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 In defence of CIG - A CFO explainsI see a lot of people are angry and upset about the revised road map. Revisions like this happen all the time in the software development world. When things don't go as planned the first reaction among the devs is denial, "We can make it", and eventually followed by acceptance. I'm a software developer and CTO, and I would like to explain some of the hardships CIG seem to be facing. I don't know that much about their specific process, but I do know software development. The COVID-19 have screwed up a lot of development across the world. I find myself working from home, not being able to go into the office. Unlike popular opinion, creative work like game development works best in an office with other people. You can get instant feedback and understand all nuances in constructive critique given by your team. This is harder when WFH. It's easier to crunch things by yourself, but anything that requires teamwork is a time sink and draining when WFH. When it comes to the road map. I personally don't care about the gameplay and content cards. They are not interesting in the long run during the alpha phase. Adding another landing zone won't make the game more playable. They need to work more on the backend and fix the underlying infrastructure. Every software project needs a stable foundation to work. This takes time and is an iterative process. In the first iteration, you build something to show the CEO/board that the concept works. The code is not pretty, hard to maintain and changing just a small piece can result in weird bugs. When the project is green lighted, you refactor most of the code, start over and then do it properly. This will take longer to build, but by building a proper foundation where everything is built systematically and is configurable, you save yourself a lot of pain later when the product goes live. Some things in SC are just horribly broken, and as a software developer I can tell what's a quick proof of concept CIG built to show people that the concept works. The older ships are the ones with most bugs, and CIG are pushing out more ships without fixing the old ones. This might seem offensive to some backers, but the fact is that for every ship they build, they learn something new, build a new system/framework to produce the new ship faster and better than previous ones. It's an iterative process. If you are curious on how the ships will look and feel when the game is done, look at the latest one. Currently, the Carrack is the best ship, and soon will be the Prowler. The tech they used to build the prowler was not available when they built the first ships, and there is no reason for them to fix the old ones until they are satisfied with the "ship tech". The same thing goes for the Orison landing zone. They need to complete New Babbage before they start working on Orison. While building New Babbage, they probably built a lot of tools and systems to speed up the development; and they learned a lot of new things that will be useful for Orison. If they start working on Orison before New Babbage is fully completed, they will just end up having to redo the work later. Adding new landing zones is a test for how fast a new one can be built. With every iteration, they are getting faster and better at pushing out new cities/landing zones. When New Babbage is done, they will have a retrospect meeting where they discuss what they can do better with Orison, and which new tools they need to build. Here we can find a dissonance between the community and CIG. The community wants content, but it’s still alpha. Content is not the goal here. CIG’s goal for building new landing zones is to improve their process of making a new landing zone. If they push out a new landing zone without improving their process and their tools, then it’s pointless. The community gets their content, but CIG does not move forward in their goal to build a massive playable universe. The truth is that CIG's ambition is too big to do by hand. Right now they have 600 employees, but it would not be better with 6000 employees. The only way to pull this project off is by building tools that build a universe. The new Planet Tech is a great example of that. It took one dev 2 weeks to build 3 moons. That would not have been possible one year ago. For SC to be scalable, they need to be able to build an entire star system that way. That means more procedurally generated content, with addition of machine learning to make it feel alive and natural. They need to have a tool/system/framework for everything. If they are to build things by hand like before, the game won’t be ready for another 20 years. All the tools they need to build SC might not be visible on the road map. But they are the only way forward. And CIG needs to prioritize. Some people have been asking for a server queue, but a better use of their time is to work on server meshing. The things that we should really be looking forward to since it enables scaling: iCache Server meshing Planet tech Tony Zurovec's Quantum economy NPC AI Network optimizations Then there are things that just need to be grinded when the tools/systems are in place: Ships, weapons, items. Just have people grinding content creation. Mission givers Animations NPC animations/loops When finding bugs in SC, one also needs to think if the bug is due to laziness, or lack of a system/framework/tool. Areas without oxygen on ships are probably just lazy mistakes Non-functional snub fighter on the Connie is due to lack of a system in place The weapon racks not working for storing weapons is due to lack of a persistence system for example. The devs could spend a few weeks to fix them as they are now without iCache, just like ships parked inside a large ship persists. But it would be a far better use of their time to work on iCache. Not only will that fix the weapon racks, but they also fix plenty of other things at the same time. When faced with bugs the devs need to decide if they want to fix the direct bug (the symptom), or fix the underlying system that caused it. Sometimes that means lots of refactoring work. This is just speculation, I've been working with software development long enough to see the patterns and understand some of CIG's decisions. That being said, I hope they abandon some of the very lofty goals stated early on in favor for realistic ones. I doubt 100 star systems is realistic. It's better to do a few star systems really well with fun an engaging gameplay.  
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May 9, 2020 08:27
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Quavers spoiler that poo poo dude! ..... Someone could lose a spleen laughing at how ridiculous it is. P.S. great taxxe catte
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May 9, 2020 08:52
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Quavers posted:
The bargaining phase has begun. Give it time. Soon they will bargain themselves down to two systems, each with more content than a single crater in Skyrim. Also, i'm a CTFEO of a software development house and know what i'm talking about!
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May 9, 2020 09:17
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:I thought he looked better without the beard. Its not about his smug rear end face. Its what he is and represents. The pinnacle of brown nosed cronyism. A total toady yes man. The only other person i find even closely as annoying at CIG is wooshisname, kieron davis, the nodding dog. Another total yes man. I mean, for all the stick i give CR, i don't find him annoying. Amusing, yes, but not annoying. I feel sorry for CR sometimes, he's a man out of his depth being swept along by his dreams, and he carries others along with him, as long as they say yes to everything he wants.
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May 9, 2020 09:23
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Pixelate posted:So that’s all the core tech that did gameplay style things dumped from
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May 9, 2020 09:31
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Out of nowhere I'd like to say: Why don't you produce vacuum like activity with your mouth on my female genitalia. Nothing else to be said.
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May 9, 2020 09:39
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Kosumo posted:Out of nowhere I'd like to say: 
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May 9, 2020 10:08
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WaltherFeng posted:Speaking of photorealism the opening intro of RE7 and Death Stranding would actually fool me into believing thats not CGI. I thought the opening of RE7 was a real recorded video with 3d stuff only up close like the car that's why it looks so photoreal?
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May 9, 2020 10:08
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Lol, citizens in the comments trying to defend CIG.
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May 9, 2020 10:39
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What's funny is for years i've been wondering why the hell no other company has put out a space game like Star Citizen is trying to be and beat CIG at their own game. Now Unreal come along and basically say to devs "Hey, you want to do a space game like Star Citizen? Come use Unreal!"
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May 9, 2020 10:51
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It took one dev 2 weeks to build 3 moons.  poo poo, two devs could build 144 moons a year, now. By the end of this century, they could use 600 devs to build 3,456,000 moons.
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May 9, 2020 11:04
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Jonny Shiloh posted:Store Citizer: We’ve removed this card from the roadmap This would be a great thread title Chocobo posted:Why do the patch notes in this space game never seem to have much... space? Well, space is mostly empty so the patch notes are also mostly empty. Fidelity!
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May 9, 2020 11:55
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Quavers posted:Tony Zurovec's Quantum economy
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May 9, 2020 12:26
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Quavers posted:
This really is the peak of galaxy brained citizen defense theses. I love how the whole things revolves around him clinging to the authority of being a “CFO”. We’re probably going to see a lot more of these as the community eats itself on Reddit. It all just begs the question of why CIG after 8+ years and 300 million dollars is still loving around trying to implement bog standard and basic MMO functionality with no end in sight. I’m sure any software/game company executive would be fine with a project being in this state with no defined design and no release date. I’m sure they’d be like “Oh Chris you lovable scamp! Here’s another hundred million!” colonelwest fucked around with this message at 12:46 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 12:43
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MarcusSA posted:Wasn’t it “leaked” a while ago that Jared really doesn’t make that much especially for living and working in LA. Yeah, I think it’s been implied from several sources. But he definitely straight up complained about his pay during one of his personal streams. It seems that CIG pays below industry standard if you aren’t a Roberts or one of their long time cronies. Lando was probably just happy to get a stable salaried job with a platform to inflict his personality onto the public, and I’m sure Chris didn’t have to offer him much money.
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May 9, 2020 12:51
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From the Roadmap Roundup: Shield System Tech ReplacementAdditional VFX work is needed on tasks in this card, and the VFX team does not have the bandwidth to complete those tasks within the current timeline. We’ve temporarily removed this card from the roadmap until we are able to determine exactly where it will fall on our schedule. From the Forbes article a year ago: At one point, one of the company’s senior graphics engineers was ordered by Roberts to spend months, through several iterations, getting the visual effects of the ship shields just right.
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May 9, 2020 13:08
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colonelwest posted:This really is the peak of galaxy brained citizen defense theses. I love how the whole things revolves around him clinging to the authority of being a “CFO”. We’re probably going to see a lot more of these as the community eats itself on Reddit. Waiting for vertical and toejam to announce they are CTOs of tech companies.
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May 9, 2020 13:16
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a $6000 backer on reddit Im done with SC. Its more than a year since i spend money on this. I cant see no reason to back or support this anymore. CIG is terrible in doing work. Every other studio would have done way more progress while this 8 years. So bye bye to you backers out there.PS: noone can defend this scale of mismanagement anymore. Theyre throwing away every plan weekly. This is just very bad management.
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May 9, 2020 13:20
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Is it just me or have CIG slowed down even more lately? Like I know it’s harder to WFH but the “progress” they achieved these last months is impressively underwhelming.
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May 9, 2020 13:22
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Quavers posted:From the Roadmap Roundup: lmao I wonder how those snoopy caps are looking these days
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May 9, 2020 13:25
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Star posted:Is it just me or have CIG slowed down even more lately? Like I know it’s harder to WFH but the “progress” they achieved these last months is impressively underwhelming. Chris told you many years ago that development speed was a function of cash injection. He just forgot to mention that it ƒ(log(x))
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May 9, 2020 13:27
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Star posted:Is it just me or have CIG slowed down even more lately? Like I know it’s harder to WFH but the “progress” they achieved these last months is impressively underwhelming. Yeah it's odd, maybe all their bad coding decisions are catching up to them. I remember the game going from kickstarter, then I bailed when the idris went on sale, then there was the period when there was derek smart and CIG started and cancelled projects seemingly just to waste money, then there was a bit when it looked like they were getting better and now it is just a trainwreck that keeps sucking in more money while not getting better and had no defenders outside of it's crazy zealots.
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May 9, 2020 13:57
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Flannelette posted:Yeah it's odd, maybe all their bad coding decisions are catching up to them. Yeah I think this is the crux of the biscuit
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May 9, 2020 14:14
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The moment when SaltEMike comes to the realisation that Star Citizen's launch is 2025+ https://www.twitch.tv/videos/615747423?t=1h24m15s
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May 9, 2020 14:18
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Quavers posted:a $6000 backer on reddit what a wimp. and so impatient. be more positive, show some gratefulness and respect towards chris, buy a wing commander package, step back for a while and come back in a year or two when alpha 4.0. rocks the gaming world. you insecure little brat.
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May 9, 2020 14:31
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Quavers posted:From the Roadmap Roundup: Have they just run out of excuses and started using the old ones again?
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May 9, 2020 14:40
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Quavers posted:a $6000 backer on reddit : One year and already fed up? Seriously don't join any crowdfunded or alpha, any of them as clearly you can't handle the reality.I got more fun and spend more time over years with my 40$ than with most triple-A sold with a couple skins + DLC's for three times that amount.
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May 9, 2020 14:43
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Dementropy posted:
You want reality? You want reality? You can't handle reality!
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May 9, 2020 14:51
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MedicineHut posted:Have they just run out of excuses and started using the old ones again? I believe the correct term is refactoring the excuses.
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May 9, 2020 14:52
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Quavers posted:The moment when SaltEMike comes to the realisation that Star Citizen's launch is 2025+ I like Mike a lot. He's deep in, but doesn't shill. He want it to succeed so bad and willing to overlook a lot, but has moments of pure clarity. From the chat there: They could launch with only 2-3 main gameplay loops and expand from there Oh my, how times have changed. Remember when it was "CIG will release a polished finished product, not like the unfinished buggy mess that is ED!" Again, bargaining themselves down from what was once proclaimed to be assured.
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May 9, 2020 14:56
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Quavers posted:a $6000 backer on reddit Is he new to reddit? The cultists can defend anything CIG do.
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May 9, 2020 14:57
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Quavers posted:a $6000 backer on reddit come on guys stop going on reddit and making FUD posts
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May 9, 2020 14:58
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If anyone wants a bunch of good games to play, you can't go wrong with this Square Enix Eidos Anthology $40 bundle (or less if you already own some) https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/14956/Square_Enix_Eidos_Anthology/ 1. Rise of the Tomb Raider 2. Just Cause 3 3. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided 4. Life is Strange: Complete Season 5. Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition 6. Tomb Raider (2013) 7. Tomb Raider I 8. Tomb Raider II 9. Tomb Raider III 10. Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation 11. Tomb Raider V Chronicles 12. Tomb Raider VI: The Angel of Darkness 13. Tomb Raider Legend 14. Tomb Raider Anniversary 15. Tomb Raider Underworld 16. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light 17. Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris 18. Just Cause 19. Just Cause 2 20. Kane and Lynch: Dead Men 21. Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days 22. Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director’s Cut 23. Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition 24. Deus Ex: Invisible War 25. Deus Ex: The Fall 26. Thief 27. Thief: Deadly Shadows 28. Thief II: The Metal Age 29. Thief Gold 30. Battlestations: Pacific 31. Battlestations: Midway 32. Project Snowblind 33. Mini Ninjas 34. Order of War 35. Flora’s Fruit Farm 36. Supreme Commander 2 37. Conflict: Desert Storm 38. Conflict: Denied Ops 39. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 40. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 41. Legacy of Kain: Defiance 42. Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain 43. Dungeon Siege 44. Dungeon Siege II 45. Dungeon Siege III 46. Anachronox 47. Pandemonium 48. Deathtrap Dungeon 49. Daikatana 50. Omikron: The Nomad Soul 51. Goetia 52. Hitman GO: Definitive Edition 53. Lara Croft GO 54. The Turing Test Like, holy poo poo Edit: DLC is included too 
Quavers fucked around with this message at 15:37 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 15:13
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 stupid fudster, usability is NOT immersive
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May 9, 2020 15:20
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Agony Aunt posted:What's funny is for years i've been wondering why the hell no other company has put out a space game like Star Citizen is trying to be and beat CIG at their own game. UE4 graphics are absolutely burying Star Citizen. It’s already dated, and in the next 1-2 years will be totally blown away by next gen games. Agony Aunt posted:I like Mike a lot. He's deep in, but doesn't shill. He want it to succeed so bad and willing to overlook a lot, but has moments of pure clarity. Yeah they’ve seemed to have collectively bargained themselves down to the poor man’s ED with 3-4 star systems at launch. colonelwest fucked around with this message at 15:30 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 15:21
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Agony Aunt posted:Waiting for vertical and toejam to announce they are CTOs of tech companies. Toejam is probably the CTO of the Lollipop Guild. His office is at the Yellow Brick Road.
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May 9, 2020 15:24
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Bofast posted:Toejam is probably the CTO of the Lollipop Guild. His office is at the Yellow Brick Road. Well (THAT!) Kazan basically runs Microsoft...
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May 9, 2020 15:25
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Quavers posted:If anyone wants a bunch of good games to play, you can't go wrong with this Square Enix Eidos Anthology $40 bundle (or less if you already own some) That's a good bundle 
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May 9, 2020 15:37
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Bofast posted:That's a good bundle Except for The Nomad Soul.
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May 9, 2020 15:46
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To the person who got me out of prison posted:Hey it’s me rainbow. You rescued me from the prison and wanted to thank you again. But my game crashed XD doing missed connections but for Star Citizen because the game crashes every 45 seconds lol
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May 9, 2020 15:48
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