The outset of Cloud Imperium Games’ sprawling 24-minute showcase for StarEngine features the disclaimer: ‘everything you are about to see has been captured in engine as one continuous shot without loading screens;’ the intention surely to allay any trepidation into its genuineness as much as it is an advertisement for CIG’s technical achievement.
After 12-ish years in development, it’s understandable Star Citizen has its fair share of detractors. And, with this video being a technical demonstration and not actual in-game footage the usual caveat with this sort of thing remains. Until we see it in situ, until we breathe in the air of its biome’s, until we walk its space station corridors, until we trailblaze through billions of kilometres of open space without encountering a loading screen (as the showcase has us believe is possible) then we must take this demonstration with a pinch of salt. Even if everything promised in CIG’s self-declared glimpse of the future were technically possible, how would it perform for the player. Is modern hardware up to the task? Gut feeling is this window of the future isn’t on the horizon, but still very much a distant speck in the far reaches of the universe. It’s a hi-res infrared of the Horsehead Nebula, crystal-clear as if you could disperse its graceful billow with the palm of your hand, but still so achingly far away.
But just imagine for a second if every feature presented in CIG’s StarEngine showcase was a reality. Ignore the doubts in your mind for a moment and allow yourself to be enraptured by the possibilities. This trailer, after all, presents a visage of interstellar travel in one continuous, thrilling experience. The transition from space to ground is seamless: seemingly effortless, even. Its sequences are undeniably awe-inspiring, taking in snow-capped mountain ranges and icy metropolises, subterranean mining operations, verdant pastures complete with grazing fauna and agriculture, waiflike cloud cities, wormhole adjacent neon-daubed gas stations, and enough outposts to fill a sci-fi feature length. Dynamic environmental weather sprinkles every vista in natural beauty: shafts of sunlight beam through planet-scale volumetric clouds, fog fully integrated into the atmosphere cloaks valleys shaped by rivers, planets harbour full day and night cycles depending on the rotation and proximity to their star. Terrestrial environments are malleable via physically based destruction too, although it’ll be interesting to see just how much of the universe can be blasted into smithereens.
Increasingly impressive is the demonstration’s interiors: bustling urban areas brim with life, public transit flows to its own timetable, multicrew spaceships work in the stratosphere, industrial, gas venting space stations orbit distant planets. There’s even an unfortunate ship on a downwards trajectory owing to a raging internal fire, with fire extinguisher clad NPCs a nice addition to StarEngine footage previously shared. The attention to detail seeps into the minutiae too: physically based water FX curl puddles and lake surfaces in the stream of a passing Gladius thruster, sweat and tears seep out of an explorer’s pores; skin appears freckled, scarred, tattooed, glistening.
It’s as if Cloud Imperium Games have covered everything there is to cover in the universe. However, it’s not even clear if this footage is 100% real-time. If we were to accuse CIG of misleading us, then we might say some of those wormhole transitions may harbour a loading screen. We’re not saying that, of course, but billions of kilometres of vast, unexplored universe can’t be rendered in seconds, surely?
The footage shared is inarguably impressive, with no doubt a ton of hard graft from CIG’s workforce going into the presentation. It’s just… it’s a little too good to be true, isn’t it? Many of the features presented, such as the seamless transition from space to ground and vice versa are already possible in Star Citizen’s playable alpha, but the experience is oftentimes accompanied by stuttered spaceflight. Just because the bulk of the features here are playable, it doesn’t make this technical demonstration 100% representative. This level of simulation and attention to detail is going to inevitably encounter problems, with even this tech demo showing its limited draw distance from time to time. But, after all, StarEngine is Cloud Imperium Games’ proprietary tech, and if anyone’s going to wrestle the best out of it, it’s them.
Star Citizen started life on a customised version of CryEngine 3. Before long, development transitioned to Amazon’s LumberYard Engine, which itself is a derivative of CryEngine. The alterations made by CIG in the years succeeding have evolved into its own breakaway game engine. CryEngine does have its own usability issues, so there is promise if nothing else that Cloud Imperium Games have enhanced it enough to make it their own, and thus continue to furrow away behind the scenes ironing out kinks before the game eventually releases. CIG is clear that StarEngine is for their use only and will not be put up for sale to third party studios. In the works is a new ‘Gen 12 Renderer’ that’ll enhance the performance of Star Citizen and its companion single player spaceflight sim Squadron 42. Integral to this update is improvements to CPU scalability, meaning both experiences should be able to better harness available CPU cores. Ray tracing – a feature promised to crowd funders – is still reportedly in the pipeline. By the time Star Citizen eventually comes out, real-time path tracing will probably have arrived, soon to be usurped by some even fancier tech.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Yes, Cloud Imperium Games are likely right in declaring their StarEngine showcase as the future of gaming. But the question is: how long into the future are we talking? It’s going to need some nifty servers to smoothly generate all this content. Yes, it’ll be using a client-server model to generate a planet’s surface but there’s so much that needs to be done instantaneously to convincingly convey the illusion of a fully explorable planet: real-time biome generation, dense environmental procedural generation, terrain tessellation, dynamic planetary weather systems, ecosystem generation, space stations streaming on demand… the list is unfathomably large. In fact, it’s a whole universe available on demand, a bazillion channels on TV with only barebones programs scheduled. The rest is made up on the fly. Improvisation from an encyclopaedia of rules.
It’s no wonder the game is reportedly at only 25% completion (although the standalone single player component Squadron 42 is locked in a polishing phase right now). Star Citizen is such a gargantuan undertaking, it’ll be a miracle if CIG ever pull this off.
Other games – Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, Starfield – are attempting the limitless space explorer sim to varying degrees of success. None are as enveloping as Star Citizen though. There’s hope that we can see StarEngine’s tech demo for what it is: a glimpse into the far-flung future, a distant promise of technical abundance and ultimate freedom.
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