Daztek posted:

Document: https://docdro.id/Fk8H2rF
Exhibit A: https://docdro.id/i85TkMM
Proposed Order: https://docdro.id/j17EnTH

quote:

CIG’s motion for bond is built on a series of fictions. While CIG may hope that Crytek is “teetering on the brink of insolvency,” the reports of Crytek’s demise are greatly exaggerated

Nyast posted:

Lol at Crytek asking CIG to return credits to Cryengine on their splash screen.

Imagine the rage from the whiteknights if they succeed

Pixelate posted:

The titanic quibbling over commas...



(Seriously, Derek, we know you're still reading. It's a punctuation argument man. Get in there!)

Koil posted:

Quavers posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

A lot of discussion about the new hover mode

There's some concern about it not being "Realistic"

Less concern about it being the 4th hack in a series of increasingly lovely junior dev fixes designed to hammer out problems in the flight model one at a time, rather than addressing the fundamental problem that nobody never actually figured out how the spaceships would fly around in a consistent manner.

Let's examine CIG's classic take on the space sim genre:
* You fly just like Wing Commander - exactly like Wing Commander, in fact, with the weird speed limit and also way more ability to rotate in place than to actually alter your speed. You're basically a space turret.
* No wait, that feels terrible. All of your thrusters are super powerful so now you can change your vector just as fast as you can turn, and your main engines are just for show.
* No wait, that feels and looks terrible. Your thrusters are still super powerful but now we've capped your speed at like, 150 m/s when you're in combat. You can get up to 1000m/s but only in a straight line and it drops if you try to turn.
* Still hate it huh. Okay, all of those past things still apply, but you can dial up or down the maximum speed limit of your thrusters to any range from zero to 1000m/s but if you go over 150 or so, they'll start using afterburner fuel or something. Also, your thrusters overheat and cut out but there's no feedback for this. Boom, flight model solved!

And then we get into flight over land:
* You fly like a camera with noclip enabled. Any direction you want with perfect twitchiness, even in a 400 ton starship.
* No wait that looks just awful. You uh, you still do that, but now if you go really fast, I guess your ship shakes a bit and doesn't turn well? Witness our revolutionary atmospheric flight model.
* Okay you didn't like that. Uh, how about... you still shake when you go really fast, but when you're slow you have to balance on a single column of downthrust even though the thrusters are clearly spread all over the ship, and it doesn't actually produce any thrust effects, so it still looks like you're noclip hovering but it's slightly harder to move with pinpoint accuracy. This will absolutely not change depending on damage to your ship. That feels good right? Atmospheric flight model complete!

Potato Salad posted:

lmao cig remade an old hovertank game

posted:

Star Citizen only has a single star system?!?! Wtf.

posted:

It's called Star Citizen, not Stars Citizen

tuo posted:

I don't need multiple star systems in my space game. All I need is a Skyrim-sized crater and I'm fine.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

This poo poo is beyond parody

Dementropy posted:

https://twitter.com/CaptainZyloh/status/1129117578843033607

Strangler 42 posted:

Chris saw the star wars cantina and got it into his head that that is where all important space business is conducted.

TheAgent posted:

I mean the only reason they are doing this is because sq42 has a ton of bar scenes, just like every roberts game

reminder that anything you see coming to the PU is because its desperately needed for a scene in sq42


the wonderful thing about single player games is that you can 100% script every combat encounter

which is exactly what they are doing

Sarsapariller posted:

How to do a MMORPG bar right:
https://www.wowhead.com/news=284680/battle-for-azeroth-dive-bars-and-fun-drinks

Come up with a bunch of funny drink names, put them in your vendors which use the same loving animations and mechanics as everyone else holy poo poo, and then string them together with an achievement. Total writer time: 2 hours. Total dev time: 0 hours, because you're using the same loving animations and mechanics jesus gently caress.

You do not need custom NPC's to serve you cocktails! Nobody will use this! Immersion will not be damaged if you buy your poo poo off a loving menu-screen, just like every weapon, armor, and ship component vendor already in the game god dammit.

It's just so unbelievably stupid

colonelwest posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/c0ei49/keanu_reeves_in_squadron_42/



They just can't stand that the world has passed by their little cult surrounding a failed crowdfunded space game from 2012.

Quavers posted:

Poor 3.6 has been shredded

posted:

Chris Roberts is not the main man behind any of the tech, the design or any other process but is basically reviewing on a daily basis every aspect and nothing gets approved without his signature. Literally nothing.

posted:

Strange how your posting is targeted though. Be a shame if I sent my local FBI office cyber crime division my findings.
wait.... I did with a very detailed set of documents.... and other pertinent information... what a shame.

posted:

You should absolutely tell the FBI that people are making fun of you on reddit. No joke, I think that's a very good idea.

Beet Wagon posted:

STEP AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD. MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE ONLINE IS A SERIOUS CRIME


I mean this is the first time someone reported us to the FBI CYBER CRIMES DIVISION so I’d say yeah Reddit quotes are probably all downhill from here lol.

Also that dude is legit mentally ill so maybe don’t gently caress with him too hard please

Virtual Captain posted:

I went to their youtube channel to see if Disco was still pumping out videos:



lol ok Icarus

Beet Wagon posted:

posted:

Alpha Patch 3.6.0 has been released to Evocati

Elevators can now move to any pad/hangar and are no longer specific to one hangar/pad. A selection of available destinations will be available via interaction at the interior elevator button panel. (HYPE!!!!!)

But I thought the whole point was that they *weren't* gonna fake the elevators lol

Neltharak posted:

Right in the fidelity, i feel the worst kind of betrayal

posted:

What happens if two people press the same hangar button in two different elevators?

big nipples big life posted:

250 million dollars
8 years of dev
no gameplay loop
theory crafting elevators in 2019

Popete posted:

Wait so they are going to have 1 elevator that is physically modeled as moving thru the station and so if someone else is using the elevator you have to wait until it's available to use?

They turned elevators into a train.

This is the Spinal Tap of game development "it goes to 11" moment.

Sarsapariller posted:

It's total bullshit- nothing in the game moves this smoothly, if elevators worked like this you would clip through the floor every time you traveled in them. Also, if elevators worked like this there would be no need for all of them to be totally sealed units.

Elevators are teleport boxes, end of story. This is either Citizen fantasizing or outright lying by the devs.

The Titanic posted:

I...




I'm not sure what joke to make here. I feel embarrassed for the developers at CIG who are making this stuff that's literally starting to look like some of the stuff people build when they are starting to learn how keyframes work.

This is bad guys. I'm super sorry, but this is pretty silly and bad and you should feel silly for trying to ever imagine an elevator like this, even in a future of infinite possibilities.

The Titanic posted:

I think the most original thing CIG has managed to pull off is how poorly they understand almost everything. :

It's like almost everything unique about Star Citizen is all the things that make you go

Then Star Citizen starts to try to fly the simulation flag. None of their things make sense, and none of the world building is even logical or plausible.

Tinfoil Papercut posted:

*Kramer busts into the apartment, half sliding through the door*
(Laugh Track: "Wooooooo!")

Kramer: *claps hands* I DID it Jerry! I FINALLY get a piece of property here on the station that I can call my own!

Jerry: Oh and here I thought that was my apartment!

(Laugh track)

Kramer: No! I bought one of the elevators to a hanger. *hands Jerry schematic*

Elaine: Why are they selling elevators?

Kramer: I guess the chairman's running low on money! *clicks tongue*

(Laugh track)

Jerry: Wait, wait wait, what are all these modifications?

Kramer: Oh yeah yeah, Newman and I came up with those, it's going to be a luxury elevator Jerry! Get this, you only have to go in and out of one door! The elevator spins around to let you out! *big smile*

Elaine: It SPINS?! Why would you have it spin?

Kramer: Well for the convenience! Who want's to walk through two doors, it's confusing!

(Laugh track)

(Scene cuts to George exiting his spaceship and getting into an elevator. The doors to the elevator close and the camera stays in the hanger, all we hear is George screaming faintly)

(Scene cuts back to Jerry's Apartment)

Newman: The G forces are fine, I did the math myself.

Jerry: Math? You can't do math - remember that 1000 calorie diet you were on?!

Newman: That was the nutritional fact labels fault, NOT MINE!

(Laugh track)

(Jerry's phone rings)

Jerry: Hello?

(Scene cuts to George, cowering in an elevator corner, the lights are flashing and the elevator is shaking violently as he screams into the phone)

George: JERRY YOU GOTTA HELP ME, THE HANGER ELEVATOR HAS GONE CRAZY I CANT EVEN STAND UP!!

Jerry: Uncle Leo?!

Scruffpuff posted:

"LTI was created without any in-game explanation or definition of any kind, knowing that their insane backers would automatically, and without CIG saying a single word, assume they were an analogue to insurance in EVE, thus allowing CIG to profit off of GoonFear™ without invoking it by name, or even designing a game."

In a very real sense, CIG's insurance isn't an in-game product with a mechanic linked to it. It's a real-life product, where people dropping tens of thousands of dollars on Chris Roberts's Make-a-Wish Foundation of pretending to be a game developer for what turned out to be almost a decade, can feel secure that they won't lose that money by being blown up. Did CIG tell them this is how it would work? No.

They're capitalizing on fear and allowing the backers to theorycraft LTI into being literally anything they want it to be. It's one of the reasons I categorize SC as a scam no matter how much they play the "but we tried to make a game, we're just inept" card. They created a concept but not a product, gave it a name, and sold it for real money, without defining what it is or what it does. But you better loving pay us a premium or you won't get it. You'd hate for something to happen to that pretty ship you just paid thousands for, would you? Maybe LTI will help, maybe it won't, you sure you wanna take that chance?

quote:

TECHRAPTOR: Amazon Game Studios struggling due to Lumberyard Engine "wasn’t built for the kind of multiplayer games Amazon wanted to make"

Quavers posted:

"What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine"

"Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the power of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an old fashioned single server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is)"

"Crytek... have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are"



"The software, a so-called engine known as Lumberyard, wasn’t built for the kind of multiplayer games Amazon wanted to make"

PederP posted:

I had a back-and-forth with one of their recruiters a while ago, and he emphasized GameLift as an interesting opportunity when I expressed my strong distate towards touching anything derived from CryEngine. Some of it was probably the usual hype to win over a skeptical potential hire, but I was given the impression that Lumberyard was in many ways a proof-of-concept for GameLift and related services/systems.

It don't get the impression Lumberyard was ever intended to compete in the same league as Unity and Epic/Unreal - rather they paid a chunk of money to CryTek so they could have full control over integrating a mainstream "generic" game engine with their technology. This makes good sense considering Amazon's cloud focus. They want to become the preferred hosting partner for online and multiplayer games. Unity and Epic/Unreal want a piece of this market, so they're not going to be particularly helpful. If Amazon could get GameLift off the ground with Lumberyard, it would be much easier to attract developers using in-house engines or Epic/Unreal.

Unfortunately, CryEngine is terrible mess. Now this is the case for other engines, so that's not damning in itself. But CryEngine is ill-suited to multiplayer/online on an architectural level. And now that GameLift has Unity and Unreal support, it's far less relevant as a proof-of-concept.

So Amazon will still be investing in game technology. They may even try to salvage Lumberyard. But I'm pretty sure they have their focus on cloud/platform/integration services, and Lumberyard is really just one of many projects meant to strengthen that position.

How does this impact CIG/Star Citizen/Squadron 42? Not much. Even if Amazon abandoned Lumberyard completely, it wouldn't really matter much - CIG would highlight how "Star Engine" is not truly it's own engine. Fans will still think there's a pile of cutting edge technology ready to be sold to the game development world at large.

Scruffpuff posted:

I think the Ben arc is one of the most interesting facets of this debacle. Ben was an insane hyper-fan, goes to work for the "creator" of Wing Commander, is there for years, then fucks off and asks another studio to make the game. Whether or not Ben left on his own or was let go is immaterial. Of all the people in the world, he's the one I'd look to to make the judgement call as to whether or not Squadron 42 is going to be what Chris claims it will be, and the answer is an emphatic "No." This is a vote of no confidence from someone who was Chris's biggest fan, and who got to see the reality in person. There's weight behind that.

must resist joke, must resist joke...

Scruffpuff posted:

So now that all the fidelity has been in for years, it's time for white-boxing.

Thank God Chris is here to show all those publishers how game development is done.

The Titanic posted:

CryEngine loving sucks. Who could have predicted this?!???!

(Almost Everybody and every game company apparently)

G0RF posted:

YOUTUBE: BoredGamer looks for the silver lining in the collapse of Amazon Gaming Studios...



"It could be that they're not struggling at all... It could be that they're struggling a lot."

Thank you, Bored, for your continuing explication of the obvious and mundane.

Highlight moment.

"A so-called engine?! I mean it IS an engine! A game engine!"
(reading)
"...wasn't built for the kind of multiplayer games Amazon wanted to make and the company's efforts to retool it have proved difficult."
(reacting)
"So this is an OPINION of someone that they talked to rather than... factual... it's ANECDOTAL."

TheAgent posted:

just a reminder that randy pitchford has done countless stupid loving things re: gearbox and its taken 10 years for this poo poo to hit mainstream news

now there's hard proof that he siphoned off $12m from Gearbox to his own personal company Pitchford Entertainment, Media and Magic (which is scummy as gently caress but might not actually be a loving crime btw)

its going to take years and years more to see all the poo poo crobbear and council got up to

IcarusUpHigh posted:

Chris Roberts: The Prince of Whales

Quavers posted:

posted:

I found the peak of star citizen gameplay

posted:

CR continues to oversell and mislead. When you indicate Star Marine is nearly complete and then not say anything or release anything for two years...
That can frustate people. When you indicate that everything is greybox or better on SQ42 a year ago and that you decided last minute not to show anything... And then indicate you might actually be behind where you said you were a year ago... People are rightly confused.

I look at the ongoing struggles they're having with AI (something they've been working on since 2015 and still not nailed) and wonder how such estimates were ever given to us. It comes down to 1 of 2 explanations for me:
1) A major disconnect between the programming and production tems
2) They simply died about the time frame to avoid having to admit "we're over a year away from the next patch" in order to avoid the drama and shitstorm that would bring about


Gamescom 2019 will mark 3 years since the original schedule was shown to us, and we are still missing features that were supposed to be in 3.0

posted:

I invested in SC back in 2013, 2 years after I retired from Civil Service. I'm now 70 and have given over $1700 to the development. Ive decided that is enough. I expected to be playing the "complete" SQ42 game by 2016 or at the latest 2017. NOW, I'm wondering if I will ever get to play before I'm pushing up daisys. Sure, they release a patch every 3 months, but these patches are miniscule changes. We need to see milestones of additional content, and not just in ships. I'm a bit disallusioned by the sloooow pace SC is moving. It seems they can't focus on those major steps, but instead keep polishing what is already in game. I feel they should work on getting major gameplay improvements finished and leave the polishing for later.

posted:

Patience, what you see right now couldn't even be described as 'placeholder' for what is coming.

posted:

I always assumed this would be a 15-20yr project and if it happens sooner than that it would just be icing on the cake

Nebakenezzer posted:

A good post, Skeletal Captain rides again

One question, though: what's this white box, grey box thing?

Scruffpuff posted:

You test the gameplay this way, and add the final graphical polish last, because it's the least essential to the core game but takes the most time and needs to be redone repeatedly if you get the early parts wrong. Chris Roberts doesn't know what any of this is, but game developers do.

Nebakenezzer posted:

A good post, Skeletal Captain rides again

One question, though: what's this white box, grey box thing?

Fashionable Jorts posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2y_rLIIB5I

Skip around in this video to see good use of white/greybox application. A bunch of broken assets t-posing around an empty looking map to make sure the gameplay is fun and working. Then, as the mechanics of the game come together, you start to apply art assets.

Star Citizen literally does this backwards, adding million-polygon spaceships who's function doesn't exist in the game yet.

Scruffpuff posted:

Chris Roberts literally believes, without irony, that high-fidelity assets will just assemble themselves into a game once you "add in" physics, like seasoning a stew. He thinks that graphics first is actually the way to make a game, and everyone else is backwards.

Hav posted:

Just one of the small gems that make up the treasure mountain that is Star Citizen.

Addamere posted:

You can't build a whitebox without load-bearing drywall

Pixelate posted:

Not even in spirit

https://twitter.com/banditloaf/status/1137890175005143051

El Grillo posted:

Holy crap. Never thought I'd see this. It was always the theory (before he left) that he'd be the last one on the train, still waving some tasty morsels under the noses of by-then-non-existent wales...

MilesK posted:

Ben still works there. He's the editor of Jump Point, a monthly magazine for marketing the newest spaceships exclusively to the people paying a monthly subscription.

G0RF posted:

Derek's influence during the JPG War (especially late 2015 through much of 2016) shouldn’t be completely discounted. He did have some inside sources, did have some original scoops, and absolutely disrupted the triumphalist narrative CIG enjoyed prior to his arrival. He forced Chris and Sandi’s marriage out into the open (rightly so) and was the first guy warning that Star Marine was deader that dead. (And but for Derek, Chris’s response to The Escapist wouldn’t have been half as wonderful to read. Because he doxxed Chris’s wife!)

And I say all this as somebody who had a lot of long form writing, charts and stuff copied from here and pasted right on his blog. (I didn’t care about him doing that at all.)

A couple of the leakers back then were active in the Discord and well placed in the company. I was skeptical when first I joined his Discord, but as a very early mod who saw a lot of what was disclosed, I wasn’t doubtful for long. There were whistleblowers then and they were talking. Chris and Sandi’s rage about Derek and Goons was a source of much ongoing chatter and interest throughout CIG & Foundry. I asked one directly back then whether the things Goons were doing were making things worse for anybody besides Chris and Sandi, and said, “if it is I don’t want to do it.” But it wasn’t. Quite the opposite we were told, and so we kept at it.

Chris and Sandi had themselves to thank for galvanizing their opposition forces to join up. Goons weren’t ever going to be easy allies with Derek, but a lot of that early drama (e.g. The Sandi Monica bloodbath) pissed off Beer, Bootcha, Pgabz and a bunch more of us and lead to a lot of joint efforts - most of which were well received by the opposition folks inside CIG and Foundry and some of which gained traction elsewhere.

(The bloodbath, we should recall, was caused by Derek publishing the Jennison letter, and later lead to stuff like notacult.avi, etc.)



PGabz was a non-stop destructive force with his video output back then, Bootcha was already going rogue but then dropped notacult.avi and really captured what had absurdly started to flourish in this weird Goon/Smart alliance. Memes and mockery of the BDSSE, of the Community, and the cult leadership of Chris and Sandi. I know later efforts like Donutgate and the Jeffrey MacArthur stuff got around and pissed the right people off, and Derek helped with that. He was also a huge force for refund efforts, too. He would both light his own flames and fan any others lit elsewhere, and with /DerekSmart there to meltdown with every tweet and utterance, it was a fine little cycle of rage and laughter.

It’s also worth mentioning that Derek’s villainous persona rallied backers old and new into a confederacy of faithful defender spenders. He helped galvanize the fundraising and also steered the Polygons and Kotakus away from some really low hanging fruit like, oh, reporting on The Book of Loaf and crap like that.

Chris should’ve sent him a thank you note: “Thanks for making Sandi, Ben and I look like victims and good guys. We really needed it!”

On the prior point, I heard as much a year later from Kotaku UK - that the obnoxiousness of Derek’s warlording was keeping the gaming press the hell away from the story. It got bad enough during the run up to release for “Inside The Troubled Development of CIG” that Keza MacDonald was openly talking about ditching the story and just publishing Julian’s long form interview with Chris at Foundry. (Thank goodness she didn’t - it was the best thing to date on the topic.)

Anyway, I’m not white knighting for Derek and lord knows we disagree about some things, sometimes pretty angrily, but he did have some real impact, for good and for ill. (Some of what began then continues today in other forms, most notably Bootcha’s deep dive series.) And whether you believe any of the above or not, it’s an absolute fact that the middle chapters of this never-ending story would have been far less hilarious had he not known shown up and tried to trogdor this godforsaken project.

G0RF posted:

Spacetoaster has your back.

It’s the end all be all of “Nice Meltdowns”, and we have Derek to thank for it.

As best I can tell, this was the chain of events that birthed it...

• David Jennison quits, and his letter enumerating his reasons for it leaks somehow.
  
• It gets published to Derek’s blog, natch.
  
• Sandi has a thermonuclear meltdown right out in the open at CIG LA - then fires Alyssa in a flood of screamed obscenities... (Alyssa may have just been collateral damage.)
  
• James defends her and petitions for calm, then he gets fired in Meltdown Part Deux...
  
• A CIG LA artist quits on the spot in disgust at the open toxicity...
  
• Lisa puts in her 2 weeks notice. Two other employees quit in Austin as word of the bloodbath spreads.
  
• The Day After is broadcast, and good lord it doesn’t get more awkward than this
  
• The Escapist covers the dumpster fire in two installments, airing grievances galore from recently departed anonymous employees.
  
• Then Chris Roberts melts down in a free form prose explosion that he apparently spent an entire day crafting. (Above)

That was just one week’s worth of drama from back then. And there was more and it was worse. Derek, ultimately, deserves the credit and blame for much of the above. And he gets called out indirectly by Ben (see video) and directly by Chris (see letter.)

And that was just the fallout from one blog post. For good or ill, that’s influence.

Scruffpuff posted:

"Orgs" will never stop being funny to me. There's a particular flavour in Star Citizen of what I call "unhomed orgs," which appear to be cadres of externally full-grown men who just patrol the internet to find upcoming games they can project their milsim dreams onto. In that sense CIG happened to be in the right place at the right time, and said exactly the right things to these people so they went on to believe that the code itself would assure their "victory." Which they clearly need, since so many of them got atomized in actual freeform systems like EVE.

TheAgent posted:

looks like CIG v CryTek has a settlement meeting on the 16th of July

it doesn't mean they have to settle, but merely one last final shot before things get into discovery and a real trial begins

the settlement proceedings are confidential, but a trial will be out in the open (otherwise I'd attend on the 16th, but its closed session by Magistrate invite only I believe)

shrach posted:

Some director changes in the company currently known as Cloud Imperium UK LTD. The US Lawyer that was appointed a while back has been replaced by a lawyer from the Cayman Islands (lasted exactly one year). They also appointed a marketing executive. Someone should (not) let Companies House know that they got her year of birth incorrect as they seem to think she is five years older than her imdb page under a different name shows.

quote:

SC has to be the first game ever where the newer players are trying to push out the old guard before the game is even released!

Beet Wagon posted:

Aside from all the other technical problems it has, Star Citizen's biggest issue is that it is manifestly unfun the second you start to actually play it. Sarsa spoke to this a bit when talking about the "running kills you" thing, but it's really impossible to overstate how catastrophically unfun this game is to play. It's not even that it's boring, it's that it goes out of its way to actively suppress fun at almost every turn. People wonder why nobody is watching Star Citizen streams and the answer is two-fold: First, nobody gives enough of a poo poo about this game to watch it besides the mega-whales who dream of sitting at a tall desk giving orders to their crack troops, and second it is deeply, depressingly boring to watch.

I took part in a couple of the RexZilla streams, and although there was occasionally a tiny bit of fun to be had when the actual shooting was going on (which were almost always and immediately hampered by SC's dogshit FPS mechanics), the period of time in between them was enough to cause existential despair. Rex's main talent - the thing that kept him flush with fresh Calder Cash - is that he worked his rear end off to make the 'in-between' parts fun for his viewers. It was one of the main things he focused on, and I'm almost certain it was a bullet point on whatever CIG sent him when they were talking about what kind of stream they wanted. Guys like BNB or Saurus or whoever else suck rear end at this, and their streams reflect this.



I just want to point out that when I say Star Citizen's FPS mechanics are bad, I mean they are really truly terrible. They're among the worst I've ever experienced in any FPS, and they remind me of those unity asset swap games Jim Sterling tortures himself with. The guns feel completely disconnected from the game itself. There's no sense of your gun doing anything, or whether you hit, or how effective the hit was. It's like watching someone else ice skating and trying to discern something meaningful from it.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Holy poo poo, that is some peak cringe. Am I right in assuming there's no stakes here at all, both sides just specifically gathered in that spot to create a roleplaying battle for the stream? He's acting like it's the most intense battle royale he's ever played or something.

Virtual Captain posted:

My thoughts and reactions as Todd Parpy takes questions from Disco Lando for an hour. :suffer:


- Is there a single question NOT about [[THE LONE NEW FEATURE IN CURRENTPATCH+.1]]?
- They're laying the groundwork for loot spawning tech. Groundbreaking. PC gaming is practically saved.
- "working more towards what we consider a loot system" It must be a real hoot trying to re-invent every MMO feature in CryEngine 6+ years after the project started.
- "Well the in-lore answer is..." lol yes that's what wanted to hear in 2019
- Is there anything else in 3.6? 'Maybe some qualify of life fixes I dunno'
- How about OCS? "NO"
- Why is gamedev tough?

Jonny Shiloh posted:

"There might be some server side work that needs to be done" *looks down and to the right, scratches nose*

Translation: we can't even estimate how much server side work needs doing, we have no idea.

Mr. Carlisle posted:

Loot spawning in an engine in 2019? Truly cutting edge technology. Perhaps they'll even invent the loot shooter genre and be the inspiration for many future titles that (off the top of my head just throwing out name possibilities here) could be called Borderlands, Destiny, The Division or Warframe. Those are just all hypothetical titles for games though I'm really excited to see what games will follow their lead with this groundbreaking tech and actually exist in the future outside of my wild speculation.

Mr. Carlisle posted:

They're literally talking about ground breaking technology that will let you... mine rocks or pick plants. You know, a mechanic that has been in mmos since probably the first mmo.

Sarsapariller posted:

Subreddit thread in which the Citizens admit that they pretty much don't play the game anymore

posted:

Please tell me your favorite game play activity? (encourage me to buy)

Star Citizen is the reason I am considering this big (for me) investment. I love graphics. I love the idea of a game I can start today and play for the next 20 years. I've watched a dozen in game videos. I watch the dev updates and I read about the bad rumors.


