The Glade 4.0

Okay, as frustrated as I get about feature creep, this Face Over IP is something multiplayer games, especially MMORPGs, have desperately needed. It's going hard into uncanny valley territory right now, but yikes with a little refinement or settings to just lipsynch, etc...

And holy ****, hallelujah, built in head tracking. That's one VR block out of the way...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Not as epic as last years but the capital ship battle was pretty cool, too bad they did it with shields down.

The live movement stuff is neat and doesn't look like it too much out of the dev schedule (I hope).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Following up on Gamescom, the traditional October CitizenCon this year...

I watched the opening remarks over the weekend, and the keynote over lunch. (I'll edit/reply to add the relevant links; can't browse them at work)

Interesting news. 3.0 is still creeping along through evocati testing (hand-picked limited public testing). But that's not news. Most significant news bits:

- Delta patcher's working well, and has been instrumental in rapid response to ongoing bugs in the last few months, now. It's also going to be very helpful as they accelerate the alpha release schedule due to...

- Date-targeted, rather than content-targeted, alpha releases. Instead of laying out content that will make up the next version or patch, and then letting the patch be ready whenever that content is done, CIG is moving to a quarterly patch target after 3.0 wraps up, and whatever content/features are ready will make it in. This should prevent delays in one area from preventing releases in others. Chris spoke of how "content droughts can cause people to get bored" and they look to prevent that (and the 10+ month patches that cause it) in the future.

- The keynote features an interesting look at the procedural development tools they're using to create planet-sized content. They do an extensive walk-through and fly-over of Stanton, which they say is currently fully built-out and "basically Coruscant" as a planet-wide city. I remain somewhat dubious as to how effectively they'll link the exterior buildings to sensible, useful, and relevant interior playable space, and the twenty minutes of procedural city they've flown us through hasn't yet allayed my fears and criticism of procedural content (it's the old Daggerfall conundrum: you can get scale procedurally, but you sacrifice hand-crafted soul and distinctiveness on the altar of generic scale), but taken as a whole, it's at least working and creating fundamentally valid environments, which could have gone wrong and is necessary if you're feature-creeping and abandoning 2-3 hand-crafted landing zones per planet/system.

They demo flying from one planet to another planet, fast-travelling for 8 minutes (while they put it picture-in-picture and showed us a very nice look at the design tools they use to guide the procedural generation -- which do look amazing for what they are, and I hope that their early commitment to the modding/personal server Freelancer community leads them to publish these eventually) to an entirely different planet appropriately far away in the same solar system.

- They fly around in the new Aurora, which, um, is fine, I guess. They also showed a Terrapin on the landing pad, but it won't be ready for 3.0 -- I'm assuming they've got the model and are still hooking up animations, damage models, etc.

- The GPU particles are on display in force. Contrails in atmosphere, engine trails in space, atmospheric re-entry effects, smokestacks and such in the cities (placed automatically during the procedural generation), and all-new quantum travel effects all show a wide variety.

- They're partnering with Intel to do a fast, exclusive variant of the Saber that's bundled with (while supplies last) orders of Intel's new SSD drive, which they announced live at the show. Cool partnership, good for them. Largely superfluous, though I imagine Intel's happy to partner with a game that will drive a couple million PC upgrades/purchases.

There are a bunch more presentations on YouTube that I have yet to watch. Probably a bunch falls into the "Oh, that's technologically cool, but gameplay meh" category.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Speaking of upgrades... my old laptop died and Asus wants $700 to repair it. Maybe it's time to replace it with something that can run the new Star Citizen. I know a desktop is a better idea for the long term but i don't really have space to set one up and have been using laptops for the last few years.

What should I look for in as far as processor, ram and video card to handle SC?

Ooh, I don't really follow laptops. Maybe this would be better fielded by folks on the SC forums.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades