

I'm having a hard time believing this game will ever get released.

CitizenCon joke has been around since the first conference in 2013 so it has kind of has got old already. Well, I hope we all get an excellent space game and at the moment it looks we will. The project is enormous but the development is progressing well. Next Wendesday we know more what they have in their development branches waiting for integration.

I'm pretty convinced their web site will crash during the keynotes, which would a bit bummer. Oh well ...

CitizenCon is now over and all demos and presentations combined it was for me easily most interesting game conference this year. What I have heard from the people who where able to participate locally the event was amazing.

Official videos are not online yet but community has already sent many of them to YouTube.

In keynote they showed about an hour amount of gameplay from upcoming Alpha 3.3.5. The demo was most likely quite boring to people who has not played Alpha 3.x series before but for others it had lot of to see. The demo showed the first planet - Hurston, multiple of biomes and the first city - Lorville. This was first time we saw gameplay in those locations. The demo included some surprises like live FoIP calls and underground facilities.

A new flight model (Alpha 3.4). The new FM will be a game changer and will make space and athmospheric flight very different experience than what it is today; much more skill based, more variety, etc. Can't wait to give it a try.

There were many other interesting technical presentations like for example about GeneSplicing to create characters, bringing player and NPC characters to life, crafting space and VFX, etc. Many of new tech are used in released Squadron 42 trailer below.

How did you liked the demos and presentations?

CitizenCon 2948 keynote demo

Squadron 42 trailer

@spacegg: is it titled 2948 because that's what year the game comes out?

Well, it could be but at the moment it stands for a year in Star Citizen universe.

“Today is meant to remind everyone that the future of the UEE is what we make it. If we want a better universe for not only ourselves, but for the generations to come, then we must create one.”
• Imperator Erin Toi, CitizenCon 2793

Portfolio: CitizenCon

To me it looks more fun to build such a game then to play it. I feel most game companies focus on fun gameplay mechanics first and use the tech to support this, with a special emphasis on making it look good. Here it is the other way around it seems. The environments look very bland, the NPCs look like situational set dressing, even more because they seem to pop in and out. Did they give an explanation how they implemented the NPCs and why that happened? Gun play looks stale. And I think the promise of sailing your space ship through the galaxy is only enticing if there are places that are worth visiting. Doesn't seem to be the case yet.

I am hoping the Squadron campaign is fun. If they didn't get that to be enticing, then I think the whole game will be unfulfilling to most.

Has Danny No-clipped this game and its developers? Seems like an obvious one but I can't find it if he did.

@pweidman: Not yet but I don't see why he wouldn't. Seems like a perfect fit got that channel. I would think they would wait until the game is more near complete whenever that will happen.

They are working graphics and VFX of course but lacking of tech and tools has been the real problem all these years. This year just like other years before most of the presentations are about the tech and not gameplay. As shown in Roadmap there will be lots of gameplay scheduled for next year. Around the Verse and Reverse the Verse shows has tons of information about tech and tools they have been developing. There's also shows about clothing design, AI tech (Subsumption), creating in-game real languages, etc.

These are not official videos but BoredGamer has edited some of the CitizenCon 2948 presentations available.

The version which is in PTU now is incredible important for the project. It includes Object Container Streaming (OCS) which will change pretty much everything. This is why the game is finally able to grow much bigger, more detailed and having lots of new gameplay features.

I wonder if they will succeed, because I believe that it is much harder to make a game fun or immersive then the technical challenges. I also wonder if they will stumble upon a variant of the empty world syndrome like No mans sky did. A gigantic world that is not immersive because the things you do aren't fun.

Or maybe it will end up like Arma or something similar, a sandbox where people can make their own games. Not the least interesting possibility because novel game types like the battle royal genre spawned from that. Will it be something like that?

I think in Star Citizen's technical challenges shouldn't be underestimated. OCS was the last big technical hurdle they needed to solve for Squadron 42 so what comes to that project things are progressing nicely. Star Citizen PU is an MMO which makes it much more complicated. Chris Roberts went through bigger technical challenges in his CitizenCon presentation: Road to Release

To make Star Citizen feel living and breathing there are lots things they are going to do; in universe there will be NPCs in ratio of 9:1 to players, background simulating variety of aspects like economy, dynamically changing universe (for example lack of supplies changes prices and cities), etc. Additionally to these CIG is pushing towards emergent gameplay and to make it possible they try to give players and NPCs many different kind of gameplay possibilities. Also their techs like mission system (uses Subsumption) is part of that. Tony Zurovec has explained how chained missions, player created missions, etc. will work in future.

