Star Citizen - ILM or Internal Lighting Model - too many fake Hollywood-pop lights

Before I get onto my lighting polemic, ID Tech 666 is used to power Doom 2016, but Star Citizen looks better … where it fails is in the Attentnion To Detail, and I don’t mean in the machinery and guns and world and stuff, “I mean the gaming sandbox,” and the general functionality of the interactive world and the re-spawning never-die hyperspace-generated-everything nature.

While it might seem okay to translate first-person or story-based narrative into a MMO, it doesn’t work that way. An MMO is a place where ‘the player’ generates the content. It’s not a place where a player is led by the nose. CIG, Squadron42 is already doing that. The dev-team should be going back in and ripping out the guts of Star Citizen to re-establish what it should actually allow as a SGE or Sandbox Game Engine. I mean that’s what it is, right? A game engine, designed to run a galactic sandbox. So, make it do that. Decide whether it’s a manual-activity game or a think-activity game – yes, there is a real difference to how any player interacts with either game.

When will ladders work like ‘any normal animation path’?

When will real now-ness be embedded in the character i.e. carry what you can until you can restock at a suitable place?

When will they sort out the internal lighting… when I was character-art lead on Empire Games’ GhostMaster, the first thing we got the assigned landscape guy to do was strip out all the old and extraneous Hollywood-pop lights that were just sitting there colouring a wall or corner for no other reason than ‘because it could’. We eventually went with a pseudo-raytraced i.e. pre-generated light maps with active light switches, model that stored a lovely bitmap per room-render area. You could turn this lightmap on and off, it worked really well for our haunted-house gameplay type. For this you need LIGHT COMING FROM REAL LIGHTS. This means fewer lights, more strategically places to cast light, and shadows.

It’s easy to demonstrate in Star Citizen. Land somewhere. Go outside. Leave your ship. Walk around on the planet with its unified light source i.e. the star. The lighting model is so much more solid. Brightness means something. Contrast means something. Inside any base or ship, the lighting is ‘so faked’ with Hollywood pop all over the joint, it’s just a colour-mush of literal non-lighting i.e. bland as f*** and doesn’t sculpt the areas being illuminated. You can’t see the lighting POURING AROUND CORNERS via calculated bounce the way our little PC game did many moons ago.

I’m glad I mentioned this, “Maybe CIG’ll fix their ILM,” or simply adopt that delicious new GPU raytracing tech everyone’s trying to implement these days.  But they still need fewer lights, better placed.