January 2017 Vault Discussion.

Clearing the highlighting...

Well... someone is ahead of himself

Its time again for Fake Progress Notes!

1) A cold front from Canada has been particularly vicious. In order to keep our DOTA2 server up we needed to burn most of the concept art and design documents to keep warm. in hind sight this was perhaps not a great idea. The server hard drives probably would have burned longer.

2) Continued work on the AI is progressing nicely. We even think the AI may be sentient. Or maybe we're watching too much Westworld? Well there's certainly not any nudity in the office so its probably not sentient yet... IS THAT FROGBOY OMG MY EYES BURN LIKE A THOUSAND SUNS!! THAT CANT BE UNSEEN!!!

3) We've gotten some preliminary Ok to incorporate the canon Star Control universe stuff. We're still in negotiations though. Plus side, original races! Possible negative, we will be indentured slave labor making Skylander mini-figs on weekends....

4) Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

5) Our RAM sticks still occasionally scream: "No god! No god please no! No! Nooooo!" Subsequently ejecting themselves from their respective motherboard slots, they hover approximately 2.5 meters above ground in a strong horizontal spin for about 30 seconds before finally bursting into flames. How much RAM does the average founder have again?

32.

bytes.

32 GB to survive any game testing...

System Requirement Updates

As you know we've been working on optimizing the game's assets due to the vast amount of great artwork we want to showcase. It's been tough but we've been able to really nail down some system requirements that makes sense

Minimum :

CPU - 16-way Xeon Intel - Minimum 4 physical slot CPU configuration

Memory - 128GB

GPU - Tri-SLI Titan (Pascal architecture only)

Recommended:

Dual Monoliths from the movie 2001 or 1 Dyson Sphere

Meteor and golden showers are confirmed.

That was clever using a special key to unlock the cloaking and stealth content.

OMG, this thread is hilarious!!! Shout out to Satoru, Prodigalmaster and Volusianus for making me audibly laugh hysterically on a MONDAY! That almost never happens. 

I'm excited about the vault update this month! Hoping it's excellent!

Side Note: There's a new banner on the top of this page that says, "STARDOCK COMMUNITY EVENT" and I thought to myself - holy crap! They finally did it! They flagged this as the OFFICIAL January Update thread, so there's no more confusion!!!

But no. It's something else, entirely heheh

That was a great laugh for me.  thank you!

I Wish i had a Monolith... ;(

Guess what?

The vault is up :) 

There's not a ton of substance, and while I'm sure a lot of people here will understand and appreciate the hyperthreading and the engine-talk and all that - the actual content of the update is a little underwhelming. 

HOWEVER - there are a few key points to note and it was such a Rollercoaster, I felt like Winona Ryder's face at the SAG Awards last night. Here is the takeaway:

1) When the February vault update comes, we'll all be playing Super Melee! Brad, you shouldn't have given a prediction like that if you can't stick to it - YOU KNOW how we are!!! 

2) Precursors CONFIRMED! And they're named Precursors and they travel through multiple dimensions, which I guess can explain why they were in the other multiverses - Star Control II and even III where they were space cows. It give me all the feels to see them still around. Uh... Even if they're dumb enough to just leave one of their blasters lying around one of our planets... 

3) Also, when hearing about your first quest, it sure seemed a little...... Fetch-questy. I Immediately thought of WoW and collecting 5 of this herb or killing 7 of this mob and then turning-in. That's not the kind of quests I'm looking for. Especially not in SC. I'm willing to give it a pass, as long as it doesn't take over and drive the rest of the game.

4) Finally, Earth looks silly with giant sphere-warping mountains in one of the screens lol. Why can't you make the planets look like the human captain lady background, from far away? 

I guess that's it. I may add more as I ponder the update tomorrow and listen to the music. Good night all :) 

Thanks for all the engine/development information, I found it quite interesting having a background in programming myself.

My Critiques:

1. Planets in our solar system need to be more realistic (while still using the art scheme) because we have a common idea of what they look like. I think this will bug a lot more people than Cuorebrave or I.

2. The opening quest does seem too much like a fetch quest and I don't want to be boxed into our solar system for an hour, especially on later playthroughs.

3. All the dialogue text, not just the reply options, need to have a box to distinguish the text from the background image.

4. I would prefer to just have Earth weapons to start with and keep the Precursors secret for later in the game.

Questions:

1. Will the player ship's ring end up having an animated rotation or will they be stationary?

2. How will connected to a match with another player work for the Super Melee test?

I welcome the thought of future proofing your work.

I already experience how sad it is to have games that struggle to work on my pc or fit naturally across my screen.

Time spent making this happen is a positive move.

