The Titanic posted:

SC has to invent "server meshing" which everybody knows is not possible, so we're all just waiting for it to be reigned into something new. They just have to invent whatever that is, all by themselves. Because CR is a visionary, you can't use what other studios have used for this system somewhat successfully before. But even then the ask is big, since it's a huge twitch based space game of some galaxy spanning proportion. It's pretty big, the team has a huge pie to eat. Without any seasoned devs who have done this kind of thing before, they probably won't have anything for many many more years. And will never create server meshing as CR babbled about 7 or 8 or so years ago because he is clueless about modern technology.

quote:

LOL seriously? NONE of you have heard of a game called WING COMMANDER and the entire series? buwahahahahahha.. Or Lands of Lore.. or a few others I could even name.. Like I have said before, it's hilarious how you all spout all your bullshit yet none of you even have the right facts about any of it...

Wing Commander was one of the biggest hits of the day along with all its sequels... Strike Commander was another but only one game, not a series.

Lands of Lore game interface and structure was also used the full Ultima Series. He also created and wrote Ultima V.

Another big game he did was Conquest Frontier Wars

Freelancer was huge as was Starlancer but for reasons you clearly did not read up on that concerned other factors, it was sold to Microsoft and he left to take on other things after that. In fact , produced a number of movies including a couple that did really well, Lord's of War and Outlander. He also did the Wing Commander movie but it was meh, more for crappy visuals than anything else.

So you see, unlike most of those going at him, he has actually done quite a bit and has the background to support it.

UNTIL he fails or not, I won't judge the man OR the project. And as for people that back his project, So what? I spend my money on firearms.. REAL firearms. Some people do drugs, real drugs. Some people buy cars others buy house.

And some people... some buy computers one after the other and new video cards the moment they are out... even if they just bought a new $3000 rig a few month earlier when that was the newest tech...

But even worse.. Look at all those that are foolish to spend $1000 or more every year on a new cell phone.. LOL THAT to me is hilarious. Personally I no longer own or use one as I realized a few years ago what was happening.. Having the "privilege" to 'buy' a new $1000 phone to hook to a network where I have the 'privilege' of also then having to pay another $100-150 dollars EVERY month just to have the privilege of using my $1000 cell phone.... LOL

You want to see fools? It's not those who believe in a project spending some of their own cash to support it... No, it the hypocrites that try to call them out without realizing THEY are exactly the same as the people they call out and make fun of..

My bet, most in this forum doing that all own cell phones, computers and their lives revolve around those and even more funny, those cell phones and computers COST 20-30 times MORE than 99% of those who backed Star Citizen have EVER paid in..

And based on the public record which any one can look up, the average backer of SC is around $100.. In fact very few spend more than a couple hundred based on public information.. and those you would call whales that spent thousands, a very SMALL number in fact. But hey, it's their money so who is anyone to say otherwise? I sure ain't.

Yet I bet everyone here has spent THOUSANDS on walking around with a cell phone or upgrading their computers constantly.. I would even bet some here play in the stock market or bitcoin... You know, those non tangible betting games hoping to get rich by betting on a price but having nothing actual of value in hand...

I personally cannot understand how someone can send thousands of dollars to a corporation and get nothing in return that is actually usable. Sure if they BET right, they might make some money but that's not the point I am making.. The point is, WHAT's the DIFFERENCE between sending some corporation all your money with nothing but a hope you get something back vs sending it to a project that is at least trying to give you a return of two games?

It's not about if they succeed or not but it is clear they are trying and have delivered something where stocks... you have nothing at all in return to watch, use, play with except as I said, a 'hope' you might make more money than you sent them.

Now THAT's funny.

As for me? I think my $60 backing of Star Citizen is a MUCH better deal.. At least if the project fails, I am only out $60... where if I still owned and used a cell phone, I could be out thousands... or if my computer fails, the same.

BTW, I have spent $60 on dozens of games that sucked and were huge disappointments.. IN fact I a newer game I would put in that status.. CP2077 is a mediocre game. I could name dozens of others... So I am not worried whether I lose $60 for Star Citizen..

