Achamp posted:

If you really want to know the problem with this project, "Chris's vision" is a really good place to start. The guy had a vision around the turn of this decade to retry his half-finished freelancer idea. He can't get money from any established source since he has a reputation at this point, turns to crowd funding instead.

Spends time making a fancy video for kickstarter, and raises a poo poo load of money. Fast forward almost 5 years later and look at the buggy poo poo-house cryengine mod you have to play. At this point the whole project is a complete train wreck. 124 million dollars of backer money unaccounted for (won't release any sort of accounting for a AAA game promising open-development with backer money), no deadlines, not even self-imposed deadlines for a supposedly AAA rated game.

The best part of everything is that the Star Citizen "community" has been taken on such a ride they've reached some sort of Stockholm syndrome-esque place with regard to the project. All criticism must be responded to. All critics must be deposed. How dare a comedy web forum speak badly about Chris! How dare you point out how Chris hired his wife to be the second in command while hiding it for as long as possible! How dare people point out that Chris has missed every deadline he ever tried to set for his own game development! Forget about the Morrow Tour!

Achamp posted:

If you really want to know the problem with this project

TheLightPurges posted:

Well for someone to be the smartest person in the room there must be someone who is the lowest. I, and the others I'm collaborating with, think we can reach several people here in a constructive dialogue. Several people have expressed interest in playing the game when it released and I know goons have donated over 500,000 dollars to Chris's vision over the years.

Saying people are here solely to mock and strike down those taller than them is demonstrably not the case.

AP posted:

TheLightPurges, if you wish to be taken seriously I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on you listing the ships in your fleet and answering a few other trick questions designed to separate a low effort troll from someone who truly is deluded and mentally ill like Lazrin.

Propagandist posted:

You blew your load too early, the joke is dead

Beet Wagon posted:

God drat, I know this is bait but it's so tasty looking.

TheLightPurges posted:

just because your boyfriend says that to your comically small penis doesn't mean its appropriate to just throw that out there willy nilly. Try harder to shut me down.

A Neurotic Jew posted:

tell us about future articles~~~

also pls tell us about what the response has been inside kotaku. I've never seen such unanimous acclaim for a videogame article before. They must be pleased.

ZenMaster posted:

Am I insane or did CR totally confirm they are using a mission from S42 to show off 3.0 tech... like, someone said that 3.0 GC demo was a S42 mission and no one could believe it but aren't they now just out and out saying it is from S42?


This is the most amazing thing to me right now.

Lladre posted:

What's funnier is Kik is just trolling you guys pretending to be the Light guy so you think the Light guy is Kik trolling you. So now not only will you all respond even more to the low effort fruit, but Kik has essentially double dog trolled your asses into trolling yourselves..

Kik is pretty much the puppet-master internet warlord of this thread.

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

The first day was just throwaway prototyping. The second day was dedicated to preparatory work: collecting sand, evaporation measurement, smoothing the foundations, team kickoff celebrations, etc. It's really just one day's work and not even quite that since they had to await favorable weather conditions.

TheLightPurges posted:

You have a unique opportunity here to show real fans everywhere that not all of you are braindead, fanatical, dimwits. And this is how you choose to utilize that opportunity? Weak insults a 5 year old could shrug off?

quote:

Sean [Tracy] is working hard on it with a bunch of talented people, so that's [how] we're showing off the potential of V2 planets and some of the cool stuff and play action that can happen in 3.0. We're […] taking one of the missions that's in Squadron 42 and showing how that would feel, from the briefing, to the ship, to taking off, to the mission, and the combination of flying and FPS stuff, so those are the two things we're going to show. We're going to show full-focus this is what V2 planets can do for you, then this is what Squadron 42 is going to feel like and play like, and this is the experience of a mission in SQ42.

"This is the first time we will show more complete gameplay. We showed last year at CitizenCon the walking around, talking character stuff, but it was very early. Our character tech has come on -- if you look at that and quality of characters compared to last year, it's night and day. I truly feel like our character stuff that we're showing is best in class at the moment. We're going to show a more complete: Here you are, you wake up on the ship, you get your briefing, do your mission. This is what one sequence of events, or what we call 'chapters,' of the game would feel and look like.”


