Drunk Theory posted:

Also, call your parents.

EmesiS posted:

The last 500 years

AP posted:

There was a big sale on over Christmas, especially on the 26th but it's harder to tell now when stuff goes off sale.

Galarox posted:

Ok everyone here is the book: How it works: Star Citizen. Clicky the link to download, it's a PDF



Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jeakavbiwcd71rb/How%20it%20Works.pdf?dl=1

Plural Abysss posted:

Can't let this page go without

Goobs posted:

That feel when you realize that the cultists are JUST realizing that these guys are just theory crafting.

e: bart tax

Propagandist posted:

Stank and Big One on the tower in my office. They rarely ever snuggle so this was kinda odd

Hobold posted:

Re-reading OP and seeing this makes me miss the ignorant days when there was still few enough examples of CR being CR that we had hope for this project.

Galarox posted:

It was. I changed it from How it works: "Computers" to "Star Citizen"

Galarox posted:

You are suffering from a condition known as "Star Citizen Fatigue" - cure? Post cat gifs.

cool new Polack jokes posted:

In our setting of Banshee, there were ten stimpires which were united under ten galaxies. They were all allied as the United Galactic Stimpires, until one day, when the Sixth Stimpire noticed that the Fourth Stimpire was adopting laws that were against the regulations of the UGS. High-ranking military servants noticed that at the end of their favourite sporting event, the losing side was being rounded up, with all 11 players wailing in despair. They then noticed that the center of the stadium was now revealing a large, cylindrical container with a sharp floor. The floor was in the shape of a grinding grater, except there were several discs each turning very slowly, one being further out than the other from its center point. They were then pushed in by very powerful cybernetic stadium security officers, and the container was sealed up. It was then, to the horror of the colonels, that there was blood being smeared against the glass of the machine. They both left for their transit van, only to be stopped by Fourth Stimpire Enforcers. They demanded that they get past, only to be told that the Fourth Stimpire is a sovereign, socialist empire which listens to its people. They were then being transported to a greyscale soundproof room, with very sharp machinery decorating the room from all over.

They were never heard from or even seen again. The only traces of them were blood trails located in the very room. The Fourth Stimpire had announced to the UGC that it was now allied with Vanduul forces, and any attack will result in immediate deplanetation, much to the dismay of the UGC. The Seventh Stimpire warned them that the other nine would revoke their UGC rights if they carried on, but they did far from what they were demanding. The Fourth Stimpire didn't massacre the First Landmass population, but left them in the worst pain known in the universe for eternity. The drug was capable of keeping the victim the same age as they were, halting growth and aging, whilst keeping them alive forever. All growth cells are killed and the drug repeats any respiratory cycles.

The other nine declared war on the Fourth Stimpire, which ultimately led to the demise of the First, Eighth, Ninth, Fifth and Tenth Stimpires. They were deplanetated, all of their planets were razed and reduced to nothing but an asteroid field, a reminder of the power of the Fourth Stimpire, and a historical monument, and a book, a tale of what was once a mighty, populated planet.

The Seventh Stimpire ordered their planets to be relocated out of the range of the Fourth Stimpire Satelitation Force through the use of planet movement technology. As the Seventh Stimpire was completely artificial, the planets were able to be relocated to a faraway place in the universe. The Second Stimpire however were unable to relocate, as they were natural to the full extent and had a ban on fighting on any kind. Weapons were not permitted in the territory, and anyone caught fighting would be exiled permanently from the planet. They were the Second Law, as the rest of the universe know them by.

The other stimpires were unable to relocate aswell, and ordered their planets to be mined until they were fresh clean, and turn artificial, so they could be moved away from threat. They did not want to meet the same fate as their brethren. As a result, the war that remains going on to this day, is now a fierce, stalemate battle. The United Earth Empire eventually joined to help them against the Fourth Stimpire in 2754, 100 years after the war began, but this would also lead to Vanduul interception, as the Vanduul were warmongering to the point of following the UEE's every move and intercepting it.

Endnote.

MilesK posted:

Yes
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/311595/banshee-origins-the-ten-stimpires

There are others too.

MilesK posted:

Yes
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/311595/banshee-origins-the-ten-stimpires

There are others too.