I'm unclear what a player does. Is this a mining game? Do you have missions where you dog fight in your ship. Is it mainly a FPS? Is there some grand strife in the world (warring factions).

I also wondered about the limited players. ESO, has hundreds of people in an instance and it is fun. How is the social aspect of Star Citizen?

Is this a looter shooter? Are we taking down bosses and hoping for gear drops? Also, how about the skins. Perhaps the most perfected aspect of ESO is the skins. They are beautiful, varied, and you can usually tell a players rank by how great their skin looks.

Is there a crafting element?

posted:

You really don't want to be playing now.

quote:

You really don't want to be playing now.

Thirsty Dog posted:

Gorf's effort posts are starting to sound like someone who's spent far too much time digging into QAnon. Pull up! Pull up!

Thirsty Dog posted:

Gorf's effort posts are starting to sound like someone who's spent far too much time digging into QAnon. Pull up! Pull up!

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

The real game was the friends and drama we made along the way

G0RF posted:

If only I were LARPing.

It’s real. All of it.

Just go back and revisit the archives, starting around page 700 of “Even the pope won’t invite me to dinner to discuss religion...” and at least getting through all of “Big MoMA’s House.” Should just take a few months to fill in any gaps!

Thirsty Dog posted:

Don't forget the Mass Effect Andromeda hype!

Thirsty Dog posted:

Don't forget the Mass Effect Andromeda hype!

posted:

There was a deal in May 2018.

10% of CIG UK is now out of the hands of the original 3 shareholders (Chris, Orwtin, Erin).

We do not know 100% who is behind the companies in the deal, but two are anonymous "shell" companies registered in the Cayman's (more importantly, NOT registered in the UK, so ... anonymous shells), and the third is likely a firm Chris and Ortwin dealt with on Lucky Number Slevin.

Here's what we found out after we recorded:

We know the deal was valued internally at about $200 per share (149 quid and change at the prevailing exchange rate at the time).

On the same day that deal was done, Mr. Daniel O'Connell Offner was named to the board.

These are facts. You may quibble with me on the "Infratrade/Infatrade" typo thing, but I will not take you seriously.

Now for conclusions:

Offner represents some or all of the following: Indus, Erloch, and Infatrade. His job is to make sure CIG survives long enough for the $20MM investment to pay off.

That payoff is likely the release of Squadron 42 in December of 2019.

There will be no delays.

There will be no second chances.

This is no longer a crowdfunded project. It has been purchased by either a publisher (Ubisoft) or a venture capital firm (Blue Heron Ventures, Mr. Offner's firm). The 10% stake is on paper only. If CIG misses a target or fails to perform, the money will be angry. You wouldn't like the money when it is angry.

The identity of the purchasing firm has been kept secret because it is somehow considered damaging to either the investing firm or CIG. Both are possible.

Hav posted:

the Calder's deal is actually a matter of public record, and they didn't just 'add', they swapped out. It's the Calder's money manager that changed.

quote:

It's important to note that even with tax credits and breaks, eventually the tax man calleth.
And considering how long Star Citizen has been in development, it's quite possible that some deferred taxes are coming due.
We may see some Hollywood accounting being done.
Shell Company Asset Shuffling too.

Sarsapariller posted:

In other news, they finally tuned shields correctly.




TLDR: 10 minutes of sustained fire from 4 ships cannot down a single shield facing on a Hammerhead now. Citizens praise this as excellent game balance.

posted:

I think this is the right path thats being tread. Larger ships should require higher firepower weapons

posted:

I am very happy to see this, this seems like a great step in the direction of a good balance.

posted:

This seems perfect to me.

skeletors_condom posted:

I am watching WTFO's Canada stream.

https://clips.twitch.tv/HealthyProductiveWaterBatChest (Deleted)

Sounds like he is selling/melting all his ships (4K worth) to buy a new car (although I could be wrong on the car).

Beexoffel posted:

I came across this old screenshot

Kosumo posted:

I can see why streamers like this game - it's so slow and time consuming that it's perfect for them to interact with their audience. If you were not doing that, what do you do during the train rides/quantum jumps/long walks?

I've been gaming over 30 years and this has some of the lamest attempts at gameplay I've ever seen.

posted:

I actually cried over how beautiful the redesign of the R&R exteriors turned out.

Dementropy posted:

TheAgent posted:

the flight model is loving awful and continues to get worse every patch

I mean, I know they are trying to figure out things for squonsole 42 and people being able to use a controller but lol goddamn

TheAgent posted:

hello

• surprise announcement of additional platforms supposedly coming this year (a rumor I've heard for like 2 years running btw)
  
• more hardware tech bundles coming, including one with faceware (mentioned previously)
  
• several people have mentioned, however, that the faceware camera is now completely dead
  
• hardware production issues, lack of software improvements by CIG and potential legal issues have killed it, according to rumor
  
• camera might be resurrected by a cheap 3rd party from china (restated rumor from last year)
  
• demo levels of sq42, including mess hall / latrine character gen and PU character crossover ready to preview by q4 this year
  
• lots of chatter now about "offline character" / "offline experience" replacing "single player" as the go-to phrase for squadron 42
  
• anything you've purchased in the PU can be flown by your "offline character"
  
• "The offline experience is as expansive, awe-inspiring and fulfilling as the PU. There's a thousand hours of gameplay there."
  
• certain currencies can be taken from the offline experience and taken into the PU
  
• same goes for ships -- buy one offline with in-game currency and take it online
  
• an "open universe offline experience"
  
• the storyline for sq42 is "just the beginning"
  
• mine, farm, trade and take missions after the story has concluded, including taking over stations and cities via combat or economically
  
• ability to hire other PU players as offline characters to crew your ships
  

Scruffpuff posted:

If accurate, an interesting internal narrative shift. Looks like the very, very beginning of deciding what the game actually is. So now we're looking at making the PU a completely single-player experience, and working out the online details later (read: after bankruptcy). That allows them to kick the can of their server costs and technology indefinitely down the road, and just make the model-viewer a local experience.

A new narrative emerges! Star Citizen was always going to be single-player and local to your PC! A thousand hours of gameplay*! What living breathing universe world, what living breathing universe world, you're the living breathing universe world.

*Gameplay not yet designed.

Sarsapariller posted:

I love that they go to all this trouble to break features that already worked perfectly fine. Let's review all the ways this doesn't make any loving sense:

* You can't see out of the elevators! They're closed loving boxes!
* If you could see out of the elevators you'd see them teleporting through the geometry because the levels weren't built for elevators!
* You are now going to have to have your servers route the elevators around and there will be collision issues with every previous level!
* You have large sections of the game, like the one in the clip, where the loving elevator paths are going to pass through open air!
* It's a guarantee that you will introduce a dozen more unforeseen bugs

Now, the one reason why they did this:
* Your ship icon will now move "Realistically" while you are in the elevator.


That's it. Break loving everything, for that one fidelitous bullet-point.



I really love CIG's modus operandi of

1) Take feature that works poorly
2) Declare you are replacing it with new feature
3) Declare victory preemptively in story and song across all channels
4) poo poo out a broken mess that's even worse than before, walk away

Pixelate posted:

HURSTON GUARDS AND WEAPONS FLOAT TO CEILING ON DEATH

Gosts posted:

Elite Dangerous: Fleet Carrier Teaser

YO YO YO DID WE TALK ABOUT THIS YET

Oh boy one more thing to cross off the list of "Elite doesn't have [insert thing star citizen will never have]!"

Sarsapariller posted:

Sarsapariller posted:

I just love that one of the best known bugs in the game, that has been present for 6+ years, that never gets patched, is that the loving door on the starter ship that every Citizen will use at some point is a death trap that kills you instantly.

The fact that this game-ruiner is not even a low priority bug fix for the company should tell you all you need to know.

Imagine if there was a bug in World of Warcraft that threw away the first three levels of progression for every player in the game, if they didn't click the level-up button just right. Imagine anyone actually mentioning the bug being accused of FUD and trying to ruin the game. That is Star Citizen in 2019.

posted:

now hear me out here... cities should have full on roads and massive interconnected highway! Just endless sprawling veins of different roads onramps and all kinds of different highways with those futuristic lights. what I'm picturing is very cinematic

Sarsapariller posted:

CIG Hacking Prototype, 2017

You have a timer on top showing seconds and milliseconds
Meter showing a value right
3 programs shown at your disposal for use - Portbomb, Shellkit and Rootworm
Values at the right of the programs, which don't update currently
Ability to Cycle Proxy, or Disconnect from the system
Timer bars to show program run progress, and the ability to run more than one at a time
A Gate level to show progress of some sort
A blank door pass code on the right which gets more characters revealed as progress is made

Actual Released Hacking, 2019
Press button and wait 15 mins


So what I'm trying to say is that when they talk about unreleased features it is a sure bet that they will come out exactly as described and not as giant fun-vacuums.


Citizens are totally fine with the events that are taking place

Because saying "You're right this is bad' might in some way mean saying "I was wrong" even about the most trivial, minor details, and that must never happen.

Scruffpuff posted:

Chris is selling the "Hollywood" experience, even though this is a game and not a movie, the two should never mix, and movies are made to be watched not played. But Chris is a weapons-grade moron, so this is now a movie. The reason, and I am not making this up, the reason those delays are there is to force the movie-going experience not on you, but on the people around you. It takes 15 minutes to hack so there's a big window of opportunity for another commando to happen upon the scene, see you there, and think "Look, he's hacking the terminal!" All they have to add is the audio for "I'm past the third firewall, this guy is good, deploying countermeasures." The reason quantum travel takes so long is so you keep having to stay engaged so your passengers can run around and "check the inertial dampeners." Star Citizen is a movie, and the players are Chris's extras, except instead of him paying them, they're paying him.

Keep in mind how many hours and hours of footage are shot to get 2 minutes that winds up in the film. That's what Chris is going for here. The longer everything takes, the more likely there will eventually be a confluence of events that plays out in such a way that people will talk about it and say "It was just like a movie!" People are paying tens of thousands of dollars to send the vast majority of their free time straight to the cutting room floor.

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

"The ship interior doesn't line up perfectly with the exterior" is something only pedantic people would notice.

This is the central conceit behind the entire project. It caters to disorders that most people would pay a psychiatrist to help them resolve. In fact, those disorders form the bedrock foundation the entire project is built on. You can't fix the game without breaking the backers.

colonelwest posted:

Yeah, I think most of the answers to why Star Citizen is broken mess of half-baked ideas left to rot on the vine boil down to some combination of.

1. Chris thinks everything in video games should be as cinematic as possible, regardless of how detrimental to actual game play this is. He has an antiquated belief that film is the inherently superior medium which video games must emulate and catch up to, compounded by an infantile understanding of what cinematic even means.

2. Chris has an idiotic belief that modern game dev technology and gaming PCs can make a fully realized simulation of a sci-fi universe, and that "realism" in video games is actually desirable and fun. (This is often at odds with #1 because mundane everyday life like bathing and using the bathroom is rarely cinematic)

3. CIG will say and do anything to keep ship sales going, including pay walling content and making the game punishingly pay-to-win.

4. CIG's is utterly incompetent at everything and relies on a constant churn of recent college grads.

Awesome Fidelity posted:

G0RF posted:

I’d be at least a little skeptical with anything CIG self-reports.

They self-reported Chris and Sandi were “just friends” from 2012-2015.

I don’t assume their numbers are entirely fictional, just can’t believe it’s 100% accurate either. The company is lead by a pathological family who lie even when they have nothing obvious to gain from it. Discount future disclosures accordingly.

Dementropy posted:

https://i.imgur.com/0xko6Oi.gifv

Quavers posted:

Asmodai_00 posted:

posted:

He's invested in its failure. He has spent years calling it a scam and he has built an identity around it. People with a sensitive ego often can't accept the fact that they might have been wrong about something and will go to extraordinary lengths for self-validation to preserve their sense of being right.

Beet Wagon posted:

I'm the constant reminder that we hosed up the most basic part of our project

Shinmera posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-QYqet8Sok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtWH5LRHiqI

Bootcha posted:

I think it's a combination of money over time that make some backers unable to see the extent of their emotional/psychological investment.

Kind in the same sense when you confront a smoker about the money they spend annually on cigarette packs. "Small" purchases are waived off as "It's just 4/5/7/10 bucks a pop". Annually it's waived off as "Well do you want to measure my McDonalds intake now? How about my toll road payments? How about how much I tip service?"

I would say no one's pledging in desperation right now, at least in the sense of "OH GOD THIS IS ALL FOR NAUGHT IF I DON'T DROP A GRAND RIGHT NOW".

But panic doesn't drive sales. That's why we'll never here the alarm bells go off until it's too late. In a sense the ELE might have already happened, but the "OH GOD WHAT THE gently caress HAPPENED" event will be far too late to do anything about.

Quavers posted:

"One of the challenges we had over many decades was most of the people we were dealing at publishers were from a marketing background. It's a bit like building a house. If you want to show the house off to someone who isn't a builder and doesn't understand how houses are built, you end decorating the house to make a milestone it look pretty but you haven't done the plumbing yet. But then the first thing after the milestone is to rip out all the furniture and decoration out just so you can do the plumbing. It's a slightly different mindset."

AbstractNapper posted:

Game development works in mysterious ways.
Known only to that Kazan, and a few select Shitizens

posted:

ships just straight-up exploding into 1000 pieces will be rare

peter gabriel posted:

The thing is, the game is worse now than ever before, and I mean that.
In the old days the fun was in the bugs, the non existent gameplay mechanics, the stupidity of others - it was fun when it was hosed.
Now they have systematically sapped that fun away, you get punished for having a ship blow up, all ships are locked, the game does run better and is more stable but that just highlights how mind blowingly dull it all is.

DigitalPenny posted:

my ultimate funny SC moment goes to

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

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

posted:

This dude is coming very close to stealing my 2 year old goon valor. I'm afraid I'm going to have report him to Derek Smart for further investigation.

MilesK posted:

TheAgent posted:

lol that no mans sky is adding another free giant expansion, that changes them from opengl to vulkan and gives full VR support (including consoles)

just lol

Banano posted:

reminder that croberts flew into a rage when he discovered artists were using UV/normal maps which he deemed to be cheating shitizens out of their fidelitous polygons

Sarsapariller posted:

posted:

The sub is making better jokes than we are these days

quote:

PCGames^N: Kickstarter suspends GTA Online imitator RAW and cancels pledges

RAW was suspended because the developers “would need to raise additional funds outside of Kickstarter to complete the game.”


“Our rules and guidelines ask that creators seek to raise the amount of money needed to bring a project to completion and fulfill all rewards,” a Kickstarter representative tells us. “This creator stated in an update that they would need to raise additional funds outside of Kickstarter to complete the game. We require projects to be honest and clearly presented, and this project failed to meet that standard.”

Dementropy posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

Look Star Citizen !!!!!!

You got it, it's finally out!

And yes, it is also out!

A couple of months ago I began work on a demo version of Star Citizen. I was able to finish it in a month, but now it's going into a closed feature test. So that means the release date is at the time of writing.

For those of you who don't know how to go about trying out the game, you can do that by visiting my Youtube channel.

Here some gameplay footage:
* hand waving intensifies *

With so many people talking about the game, the release will be tough. I also want to stress that Star Citizen is not out at the same point every day. I have to say that even though there have been over 60k downloads already, it's still a little harder than it could have been without all the press. As you may imagine, I've taken a lot of time to get this build ready and I will make it available when it is ready.

A few weeks after release, I'll be hosting a public announcement that will go some way towards answering your burning questions. I could not take everything I've gathered and put into words today, so the answer will go into the game soon, but only from my own personal perspective.

Until then, please keep posting your questions!

Chocobo posted:

They could probably salvage this product by dropping the entire online component and just making the goddamned Freelancer 2 we all wanted in the first place.

lofi posted:

RGO?