Star Citizen: $48,000 is only $334/month for 12 years

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Star Citizen: $48,000 is only $334/month for 12 years

trucutru: Jul 9, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Beexoffel posted:

I just looked at this poo poo, and wondered, what is the threshold amount of funding to make it worthwhile for the FBI to investigate for money laundering?

Do you personally know anybody of influence? Then the threshold is zero.

Otherwise the threshold is still zero, but only in theory.

e: ooops. taxxe

trucutru fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Apr 13, 2020

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:10

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 14:26

Bofast: Feb 21, 2011; Grimey Drawer

The White Dragon posted:

wait elite dangerous has pvp? or is this stupid pie in the sky poo poo? because i've always been a little interested in space euro truck sim but honestly i hate pvp so much that if it's always-on then i'm just gonna hard pass on it

Elite has more of a PvP slider than Star Citizen does. It's not actually a slider at all, but it's still more than nothing.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:21

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Bumble He posted:

these are my thoughts too. this might be the main reason why star citizen is a failure. it was not the lack of money thats for sure!

edit: it costs around 200 million $$$ to run a formula one team.so, as an outsider, if you decide to crowdfund your own formula one team to absolutely destroy every other team out there, then you might even be able to get the money. but i dunno, better have some real experts in your staff who explain to you how it all is supposed to be done

For the experts, my opinion is CRs method of management has scared them to the winds, never to return.

But hey, he's got table stakes with the local high school kids who know how to make a mod.

Remember that ideas are hard!

The programming is simple; just layer code on top of these amazing ideas. :allears:

The Titanic fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Apr 14, 2020

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:29

Variable 5: Apr 17, 2007; We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.; Grimey Drawer

Snazzy Frocks posted:

lots of $1200 pledges incoming

If CR doesn't rush out a UEE Stimulus Bundle that comes to $1200 after tax, I will be sorely disappointed.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:36

BumbleOne: Jul 1, 2018; by Fluffdaddy

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/Lukas_Genever/status/1247874121800863746

is this guy some sort of nomad who roams the lands together with a flock of sheep?

if i worked for the kraut stimperium, could i afford a roof? or do you just get a laptop to live in the woods and eat berries and grass between coding?

BumbleOne fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Apr 13, 2020

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:46

Agony Aunt: Apr 17, 2018; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Quavers posted:

it's a bullshit made-up task, and because you noticed we're removing it from the roadmap

So one of the only gameplay features actually on this patch is not real, and CIG claims they didn't even know it existed. How can anyone on here not become more skeptical of this project on a daily basis. I've been around since the beginning. I am not a 'refundian'. I have defended the game from lots of criticism while doling out where appropriate. I understand it may take a while, which I am not worried about. But the lack of transparency this last year has been astounding. Especially regarding Squadron 42. They just don't give a gently caress about keeping us in the know anymore, and that is very worrisome. Like I wonder what's actually happening here.

It exists, its just tier 0!

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:49

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

The White Dragon posted:

it stops moving left or right when you let go of the left or right buttons so yes

I wouldn't say that kind of code wizardry too much in this thread... the CIG tread intern will report you to high command and you'll be getting recruitment offers to join the team.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:51

Agony Aunt: Apr 17, 2018; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

I enjoyed PvP in ED (and the game in general) until they added ship engineering. It introduced a huge new grind to an already grindy game. I keep thinking I'll get back into it and putter around in my Python.

The "grind" for engineering i don't really care about (since i'm a PvEer anyway) as its all rather nice getting the upgrades and since they added material traders it makes getting the stuff you need rather trivial.

What engineers did though (along with addition of things like MRPs, HRPs, SBs, and guardian boosters) was increase the disparity in power between a combat focused ship and a non-combat focused ship.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:54

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

colonelwest posted:

Man that�s bad... The dialogue sounds like C-grade fan fiction.

I also love that right off the bat in the first 2 minutes they rip off Battlestar Galactica (wide shots followed by quick snap zooms to spaceships) and Mass Effect 2 (snarky male/female engineering duo with the man being Scottish).

It has been widely acknowledged that CIG is both an IP and ideas/concept thief.

I mean:

I can't wait to play Squadron 42 in the verse!

Is a phrase that is literally hacking ideas from 2 other franchises. You can't even talk about any thing CIG has done without breaching some other companies IP.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 22:59

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Kosumo posted:

What if EA announced that Wing Commander V was coming out in 8 months?

You'd be able to play it in 8 months, probably. :shrug:

# ? Apr 13, 2020 23:13

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Snazzy Frocks posted:

i cant believe the star citizen project ultimately failed because of the coronavirus global crisis

And just when the pace of development was about to really pick up, too. They were almost done deciding what tools they would like to have eventually built, and the pipelines were really going to start opening up after that!

It's simply tragic how vulnerable projects are when they're in their early days, like Star Citizen was.

# ? Apr 13, 2020 23:27

XK: Jul 9, 2001; Star Citizen is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it's fidelity when you look out your window or when you watch youtube

Quavers posted:

it's a bullshit made-up task, and because you noticed we're removing it from the roadmap

So one of the only gameplay features actually on this patch is not real, and CIG claims they didn't even know it existed. How can anyone on here not become more skeptical of this project on a daily basis. I've been around since the beginning. I am not a 'refundian'. I have defended the game from lots of criticism while doling out where appropriate. I understand it may take a while, which I am not worried about. But the lack of transparency this last year has been astounding. Especially regarding Squadron 42. They just don't give a gently caress about keeping us in the know anymore, and that is very worrisome. Like I wonder what's actually happening here.

It's just an alpha.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 00:01

DigitalPenny: Sep 3, 2018

Scruffpuff posted:

It's a huge portion of the problem, and it's not limited to Chris. poo poo devs the world over have discovered that if you can't get your poo poo up and running properly, just change the system requirements and let the hardware churn through the bloat and inefficiency.

You can see this kind of thing just as a casual gamer. I'm sure off the top of your head you can think of several examples of games A, B, and C that run absolutely fast, look terrific, on a lower-end system, with low heat. And games X, Y, and Z, which don't look much better, oftentimes in fact look much worse, that require top-end systems with the newest video cards, run them hotter than they need to, and still don't run 100%.

"We're building a game for future systems!" is one of the most insidious lies in the gaming industry. You literally can't build "for future systems" because you don't know what algorithms and calculations and (I hate to use the word) pipelines are going to come down the road. NVidia has their raytracing cards now - those were not possible to anticipate 10 years ago, because that kind of work was done other ways and nobody knew that would be the key tech to bubble to the top in the following generation. In another couple of years it'll be something else - whatever is the current (new) bottleneck. And so it goes.

And of course this lie compounds itself with assumptions and implications. If you're saying your code needs future machines to run, you're implying that you're a visionary that's ahead of the curve. You're implying that the game is so involved and complicated that it requires a monster machine to run. And the backers assume all this to be true, and it makes sense in their little minds. And it's all complete bullshit.

Good developers understand how to make their code elegant and efficient. Doing your work on the fastest and best systems hides inefficiencies and breeds laziness and bad practices. It's one of the reasons I deliberately underprovision any VMs I have developers running unit tests on. The rule is simple: make it run as fast as you can on minimum resources. Try to overload it. I will monitor. When you can make this run reasonably fast on the poo poo specs I gave you, when I dial up the resources, there won't be any surprises.

And that approach works. It's amazing how many obvious logic missteps are completely obfuscated when you test on a machine that's too fast. Everything seems perfect until you deploy to production and introduce scale, then it's all head-scratching and shrugs. You don't need an overclocked I9 to scan a 5 KB text document for a character string - if it's slow, you coded something wrong.

Consider how bad CIG must be when modern-day high-end systems, which did not exist when the project started, and did not exist when the PU landed, and which are several times faster than the wet dreams of yesteryear, still can't play this loving fiasco without looking and running like absolute dogshit.

That isn't CIG "looking ahead" - it's them looking at the inside of their asses which is where their heads have been lodged for the greater part of a decade.

I was reading about algorithmic trading, it explained there was a huge demand for older Russian programmers as there are now to write some of the fastest code. This was attributed to them having to learn computer science when they only had extremely limited access to a crappy computer. They were taught from the beginning to plan carefully what they wanted to do before even touching key board, and only do the absolute minimum or there time computer time would be up.

I used to use mining software and it has lots of super old code written in 4 tran. Despite being 30 years old a pain in the arse to use, its still in the package because the new fancy code that has a slick GUI is ^4 times slower when you make it crunch big numbers. When i say slow its the difference for it taking 40 mins and leaving it run to over night. Sure it works but not well when you see what can be done.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 01:35

Thoatse: Feb 29, 2016; Lol said the scorpion, lmao

# ? Apr 14, 2020 01:52

precision: May 7, 2006; by VideoGames

Snazzy Frocks posted:

lots of $1200 pledges incoming

Oh loving hell, you're right

# ? Apr 14, 2020 01:56

XK: Jul 9, 2001; Star Citizen is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it's fidelity when you look out your window or when you watch youtube

DigitalPenny posted:

I was reading about algorithmic trading, it explained there was a huge demand for older Russian programmers as there are now to write some of the fastest code. This was attributed to them having to learn computer science when they only had extremely limited access to a crappy computer. They were taught from the beginning to plan carefully what they wanted to do before even touching key board, and only do the absolute minimum or there time computer time would be up.

I used to use mining software and it has lots of super old code written in 4 tran. Despite being 30 years old a pain in the arse to use, its still in the package because the new fancy code that has a slick GUI is ^4 times slower when you make it crunch big numbers. When i say slow its the difference for it taking 40 mins and leaving it run to over night. Sure it works but not well when you see what can be done.

Magic Russian programmers.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 02:51

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/Lukas_Genever/status/1247874121800863746

Written like somebody who never spent a day with developers, aka darkness denizens.

Nobody works in that much light. Hell, you turn on an overhead light bank and you're going to hear at least a few people groaning!

# ? Apr 14, 2020 02:52

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Quavers posted:

it's a bullshit made-up task, and because you noticed we're removing it from the roadmap

So one of the only gameplay features actually on this patch is not real, and CIG claims they didn't even know it existed. How can anyone on here not become more skeptical of this project on a daily basis. I've been around since the beginning. I am not a 'refundian'. I have defended the game from lots of criticism while doling out where appropriate. I understand it may take a while, which I am not worried about. But the lack of transparency this last year has been astounding. Especially regarding Squadron 42. They just don't give a gently caress about keeping us in the know anymore, and that is very worrisome. Like I wonder what's actually happening here.

Comment included:
* Length of time since "backing"
* Not "one of those guys"
* Justification for not being "one of those guys"
* Reinforcement if not minding things take long and understand game development is hard
* ended with "my justified worries and concerns"

Sounds like this guy will be joining us here soon, after being run out of his place of belonging by the guys getting the torches and pitchforks for having such a "controversial" opinion. May as well be Derek smart himself. :sureboat:

Also I'm glad they're still using the "I am a hardcore backer... but I have some concerns please don't kill me guys please I'm not really a FUD spreader I'm one of you please PLEASE!!" template.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 02:59

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Thoatse posted:

I can't believe you imprisoned one of those rare white ferrets.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 03:02

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

I hate reading something I posted and seeing how stupid it looks because I don't go back and fix what "swipe keyboard" thinks I was trying to write or reread before posting it.

I'm probably just really that stupid. :sureboat:

# ? Apr 14, 2020 03:04

colonelwest: Jun 30, 2018

Snazzy Frocks posted:

lots of $1200 pledges incoming

I told my bank to wire the money directly to Roberts Space Industries Cayman Islands LLC the second it hits my account.

The Titanic posted:

Comment included:
* Length of time since "backing"
* Not "one of those guys"
* Justification for not being "one of those guys"
* Reinforcement if not minding things take long and understand game development is hard
* ended with "my justified worries and concerns"

Sounds like this guy will be joining us here soon, after being run out of his place of belonging by the guys getting the torches and pitchforks for having such a "controversial" opinion. May as well be Derek smart himself.

Also I'm glad they're still using the "I am a hardcore backer... but I have some concerns please don't kill me guys please I'm not really a FUD spreader I'm one of you please PLEASE!!" template.

You�re seeing the doubt and frustration creep in more and more over the past year as progress has somehow become even more glacial and CIG even less transparent. They�ve dropped even the slightest pretense of giving a poo poo about the backers or having any path forward to a release. Even on Reddit every new roadmap update is trashed and the hardcore cultists are now afraid to even comment in the thread because they get flamed and downvoted.

colonelwest fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Apr 14, 2020

# ? Apr 14, 2020 03:14

Quavers: Feb 26, 2016; You clearly don't understand game development

Zyloh_CIG comments on 3.9 (From SaltEMike's Sunday ATC Stream)

# ? Apr 14, 2020 03:30

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

Quavers posted:

Zyloh_CIG comments on 3.9 (From SaltEMike's Sunday ATC Stream)

up to 600+ now eh

# ? Apr 14, 2020 03:50

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

DigitalPenny posted:

I was reading about algorithmic trading, it explained there was a huge demand for older Russian programmers as there are now to write some of the fastest code. This was attributed to them having to learn computer science when they only had extremely limited access to a crappy computer. They were taught from the beginning to plan carefully what they wanted to do before even touching key board, and only do the absolute minimum or there time computer time would be up.

I used to use mining software and it has lots of super old code written in 4 tran. Despite being 30 years old a pain in the arse to use, its still in the package because the new fancy code that has a slick GUI is ^4 times slower when you make it crunch big numbers. When i say slow its the difference for it taking 40 mins and leaving it run to over night. Sure it works but not well when you see what can be done.

In the past year (1/500th of the time the Stimpire has been active) I've twisted enough wrists to address the following:

- A website that took 40 seconds to log on. Cause: populating a list with a cursor.
- A validation of a plain text file taking minutes. Cause: recursive validation (1st pass sees line 1, second pass sees lines 1 and 2, 3rd pass sees 1, 2, and 3, and so on.) Guess what happens when it's 1000 lines? 10,000? Time dropped from 10 minutes to 5 seconds.
- A SQL query with nested cursors that took 3 minutes to run. Takes about a millisecond when you actually query with grouping and HAVING statements.

So many more I can't even remember them all. One authentication query checked how many bad logons a user had by checking millions of lines of an audit table, as opposed to just counting them in a column. This poo poo is rampant, it's all bad programming, it's all completely invisible until you start to scale, it's all hidden by constantly upgrading hardware, which was management mistakenly believing (and being told by developers) that we needed new hardware constantly because of all the "success" we were having and the new business that was getting signed on.

It almost took divine intervention to explain that they were wasting millions of dollars upgrading hardware that was brute-forcing code that could have run on a 15 year old machine had it been written correctly. And this poo poo infests every level of the architecture - overly taxing the CPU due to recursion, nailing the network layer with thousands of queries that could have been completed in a single query, loving the SQL servers with enormous queries that took minutes to run when a correctly written one would return that data in a millisecond. Overprovisioning RAM on key servers because memory handling is poo poo. (Obscure tip: did you know that too much RAM can actually slow down a machine? Unless it's a SQL box it's true and can be insidious. The extra addressing itself takes overhead for mapping address space. Bad memory can be in higher areas and never get hit until suddenly it does. Boot times are higher. Memory dumps are unmanageably large. If more than 50% of your memory space is completely unused you have too much. Your cheesemaking blog doesn't need a 256 GB RAM webserver.)

So the point of all this is this: the CIG defense force often trots out the "BUT IT'S NOT OPTIMIZED YET LOL IT'S ALPHA" but this isn't optimization - it's fundamental code architecture. Optimization is poo poo like intelligently short-circuiting operators, reindexing tables once you perceive scale patterns, etc. Star Citizen runs like poo poo because it has a pure poo poo core. They've been building layers of poo poo around that core for years now, and the layers aren't any better. The entire project is this ridiculous spaghetti-coded Jenga tower of absolute garbage. Each time they say "fixed a crash where..." I facepalm, because they're implying that each crash has a unique cause and once they're all squashed the game will be stable. I'm willing to bet a package of Tim-Tams that the crash "fixes" are yet another bandaid layer that simply keeps the crash from occurring, like an empty try-catch that dumps whatever would have crashed the game into what is now leaked memory.

Better upgrade that RAM! Chris's genius can't be held in a mere 128 GB!

Scruffpuff fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Apr 14, 2020

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:14

Popete: Oct 6, 2009; This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs; Grimey Drawer

Do they seriously have 600+ people? The lack of progress is staggering if that's true. What are these people doing all day?

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:16

Asmodai_00: Nov 26, 2007

Popete posted:

Do they seriously have 600+ people? The lack of progress is staggering if that's true. What are these people doing all day?

https://i.imgur.com/IEVPGoG.mp4

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:19

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

how hard can it be for all those artists to work from home, they just need to jump on a zoom call every day so Chris can tell them he hates the design

seems pretty easy from an IT stand point to me

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:19

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

Popete posted:

Do they seriously have 600+ people? The lack of progress is staggering if that's true. What are these people doing all day?

They have customer service people to steal money and deny refunds. They have a team of advertisers and social media experts making 24/7 misleading posts that make it sound like the game has been done for years and has a vibrant playerbase and a rich gaming experience. They have tons of "lore" writers because the game's completion is apparently a foregone conclusion so you better front-load that story bullshit instead of letting it evolve organically. Lore means it's real! They have tons of artists so photons can reach the backers retinas and prove the game is real. They have an IT team whose job it is to reboot the server every 10 minutes, and a networking team to replace the cable occasionally. They have to have office managers, coffee makers, janitors, attorneys, and all those things that real companies had to grow into as they gained success over time. Getting all those things right away by spending backer money directly on them means you can skip all that growth, just like I can immediately create a 200 year old redwood overnight by just buying millions of dollars of fertilizer and putting mirrors around it to mimic hundreds of years of sunlight in a short time.

I've heard they also have developers, but I haven't seen the evidence.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:22

Popete: Oct 6, 2009; This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs; Grimey Drawer

I'm an embedded software developer. I've worked for defense engineering firms and currently work in commercial aerospace, both industries notorious for long project turnaround due to heavy requirements and certification. CIG makes the companies I work for look fast paced, lol.

Edit: to be fair, I don't know game development

Popete fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Apr 14, 2020

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:22

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

Blue On Blue posted:

up to 600+ now eh

Early days.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:31

Kosumo: Apr 9, 2016

Blue On Blue posted:

up to 600+ now eh

They had to go to 600+ people since CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 had 600 people working on it. You think Chris is gonna let some amatuer AAA development house have more people than him? Don't think so.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:33

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

Kosumo posted:

They had to go to 600+ people since CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 had 600 people working on it. You think Chris is gonna let some amatuer AAA development house have more people than him? Don't think so.

OK, there's the explanation. I was curious about the sudden jump. This explanation is 100% distilled CIG.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:42

Zazz Razzamatazz: Apr 19, 2016; by sebmojo

The Titanic posted:

Comment included:
* Length of time since "backing"
* Not "one of those guys"
* Justification for not being "one of those guys"
* Reinforcement if not minding things take long and understand game development is hard
* ended with "my justified worries and concerns"

Sounds like this guy will be joining us here soon, after being run out of his place of belonging by the guys getting the torches and pitchforks for having such a "controversial" opinion. May as well be Derek smart himself.

Also I'm glad they're still using the "I am a hardcore backer... but I have some concerns please don't kill me guys please I'm not really a FUD spreader I'm one of you please PLEASE!!" template.

I wonder just how many :10bux:

for the spine fund this thread has generated?

Quavers posted:

Zyloh_CIG comments on 3.9 (From SaltEMike's Sunday ATC Stream)

Considering how terrible and buggy and terribly buggy their patches can be, I shudder to wonder what would constitute "nasty enough issues" for CIG...
Erasing the users hard drive? Erasing the user?

# ? Apr 14, 2020 04:49

Agony Aunt: Apr 17, 2018; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

DigitalPenny posted:

I was reading about algorithmic trading, it explained there was a huge demand for older Russian programmers as there are now to write some of the fastest code. This was attributed to them having to learn computer science when they only had extremely limited access to a crappy computer. They were taught from the beginning to plan carefully what they wanted to do before even touching key board, and only do the absolute minimum or there time computer time would be up.

I used to use mining software and it has lots of super old code written in 4 tran. Despite being 30 years old a pain in the arse to use, its still in the package because the new fancy code that has a slick GUI is ^4 times slower when you make it crunch big numbers. When i say slow its the difference for it taking 40 mins and leaving it run to over night. Sure it works but not well when you see what can be done.

I heard a quote that went something like this:

In software development you give the sensitive jobs to the Americans, the bulk jobs to the Indians, and the impossible jobs to the Russians.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 05:29

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

Agony Aunt posted:

I heard a quote that went something like this:

In software development you give the sensitive jobs to the Americans, the bulk jobs to the Indians, and the impossible jobs to the Russians.

звезда гражданин confirmed!

# ? Apr 14, 2020 06:17

PHIZ KALIFA: Dec 21, 2011; #mood

Scruffpuff posted:

They have customer service people to steal money and deny refunds. They have a team of advertisers and social media experts making 24/7 misleading posts that make it sound like the game has been done for years and has a vibrant playerbase and a rich gaming experience. They have tons of "lore" writers because the game's completion is apparently a foregone conclusion so you better front-load that story bullshit instead of letting it evolve organically. Lore means it's real! They have tons of artists so photons can reach the backers retinas and prove the game is real. They have an IT team whose job it is to reboot the server every 10 minutes, and a networking team to replace the cable occasionally. They have to have office managers, coffee makers, janitors, attorneys, and all those things that real companies had to grow into as they gained success over time. Getting all those things right away by spending backer money directly on them means you can skip all that growth, just like I can immediately create a 200 year old redwood overnight by just buying millions of dollars of fertilizer and putting mirrors around it to mimic hundreds of years of sunlight in a short time.

I've heard they also have developers, but I haven't seen the evidence.

i want a job writing lore. i will turn in 300 pages of "pew pew pew" and be heralded as a bright and shining g-d.

# ? Apr 14, 2020 06:24