"There was a bunch of stuff broken in the shaders, the lighting was completely borked. In the senate speech, when you saw the blend maps and the wrinkle maps and diffuse map, the tangents on them were wrong, and the actual skinning of it was incorrect. It was a linear skin instead of a quaternion skin, so he looked a bit chipmunk-y. [...] The wrinkle maps and blend shapes and lighting were kind of broken in it.

“The characters now are leaps and bounds – we have a process where we scan the actors. They don't have any makeup on, because you don't want makeup on for the process of the photogrammetry that you build a head with. So we didn't have any time to work on those when we did the [demo]. This time, every actor gets a pass, gets essentially made up like a makeup artist would make an actor look good for shooting.”

“A massive change we did which people may not think about is that – every 3D engine I know moves the sun. So basically, the sun moves. Well, the sun doesn't really move in our solar system – it stays in the middle and we move around it. It was a massive change in the engine, where the sun is fixed in place, and so it depends on where you are relative to the sun, [that's] where the lighting is. It's not that the sun's moving, you move.

“That's a fairly fundamental, base rendering and shading change. So that was an example of something that we had to do because of what we're doing with our star systems. Night and day cycles on a planet for us will not be because the sun's moving, it'll be because the planet's rotating on its axis. [The system] will also be able to rotate the planet around the sun.”

"A lot of the fundamental of the rendering and shading and how we approach has been completely refactored from the way it used to be in CryEngine, because we moved to 64-bit [last year], which was a big deal for the precision. But there's a lot of other things, like moving the sun to be an actual fixed entity that cast its light correctly. Usually, it's sort of a special case in a shader or the rendering pipeline. We're doing this at a sort of galactic scale, so some of the cheats you would use in other cases – it's the same reason for the first- and third-person unification – some of the cheats you would use in games that would be more limited in travel or scope... we could probably short-term get away [with] them, but it'd create all sorts of headaches for us. Generally, we always go, 'OK, how would this work properly? How, systemically, should this function?''

“A visual FX artist could create a flow map for clouds, and it would look pretty cool and everything, but then you'd have to be creating flow maps for every single planet you do. [...] Whereas this way, if they create the planet and the biomes [go], 'OK, this is a hot area, this is a cold area,' and then the simulation just simulates the wind and weather patterns, which would generate the cloud patterns, then you just don't have to do anything. It takes more work to do that upfront, but longer term [the weather system] allows for a greater range of gameplay and fidelity, and also less work needed down the road.”

“Generally, our approach has been investing the time in the upfront stuff […] we know 3.0 and beyond, we're not building something we're going to release and then play in two weeks. Our hope, anyway, is to be around for ten years after release, in the same way that Eve has been or WoW has been. That's one of the reasons why we're trying to engineer it right, which does mean that it takes us longer to get to the initial stage where we say, 'we have a game ready for you.' Obviously, we're letting people play [the game] as we're building it, but I think it's the right approach to build something for the long-term.

"In almost every case, a lot of – we get the release, like 2.4 or 2.5 out, and an inordinate amount of time is spent fixing and patching systems that essentially generate bugs because they were patched and hacked in a certain way to work in a certain case. In some ways, it takes us longer to QA and get through things than we would like, because there's been a lot of short-term thinking in earlier iterations. Like, 'we're just making a game for this, and it's just a first-person shooter.' [...] Invariably, in all these cases, we say, 'well, it's just not going to scale to what we need,' and we've got to adapt and change things around for that. So we have been, because we've had the support. So. thank you everyone [addresses camera], it's allowed us to go in and do things right, so to speak, which is all foundational for a long-running, robust game that will have a lot of emergent gameplay.

“That, for me, is super important. I really love this idea [of emergent gameplay], and I can already see it in what people do right now in 2.5: seeing the community go out and do things that we weren't even thinking about because the system allows it. So, our thinking has always been about how can we create a system for people, rather than specifically control exactly what they want to do, and say 'let them operate inside this set of rules and system and let it work.'”

"Every year we do this event, which is essentially a celebration of when we first announced the project. This [LA office] is actually not the biggest studio, the UK studio is much bigger than this one – it's about 185 people now, I think, so it's about 3x bigger than this one – but we've been enabled by this amazing community that's supported us to do this.

