TheAgent posted:

hello

quote:

I am not discussing the ongoing legal battle. I will not and won't ever utter a word about that. What I will talk about is scope and it's ongoing reduction; something our backers should know and understand now, and not when it suddenly confronts them.

I want to discuss the often quoted "game development," specifically when I see our backers pair this with "you don't understand." Game development is volatile, undoubtably; the mechanics you most want in are often the the mechanics left on the cutting room floor.

Before I get into why this is dangerous -- especially for our product -- I want to talk about why I am posting this anonymously through a source that has their own complications. I don't think [TheAgent] is the most objective source, nor do I consider them without bias. I admit [they] have an overloaded sense of the dramatic which often borders the absurd. [They] don't, however, post this across the internet. It seems this is something of a Something Awful "exclusive," meant for a certain reader. It can be taken jokingly and dismissed, but still read; which is my intention. By informing some backers slowly of the why of these changes are happening, I hope to prevent shock when the eventual happens.

Let me be clear and plain: mechanics for space flight, ground and space combat, trading and basic professions are 18 to 24 months away. This means out of our pre-alpha testbed and working how we want them to work. Notice that this might clash with how you, the backer, wants them to work.

18 to 24 months. For basic things. What this means, ultimately, is that things we've sold you -- things you have already purchased -- will have drastic changes and reductions. I'm not suggesting you refund; in fact, quite the opposite. In order to fulfil your earlier purchases -- even in reduced form -- we need you to pledge more. By internal estimates, we have another $200 million worth of tech that needs to be created, implemented, tested and released. This can take anywhere from 4 to 8 more years. 4 is best case, expecting no turnovers or unexpected problems -- which their always are.

Creating ground combat on a massive scale hasn't begun prototyping. We dont have any idea how space combat could change ground combat or vice versa. These things are years and years out; just getting to the point where we are now has been a massive undertaking.

What you are expecting -- to be frank, let me use some colorful language -- tone it the gently caress down. You are not going to have 1,000 player battles by the end of the decade. You are not going to have AI crew on your ships by the end of the decade. You are not going to have an entire universe to explore by the end of the decade.

What you will have -- what we hope you'll have -- is a great, fun and exciting space game that seamlessly blends combat, exploration, trading and socializing.

I want to take a sec to remind each and every one of you how much you mean to us, this project, and even Chris himself. We get painted in a negative light across a lot of different places, but we are not, and never have been, anything but 100% dedicated to this project and it's fans.

I want to personally -- and anonymously -- thank you. Thank you for believing in us. For keeping us working, for keeping us dreaming, and keeping us dedicated to making the greatest space game that's ever been created.

Thank you.

Virtual Captain posted:

Reminder for the CIG intern and the guy checking how his e-mail was received:

Scruffpuff posted:

CIG keeps showing these small, incremental pieces of complete bullshit, and passes each and every one of them off as progress toward some amorphous goal and endpoint. No, CIG, you're not X% completed - you're 0% completed, and you'll always be 0% completed no matter how much work you do, because your core technology is impossible as designed and built. You hosed up from the jump, and now you're full-on hosed and there's nothing you can do about it except scrap everything, fire Chris, start all over again, and plan it right. That's how you get past 0%.

But be my guest and spend another $200 million figuring that out.

XK posted:

TheAgent posted:

[Project is dead]

We know.

The Titanic posted:

Sounds mostly accurate, but I still think those dates are super super conservative. In 8 years you may be getting close to something like a rough “beta-like” state of the product.

The problem with this is as the unknown dev says, it’s going to take a constant influx of money like they were seeing a year ago. People will need to continue to pay for nothing now, and in high volumes and amounts, for the possibility that at some point over the next 10 year span something somewhat resembling the dream will happen.

Pixelate posted:

Preen Dog posted:

True to my prediction of CiG deliberately keeping the PU unplayable, threads on the spectrum report dozens of AI ships constantly spawning, bringing the servers to their knees. Days later, not fixed, when commenting one line would probably do it. Somehow they even managed to create a bug that resembles a defective video card, but isn't, because multiple people have reported it.

loving

I love it when ships become jpegs

Pixelate posted:

Awww, this game. So long as citizen's keep sacrificing themselves, it will give unto us the lols.

Scruffpuff posted:

SoftNum posted:

This is really the reasonable thing to hope for:

Accusations of bribery or coersion

Letter writing campaign to the court

Some in-too-deep citizen will probably actually suggest harm to the judge.

An extended campaign of harassment against anything Crytek is tangentially involved with (except Lumberyard)

Maybe even bugging Bezos to save them.

None of this is far-fetched. The truly amazing thing to me, and this comes back to haunt me again and again, is the nagging feeling that the backers do not actually want the game. Here is how I come by that realization:

- The biggest obstacle keeping Star Citizen from being released; in fact, the one and only reason it's literally impossible for it to be released in any way resembling the backers' wishes, is Chris Roberts himself
- If backers truly wanted this game, they would rage hard against Chris - they would demand his removal and his replacement
- Backers do not do this - rather they defend and protect him (by extension defending and protecting the one man completely destroying their dream game)
- Hence they do not want Star Citizen released

So if they don't want the game released, the best way to do that is to make sure Chris Roberts stays where he is, continues his staggering and unprecedented levels of ineptitude, continues his lying, scamming, and stealing, and just generally continues to get on with the behavior that has defined his parasitic life.

It's basically a cult dedicated to negating its own existence. Rather high-concept for a collection of furries and pedophiles.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Consider that people are still taking Star Citizen seriously. Chris certainly isn't. The developers certainly aren't. The only people who still care about this abortion and think it has a chance in hell of coming out are the backers who "will never know".

There is nothing left about Star Citizen that should be taken seriously. Chris is a joke. Derek is a broken clock. The rest of the staff stopped giving a poo poo and are just trying to collect a paycheck. The product is an unsustainable mess. The backers who are left have proven themselves to be insufferable fools who deserve to have their money wasted... assuming they're not paid shills.

There's no reason to counter their arguments. They don't care any more than I do about hearing about how great Star Citizen is. There's no reason to listen to anything CIG says; it's all lies with the sole purpose of exploiting the gullible. It's all a giant joke and the punchline is Chris's bank account.

kordansk posted:

I think a large problem with SC that people take issue with is that you have a company that is constantly generating engineering debt to obtain more funding for development of a game that appears to be in perpetual alpha with no end in sight. Every deadline has been missed by months, every statement about the current status of the project and expected releases has been demonstrably false to the point that they had to know they were lying when they made those statements, and literally you have what appears to be the most heinous rabid fanbase on the planet that goes out of their way to promote SC in a way that makes bitcoin shittards look like normal people.

How do you explain what looks like the complete inability for fans to have introspection into why they make the statements they do, or why they have what looks like a cult-like following for a game?

Pixelate posted:

And it never will end. Amen.



[Source: A3ATOT channelling AdzAdama]

The Titanic posted:

quote:

You seem to forget once again and rather conveniently I may add, that when Chris decided to beg the internet for money since no publisher would touch him with a ten foot pole he told everyone that he had been working on it for a year prior to that. So which is it? Did it start in 2011 or is Chris a liar? It' cannot be both.

CR is.. a man of his word! He tells it as he believes it 100% of the time!

You can’t just say “this is a lie” or “that is a lie” because really who’s to say what a lie is? Can CR define a lie simply by stating what he’s thinking or feeling? It’s like opinions really, and he has an opinion of his words and those words are the truth as he sees it within that opinion.

Pixelate posted:

You're all missing the point people. VR will be in by at least 2020. Can't wait!

Blue On Blue posted:

It is funny to see them try to ride the wave of success from space x .... hey you know that cool thing someone else did ? Well check out this janky rear end game we are building #wemadeit #actress #buyinganelectricporsche #s42

ChaseSP posted:

Chris should've paid SpaceX to have a HD containing SC so he could claim it's finally launched.

G0RF posted:

ZenMaster posted:

Detractor: SC is a huge scam and full of bugs.

TARKOSHE: You slimy hypocrites will play the game one day!

10 years pass and SC releases to luke warm reviews.

Detractor: This game sucks.

TARKOSHE: I KNEW IT U SLIMEBALL HYPOCRITE

Virtual Captain posted:

FYI SomethingJones don't hurt yourself transcribing this AtV. Relay already took the bullet for you.

https://relay.sc/transcript/around-the-verse-bringing-balance-to-force

quote:

What we did was we took the health down and put the armour on so even though there’s less health it still takes roughly the same amount of time to kill the ship. And then shields on top of that.

quote:

There’s pirates in the PU that are supposed to be weaker than player ships. So instead of giving them less health - which requires an entirely separate ship - we can have the same ship the player has and just fit a weaker version of the armour to it.

So they were fixing everything manually and bloating the download with an entire ship copy? lol

quote:

a common one people say, “The weapons don’t feel like they're doing enough damage,” and aside from the weapons perhaps not doing enough damage, that is quite often from network desync - your pips are on something as a client and you feel you should be hitting them but somewhere between the client and the server it goes slightly amiss and then suddenly you're not hitting anything. You feel as a player that you should be hitting them but you're not. Your first instinct is to go, “Well, the weapons are wrong” and there's tons and tons of other scenarios like that where it's something else that's actually causing the issue rather than the weapons

Blame the networking team, everyone does.

quote:

could be as simple as someone's just put the wrong number in the XML; put a decimal point in the wrong place.

quote:

For the longest time - pretty much since the game first came out - all the ships had the same armour values and their toughness was determined in their health. We decided that was incorrect

Almost like you gummed up a fake demo that just barely works and are now trying to make a sane game with different armor values. Quick question, has anyone done this before or is CIG still breaking new ground? It sounds suspiciously like leather armor vs plate mail.

Beet Wagon posted:

CIG actually did just gently caress up - simplified ship damage represents a huge departure from their promises - but it's such a mundane and expected fuckup that none of us lunatics even bothered to write an effortpost about it because we're completely acclimated and only get excited about apocalyptic mistakes.

AutismVaccine posted:

Star Citizex: Now with X-Com 2's health system

Thoatse posted:

:cig: should hire to get component destruction working. At this point they are literally better at Cryengine.

Quavers posted:

Carmageddon from 1997 has a better and more fidelitious damage model.

Twenty. One. Years. Ago.

Virtual Captain posted:

quote:

The way armour works it’s a multiplier on the damage the ships taking. We gave the civilian armours a multiplier of 0.9 so that times the damage by 0.9 so that lessens it a bit. But military ships would have 0.7 or 0.6 so the would take less damage overall. So even if the ships ... the Gladius and, say, the 300 they’re roughly the same size with the same amount of health but the Gladius will take more hits because it’s got better armour on. That’s … we prefer to have that rather than just giving Gladius an extra 3000 health because it’s tidier at the end of the day.

What they are doing seems a little backwards to me. 0.7 is armor than 0.9? Maybe they are doing this but 0 for no armor and 1 for perfect armor makes more sense to programmers, then find the inverse in the dmg logic or at compile. But the way they're speaking about it multiple times this way makes me think they're not.

Mattjpwns posted:

Strikes me as someone trying to be 'clever' with optimization. "This way we only have to do damage = baseDamage * armour rather than damage = baseDamage - armour * baseDamage, omg the CPU cycle savings"

Flared Basic Bitch posted:

What’s far, far worse IMHO is how the whole design will work in practice. To use a deliberately exaggerated example, if I fire my super badass Star Blazers wave motion gun at a ship with 0.5 armor, only half the damage gets through. But if some n00b fires his plebe starting pew pew laser at the same ship, half of their damage also gets through. How the hell does that play with the crowd that’s put time and effort (or pledges their loving money) into getting top-of-the-line ship builds?

It’s awful. The high end weapons, which are typically exponentially more “expensive”, provide less value on the virtual dollar against good armor reduction than the cheap crap. And if you can bring enough of that cheap firepower to bear, then it’s also exploitable. Nice.

And this is the sort of poo poo that a competent designer should be thinking about, and that a competent... anyone else really... should be noticing and bringing to their attention. It took me literally moments after reading this post to realize it was a problem (and probably most of you thought of it too- I fear that someone’s already called it).

In short CIG sucks, Ben fat.

XK posted:

You'll have components, and various systems. They can all be damaged in a fight. Your underlings will have to run around the ship replacing blade servers, splicing wires, plumbing pipes. Like a crew in a submarine movie trying to deal with the water gushing in after a near hit from a depth charge.

Nevermind, that was too hard. Nobody had any idea how to do that. We're doing health bars.

ZenMaster posted:

G0RF posted:

Massively has pretty much joined SA and Frontier as a mockery booster.

You really need to make haste on your settlement plans, CIG. The Crytek lawsuit is the dominant CIG narrative of 2018. The primary energy, interest, and chatter about your studio needs to be your Games, not your legal dramas. The longer this stretches on, the longer it’ll take to clear the air.

