Star Citizen: Death of a Space Thread?

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Star Citizen: Death of a Space Thread?

Terebus: Feb 17, 2007; Pillbug

I was really youg when i played wing commander for the first time and i had a poor grasp of english. I thought the catmen were funny.

At the time i was also playing fatty bear and space que space quest was my favorie.

Terebus fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Oct 23, 2017

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:01

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# ? May 21, 2024 18:59

Bofast: Feb 21, 2011; Grimey Drawer

SomethingJones posted:

Programmer chat is cool and it shows me that there's a crazy number of folks posting on here who actually know what they're talking about. Lends a lot of credibility to the criticism of CIG's coding.

The last professional programming I did was Dataflex and DBase IV way way back in the day, and I was a Novell guru. My geek credibility is therefore completely out off date and can safely be ignored in most cases. I do know a couple of games programmers who were doing stuff back in the 90s and games programming is a whole different level of pure madness, I can't even fathom how difficult it must be to make multiplayer games.

Watching the Twitchcon panel atm, this is the first chance I've had to look at it. Scott Manley just said "PDP 11"

My workplace is currently transitioning out of using Novell :ohdear:

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:07

AutismVaccine: Feb 26, 2017; SPECIAL NEEDS
SQUAD

Freespace 2 loving rocks. You really get immersed in the thing.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:14

SomethingJones: Mar 6, 2016; <3

Truga posted:

Yeah, you kinda need to know how your networking is going to work and then work from there. You can get away with a lot with their model (authoritative server/predicting client), but it's a model that only really works well for simple games with not too many moving parts, like shooters.

Take something like battlefield for example, it seems complicated at first, you have tanks, choppers, you can see how many people are in each, and so on. But making games is all about cheating as much as you can, so each vehicle is serialized to just 1 actor in netcode, with pointers to people in them, and then hit points, position, orientation (+ turret orientation, if it's a tank) and speed (for prediction purposes), and generally these games only run at 20-60 ticks per second and the rest is filled in by your client's prediction, which it does by running the same game as the server at a higher tick rate, and adjusts every time it gets an update, and it does all the pretty poo poo that happens on your monitor like calculating suspension physics etc.

So you get away with clients not needing much bandwidth, since there's a max of like 80 very simple mobile actors on a map (max players + max vehicles), less if there's many people in vehicles. Grenades, tank shells, bullets, etc all get simulated on each client completely independently, the clients only get the "player throws grenade in direction", the server then just confirms hits when needed, which is why you once in a blue moon get killed by a grenade or bullet that wasn't there on your client due to local error due to latency/packet loss/whatever.

Meanwhile in star citizen every ship is like 47 actors, and spawning in a medium sized ship sends like 10MB of data over the internet so the correct variant with the correct guns, tv, shower stall, thrusters and outhouse spawns in your game, during which all the clients must wait (and, in the case of star citizen, they don't even render new frames while waiting apparently, so the game stutters to gently caress constantly. who the gently caress makes the renderer wait on network I/O, jesus loving christ is this 1991?), and then it sends 43 different thruster updates every tick because they swivel and exhaust at random and everything grinds to a loving halt.

At these amounts of data to track you should be using lockstep (all the clients are calculating the exact same things and only player inputs that modify results + a heartbeat to stay in sync get sent between clients), but lockstep is a slowass piece of poo poo that works really well for RTS games where having half a second of delay between click and shoot doesn't matter (see: warcraft 3, runs exactly the same with 2 players and 12 players at max capacity), but would be absolutely terrible even for the spacesim part of the game, much less star marine.

Oh, also, the server in SC isn't very authoritative after all, it just believes any input the clients send, so cheating is the easiest thing on earth. Or at least, it was that way when I last launched the game 2 years ago, though I see no reason that'd have changed, seeing how nothing else has.

Where I live the standard for people out of software engineering university is usually "~~dumb as poo poo unless they did real work on the side~~ manager", because they teach specific problems and how to solve them, rather than show a simple example in how something works and then give them a problem they can solve with it.

That's not saying people who just go into computery jobs straight outta high school are any better on average, mind, but they don't get reclassified as manager so.

Holy poo poo this is a fantastic description thank you for taking the time.

