DOMDOM posted:

that's no typo


http://www.mnrdaily.com/article/star.citizen.updates.opening.its.doors.to.potential.investors/5230.htm

Eonwe posted:

When people got Kimsemsus'd though it was pretty funny

Maldoror posted:

.

Lastgirl posted:

im glad of Elite Dangerous imo

SC backers lmbo

Vire posted:

40 loving thousand dollars on jpgs. That's a yearly salary for a lot of people holy poo poo. I wonder what percentage of that 90 million is from whales. It's hard for me to believe all these people are in jobs that pay 6 figures if they are this stupid with their money.

edit: I mean in just that screen shot people admitted to paying 80k gently caress me. The sad thing is those guys have probably put in more money since march. Like I can't even imagine how unscrupulous you would have to be knowing your fans are dropping this kinda cash for your project and not saying anything to them knowing they are probably destroying their financial lives on something like this and having to live up to those expectations.

trucutru posted:

A regular person will just get a refund.

Vire posted:

You know it's serious because it's in all caps. Is this the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and hoping all the bad things go away because you can't see them anymore?

quote:

What could possibly be worth $93 million? Well, think of it this way: Cloud Imperium now have a scan of Gary Oldman doing duckface. Somewhere on record there’s a Gary Oldman grimacing; a Gary Oldman pouting; a Gary Oldman pulling his jaw back into his face so that the tendons in his neck stick out. Thanks to Ryse veterans 3lateral, the Star Citizen studio now have a tool that allows them to do with Gary Oldman’s face what we did with Mario’s back on the N64, pulling it this way and that like Oscar-nominated putty.

For more star names, check out the best PC space games.

The point of all this Gary abuse is that performance capture doesn’t have to mean only watching movie-like monologues, like the one Oldman’s Admiral Bishop delivers to the United Empire of Earth senate. Cloud Imperium intend to turn their actors into reactive NPCs. Personalities who sit down in the canteen of the UEES Stanton for lunch at 12 o’clock, and who run to man the guns in an emergency. Characters who roll up their sleeves to help with repairs in the aftermath.

In Squadron 42, they plan to turn out a single-player game that tells a story worthy of Wing Commander, and preserves the player freedom of Star Citizen’s space sandbox.


“You see that speech on a big monitor in the game, but literally 95% of the performance capture is all for the player to interact with and depending on what the player does and so forth,” says Erin Roberts, the campaign’s director. “We want players to take little actions which will cause stuff to happen.”

Chris Roberts played down the scale of Squadron 42 in Star Citizen’s initial Kickstarter campaign, pitching a branching series of missions in the Wing Commander vein. But younger brother Erin and his team have set aside huge tracts of space for those missions to take place in.

“You get to go, ‘I’m going to clear off over here and just check this out on my own because I want to’,” he explains. “It’s not like the old Wing Commander where when you take off you go to this point, this point and this point. You take off and you’re in space - you’ll have lots of different locations you can go to.”

Foundry 42 - the Wilmslow and now Frankfurt studio formed to put the campaign together - are constructing their areas from sets: 10 or 12 styles of high and low tech environments which allow for the swift assembly of ships and stations you’ll be able to tell apart (“So people don’t feel like they’re going to the same old places, which happened a lot in the old days”).

Squadron 42

But how do you lend a story in a universe like that structure? As it turns out, Foundry 42 are leaning heavily on that ‘squadron’ conceit. You’re in the navy, and the navy don’t fly off willy-nilly when the feeling takes them.

Turn your back and walk out on the commander during an important ship briefing and you can expect to be arrested and thrown in the brig. Fly way off-course on an important operation and your leaders will “get pissed off with you”.

“There are decisions that you can make but there are consequences to those decisions,” expands Roberts. “[Although] there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for the player to just explore stuff so you get a lot more freedom than you generally get in a story driven game.”

The studio are keen to leave players plenty of room to manoeuvre when it comes to missions - mixtures of extraplanetary and on-the-ground encounters that might go very differently depending on what vehicle you choose to show up in, who you show up with, or whether you choose to go quiet or loud.

When expounding the possibilities in Squadron 42, Erin Roberts is liable to get carried away. In one moment, we’re talking about the long memories of the crew aboard the Stanton, your de facto family for the duration of the campaign. In the next, our conversation is entering the atmosphere of alien planets where, he says, the behaviour of the locals will alter depending on whether or not they’re getting enough minerals, or the population’s in decline, or the economy is failing. The universe he describes is an invisible network of interlocking systems, and you can see the DNA of Richard Garriott’s Origin Systems seeping through, where both Roberts brothers got their start at the turn of the ’90s.

