Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
3.0 Spoilers From An Evocati
rpmcmurphy
Member EpicPosts: 3,502
This is a copy/paste of a reddit thread that can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/76lqca/30_spoilers_from_my_evocati_friend/
----
A: It differs between builds. We're at patch 3.0.0d and I've been getting an average of ~40 FPS in the US server, 20 FPS in the EU server and 15 FPS in the AUS server. I'm testing with a GTX980, Intel i7 and 32GB RAM. As always, the FPS drops down 10-15 FPS when the server is full.
Q: How's the delta patcher?
A: It's excellent and working as intended. 3.0.0a was less than 300 MB, 3.0.0b was about 8GB, and 3.0.0C and 3.0.0D were less than 2GB. We've been getting a patch almost daily and thanks to the delta patcher, testing isn't interrupted very long.
Q: How's traversal in 3.0?
A: We're able to QT to Cellin, Daymar, Yela, and Delamar/Levski. ArcCorp, Hurston, and MicroTech are in the star map app but is currently unreachable due to QT fuel limitations. There's a new QT VFX, and QT fuel varies depending on the size of the ship, ie. the Aurora has less fuel than the Starfarer.
Q: How's cargo?
A: We can interact with cargo strewn about in derelicts and mission sites, but shopping/selling cargo isn't fleshed out yet.
Q: How's the Nox and other bikes?
A: The Nox is very uncontrollable and tends to flip to its side. The DF can spawn upside down and is jerky at best. Both bikes can be placed inside the Cutlass and other multicrew ships, but getting them inside in one piece without dying is very challenging. The URSA I have not tested because there's a known issue with the ASOP terminals where some ships don't show up even though they're available in the patch.
Q: How's the interaction system?
A: It's very tactile and immersive. Yes, there are keybinds for them, but it's satisfying opening doors/airlocks/ramps/cockpits/ladders and turning on power and engines to fly. Pressing F5 turns everything on in the ship when the "flight ready" option is broken in the patch. Everything you do now revolves around holding F and moving you mouse around you to grab/power on/open&close/enter&exit seats.
Q: How's the moons?
A: Tricky to get to atm. When first QTing to a moon, the ship stops about 500km away, so you have to go back to the star map app and select 1 of 6 bouys or "OMs" to get closer to them. Then you have to max out your ship's speed with AB to travel about 100km to reach an outpost or station. For example, from Port Olisar to Levski, you select Delamar as your destination on the star map app, then after arriving you select OM3 to get close to Levski, then after that you point your ship towards where Levski should be and you wait about 5 minutes in max speed to get to the vicinity of Levski where you can ping the ATC guy to give you a hangar to land on. The moons themselves only have 5-7 outposts marked on the star map, but there are roads, derelicts and un-marked buildings that you can explore just by flying around. Other than that, the moons are very sparse between marked outposts and bikes are too buggy to effectively roam around moons.
Q: You mentioned there are NPCs in the build?
A: Yes, patch 3.0.0a had them roaming around doing their own business in Port Olisar and Levski, but they were buggy and get stuck in doors. In later patches, CIG decided to freeze them in a line in Port Olisar, so we'd make memes about them in ETF Spectrum. You can't interact with them yet, and Miles spits out the same greeting line at Levski.
Q: Any new weapons?
A: Yes, there's a new SMG and shoulder-fired Railgun. All weapons are working, but you have to manually add them and their ammo through your inventory.
Q: How's the inventory work?
A: It has its own app. When you bring it up, there's a dropdown of all available body regions you can add/change/subtract items to. Every armor, clothing, weapon, ammo, device is available to us but we can only carry 2 weapons at a time. Armor you can mix and match with any body part, but the heavier armors will deplete your stamina and o2 meter faster. If I put on the heavy marine armor, I can only sprint for 5 seconds until my heart rate goes to 170 beats, my vision blurs to near blackout, and my o2 meter depletes to 80%. For testing purposes, it's best not to use armor because there's a lot of running to get to places.
Q: How's oxygen and stamina?
A: Like I said, there's an o2 meter showing a blue bar that depletes over time and how fast your pace is. There's also an oxygen timer on the front page of the mobiglass showing how much oxygen you have like 1H:50M:26S. Stamina is dependent on your o2 levels and is influenced by how fast you walk/jog. You use the scroll wheel to change your pace from casual walk to power walking to lazy jog to normal jog. The sprint button is still the left shift key and it drains your stamina & oxygen the fastest among the paces. There's a heart rate graph on your helmet HUD that quickens depending on how fast and how long you sprint and what pieces of armor you wear. If you don't heed the heart rate graph and keep sprinting, your character slows to the casual walk, your vision goes blurry, and you have to wait for your heart rate to go down before you resume. This will be great for Star Marine.
Q: How's the interaction with the devs?