I think your artist should  check out the most downloaded popular player made ships on Galactic Civ III Steam Workshop and get an idea of the styles of ships the players are preferring.This may help you think about the look of the expanded human ship.

As well I too don't want the whole story spoilt and also with replays would like to bypass somehow the starting area in future play throughs.

I definitely appreciate the insight on the game engine choice.

I am definitely concerned about the 14 GB draw for RAM that the Nitrous Engine is preliminarily requiring.  Optimization is a huge issue for a lot of gamers.  Note that even the most sophisticated and graphically intensive games have not yet really surpassed 8 GB on average.  The recent Rise of the Tomb Raider generally recommends 8.

Even the playstation 4 has 8GB GDDR5 total RAM.

I think if you can't optimize for around this number, your going to have alot of problems with people that have less than 1200$ computer that they just bought last year, which can outright kill alot of the audience because of accessibility.

I would note that to keep the game accessibility reasonable for most gamers, the recommended specs to aim for are:

-6 GB RAM

-1-2 GB VRAM (no higher than the Nvidia GTX 970, which is the most common card gamers have currently now)

-No more than 3.5 Ghz CPU requirement (e.g. intel i5)

-Less than 20gb storage (12 would be optimal)

If you look at current gen console hardware, I think those specs are good to shoot for.  Anything more and your really going to be hurting on accessibility (not to mention your helpdesk will get slaughtered by game won't run issues).

I am also speaking for the masses on this one, I've done alot of hardware troubleshooting recently so these specs come from personal experience with working on other people's machines.  My CPU is much more powerful than the above and I am currently running a fully modded skyrim with 500+ mods and 4k textures on everything downsampled beyond 1080p.  I'm way more invested than the "average" gamer.  However, the average gamer who lacks quantum computing is who the specs should be targeting.

The update was quite an interesting read, thanks.

Regarding the hardware requirements, I think the game will probably be at least a bit less hardware hungry / better optimized closer to release. But since Stardock is planning to work on Star Control for many years (10+ years for Ashes of the Singularity from what I've read), it should be in my opinion as much of a next gen game / engine as possible to be futureproof.

I have 32 GB ram, so feel free to drop that memory hungry beast of a super melee anytime...

Peasant.

I'm with him.  I can play the game as-is and have PLENTY of RAM set aside.  If I had the cash, I could actually double the RAM I have.  It looks like once Crusade finishes, we'll probably have a confirmed ETA on alpha 1, limited as it will be.

Woah, woah. No, lemme stop you right there. Consoles are an afterthought. CONSOLES ARE AN AFTERTHOUGHT. Follow the XCOM 2 route, imo, make the PC version polished after several months, let it get the nastiness out of its system, then release a console port.

Exited to see the vault, can't now, will post my review later!

Quoting cuorebrave, reply 14

Guess what?

The vault is up  

There's not a ton of substance, and while I'm sure a lot of people here will understand and appreciate the hyperthreading and the engine-talk and all that - the actual content of the update is a little underwhelming. 

HOWEVER - there are a few key points to note and it was such a Rollercoaster, I felt like Winona Ryder's face at the SAG Awards last night. Here is the takeaway:

1) When the February vault update comes, we'll all be playing Super Melee! Brad, you shouldn't have given a prediction like that if you can't stick to it - YOU KNOW how we are!!! 

2) Precursors CONFIRMED! And they're named Precursors and they travel through multiple dimensions, which I guess can explain why they were in the other multiverses - Star Control II and even III where they were space cows. It give me all the feels to see them still around. Uh... Even if they're dumb enough to just leave one of their blasters lying around one of our planets... 

3) Also, when hearing about your first quest, it sure seemed a little...... Fetch-questy. I Immediately thought of WoW and collecting 5 of this herb or killing 7 of this mob and then turning-in. That's not the kind of quests I'm looking for. Especially not in SC. I'm willing to give it a pass, as long as it doesn't take over and drive the rest of the game.

4) Finally, Earth looks silly with giant sphere-warping mountains in one of the screens lol. Why can't you make the planets look like the human captain lady background, from far away? 

I guess that's it. I may add more as I ponder the update tomorrow and listen to the music. Good night all  

Greetings!

Re February Super Melee.  No promises. Just my best guess.  

Re Fetch Questy.  It's important that new players have a gentle way of learning how to play the game first.  But you guys will have a lot of practice with that first quest before we ship so I expected it to be honed to a fine point.

Re visuals.  Don't make me regret showing you pre-alpha visuals.   

The game requirements will be 4GB of system memory, 1GB of video memory.  Hence, we have to make the game stream the assets as you need them and not load them all up front.