Case in point:

MASSIVELYOP: Star Citizen is balancing the crap out of ship weapons as the Crytek lawsuit drags on

Toops posted:

quote:

Is it normal to develop sequential patches in parallel other than poo poo like DLC/additional content for actual released and fully working software?

I don't understand game development.

I've never seen any studio try to develop content like this before, and that is because it's a dumb gently caress idea that will never work.


I'm very excited to see months of updates that consist of "Still trying to merge the 3.3 features into the 3.2 and 3.1 branches which were all based off the 3.0 branch but diverged heavily. I am trying not to kill myself but outcome is uncertain at this point. Back to you, Sandi!

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

There is nothing left about Star Citizen that should be taken seriously. Chris is a joke. Derek is a broken clock. The rest of the staff stopped giving a poo poo and are just trying to collect a paycheck. The product is an unsustainable mess. The backers who are left have proven themselves to be insufferable fools who deserve to have their money wasted... assuming they're not paid shills.

There's no reason to counter their arguments. They don't care any more than I do about hearing about how great Star Citizen is. There's no reason to listen to anything CIG says; it's all lies with the sole purpose of exploiting the gullible. It's all a giant joke and the punchline is Chris's bank account.

Virtual Captain posted:

https://youtu.be/R7gWqAj21ZU?t=3447
The Mittani 2014: 'oh I'm watching Star Citizen. I mean everybody who plays EVE is keeping their eye on Star Citizen but only to point and laugh at the fanfiction and the sort of religious fervor that people have for a game that doesn't exist'

MilesK posted:

A fun SC easter egg.

Pixelate posted:

Chris Roberts: An artist SHOULD be able to crank out a moon, or even a base planet, in a day, or two days, THEMSELVES.

Virtual Captain posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

magnetic boots were working in 2014, then mysteriously stopped working ever since. I don't have a strong grasp on the "gravity zones" timeline but I remember it was a technical hurdle that any backer will tell you was solved a long time ago.

If the short term fake-it-for-now solution was to make each gravity object (station, ships, bennyhenge, etc) a floating 2d plane; it may have displaced the more complex logic that controlled anchoring a player to an arbitrary surface. A year or two passes and now it's too difficult to take out the short term solution because every ship seemingly takes months to implement thanks to whatever horrible manual process they have.

Don't call it a comeback.




But seriously don't remind backers this has been broken for over a year.

thatguy posted:

Star Citizen: Episode IV - A New Feature

Star Citizen: Episode V - The Chairman Takes it Back

Star Citizen: Episode VI - Return of the Mag Boot

Ghostlight posted:

It is
(Return of the Mag) come on
(Return of the Mag) oh my God
(You know it's in the bag) here I am
(Return of the Mag) once again
(Return of the Mag) pump up the world
(Return of the Mag) watch my flow
(You know it's in the bag) here I go

Virtual Captain posted:

SomethingJones posted:

Todd Papy:
So... it WAS taken out of context, um... haha! First and foremost, ah... from there... ah... what Chris's HIGH LEVEL VISION is, is that he DOES want you to be able to steal ships, and have the, um... CAPACITY to actually hold on to them for as long as you possibly can.

However that's gonna require... ah... you know... you jump through certain HOOPS, we haven't figured out what those HOOPS are yet, but, ah... think of it as like, you know, GRAND THEFT AUTO or in this case it'll be GRAND THEFT SPACESHIP, and therefore if you're ever CAUGHT with this then it would, um... basically... um... be... considered a FELONY and you'd go to jail for long time... in the game

Or you'd... or... you'd be, ah... CHASED DOWN, you know, HUNTED, um... possibly put up as, um... as a BOUNTY and... pay it THAT WAY.

What do you mean you haven't figured out the hoops for keeping stolen ships Papy? Have you already forgotten about faking hull IDs? You seem confused for someone who is supposedly a Design Director.


https://robertsspaceindustries.com/faq/Insurance-FAQ

quote:

You will be able to fly a “hot” ship to the less savory parts of the Star Citizen universe, where you will probably be able to land and may be able to purchase a fake hull id code, but it will take effort and not necessarily be cheap.

Spectrum posted:

You're a good guy Jarus but you're wasting your time. Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically This is Spinal Tap except people think the band is real. The flight model is never going to get resolved for the same reason Gilligan can never get off the Island. If it gets resolved the show is over. Our debating this on the forums has just become part of the show. It gives legitimacy to all this. We are arguing about hypotheticals for a game that doesn't exist. If we take Chris's demo at face value the combat experience will be little more than a mini game for an interactive movie anyway, of the hour and a half of gameplay we saw combat was what, a minute and a half of the experience give or take? It does make you wonder about how people devote themselves to it. It's like devoting your life to bejeweled or something.



If this poo poo was real all this would have been laid out day one. Instead we get "Wing Commander with physics," Switching between PVP and PVE without affecting other players, Control schemes for different types of game active at the same time, the loudest Rock and Roll band in history! etc. All these impossible completely mutually exclusive concepts that we only accept due to the human propensity towards confirmation bias. I've been playing Hellion quite a bit lately. It's not even a popular game really but I like it. Once you spend some time outside the bubble and interact with a normal community you look back and wonder wtf is going on here. It's like battered wife syndrome. People over there give feedback and bitch like any community but everyone knows what game they're making. Feedback is focused and makes sense. Here everyone just believes it's going to be whatever they want it to be. The greatest space sim ever made and exactly what we all want. Even though we're all different. I'd seriously recommend getting out of the bubble for a while. When you're outside the bubble and you think about how "the team" worked for years on revolutionary technology that would allow the game to update to a new version without having to download the whole game or about how they have been working for years on groundbreaking unheard of technology like the ability to play as either a man or a woman, in the same game! When you start buying into all this you need to step back and think about things. Not you personally but every one of us. Of the 400 employees they have what, 3 people that work on net code? For a supposed MMO? It's just a show. Speaking of 3 people the 4 or so dudes making Hellion sailed past Star Citizen long ago in terms of features and it's only been in development for less than 2 years.



If a game comes of this it will be because so much money has been thrown at the show that it just ends up getting made. The Monkees had a hit song and they weren't a real band. The song was made for the show but it wasn't the point. The point of the Monkees was the show about the band not the band actually touring. The problem is what kind of game will it end up being? I don't think anyone gives a poo poo really. That's why everything can be everything to everyone and seasoned game developers act like it's ok. Because it ultimately doesn't matter in the end. If the game ever got made the shows over. They'd have picked a control scheme long ago for example if they honestly wanted to make a real game. Just keep the fantasy going. Maybe the Castaways will get off the Island in next weeks episode. Just stay tuned.

Toops posted:

Toops posted:

Scruffpuff posted:

TheAgent posted:

each lot is around $85. I mean holy poo poo. holy loving poo poo that's almost $45,000 in housing. the estimated total spend for him on Shroud of the Avatar is something like $100,000 to $125,000 and he's just now complaining about p2w mechanics, lol

the icing on this is his burning hatred of wow, a game which he never played and is about 21398103109283 billion times better than shroud in every single possible way


the dude was straight up hoping to make like $15k a month or so off his "investment" which of course won't loving happen because shroud is a completely hosed game from top to bottom

I think the burning hatred of WoW and all other games in that category you hear from SC or SOTA usually stems from people who hate the lack of the ability to pay for respect.

They deny it's pay to win because they argue the housing etc. doesn't give you in-game combat advantages. They don't want time to win either because someone with more time than they have can get better than they are.

It's literally their deepest need to have a permanent elite class that they paid to be a member of. Purchased esteem that can never be achieved by anyone else no matter how much time they spend.

I can't imagine what these people's lives are like.

veiled boner fuel posted:

quote:

People aren’t paying for what SC is, they’re paying for what they hope it will be, and when it fails to deliver (which, with all the hype how could it even possibly meet people’s expectations) a lot of people are going to be crushed.

Idk just seems wrong to me.

Yeah it's not even that there's poo poo tons of over promising and scope creep, you nailed it with your "not what it is, but what they hope" but the really lovely part is combining that "all my hopes and dreams in a unified vidyagame" it's that Chgris Crobberts and his skeezy wife took all those things, added nostalgia and Chris' reputation from the 80s/90s, AND (the worst part) combining that with using literally every single sleazy marketing 101 trick in the book. Like the chapter in the marketing 101 book titled "Don't do this because it's bad but if you're a shitbag used car dealer then read this chapter I guess."

Time limited sales. Number limited sales. Special treatment for people that have spent big money. Special in game locations for people that spent big money. Special sales for people that have already spent big money. An upgrade system that takes a masters in accounting for people to decipher. Sales where you only get the sale price if you're using NEW money and not just upgrading.

