What is the status of Star Marine?asked by [Uncredited]

[86-minute special with Ben Lesnick - Summary Transcript]– Hard at work on Star Marine. Illfonic are working round the clock on it, and many people in other studios are working on it as well.– Chris has some code up on his screen that he's helping with as well.– Lots of people working on it in the Frankfurt office as well.– CryEngine's very powerful, but it's dense and complicated as well. Having the engineers that built it helps. They have the engineer that created CryAnimation, which is a great resource to have.– Working on closing out a few things.1. Networking (Networking's a bitch, whether on SC or any other game). Working on getting 32 players in Astro Arena and at least 16 in Gold Horizon. Ultimately want to push beyond there.2. Animations. Challenge on the animation is that most FPS games have first person and third person. First person is essentially a floating camera. Not physically realistic, but it's normally okay because you can't see your character. It's also why, when you get into mulitiplayer in something like Call of Duty, the animations aren't nearly as fluid. Player animation doesn't translate to what someone does in first person.– Real life has inertia. If SC were just doing an FPS, they could do what CoD does, but the foundation for the whole game is First Person. Because it's a multiplayer game, there has to be player controlled characters interacting with their environments, and that has to look good. CIG can't 'cheat' and put arms up where the eyes are, like many other FPS games do.– Means they have to unify first and third person together. If they can get it to work, it makes life simpler. Camera where the eyes are.– They use tricks like camera stabilization – In real life, if you're running, your brain makes it so you don't look like you're bouncing up and down so much. That kind of logic has been built in.– Lots of work with animations. Lots of animations that can normally work for AI, but it takes more work to build them into player animations, and to keep them responsive and fluid, without hampering the player experience.– This is one of the reasons FPS has been delayed. Not something you can say 'this'll take a week to do', it takes play time and experimentation time. Don't want to put it out if it feels slow or unresponsive, or if there are glitches. Yes, it's an alpha, but it will inherently hurt the feeling if the animations aren't in.– Making really good progress, hoping it'll be able to be played on PTU at or after GamesCom (don't hold him to that though).– Definitely working really hard on FPS, and it'll be a great foundation once it's done. Definitely not 'indefinitely delayed'. More people working on it now than ever before.– It's frustrating for CIG as well, they want it out as soon as possible as well, but if they're not happy with how it feels yet. When they do put it out, it will still have issues, it will still need polish, but it will be able to be played. More constructive for feedback.– Definitely thinking in terms of weeks, rather than a month.– The delays don't have as much to do with the FPS portion either. If it was just an FPS, they could get it out. The delays have to do with the feeling of the PU as a whole. Rather do one thing right, rather than do two different ones and then have to waste time refactoring them later.– Frustrating, but it's a better way to look after everyone's money.– FPS is foundational for the whole game.– Apparently Crytek had talked about doing this sort of first and third person unification on Crysis 2 and 3, but gave up because they had deadlines. CIG have made more progress than when Crytek were trying. Don't see it a lot in games, because it's very hard to do.