A lore has also a big part in Star Citizen. CIG made quite different design decisions with Star Citizen compared for example No Man's Sky or Elite: Dangerous. There are something like 2^64 star systems in NMS and 400 billion in ED but only about 100 in SC. Those star systems in NMS and ED are fully procedurally generated but in SC they are procedurally generated and partially handcrafted. Handcrafting is a huge work but makes it possible to fill astronomical objects with interesting locations and add places explained in lore. In Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy they go through these star systems and explains lore related to them.

... Of course after all these features added it is still possible the game will be boring and bad :)

These vertical slice demos always look great but (I suppose in an online game with seemingly no end there is no such thing as a vertical slice) whenever I see people playing the game like the stream Vinny did with Drew not too long ago the game looks like a mess. (granted Vinny can break any open world) I'd love for it all to come together eventually though and i'm glad there are people crazy enough to fund this thing and I hope by the time it comes out you wont have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a half decent ship.

Squadron 42 looks interesting, with the amount of big names attached to it i'm surprised it isnt getting more buzz.

EDIT: Just noticed it had over half a million views, dont know what I was looking at to make me think people didnt care.

The current build (Alpha 3.3.0m PTU.958784) is still very unstable. I have been testing it today couple of hours and got already multiple of crash to desktops (CTD).

The demo build they used was very unstable as well but it was most likely just pure luck it crashed only once :). Jeremiah Lee (jlee) from CIG goes through the demo and gives some more details and insight what was actually going on.

I still like CIG is doing live demos with unstable builds. It gives better picture about the state of the project and gives a nice relazed feeling; a dev talks directly to backers.

I saw a video where somebody was using his webcam to mimic his face thought that was a interesting implementation, but yeah this game has major feature creep reminds me of Warframe for some reason :P.

Why is "feature creep" considered only as a bad thing? I guess features they have planned to add is one of the main reasons why so many people are still supporting this project. This game will be enormous even with 10% of finished features. Every quarter we will get more and more gameplay features, bigger universe, more depth, etc. At the point when they stop resetting the progress one can actually starts to play the game despite if the project is still in Alpha stage.

@spacegg:From a programing stand point it bring a lot of trouble you gotta make all these parts work well together and stuff, ( the switch to the Amazon engine is a nice proof of them not really testing the limits of cryengine.) your better of building a solid base and then building on that base. As for as i heard now there isn't really a base but a bunch of projects that are at some point are gonna work together and it sounds like a nightmare to make this thing "whole". One of my favorite quotes comes from the inventors of Unix who said: "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features"".

Considering how many developers they have from the Crytek I think they had very good idea of its capabilities. I'm sure there are many reasons why they moved over Lumberyard.

What they have been doing all these years is build the base; tech and tools. Some people says that the progress of the development has been slow but since they have not seen the work that has been done underneath I think they have mistaken "a progress" to features what they can actually see. Star Citizen is the game build on this base. As the base gets better and better they are able to add new features to SC. For example the base has now client side OCS implemented and that's why they are able to integrate one planet, a city, 4 new moons new and eventually about 100 star systems into the game.

They did release different modules back in time but they have nothing to do with Star Citizen PU and most likely with Squadron 42. Arena Commander (2014) and Star Marine (2016) are modules where you can practice flying and FPS and test weapons, ships, equipments, etc.

@soulcake said:

Yeah reminds me of Warframe too, but Warframe has been a playable game for 5 years.

I will jump in for Squadron 42, loved me some Wing Commander back in the day.

If Star Citizen or Squadron 42 would be anything like Warframe I think the SC/SQ4 would have died long time ago :). I wouldn't expect it to be too much like Wing Commander either. SC/SQ42 is 6DOF game which makes a huge difference already. As far as I know the universe is pretty open to move around freely unlike in Wing Commander.

I think it was kind of funny that half way through the keynote there was an add for a ship that costs almost $400 and it was the most well produced part of the whole presentation.