“We're building the best – the game that I don't think I would ever be able to build anywhere else, I don't think any publisher would be crazy enough to invest this kind of money, this kind of time into it. Probably venture capitalists wouldn't have the patience for it, so it's allowing us to build something long-term, so CitizenCon's celebrating how that started.”

Right. It's not even 'best drat space sim' anymore, it's 'best drat everything sim.' Especially with the way the procedural planets [...] we were able to do that with everyone's support, which allowed us to open up the Frankfurt office and hire up people that are incredibly talented [...] That's the iterative way that Star Citizen works, because I wasn't thinking we were going to be able to do what we are going to be able to do now, but the additional play possibilities that come with it and what players will be able to do by themselves, it's really exciting.

“You've opened up a much bigger palette of things you can do because you have planetary locations, you can do things, recover things, rescue people, create your own little place – whatever you want to do. Whereas before, we were more limited to space and landing areas that were just a certain area, so it's – from a game designer standpoint, someone making games – it's super, super, super exciting, because it means the world is going to feel bigger and more alive. Anyway, so, CitizenCon is where we celebrate everyone enabling us to do that and where we tend to show the next step we're working on, and it's a fun event.”

Lladre posted:

Kik is pretty much the puppet-master internet warlord of this thread.

ZenMaster posted:

Am I insane or did CR totally confirm they are using a mission from S42 to show off 3.0 tech... like, someone said that 3.0 GC demo was a S42 mission and no one could believe it but aren't they now just out and out saying it is from S42?

Super Foul Egg posted:

Now I disappear to the shame cube, where I will stay until I learn how to internet in 2016 (just don't mainly)

thatguy posted:

Can you guys post some unflattering photos of Chris's face for me? I have some already but I need a good profile view, a nice smirk from head-on, a confused gaze, and a 3/4 view of him kind of looking downwards. Also, this is a long shot but if there's a picture of Chris doing this that would save me some work. I'm too lazy to look through their Youtube and I'm hoping the guys who make the .gifs of AtV and stuff have some already saved.

TheLightPurges posted:

I think most citizens will be perfectly happy if you never play the game. But I, and several others, think this community can be redeemed somewhat. We don't need to prove ourselves to you, but you need to prove yourselves to us if you wish to be a part of this community. Its really not too late.

thatguy posted:

Hav posted:

You know that thing about explaining the joke. Yeah, that's you.

Jimeth posted:

Got a response to my request for a refund. Standard prewritten waterworks. Immediately responded my indifference and continued desire for a refund. A spider fell out of the air conditioning duct and onto me. I danced like a girl and destroyed a mug of milk with my phone. Spider is now deceased and integrated with the carpet.

Wafflz posted:

thatguy posted:

Can you guys post some unflattering photos of Chris's face for me? I have some already but I need a good profile view, a nice smirk from head-on, a confused gaze, and a 3/4 view of him kind of looking downwards. Also, this is a long shot but if there's a picture of Chris doing this that would save me some work. I'm too lazy to look through their Youtube and I'm hoping the guys who make the .gifs of AtV and stuff have some already saved.

Super Foul Egg posted:

Well now I see how that post looked and so did some other people (spies are everywhere!!) to the extent that I have, quite correctly, received my official spanking notice for being dumb enough to even potentially let that connection be made, so to clarify: I'm not anything to do with Kotaku, I just know how things went down there. I figured the very idea that someone involved directly in the articles would post here to be too ludicrous to even consider but I also forgot that this is the internet, so...!

I'll just say this: Although all the work there was done with proper pro-tier journalistic integrity the likes of which the games industry barely encounters (which obviously meant completely ignoring conjecture-flinging idiots like us) the visibility given to the project's issues here were an integral part of it getting enough heat to consider covering in the first place. So, in an abstract way, goons still ruined everything, and anyone here who did anything more than a drive-by shitpost (including dearly departed Gorf) should feel appropriately warm inside.

Now I disappear to the shame cube, where I will stay until I learn how to internet in 2016 (just don't mainly)

orcinus posted:

Last night (well, morning, technically, i keep weird hours), while i was reading this thread in bed, an earwig fell from somewhere above and into my moustache. It was dark, i had no idea what was going on, besides smelling an odd insect smell and feeling something fall on my face.

After i saw a shadow on my hand, i turned on the lights and then promptly panicked in a very girlish fashion.
I'm ashamed to admit i've killed it, even though i have nothing against earwigs.