MilesK posted:

Also I'm pretty sure Stimpire guy was a goon.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/302129/am-i-hallucinating-or-are-these-ships-really-over-10k

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6085443/#Comment_6085443

Foo Diddley posted:

The citizens are way ahead of you:



Guy that drew this insisted that it is not just any old cartoon girl with her vag half out; it is in fact his sister

Tokamak posted:

The Benefits of Castration self.starcitizen
Submitted 3 hours ago by jadesuccubusDoctor

Hello, my fellow citizens! I'd like to go over some medical notes in regard to bounty hunting and helping those that do similar jobs obtain some extra safety and budget flexibility.

In the live game, if you do higher risk work there's going to be a major factors on if you make money: Ship capacity.

What I refer to is if you have a ship with four prisoner pods, you're capped at a maximum of four prisoners via the pods at once. The storage capacity will influence which contracts and missions will generate profit or loss due to this cap: EG five capture contracts in one area may require a return trip and additional fuel/time cost or lower the profit beyond what it could be due to increased expenses. I've previously made a thesis on helping bounty hunters here, however new information has been laid out since then.

In particular, one bit may aid lower budget bounty hunters, mercs and organizations that don't yet have a lot of resources to increase their safety nets and cost-effectiveness: the combination of the limb damage system and the ability to place people in crates.

If you are a poorer player starting with only a humble aurora to your name, you may not be able to have multiple prisoner pods - but you could instead have a single storage crate for that you can stuff a human in after removing their arms and legs. You may even be able to create makeshift crates such as using a mustang's bathroom or simply keeping the body on the floor, if the arms and legs have been removed and they cannot move or attempt malcompliance.

Remember: a requirement to deliver someone alive does not necessarily mean in one piece - if they need to confess, they need to speak. They don't need to walk, see, hold things, or have testicles producing testosterone that increases aggression, upper body strength, and risks of malcompliance - so if you have a simple medkit, these non-essential items can be removed by crippling the arms, legs, and torso into a ruined state then halting the bleeding.

This may allow a humble aurora/mustang pilot, or other organizations that need to reduce costs and increase profit margin so they can upgrade their equipment faster, to have more saving power and more flexibility for taking on jobs as well as bigger cash reserves for safety nets. Suppose you are a small family organization and the only member on is a low-budget kiddo with an aurora that plays with his father. You can have more credits on hand to help him out if he's mauled by pirates if your profit margins are higher. At the risk of making a cliche, think of the children!

If it is not possible for a target with ruined arms to open doors, you may be able to safely store prisoners in a bathroom, closet, box, on the counter in a mustang, under the bed, or in any other random location, which will allow much more flexibility in which ships can take on which jobs and much less restriction on storage space for prisoners. That means higher profit margins!

Hopefully, the reduced weight of the lost limbs will allow some space efficiency like placing multiple prisoners in a box. This brings up another point though - the importance of castration.

It's listed that the torso on the medical diagrams will each have consequences for being ruined - in the case of the torso, it encompasses the groin, heart, lungs, and though they are non-essential many males seem to consider them so, testicles. Presumably there will be related penalties to a ruined torso. In the case of a male NPC, the removal of the testicles can mirror soviet medical experiment results IRL - that the lack of testosterone production will reduce rebelliousness and malcompliance risks. This has several effects on a real human:

A) The subject will not have as much upper body strength and will not be as likely to instigate a prison riot or be as difficult to restrain.

B) The subject will suffer negative psychological effects due to the loss of testosterone production and may be more compliant with interrogation, forced labor, protracted detainment, etc.

C) The subject will in addition to being unable to assault the bounty hunter or otherwise disrupt the operation due to limb removal, potentially slip into depression and can be controlled via medications that will make them more dependent on the prison, or if they need testosterone for forced labor, it can be provided by supplement rather than produced naturally, for the same reason of increasing compliance due to dependency on provision of the supplement. To be fair, I got that idea from half life 2's stalkers that have their organs removed to hook them on a nutrition provided by the combine and cause them to starve in the event of malcompliance and hands removed for tool grafts - which I think is an excellent idea if prisoner management becomes a thing in-universe.

The effects of the above could be placed in for NPC's to increase the ease of an interrogation, reduce costs, increase compliance or confession chances, or any other possible benefit of the above, should castration be included in torso ruining in addition to the heart, lungs, and others. Most males I know seem to consider the testicles a critical item so I think it's fair the removal of them have consequences, at least in the case of male human NPC's. Possibly also an option for capturing and interrogating Vanduul if their physiology has similar consequences for their removal, so this may be very helpful for management of Vanduul prisoners as well.

