Agony Aunt posted:

Hentai Jihadist posted:

we meet again SC thread

i think one of my fav things about the whole "GTAV took x years" is the corollary that GTAV and skyrim are miniscule undertakings in comparison to star citizen

which should immediately flash alarms for everyone since those are both huge AAA games

Sandepande posted:

I too like to call release dates "not actual dates".

TheDarkFlame posted:

The best part is the insistence on comparing the games by their scale alone, saying Skyrim would fit in a crater on a single moon and dumb poo poo like that. It fundamentally misunderstands what makes a game.
Skyrim is so big and broad that it's easy to lose direction and abandon what you were doing (the main quest chain, the civil war) so you can galavant around doing more interesting stuff (collecting godly artefacts, becoming a werewolf or an assassin, learning dragon shouts, building a house, basically the entire rest of the game). If you haven't explored enough the game will also routinely generate ambient quests directing you to places you haven't discovered to make you go there and find the real quest waiting in that area.
The setting has dozens of small points of interest like its villages, ruins, caves, most of which have some kind of sidequest or objective, an interesting feature, a purpose for the place to be there and a reason for the player to stop and interact with things. Each village has a handful of NPCs who will have some story and want you to do some minor thing for them, and the towns each have a number of places to investigate and characters to interact with, which will lead to bigger quests and unique rewards. So every area has some kind of content for the player to interact with (mostly through murder).
Any one of those villages has more actual playable content than Star Citizen's ten billion square miles of loving nothing.

Zzr posted:

Well they call their nogame a game too.

Rap Three Times posted:

It's your agenda that's the problem. If only your agenda was better. Everything that went wrong is due to your agenda!

posted:

So all the doxing, fabricated refunds, video reviews, glassdoor reviews, creating multiple accounts through several forums to spread the fud goes all under the "making fun" rug and not into the maniac obsessive disorder all while being mad at Chris Roberts for "absolving" himself for breaking your heart lol

Right.

Agony Aunt posted:

So, i'm having a robust back and forth with one of the more stauch supporters of the game.

Its certainly been challenging because he's avoiding actually discussing the topic a lot and instead focuses on making personal comments and casting shade on my motivations.

Occasionally he does deem to actually try and make an on-topic point, in between making personal comments.

I've been avoiding sharing the discussions because i didn't want to be accused of brigading, but this one is pure gold.

Note, not providing link or including their name for the aforementioned reason.

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE POOP!



This was in relation to me talking about how Chris, live on video, said SQ42 would be out later that year (2014) with SC to follow the next year.

But apparently they are not dates and mean nothing, poo poo happens apparently, and this is absoloutely fine and normal. Now, i'm happy to agree projects get delayed, things don't work out, but when the man in charge keeps revising it year after year, and then goes silent for a couple of years, then shows off an hour long demo, and how it just needs more polish, then more silence for a year, then announces they have scrapped it all and redoing it... well, it does make one a tad concerned about the honesty of their communications.

Beet Wagon posted:

just call them idiots and move on lol who cares

S1rmunchalot - August 22nd at 3:31 am posted:

If you want a full picture the problem is that it is so complicated it doesn't lend itself to a few lines in a post.. but OK. If you really are interested.

It is Chris Roberts stated intent that players should not be able to tell the difference between NPC and real player behaviour. Obviously this would be unlikely to extend to 'face to face' communication. Even the non-verbal variety, let alone the bursting into song variety.

Tony Zurovec has gone into long and detailed descriptions of how he plans to make Chris Roberts ideas come to life, and they are beyond anything anyone has ever attempted before. It's interesting that you mention a 3 body problem, because that is indeed somewhat akin to how TZ has described what he intends. It breaks down to 3 layers.

1. The Game-master AI with human input. This will be responsible for the overall flow in the Persistent Universe, but has the facility to enable random events such as space weather, pandemics, crop failures, mine-able ore discovery or depletion, alien behaviours, politics - The list of top level influencing behaviour is endless, but allowing human intervention as well as this AI randomness removes that level of obvious algorithm contrivance.

