Star Citizen Announced - Wing Commander Sequel
 

This next gen space opera/sim has finally been announced.

I love the look of it and the way they are going about it.
I made my first crowd sourcing pledge to it as this game is what got me into space/flight simulation all those years ago.

I hope Luthier is watching this one, they are doing everything exactly how I would like IL2 to evolve and the community interaction is the best I have ever seen. Maybe luthier should also take a look at using an off the shelf (customised of course) Cryengine 3 type approach to the MMO. (if its still alive) Here's to hoping Luthier and 1C can do something similar for the WW2 universe!

Free to play - Pay once and play for free for ever
Single player campaign with branching stories (can also be played Co-op)
Offline and online play
Persistent Universe Public Servers AND Private servers.
No concept of Pay to win - although it looks like you could still theoretically buy the best ships and parts, they are going to discourage that type of game play through the gameplay somehow... "no concept of level 80 - kill everything players" to quote Chris Roberts.
Private servers allow modding and community content and the Public world will also allow approved community content.
Micro patching instead of yearly patches and they will constantly add content and new single player stories. (some you have to pay for.. a new story/mission pack for example)

You have to see the teaser trailer and Chris Roberts 1hr launch video to appreciate the level of immersion he is creating... walking around carriers, getting in ships, full 3d rendered cockpits (and fully animated pilots) and cockpit entry/exit in realtime first person view. WOW!

PS. he makes no apology for needing latest gen hardware for this game either.

Official site
http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/

Good press annoucement
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/10/mee...ury-successor/

1hr Launch video and preview
http://au.gamespot.com/shows/gamespo..._panel20121010

Wow, I have to say that this is not my kind of thing at all, but colour me impressed. I might have to get this actually. The only thing that concerns me is that he seems very very abitious. If he delivers, this could be the game that I never knew I was always waiting for :P Is there any sort of time scale on a release?

Late 2014 release. Alpha/Beta testing soon.

He's ambitious but I believe he will achieve it. He was the first to use real actors and full motion video in a game. (WCIII 1994)

too bad it's not a "newton universe"(momentum, drift) like it was in IWar2.
[that would require 2 joysticks plus pedals though]

This could be of interest for our Clod whiners.

http://starcitizen.robertsspaceindus...2/10/chart.jpg

It does have newtonian physics.. I dont know where you got the idea it doesnt!!

"Although Roberts is only showing technical demos at the moment, the visual fidelity is astonishing. Running on a PC with a GTX 670 graphics card, we see gigantic, kilometre-long carriers, their exteriors constructed from seven million polygons. Player craft feature over 200 parts, with over 60 animated sections that all make sense, that all have a purpose. The handling model is based around Newtonian physics. “There’s a rigid body, it has mass and it has maneuvering thrusters, that articulate and generate force,” says Roberts. “The maneuverability is completely down to the weight of the craft and power and articulation of the thrusters. In combat, if you’re hit in a back thruster the handling will be different – there’s a lot of fallout.”"

And the ship flies like an F35...

What I was talking about was flying in "real" space.
i.e. full speed ahead, cut power, no deceleration, turn 180 with your maneuvering thrusters an fly backwards. B5 style. ;)

I'm a fan of stargazing, not so much futuristic space stuff.

Anyway I didn't mean to watch the whole presentation right now, but I got quite sucked in. I think that he has the game industry summed up, and hopefully he manages to pull it off, I think he will, the site just went down for me so it must be getting a lot of hits.

The game looks great & has some really fantastic ideas, and I think the community will be great and the communication too :rolleyes:, I'll be watching this with interest!

Meh, looks like that game also sucks. Where is words about influence of gravitational fields!? I can't go into orbit?

That would be totally at odds with the flight dynamics in all the earlier games. You would just totally annoy all the old players from the original series.

The Wing Commander games have always flown like a starwars/batttlestar-galactica fighter Hollywood movie style.

In a sense that is essential to make an interesting "space" game as dog-fighting and combat using the behavior of real world space craft (head on passes at 30,000 mph anyone?) would be hours of boredom followed by milliseconds of excitement and more hours of boredom.

Yes the ships fly like an F35 in that they are fly by wire.
If you watch the 1hr video near the end in the Q&A he talks about sliding and doing tricks by disabling thrusters to take advantage of mass and inertia. So you can do everything your talking about and I would expect nothing less.

Im sure the newtonian physics wont be 100% just like in his previous games as that would make the ships too hard to fly even with fly by wire. Some compromises will have to be made to allow enjoyable game play.