A: CIG devs are more available to Evocati through our private ETF Spectrum chat. There's always 3 or 4 devs willing to talk to us everyday and discuss anything from testing 3.0 to what they're going to do on the weekends if they're not working. Sometimes, we get big name devs like Sean Tracy, Brian Chambers and Eric Davis to chat with us and we can ask them questions about the 3.0 builds or how epic their hair or beards are. If you aren't in ETF, you're really missing out on this close connection.
Q: How's Evocati and are more being added?
A: CIG added about 80 new members in the last 30 days, so we're up to 950 members last I remember. Some Evocati members are very patient and hardworking, and some are complete noobs who haven't tested anything in their life. Some don't read/follow directions from CIG and try to "play" the build, some are ultra dedicated testing 12 hours straight and helping with IC reports.
Q: When do you think 3.0 will go to PTU?
A: Honestly, don't expect it in November. We're still only focusing tests on traversal features. Shopping and the mission system still needs a lot of work, NPCs are broken af, ships are buggy af, crashes and 30001 errors happen every day, and even traversal is buggy with some ships not having QT fuel nor not enough to get anywhere interesting.
Just FYI, I can't verify if any of his responses are true because I'm not an Avocado myself as I don't have access to 3.0----
Comments
It is voluntary player testing of a buggy Alpha build. And sending in bug reports.
It is a common misconception that the Evocati are there "to play the game earlier than others". If you think that, you have not yet understood what the Avocados do.
Have fun
Yes, I am dying to know more about Brian Chambers beard .....
Have fun
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The department of redundancy department.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Dropping down to 15-20 with a GTX,ouch,so anyone with anything less ,might as well fire up a game of Yahtzee?
Point being,the overall polycount in a view able area cannot be very high at all,i could be wrong but i doubt it knowing what space maps require.As proven in many videos i have watched,competent people in this industry know how to lower the polycount of models and objects and still maintain a good looking product.
Looking it up right now ,i see they moved from CryEngine to Amazon engine,so imo a sellout likely partnering with Microsoft,not that i am surprised at all.I happen tro stumble into a link to Microsoft store and see a free SC app "Star citizen Center" boldly boasting "BEST space sim ever",,haha hold off their Jack,wait until the game is actually a game before boasting best ever.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
That's correct. The issue they are having is that everybody on a server is being sent updates for everything that occurs even if it has no bearing on their own gameplay, so if player A spawns some pirates on the opposite side of the map, player B get updates on all of it, multiply that by the number of people on the server and you've got a hot mess.
I was under the impression they had partially addressed some of it but the big thing that fully addresses it, which everyone is waiting for and banking on, is network bind culling. Whether that is going to allow them to run 50-100 per server remains to be seen, it's all fine when everyone is spread out but put all of those ships in close vicinity with the amount of polys they use and performance is guaranteed to tank.
The "Amazon engine" IS the CryEngine with some modifications. So they moved from CryEngine to CryEngine ;-)
The framerate seems to be limited by the netcode and server. The grafic card seems to have little influence on it (and modern grafic cards are able to get much higher FPS counts). There were some discussions about that some months ago.
Have fun
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Old SC Engine = CryEngine + RSI bespoke
Amazon Engine = CryEngine (same version) + Amazon bespoke
Current/New SC Engine = CryEngine + RSI bespoke + Amazon bespoke.
Have fun
if true - time to live may or may not be affected, could be simple bugs could be unfinished.
if false- thanks.
Perhaps CitizenCon will reveal more.
Originally, most of that was supposed to be in 3.0 - but it was postponed for 3.1 I believe.
Meaning, even if there's going to be SOME performance improvement in 3.0 (LIVE version) - it won't be until 3.1 that we're going to see how the planned netcode integration will improve the performance.
Also, it won't be until they have a solid frame-rate that they expand the player count.
This, too, has been made public several times - and yet it seems the detractors are still conveniently forgetting and pretending that this early Evocati build is, somehow, representative of the best CIG can do.
It's the same old bullshit
A fact often ignored here that's true, but we will see how this process flows and what they will achieve once this reaches live. But indeed until the server mesh the PU network setup will be a placeholder (1 server = 1 PU instance).
Perhaps that's because at the moment it really is the best they can do. Until they deliver these magical changes one can only judge on what is currently available, who knows how much the networking changes allegedly coming in 3.1 will affect things?
Network performance has meant to be getting better for years, it shouldn't come as any surprise that people are a bit jaded by now.
---
As an aside, I was very surprised to read they haven't even started on their server mesh technology, instead they are focusing on the single server performance and optimisation (lol).
(so in the reality of the open world, X and Y area will still be different containers, handled by different servers, that's the whole point)
I've played countless games - both in and out of testing - that have had debug/developer modes, and it DOES tend to make a massive difference for performance compared to release/normal modes.