2. NPC/Player monitoring and spawning. The idea that NPC's will turn up, and only then resources and other such space-filling encounter enabling assets would be placed around them might be the norm in other systems that simulate populations, but actually it's the other way around - Chris has stated this clearly when he says that he does not intend 'The Sims' type of NPC's. The population of NPC's will spawn and behave according to the local conditions defined by the over-arching AI. This is done by setting behaviours. Each NPC will have it's desires, goals, daily routine, home, possessions, relationships and even backstories and allegiances based upon experiential narrative etc.- AND these will be dynamic. NPC's personalities will change according to local conditions and their experiences. NPC's can become addicted. This seems beyond comprehension that potentially millions of NPC's would need to be created at such a level of detail, but they wouldn't, they are approaching it in much the same way as spawning any 3D asset in the game, there are 'LOD's'. If you have no interaction with an NPC, it only exists as a virtual NPC, if you see the NPC avatar you will simply see an NPC going about it's business. Only when a player interacts does the system give that NPC more and more detail and depth. NPC's will grow old and die, but you won't see it unless you have a relationship with them.

3. Lower level fluctuations in local conditions, may be long term or temporary. This is where players will have their main effect, but also the local conditions respond to the overall condition of the persistent universe. TZ has talked about areas once affluent (in the lifetime of the player) becoming ghetto's, and it actually affecting the architecture, style of dress and artwork the player is seeing - Rust, grime, graffiti - more armour being worn etc. As areas decline crime increases, populations decrease, drug use increases, police activity increases and all the knock on's from that. But there is the corollary.. it may be that a barren or run down area gets a sudden influx of wealth and population due to a discovery of resources by players and their ability to martial those resources to feed into the economy.

There is no magic spawning of assets from nowhere, or magic bag of holding as Chris calls it. Whether it happens in front of your eyes, or in the virtual AI simulation each item in the game will take basic raw material to produce and someone whose job it is to create that thing, to transport it to where it is to be sold, and then to transport it to the player or NPC. There will be manufacturing, there will be consumables and even NPC's will be consumers. There will be retail, there will be customisation of existing assets. If demand goes down there will be job losses, economic migration, there will local economy collapse and gradually those service sectors will also diminish. There will be boom and bust in Star Citizen.

If you want your ship a different colour, you don't get to go to a cutscene garage and choose from a menu to drive out seconds later. You go to an actual place in the game world a physical structure with NPC's in it, and the NPC has to order the paint for you. If he doesn't have it in stock you have to wait for it to be delivered. Each and any of these events, and more, will draw in NPC's with specific roles - bring paint from planet X, they are not on-demand spawning they already exist in the virtualised PU, they are simply prioritised or re-tasked. If your ship is unavailable to you while being repaired, upgraded or customised you will have choices, stay in a local hotel, rent another ship from the ship rental place, or take a passenger service vessel. You will have to find and eat food. Each of these choices will have a cascade effect like a grain of sand on a sand dune. It may be just one or two or it could move a whole landscape if enough players or NPC's are motivated to do what you wanted to do. Tony Zurovec has even talked about 'fashions' coming and going.

All this would be amazing enough but is gets more complex due to the interactions and structures that might not be expected.. read on.

Mirificus posted:

Mirificus posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/non-player-emergent-gameplay-could-this-even-be-a-/2323439

h3isenbug posted:

After all those years of enjoying this dumpster fire for free and foremostly because Chris really needs his Vitamins I'm thinking about buying a starter package in order to be able to meddle with the game files, marvel at the incredible pace of development and to ultimately keep CIG afloat.

Unfortunately, working as the CTO of a high-end gaming PC distributor located in Germany, I really need to keep my eye on my wallet and thus wanted to ask if there is a way to buy a used game package - probably from a poor heretic who prematurely lost faith in the dream - for cheap.

I know that there is a grey market for accounts featuring all those expensive, totally-not-P2W ships, but I'm rather looking for something along the lines of "50 bucks for a used account being a better bargain than warbonding fresh money into the scam".

Packages at sites like https://www.playerauctions.com/star-citizen-account/ start at 100+ USD, which in my opinion is a bit too pricey for a goof account which will be worth poo poo in 3 years from now.

SoftNum posted:

Please don't buy into this scam. Seriously.

TheDarkFlame posted:

The best part is the insistence on comparing the games by their scale alone, saying Skyrim would fit in a crater on a single moon and dumb poo poo like that. It fundamentally misunderstands what makes a game.
Skyrim is so big and broad that it's easy to lose direction and abandon what you were doing (the main quest chain, the civil war) so you can galavant around doing more interesting stuff (collecting godly artefacts, becoming a werewolf or an assassin, learning dragon shouts, building a house, basically the entire rest of the game). If you haven't explored enough the game will also routinely generate ambient quests directing you to places you haven't discovered to make you go there and find the real quest waiting in that area.
The setting has dozens of small points of interest like its villages, ruins, caves, most of which have some kind of sidequest or objective, an interesting feature, a purpose for the place to be there and a reason for the player to stop and interact with things. Each village has a handful of NPCs who will have some story and want you to do some minor thing for them, and the towns each have a number of places to investigate and characters to interact with, which will lead to bigger quests and unique rewards. So every area has some kind of content for the player to interact with (mostly through murder).
Any one of those villages has more actual playable content than Star Citizen's ten billion square miles of loving nothing.

Mirificus posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/non-player-emergent-gameplay-could-this-even-be-a-/2323439

quote:

Chris Roberts stated...

h3isenbug posted:

That is why I never would give money to CIG.

But you probably are right - let's wait for the free flight event coming with CitizenCon, download and check out their glorified model viewer and then instead donate the 50 bucks to a charity.

colonelwest posted:

Who told them about our top secret anti-Star Citizen Discord?!

Looks like we need another round of purges. I'll convene the Central Committee at once!

SoftNum posted:

Please don't buy into this scam. Seriously. There's likely to be a free fly weekend soon (there usually is around citcon). Go watch one of Beet's unedited playthroughs. There's not even a game here to laugh at. All the poo poo you see, good or bad, is heavily edited to when the game, the server, the phase of the moon and whatever the hell else align to bring you 20 minutes of uninterrupted model viewing.

colonelwest posted:

Who told them about our top secret anti-Star Citizen Discord?!

Looks like we need another round of purges. I'll convene the Central Committee at once!

SoftNum posted:

Please don't buy into this scam. Seriously. There's likely to be a free fly weekend soon (there usually is around citcon). Go watch one of Beet's unedited playthroughs. There's not even a game here to laugh at. All the poo poo you see, good or bad, is heavily edited to when the game, the server, the phase of the moon and whatever the hell else align to bring you 20 minutes of uninterrupted model viewing.

eonwe posted:

starting to think star citizen isnt coming out

Mirificus posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/do-you-guys-have-multiple-game-packages/2350886

Mirificus posted:

(...) It's interesting that you mention a 3 body problem, because that is indeed somewhat akin to how TZ has described what he intends. It breaks down to 3 layers. (...)

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

These things he quotes are nothing alike, 3-body problem has no three layers, I wonder if he even realizes that.

S1rmunchalot - August 23rd at 1:58 am posted:

Thank you.. this made me laugh out loud! YES! They are!

The why is a lot more complicated than it would appear on the surface though.

If you watch this weeks ISC you will hear a guy say "As far as scale goes I don't think anyone else in the industry is really 'catching' on what Star Citizen is trying to do" This isn't some fan on Reddit or Youtube this is someone who works inside the industry, and CIG. I wonder if he meant to say 'matching', either way it's notable because it is very rare for developers to talk about the work of other game development companies.

When I visited their UK office in March 2016, it became instantly clear that they were miles further ahead than anyone thought at that time. Some of the things we saw weren't revealed until CitizenCon in Novemeber 2017 and we knew even during that visit in early 2016 that they were hiding things from us because as we went around they either turned off their screens or they switched to the RSI chat/forum. They didn't show us anything alien. At that time Foundry 42 DE hadn't fully opened and they had much less staff than they do now. Right now, aside from the cryptic Squadron 42 reveals and trailers all they give us is snippets about some features and the small mini PU. This is nowhere near what they had the potential to do. They have more than double the staff than they had when I saw the work they were doing. I understand that when people at CitizenCon 2017 see the things on screen they might think.. Oh that was made last month.. No - more like over 2 years before, I know I saw it.

