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

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Colostomy Bag posted:

Is there anything interesting in that 5,000 word Roberts manifesto?

Only thing I saw (just skimming it, because reading Chris Roberts is only marginally better than listening to Chris Roberts) was that they won't be showing off any "live" gameplay demos at their CitizenCon, which means we won't get to laugh at that this year.

# ? May 19, 2022 01:30

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# ? May 31, 2024 18:21

Dr. Kyle Farnsworth: Apr 23, 2004

I tried to read all those words but my eyes slid right off. My body rejected it. Someone post it in the form of a sexy bear.

# ? May 19, 2022 01:33

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

CitCon is effectively done, it'll just be a live stream thing like they did last fall where Roberts makes a brief 10 minute showing and there is no live demo of some insane promise that will never be seen in game.

Star Citizen really has entered a new era, show and say nothing and the money keeps flowing in.

# ? May 19, 2022 01:39

Viscous Soda: Apr 24, 2004

slagmatic posted:

the bit about AI janitors made me lose it, I'm sure they'll be motion capped too

I think they've already done that. At the vary least one of the videos way back had some guy being mocapped while he acted like he was mopping the floor with a headless mop.

# ? May 19, 2022 01:45

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

so apparently they have 2000 NEW players a day signing up?

I would love to see the hard data metrics on that one, and not just the top 5 SC losers logging in via VPN using a few hundred fake accounts

there is absolutely NO way they have 2k brand new people a day discovering the trash heap that is SC and gleefully singing up

"We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42�s launch.

In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.

We�re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too."

So they are opening two NEW offices, and then planning to expand / open new offices for Austin and LA.

Dear god they love splashing money around thinking it will keep raining down forever

# ? May 19, 2022 02:15

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Kavros posted:

The physicalized representation of inventory is pretty difficult to use to actually kill someone. What you could do, hypothetically, is target a player character spawning in a PO cubby with a sequence of inventory drops that push them through the ceiling by stacking clothing items below them. They would go through the ceiling of the habitable area and get tossed into space. If this game was a big enough deal, there would already be some scripting tools to do things like sequence-dump inventory items underneath you to 'climb' like that but mehhhh

They all roleplay as people who are really obsessed about talking what they can do with their ships when the relevant gameplay loops are installed and the in-game universe has interconnected service industry parts where types of ships assist other ships. They will roleplay as dudes who are so excited about their ship that doesn't exist yet that they bought for $1200 will be at the forefront of the system that doesn't exist yet where they repair other ships using a repair function that doesn't exist yet to repair damage that doesn't exist yet for other ships that generally also don't exist, once the ship that doesn't repair the other ships, that they bought, exists. Or perhaps they're interested in Salvage� (coming june 2011) or scientific missions or planetary colony building? The list of things they're eventually going to do in the game is endless.

Disappointed nobody is roleplaying about the luxury liner excitement. Does nobody want to drink down a nice hairy Roberts? :boobeer:

# ? May 19, 2022 02:15

Gravity_Storm: Mar 1, 2016

Blue On Blue posted:

so apparently they have 2000 NEW players a day signing up?

I would love to see the hard data metrics on that one, and not just the top 5 SC losers logging in via VPN using a few hundred fake accounts

there is absolutely NO way they have 2k brand new people a day discovering the trash heap that is SC and gleefully singing up

Its a money laundering operation. Make account, buy assets, flip on grey market, clean money. Repeat.

There is no way these are real players. Not that many.

they will be keeping the accounts small and realistic looking so CIG have plausible deniability and dont have any financial alarms tripped.

I genuinely believe this.

# ? May 19, 2022 02:22

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

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/RectangularQuarrelsomeBird-mobile.mp4

# ? May 19, 2022 02:47

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

I had a big post and I losted it.

# ? May 19, 2022 03:07

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

The Titanic posted:

I had a big post and I losted it.

i expect this latest Crobberts missive will lead to hilarity as people pick it apart, i am sure you had some funny stuff to post so please make sure you search everywhere for the post!

# ? May 19, 2022 03:24

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

The new Letter from the Chairman is this

in text form.

It's Covid! We had to work from home! We just reopened yesterday! The game is big! It's complicated!
We're working on HUGE technology! Plans changed! There's lots of testing involved! We're building two hugely ambitious games!
Our studios are too small! It wasn't my fault I swear!

Also, anyone noticed he's channeling lots of trademark backer excuses?
With classics such as:

- We had to build the teams and tools, we only started with 2 and a half ppl working on this!

- We're building two AAAAAA games!

- Tech is hard and never done before, ofc it takes years!

- They can't show us anything cause it'd take resources away from development!

- Covid made everything slow down!

And the trademark backer dreams.txt such as:

- "It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game."

