******Official Star Citizen / Squadron 42 Thread******

[pete910]

It seems you are hell bent on trying to change my opinion on how this game looks bad/outdated when IMO it doesnt.

Not at all, You was the one that went defensive when I disagreed with what you feel about said game. Then ironically tried changing my opinion on the matter.

I admit at times it does look good but to me for the most part it is not.
I have said that SQ42 was is very good to many a folk , to me A LOT better than what SC does at the moment.

 

[Nigel Kingdon]

I'd say that until it's delivered, and open to general purchase, it should be considered a great demo which shows promise.

 

[jonneymendoza]

I'd say that until it's delivered, and open to general purchase, it should be considered a great demo which shows promise.

Half of your requirements are already met ie it is open for general purchase

 

[bigmike20vt]

Half of your requirements are already met ie it is open for general purchase

imo it cant be considered delivered until our progress is set in stone.
i am itching to put some real time into the game as parts of it are brilliant............... but right now where whales have paid for cash ships that they get to keep on wipe where as other players who "just" bought the game have to continually start from scratch i just cant support it. it is a horrible system and imo this practice should not be supported - esp when it has been going on for multiple years and has no sign of stopping any time soon.

some people bang on about P2W due to being able to buy ships with cash...... whilst i am not a fan of this ideologically i can live with it ... but taking earned in game stuff from players whilst letting the cash bought ships stay is a horrible thing to do to players imo

I just hope me holding off playing properly does not bite me in the ass. i do have a number of games that i bought which were shut down before i ever even started. I hope this does not happen with Star Citizen

 

[jonneymendoza]

imo it cant be considered delivered until our progress is set in stone.
i am itching to put some real time into the game as parts of it are brilliant............... but right now where whales have paid for cash ships that they get to keep on wipe where as other players who "just" bought the game have to continually start from scratch i just cant support it. it is a horrible system and imo this practice should not be supported - esp when it has been going on for multiple years and has no sign of stopping any time soon.

some people bang on about P2W due to being able to buy ships with cash...... whilst i am not a fan of this ideologically i can live with it ... but taking earned in game stuff from players whilst letting the cash bought ships stay is a horrible thing to do to players imo

Yea that will be 1.0 when wipes will stop.

CIG dont do wipes that often.

They only do it for two reasons:

1. when there is a game breaking economy bug that needs addressing
2. When something in the economy changes(like a new database tech or whole game feature)

I suspect we will get a wipe once crafting and base building is in as that will impact the economy dramatically.

CIG are in a place where they can test parts of the economy and in order to do that. they dont want to be wiping every 3 months. The less they wipe, the more data they get and come 1.0, the balance of economy should practically be spot on

 

[End Creditz]

Hoping they rebooted everything last night. Finally got on only to find the trams weren't running properly and eventually the server just died, no server error, just froze up with a hanger open, unable to leave my ship.


All I wanted to do was move my imprint to the station

 

[Curlyriff]

Going back to the foliage, visuals and games. The new Witcher 4 demo showing that stuff off was both visually and technically impressive.

If they have fixed the hitching and stuttering and get to that level of detail truly in a game then that is super impressive and would be the gold standard for open world games.

 

[Calin Banc]

Honestly the foliage is the same as we have now. It is just being spread about. That still looks super dated even compared to many older games. It is something when I spoke to Ali previous CitCon and on forums they basically said they are out of budget for them to get better though. Seems that isn't changing with Genesis updates. The foliage also very static and repetitive with a very low number of individual assets that don't appear to have any transform ability to provide variation.

Oddly enough games like Prehistoric Kingdom and Jurassic world evolution both do that extremely well where it is one asset with transform parameters that allow dozen if not hundreds of variation. Scaling parameters for their 9 rubber trees for instance would be good where they can be +/- 5% even. This means nothing is overstretched or gets broken but allows for greater variation. The trunk bases are all similar for scale of tree too so needing to have variation where modular could have been thought about. You get base trunk, mid trunk, top canopy as long as you conform to the shapes that can transform between one to another could have allowed much greater variation. To note for instance there is around 32 species of trees in UK forests alone. A lot of games do cover variation for such much better than SC does and really helps with the visuals of the environment.

Not saying not better with the new system they want with the spawning system, however it isn't greater asset coverage. Grass actually in SC is good, the ferns and such look really bad.

However one thing that will be excellent will be if they do genuinely get the seasons part in they showed. I am not sure how they are faking that data since we don't have orbital mechanic but I assume seasons are just done via a timing system instead of derived data from distance from sun. Also the fact that all planets rotate on a vertical axis at min unlike earth. So again assume planets will be fakes in that way. Not a bad thing just be interesting to see how it all goes and ties up in a couple of years from now when they get there with it.

The pop in and terrain detailing though yes looks much better for planets so that is a hope as that has been the headroom they have resolved there with the tiling. That will significantly improve how it feels at ground, the textures there though still don't look great but then they are using I believe Ali said only 480p ground textures to keep in that budget still and using it in other areas instead. Would like to see if they could at least use 1080p textures cause they do get muddy quick.

Sorry trying to keep replies short but there so much to all that and partially what I get involved in and why I end up writing so much. Oh and course again other games of scale still don't show the same LOD as SC, just SC can't compete with games that are 1km to 16km player spaces cause they have a much greater computational budget per m2 of player space you see.

They'll need to go towards something similar to Nanite to solve the vegetation and other complex geometry issues or they'll keep running into troubles later on. My biggest irk with vegetation would be if it's just static and not destructible.

For streaming... direct storage.

 

[Curlyriff]

They'll need to go towards something similar to Nanite to solve the vegetation and other complex geometry issues or they'll keep running into troubles later on. My biggest irk with vegetation would be if it's just static and not destructible.

For streaming... direct storage.

Don't ever expect destructible foliage tbh. The computational requirements for that to work along with the gameplay requirements of trees having to regrow etc is not there.

Nanite foliage is certainly impressive, by far beyond anything anyone else has produced, 5.7 should be proof of where that ends up in an engine, but seeing it in game is still half a decade out. CIG do have something they are working for similar density and also tbh removing the LOD pop on Genesis but the density part is very very different there of course as noted above.

Direct storage isn't an answer for streaming because the data still needs to be fed to the possibly (even currently) 599 other players that could be in the location. There will always be limitations. Purely wish they just used more budget and stopped trying to scrimp on the VRAM and system RAM compared to what modern hardware gives.

 

[Calin Banc]

Don't ever expect destructible foliage tbh. The computational requirements for that to work along with the gameplay requirements of trees having to regrow etc is not there.

Nanite foliage is certainly impressive, by far beyond anything anyone else has produced, 5.7 should be proof of where that ends up in an engine, but seeing it in game is still half a decade out. CIG do have something they are working for similar density and also tbh removing the LOD pop on Genesis but the density part is very very different there of course as noted above.

Direct storage isn't an answer for streaming because the data still needs to be fed to the possibly (even currently) 599 other players that could be in the location. There will always be limitations. Purely wish they just used more budget and stopped trying to scrimp on the VRAM and system RAM compared to what modern hardware gives.

Destructible foliage was with us since Crysis and Far Cry 2 (along side grass getting lit, etc - don't forget they have a fire mechanic inside ships!). This absolutely has to be in or else is a major fail including from a gameplay perspective where you set your base inside a clearing of a dense forest, defended heavily by AA. No vehicles can get it... It can be done locally, on the client, alongside other things. It's very doable.

Direct Storage (well, if Vulkan has something similar, if not, they can write it themselves) is no different than using different levels of quality for your models. Again, done locally on player's PC, nothing big on the server.

I really do hope they won't cut corners with some rather essential stuff.

 

[Curlyriff]

Destructible foliage was with us since Crysis and Far Cry 2 (along side grass getting lit, etc - don't forget they have a fire mechanic inside ships!). This absolutely has to be in or else is a major fail including from a gameplay perspective where you set your base inside a clearing of a dense forest, defended heavily by AA. No vehicles can get it... It can be done locally, on the client, alongside other things. It's very doable.

Direct Storage (well, if Vulkan has something similar, if not, they can write it themselves) is no different than using different levels of quality for your models. Again, done locally on player's PC, nothing big on the server.

I really do hope they won't cut corners with some rather essential stuff.

They have already said fully destructible foliage wont happen and neither will fire on planets (ships only for that feature) because at moment they wouldn't be able to share all that data through server because it would be too much. Being done locally on the client is exactly what can't be done for something like this as it needs every tree and asset to be reported to every client within that local server to receive the same data as anything like a forest fire or clearing would be visible as you fly into that location. Then add in the gameplay, people would burn whole forests down. Then what you have no forest in the game because people have burnt them all stripping land for stupid fun. Making it grow naturally, not spawn in randomly etc. It really is much more complex and isn't at all the same as Crysis or FarCry you know because they are single player games local with no server.

Direct Storage is not directly supported by Vulkan, however Nvidia version is. However you need to consider is that we are already hitting VRAM limits and this would significantly hit that further. Not there is only around a dozen games ever made with it for a reason. Also note in testing of it so far in real world the results really haven't occurred as well as expected from the examples. Bit like like the UE stutter never shown but been there since like UE4. Finally with DirectStorage, writing that into the game and working fully it is fundamentally different with how assets would be packaged, compressed and decompressed which is about as major of a rewrite as 64bit precision, server meshing, dynamic meshing etc. Oh and you would force everyone to be running on a faster M.2 SSD to realistically see results too as you need faster read/write than older NVMe drivers or Sata SSDs would provide.

It isn't about cutting corners, it is about what is fundamentally achievable in an MMO.

All that is to say that it can never happen but as noted they would need to start their whole foliage system again to something like Nanite and that also is a huge fundamental shift. Ali has explained why anything Nanite wise wouldn't work for SC anytime soon and that it would be larger task than getting server meshing to work. But expectations of this being realistic is pretty much 0 for Star Citizen. Note it was also the reason we never got the deformation system on planets that was shown with the grenades. Gameplay implications became a thing.

 

[Noxia]

Well that's a deal breaker if weeds don't disappear in my space game.

 

[jonneymendoza]

Destructible foliage was with us since Crysis and Far Cry 2 (along side grass getting lit, etc - don't forget they have a fire mechanic inside ships!). This absolutely has to be in or else is a major fail including from a gameplay perspective where you set your base inside a clearing of a dense forest, defended heavily by AA. No vehicles can get it... It can be done locally, on the client, alongside other things. It's very doable.

Direct Storage (well, if Vulkan has something similar, if not, they can write it themselves) is no different than using different levels of quality for your models. Again, done locally on player's PC, nothing big on the server.

I really do hope they won't cut corners with some rather essential stuff.

I personaly could not care less if you can cut grass so to speak...

Enough of that fluff and finish the game instead to what they invisioned 1.0 to be and then they can go add lawnmower profession post 1.0 for the folks that love cutting grass

 

[Curlyriff]

I personaly could not care less if you can cut grass so to speak...

Enough of that fluff and finish the game instead to what they invisioned 1.0 to be and then they can go add lawnmower profession post 1.0 for the folks that love cutting grass

In fairness I think it's more the collision of ships and vehicles with for instance in discussion compared to the whole "cutting grass". I do think there will be forest deformation requirements for base building so culling that accordingly.

Now if you can then destroy the structure after and it leaves the space empty of trees is unknown but if they don't consider that during base construction that will limit structures in such areas to finding clearing etc.

 

[Calin Banc]

They have already said fully destructible foliage wont happen and neither will fire on planets (ships only for that feature) because at moment they wouldn't be able to share all that data through server because it would be too much. Being done locally on the client is exactly what can't be done for something like this as it needs every tree and asset to be reported to every client within that local server to receive the same data as anything like a forest fire or clearing would be visible as you fly into that location. Then add in the gameplay, people would burn whole forests down. Then what you have no forest in the game because people have burnt them all stripping land for stupid fun. Making it grow naturally, not spawn in randomly etc. It really is much more complex and isn't at all the same as Crysis or FarCry you know because they are single player games local with no server.

Direct Storage is not directly supported by Vulkan, however Nvidia version is. However you need to consider is that we are already hitting VRAM limits and this would significantly hit that further. Not there is only around a dozen games ever made with it for a reason. Also note in testing of it so far in real world the results really haven't occurred as well as expected from the examples. Bit like like the UE stutter never shown but been there since like UE4. Finally with DirectStorage, writing that into the game and working fully it is fundamentally different with how assets would be packaged, compressed and decompressed which is about as major of a rewrite as 64bit precision, server meshing, dynamic meshing etc. Oh and you would force everyone to be running on a faster M.2 SSD to realistically see results too as you need faster read/write than older NVMe drivers or Sata SSDs would provide.

It isn't about cutting corners, it is about what is fundamentally achievable in an MMO.

All that is to say that it can never happen but as noted they would need to start their whole foliage system again to something like Nanite and that also is a huge fundamental shift. Ali has explained why anything Nanite wise wouldn't work for SC anytime soon and that it would be larger task than getting server meshing to work. But expectations of this being realistic is pretty much 0 for Star Citizen. Note it was also the reason we never got the deformation system on planets that was shown with the grenades. Gameplay implications became a thing.

You can have relative simple animation for vegetation / trees (like The Forest or stranded deep has when you "harvest" a tree or other vegetation), much of it being VFX local side, like smoke is for instance. You don't need to track every branch and leaf, no need to have hitboxes for each rock etc. Come one... they wanna do complex destruction of houses, walls, water/ocean deformation, freaking thousands of projectiles from ships, tanks and other weapons and you'll telling me that relative simple stuff cannot be made? BF done the destruction, the land deformation with plenty of players on the server (64 or 128?) even at 60fps server side... Even ArmA 3 has the walls and houses that can be destroyed - granted, no tress.

Then just stream more with what you have, make it efficient. Indiana Jones streams heavily from the SSD if you force it- from memory constantly 200-300MB/s with peaks even higher... decent nvme drives do 1GB+ easily...

I personaly could not care less if you can cut grass so to speak...

Enough of that fluff and finish the game instead to what they invisioned 1.0 to be and then they can go add lawnmower profession post 1.0 for the folks that love cutting grass

Yeah, until you reach a forest with your vehicle that you can't enter or use smaller roads because a small tree stands in the way of a 40 tones monster ) It leads to rather stupid and annoying stuff considering how much they wanna fit into other aspects of the game.

 

[Curlyriff]

You can have relative simple animation for vegetation / trees (like The Forest or stranded deep has when you "harvest" a tree or other vegetation), much of it being VFX local side, like smoke is for instance. You don't need to track every branch and leaf, no need to have hitboxes for each rock etc. Come one... they wanna do complex destruction of houses, walls, water/ocean deformation, freaking thousands of projectiles from ships, tanks and other weapons and you'll telling me that relative simple stuff cannot be made? BF done the destruction, the land deformation with plenty of players on the server (64 or 128?) even at 60fps server side... Even ArmA 3 has the walls and houses that can be destroyed - granted, no tress.

Then just stream more with what you have, make it efficient. Indiana Jones streams heavily from the SSD if you force it- from memory constantly 200-300MB/s with peaks even higher... decent nvme drives do 1GB+ easily...

Again that isn't at all how that can and will be able to work though. You cannot have local VFX side, it is all running through the server and has to be distributed to all clients, the same as they have shown and discussed fire as example where fire needed to be sent through the replication layer so that all clients see the same flames etc. Things like the building structure in BF is not same, they are set buildings/structures for instance in BF4 and scripted, BC2 had it but that meant maps were debris all on ground and it was again reset and didn't play well once the map was raised. BF5 finally does well but again you are talking 64 player instead of 128 player and maps that after the game reset.

Note there is no way they would go for The Forest level of detail for such just the same reason you are suggesting destruction of the structures CIG have shown principle of. So yeah I don't see with that and at least what Ali said a year ago is currently possible.

Partially I believe this again is something gameplay wise needs to be considered and they haven't got solution too even if they get Maelstrom to work for such. What happens when an Org destroys the whole forest or swamp and clears it completely so it bland ground texture? Structures being destroyed and rebuilt is one thing, natural occurring elements being removed in an MMO scaled game is very different requirement. They wont want to allow destruction of such extent removing those carefully crafted biomes they spent 13yrs producing. ArmA, Battlfield etc are completely different games where maps reset each match and you start again. That isn't the case with SC where there is (should be) permanence.

Yeah, until you reach a forest with your vehicle that you can't enter or use smaller roads because a small tree stands in the way of a 40 tones monster ) It leads to rather stupid and annoying stuff considering how much they wanna fit into other aspects of the game.

This is where there is consideration that player created structures offer the ability for destruction of vegetation so that you can create your player base but I don't expect ability to construct roads that eat away at the trees etc to drive through. More likely when you select a location it may offer when you pick a structure to have destruction on and it clears an area around it accordingly. The demo shown at CitCon just shows that the structure isn't able to be placed. So it could even be there still isn't construction and you will never be able have structures deep in a forest. And you wont be able to take larger vehicles into such locations.

 

[bigmike20vt]

This is where there is consideration that player created structures offer the ability for destruction of vegetation so that you can create your player base but I don't expect ability to construct roads that eat away at the trees etc to drive through. More likely when you select a location it may offer when you pick a structure to have destruction on and it clears an area around it accordingly. The demo shown at CitCon just shows that the structure isn't able to be placed. So it could even be there still isn't construction and you will never be able have structures deep in a forest. And you wont be able to take larger vehicles into such locations.

i do agree this is a problem and if anything is exactly why imo its a shame that so many games go the way of MMOs rather than open world RPGs with "fairly" small multiple player support where you can take progress around with you.... i am hoping up and coming game jump ship offers something for me. (i missed the demo however)
i guess its just personal preference and Star Citizens hook is 100s of player in an instance

it would be nice if they could split the difference. maybe have say half a dozen "stages" of accelerated tree growth and building repair which occurs over a.. i dunno, 3 day window? but its all just pie in the sky for now. i just want them to get a MVP out there so i can get stuck in.

 

[Calin Banc]

Again that isn't at all how that can and will be able to work though. You cannot have local VFX side, it is all running through the server and has to be distributed to all clients, the same as they have shown and discussed fire as example where fire needed to be sent through the replication layer so that all clients see the same flames etc. Things like the building structure in BF is not same, they are set buildings/structures for instance in BF4 and scripted, BC2 had it but that meant maps were debris all on ground and it was again reset and didn't play well once the map was raised. BF5 finally does well but again you are talking 64 player instead of 128 player and maps that after the game reset.

Note there is no way they would go for The Forest level of detail for such just the same reason you are suggesting destruction of the structures CIG have shown principle of. So yeah I don't see with that and at least what Ali said a year ago is currently possible.

Partially I believe this again is something gameplay wise needs to be considered and they haven't got solution too even if they get Maelstrom to work for such. What happens when an Org destroys the whole forest or swamp and clears it completely so it bland ground texture? Structures being destroyed and rebuilt is one thing, natural occurring elements being removed in an MMO scaled game is very different requirement. They wont want to allow destruction of such extent removing those carefully crafted biomes they spent 13yrs producing. ArmA, Battlfield etc are completely different games where maps reset each match and you start again. That isn't the case with SC where there is (should be) permanence.


This is where there is consideration that player created structures offer the ability for destruction of vegetation so that you can create your player base but I don't expect ability to construct roads that eat away at the trees etc to drive through. More likely when you select a location it may offer when you pick a structure to have destruction on and it clears an area around it accordingly. The demo shown at CitCon just shows that the structure isn't able to be placed. So it could even be there still isn't construction and you will never be able have structures deep in a forest. And you wont be able to take larger vehicles into such locations.

You're telling me they're wasting server resources to have the exact detail of smoke and fire coming from a grenade, ship, etc. to each player? Why? If it's for gameplay purposes, then they'll need to lock the graphical details to the same level or else the ones with lower settings will see different things than the ones with higher settings... That will never happen. Probably they'll just signal a simple "render fire" and that's done on client side without much fuss, just be within the same boundaries so you know what gets affected and what not. In this case, you can do the destruction as well. I really don't see what's complicated to have an extremely basic animation with "fall down/disappear" from a technical side. However, knowing CIG, probably even Maelstrom will get toned down to just some outposts making it a bit... meh. Same as they hyped the destruction of the ships years back, in a very natural and dynamic way, based on the type of weapon and still nothing has been done like that (giving you, basically, the ability to cut a ship in half).

The only thing that has kind of a valid reason is the gameplay, but again... it's a game set in the future, you can increase the spawning rate of the vegetation so it gets back quicker to the initial state (maybe get a job to spread seeds and remake an ecosystem ). You can't really keep an entire planed burned down as the amount of people doing it would make it probably impossible - and only on a lawless system, or else you'll attract the law enforcement which should try to keep things normal.

It gets generated automatically based on algorithms, there's nothing special to it, it just follows a set of rules, you can have an infinite number of planets - or at least No Man Sky numbers... as you'll do a NMS generation anyway.

With that said, they can do whatever. I'm just waiting to play SQ42 and perhpas a bit of SC as the whole "complete" state for SC seems to be another decade along de way.

 

[Curlyriff]

You're telling me they're wasting server resources to have the exact detail of smoke and fire coming from a grenade, ship, etc. to each player? Why? If it's for gameplay purposes, then they'll need to lock the graphical details to the same level or else the ones with lower settings will see different things than the ones with higher settings... That will never happen. Probably they'll just signal a simple "render fire" and that's done on client side without much fuss, just be within the same boundaries so you know what gets affected and what not. In this case, you can do the destruction as well. I really don't see what's complicated to have an extremely basic animation with "fall down/disappear" from a technical side. However, knowing CIG, probably even Maelstrom will get toned down to just some outposts making it a bit... meh. Same as they hyped the destruction of the ships years back, in a very natural and dynamic way, based on the type of weapon and still nothing has been done like that (giving you, basically, the ability to cut a ship in half).

The only thing that has kind of a valid reason is the gameplay, but again... it's a game set in the future, you can increase the spawning rate of the vegetation so it gets back quicker to the initial state (maybe get a job to spread seeds and remake an ecosystem ). You can't really keep an entire planed burned down as the amount of people doing it would make it probably impossible - and only on a lawless system, or else you'll attract the law enforcement which should try to keep things normal.

It gets generated automatically based on algorithms, there's nothing special to it, it just follows a set of rules, you can have an infinite number of planets - or at least No Man Sky numbers... as you'll do a NMS generation anyway.

With that said, they can do whatever. I'm just waiting to play SQ42 and perhpas a bit of SC as the whole "complete" state for SC seems to be another decade along de way.

Not sure if you've seen the fire tech demo elements and their explanations to the system but yes the fire SIM is run on server side and distributed to all clients to be exactly the same detail of flames, smoke, material damage and such, the same with the dynamic cloud system as well as example. None of that is client based and all run through the server replication layer and distributed from there. When you then interact with say the fire that interaction is then sent back to the replication layer and then sent to all other clients in the area with the update accordingly.

This is why certain things like clouds can't be off anymore. The part that is adjustable is the quality of the data the client sees based on the settings. All the data is sent accordingly and your settings adjust how much of that data it utilises. Basically you are selecting LoD level from the server options of the data it transfers. So if you all set the quality of sat clouds to LoD 1 or low then everyone with the low settings get the same data, then those with it set as LoD 2 medium they see all the same data etc. All of them use the same highest LoD data say level 5 to help keep the same shape, formation and deformation but just the detail with the element is at different levels.

This data principle is also the same for Maelstrom system again so all debris match and are in sync with all clients and visually all seeing the same data.

Almost all the ships in the CitCon SQ42 demo already used Maelstrom so you can see there the level of destruction they are at least using in the single player game. How well that transfers to the PU we shall see.

I think you are understating a lot of this and also gameplay wise, do you get the trees to regrow as they were prior, do you have a 100 different states of a tree to get from seed to fully grown. Do existing trees keep growing then? Do you allow the trees to regrow but only got say 4-5 tree stages and so they just pop to the next size in front of you, can they only grow when there are no players in the area or within visual range? There is always more cases and edge cases to these systems that single player games or games similar to NMS that have very limited multiplayer where it is easier to implement such but on something honestly like this it needs a lot more thought and development to make it work and work organically in comparison.

Do you really feel there will be enough people wanting to plant seeds for foliage compared to those whom happy to just destroy such things? I would love to say the law system would work to control the destruction of such but considering how bad the law system works currently and the lack of dynamic spawning of UEE and such security being effective I won't hold breath there.

Not sure what you mean about the NMS side of things here. Currently all we know is that there are going to be 5 star systems for SC 1.0, there is never going to be hundreds let alone thousands of planets in SC.

 

[bigmike20vt]

.
Currently all we know is that there are going to be 5 star systems for SC 1.0, there is never going to be hundreds let alone thousands of planets in SC.

is this true? if so that is a hell of a scale back

I thought it was launching with at least 100 star systems, and bear in mind a star system itself is a collection of planets so Sol for instance has 8 planets (still feels odd ..... it was 9 when I was a kid!)

edit from here and it's an official source so if no longer true it should be updated.
100 down to 5 sounds more than a minor alteration to me and should be massive news if true

Stretch Goals - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

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Star Citizen will launch with 100 star systems.