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Post by KostaAndreadis @ 01:04pm 12/03/15 | 14 Comments
Houston, we have a potential space problem. No, everything's fine with the space ship but our hard drives may need a little cleaning. You see, Star Citizen, the little crowd funded space simulator that could, may just end up pushing our hard drives and download limits to the furthest reaches of deep space. That being, an installation of up to 100GB of intergalactic space data and patches in the outer regions of 20GB.

With crowd funding for Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts' space simulator Star Citizen sitting just shy of $75 million dollars comes word from the Roberts Space Industries forum that the game client could end up being around 100GB (that's Gigabytes) of data. According to director of game operations Jeremy Masker,
"The game compression and asset removal is unlikely to yield such high gains that we will be able to reduce our client size to 30-40GB. The size and number of assets that are left to deliver means that our client size is much more likely to be 100GB."

Not only that but patch sizes are expected to be pretty big too,
"Each patch has 100s of assets, each of these assets are at times 200MB, this leads to 2-6GB patches, and if we end up doing a file type re-factor and have to re-download 30-40% of the assets on the hard-drive, then the patch will be 14-20GB."

With the sheer scope and size of Star Citizen this shouldn't really come as a surprise, but this news definitely puts the game's ambition into the correct perspective. Also, it gives new meaning to the phrase, "Space, the final frontier."



chris robertscrowd fundingstar citizenroberts space industries





Latest Comments
Ickus
Posted 01:20pm 12/3/15
CR touched on some of the problems of "space" when doing the recent new procedural damage demonstration.

One of the reasons why they went to a more procedural based damage system is it cut ship asset size. They had noticed the larger graphical assets were causing delays when transferring from machine ram to video card ram.

I expect that they will have to start doing more things to control asset size while trying to main CRs desired level of fidelity.
Khel
Posted 01:45pm 12/3/15
Yeah, I was gonna say, they really should be looking into generating more things procedurally if its getting that out of control.
Melrick
Posted 06:40pm 12/3/15
Guess what game I'll never buy?
Dazhel
Posted 12:28am 13/3/15

They had noticed the larger graphical assets were causing delays when transferring from machine ram to video card ram.


Faaaaark... the bandwidth on memory transfers is measured in gigabytes per second and latency in nanoseconds.
Now imagine transferring those assets off disk into main memory where transfer rates are measured in megabytes per second and latency in milliseconds.

This game looks like it'll have some obscenely long load times.

Edit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/2m0g1g/hangar_load_times/

I've been playing a lot more since the new patch came out but I've noticed that initial load into the hangar can take upwards of 5 minutes, anybody else having similar load times?
5 minutes seems kind of long. I've got about 2 minute load times. I hear most folks with a SSD get 20-30 second load times.
SSD here, I'd say I average about 40 seconds.


So, will they be shipping a bonus 120GB SSD to everyone that purchased a copy?
Khel
Posted 01:20am 13/3/15
Sounds like they're trying to capture that wing commander 3 load times nostalgia
Ickus
Posted 01:22am 13/3/15
It fits right in there with that one of the kickstarter packages came with a USB stick and a copy of Star Citizen on it... so either a 128GB or 256GB USB stick, may of almost made the donation worth it.

I actually play off a standard hard drive, load times are excessively long. Just as well I only fire it up once or twice a month to see what has changed. Next time I do it I might remember to time it.
Whoop
Posted 11:53am 13/3/15
This game looks like it'll have some obscenely long load times.

Like how Battlefield 4 takes forever to load a map off a platter drive.
niteheh
Posted 08:22pm 13/3/15
I haven't been following the development at all, but it feels like any game which is 100GB in the current climate is just badly designed.
icewyrm
Posted 02:59am 14/3/15
Big game, big client. Seems legit seeing as they are trying to squeeze in so many different game play elements into the one title.

Though it sounds like there might be a problem if load times for a single aspect (like the hangar view for example) are taking that long. If you were switching between things often in game you could wind up spending a long time watching progress bars.

I might have to get a bigger SSD if I decide to pick up star citizen, I'm only keeping my OS and a few of my more commonly played/load intensive games on my current one at the moment.

last edited by icewyrm at 02:59:43 14/Mar/15
BladeRunner
Posted 06:03am 14/3/15
Its funny to imagine a single drive (SSD 120gb) dedicated to a single game. Its not a bad idea though. This is not your average Caw'a'dooty here.
Crakaveli
Posted 08:43pm 14/3/15
ssd's should be pretty cheap by the time this comes out anyway.
lmnt
Posted 07:25pm 15/3/15
100gb of sweet space-sim nectar you say?

Tiny
Posted 09:53am 16/3/15
So, crowd funding means that the users pre-pay for the game and then they get to release a finished game they can then charge others for without anything personally invested?

Is this what's happening here?
Tollaz0r!
Posted 10:44am 16/3/15


So, crowd funding means that the users pre-pay for the game and then they get to release a finished game they can then charge others for without anything personally invested?


Sometimes, other times the people invovled also through in their own cash.

The Star Citizen income well and truly got kick-started.
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