I hope this takes off.

Wish I had 10 grand to through around for a pledge....

Looks pretty cool. I never played WC for PC but they did a few SNES ports in the early 90s that I rented, those were great games.

Who knows if this succeeds maybe it will kick Lucas Arts in the pants to remake Tie Fighter?

I wonder if you will be able to fly down into planets from space or take off from planets and go into space....that has always been a dream of mine in a Starwars / Space sim.

sounds cool.. loved WC

I would like to register at their Forum but cant figure out how.

I tried to create an account on the main page (needed for the forum), registration was some kind of inconclusive, meaning there was no defined end like "your registration is now complete". But trying to log in resulted in the error message "Account is not active"... Retrying to register said "user name / email adress already taken", so I obviously do have an account, but cannot access it. I guess, they have a problem sending out the registration-confirmation ("click here to complete") emails.

Made a pledge anyhow :grin:, loved that scene running from the briefing to the ship, which got all my adrenalin up for the fight - would love to have something similiar in CloD ;) And in any case: if that works for that niche, maybe it will work for ours, too.

Here's an up to date response from Chris Roberts.... As I said for gameplay reasons and visual reasons it doesnt always look like newtonian physics but it is. From the Horses Mouth.. below.

Question about Physics

Christopher Roberts:

“First post on the forums! I finally have a few spare minutes.

As someone that was taking Physics at Manchester University before I dropped out to make games full time I can assure everyone that the physics model is COMPLETELY accurate and its a full rigid body simulation. I know because I wrote the code.

Maybe I should have done a better job in the demo, but if you are flying at speed and you set your desired velocity to zero you WILL see the top front thrusters articulating and firing to slow your velocity. If you watch my demo you will notice there is some momentum with the Hornet when I slow down close to the bridge. It may not have been apparent on the screen, but I can assure the Hornet does not stop on a dime. if you load it up with more mass (like extra weapons) you feel the effect of this.

There is no drag modeled – everything is done as it would be in space.

Additionally there is actually counter thrust being applied inside the physics and if you had your hands on the controller you would feel it. If you look closely you will see the inertia of this – the ship doesn’t stop rolling or pitching on a dime. There is however a very good reason why you don’t actually see the thrusters fire entirely accurately.

The problem with visually depicting the proper thrust is that it would actually look pretty horrible (trust me this is how I first did it, and is still pretty easy to switch back to as I’m actually doing some extra work to make the visuals looks nicer).

The reason is because there is no drag in space, so even a micro amount of thrust starts the Hornet (or any spaceship) rotating until you apply counter thrust. So what is really happening is that the flight control system is always applying micro thrust and counter thrust to achieve the pilot’s inputs. This results in the thrusters flickering off oand on in micro amounts and you actually not getting a good feel of the general application of thrust. I think you know I like things to look cool (come on, we all know you probably wouldnt be engaging in space dogfights at WW2 speeds, but its so much more fun than what the reality would probably be), so what happens is that the system is still modeled accurately, but I use the angular /linear velocity delta to drive the visual represntation of thrust. Here’s my code comment

//Note the thrustGoal is actually the linear velocity delta (desired vel – current vel of
//the vehicle & rotational vel rather than the actual linear & angular acceleration / thrust.
//This is because, while inaccurate its cooler to see more constant thrust that gives
//you a visual clue as to what correctional movement / velocity vectors the vehicle is using.
//If we just used the acceleration as opposed to the desired velocity correction, the thruster flames
//would flicker on and off – especially in the Wing Commander use case of Space, where
//there is no atmosphere to provide drag.
//Of course if you pass the actual accelerations to SetThrustGoal, then you’ll get an accurate
//visual representation of what a thruster would really do

I hope that clears up any confusion!

I will admit that the ship doesn’t need to have wings or fans on the front, but the idea behind that is for possible atmospheric flight (this is not a promise of planetary action for the early build but allows for expansions in this direction), and as a RAM scoop. Plus it just looks / feels cool.”

They had problems with the massive load on the servers, everything is back up and running properly now. Try emailing them if you cant log in, or if you like give me your registration details and I'll contact them on your behalf.

Yeah Id love to have a scramble cut scene or realtime first person or 3rd person view scrambling... running to your aircraft with the ground crew doing their thing too!

As you'll see in the post I made a couple above, Chris has thought of atmospheric flight so its a possibility! ;)

S!

That is a definitive game to wait for :) Maybe this time warrants CrossFire as so far I've seen more trouble than worth from using either SLI or CrossFire.