I knew they were sending big xml files to tell the clients what to spawn but I had no idea it was as big as 10mb, that's loving ridiculous. And I didn't know the renderer had to wait for that to finish.

So if the renderer is waiting that means there is no 'in betweeny prediction stuff' going on, I believe that is the correct terminology

It's clear that the engine was never built with any of this stuff in mind at all, and it's also clear that this is probably the very first thing they should have worked on.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:22

SomethingJones: Mar 6, 2016; <3

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that parkour isn't coming any time soon

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:30

Beet Wagon: Oct 19, 2015

Hobold posted:

My memory is hosed, but I seem to remember even way back in the day, CIG saying people would have to spend upgrade slots, or downsize turrets to give them the ability to independently track and fire at targets.

That really isn't anything new. Its still dumb as hell, ED does it better.

Yeah originally you were going to have to just use smaller guns if you wanted auto-tracking, and I think maybe they talked about upgrading your fire control computer to get more accurate tracking or something, which is a stupid lovely idea.

The "you have to use a smaller gun" thing makes sense though, it's a much less stupid solution than "Oh your ship has one big pool of upgrade slots regardless of whether the upgrade is for your engine or turrets or espresso maker, so pick which one you want the most!"

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:38

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

The best space game I played as a kid was Super Ghouls n Ghosts

# ? Oct 23, 2017 13:53

Dooguk: Oct 11, 2016; Pillbug

peter gabriel posted:

The best space game I played as a kid was Super Ghouls n Ghosts

I played Lemmings. Reminds me of Star Citizen for some reason.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:00

Virtual Captain: Feb 20, 2017; Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.

Thought I linked The Mythical Man Month at some point but I couldn't find it via search or this would have been a "called it :smug:

" post.
I should read AntiPatterns but I feel like following Star Citizen is the live action version.

Quote these after the CIG closure:

nopantsjack posted:

now its time for us all to get on with our lives and look forward to the next kickstarter

Fellatio del Toro posted:

A rushed game is bad forever, the Greatest Game Of All Time will never be released

- Ancient Japanese Prophecy

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:00

kilus aof: Mar 24, 2001

I'm going to use one of my blade spots on a Big Benny's machine

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:12

Nanako the Narc: Sep 6, 2011

peter gabriel posted:

The best space game I played as a kid was Super Ghouls n Ghosts

SGnG had the best end(mid?)-game 'gently caress you' ever. Seriously, it makes me laugh just thinking about it again.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:34

Toops: Nov 5, 2015; -find mood stabilizers
-also,

Let's ponder persistence for just a second. From what I've seen, CIG has only a few of these items currently "persisting."

So let's say I'm flying in a ship, and I have a smaller ship inside my ship. Someone is sitting inside the smaller ship.

Now, let's say I disconnect. What happens?

At this simple point, here's an abbreviated list of what we need persisted so that when I reconnect, I can resume what I was doing:
- what ship I was in
- the ship's coordinates in 3d world space (x, y, z)
- the ship's rotation in quaternion world space (w, x, y, z)
- ship's loadout
- contents of ship's inventory
- state of the ship's doors
- state of ship's lights
- landing gear and other ship "stuff"
- health/damage state of ship
- remaining ammunition on ship
- fuel level of ship
- did I remember to lock the ship?
- remaining beverages in hairy robert's cocktail machine
- the state of other ships inside my ship (which includes everything listed above)
- my specific 3-d coords (x, y, z) relative to the ship
- what color space underpants I was wearing
- is my space helmet on?
- my health, THC levels in bloodstream, etc
- my weapon loadout
- my character inventory
- mission statuses
- my current amount of available spacebux
- all my various reputations
- UI/HUD settings
- is my friend still in the ship? if so, where?
- is that ship still in my ship? where? What are its states?

Every bullet point is data that needs to be stored server-side in the database. Most of them will span multiple tables, if not multiple schemas (like ships), and you'll need specific queries for each entity type, as well as all the joins, that can create, read, update, and delete that data. Think of how much work you need to do on the back-end when crobberts wants to add a new ship feature. Update all the databases, add/remove columns, create new tables, add new queries and/or re-write old ones, change the code that interacts with the database, change the nectode which sends/receives it, change the clients, etc.