- "what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance� that becomes another planet, that you can enter it�s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? "

- "There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers."

:allears:

The funniest poo poo about this Letter is that it's basically the omnibus edition of all the stupid crap you can find every day on the main sub and Spectrum.
And now I wanna rewatch Blues Brothers.

4th Stimpire Queen fucked around with this message at 03:41 on May 19, 2022

# ? May 19, 2022 03:35

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

"I'm Satisfied with the Letter." posted:

For me, personally, this LftC was sort of the ultimate clarification that it's all about backing the dream and the effort, not so much an end product.

CIG is going to keep going in order to prove what can be built (and improve what already has). I'm ok with that, because I just want to see what's possible.

Don't get me wrong, there were several words in there that could be ripe for regret depending how things pan out.

But I do think most people would be happier if they stopped waiting for something to be done and instead enjoy what is going on.

*As long as CIG makes sure communication does not suffer further, that is. Most of my frustration has been around exactly that point... not what they're doing or not doing or how fast or slow... but that we didn't seem to know about as much as I think we should have.

Anyway, I really can't wait to see the new offices, bummed about CitizenCon, but sounds like 2023 is going to be all kinds of goodness for Star Citizen, CIG and the backers!

Cheers.

# ? May 19, 2022 03:49

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

"Star Citizen is possible." posted:

Today is a really big day. For the first time since November 2012 (I think), we now know the answer to a massive question that has lurked in the back of our minds since the beginning:

Is this really possible, or is it all a big pipe dream?

I'm not super averse to pipe dreams. If you told me that SC would never be finished, that the organization would fail, and that all of it was for naught, I wouldn't really mind... It really has been a fun journey, and CIG has pushed the boundaries of gaming along the way.

But what they have achieved as of last week is a bit of a historic moment. No game has ever been able to achieve what is now possible for Star Citizen. A fully connected, persistent universe. Something that is, if not real, the closest thing to it. I'm not looking for an "escape", but I have always wanted to experience for myself a universe akin to Star Wars or Star Trek.

Games have always disappointed me-- not in the fun i've had with them but with the lack of a sense of realism. We all thought that if anyone could do it, Mr. Realism himself, Chris Roberts could. But we didn't know if it could be done, and CIG's lack of communication to date on the subject (which is understandable given the failure of iCache), has been a major source of pessimism. Meanwhile, the naysayers have been out in force to decry this endeavor.

But now we see that it can work, and that it will. Not some year far off in the future but this year. This patch (PTU 3.18).

The future is very bright indeed. As one of my good friends put it when I shared the news with him:

"Bravo. Finally"

Mr. Realism :crobear:

# ? May 19, 2022 03:53

.random: May 7, 2007

Chris.txt posted:

To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.

from the current 40 to millions is actually just hidden behind a configuration flag.

code:

# MaxPlayersPerServer = 40
MaxPlayersPerServer = MILLIONS

quote:

The technology to do [Persistent Entity Streaming] at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering.

�

The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph.

So� ~~a Redis cluster in front of neo4j?~~ Sorry, I mean �an AWS Elasticache cluster in front of AWS Neptune?� This is revolutionary after all!

quote:

As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication.

This definitely sounds like a person who knows what gRPC is, yep.

quote:

For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage�s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!

Garbage collection will definitely not have problems, of this I am sure.

quote:

The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.

Are there REALLY that many players playing? So� 200,000 players/40 players per server = players spread across 5,000 servers? Well if you say so, Chris.

I, for one, am inspired :patriot:

(Also lol that some fools thought SQ42 would come out this year)

.random fucked around with this message at 04:07 on May 19, 2022

# ? May 19, 2022 04:05

nawledgelambo: Nov 8, 2016; Immersion chariot

imagine blaming covid for inept performance of your company within the past 4 months

# ? May 19, 2022 04:14

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Writing this again except with more language because I lost it the first time.

Movies.. yay I love movies!

4 global locations.

Blame Covid.

No work done since 2020 apparently.

So many feathers in the cap for nonsense.

Beating the 30K error was the best thing that ever happened to star citizen apparently.

2 systems apparently? I though there was only 1. I guess they got jumping between solar systems working?

Lots of numbers. Lots of stats. This is interesting. None of it entirely makes sense and with everything doubling and unique players.. y'all never say what the daily active average is. Nice word smithing.

Nobody wants to remember the past, including you guys. If we look at the past all that's there are dead promises, from Kickstarter lies, to 10 for the chairman lies... to ship functionality lies. The past is lies. And you have 10 years of a long alpha game that is full of prototype features.

You put a lot of feathers in your hat for functionality that you are claiming a victory over, but in the game it's barely working or broken. It's a prototype. You have no victory over anything that barely works. But it's another good mislead.

