Playing Star Citizen in the Cloud
TLDR
I got the best gaming experience with the Parsec Cloud Gaming. I really like their billing model by paying for gaming time by the minute in comparison to the fixed prices offered by other cloud gaming companies.
So there I am, loyal Mac user but I still love gaming. I grew up as a PC child with my gaming rig and all – that’s Age of Empires I & II times.
I got into Star Citizen during it’s kickstarter days. As a long time gamer of the X series (EA) ever since X-Beyond the frontier I am looking for the next great space sim – but also I wanted the complexity of economy, the pseudo realism and over all, a story to follow.
Star citizen is this for me, and the journey following the development is more entertaining than I could have hoped for.
But what I lacked was the machine to run SC on. Having Macbook Pro’s due to the field I work in didn’t help with the endeavor.
When cloud computing became a thing and services like onlive and such came a long this seemed like the way to go. I do follow youtubers that promote Shadow cloud gaming PCs. But with 29,99€ a month on the bill I was looking for a cheaper alternative … I want to try out a game in it’s alpha, so my sunk cost better not be too high.
Become a Star Citizen: and get 5,000 free Credits
Using Paperspace & Parsec
Paperspace is one of the other options and got me a monthly bill around 15–17€ with the game time I put in (not that many hours).
There are a lot of guides out there, but just to say the setup was beyond easy – but you pay for that. I had to contact the Paperspace team to get a larger instance, but I received the go in less than a day.
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I got a decent experience out of that. Variables were of course the current build of the Star Citizen Alpha, 3.3 at that time, internet speeds and the machine the parsec client was running on. Peripherals were supported, at least my gamepad (Xbox one controller).
Also I must admit with Object Container Streaming in the PTU I had even better results:
With the release of Loreville players cite record frame rates and we see frame rate improvements across the board.
But my next experiment will be trying to play this via Parsec Cloud Gaming… Not ordering a Paperspace machine via their interface but rather a AWS machine.
I will get there in under 12 parsecs
The Setup is very simple.
Just click to rent a cloud computer and select a location nearest you. I went with the smallest option, the g2.2xlarge and have a smooth gaming experience.
In order to get Star Citzen onto the machine you need the 200gb SSD. This will increase the initial costs but essentially you pay by the minute, meaning you get some 40+ gaming hours with the 45€ credits.
Here you can check out my latest run for the Security Post Kareah to lower my crime stat. I still fiddle around with settings as sometimes certain key strokes wont go through (this might be a Mac keyboard thing), but my xbox controller provides a solid flying experience.
In conclusion I am very happy with the instance I am running, and can say I wouldn’t need anything else for trying out an Alpha of a game. Once it is released I will probably jump onto a local machine, but that‘ll be in two years or so.
A limiting factor is of course the internet connection. I do feel differences in frame rate from WiFi to local cabled network, especially when my wife is clogging up the wifi with Netflix at the same time.
Also I live fairly close to the Amazon Server Farm and thus get a very low latency, when connecting directly to an AWS Server.
Final words: Go play this amazing alpha, and if you can’t go with your machine checkout Parsec as an option. Also there are always free flight Weekends coming up with big releases, so be on the lookout for them.
See you around the verse.