There are so many types of things (domains, entities) that you need to constantly sync to the database so that if the server goes down, or when people connect to the server, they can get in sync with the game. And everyone is constantly reading from and writing to the database, sending that data over the network. How many edge-cases can you think of that could cause problems?

It's always the details that get you. Fidelity is a warm gun. That's why almost every early access game starts strong (well, almost every EA game...). They get a few prototypes out, everyone's excited. Then they pivot hard from "Hey, this might actually be possible" to "Holy gently caress every little tiny detail is way harder than I thought, and none of them are working right, and even the stuff that works right feels like poo poo, I have a massive backlog of bugs already, I need to refactor 3/4 of my work because it's rushed and messy, we're way behind, we're running out of money, we probably need a top to bottom re-write of our core features, and I can't survive on 3 hours of sleep and cold ramen for much longer or my wife will leave me and take the children and I will have a mental breakdown."

Toops fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Oct 23, 2017

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:41

big nipples big life: May 12, 2014

Truga posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/76y4pm/when_you_only_know_how_to_write_brute_force/dohume8/

Now think how absolutely hosed star citizen is to run at 13 fps despite this.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:51

Beer4TheBeerGod: Aug 23, 2004; Exciting Lemon

It gets even more fun when you consider that the jump from development to sustaining a product after you release is really loving hard and all of those grand goals you hoped to achieve once your product ships go out the window in favor of crushing bugs, maintaining the player base, addressing balance, and hundreds of other things that you have to address NOW because people are paying for your product and won't tolerate the kind of failures that define an Early Access product.

Awhile ago there was an interview with a developer from MWO who talked about it. I wish I could find the video; it was really good.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:52

Hav: Dec 11, 2009; Fun Shoe

SomethingJones posted:

Watching the Twitchcon panel atm, this is the first chance I've had to look at it. Scott Manley just said "PDP 11"

A friend of mine, sadly deceased, claimed to have left teeth marks in the chassis of that thing.

Truga posted:

Then come the actual hard parts though: adding in a game people will want to play and tuning your netcode to work with your particular game (all netcodes are basically one of like 2-3 variants, but their parameters can differ pretty significantly).

SC somehow only managed to get the archer part down.

The cascade of attention deficit teenagers.

SomethingJones posted:

Scott Manley then talks about Warhead, a cool old Amiga game with 6dof that nobody really remembers. This is another old classic space game, it had a ten mission story campaign iirc.

Runs a fairly hard bait'n'switch in the campaign too.

You start by fighting a race of insectoids, but quickly find yourself facing down an super-powerful being that simply sweeps aside any resistance. After foreshadowing an accidental jump to a black hole, you eventually lead the super-being to the black hole, then continue blatting insectoids until you genocide their home planet

Total newtonian, so the optimal was retrograde flying while hosing them down with whatever you had. Great game for atmosphere, though.

Captain Blood was pretty amazing, although like Knights of the Crystallion, it was incomprehensible to start with. Started with Jean Michel Jarre's Zoolook, as well.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:55

AP: Jul 12, 2004; One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them; Grimey Drawer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmHU1meU_cw

https://twitter.com/Silrace/status/922430419802513414

# ? Oct 23, 2017 14:57

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

Latin Pheonix posted:

SGnG had the best end(mid?)-game 'gently caress you' ever. Seriously, it makes me laugh just thinking about it again.

I got to witness that on Ghouls n Ghosts for the Megadrive, total :stare:

moment
What I am gathering from this is I played way too much Ghouls n Ghosts as a kid. I regret nothing.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:05

Lladre: Jun 28, 2011; Soiled Meat

Combat Theory posted:

If i was Scott Manley in the Audience i would have had a Meltdown 5 Times already.

Scott you have the self control of a Monk

If you were Scott Manley you would have the self control of Scott Manley.

Your logic is flawed.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:07

stingtwo: Nov 16, 2012

ahmini posted:

WC was one of those games that was in the right place at the right time. Up until that point, PC gaming (as opposed to obscure Microprose simulations or RPGs with horrible graphics) wasn't that great and PCs just weren't thought of as a serious games platform vs Amigas and Atari STs. WC was simple, accessible and the graphics were good vs what little competition existed at the time. That was all that was required for it to become a success. This also explains why it has dated so awfully.