Anyway, TL;DR: due to the ability to "hide" a person in a crate, it may be possible to forcefully place a prisoner in a crate or mundane location such as a bathroom via crippling the arms, legs, and torso/groin. This could allow lower budget organizations, casual players, poorer players, smaller orgs, etc. to have more flexibility in which members and which ships can take which roles, and help overcome lower profit margin penalties that would otherwise occur. This could be especially helpful for small family orgs that have say a parent and a child that are playing together and may not have a lot of free time and need some higher profit margins. It could be helpful to them if a humble aurora can be used to cart around prisoners instead of needing to obtain a ship with a full prison pod loadout first. Similarly, this could increase flexibility of other ships such as a freelancer or cutlass red to take on a non-traditional role and store captives in this manner.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this was helpful to you; especially for those just starting out, and those that must start from little at live! May fortune favor you.

<3Mwah

~Doctor Jade

a cyberpunk goose posted:

Unpacking why SC is doomed from a technical perspective is conveniently (for chris roberts) very tough because it's extremely hard to get people's attentions long enough to elaborate on why making games is hard and you can't just ideas-guy development teams into doing the impossible. let's try to break Star Citizen down by starting from the abstract:

game engines are, at their core, real time operating systems (RTOS)

you have disparate systems that need to be scheduled, informed of things like user input or network activity, share state + somehow send messages to each other (or, more dangerously, directly reference each other), be maintained to respect logical contracts etc. there's not a lot of shortcuts you can take between these systems without introducing serious consequences to your runtime stability or overall code maintainability, you need to design it Right™ and early and not let it slip when other people start helping you maintain/grow the engine.

the above outlines the overall concepts an "engine developer" has to maintain and grapple with. this is explicitly distinct from a "game developer" which I'll outline next.

engine development is all very complicated and often way more brittle than you expect. How many "complete" racing games have you seen on the Source engine compared to FPS games? The answer is obvious and influenced strongly by the products the original engine developers were aiming for. Some engines, like Unity, have done a great job at not being married to any one framework of gameplay but that ultimately results in a larger conceptual gap that a "game developer" might need to fill if they aren't an experienced "engine" developer or aren't good at building their own operating frameworks for the kind of game they want to make. In something like Unity there's no built in concept of guns or inventory or reticles or chat systems or existing game-like behavior. unity bridges this gap a bit with an asset store but then you are banging differently shaped puzzle pieces made by strangers together that might not fit nicely

The following are questions you need to answer and grasp the implications of when making any game and picking an engine that will suit your development style: first person? racing? strategy? turn based? multiplayer? single player? local multiplayer? physics a part of the gameplay or just aesthetic? persistent centralized accounts (ie: an MMO or something like it)? ad hoc p2p player servers? the list goes on, but you need answers to every question you can think of that is a core component of your game.

The answers to these questions will influence what kinds of problems you're signing yourself up to solve. If I know I'm making a 20 player arena based FPS shooter, I might as well go with UDK because out of the box it has templates and a lot of community discussion surrounding making FPS games and it has a history of being for that, the engine will present low friction for this problem set. If I try to make an FPS game in game maker or from scratch in C++, I'm going to be miserable and have to basically reinvent every single wheel.

Every system your game needs, that your engine may or may not make easy on you, needs to interact well with its dependent systems & providers at run-time and also be maintainable and ideally compartmentalized, you don't want to realize half way through development that upgrading your engine to the latest upstream (which comes with features you've been begging for) will break literally everything because you were coding around undocumented potentially-is-actually-a-bug behavior in the engine because you didn't really grok the intent outlined in the documentation and naively code-bashed your way into a solution. developers in all software need to develop a 6th sense for what "smells bad" when trying to make a framework do something it wasn't meant for, leading you to overarchitect some things in some cases, but also make extreme but convenient and well-weighed short-cuts in others. this specific skill along with the ability to set expectations reasonably ( ) is at the crux of being a good software developer.

Realistically it is impossible to design perfect game systems in a vacuum that you can plug and play together with any sort of configuration, there's always a compromise or some sort of edge case you're introducing with other systems and you end up having to write a bunch of special edge case marshalling to do things like: translate between one spacial system to another, or have one set of physics objects follow one set of rules while another set of physics objects follows another. and the way you implement these systems will concrete you into behavior that will exclude other potentialities for designs in the game.

Now let's talk about Crytek and Cryengine. Cryengine specifically set out to solve one very specific set of problems in game development: rendering huge amounts of space & geography efficiently and having such large space also work sanely in multiplayer. This made it naturally suited for cool homebrew games like Mechwarrior: Living Legends. The engine already had existing frameworks for things such as controlling vehicles, rendering day/night cycles, complex shader techniques for mapping textures onto bump maps in a way that doesn't stretch, conveniences in the editor for editing large amounts of geometry and placing & rendering roads (entire white papers exist for rendering/editing roads sanely in bump-map engines lol).

