Can you explain to me which part I distorted, because it looks like it's exactly the same to me. Probably because it is exactly the same.
I'm not playing your stupid game. I
HIGHLIGHTED the specific section. But go ahead and ignore it you want.
So if something, (64 bit coordinates), has been 'deployed to the main codebase', I'm taking that to mean it's basically completed. They'd been working on it for years.
No, that's not what that means.
I'm referring to an interview where I heard you saying they'd just started on the conversion. I don't have a link. Perhaps it was the open house or somewhere else. I have a good memory and I know you said it somewhere. I remember listening to you, going to check the comm link and laughing at your, (deliberate?), misunderstanding.
I have always been consistent in my alarm that they started doing that at all; and that
FOUR years later, in Summer 2015, barely had it implemented. As I stated in my first blog, that was the impetus for the blog and which led to my assessment that the project was
FUBAR. Had they NOT increased the game's scope, and made all these promises, THAT complex and time consuming amount of work would NOT have been necessary because the level extents supported by CryEngine, would have built the original game just fine. They could have created the entire world by connecting together all the smaller max size levels allowed by CryEngine, using the same very jump points they currently have in the Star Map. And it could still have appeared as one contiguous world, without any loading screens. Which is what most games, include Elite Dangerous, do.
Of course I was right because the
PU didn't release until Dec 2015, and it was a horribly, broken, mess. Even for a pre-Alpha. And it still is, almost two years later in 2.6.3 (last patch was in April btw).
They've done what the blog you linked talks about you could never do. That must hurt. I'm sorry that someone else is managing to accomplish your dream but there you go. There it is and there we are. Of course, we need 3.0 in our hands to confirm but the PC gamer journalist you questioned on twitter confirmed it, that's good enough for me.
What in the hell are you talking about? My
Interstellar Citizens blog had
NOTHING to do with anything other than having a
seamless experience whereby a player exists in the ENTIRE game in first person. None of the BC/UC games have FPS inside capital ships or stations. And LoD has some (FPS inside stations and a carrier) that, but as a "Combined Arms" game, not a dedicated "Space/Planetary Combat Game/Sim" like BC/UC games, it doesn't count.
And it's right there in the HOLY GRAIL section of the blog.
THE HOLY GRAIL
As I’ve said in many interviews, articles and so on, when I first set out to make these games, I had an all-encompassing vision. Being a sci-fi buff, I wanted a game in which one could travel through the stars, meet strange new people, explore, trade, fight, command your crew, and all that. All in space, and on planets, in first person infantry mode, with air, space, and vehicular combat thrown into the mix. I envisioned a mix of Elite with Star Flight, a dash of Sentinel Worlds and Hard Nova, and all the ludicrously complex machinations of the Star Fleet series.
The fact that I actually pulled off the first iteration in 1996, while most were either laughing at me, or saying how it couldn’t be done, is something that has been lost in time.
Through it all, my vision was still not complete because, even though GPU and CPU technologies were progressing at a fast pace, the game engine technologies still weren’t there. As a result, I continued to make sacrifices in order to keep moving things forward. For example, you can’t have high visual fidelity when you’re trying to build a massive game world. So I tended to sacrifice visuals for gameplay, something that was seemingly unheard of back in the day because you just get laughed at. Which is hilarious now that I think about it, when there are so many best-selling but shallow games with sub-par graphics.
The Holy Grail of immersion for me has always been for the player to be able to exist in first person (aka infantry) mode throughout the entire game world. You’d be able to walk around inside your ship. You’d be able to dock that ship with a station, exit, walk around inside that station. You’d be able to fly your ship directly into a planet, land, exit that ship, enter a building, do stuff etc.
Much like back in 1996 whereby nobody had even come close to my vision, as of this writing, nobody has come close to making that game, let alone a capital ship combat game that gives you so much control and freedom.
Except me.
And it still continues to be a technical challenge of seemingly insurmountable proportions, over twenty-five years later since I first had an idea for the game that was to become Battlecruiser 3000AD.
And the only way that anyone is ever going to be able to make that game is if they built technologies specifically designed for it, and they have the deep financial pockets to do it with. And after that, it has to be compelling enough for gamers to want to upgrade their rig in order to play it. Unless you’re releasing the next Elder Scrolls, Call Of Duty, Battlefield, GTA or similar, good luck with getting modern-day gamers to bother upgrading to play your game without sufficient evidence of what makes your game so special.
Fact is, these all-encompassing games are exceptionally difficult to make. You can safely take that from someone who has spent over two decades making them. And even if you do manage to get the money to do it, and even manage to pull it off, the genre itself pretty much guarantees that the race to profit is fraught with agony, strife, frustration, and pain.
And so far Star Citizen hasn't even done it because, unlike LoD, they're still struggling to get a moon or planetoid working, let alone the massive scale planets and moons in BC/UC, or the
detailed planetary bases in LoD.
Are you aware that the
ENTIRE Star Citizen "world" is but a postage stamp, compared to the
contiguous world featured in Battlecruiser/Universal Combat games? Yes, yes, of course you are, but go ahead and ignore it if you want.