Thoatse posted:

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

Pixelate posted:

Say hello to some new bizarre memes

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

• The sunk cost fallacy doesn't apply if you're having fun
  
• If RDR2 had only had 468 devs, it would have taken 24 years
  
• Endless income forced CIG to feature creep further. Now they have no choice but develop the game until it's done.

quote:

Build a game in 10 years? Yes, that is slow! Start a company from the ground up and have a playable demo after 10 years(a demo of one of the most ambitious games ever, mind you), completly reasonable and actually impressive development speed. And one more thing that we need to keep in mind is that I expect that soon, after they finish more backend tech, to have an explosion of content that we can see: planets, ships, equipment, mission types etc

quote:

They should focus on functionality over quality over quantity. And I believe thats exactly what they are doing without compromising any of the three too much. They do try to find a good middle ground.

We are still in the early days of tech and tools only about to transition into active gameplay development once the last big tech hurdles are overcome. Quantity, as in scaling up the content, should come last, once all tech, tools and gameplay systems are in place and the chance of any lager reworks (that would also have to touch all content as well) would be rather small (compared to when you know that you still have a few major tech systems ahead of you, so it always baffles me that people call them out for mismanagement just because the game is not a game yet and taking too long).

I do think that iCache+Persistence, Server Meshing and Quantum Economy System and Mission System are the last big tech systems. Once they are done, I will start to except more gameplay and eventually more content to pop up. But not before.

quote:

It's also worth noting that CIG has throughout its development had two (technically four) clear visions of the games respectively. 2012-2015 and in late 2015 we all got to see the video Pupil to Planet (Look it up if you haven't) that was our very first glimpse of procedural planet tech. So a considerable amount of the work that went into the game from 2011-2015-16 would very likely have had to be scrapped or completely rethought to actually produce the game.

From the old way of instancing and layering the services to the creation of content itself all would have had to change drastically. There would have been challenges presented that they hadn't even considered in all that time which is largely I think why the last 4 years or so have dragged on and on and more importantly why the drought of 2016 was... well a drought. Because they were stuck trying to grapple with this amazing new tech that was not at all in the original plan for the core of the game. (Remember it was merely a stretch goal for post-release) So at the very least it would be disingenuous to say that "development" on this game has been going a full 8 years. (it hasn't)

Because a rationalizing tool I use to make sense of the way this project has gone down (and I do mean down) is that they pitched Star Citizen 1, a good enough game. A FL/WC spiritual successor. Great idea for a broad style MMO. But then they got the tech (and more importantly money) to skip SC1 and go straight onto doing the bigger badder sequel. Unfortunately doing so open ended the development to ridiculous proportions. Namely on the grounds of tech needing to be created to facilitate the new vision (fully shared universe, procedural planets, persistent everything etc) which effectively ended their SC1 project. (And SQ42 too)

So what that means in functional terms is that people who backed SC back in the Kickstarter days or even anytime before 2016 and desperately want that game, I'm sorry that game failed. It died. It is an unsuccessful crowd funding venture that is never happening. RIP Star Citizen, LONG LIVE STAR CITIZEN. Yes that sounds odd but it's pretty accurate. The game they were building now shares a resemblance to the game they were building before much in the same way a sequel would the previous title. They're similar yes, but one is vastly superior. All because they thought they were getting the money and tech to do 1 but ended up with the money and tech to do 2. And as far as MMO's go... you never wanna get in that situation where you build out a game, then realize you can do much better if you rebuild it... and then have to try to maintain both the original and build a sequel. So I would say this was the right call, albeit frustrating as hell for backers and spectators.

quote:

Halo Infinity started development at the same time as SC backers voted for the MMO which was always going to expand in scale based on it's funding targets, 5 years ago. RDR2 cost 650 million, and took over 6400 employees 7 years to make. Destiny cost 500 million.
CyberPunk'd has taken 9 years and 250 million for a single player game in a single city. And Anthem took 7 years to make a shitshow. In 2013 Star citizen had 13 devs, and only really began in 2015, when having reached their fundraising goals offered backers a vote to expand the project into a fully realised space sim, offering refunds to those who wanted to back out. They then had to swap engines due to a lawsuit. They are also making two games simultaneously with a fraction of the devs of an established studio, are in open development, and producing tech no one has ever seen before that we can actually see and thus know it's not some fake rear end trailor that will be downgraded when released. Not only that it's like 10,000 times the scale of CyberPunk AND an MMO. The clowns who try to pull the copy paste hate bait opinions they got off clickbait videos are simply doing the dirty work for publishers terrified of SC succeeding, because it will mean no one will accept their half arse half finished bullshit titles anymore. Star Wars, gave 4 hrs of gameplay and got old quick, same with AC Valhalla, Fallout 76, etc etc, all big names that failed miserably because they rushed out an unfinished product, whereas SC provides an endless sandbox with content that only continues to grow. They've completed two dozen fully realised moons and planets with different biomes, and 40 different flyable ships. They also just opened a new studio in Canada with 100 new devs for building the proposed 100 star systems. Theres nothing else that even comes close, but hey, if you're such a hotshot you could always start your own kickstarter, raise 300 million plus, hire devs and rent your own studios, put your money where your mouth is, because developing groundbreaking tech is hard, copy pasting opinions someone else gave you is easy.
What they've done already is amazing, so acting like it's some kind of cheap knock off only shows you have no idea what you're talking about, and are simply parroting what you've heard. Can you show me a Halo game that offers ANY of that?!
What's your closest competitor?
A question none of the critics are willing to answer, they prefer the safety and impunity of their armchair, and a subjective opinion cited as if fact.

Mirificus posted:

Ultima V DOS Credits posted:

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny Credits
28 people

Credits

• Programming — Kenneth W. Arnold, Richard Garriott, Mark Hamner, Steven Meuse, John Miles, Toshiyasu Morita, Dallas Snell
  
• Project Manager — Dallas Snell
  
• Lead Artist / Manual Illustrator — Denis R. Loubet
  
• Music — Kenneth W. Arnold
  
• Writers — Richard Garriott, Marsha Meuse, John Miles, Lori Ogwulu, Dallas Snell, Douglas Wike
  
• Design — Paul C. Isaac, Richard Garriott, Mark Hamner, Stuart B. Marks, Steven Meuse, John Miles, Toshiyasu Morita, Chris Roberts, Dallas Snell
  
• Playtesting — Tim Beaudoin, Kurt Boutin, Cheryl Chen, John R. Fachini, Richard Garriott, Mark Hamner, Kirk Hutcheon, Ian Manchester, Steven Meuse, John Miles, Herman Miller, Toshiyasu Morita, Ed Nelson, Dale Nichols, Collin Sachs, Mac Senour, Dallas Snell, Jean Tauscher, Mary Taylor Rollo, Laurel Treamer
  
• PC Conversion by — John R. Fachini, Herman Miller, Ed Nelson, Cheryl Chen
  

Ultima V Apple II Credits posted:

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny Credits

9 people

Credits

• Produced by — Richard Garriott (Lord British)
  
• Designed by — Richard Garriott (Lord British)
  
• Programmed by — Richard Garriott (Lord British), Mark Hamner, Steven Meuse, John Miles, Toshiyasu Morita, Dallas Snell
  
• Project Management by — Dallas Snell
  
• Artwork by — Denis R. Loubet (Denis Loubet)
  
• Music by — Kenneth W. Arnold (Kenneth Arnold)
  
• Operating System by — Henry Roberts
  

Tippis posted:

Huh… that's weird…


Wait, what's that? “PC Conversion”? So what release of the game does not have a “conversion” credit and could probably be seen as the baseline? Oh…

Yes. Clearly “created and written” by CRobber. Take less LSD, citizens. It does bad things to your perception of reality.

Mirificus posted:

downout posted:

I just watched the wework doc on hulu. Unsurprisingly parts are reminiscent of this debacle. The part about venture capitalist outside investors sounded hilariously familiar with the $40 billion valuation for smoke and mirrors. So if wework could get overvalued by nearly 40 billion, it is pretty unsurprising that CR has been able to get so much for his boondoggle. Speculative investment seems to be the name of the game for the last decade.

kuddles posted:

It's always the same defenses over and over again:

- Actually the game development didn't start in earnest until *date that keeps moving up*

- If you compare the scope of this game that doesn't exist to games that actually do, it's a reasonable amount of time.

Tippis posted:

Huh… that's weird…


Wait, what's that? “PC Conversion”? So what release of the game does not have a “conversion” credit and could probably be seen as the baseline? Oh…

Yes. Clearly “created and written” by CRobber. Take less LSD, citizens. It does bad things to your perception of reality.

Popete posted:

The much beloved Banu holiday of hunting for space whale eggs among asteroids, after which everyone goes out and buys a new space ship.

Mirificus posted:

I do think that iCache+Persistence, Server Meshing and Quantum Economy System and Mission System are the last big tech systems

Mirificus posted:

doing the dirty work for publishers terrified of SC succeeding, because it will mean no one will accept their half arse half finished bullshit titles anymore.

Mirificus posted:

And one more thing that we need to keep in mind is that I expect that soon, after they finish more backend tech, to have an explosion of content that we can see: planets, ships, equipment, mission types etc

Mirificus posted:

As for me? I think my $60 backing of Star Citizen is a MUCH better deal.. At least if the project fails, I am only out $60... where if I still owned and used a cell phone, I could be out thousands... or if my computer fails, the same.

BTW, I have spent $60 on dozens of games that sucked and were huge disappointments.. IN fact I a newer game I would put in that status.. CP2077 is a mediocre game. I could name dozens of others... So I am not worried whether I lose $60 for Star Citizen..

Zaphod42 posted:

I mean, to be clear "server meshing" is not just possible but easy, CIG is just incompetent at architecture (hence buying crytek off the shelf to render pretty pictures). But as we've discussed ITT, half the things they claim to "invent" are just old tech most gamers don't know about. The same would be easily true of "server meshing", if there was some approach other studios were using that worked, they would just crib it and then pretend it was something different and they were the first, even though they just copied a basic industry-standard approach. That's what they're trying to do, but designing a game engine backwards is much harder than making a 3D model in a completed engine and pipeline. All the tech debt makes it impossible for them to move forward.

The problem isn't really the lack of seasoned devs though as the lack of someone who can cut through the bullshit. Development is gridlocked because everybody is waiting on everybody else and the person in charge, Chris, rather than solving it constantly makes it worse, demanding completed work be re-done for the nth time while also having no interest in the actual problems.

You could have server meshing in a couple months if you were willing to scrap the engine and Chris and start fresh from how they should have But whether that happens anytime soon or in years or never

quote:

Clive Johnson has spoken about this, he feels the answer lies in intelligent choices of server location based upon the real world locations of each player in a group/game location - server meshing facilitates this - and improved netcode.

Right now you log into whichever server is best for the players randomly according to when they log in, it is more or less a random assignment even though you get to choose the general location. Your South African friend will have no choice but to log into a US server to be able to play with you so naturally he has the worst ping, but if it were you logging into his regional server then you would be the one to suffer. Players can over-ride this by choosing to form a group and the server infrastructure tries to pick the one most efficient server for each party member, for example you could choose Europe as you server location and hope that it is somewhat equidistant to Texas and S.Africa. Your very long and informative post gives the impression that only fixed location servers are available in limited region choices and does not mention that AWS servers are positioned all over the world and this 'equidistant' approach to server location choice can mitigate desync potentially - it's a form of delay based strategy that relies on real world server location rather than specific delay based netcode.

The first tier of server meshing is Static Server Meshing, each location in a star system is loaded onto a server rather than the whole (Stanton) star system loading onto a server - these location specific servers are then meshed together so that players transition between servers out in space (probably in QT). There can be more players per server because the servers are not required to load whole star systems even if players spread out in a star system, server load won't change much since they will migrate across server boundaries. You can still have multiples of a given fixed location in the game world - multiple Daymar's for example. This will do nothing for desync on it's own, but it will allow reduction in netcode traffic between clients and servers which hopefully would improve bandwidth. There will still be many Stanton systems around the world and you will still have regional server based play.

The next stage of server meshing is to allow servers to dynamically shrink and expand what gets loaded into memory according to player population in a given location. You still have regional servers, but again a reduced netcode volume requirement and potentially increased player capacity per server. The server expands and shrinks according to it's capacity rather than having fixed borders to an in-game region. Potentially players on the surface of a planet at one location are on a server, while players in a another location on that planet are on another server but both are meshed so that the game server is aware of the whole planet and perhaps the space immediately above that planet is handled by another server. The player in space can see the players on the surface below but they are all on different servers, if you drop a MOAB it is the object container that transitions between servers in flight. Dynamic Server Meshing will not solve desync by itself either, but it will go a long way to reducing the incidences of it. Since if the S.African player drops the MOAB onto a Texan player on the surface, any desync in the MOAB's flight would be barely noticed by the players if it happens somewhere between them. This was behind the reasoning of crazy Chris Roberts in physicalising bullets in Star Citizen, they can also transition from server to server.

The next stage after dynamic server meshing is to make intelligent network choices for any players in a given play area within the game and now because of server meshing large numbers of players can be in proximity to each other and yet bandwidth requirements are still kept relatively low. The next step to mitigating desync is now to analyse the ping of each player present in an area and then choose a set of AWS servers to spin up and migrate all those players to (hopefully without them even knowing it happened) - a server which is more equidistant to each player - slowing down the faster pings and speeding up the slower pings by dint of world network traffic node choice. It is likely they will in most cases still rely on regional server areas and keep players who are local to each other grouped together where possible. There will still be Asian Star Citizen, European Star Citizen and US Star Citizen game universes for a significant amount of time to come.

There are things happening in the real world - not least is Elon Musk's Starlink which would help solve the problem of 'backwoods internet' edge cases not solved by other methods, but it will (hopefully) generally reduce latency in the whole world network even if players don't use the Starlink service since AWS can route traffic through it to speed up their service traffic and reduce the physical limitations of the undersea cable network. Starlink plans to have ground stations connected to the WWW backbone.

TL:DR - Server meshing will somewhat mitigate network traffic load as it progresses, but mainly it will allow a better distribution of server nodes to maximise the efficiency of net traffic between players whereby the average players experience will improve over time. Improvements in the world wide network will further reduce latency and CIG can then work on which of the methods you described above are needed after that - and they likely will still have to employ some of those methods probably to reach the ultimate goal of one fully meshed universe but hopefully only in edge cases and hopefully the forward prediction time is minimal and the AI doing it is significantly better than it is today. The trick is to devise a netcode system (and player grouping system) that takes advantage of any future improvements made either by Amazon, Elon, The AI system designers - or anyone else. One that is dynamic.

Trilobite posted:

The Titanic posted:

What CIG does is the equivalent of "owning photoshop" and not having artistic talent to use it. They want to believe that just having this thing will make something tremendous and amazing happen.

This is why a real artist can take any tool, even MSPaint, and make something far and above beyond what anybody with no or nominal talent can do.

Mirificus posted:

Nicholas posted:

Hello, my name is Rian Johnson, creator of Starwars.

trucutru posted:

Speculative investment works as long as you can exploit information asymmetries to offload the hot potato to someone else (IPOs), with banks and other "trusted professional third parties" helping you fleece other people. (And in some rare cases you actually invest in something actually worth it)

There is very little information asymmetry here. CIG has indeed been somewhat transparent, and you can transparently see that they are hosed.

.random posted:

I think the most interesting part of the latest (edit:) second to latest Mirificus post dump is a small corner of the psychology I hadn’t previously understood.

The “us against them” mentality has been quite obvious, but I thought the “them” was mainly small-minded, for-the-lulz trolls. Apparently, there is also within the “them” an aspect of The Establishment which wants to preserve The Status Quo of being able to release half-finished games - which will no longer be a viable business strategy once Star Citizen upends the world of gaming. I find this very interesting; it really does play better into the whole psychological archetype (I use that term loosely, not calling forth the spirit of Jung) I’d assumed was at play.

Fascinating

Bootcha posted:

You have to remember, this is core of the SC Project narrative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsgiliheP0

They said I was dead
They said console was the future

"They" being The Establishment, the evil greed game publishers. The ones who said space sims weren't the risk or investment.
"They" being The Sheep, the dumb console "gamers". The ones who cheer for a new CoD or Battlefield game every year and don't demand better.
"They" being The Media, the right arm of The Establishment. The ones who praise and defend every decision that keeps gaming in the dark ages.
"They" are all around you, looking to keep a project like Star Citizen from ever succeeding. Star Citizen would change everything "They" don't want to change.

Thoatse posted:

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

I said come in! posted:

I need to know more.... so much more.

I said come in! posted:

I am trying to understand how they promised to release a finished game in 2018, and yet it is 2021 now and absolutely no progress has been made on Squadron 42.

.random posted:

I think the most interesting part of the latest (edit:) second to latest Mirificus post dump is a small corner of the psychology I hadn’t previously understood.

The “us against them” mentality has been quite obvious, but I thought the “them” was mainly small-minded, for-the-lulz trolls. Apparently, there is also within the “them” an aspect of The Establishment which wants to preserve The Status Quo of being able to release half-finished games - which will no longer be a viable business strategy once Star Citizen upends the world of gaming. I find this very interesting; it really does play better into the whole psychological archetype (I use that term loosely, not calling forth the spirit of Jung) I’d assumed was at play.

Fascinating

Bofast posted:

Those credits make me think Chris might have been involved in designing the DOS version UI and nothing else. Did the Mac version have mouse control and the DOS version didn't, by any chance?