Star Citizen - scale of the verse - density of the air

in many ways, CI or Cloud Imperium have brought this upon themselves. It might seem unfair to say, but they got greedy. Back in 2013, CI could have brought out SC or Star Citizen (a space flight sim) and many of the original (loyal to the point of cult member) backers who loved Chris Roberts other games like Freelancer and Wing Commander etc. would have been as happy as pigs in mud.

Fast forward to 2018, and SC’s ever-expanding gameplay template is still lost in development hell and it’s not coming out any time soon. Like YEARS…

SPACE:
…as Douglas Adams liked to say, “Is big, really big.”

And CI discovered this as soon as they built a mock-up of our own Solar System in their in-house level design tool. Not only is space ‘really big’ but it’s mostly empty. Their solution; scale down all the distances. scale down all the planets and their moons. You then have a game world that’s big enough to contain all the game content and small enough to be navigable in a reasonable time.

That image up there shows SC’s gas giant Crusader and Hurston (central orb) of the Stanton System. I put Earth in for reference, and its Moon. Hurston is twice the size of Earth. Crusader is a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. And you can understand why they rescaled them, to reduce travel times just enough so that you don’t die of boredom trying to get from A to B. But it’s still a grind because the atmosphere of the only planet that’s in-game right now, Hurston, is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than a double-Earth-sized Karman-line or burning-up re-entry altitude model would suggest it should be.

And these planets, while big compared to most game levels, are tiny. When you think that a super-Earth Hurston has ONE TOWN on it. One town the size of Dallas called Lorville, and that’s it. Already, filling the one town with a level of acceptable realism is proving to be a real struggle. Nothing seems to have inquisitive life to it, no flow. There’s trees and grass and plants elsewhere in the planet but no living things, no birds or animals nor rivers or streams teeming with fish. Workers don’t even get to ride the work train – yes, there’s a train you can ride in Lorville. There’s neither sufficient individual nor crowd A.I. to speak of, and Chris Roberts is advertising for (at least) four new AI-programmers. Shopkeepers seem to be ignored in most retail cases. This is really worrying.

Earth, in this game, will feel TINY. And I can’t stress this enough. Earth will feel tiny. And by tiny I mean, “Earth’s diameter in this game is ONE TENTH the diameter of the Real Earth i.e. 1,300 kilometers, which is half the distance from L.A to New York. So how will CI fit all the details of the Earth’s futuristic landing locations onto this tiny in-game rendition of everyone’s home planet?

And none of these planets orbit their parent star, none of the moons orbit their parent planet etc. and remember the ship’s top speed is about 1,200 m/s in most cases. Planets, even planets that are ten times smaller, ten times closer, still go round their star at 3,300 m/s which means YOU CAN’T CATCH A PLANET in your ship.

FLIGHT:
…and she flies, “Like a bird, in the sky.”

Coming in version 3.5 i.e. March 2019, is a re-worked flight model that will include the mass of the ship + cargo, the lift potential of the flight surfaces and the air resistance of the more chunkier ship designs. It’s going to be a love-hate revelation and the game truly needs it. For the last few builds, atmospheric flight has basically been no different from space flight such that ships could hang ridiculously in mid-air with their nose four or five feet from the ground with no noticable strain on their engines.

It’ll be better… but… SONIC BOOM.

The speed of sound in air, is about 343 m/s and some of these ships have a top speed of something like 1,200 m/s which is FOUR TIMES FASTER than a ship needs to fly to produce a sonic boom. You shoudn’t be able to hear them coming. Neither the plane, nor its sonic boom. Also, when that boom arrives, especially if your ship is doing a low-altitude fly-by, it should be explosive upon you and your internal organs; your eardrums at the very least. Even for high altitude ships, the sonic booms should be crackling all the time. A low fly-by ship should BLAST YOU OFF YOUR FEET and gouge enormous troughs into the oceans of these planets.

The physical act of flying the plane is also in flux. I don’t mean a third person flight camera, though that would be better than the awful object-centric turntable camera the game currently has. I’m talking about the PILOT CONSOLE EXPERIENCE or PCE.

What’s the PCE? It’s how you interact with your ship. Currently, there’s a cheeky bit of code in the game called Inner Thought. This came in before Item 2.0 assets made their way into the game and is a strange psycho-kinetic cheat where the player auto-activates everything without having to physically touch it. Now all new objects in the game are usefully self-highlightable as these Item 2.0 assets. We basically don’t need Inner Thought any more. We can do it all manually. A player’s hand can physically reach down towards a button panel or activate a MFD or multi-function display in his cockpit to make the experience feel super-embedded.

But there’s a whole (another) slew of code needed to turn what exists right now into a Pilot Seat Auto-highlighting Console 2.0 flight experience. I don’t even think CI are going to have the time/management to go there. The best the player is likely to get is a post-button click animation, which means double-activating EVERY SINGLE BUTTON or MFD in the cockpit similar to what currently happens when you exit your MobiGlas and that’s gonna get mega-tedious very quickly.

ORRERY:
…or to put it another way, “Mechanical animation is the only way.”