It’s a simulation-first philosophy of game development that’s left a trail of beloved, broken PC games in its wake; playable testaments to ambition unmatched by publisher patience. But perhaps things are different this time. For once, the Roberts’ paymasters are wholly invested in their vision.

“I’ve been doing this over two years and I still can't get over the fact that I don't work for a publisher anymore,” says Roberts. “I work for a community and my job is to keep on showing them all this cool stuff. That’s miles more pressure than working for a publisher, because these guys put their faith in us and you want to repay that.”

What’s more, Erin has the technical weight of Star Citizen behind him. Foundry 42 are drawing assets from the huge MMO-in-testing, as you might imagine, but they’re also looking for opportunities to gather feedback. There are plans to feed sample combat encounters into the Star Citizen alpha as it evolves, collating opinion on what might work well in single-player.

“It’s almost like our beta,” Roberts explains. “With the Large World stuff we basically have the ability for people to go in there, play stuff and tell us what they like what they don’t like.”

Squadron 42 isn’t best thought of as one component of a larger game. In fact it’s not even one game: Roberts reckons there’ll be at least three triple-A titles released over the course of the next few years.

“It got to the stage where we wanted to do it in one game and we just looked at it and it was just getting insane,” he says. “It was hundreds and hundreds of hours.”

The Roberts brothers have the plotline for each episode already fleshed out, along a backbone of interstellar politics reminiscent of 2003’s Freelancer. The script for the first installment alone, next year’s story of a rookie earning his wings, is 700 pages long. Large enough that Roberts expects players will need to fly through the campaign two or three times to receive everything loud and clear.

Squadron 42

“I guess we kind of expect people to just play it and then play it again to see what they missed out,” he muses. “You plan the original campaign for $6 million and you’re not going to make the $6 million game when you've got $92 million.”

After Privateer and Starlancer, Erin spent the best part of a decade directing and producing Lego games - before Chris called him back to the world of very-high-end PCs. For him Squadron 42 isn’t so much a blue sky project as a punt into the outer atmosphere.

“I love the space genre, I love doing this kind of stuff,” he says. “I’ve got one big big thing left in me. I’m getting on a little bit and this really is for me almost like the pinnacle of a challenge. Yeah, there’s a lot of stress. There’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of people who feel like it’s impossible to do.

“So we're just going to work away on it and keep getting stuff out and showing people. It’s a really exciting time. Right now there are little smiles in the faces of the people in the offices because we know we're doing well.”

quote:

“It’s almost like our beta,” Roberts explains. “With the Large World stuff we basically have the ability for people to go in there, play stuff and tell us what they like what they don’t like.”

Eonwe posted:

hey reddit on something awful having an av bought for you is definitely a mark of shame and not something a lot of people are proud of considering they got some idiot on the internet angry enough to spend money on them

please dont buy us avatars

Karl_Ramseier posted:

Serious answer:
It's not a question of believe, It is just a game after all. I don't plan to buy any more ships anyway, the package I got is more than enough. I won't sell it either ( can you sell gifted ships? Or get a refund?) in the end I had more fun not playing SC than the 70?$ the package is worth.

Besides for me believing any of those allegations it would need actual facts and evidence.
Until now nothing special happened besides that CIG has the worst community management and PR I ever saw.

Take the turnover rate: In my daily work life I deal with companies having employee turnover rates ranging from 3% to 30%. And it highly depends on the business field if such a rate should ring any alarmbells or not.

An example would be any sort of media related company, a turnover of 30% a year would be considered as normal, whereas a traditional managed family business dealing with machine parts shouldn't have more than 5%.

Since I went to bed this thread grew 20 pages. I'm not gonna read all of it, that's for sure...

Omi-Polari posted:

Saw a comment on Reddit thread about an upcoming Star Citizen meetup:



Which made me curious:

Bootcha posted:

Can someone find me a picture of that Slavik RSI brown sea mod's avatar's source?

NVM found it

Al Borland posted:

So whats going on Is reddit trying to troll SA citizen people or something? Lotta reddit talk in here.