I have been lucky enough to talk to some of them in person in social settings, one thing is clear, they are all very experienced in the industry and yet they really emphasise it when they say.. there has never been anything like this before.. it is way beyond what any other development has been in the past. When you realise this it makes sense why the gaming press, money men and others try to bring it down. If it IS what they say, then no private funded development could ever touch it - match it's scope, and it's no wonder those outside find that scary. They spread rumours and FUD to try and dissuade people from supporting the project, they accuse us and CIG of over-hype or fanboy-ism, they try to cause dissent and division in the community too. It's cheap to get access to these forums and Reddit. Even other companies employees can do it.

One thing I will tell you.. when you play a single player campaign normally what you have are cinematics (Whether in engine on rails or pre-recorded) followed by perhaps a wander around a small space like inside an aircraft or space ship - then you get in cockpit and do missions. One of first that broke this tradition was Mass Effect, you went planetside and there were things you could do within small areas but it was still mission based timeline.

Squadron 42 is set in the same universe as the PU, the things you can do in the PU you will be able to do a lot of them in Squadron 42 - you will have 'time off' between missions. It is not a case of - do this quick and move on to the next mission. The ship you are on has it's own timeline and you are along for the ride, it is actually moving through the star systems. There will be things that you can do while you are aboard ship, and while you are planetside the universe will be going on around you. You don't have to go and do the non-mission stuff, but if you don't you won't get the full experience. It is absolutely nothing like a AAA standard campaign game. There will be a massive amount of stuff that can go into the PU once Squadron 42 has been revealed.

You will hear a rumour (among other FUD) that has been going around for years both on Reddit and in these forums that Squadron 42 takes place in only the Odin system. They keep repeating this despite the facts, the Squadron 42 trailer reveal takes place at the site of the Vanduul attack on Vega II - Aremis. There are NO non-player interactive cut-scenes in Squadron 42. Admiral Bishop's speech takes place in the UEE Senate in New York. Every time the senior staff come on camera they say the same thing time and time again, Squadron 42 HAS TO BE THE PRIORITY. So why were they making player traversible 3D in engine maps of Terra Prime back in 2015 or earlier? Why did the TNGS Redeemer get it's first in engine reveal during a player walk-through of a level on Ruin Station in the Pyro system? If you're just aboard ship going nowhere except into your cockpit? CIG do drop hints every now and again.. in the recent Squadron 42 update email they said that they had been working on new tech space-weather which would affect "some of the asteroid belts that the player will encounter during the game". There is NO asteroid belt in the Odin system. Gainey has a debris field of destroyed space stations in a planetary ring system and there is The Coil. The Vega system DOES have an asteroid belt. CIG don't confuse planetary rings with asteroid belts.

People will keep yelling that Chris messed it up, that a lot of the early work was just dumped for no good reason. They have no evidence for this, and it seems highly unlikely. What did happen was that they went hell bent for leather creating flat landing zones such as Terra Prime and Goss, then those landing zones had to be fitted to the new tech spherical grid planets... but that is not a reason to dump all the work. If it was the case of a huge embarrassment to CIG - WHY is the Terra Prime huge wall mural featured so often in their videos and even in their published books? Couldn't they paint over it? Couldn't they have chosen a different sunset over Hurston picture for the Chairman's Club Handbook? Why when they finally got a conference room on the top floor of Foundry 42 UK did they have the Super Dreadnought Class Retribution etched into the glass door and subsequently feature that many times in CIG videos? Really? They would do that if they had just dumped it? They could have put a Javelin or a Bengal there?

I've seen some leaks too.. people have no idea just how massive the Squadron 42 experience is going to be.


Yeah... CIG are holding out on us. Just like any other game development house holds out on us eh?