Why must this require Shader Model 5.0? Judging by last month's Steam survey, only about 62% of machines surveyed are equipped for it, and judging by Wikipedia, there are still plenty of games in development that support older hardware. This and TUG are the only games I know of to have this requirement. It's strange to me that indie studios would do this, with Kickstarted projects no less, when it's usually the AAA studios pushing the bleeding edge.
Edit: To be fair, doing some linear extrapolation it looks like the 62% will be closer to 90% by Q4 2014.
In general, there are a few reasons for it.
First, Chris Roberts' vision for the game. He wants the graphics of this game to be film-like; if the game looks like a game, we haven't tried hard enough.
Second, there are no games which challenge a Titan GPU. Let alone 2 or 4 of em SLI'd together. So why would anyone buy them? Part of the goal CR has is to push the industry forward by having the ability for the game to use every ounce of power supplied by your quad-Titan setup. Or even beyond. To quote CR, "The game['s graphics] should grow as your hardware does."
As for specifically DirectX11 requirements, we need that because it has some awesome features.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476342(v=vs.85).aspxTessellation can be pretty nifty if used right, and there is really nothing like it in prior versions of DirectX. Shader 5 also has things like structured buffers, for which we have extensive plans.
As for that last bit, the reason most indies don't push the limits is because most of them haven't explored the limits enough to know what they can push. Most indie games don't really need a specialized graphics or GPGPU programmer, and so if the teams happen to have one, it's only by chance. And most of them build on preexisting engines anyway. The reason we're doing it
is because we can. Our crowdfunding passed $17 million last night. That's not even approaching the budget of an MMO like SWTOR, which was well over $100 million, but it's still enough for us to basically be a fully crowdfunded AAA studio. And we're shipping the equivalent of like 4 small games [ship to ship dogfighting, fps combat, social modules, ect] and 2 AAA games [Squadron 42 and Star Citizen].
On an unrelated note, as far as the Voyager Direct stuff goes, I think they may have made the prices too low for most of the cosmetic stuff.
Reason being, it currently smells like micro-transactions; when it's really little more than another crowdfunding reward tier. Methinks if they were obviously unreasonably priced, rather than near the very high end of reasonable, people would react less harshly. So yeah, those needed better spindoctoring; because that was pretty bad.
Edit: Oh, and if you haven't seen it yet, be sure to browse through this thread:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/44486/so-i-loaded-the-assets-of-the-hangar-into-the-sandbox-editor/p1Best one is the person who put the Aurora model on the CryEngine blackhawk helicopter entity. In the office, we were wondering how long it would take for someone to do that.
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Topic: Star Citizen: The Old Thread Was Dead (Read 64741 times)