Star Citizen? Will it ever be? Fund-a-mentally finished?

yeah, I know, “Star Citizen has not even been released yet,” but this game that’s been in crowd-funded production for four years looks like it’s never going to be FUND-A-MENTALLY FINISHED to the point where the basic gaming world seems convincingly solid.

And I’m not talking about the gorgeous ship design. I’m not talking about all the effort that’s gone into the art direction and planet-rendering star-rendering hyperspace-rendering surface-rendering facial-animation materials-technology tech. I’m not talking about the streaming space-to-ground system which is just superb. I’m not even talking about the player animation system, which just does its job.

This ex-game developer of twelve years is talking about a gaming fund-a-mental, seriously — DOORS.

Ref: the above petty video example which is just your basic ‘correct animation running the wrong door size’ issue. But doors are just basic gaming 1.01, surely? It gets worse, even in the heavily-anticipated Xmas 2016 release i.e. Star Citizen 3.0, when used by a non-coached private-sponsor videoing his appraisal of all 36 ships, all doors are still a major issue. As you walk up to them, they click or glitch or just vanish; in the distance or in the foreground across the larger ships. You can get trapped in such doors. You can be thrown out into space if such a ‘door’ is an e-e or entry-elevator setup. Many a code-crash and space-ejection happens (in the demos this reviewer has seen) as a direct result of this horrible and aging DOOR TECH.

Doors need a massive re-overhaul; they need intelligence, they need to know what you want from them, as you’re progressing through the game world. Why are so many doors a USE issue, when they should be an approach-vector stimulated-timer 0-n seconds issue. Why does a door not just know it’s you? Why does it not offer a LOCK option – like if you leave your ship in space for an EVA? Why do doors not know you’re ‘under fire’ and might need to enter a ship at speed, or on the move the way they used to leap onto moving horses in westerns? As you’re always in your space suit in ships, are doors needed at all? These are the questions ‘this reviewer’ suspects might never have been asked.

And by ‘doors’ we also mean, “Getting into and out of the ship, under gravity,” and we’ve all seen the matrix-errors that were offsetting the animation’s hands and feet from the ladder bars and retracting steps the artists had painstakingly made your player-character hold onto or align with. But this was ‘fixed’. In the gaming industry, we call this a ‘no one will ever notice’ FUDGE. And the actual laborious process of entering and exiting a ship is just ‘old school’ for kids who now have attention spans of nanoseconds and, “Might be running to their ship, escaping enemy fire,” to then have to go through the laborious process of climbing stairs at a snail’s pace and positioning oneself carefully around all the cockpit furniture.

“You’d be dead,” in such a world – your DOOR HAS KILLED YOU, again…

Man, they should give me a job at SCC or Star Citizen Central so that ‘all these basics’ are dealt with before the all-the-sexy stuff is crippled by them.