That said, it's clear why at first glance Cryengine seemed like a good fit for SC, you have huge swathes of space as a game problem you need to solve, lo and behold Cryengine offers a partial solution at first glance. Cryengine also featured some zero-g segments at times, which I'm sure made Chris Robert's eyes pop out of his loving sockets on one of his major coke fueled gaming benders in a sad poorly furnished mcmansion somewhere.

It's not insanely difficult, if you have any game programming experience, to hop into an engine like Cryengine and start prototyping some things. Let's create a blank level, let's make the skybox be a nice starry sky texture, let's set gravity to 0, let's subclass the vehicle class and drop in one of our models. The engine is very low friction for this hello world smoke test. So you start flying around in your lovely 3d mesh and are feeling like a programming/game development god, zooming around thinking "Wow this is gonna be EASY", then you fly to far down on the Y axis and start drowning. "what the gently caress" you whisper as you squint. It's too late though, your boss, Chris Roberts, saw this early smoke test of assets and quickly started drafting up earnest estimates on how long OTHER systems will take, as if the demo you threw together is actually complete (when it's not). If you dont know how to hire devs you might put a senior dev in place who also doesn't grok how much actual work is left to be done and enforces your boss' stupid promises based on what isn't real game development. Guns are now pointed at you to fix the "small" issue or you'll be holding up the schedule (that no one consulted you about). so you work a weekend and dive into wtf happens when Y axis < CRY_WATER_LINE_HEIGHT. You find an instance in the base player controller logic and fix it, thinking you're done, but -- gently caress it turns out the physics subsystem also uses that same CRY_WATER_LINE_HEIGHT constant to do some optimizations, so you start grepping the code for that code instance and try flipping it off, except you don't realize there are some extra subsystems hidden somewhere that don't reference that constant like they should also do their own weird rendering tricks or optimizations when Y approaches that magic value.

there's a phrase in software development and especially games: 90% of the time is spent on the last 10% of polish. the last mile problem is super loving real in gamedev, seemingly tiny things in the grand scope of what you're delivering can make or break your game experience for players, and it's always those "tiny" things that are the results of weird edge cases from literally hundreds of subsystems interacting with eachother through the engine.

now, take the water example and apply it to basically everything. most likely every single system in cryengine has some kind of limit to what it was built to do originally and there are always unexpected results when you push engines into territory they werent developed for or tested for. now if you consider how Chris is pushing people to ship lovely demos and move on instead of developing a strong foundation for the rest of the game: you start to imagine how one could half rear end a system for an effect in demo and how "ok but it wont work outside of this or with any of the other things we talked about" might fall on deaf ears to a demonstrable cant-actually-delegate-or-listen-to-reason dingus like CRoberts.

now i want to introduce the final nail in the coffin. I could write like an essay on the basic MMO problem space but I wont, i'll keep it simple: MMOs are one of the hardest possible problems to tackle in a game development context from a resource management perspective. the amount of resource expertise (developers, architects, planning) and continued cost of servers and CPU/network time are as big as it gets in game development, and not only that but your game needs to be architected incredibly precisely to fit into the featureset your MMO imagination describes. you really can spare no unnecessary complexity when attempting an MMO, your scope needs to be VERY specific for your first release ( )

Even on a basic employee headcount level, Star Citizen doesn't employ nearly the number of experienced developers required for a project of this size, not only that but we all have plenty of evidence as to CRobert's awful management styles given how many rewrites and "refactors" occur for even the existing unfinished systems. there are clear, glaring signs of bad software development planning and inexperienced game developers rushing a product (while senior ones seem to keep leaving , weird!! ).

absolutely none of this is conducive to shipping the PU as shitizens imagine. they will never see their game. making games is really complicated, making multiplayer games is even MORE complicated, making MASSIVELY multiplayer games is THE most resource intensive & complicated from a project management perspective.

Sarsapariller posted:

Here, journalists, I have researched a list of convenient questions for you to ask Chris Roberts in your next totally-not-a-paid-placement interview! No need to thank me- just be sure to read them verbatim.


