Chairman Roberts Unleashes the fabled HANGAR of Star Citizen : I take a look around with Cinemizer OLED head tracking

So this may be the first play of Star Citizen with head tracking : The Chairman famously supports the Rift and talks of in game changes that head tracking will bring. But right now the finest head tracker there is the Cinemizer OLED head tracker and as Oculus fans struggle with a new layer of lag in software mouse emulation in Tridef the Zeiss just works .. and  does it all in hardware, so it moves as fast as your gaming machine or engine, towards the end of this video you will even see me slow it down by half..  Here is my first test. 

 

So Chris/RSI check this out. And if I can reach past the Rift trolls I would like to talk to the game developers about full integration of head tracking and supporting 3D hmds like the Cinemizer OLED,  smd ST1080...and yeah I am a backer too... 

Colour me sort of excited, for whilst other crowd sourced projects 90s coding legends are breaking veteran gamer//backer hearts and biased press keyboards as they struggle to put up reasons  for what were inevitable issues ... our Chairman Roberts has pulled a blinder ...gone and done it , not only is Star Citizen a game I am looking forward as much as the third coming of Freespace ( once Saints Row tanks for Volition) but if you are a backer currently everything is shiny for this project. 

Of course it's the kind of thing that got Origin and many other studios canned .. a long delay and then a tech demo ..followed by a long delay... Still we now have a hangar with a couple of ships , if you wish to buy them Rise of Flight style , starting price $55.. 

don't be fooled whilst these are 5120 by 1600 res shots the game currently moves around 5 fps at this res strange for the Cryengine...though at 1080p it flies ..this is pre alpha code after all we have to wait for hi res optimisation

With RSI though I have hope of better things to come , for starters you get great updates every week almost it seems, trolls are present on the forums yes, even some prominent Rift trolls but overall it is  a great community to be part of.

 

when Star Citizen launches phones will have higher res than this so don't worry your future PC GPUs will cope ..just like they did with Freelancer!

Contrary to popular belief the space combat /opera scene never died , in fact it is one of the most active mod and total conversion scenes , with people working out of love not crowd source pressure over a decade of time that our Chris was courting Hollywood.. It has always been a cool scene , from total conversions of Freespace 2 , to getting the old Wing Commanders working on today's hardware ..and Privateer for that matter .. or hi res mods for the X Wing series... it's all out there and free ... just check out places like  Wing Commander CIC ..    

as you can see I am fairly relaxed about Chairman Robert's crowd sourced game

So then , yesterday the Hangar module launched , launched on time people  and I don't know if this was deliberate humour on RSI ( not the injury) part but the download is a paltry 16Mb whilst the patch is  3GB .. can you imagine the size of the patch for the real game?

just enough room for a friend to fit in there with you .. what to do you think will Star Citizen go the ways of Mass Effect?

Just like old times ...classic PC gaming ... the Patch is bigger than the download... this has to be some kind of in joke ..

The downside of us  backing all our 90s coding heroes  currently crowd sourcing games development, is that we know them, those of us born before the Internet that is... we know what happened with the great Tim Shafer at Lucasfilm, we know what happened at Origin (the " we create worlds" one) and great 90's space opera developing schism of the brothers Roberts..That's all game lore, but two things utterly destroyed the space combat genre in the 90s and these may also threaten the space opera genre's resurgence:  .. delay ...and funding ... 

For fans there are long  delays like that of Freelancer, which I believe holds the record for appearing in pre release form(s) at consecutive E3s .. without releasing ...although this may have been bested by the Oculus Rift ... I shall have to do some sums and check with JC ..go go Reddit trolls...

For publishers , the old money, as legendary as Tim and Chris are to us ( I used to ring up the publishers and tease them about losing Shafer) , it is just about profit so delays lead to funding issues :  So these artists , who need time, often get side lined for more popular and profitable gaming fare ..or canned along with their games.. Thus at a certain time in the evolution of gaming both point and click and space combat sims became irrelevant to publishers. That is why young Padawan you know Volition for  Saints Row and it's brand of insanity ..and we veteran gamers stare in shock at the coders of the finest space combat series ever Freespace ..now creating alien anal probe weapon controversy... 

Crowd sourced games thus face a double whammy of angered fans facing delays and the same fans also acting like the publishers used to in the good old days expecting delivery by deadlines...hence the chaos around Double Fine's announcement of delay and funding issues ..that our Tim has moved quickly to attempt to calm down...with a very long piece by a friendly journalist type .. Meanwhile our Chairman has deftly countered such issues ..for now..

But true artists do not bend to publisher or critical opinion, they rise above it and that's were Tim Shafer and Chris the "Chairman" Roberts shine ...  so rest easy the game Tim will release is the game(s) you have always wanted as an adventure game fan similarly RSI and Star Citizen is in rude health right now as can be seen by the release of the Hangar module which for me is exciting because we are one step closer to getting the combat module... Can you actually do anything ...not really (see the video above) but it is an excellent way for RSI to reach out and touch it's backers .. 

So keep the faith because otherwise, one day our Tim and Chris may be pwned by some games publishing leviathan that forces them to churn out absurd open world cliche ridden (though quite enjoyable) "popular" games on time and under budget... 

Now that , that is just not rock and roll... as I am sure Volition  currently short listing insane weapon combinations for Saints Row V and not Freespace 3 ( hint hint) ..would agree... 

Log on now and download your Hangar and people support your friendly global neighborhood game developing legends.. 

I need to find a way of making this 3D .. should be possible as this is Cryengine 3 : NB this is pre alpha code so expect the expected..... 

time to dust off that old Force Feedback Pro....almost ... 

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