Star Citizen Plans To Go Vulkan-Only

[AdamOne]

great news, but star citizen is way too over developed.

they could have released ages ago but whats his face john carmack or whatever has set his mind to deing the most thorough job ever, its just way too thorough. release it one day!!

future bodes bad...

[Notavi]

Well they need rewrite their engine to get the right calls without screwing up their current work, then get their rendering pipeline ready again without screwing up what currently works. So a Windows alpha of the Vulkan version maybe 6 months if it's high priority probably closer to a year, if you want a Linux alpha you'll be waiting an good long while past that due to the heaven knows how much windows specific stuff they'd have to rewrite or replace. A project of this size should really have planned from the start to be crossplatform

Actually, they currently do maintain a (graphics-less) Linux build[1] - so they have been putting effort into keeping platform specific stuff out of the build (the reason we never saw an OpenGL release is that it would have required too much rework and Vulkan was already on the horizon so it just didn't make sense).

We will still be waiting a little while after the Windows Vulkan release for the Linux version though, as they want to shake any issues with the new renderer out on Windows (easier to debug issues if you've only changed the renderer than if you've changed the renderer and platform at the same time).

[1] https://forums.robertsspaceindustrie...omment_6792315

[Notavi]

so the correct solution is to upgrade their version

Uh, no - the version CIG has is heavily modified to meet their needs so they'd have to throw out a lot of the work they've done to do that (for example, Star Citizen uses double-precision floating point for all co-ordinates to enable it to support much, much larger areas - pretty handy for a space game but that change goes right through the entirety of their engine. They've also put a lot of work into custom lighting systems, planet rendering with weather, etc). It's actually less work for them to build out Vulkan independantly.

[ArchFanatic]

I love Vulkan but what about finishing the damn game first?

http://dereksmart.com/2016/06/star-citizen-fidelity-of-failure/

Also Nvidia is faling to fix huge flaw in their WSI extension function: vkQueuePresentKHR implementation with VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR is blocking until next vblank period which mesa devs fixed long time ago

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2016-November/134653.html

Or maybe its desired behavior for efficient implementation and intel-anv driver is doing it wrong?

[theriddick]

great news, but star citizen is way too over developed.
they could have released ages ago but whats his face john carmack or whatever has set his mind to deing the most thorough job ever, its just way too thorough. release it one day!!
future bodes bad...

LOL, I think you mean Chris Roberts. These additional stuff is all part of the stretch goal system that's being paid for by the community, also I would say to those waiting for a retail boxed 1.0 release, just give the game a go when alpha 3.0 comes out in the next month or two! Waiting and grumbling on the sideline acting like its all a failure is silly!

[mike44]

I especially love that they are dropping Dx11 support, the sooner that dies, the better it will be for everyone.

Oh well if they have DX12...
140Millions seems a lot. For Alien Isolation I've heard about 2 Millions copies sold, that would make ~50 Millions only.

[Shevchen]

great news, but star citizen is way too over developed.

they could have released ages ago but whats his face john carmack or whatever has set his mind to deing the most thorough job ever, its just way too thorough. release it one day!!

future bodes bad...

I don't want to attack your personal opinion - its fine if you see it that way. But the game is funded by the whole community and CR made several polls regarding the complexity and an overwhelming amount of the community (70%) wanted more complexity, even if it means longer production time.

That being said, SC echoes the dreams of many people to finally see a deep, complex and vast open world game with a very high quality standard - something that has never been done before (and yes, it invokes a level of hype that may look like mental illness for outsiders). People give it a shot and if it fails... it fails. But if it succeeds, the whole gaming industry can buy a stock of winter-socks for the next 10 years. (Which is good, because they need a major kick in the butt)

[bug77]

I think only fools get excited these days about anything RSI announces. They always announce some new addition to their WiP title, but they never completely implement anything.
Also, they don't actually target DX12 or Vulkan, they use an engine that can support those. First they "wisely" chose CryEngine and when Crytek started going downhill they move to Lumberyard. Lumberyard may support Vulkan, but the engine itself is not open (dev will get the source code, but that's it) and also doubles as a way to herd people onto AWS.

In short, Vulkan is preferable to DX12, but the only thing that would pique my interest, is a finished Star Citizen/Squadron 42.

[simonalsn]

I get the frustration with the long development time, but I, as many others, prefer to get an awesome game late, rather than a crappy game early.
If you follow their community stuff you can also easily see that they are making lots of progress all the time.
Anyone saying it is a scam must not have looked into it, sure the game could come out and disappoint everyone, but if it is a scam they sure hire a lot of developers and actors for no reason, and produce a lot of assets to no end.

[bug77]

I get the frustration with the long development time, but I, as many others, prefer to get an awesome game late, rather than a crappy game early.
If you follow their community stuff you can also easily see that they are making lots of progress all the time.
Anyone saying it is a scam must not have looked into it, sure the game could come out and disappoint everyone, but if it is a scam they sure hire a lot of developers and actors for no reason, and produce a lot of assets to no end.

I know the story. But after so many years in development, how many features are actually finished? Is space combat done? Trading? Weapon systems? Something? Because last I heard about it, someone tried to get into the open beta week-end, only to rage-quit after a few hours playing a bug-ridden mess.

I don't mind the waiting (I haven't chipped in anyway). But to demonstrate progress you have to hit some milestones every now and then. As always, I prefer to be sceptical and let RSI surprise me, rather than the other way around.