Y'all can be anything... uh hmm how about a fighter pilot???!! No Chris. Your best backers want to be kings of industry with rows of sex slaves manacled to their walls while they /spit on users with a [Goon] tag that your system applies to them in the game because you're tracking people's activity off site and keeping records of al these transgressions.

Profits and quarterly earnings ... loving really? Last I checked your company is alive because of donations and charity. Claiming profits and quarterly earnings is a real poo poo thing to do from your beggar company existing off of hand outs. You haven't delivered a single sellable product yet that is complete, over 10 years. You're not making profits from sales of your success, it's the endless promise of a better game- tomorrow.

Also great job with those profits too after admitting that y'all haven't worked much since 2020 because uuhbnmmm Covid and stuff. Right on!

PES, SM... whatever. None of this matters because your game supports less people than a fortnight match. Spank me baby.

Ok... you have cut and pasted in a whole lot of poo poo from another person here. They were told apparently to translate some half assed lucid chart scribbles of an attempt at architecture from people who don't understand architecture in the least, and whoever is writing now has no idea how to translate this into English. Good job.

So is the failure of iCache before or after when y'all decided to tell the backers to gently caress themselves when they had expectations for cig to deliver working technology and meet their promises? Was this the same thinking that went into the time that Sq404 was weeks and not months away from 6 years ago, too? Beautiful.

Leveraging Google... for reals? Comparing the people using Google to your poo poo-tier game and you believe that you'll somehow leverage the powers of Google to fix star citizen?

Wow. loving wow guys.

You have 4 facilities spread across the globe, and you have loving a grand total of 25 people working on star citizen? Gee.. that's really loving great, guys. Good loving job. That pretty much lines up with my expectations that you have your D-team working on SC and the rest of your mystery shell company is working on unrelated projects.

All with your donated money of course. Record profits abound!

Glad you got cans saving and this "save my game" nonsense is better than any game ever created in time, including single player games. Y'all realize you can fuz ro dah a dinner table or a room full of a thousand watermelons in Skyrim and it too will save your game, right? Congrats on this huge victory of game saving on an empty server. Y'all must be so proud.

Saving your game is not revolutionary, you're right. And gently caress you for comparing your lovely video game against actual people going into space, done in a shorter period of time.

But that's kind of an important point too. Know why they were able to go into space successfully on time and on budget? Because they had smart people who understood the technology at their disposal and worked with it to make genuinely revolutionary functionality at the time.

You and your team of full sail grads refuse to understand current technology, refuse to take ownership over the poor performance of your code, and think that you can keep leveraging the future to allow your inelegant, brute force bullshit to function when it breaks at the seams if 40 people log into a server at the same time.

Until you decide to play within the rules of today, you will always fail.

I'm glad Server Meshing has turned out to be the never before seen technology of more than one server reading and writing to what seems to be a database cluster. Nobody has ever done this before, y'all better hold on to your asses because Chris is about to go Full Burn on this news!

Testing and release huh, man y'all really gonna burn out your 3 whole QA people on the project. Or maybe one of your 18 devs doing the deployments. Better calm down there guys!

WALL-E, yay I love movies!

Bodies in new Babbage... yes, now you are speaking the language of your backers! They want to loot and rape those corpses and have them be naked and do dance emotes and be sex slaves on their ships. You done guessed it!

PES is gonna be slow.. well darn Chris. Maybe you can hire a 4th QA guy or something!? Maybe add another 19th developer to one of the 4 facilities you have across the globe? That's like, almost 5 whole developers per physical location! You better hold on to something with that kind of manpower!!!

Gen 12, huh? Can't wait. I bet it will be unreal when we see it! Oh gosh did I say unreal??? Maybe I should have said Unreal with a capital U???? Sure hope that will be awesome!!! I bet epic will be lining up at your door to beg for your code.

Oh god Chris spank me daddy. I was just guessing that you were going to roll out SM exactly how you are rolling out PES!!! Especially since one seems to be a dependency on the other as you indicated previously and we need PES first!!!

Oh god yes... SSM is exactly what other mmo type games are doing!!! Yes!!! Please give me more!!! Tell me how it's taken you a decade to reinvent the basics again because you refused to learn about current technology, fired all the smart people around you, and filled your staff with full sail yes-people!!!! This is awesome news Chris! <3

Oh yes... SSM leads to DSM... please spank me again daddy.

Wait wait wait... I thought earlier it was implied that Orison was the second system? Now Pyro is the second system? Tell me daddy... will it be a hot place? Will it have... gasp.. a lava planet?!!? Maybe call it something original like "Lavatown"!

PES might slip guys...

Chris.

You fucker. It better not. You better tell those 18 unlucky fuckers working on your poo poo game that they better work triple loving overtime on this.

But on the other hand... y'all already absolved yourself of responsibility haha! Who cares if it slips. gently caress.. slip it into 10 more years down the road. Who cares! Record profits rolling in on these donations after doing nothing for the last 2 years anyway. Why start working now??!?

Longevity... mmm mm I love the taste of CryEngine in the next 10 years. Oh wait, Gen 12.

Also glad we're working on 2 AAA games with your people. How many are working on the other one? Like, maybe 15 devs and 1 QA and 2 producers? You cad! Really rolling out that staffing!!!

Talking about building a company... still? It's been 10 loving years. You have 4 locations and apparently at least maybe 5 people working at each site. I think y'all built enough of this company stuff.

Names names names-

Gasp!!!

780 people!!!!

Wow!!!

You've dedicated a whole 3% of your entire staff to work on star citizen!!! My goodness it's no wonder y'all swimming in record profits!! You really know how to make a company and make it work like a well oiled machine!!!

So hang on! At first y'all were struggling and couldn't collaborate well and said y'all couldn't handle working under Covid, and for 2 years did basically nothing. So while y'all were lost and scared and had 25 people building start citizen y'all also hired more people than you have room for... but weren't in the office.. but...

Chris!! This is confusing me!!! Y'all said earlier-- oh forget it. Let's roll with it.

Covid schmovid... it affected you... but it enough to not hire people---

Oooohhhhhbb wait.....

What you're saying is you hired a lot of people, but development has been terrible for 2 years, and things are going to slip more because you already know, because you're hiring people with your donated fundraising money to not work on star citizen at all.

Got it. Makes perfect t sense now. All the stuff lines up again and the stars have achieved alignment once more. Got it. It's just a slight misuse of funds. But hell, the backers will never know, right guys???

Oh delicious. You're adding two new locations to your existing 4.

Why, that means you could put like 4 people working on star citizen at each site. That would help with collaboration and development. Good idea. Let's do this!!!!

Oh of course we're also increasing the size of Frankfurt and Austin. Why not.

Maybe we can get down to like 2 or 3 guys per site working on star citizen.

CitizenCon--- you're right Chris. These take tons of people to organize and make movies and media... I sure hope you can leverage some of the over 750 people by then not working on star citizen to help make that event awesome!!!

But wait there's more!! Turns out y'all can't organize it. It will be virtual, so I hope it's all full of videos and prerecorded nonsense. Yay!!!

Holy gently caress Chris.

Not only do you have huge balls, but you have huge balls. I feel like just reading this is making my ovaries drop and literally transform into huge balls.

You have no gameplay demo... at your game show off moment. Wow!

What have those 25 people been doing for the last 2 years??!!! Oh that's right- loving nothing.

I wouldn't want to show off any gameplay either anyhow. We both know it's a poo poo riddled prototype where every release makes it more and more tremendously unstable.

And also--- gasp--- someone may ask you to play your game again!!!!

Can't have none of that nonsense!!!!

Can't wait to celebrate all the chumps paying for your 6 offices across the globe while you bitchslap 25 people to make your prototype while telling people it will never be done because perfection takes time and of course technology is too far behind you because you know, nasa and all that. Moon landings. Etc etc.

Bar citizen... oh ok. So now the backers are going to also pay for people to go on vacations around the globe. :lol:

What a celebration!!!! Hahaha

Final thoughts... yes. Let's recap the disappointment.

A small tiny fraction of people are working on star citizen.

They are so poo poo we're already warning you that dates will be missed.

But we have 100's of people and need 6 buildings to house them all in for magical reasons nobody knows.

We don't care though because we're going on endless vacation around the globe.

Oh and a ton of acronyms from some guy we asked to translate the lucid chart barf into text for this presentation.

Wait wait... moving closer to critical milestones outlined above??? The ones where you have no idea what it means, where it's going, how to get there, and are already going to be late? Those ones?? Ok.

Enjoy your vacation across the globe!!!

# ? May 19, 2022 04:17

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Blue On Blue posted:

so apparently they have 2000 NEW players a day signing up?

I would love to see the hard data metrics on that one, and not just the top 5 SC losers logging in via VPN using a few hundred fake accounts

there is absolutely NO way they have 2k brand new people a day discovering the trash heap that is SC and gleefully singing up

"We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42�s launch.

In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.

We�re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too."

So they are opening two NEW offices, and then planning to expand / open new offices for Austin and LA.

Dear god they love splashing money around thinking it will keep raining down forever

The numbers make no sense.

The staffing makes no sense.

The only thing that does seem to make sense to me is almost nobody at cig is working on any video games at all, with star citizen probably getting the least amount of attention despite being the thing bringing in the money-- somehow.

I have no idea how they make so much money like this. It makes my brain want to tie in a knot when I try to apply any kind of business logic to it.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:26

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Gravity_Storm posted:

Its a money laundering operation. Make account, buy assets, flip on grey market, clean money. Repeat.

There is no way these are real players. Not that many.

they will be keeping the accounts small and realistic looking so CIG have plausible deniability and dont have any financial alarms tripped.

I genuinely believe this.

The good person in me wants to believe there must be something else that I'm not seeing that makes it all make sense. But this explanation is getting more and more as the only logical solution.

Like, I just don't know how otherwise. It feels like at the levels they are indicating, SC would be literally flooded with people frothing at the mouth for it.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:29

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

The Titanic posted:

The good person in me wants to believe there must be something else that I'm not seeing that makes it all make sense. But this explanation is getting more and more as the only logical solution.

Like, I just don't know how otherwise. It feels like at the levels they are indicating, SC would be literally flooded with people frothing at the mouth for it.

secret answer, it's Ben working over an entire house full of PC's running VM's

gotta keep the numbers up!

# ? May 19, 2022 04:32

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

The new Letter from the Chairman is this

in text form.

It's Covid! We had to work from home! We just reopened yesterday! The game is big! It's complicated!
We're working on HUGE technology! Plans changed! There's lots of testing involved! We're building two hugely ambitious games!
Our studios are too small! It wasn't my fault I swear!

Also, anyone noticed he's channeling lots of trademark backer excuses?
With classics such as:

- We had to build the teams and tools, we only started with 2 and a half ppl working on this!

- We're building two AAAAAA games!

- Tech is hard and never done before, ofc it takes years!

- They can't show us anything cause it'd take resources away from development!

- Covid made everything slow down!

And the trademark backer dreams.txt such as:

- "It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game."

- "what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance� that becomes another planet, that you can enter it�s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? "

- "There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers."

The funniest poo poo about this Letter is that it's basically the omnibus edition of all the stupid crap you can find every day on the main sub and Spectrum.
And now I wanna rewatch Blues Brothers.

There was a healthy amount of "you don't care about where the money is going haha... you just want this amazing game that is a universe simulator!"

And "we're a family/village yay!"

However it made no sense. The whole middle section was written by a completely different person who has no idea how to translate technical writing to English.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:33

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

i skipped a bunch but i could have sworn Chris said a few times 'when we decided to scrap this' or 'we changed this backend and thus have to re-do everything that hooks into it'

seems like the kind of thing that they would want to lay out on the line in advance, during oh say something like their BIG official updates?

but no, they've re-worked and re-jiggered entire subsystems due to changing the systems they're using (honestly I expected him to just drop a 'oh we switched engines' in there somewhere too)

# ? May 19, 2022 04:36

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

I think overall my favorite parts was how much of the backer money is being mismanaged into buildings and locations, and how they are going to apparently go on infinite vacations to meet people.

And while all this is happening they indicated that the game is in such poor shape they can't even show it to anyone with the ridiculous excuse of taking developers off the game, when next to no one is working on it.

Gee Chris; I bet you could just pick up your Xbox controller and try to play your video game again in, you know, it's current ridiculous state and try to justify how poo poo it all is to people.

You don't need to spend a year building a demo that is designed just for that demo so you look good.

Just log in to it and play your stupid loving video game. It's not hard. Apparently at least 2 million people love it and play it non stop.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:38

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

After all this time and this statement from Chris, y'all backers are genuinely some dumb people.

I'm not sure if you can get a more badly written "we're mismanaging all your money, and not even building the thing we're telling you we are building" message.

You get nothing.

They are struggling with saving a game state.

Their huge server meshing is bog standard mmo tech from years ago-- and it's not going to let you have fleet battles. You'll still be super limited to the number of people in an area before people go to that area and go to a different server.

You're being lied to. Like, badly lied to. And it's been going on for a decade.

The prototype is not the work of a company that size for 10 years. Your money is being spent elsewhere for other things cig will never ever tell you.

You don't even get a demo of something that you'll never get this year. They don't even care enough anymore to try to fraud you. They just know y'all dumb as rocks at this point.

The Titanic fucked around with this message at 04:47 on May 19, 2022

# ? May 19, 2022 04:45

Kosumo: Apr 9, 2016

The Titanic posted:

I think overall my favorite parts was how much of the backer money is being mismanaged into buildings and locations, and how they are going to apparently go on infinite vacations to meet people.

And while all this is happening they indicated that the game is in such poor shape they can't even show it to anyone with the ridiculous excuse of taking developers off the game, when next to no one is working on it.

Gee Chris; I bet you could just pick up your Xbox controller and try to play your video game again in, you know, it's current ridiculous state and try to justify how poo poo it all is to people.

You don't need to spend a year building a demo that is designed just for that demo so you look good.

Just log in to it and play your stupid loving video game. It's not hard. Apparently at least 2 million people love it and play it non stop.

Nah, this is easily the best part -

quote:

Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year.

This will not happen, this will take CIG 2 more years to release a watered down 'tier 0' version.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:56

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Like whoever wrote that for Chris, I too want to remember all the past achievements.

I remember back in the day where Chris did his 10 for the chairman.

Back when cig put in effort to fraud people.

I enjoyed the sandworm demo that never came to light.

I liked the other one that other year where they had some guy one shot one of those big ships or something.

I liked when it crashed, and the tester has to do everything exactly like they did it before because they knew even looking in the wrong direction would break it.

Heck I remember the tour of that one ship, where the dude running it had to look away or up at times so the clipping of characters or broken stuff wasn't as noticeable or hidden.

I remember the science vessel that you could do science in and the luxury liner and the hairy Roberts.

I remember Chris coming up with crazy new Kickstarter goals before he even went to the 10 for the chairman because the promises just kept bringing in more and more money while getting more and more crazy.

Now... y'all don't even get that level of effort.

It's a note, probably not even written by Chris, laced with how they're misspending your money, how they aren't even going to bother trying to impress you anymore.

They're buying buildings... going on vacations.

Telling you they're going on vacations right to your face.

It's pretty funny really. CR has some ginormous balls to be able to have someone put his name on that. And he's using them to slap y'all right in the face.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:56

Only Kindness: Oct 12, 2016

Bootcha posted:

Welcome back Chris Roberts.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18696-Letter-From-The-Chairman

50-odd unreadable paragraphs of this garbage. The man should be in jail for this alone.

# ? May 19, 2022 04:58

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Kosumo posted:

Nah, this is easily the best part -

This will not happen, this will take CIG 2 more years to release a watered down 'tier 0' version.

It's good but you have to go full circle with that and add in how at the end they indicated that they're achieving all those milestones that clearly laid out above.

It was like spilling alphabet soup on a table, and some guy jumps up and points at something and says "look at that... that's where the treasure is hidden. Of course!!!" and then they gently caress off to go bar hop around the globe forever.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:01

cmdrk: Jun 10, 2013

Blue On Blue posted:

so apparently they have 2000 NEW players a day signing up?

I would love to see the hard data metrics on that one, and not just the top 5 SC losers logging in via VPN using a few hundred fake accounts

my anec-data on this was looking at the star citizer discord. can't say whether they're bots or astoturfers or what, but there seem to be 75-100 rubes/day joining up.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:02

Kavros: May 18, 2011; sleep sleep sleep
fly fly post post
sleep sleep sleep

i appreciate the effort to parse his terribly long and tired announcement into digestible chunks but it's honestly just so much to say about nothing.

it's like the game dev version of a jordan peterson speech, where he's just rambling in a way which remains noncommittal to anything concrete and tangible but he does it long enough that the true believers are able to dig into it and say "ah, this next patch sounds like it will be a true game changer� i see the real stuff� is coming along quick� we can get excited� now"

quote:

most people would be happier if they stopped waiting for something to be done and instead enjoy what is going on

this sounds like a surreal ending in stanley parable where the narrator is lecturing you on the concrete limits of patience and how the journey itself must be the destination and. .. what? where are you going, stanley? there's a space game, right here! they're making it for you as we speak, stanley! now, don't tell me you're just going to [scoff] up and walk away, are you? well, yes, you've been standing in this room for a decade, but you most certainly must remember that these things take time! stanley, I'm not going to get caught up in the weeds of how MUCH time, I most certainly hope you understand. please continue to listen to the Waiting Music.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:04

The Titanic: Sep 15, 2016; Unsinkable

Also that post needs to be immortalized as the reason why I don't much care for the people behind the game.

Lots of people always think it's hating on the game, or the game is doing too good and I'm upset about it for some reason, or the game this the game that...

Nothing I'm interested in in this project is about the game.

I'm interested in the people behind the game, and what they do and how they do it and what they get away with.

It's like Disney villains where you know they are bad, but you can't stop them. And instead of the hero winning in the end, the villain drives off in a Porsche full of money falling out of the windows while yelling "I'm coding your game right now in my car as I drive away. Give me more money hahaha!"

The state of the game, good or bad, is irrelevant. However, it's bad. So that kind of makes it fun as well because it keeps people occupied between these kinds of events where we see terrible people taking advantage of other people for their own gains.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:06

Blue On Blue: Nov 14, 2012

just think for minute, how much money are they putting into REAL ESTATE this year, building/buying/leasing/renting new office space

it's in the 10's of millions , ... plus outfitting all that space with desks and brand new PC's, and fancy seating, pool tables.

a few floors in a brand new state of the art high rise office tower in frankfurt? that'll be 10 mil easy - plus plus plus

and the part Chris slipped in about Studio 6 being rented out for their exclusive use for.... the foreseeable future. Any idea how much a 5,000sqft TV stage goes for these days? by the day, week, month?

# ? May 19, 2022 05:10

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

The whole affair is equally sad and funny tbh.

The Titanic posted:

I'm not sure if you can get a more badly written "we're mismanaging all your money, and not even building the thing we're telling you we are building" message.

They don't care, see the various "well once you pledge it's not your money anymore, it's their money and they can use it as they see fit" you see around.

The Titanic posted:

You get nothing.

Eh, they've already rationalized years ago that "even if we get nothing at least we tried!" or "even if the game fails I had enough fun playing the pre-alpha to justify the money spent".

The Titanic posted:

They are struggling with saving a game state.

Never done before in a MMO!
Not kidding, I quote from the main sub:

"Most MMOs give you well defined "places" to put your stuff and have a max server pop count. (Think bases, houses, etc.)

Many single player games do this already, but that'a because there's only one person.

Dual Universe (and another one, I think) were close or are already there. Not sure. But neither have SC's attention for detail.

Space Engineers and games like it exist as well, but they all run on a single machine.

There's a reason SC's been in the works for as long as it has, just saying. Am I a shill? Maybe. But you can't deny it's exciting if it is true."

The Titanic posted:

Their huge server meshing is bog standard mmo tech from years ago--

Sure but it's "never been done before in a world with so much fidelity" (lol) or backers never played a MMO cause their last gaming experience was Heimdall on the Atari ST.

The Titanic posted:

and it's not going to let you have fleet battles. You'll still be super limited to the number of people in an area before people go to that area and go to a different server.

I have a sneaking suspicion that, once CIG can't lie anymore about certain big ships and fleet battles, they'll just say something like "sorry, the technology isn't there yet! No refunds but we'll convert all the money you've spent on those ships into store credit so you can enjoy the other awesome ships we have!".
And the backers'll thank them for being so generous ofc.

The Titanic posted:

You're being lied to. Like, badly lied to. And it's been going on for a decade.

Oh yeah, it's worse than that, it's a whole belief system based on lies. A system which has been basically self-sufficient for years now.

The Titanic posted:

The prototype is not the work of a company that size for 10 years. Your money is being spent elsewhere for other things cig will never ever tell you.

Like nice wages, investor payouts etc? "But CIG deserves nice things" and "Well, it's the only way they can move forward so we have accept this".
Or "it's all development costs, it's normal" plus "how do you expect them to eat and provide for their families if they don't have a decnt wage?".

The Titanic posted:

You don't even get a demo of something that you'll never get this year. They don't even care enough anymore to try to fraud you.

They don't need to, the backers themselves lowered the standards so much that CIG can just relax and count all the money going in.

The Titanic posted:

They just know y'all dumb as rocks at this point.

Oh it's more than that, it's a mixture of delusions, escapism, skewed self-esteem, frankly worrying group mentality and cult of personality, just to mention a few.
Also, being a belief system means it's immune to hard facts, which is what makes these kinds of things so resilient to external interferences or failure.
You'd write a thesis or a book about this kind of poo poo. But no one cares about SC, or has heard of it, in the real world so that ain't happening.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:12

cmdrk: Jun 10, 2013

Gravity_Storm posted:

Its a money laundering operation. Make account, buy assets, flip on grey market, clean money. Repeat.

There is no way these are real players. Not that many.

they will be keeping the accounts small and realistic looking so CIG have plausible deniability and dont have any financial alarms tripped.

I genuinely believe this.

maybe the record funding in 2022 is due to Russian oligarchs getting squeezed because of the Ukraine war.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:21

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

cmdrk posted:

maybe the record funding in 2022 is due to Russian oligarchs getting squeezed because of the Ukraine war.

Maybe the real game was all the record funding they made along the way.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:32

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

The

Letter is already conjuring some more dreams.txt.

Garbageman Gameplay? posted:

With truly persistent objects now on the radar, will there be the ability to play a trash collector? Could be a new profession complete with a Drake rubbish hauler, let's call it the Drake Scarab.

Could even have a section on one of the corporate moons that's just a giant dump that slowly gets recycled where you have to fly your Drake Scarab to unload a thousand tons of mixed trash, and then other players could try and sneak past the local security and the junkyard cyber-dogs to salvage parts for free.

Might be cool!

Tbh, I think backers already have a giant dump to play with.

# ? May 19, 2022 05:41

4th Stimpire Queen: May 4, 2022; Contemplate with nice thoughts and utterances.

Also, since you guys are posing as people in the know and spreading FUD I'll collate a few genuine backer reactions to the tech jargon about server meshing.

This one, in case you tried to forget:

A true software dev posted:

As a software developer, I can definitely feel the immense joy they felt while I was reading this part. Massive respect to all the people involved!

A NASA simp posted:

Reading this was a "It's happening" moment. One of the biggest technically issues has been tested. Still a lot of work to be done, but you can't put a man on the moon before sending one to space.

Happysysadmin posted:

As a system administrator/integration engineer I completely understand the elation when a complex proof of concept finally works. It's an amazing feeling.

"A consummate dreamer" posted:

as a programmer each of those steps can be infinitely complicated, and successfully completing each step in a complete flow, without any hiccups, is massively satisfying for the people working on it, and a pretty good sign for us as consumers too. The dream is pretty much a reality on their dev machines, and now its just ironing out bugs, edge cases, and whatever technical debt is left before players can consume it.

A VR bear enthusiast posted:

As a game/VR developer who has solved many thorny challenges (alone and with a team); I can absolutely relate to this 'Eureka' moment. So glad to see this.
I definitely see an overall 'it's happening' trend with big streamers playing SC, the huge influx of new players mentioned by CR in his letter, the awesome events, the reduced incidence of 30k crashes, many QoL improvements, etc.

Hopeful doubter posted:

Server Meshing (Hopefully) by the end of Q1 2023 (Maybe)

Ship divisions expert posted:

if you can divide that 80 player vessel in such a way that one server handles 40 players and a second server handles the other 40 then server meshing can help.

1 Percenter posted:

This 100%, now it is just a matter of time.

SC Historian posted:

the point where it can fail was past a long time ago.

Scapoegoat lead designer posted:

Server meshing may not pan out the way they want it to. Amazon might not be able to provide the necessary cloud hardware to make it scale as necessary. Hell external factors could occur that make progress unfeasible thereby causing a cascade of events which lead to failure.

# ? May 19, 2022 06:00

Kosumo: Apr 9, 2016

4th Stimpire Queen ......does this mean, Derek Smart was.... Wrong?

# ? May 19, 2022 06:22

NoNotTheMindProbe: Aug 9, 2010; pony porn was here

Trilobite posted:

Only thing I saw (just skimming it, because reading Chris Roberts is only marginally better than listening to Chris Roberts) was that they won't be showing off any "live" gameplay demos at their CitizenCon, which means we won't get to laugh at that this year.

What's the point of citizencon if they aren't even going to show off the game?

# ? May 19, 2022 06:31

Mirificus: Oct 29, 2004; Kings need not raise their voices to be heard

quote:

Were you not reading the same thing everyone else is?

Q2 2022 patch in June is to be 3.17.2 - more locations and things to do in the game come with it - we know about the planetside derelicts etc. A gradually more stable build to play for those who don't want to test. He doesn't say it specifically but it looks they will be recruiting a significantly expanded Evocati.

3.18 is being reserved for full persistence internal testing + PTU Q3 and Q4 (possibly Q1 as well) then a release to Evocati end of year or Q1 for 4.0 - there won't be a 3.19. It looks very likely a full wipe is incoming for end of year, or Q1 of 2023, after 3.17.x closes out (this is just my speculation). We won't see another Live Build 3.XX after 3.17.X.

They will progress to PTU waves 1 and 2 after Evocati and a fact not obvious is that the 3.17.2 Live build will continue to have the Freefly's and events for 'casuals' for around 9 months while the players more invested get to test progress in the extended PTU. 3.18 brings physicalised cargo and salvaging which was reserved for Persistent Entity Streaming to be in place rather than factored for the current backend server design.

Next Live Build main branch - 4.0 - brings Server Meshing and Pyro (+more content added gradually).. followed by a Beta phase. Then it's years of continual development world building from an expanded dev team.

quote:
And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we�re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.

As I have pointed out on the Progress Tracker numerous times they aren't adding any new content to Squadron 42 and are in a finalising/testing phase - Chris confirmed this..

quote:
I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure.

They have a very definite marketing plan in mind clearly, and the No Spoilers mantra is being maintained until they are ready to launch that campaign. Chris knows he can't do that forever, not because of us but because of minority shareholders in CIG.

I find it amusing that Chris is referring to 'Armstrong Moments' in development after spending a good chunk of the letter doing something he rarely does, comparing Star Citizen to other games.

TL:DR
The main 'Jesus-tech' is now more or less all done for Star Citizen apart from testing and we have a definite route to beta. There are only 4 new services required on top of PES (which needed 12 new services) for Server Meshing. No new dependencies after next year... it's just content, content, content...

quote:
...to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.