Wheeee posted:

Oh poo poo I heard you can get refunds, is that true? I backed some minimum amount back when the whole thing was first announced as basically being Privateer 3 since I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

Bootcha posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeVuMMf-jyQ

Hey reddit, archive this.

Deki posted:

When a low-ranking co-worker of mine (programmer) ended up leaving for health reasons, it took 6 months to get his replacement up to speed, and the codebase we work on daily is actually really simple compared to a prototype spaceship MMO.

Getting a lead up to speed mid-project is going to take a lot longer, and that's going to affect everybody the original lead worked with heavily.

Kegslayer posted:

This is a serious response.

MeLKoR posted:

That's not even the worst, these people are at the stage of retrieving false memories. When the hell did CIG ever mention 2017 during the kickstarter?

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

According to the supposed letter by David Jennison, formerly the lead character artist for CIG:


So the sad thing is that, out of all of the concepts, the Heavy Pirate is supposedly one of the most cohesive ones. Of course we don't actually know if what we're seeing now is what they finished because...


Fun fact; this is what they had for the FPS a year ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cir3w-wIx9U

What the gently caress happened?

Sillybones posted:

On this, what are examples of engines that do 64-bit for everything and are performant? I can't imagine aiming for current gen fidelity while pushing all that extra data around.

Sillybones posted:

(I programmed an engine, I am asking because I am lazy. Sorry)

Just from my understanding it seems insane and pointless. But I wouldn't be surprised if it actually were already implemented in some engine for some reason.

Wafflz posted:

spite jpegs are the make up sex of the verse

jaegerx posted:

Reddit really needs to stop reporting LoD. You're loving with his livelihood at that point and the Derek will find you.

trucutru posted:

Today, on "things the SC fanatics are creaming themselves about" a store-front has new duds (that you can't buy or wear, of course).

Holy poo poo! Brown is in.

KakerMix posted:

only that place can manufacture such fabulous and bodacious posting pals


So hey this dvolk guy or howveer you say his name, all his reddit poo poo is gone all of a sudden? Does that mean some lawyers got to him? That's how this works right? What about ol' Wuldgems?

Kimsemus posted:

Eonwe's story is correct.

Also depending on when you quit EVE, probably not. EVE goons did a very good job of rightly kicking him and then hell purging all of his poo poo from their forums and auth. Which is one reason many of us really had no idea what had happened. There is actually concrete evidence of what happened, though, still out there.

To add to what Eonwe posted:

Lincoln, btw, is thatguy on SA, or THEUNITEDSTATESOFAMERICA as Goonrathi knew him.

This is no joke, but Anders was 100% serious about bringing Goonrathi into ArcheAge, and one reason he purged thatguy was because (seriously) they wanted to really make a splash in ArcheAge and felt it better to "distance" themselves from the goons currently playing because you know, they had serious plans about being a serious power in super serious AA because Goonrathi was somehow a brand literally anyone gave a poo poo about. Anders went so far as to come on our mumble to ask me about thatguy, expecting me to poo poo on him to get the evidence he needed to purge him.

But because thatguy is actually a funny guy who didn't goonfuck, I took up for him, which infuriated Anders further, and kicked him anyway. This is despite the fact that thatguy produced the vast majority of their art and propaganda for quite some time. Anders kicked me because of DBRB, and then initially blamed it on the fact that I was an opsec liability and might turn against their leadership as Eonwe, Stormgale, myself and others did in AA because we weren't going to stand for lovely behavior or playing with people who liked to gently caress kids. I was kicked because DBRB is a fuckboi of Anders (or vice versa), and he was butthurt about us ruining his fishing pacts, and no one outside of the clique he brought to AA giving a gently caress about how much of a spaceship tough guy he was.

Let's be clear: Anders was 100% serious about protecting secret information Goonrathi had, for Star Citizen. A game that doesn't exist, and will never exist. This is real life and happened.

Goons!

Eonwe posted:

2 weeks

Random Integer posted:

Is every episode near 2 hours long? Because thats almost 200 hours of their lives spent talking about a computer game which doesn't even exist. I can't imagine anyone would be able to look back on their life and think 'yes, that was time well spent'.

Ravane posted:

I just realized.... Yughioh cards are also jpgs!!! Why didn't anyone tell me? Now I know the appeal of Star Citizen!

Ravane posted:

I printed out a blue eyes white constellation and an Aurora the Destroyer Tormenter. So I guess your point is invalid.

EminusSleepus posted: