You know what else had pretty sweet bedsheet animations? Deadly Premonition.
If you ever gave money to the Star Citizen campaign, you’ve got a brand new thing to be excited for whenever it releases: bedsheet deformation physics. For the most part, this is exactly what it says on the tin; physics in engine which ensure that bedsheets that have been slept in are realistically mussed. Why, you ask?
Well, the single player campaign for Star Citizen, Squadron 42, features “sleep and bed relaxation” elements, which means NPCs need to be able to enter beds and sleep until they are scheduled to awake. As the AI team states in the official update:
We knew early on that, to hit the fidelity we expect for Sq42, we would need to do some R&D on bedsheet deformation. This work is currently underway and, if successful, will allow the AI to deform their sheets when entering, exiting, or sleeping inside them. This is a challenging assignment and expands the complexity of the feature. For example, what happens to the sheets if the AI needs to exit the bed in an emergency?
AI Content Team
The Reddit thread for this update features the usual suspects, but also a considerable contingent of people mocking the idea that this is a remotely necessary feature in a game that’s nearly a decade past its intended release date (that being 2014).
I’m going to be blunt, here. This is a game that was once mentioned in the same breath as Elite: Dangerous and No Man’s Sky. The difference between Star Citizen and those other games is that those other games actually released.
Don’t get me wrong; Chris Roberts is absolutely a man of vision. It’s not for nothing that his name is attached to some of the best space combat sim games ever released. But you have to understand that this is a game that has raised over $450,000,000 over the course of its development from over 3,700,000 potential players, and it’s still not done. For frame of reference, it is absolutely in the rarefied air of “Most Expensive Games Ever Developed“, and the major difference between it and its peers is that, for better or worse, they’ve all seen release (are you sensing a pattern?). Chris Roberts can’t stop himself when he has an idea; this is readily apparent. And there’s nobody to tell him no. He can keep going as long as the game keeps getting funding.
Which, it seems, will presumably happen in perpetuity, because I imagine that for a lot of the Star Citizens backing it, the Gambler’s Fallacy has kicked in. I will be shocked if this game ever releases, and I’m not even remotely invested into it. And if that happens, it will be, bar none, the most expensive Indie game ever made. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Source: PC Gamer
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