At Gamescom in April of 2016 you demo'd the "Alpha" of Star Citizen's 3.0 patch, which was slated to introduce NPC's and a larger game world. At the time you indicated that this was set to release before the end of the year.
At the moment, it is 2 months into 2017, and several statements by employees have given the impression that you have not even begun working on 3.0. Is that the case, and if so, what was it that you showed off last year at Gamescom? What prompted you to give late-2016 as a release date?

In an interview with Forbes in 2013, you said: "[Then] an alpha of the single-player game, and then finally a beta of the persistent universe by the end of the year (2014)." Now obviously that was wildly off the mark.
What was behind your estimates at that time, and what has changed to push the release date back by 3+ years with no end in sight? Are you addicted to that little tingle that comes from making declarative statements?

On your forums in 2014, Ben Lesnick, then director of community engagement and content strategy, said: " [... We] plan to launch the Persistent Universe sometime in 2015 and expect to have all the features we’ve talked about to date implemented and functioning (with the help of the community which will be testing them) over the course of the ensuing year." In an interview with Geekdomo in April 2014, Erin Roberts said: "For the first chapter [of Squadron 42], we're aiming for it to be towards the beginning of next year (2015)."What was behind their estimates at that time? It appears that in each of these quotes, the strategy when discussing release dates was just to say something approximately 12 months ahead of the current moment. Would you say your company has some kind of issue with estimating more than 5-6 months out? Would you say that the "Con" in CitizenCon does not, in fact, stand for "Convention?"

In this video, you begin waving your hands while describing procedural generation for star citizen in 2014. In this video, you begin waving your hands while describing procedural generation for star citizen in 2016. These appear to be the same mechanics you've been waving your hands and describing for 2 years. What have you actually accomplished, you intolerable waste of skin?

In september of last year, you angrily denied rumors that the SQ42 was delayed. Less than a month later, you did a complete 180 on that statement and announced that the game was delayed, and promised an update in the near future. It's been 4 months since then and it is increasingly apparent that you weren't anywhere close to finishing the smallest part of this project. When you lie so blatantly, do your testicles kind of shrink up into your body or have you lost the ability to feel shame?

Virtually everything in this timeline is wrong. Are you a loofah-faced poo poo gibbon?

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

Star Citizen is like a Mandelbrot set of stupid, whatever aspect of it you zoom in to examine is exactly as stupid as the whole thing.

D_Smart posted:

Oh, you have to read this post from Ars Technica about an interview they just did with Chris, Erin, Tony

quote:

3) The recent changes to Arena Commander have made it more arcade-y. WTF?
Working as intended—that's the idea. The intent is to have AC (and Star Marine, potentially) be more arcade-like than actual in-game fighter combat.

Chalks posted:

quote:

Star Citizen is a space trading and combat simulation video game developed by Cloud Imperium Games and published by Amazon Game Studios. It is a spiritual sequel to Wing Commander, a combat flight simulator released in 1990. The game was initially announced by Chris Roberts in 2013, and following many production schedule mishaps and a buyout of CIG by Amazon, it was eventually released in March 2023.

In the game, players take on the roles of spacecraft pilots. These characters fly single-seater ships, exploring the planets and space stations of 7 known star systems. They also engage in dogfights with other pilots (player- and computer-controlled) to protect traders or engage in piracy themselves. Other player activities include bounty-hunting and commodity trading. The single-player mode puts the player in the role of Johnny Bland, who goes through a series of missions to save the Sirius sector from a mysterious alien force. In multiplayer mode, players are free to take on any role and to explore anywhere from the start.

Originally, Roberts promised features such as automated flight maneuvers, dynamic economies, and a multiplayer mode that could host thousands of players, but diminished versions of these features were implemented in the final release. The game's initial technical demos impressed reviewers, but after the Amazon buyout and Roberts' departure from CIG, critics had doubts about the game. Reviewers judged the final product technically good but failing to fulfill their initial expectations.

I said come in! posted:

*2012

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/posts/331705

ewe2 posted:

Faced with a choice between OMG PUBLISHER and Derek Smart Was Right, I'm going for OMG PUBLISHER, there's nothing they won't swallow to avoid being out-Smarted.

Coincidental: my song called Right has had almost 1300 downloads, must be a popular sentiment. But listen to the improved version instead.

thatguy posted:

thatguy posted:

SelenicMartian posted:

What makes you think there's only one can in that logo?

Rudager posted:

You put too much faith in the counter, It's 100% internally controlled by CiG. I get why journalists don't cover SC news, but I get annoyed when they post "CiG just posted $140m in pledges!" articles where it's obvious they never asked to see a statement from a 3rd party auditor backing that up.