The game looks cool but so far it just seems like a bunch of half-baked ideas and mechanics and the real meat of it is the spaceship porn.

Just buy, rent, steal ships in game if you are not able to support the project with such a big money. $45 (game package) Aurora or Mustang is enough.

The keynote demo showed only some new features in Alpha 3.3.5 and didn't show gameplay features which already in game; trading, mining, etc. I guess the main points for most were ability to rent/buy ships, a first city, own flat and multiple of biomes. The train system was nice to see because some of the ships are so big they have a train inside them.

VoIP+FoIP is not bad either. A live call to MobiGlas (wrist device) or to a ship's MFD:

Tony Zurovec's talk is now online. It is pretty essential to watch all CitizenCon videos to understand what kind of project CIG is working on and what kind of game we can expect to have in future. Tony's talks are always very passionate and full of interesting information.

I maintain nothing but hope for all involved that Star Citizen is in fact real.

I want to believe that something beautiful will come out someday, because I really want a crack at Squadron 42. But this thing has been sounding project management alarm bells for about 2-3 years now. There's still a disconnect somewhere between budget, deliverables and scope from the info they've publicly released, which makes me very cautious.

I was hoping from the latest news releases that there would be something concrete, some sign that the finish line is approaching, or that they're even capable of reaching the finish line. But rebooting your flight model 5 years into development - that's not a good sign you're going to be done anytime soon.

Ask them if it's ever going to come out

They just need to draw a line, stop looking at feature creep and decide, "Right, we stop now. Let's polish, fit and finish this." I often wonder what they have. Obviously, there's a lot of assets and modules but can they connect that into something considered a publishable product?

I recommed to watch Chris's presentation: Road to Release

Alpha 3.3 could be considered as Sea of Thieves or a bit more what comes to amount of content. We will get more gameplay every three months now, so things are moving fast. Object Container Streaming (OCS) was an important tech to get integrated. As Chris points out in his presentation they have still three technical goals to achieve inStar Citizen PU (not SQ42) before one can consider game "released". It will be ever developing project just like all other MMOs are.

I wouldn't mind either if one of the patches would include major UI cleanups and that seems to be one of the most polular wish from community as well. It seems people are ready to start to play the game instead of just testing especially now when some major game loops are going to be interated in Alpha 3.3.

Roadmap and Stretch Goals can be used to give an idea what can be added in future.

Tony Zurovec is talking a bit about dynamic missions and economy in his presentation. I recommend to watch his earlier interviews and presentations where he talks about chaining missions, etc. He is the guy behind Star Citizen PU and has lots of information to share.

I agree, but I think this is actually quite confronting to do for them. Because trying to tie modules together and get a fun and engaging gaming experience in the end somehow sounds like hit and miss. Why would all these parts together make for a fun experience. Why would it be fun to have to travel an hour to have a gun fight somewhere. I really liked to read about the Mass Effect Andromeda dissection of all that went wrong and that they had to cut all the player controlled space travel because they did not find a way to make it engaging.

I think Start citizen can work as a tinker sandbox for the enthusiast. But I like to be proven wrong on my thoughts that it won't work as a game with an immersive sandbox campaign on par with the best in the industry.

Also to be really honest, I think the utterance "Star Citizen is an unprecedented technical marvel in gaming" that floats around sometimes a bit strong. I think it is not fair to technologies like Frostbite 2 and Unreal 4 that contain really interesting features as well and also give great results on relatively "modest" hardware (such as found in current-gen consoles). If you follow a lot of the technical talks on Star Citizen, maybe it is also nice to start listening at technical talks about other games, from Indie to AAA. I think you'll find that what distinguishes Star Citizen from the rest is less so it's impressive tech stack, but more so its reluctance to converge to an actual product that can be critically regarded.

Just my opinion though ;)

NPCs wandering around space stations were included in Alpha 3.2 and they have not got an update after that. It would be a good question to Call All Devs show to ask what is the current status of these NPCs in their development branches. At the moment they are just place holders and doesn't have any meaningful purpose other than for developers to see performance impact etc.

FPS is still far from perfect but it has got and is getting improvements in all released versions. For example they demoed motion warping in Around the Verse recently.

They talked about player and NPC characters in their presentations: