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Large Amount of Star Citizen Art Assets Leaked

jones_supa writes: A huge batch of work-in-progress assets for Star Citizen have leaked to the public. An unknown person, likely connected with Cloud Imperium Games in some way, provided a link to the 48 gigabytes of content. The link has now been taken down, but as we know, it's hard to remove material from Internet after once put there. Being a CryEngine game, it has been suggested that it might be possible to view some of the assets using CryEngine development tools. Leaks are always quite the conundrum with the opportunities they present to curious fans and competitor companies, but can also be very depressing for the developers and publisher of the game.

9 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re:48GB?! by Skidborg · · Score: 4, Informative

    Art assets are always many times larger than what goes into the actual game. Ultra-resolution textures, different versions of models, placeholders, etc. Most of which are trimmed or discarded long before release.

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    Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
  2. GTA V by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Grand Theft Auto V was a 60GB download.

    Should come as no suprise really as these latest-gen AAA games are massive, MASSIVE downloads.

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    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
    1. Re:GTA V by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's one way to cut down on piracy.

      It isn't, though. The pirates can afford a better net connection, since they're not buying games.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:48GB?! by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    How big is thing thing going to be?

    In my experience, the development environment for software is larger than the actual software.

    Working copies, and interim copies, and what have you. Tools, pieces, and parts.

    Now imagine something as massive as a video game, specifically involving art and computer graphics ... models, mockups, rendered seqeunces, things I don't even know what might be in there.

    I'm betting the amount of source material which feeds into a finished game is likely many thousands of times the end-product. Because you probably have various edits and do-overs of stuff which took a long time to make, and is probably valuable.

    I can't imagine how many terabytes it takes to build a modern video game.

    But 40GB of cool stuff? Yeah, I totally buy that as possible.

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    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. How the leak happened by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How the leak happened isn't a mystery. A person working for CIG (screen-name DiscoLando) posted some screenshots of content for the upcoming first-person-shooter module. In the desktop background to the image was a link to an internal torrent that was not password protected. People used the link to download the data, and then it spread all over the internet. Remember folks, always password-protect!

  5. Re:What is Star Citizen and why should we care? by jones_supa · · Score: 2

    I included the Wikipedia link for that purpose.

  6. As An Aside... by Guy+From+V · · Score: 3

    As one of a lot of "early contributors/gamma testers" I can say this will be a rather good game, at least better and more approachable than EVE Online...which I despise. It has more of a BattleTech/XvT vibe. It won't usher in Ragnarok or raise the dead but it will be worth the wait for most people who would decide to play it anyway.

  7. Re:Not planned at all by Aereus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What scheme would that be? You can buy the game for as low as $30. Earning your way into something like a Hornet has been planned for a handful of days and something like a Constellation about two weeks. Buying massive capital ships won't necessarily do you any good, because you won't be able to afford the maintenance, fuel, and equipment costs to even fly the thing at release. All you get is the base hull with basic fittings. Ships also fulfill certain roles, so there is far far more lateral mobility in hull purchases than vertical. It's been my perception that the more vocal people are about doomsaying Star Citizen, the less they actually know about the game. And that's not to say it's even going to be a huge success—there are a lot of uncertainties related to seeing all of the various modules/systems to the game come together as one cohesive whole. But they've been making consistent progress, and while their have been some delays, they are explained and fall within the usual scope of development uncertainty.

  8. Eh, who cares? by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The art is unusable for any real purposes, as it's clear copyright infringement. No competitor would touch this with a 10 foot pole, and would be even less likely to use it for anything.

    A few curious people will poke around and that's about it.