I don't think the WC games have become dated per say, but the allure of what they were has long gone but that's thats the way most games with FMV cut scenes of the day, the cheesy stuff like Phantasmagoria can be looked back with some lols at the acting. Because WC and Privateteer are have such serious non cheese cutscenes, theres nothing to discuss besides the cast.

That panel discussion I thought would be a major trainwreck and really, up untill the Lesnick on screen masturbation about wing commander and maybe the lack of diversity of recent "space" games because it all of them would be out before SC, it was actually watchable.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:09

tooterfish: Jul 13, 2013

Toops posted:

- contents of ship's inventory

It's worth noting that none of a ship's cargo will be abstracted.

"All of the above use cases are built atop one requirement: the ability for the player to manipulate individual component items at will."

Every single container, and every single individual widget will have to save its state. How many objects will that be? Hundreds? Thousands? Who knows!

It's okay though, because they can serialise variables.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:09

Lladre: Jun 28, 2011; Soiled Meat

Foo Diddley posted:

https://clips.twitch.tv/EncouragingAmorphousPastaDuDudu

He's not lying.

The game is practically finished.

Just not finished in the sense of completed.

Finished as in dead in the water.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:10

Colostomy Bag: Jan 11, 2016; C-Bangin' it

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

It gets even more fun when you consider that the jump from development to sustaining a product after you release is really loving hard and all of those grand goals you hoped to achieve once your product ships go out the window in favor of crushing bugs, maintaining the player base, addressing balance, and hundreds of other things that you have to address NOW because people are paying for your product and won't tolerate the kind of failures that define an Early Access product.

Awhile ago there was an interview with a developer from MWO who talked about it. I wish I could find the video; it was really good.

You're overlooking the fact that the game will be so great that millions more will flock to it thus funding their coffers. This will enable the hiring of additional staffing to handle these ongoing issues while development can continue on the other 95 systems.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:11

BeefThief: Aug 8, 2007

guys we're terribly sorry...we really wanted to have 3.0 ready for you to play before citizen con but our main FoIP developer broke both his hands in a bicycle accident, so we've got a few critical blockers for this critical tech that are keeping it from getting it out the door. I'm not going to give any dates or anything on when we might be done since people give me poo poo for that and we're only a year late on the patch, but you will probably see something in about two weeks.

now here's a video of ben lesnick, recorded four months ago, where he describes the ultimate game changer ship now available for $800. it really punches above its weight.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:13

D1E: Nov 25, 2001

So it looks pretty likely that CitizenCon is gonna suck just like it does every year and then RSI is gonna release a bunch of new ship jpegs/sales and lots of idiots are gonna buy them and this farce will continue, right?

I mean, regardless of what Derek says on his blogs.

D1E fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Oct 23, 2017

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:15

Ghostlight: Sep 25, 2009; maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me

Latin Pheonix posted:

SGnG had the best end(mid?)-game 'gently caress you' ever. Seriously, it makes me laugh just thinking about it again.

I knew the twist going into it but the first time I got there it still totally blew my mind, and even now it's mind-boggling that there's no way of short-cutting it no matter how good you are.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:20

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

BeefThief posted:

guys we're terribly sorry...we really wanted to have 3.0 ready for you to play before citizen con but our main FoIP developer broke both his hands in a bicycle accident, so we've got a few critical blockers for this critical tech that are keeping it from getting it out the door. I'm not going to give any dates or anything on when we might be done since people give me poo poo for that and we're only a year late on the patch, but you will probably see something in about two weeks.

now here's a video of ben lesnick, recorded four months ago, where he describes the ultimate game changer ship now available for $800. it really punches above its weight.

Well I for one would prefer to see delays and the game be up to Chris's vision than rushed and pushed out the door like you get with PUBLI$HERS and their lovely DLC ridden pieces of CRAP that no one wants or asked for gently caress arrrgh GRRRRR gently caress YOU ACTIVI$$$$$ION drat YOU ALL TO HELL

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:37

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

D1E posted:

So it looks pretty likely that CitizenCon is gonna suck just like it does every year and then RSI is gonna release a bunch of new ship jpegs/sales and lots of idiots are gonna buy them and this farce will continue, right?

