How hard could it be??

I actually think that *currently* in arena commander, the system is rendering everything (certainly in the hangar module, they actually spawn all the different ships under the hangar, which was a quick fix to get the holo table working).

I think the tech your referring to falls under the 'large world' system they've been building (along with some other things, they mentioned an 'instance manager' if I recall correctly). Most of this isn't in game yet so I expect the frame rates in the existing levels to improve quite a bit when that actually gets added.

While that blog post from Derek Smart reads a little arrogant "look I made that game a few years back and nothing comes close" he certainly is right that Star citizen has a ton of feature creep. I don't think it is generally technically impossible to do what they want to do, but it probably is impossible with their resources and once that will become clear I'll get a LOT of popcorn and watch from the distance. Maybe after that more people will realize that making games is hard.

Well in fairness to CIG, *most* of the feature creep has been segregated off into the 'after launch update' section. The game they launch will be more complicated than what was originally pitched, although I think they've been careful to keep the launch feature set sensible.

Where the popcorn will really be needed is when people realise that StarCitizen vs 1.0 won't have every stretch goal and additional feature in place I mean I can't really see what CIG can do about it, any backer who's bothered to read up on the game knows this but then again we saw how the community reacted to PA at launch so your right there will inevitably be some controversy

Thankfully for me, the bit of the game I most want is Squadron 42 (which also happens to be technically reasonably straight forward compared to the larger sandbox game) and is set to release well before vs 1.0 (well the first chapter is at least)

The engine for this game, network code and all should have been built to suit the games demands for features, Physic's and MMO play-ability right from the start...
The Cryengine it'self IMO is very demanding on hardware,
I think they will have to cut corners somewhere to get MMO functionality from it they way that star citizen requires,
Or they will need to rebuild the entire engine from scratch specifically to suit Star citizen....

And this is the most likely reason the CryEngine team was hired . to do this ^^^^

they don't tend to work for free and 85 million is only 85 million.

good point..

They're expecting a total development budget of 100 million so they have room on that imo. Also cry engine was chosen before the initial kickstarter and it would have been fine for squadron 42 imo, what happened after has kinda made them have to rethink a bit. Either way I think they'll pull it off, also the way they are doing the 'mmo' bit is quite shrewd and more akin to freelancer than wow ... Essentially they're going to run loads of small servers that cater to individual areas (and there will be multiple instances in each area). Where players aren't actually interacting they'll be in separate servers and only get put together when required (this will all occur in the background). They said there will be a limit of number of players on one instance at the same time (prob 64) so maybe scale raids eve style probably won't be possible (at least with human players, npcs will be on top of that number).

They're being realistic about what they can do and star citizen is about up close detail rather than massive fleets so I can live with this.

That means it was chosen without considering the major feature extensions that came up after they suddenly had a budget that was a loooot bigger than initially planned.

Let me fix that for you

I would have like to have seen what this could have been if the $85m+ was put into the original Star Citizen idea as originally pitched in the kickstarter without the stretch goals ...
I honestly think this title could have generated this amount of money still without half of those "Ridiculous" stretch goals, like pets and ornament's in your cockpit.

Same as i would like to have seen what PA would have been if Uber had the 2.5 million just to build the original pitched idea without the stretch goals too..
I also believe PA could have generated as much as it did without the stretch goals too..

edit ..
fixed my awesome Max Powerz spelling errors :d

I should add "Stretch Goals" to my GoFundMe campaign for my LaserTag..
Like
At $1500 i will send all my backers "Gold plated, Diamond encrusted underwear"
(Disclaimer -- The "Gold" may be fake , The "Diamonds" will be glass, And your underwear may never be delivered!)