TheAgent posted:

I dunno, I never saw any of that rattled confidence among the backers. in fact, each month has beaten any previous months funding since October 2019, sometimes by double

but it doesn't matter since there is never going to be any way of knowing until the company collapses and maybe not even then

TheAgent posted:

and we have that pastebin with the top sellers, sometimes with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory, mostly from Russia

https://pastebin.com/S3Ngh0QB

I mean what other loving game that hasn't turned out to be a money laundering scheme (IGE, CS:GO, etc) has a dude selling $200k worth of digital items

posted:

I can already tell I'm going to be bored with 3.10 before it even goes live

This patch has a very short half-life for me personally. You can check out the new stuff in one session, and then what?

Same old poo poo for another 3 months, just with new bugs and a flight system that makes flying less fun, at least for me.

I sure hope they got some hidden aces up their sleeves for 3.11, which atm looks like a nothing-burger as well.

Yeh, I know, another negative post, but I am genuinely disappointed.

I was really looking forward to trying out the new flight system, and when I tried the Arrow on MicroTech, I couldn't even really tell a big difference and it still didn't feel like a jet in atmo at all, while the 600i, which used to handle like a pregnant cow, now handles like a pregnant drunken cow... on ice. Such luxury, such fun!

I was looking forward to fixed weapons being a valid option again, and they kind of are, but since you can't see the PIP half of the time, depending on the background, I'll stick with gimbal assist, thanks. Great job with that dynamic HUD visibility.

Oh and trying the fixed weapons out in AC is so much fun, because your poo poo wingmen die early in the first round and then half a dozen enemies pile up on you and hammer you with missiles and everything else they got, but don't even think about trying evasive maneuvers, because your poo poo is going to overheat instantly - but it doesn't matter because you'll get hit anyways. But I digress.

I mean, if you're really into changing the color of your mobiGlass wristband or watching an NPC perform a series of motion-captured movements, or mining (but in a CAR this time!), or turrets, or making screenshots of penguin plushies, or standing in new locations with gently caress all new to do, or wiping your helmet (which now prevents freelook while sprinting, because making default key bindings is hard) or just doing the same stuff you did in 3.9, and 3.8, and 3.7 again, 3.10 is probably going to entertain you a lot longer than it will me.
​
It's loving beautiful tho.
(Yet somehow I can manage to not post screenshots. Imagine that.)
​
Anyway, I'm done venting and feel a bit better; gonna give it another try. Downvote away.

quote:

Eh everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm personally finding 3.10 to be pretty fun and as we get further and further into development these changes and updates are going to seem less and less significant because there is honestly so much content drowning out the newer stuff.

Take the new trading app for example. It's not something that was even on the roadmap, but that little feature is going to add so much in terms of gameplay and how players interact with one another. Imagine pulling a new friend in to play and they don't want to solo an Aurora when you aren't on. You could literally give them a million UEC to go buy anything. If you want to do an FPS mission, no problem just toss them money to buy some guns. Your crew's ship got blown up but now we can pool together money to buy new mods. Even meeting people in game to play is going to change seeing as now you can just type in global : "paying 30k aUEC an hour for a gunner.".

That is just to give you an idea of how CIG works. Just because this patch seems to lackluster doesn't mean there aren't new features that weren't discussed that you haven't stumbled upon yet.

Another example would be the technology tab in your equipment loadouts. While it only works for the new mobiglass, they already have the models for the blade, the contacts, and a few other items on display in factory line. These are likely things already in the game that just need to be activated.

Even a bunch of ships and locations got updated and adjusted to look more " lived in". We even get the ROC which no one knew about like two weeks ago which is going to vhange mining for a lot of people. The ROC now gives any cargo hauler the ability to mine.

I won't touch the new flight model in a discussion, but I will say it's being welcomed the same as the last time they changed it. Needless to say people aren't pro like they used to be so everyone is butt hurt saying the new model is garbage when it's really not.

I could keep going and I'm sure many players will uncover more things as 3.10 goes to live. But the overall goal is the delivered on what yhey wanted this year and that was to give us a more playable game. Ive logged about six hours in the PTU so far and while my first log in (within an hour of first wave) was absolutely loving awful, my second log in and then on has been phenomenal. My framerate in cities dramatically increased, I was running around Levski at 50FPS the whole time my mind was blow. NPC's aren't chair standing or at least the numbers of the. Have dropped considerably. I've seen three on chairs out of the 400-500 I've run across in the last day. I also have not run into a single 30k yet.

For me 3.10 is just making this more of a long term game for me. Last two patches I barely played, but now im jumping in for 2-3 hours a day and that number is steadily increasing. Really money transfers are what ive been waiting for more than anything.

Scruffpuff posted:

They've been laundering money for a while now though - what's with this bubble? Why now? Why did CIG see the need to create what to a normal person is obviously an inorganic and statistically anomalous spike in their income? Who was that actually for? And was the target truly stupid enough to believe it, or was CIG stupid enough to not make it more subtle, or is everyone just so goddamned moronic that's involved in this that we're well past even attempting to hide the lies?

The Titanic posted:

Part of how you can reward people for spending an exorbitant amount of money on your broken game is to allow them to feel superior to their less spendy buddies by letting them work as free QA testers on prerelease versions.

Historically, the role of QA is a paid position. They do it for free, even filling out tickets per the specs of CIG requirements.

TheAgent posted:

there's just no way they had the best month of funding ever for a broken event that wasn't even really promoted and a ship sale that nobody really even cared about

it beat out any citcon or anniversary sale or any other event in company history by like 20%

Trilobite posted:

And even this is just another layer of smoke and mirrors, because they're only pretending to let people spend money to do that super-exclusive QA testing. The bugs they log aren't going to get fixed. They're probably not even going to be looked at. There are too many milestones they've already missed, too many promised features not even thought about yet, too many bugs they already know about, and way too much Chris Roberts to make digging through the massive pile of whale-submitted bugs even vaguely possible. There might as well be an actual garbage can behind the "submit" button, because that's where all those bug reports are going to go.

But letting the whales submit those bugs helps maintain the illusion that This Is Normal For Software Development, because real projects track and fix user-submitted bugs. And it also gives them a handy way to shut down complainers who think that spending real cash money on a game that they were told was being made entitles them to a game that isn't a janky-rear end pile of severe glitches and unfixable spaghetti code: "That bug was reported earlier and we are currently tracking the issue. Please submit future bug reports in the proper format to the Issue Council. Thanks!"

quote:

The most horrible thing about the current flight model is the turning of the nose of the ship with the wind like a flag and the slow rolling speed.
1. the ships fly with the wind, that means, if the wind comes from the front, the speed above the ground slows down, but the nose stays in flight direction. If the wind comes from the side, the ship moves sideways, but the nose remains in flight direction. But because the ships move in the air mass, the wind ALWAYS comes from the front. Only when strafe sideways should the nose move in flight direction. Please stop the turning of the ships like in a tornado. The complete ship is pushed with the wind direction, not only the nose, because we move with the air and are not a flag in the wind.

quote:

For reference, Elite Dangerous has sold over 3 million copies and consists of players that are likely also to enjoy Squadron 42 (and of course there will be players who are not interested in ED which would be interested in SQ42). Subtract a million or so from that to account for the Squadron 42 copies already sold and we can estimate that there's 2 million or so players out there who would be interested in buying and playing Squadron 42. If Squadron 42 is sold for $30 a copy (which I think is lowballing it), that's still $60 million bucks, not counting the people it'd pull into Star Citizen as well.

The only other comparable campaign I can think of is CoD: Infinite Warfare, and it sold a lot of copies but it's a well-known fact that most people bought that in a bundle.

So the argument is simply this: there are at least a few million people out there who could be interested in buying and playing a reasonably well-rated Squadron 42 who have not already paid for it, and even if we're pretty conservative with the numbers it's still a sizable chunk of change; enough to pay for development on Star Citizen for a couple more years even with absolutely no further crowdfunding happening, and more than enough to staunch a trickle of a few million dollars in losses on a yearly basis.

trucutru posted:

So what about that new flight model?

So I went into the spectrum to check what they think of it and it's mostly bitching at how bad it is. So I found this message that was heavily upvoted that explains some of the main problems, the first being


Do you get what he's saying? It took me a while to get it but, in their new model, the ships get blown away by the wind, with the nose working as the rotating point.

This is some next-level hackery.

quote:

Another video where the player choose "beer" which open 7 another choices. At least 8 beverage for this first iteration of the bartender. Animations are better than the last video in this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=158G8zO1bx0

quote:

The bartender is a test bed for all AI in game.
I can tell you more for what the devs wants to achieve with the bartender but not all those features exist yet in the actual bartender. I will try to test which one have been done.

The bartender manage real stocks (bottles in fridge for instance). Every element used is counted. If the fridge is empty he should say he can't do your beverage and launch restock order to the server (the bartender AI will do it, not a script tied to the fridge)

He had no scripted routes. He will search the fridge and go to it by himself from where he is when needed. When he takes your order, he should seek you to give it to you when done. If you have moved and took a sit 5 m away, the bartender have to detect the small door closing the bar, open it and pass the bar to give you your order. All those events not predefined. He have to recognize all its surroundings, don't collide with others NPC/PC and put the bottle in the right place where you are (the table if you have take a sit for instance). He should be able to get back the empty glass too.

When you command a multi elements beverage, he doesn't execute a full script but follow a recipe (whiskey, next ice cube, next water). The animation suite is dynamicaly launched.

A part of the animations are not in mocap or hard scripted but calculated. Ex : the movement to the fridge should be natural from 2m, 2.1m, 2.2m, 2.3m, 2.4m, etc (no moon walk). I have a good video about it from SQ42. I will post it later.

He constantly detects pnj and players in its surrounding and their localisations. For ex, if you pass behind the bar, he shouts at you to get out (seen in video).

He will be able to show emotions and analyze you. If you stink (no shower since several days), he can refuse to serve you.

He can queue orders. If 2 npc ask beers before you, you have to wait, you will be the third to be served.

The bartender and the NPCs will interact by themselve. We should see bartender getting orders from NPC.

He can be used as a mission giver or receiver and should have a good stock of sentences to say.

That's the plan. Dev have said that some of those features are already used for combat. For instance NPC will seek soon for ammo box when out of ammo (shown in video).

Mirificus posted:

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Why not have the test bed for AI combat in Star Citizen... Be combat?

Also none of that sounds remotely impressive or very hard to replicate with scripts. That one bartender video doesn't even look impressive, it just looks like a well-animated set of scripts.

Edit: lol



SaltEMike and the bartender

Edit edit: This video is also amazing:

FTR - Star Citizen 3.10 PTU (starting at 2:59:05)

FTR tries to order a drink, it forces him to order from someone on the other side of the bar, who proceeds to pour his beer, look at ingredients for a bit (with his beer in hand), and then place the still-full glass in the dishwasher.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Also none of that sounds remotely impressive or very hard to replicate with scripts. That one bartender video doesn't even look impressive, it just looks like a well-animated set of scripts.

Scruffpuff posted:

drat, I had to read that so many times before I understood it, but the guy is both onto something and missing something huge at the same time. That being, there is no "air" and there is no flight model, just hacks to approximate the understanding of physics of a certain physics dropout and non-game-developer. It's an interesting post because it takes a great deal of intelligence about the subject for him to notice and understand what he's talking about, and he's exactly right, but that intelligence didn't get deployed that extra step to notice "oh, CIG are full of poo poo."

trucutru posted:

Yes, there is no wind or air that the ship is flying in, there is only some sort of wind-vector that pushes against the ship depending on its direction. Which is a perfectly fine flight model for a NES game and the sort of thing that destroyed me in Ninja Gaiden III.

People are discovering all sorts of hosed up poo poo about the flight model. For instance, in some of the bigger ships it is easier to gain altitude using your secondary thrusters instead of your main gently caress-off engine. Point your ship directly upward and slam on the afterburner? You barely move. Have your ship upside down and use the thrusters on its roof to climb? works ok.

Pharohman777 posted:

Wait, so all outside forces act on the ship as if its nose is the axis of rotation? Like the ship is a spoke on a wheel?
That sounds like its gonna cause wildly disproportionate turning from even small forces acting on the ship.

quote:

Aligning your speed vector and the aim point of your ship should make your ship go FASTER, not slower like currently. This is one of the first things you learn when flying, you "keep the ball aligned" (ie keep he nose aligned with the trajectory) to have the best performance. That means putting a slight rudder input into the wind, for example. Certainly not to counter a rotation of your plane (like explained in point 1) above) but to reduce friction and gain performance.

quote:

The Reclaimer is almost unflyable at hurston, weirdly enough the VTOL mode is stronger than the normal flight mode. The only way to escape is to play flappy bird with the restricted area rings then space bar straight up for the next 15 minutes in vtol mode. If you press J you will drop like a rock even if you are pointed straight up 90 degrees. The Starfarer handles extremely poorly as well in atmo. The 600I has no shortage of phantom movements that wont allow it to stay still while flying even if you lock your cursor.

Oh, also both the starfarer and the 600I suffer from being unable to escape the grasp of their own landing gear on hurston without using afterburners straight up.

G0RF posted:

Hello Games: Desolation features overview

quote:

wind only affects you when your thrusters are on. Kill all thrusters and you hover dead still. Your rule set is so inconsistent. we have anti gravity and can float in atmo and walk on space stations but we still red out and black out when flying. wind affects my craft with thrusters on, but has zero effect when thrusters are off.

Mailer posted:

I genuinely love how this game got panned at release and they did the right thing then just said gently caress it and kept on going. At this point it's basically Chill Warframe. If they implement humanoid combat, 6dof, and getting out of your ship in space then they'll corner the non-bartender market on space games.

I wonder if the SC defense league got stirred up about this is or if NMS flies under the radar because it's not a "serious" game like ED.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Well they (Hello Games) were only able to do that because the massive hype for the game caused huge initial sales. So while it's commendable what they've done since, it was only as a result of Sean Murray outright lying. So their comeback story will always have that black mark on it for me.

TheBombPhilosopher posted:

When you're thirty you're thirsty, I guess.