I mean, regardless of what Derek says on his blogs.

Every year so far...

As Citizencon approaches:
:saddowns:

Citizencon is not that important, CIG usually save big reveals for Gamescon

As Gamescon approaches:
:saddowns:

Gamescon is not that important, CIG usually save big reveals for Citizencon

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:41

tooterfish: Jul 13, 2013

peter gabriel posted:

Well I for one would prefer to see delays and the game be up to Chris's vision than rushed and pushed out the door like you get with PUBLI$HERS and their lovely DLC ridden pieces of CRAP that no one wants or asked for gently caress arrrgh GRRRRR gently caress YOU ACTIVI$$$$$ION drat YOU ALL TO HELL

CIG doesn't believe in microtransations.

They believe in megatransactions.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:43

Hav: Dec 11, 2009; Fun Shoe

Lladre posted:

If you were Scott Manley you would have the self control of Scott Manley.

Your logic is flawed.

He would also be a sexual tyrannosaur.

(Good on the flat over short distances, but defeated by pickle jars)

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:43

ManofManyAliases: Mar 21, 2016; ToastOfManySmarts

Can't post for 3 hours!

AP posted:

Moma, why don't you post so much anymore?

It's almost as if vocal support for this project is completely embarrassing. Say it ain't so.

I vocally support CIG, RSI and the game.

I have decreased my posting because my duties at work have increased. Lots to do before the end of the year and all . . .

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:49

big nipples big life: May 12, 2014

ManofManyAliases posted:

I vocally support CIG, RSI and the game.

I have decreased my posting because my duties at work have increased. Lots to do before the end of the year and all . . .

Thanks for the update Lando.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:50

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

ManofManyAliases posted:

I vocally support CIG, RSI and the game.

I have decreased my posting because my duties at work have increased. Lots to do before the end of the year and all . . .

That's wonderful

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:52

Hav: Dec 11, 2009; Fun Shoe

D1E posted:

So it looks pretty likely that CitizenCon is gonna suck just like it does every year and then RSI is gonna release a bunch of new ship jpegs/sales and lots of idiots are gonna buy them and this farce will continue, right?

I mean, regardless of what Derek says on his blogs.

Yes, although at some point the star will exhaust the easily fused lighter gases and attempt to fuse heavier elements, leading to lower outward pressure. At this point, gravity will allow the hot corona to collapse, throwing off shells of heated material and ejecta. If the star is large enough, it will lead to a supernova, but generally these need a smaller companion that can donate gas to fuel the explosion.

That's a stellar evolution analogy.

The way I see it, when they lock the doors on more than one studio, the gig is up.

peter gabriel posted:

That's wonderful

Hey, Dragon Dildos don't QA themselves.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:53

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

big nipples big life posted:

Thanks for the update Lando.

Just as a side note Lando is a real sack of poo poo imo

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:53

tooterfish: Jul 13, 2013

ManofManyAliases posted:

Lots to do before the end of the year and all . . .

Clearing out your desk?

# ? Oct 23, 2017 15:53

stingtwo: Nov 16, 2012

Listing office inventory for Coutts must be daunting, gotta seperate whats CIG and the box of Lesnick garbage aka the cels for the wing commander show.

# ? Oct 23, 2017 16:09

crisp roberts: Oct 13, 2016

Will Reddit be more quiet the morning after citcon than the morning after gamescom?
You could really feel the "someone tell me how to think" Back then

# ? Oct 23, 2017 16:13

a real rude dude: Jan 23, 2005

anyone ever call this thing shart citizen or something like that itd go down pretty well

# ? Oct 23, 2017 16:15

peter gabriel: Nov 8, 2011; Hello Commandos

stingtwo posted:

Listing office inventory for Coutts must be daunting, gotta seperate whats CIG and the box of Lesnick garbage aka the cels for the wing commander show.

Well we know from reddit that it took CIG two years to set up the company and the majority of this was stocking the stationary cupboard so I don't envy MoMA there

# ? Oct 23, 2017 16:23

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# ? May 21, 2024 18:59

BeefThief: Aug 8, 2007

MoMA why don't you clean that nasty loving counter the $10,000 coffee machine sits on

# ? Oct 23, 2017 16:25

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