I also have to point out that it runs smoothly for me and many others, but it is an alpha game that's supposed to be cutting edge in a few years time when it releases. Expecting it to run well everywhere has been one of the huge drawbacks of open development as they have ended up doing a few performance passes that really didn't need to be done yet. It's not meant to be a released game. It also loads in less than 40 seconds for me now as they implemented level streaming.
It's not really a good idea to design for future hardware and assume that future GPUs are going to be able to handle X% more polygons/samples/etc. than what we have now. Just look at the original Crysis. It's still not easy to get solid high frame rates on a decade-old game since it was designed with the assumption that CPUs would continue to evolve on the axis of fast, single threaded performance. Instead parallelism happened.
A good game engine should scale smoothly from mid-range hardware upwards, and be designed so that it can be modified to take advantage of advances in hardware when they become available, not before.
Dumb as it sounds, it is because the client and the server are in lock-step. The root of the issue is the hardware on their servers. It doesn't have much to do with client hardware. The fixes for this are within the next few patches (maybe year and a half away). It has a lot to do with how much junk there is floating around on the server and, when you get a pristine server, things are much better.
It's still not acceptable, especially given that their promo videos demonstrate an experience that does not exist right now (unless you hit gold with a pristine server). However, it has absolutely nothing to do with client hardware. It's a bug.
Problems that persist in alphas tend to never get fixed. Improvements are only ever incremental. If you arent happy with the alpha, you wont be happy with the final product.
I can easily defend the game itself and try to, but the project management is harder. Sure, we can see huge progress is happening and they are making two games at once hence the massive head count. But everything else is a bit opaque.
And 40sec of load time on an SSD? That's a lot if you ask me. Fortnite loads in <5secs, CS:GO also in <5secs. Just few days ago I installed Quake Champions and the game needs 30+secs to load and it's really frustrating, considering matches are quite fast + their menu forces you to look at all achievements and all the crap I don't care about. Waiting is horrible.
It's great hat they are making improvements, but as another commenter said it seems like they haven't polished core gameplay enough -at least not enough for me to care.
We don't know a ton about the final design for system-to-system jumps yet, but the original concept is that you have to actively fly your ship through a somewhat twisty "jump point" wormhole thing and come out the other side. That would be long enough to cover the loading time, but it's all active gameplay instead of loading screens.
It also won't need to load the whole system when you jump in, only the "low poly" versions of planets and moons and whatever large scale spacescaping objects (gas clouds, etc.) are visible from where you come out. The more detailed versions of planets and moons only need to stream in once you pick where you're going within the system spool up your quantum drive to get there.
If you don't want a "quantum drive" scene going from one place to another, you're also free to make a seamless flight using regular engines! Port Olisar to Daymar takes a bit under 10 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_iXlgxsEVc (timelapse of that trip condensed to 15 minutes)
And if you're in something bigger than a single seat fighter, you can get up and do other stuff around your ship while it's traveling, but it's not a good idea in areas with pirates. Still, more options than a Mass Effect elevator.
Flying around a planet/moon all the way down to the surface, getting out of your ship and walking around, and going inside the various outposts happens completely seamlessly. I've only fired it up a couple times since beta 3.1 came out, but my first trip down to Yela was pretty mindblowing.
There's also related work with getting things like ship spawning off the main thread and improving the networking so that it only sends you data that's relevant to areas you're in.
Hopefully this stuff doesn't get pushed further down the schedule because it should make a big difference to performance.
You can see their development roadmap online: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...
As for not being able to imagine playing any FPS at 40hz -- I grew up playing FPS on computers which really couldn't handle playing FPS, pushing "entry level" $25 nvidia cards past their limits because I wanted the pretty graphics, 40 frames per second sounds amazing when you got accustomed to 15 ;)
However it does provide some vision for where the game developers would like to go for the restive SC backer population so there is some value in that
Again, I don't want to sell short the difficulty of the engine work they're trying to do, and frankly I should probably keep separate my grievances about deadline-meeting (although that certainly throws salt on the metaphorical wound). But to my eyes this is in the same vein as the complaints I see about other web products, "you have something good, polish but then don't fix what aint broke", while echoing a trope Star Citizen inflicted on itself from its very first "Iron Man" HUD design.[1] (reviled for being piles of overdesigned spinny widgets, and very little functionality).
I can zoom out and see the whole volume just fine. Don't select a specific system, use the mouse wheel. It works exactly as I expect a star map to work and it looks beautiful.
> Meanwhile, the core gameplay systems have, by many fans perceptions, degraded in quality, and prior deliverable dates have been slipped to levels that would get me fired in my position.
I really have my doubts that the people who cry the loudest are really "fans" or even pledged. There are real problems (e.g. the deliverable date thing, which they now reigned in a bit by doing a new feature release every three month), but many of the so called criticisms are just crying wolf or repeating old accusations which don't even fit anymore (see one of the posts below which states that they add stretch goal after stretch goal with new money ... there hasn't been a new stretch goal for a long time and they made clear that there won't be. All new money goes to existing targets)
I was using the scroll wheel, nothing selected (from first load), but from most angles systems at the edge are clipping on my system. From the initial view, for me, min, hades, taranis are all below the bottom, and a bunch off to the left. I can take a screenshot if it's really in doubt. (I'm on a new machine now than my initial post, but still chrome. Unfortunately this also gave me a chance to realize a nauseating back and forth swaying in the background if I leave this open too long in my peripheral... I can't honestly understand why one would chose that)
> I really have my doubts that the people who cry the loudest...
From a relatively disinterested point of view (Having slowly fallen out of interest over the last few years, from a point of playing every patch with anticipation) yes there's a lot of love to hate on SC, hell, even EvE has an "unofficial war" with them recently because of some ship design hubbub. That being said, there's also a lot of defensiveness about it, despite some very real issues. Back when I was far more involved, the subreddit could get QUITE cheerleady. Like many things nowadays there's a wonderful bit of polarization involved, I'd (riskily) make the sober statement of "They made enough questionable judgement calls, and had enough of a bad trend of meeting goals that I lost interest, and in that context this is both preconception-reinforcing and underwhelming." As said in my OP, just giving my own context, others are free to disagree.
As an addendum, the stretch goals thing is a good example of the reality distortion field, since yes, there aren't "nth new stretch goals" now, but some of their older, more ad-hoc stretch goals (100 systems at launch) are looking to be... interpreted flexibly, shall we say; so honestly I don't think it's super black and white. (I do think the claims that it's outright fraud are disingenuous)
A fun bit of history as well, lest I fall under accusation of not being a fan, the first post on this account and my reason for upgrading from just reading HN was to ask community opinion of pursuing a risky "dream job" over a stable corporate bigCo job, the dream job was at CIG. If you're curious, THAT context adds even more flavor, as with hindsight some warning signs from 2013 ended up being apocryphal to my current perception.[0]
But the SC as imagined by the 1000th "what money is still coming in? promise something! promise more!" new stretch goal, that will never be released.
They do have an actual roadmap now though so that's promising. Also SQ42 will come out at some point between now and the Star Citizens launch so they will have a hype cycle they need to release at the right time for.