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Re: Star Citizen

#16
A friend of mine is a freelancer 3d artist (he worked on galactic civ 2). He told me that the more "HD" textures get, the more expensive they are to make. Doubling the dimensions of a square texture quadrupedal the area. In theory that quadrupedal the man hours needed to texture it (never is the case, but is the theory). Normal maps, gloss maps, spec maps, glow maps are all textures as well, and those have to be painted too. This is part of the reason why AAA titles are getting so expensive to make.
David -- Proud to be saving the world since 1984
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Re: Star Citizen

#17
croxis wrote:A friend of mine is a freelancer 3d artist (he worked on galactic civ 2). He told me that the more "HD" textures get, the more expensive they are to make. Doubling the dimensions of a square texture quadrupedal the area. In theory that quadrupedal the man hours needed to texture it (never is the case, but is the theory). Normal maps, gloss maps, spec maps, glow maps are all textures as well, and those have to be painted too. This is part of the reason why AAA titles are getting so expensive to make.
sad to say but people wont be happy with any game now days that dosent push current tech levels to ther max. and ill be hinest a lot of the games i play i play mostl out of nostalgia factor. if they were to be released as a new game ill admit id take 1 look at the graphics and mby just mby watch a bit of the game play before moving on Even some of my most beloved games i would pass up because of my expectations of what a game should be. for instance Dune 2k ive plaied this game since i was 8. the graphics are 8 bit with the option for 16 bit if your pc can cope with it. (ill pause here to let you finish laughing at that....) the ai are rudimentary at best and the replay value is almost nill once you find the style of gameplay that works best for you. but this one game to this day is one of the main go to games for me when i have an hour or 2 to waste or while my comps doing something a bit more resource hungry.
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Star Citizen

#18
croxis wrote:A friend of mine is a freelancer 3d artist (he worked on galactic civ 2). He told me that the more "HD" textures get, the more expensive they are to make. Doubling the dimensions of a square texture quadrupedal the area. In theory that quadrupedal the man hours needed to texture it (never is the case, but is the theory). Normal maps, gloss maps, spec maps, glow maps are all textures as well, and those have to be painted too. This is part of the reason why AAA titles are getting so expensive to make.
That's how freelance artists charge. But in-house artists do not get paid per model or texture, they get paid a fixed salary, no matter how many assets they make. Usually, only studios that can't afford an in-house team will outsource.

Still, there's many factors that drive development costs up, which include all the staff a publisher hires to do the PR/advertising work, people who look for investors to get funding, not to mention global inflation that drives up the costs for everything. New games require higher-end equipment/PCs, and game devs need to make sure they're running the highest end to make optimizations.

Add to the fact that investors want guaranteed and fast ROIs, there's alot of pressure on the publishers, and in turn the development team to deliver. For the publishers to make sure their product stands out, they think "ultra-shiny graphics!" and thus the drive to make games with shinier graphics was born, often sacrificing gameplay as a result.

That being said, game development costs DON'T necessarily have to be as insanely high as they are now. Cut out all the publishing costs, keep the distribution digital, work with an online team who don't need to work from an office, and ~90% of the development costs are cut from the get-go.
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Re: Star Citizen

#19
yeah true, but the thing is, who is really to blame for pushing game costs up? I think publishers have a lot to answer for, back in the day, I read that BG1 cost around 3 million to make, ok things have changed and prices have gone up a lot, but even so, we will be getting a feature rich game project eternity for 4.1 million dollars, expensive yes, but it should probably be as big if not bigger then BG series, plus a 15 level mega dungeon (that gives me the giddys just thinking of how my party of six is going to survive in that nightmarish place and still get to the bottom?)
We likely should have a separate Kickstarter or general gaming thread, but I could not let the above statement pass without comment. Just the staff salaries for the 1.5 year projected development of Project: Eternity will exhaust the funds collected by Obsidian. And that is without considering the costs of pledge fulfillment, and various extraneous costs such as music, special effects, cinematics, voice acting, and promotion once the game is introduced. I have no idea what the final cost of the game will be but it will likely be more than double what Obsidian pulled in through their fundraiser. Additionally, I fully expect to see Project: Eternity to fall behind schedule. I would be very surprised indeed if the game released before the end of 2014. Yes, I do expect a fine game to emerge from PE, but I am more than a little concerned about Obsidian's ability to properly manage the development process on such a tight budget and compressed timeline. Hopefully Obsidian will pay a great deal of attention to detail especially given their less than stellar reputation for proper quality control which, this time, will not be able to be laid at the feet of greedy publishers. I suspect that Obsidian will end up taking out a loan or bringing on investors to provide additional funding. Regardless, if the game that emerges from PE is a success, Obsidian will be set with an IP that they own and can build around. Either way, it will be an interesting two years for the company and their fans.
I know not what life is, nor death.
Year in year out-all but a dream.
Both Heaven and Hell are left behind;
I stand in the moonlit dawn,
Free from clouds of attachment.
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Re: Star Citizen

#21
I'm extremely excited about Star Citizen. It looks phenomenal!!
I found out about Limit theory because of Star Citizen. I was also checking out Elite dangerous but it just didn't pop out to me like Star Citizen and Limit Theory.
I'm new to space games for the most part. S.P.A.Z and Sins of a Solar Empire are the ones that really peaked my interest in space games. I played a few way back in the day but don't remember them.
One reason I'm really liking Star Citizen is the way co-op is handled and multiplayer but I'm more of a co-op guy playing with a few friends of mine.
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Re: Star Citizen

#22
To me, the whoe SC or LT question is like the "blonde or brunette" choice.
If I can decide whatever way I like, I take both of them :D They're just so different, yet the same space taste - want to have them both :)
These different experiences should deliver loads of different fun. Like it!
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Re: Star Citizen

#23
also the latest update made a lot of things clear, this is something I really like about the game, you know what type of game they are going to make, and how it will play, and the lifetime insurance questions and answers helped to clear up a lot of questions, it will be a good game, no mistake
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Re: Star Citizen

#24
I found the Star Citizen campaign excecution a lot more amateurish then what Josh has shown us so far. :mrgreen:
Star Citizen had to deal with almost 100,000 people by the end of the campaign though. Josh has about 3000. It's a lot easier to manage a smaller crowd. In general I thought Star Citizen's campaign was done fairly well.... except the website, god I hate that thing. I just keeping hoping that one day I'll go to check an update and it will change. But other than that the videos were interesting and I loved the theatrical trailer. The game looks awesome and I think it will definitely be an interesting game to play, assuming it lives up to at least half of the hype it gets.
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Re: Star Citizen

#25
Thardimin wrote: The game looks awesome and I think it will definitely be an interesting game to play, assuming it lives up to at least half of the hype it gets.
if it lives up to half the hype it WILL be a phenomenal game. and truth be told I cant tell you which (SC or LT) ill be playing more of ( *please stop throwing rocks at me let me explain*) though I will say for a fact that im far mor impressed with Josh's work on LT then i am for SC. he a one man Demi god shaping the universe in his own way. where as SC has millions upon millions of dollars and teams of people and for all that its only marginally more impressive. will I play it yes. will i enjoy it? yes. which am i wanting more ? LT all the way XD.
If I've rambled and gone off topic im sorry but i tend to be long winded as you might notice if you stumble across my other post XD. thanks for reading.
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Re: Star Citizen

#27
Thardimin wrote:
I found the Star Citizen campaign excecution a lot more amateurish then what Josh has shown us so far. :mrgreen:
Star Citizen had to deal with almost 100,000 people by the end of the campaign though. Josh has about 3000.
That was not what I'm referring to at all.

Load can not be expected the first time when the campaign opened, but the second time it could be expected and they had two months to prepare!
Even despite turning off their forums the website could not keep up. Either because of poor design or because of to few servers/capacity rented.

But I'm also referring to the professionalism expressed by Josh and by the SC team.

Chris Roberts and the SC team failed to make a professional impression on me in so many points.
* Pricing errors on updates not getting corrected (17$ is not the same as 175$), despite the error being pointed out in comments within minutes.
* Limited edition ships offered were not limited at all, everyone pledging enough on KS could get them since they choose rewards afterwards.
* An ancient forum that returns error message half the time you post losing what you wrote if you didn't save it elsewhere.
* Chris speaking so quickly you can hardly understand what he says, getting overexcited and seems to improvise.
* As many has pointed out a confusing and ancient looking home page.
* Often contradictory info from their comments, KS and/or RSI.

The only thing they did professionally was the game content (video content and concept art) and apparently that is what counts judging from how much they raised :)
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Re: Star Citizen

#30
You know I was going to back Star Citizen but than I backed out of it, I really dislike player-run multiplayer only universes, because they inevitably end up falling to the couple dozen players that insist on spending 20 hours a day every single day in the game, and end up totally warping the economy, the world, and everything else to whatever they want, making said games very difficult to play beyond the very very early segments, or at least such has been my experience. It looks like it'll be a quality game but I LOATHE games where the only single-player content is a glorified multiplayer tutorial.
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