And it results in the SC Faithful revering Sandi as a marketing genius since she's the person that raised 170 million dollars for their dreams. It definitely isn't nostalgia and obsessive-compulsive disorder and sleazy marketing 101. It's because Sandi is a marketing wunderkind.

G0RF posted:

It’s honesty been a while since Erin, Sandi or Archer (!) have really been in the hot seat. Feels like Papy’s been made the heat sink for backer dreams this season in his new role. Poor bastard. Oh and Lando, too — laying it on thicker than ever, convincing no one, and leaving many of us nostalgic for the earnestness of the trueblood fanboy Lesnick.

Nobody here thinks Sandi does the Marketing nor have they for ages — she shows up for ATV, occasionally twitters, pursues the next cutting room floor gig with that indomitable drive of hers, drives away Marketing subordinates quarterly, and hits a stage twice a year to tearfully giggle before a crowd as if each new appearance was her accepting a lifetime achievement award for humanitarian work rather than being a big awkward reminder she’s still making fat bank for reading scripts about marginal progress underway for a game she cares not a whit about.

As for Erin and Chris, they both seem to be shrinking and retreating. Chris has pivoted back to Squadron oversight again so that should pretty much kill its hope of release in the next couple of years. Erin was supposed to be a confidence builder for the backers but at this point his machine gun stammer and worrying health signs just seem to heighten anxieties. He may be better off letting the Dukes of High Chill, Papy and Chambers, do the talking. Neither look like they’re about to grab their chest and start gasping — which is optically a more helpful look.

I don’t know how it looks from where you stand but it sure feels to me like 2017 was the year that the expansionist vision of Star Citizen surrendered to contraction and resignation, even though neither CIG nor backers are openly speaking of it. Capitulation is felt and seen everywhere even though old habits die hard and routines run habitually. It’s depressingly thin gruel for comedy sometimes but we do what we can.

CONSIDER THE LIVESTREAMERS

You can really see it on the regular fan livestreams. Redacted, Relay, the Captain’s Table, the Space Bro Show. Nobody is playing the release they spent a year and a half hyped to max about.

It’s widely agreed that 3.01 is unplayable. If it’s not the framerates, it’s the interdictions. If not the interdictions, the broken missions. So everybody’s jamming on Tarkov, Fortnite, Monster Hunter or something, anything else but Star Citizen during their daily streams and when they get together for their weekly discussions with other streamers, they theorycraft about 3.2, 4.0, “what I will do when (x) is in the game”, or they grouse politely about CIG’s gaffes of the last week. The old routines run out of duty, habit, compulsion — even though they rely on an assumption nobody really seems to believe anymore:

“The game will one day be fixed, fun and make possible all of these theorycrafted possibilities for gameplay I’ve been clinging to for years and do so better than all games that came before it.”

(Just listen to Erris on this week’s Relay craptalking about Bethesda’s supposedly terrible lockpicking mechanics and you’ll see him employ this when theorycrafting CIG’s better [but as yet totally undefined] way of implementing hacking in the game...)

The routines die hard, but even the longtime loyalists are exhausted, losing faith, watching the last dimly glowing embers of what was once white hot hope slowly crumble off as ash. Even if stability and performance weren’t such a brutal tax, the meager loops and frustratingly implemented play mechanics in the game are a drag as designed — a fact that guys like Luke Pressley at Foundry openly admit. There’s a huge burden to fix not just what is broken to make what isn’t broken Fun. In year 6.

Erris’s desperate pleading that “We need Chris, too” because “Chris gives me faith” a couple of weeks ago was a miserable drat sight; a dreamoholic with cirrhosis of the brain begging for a shot of the hair of the dog that bit him. Chris’s confidence helps Erris run the magic routine. But Chris is retreating, closing up, slipping away and he might as well, he may be symbolic source of hope for the dreamer collective but he’s the practical source of the project malaise just as Lucas was for the prequels.

Batgirl watched CIG revoke her backstage VIP pass right after they maximized the chance to squeeze it for a little extra CitizenCon 2017 hype — cold-blooded, considering how loyal she’s been and for how long. Now she’s venturing into constructive criticism.

Dan Gheesling said his pained goodbyes after explaining 3.0 didn’t have enough to keep either him or his viewers engaged.

BadNewsBaron wrote an essay of defense of Star Citizen on Medium.com a little while back, but he too has moved on quietly to new games.

Twerk probably didn’t realize the irony last week when he openly bemoaned that the bigger ships made for terrible FPS levels and it really needed fixing — he was only just now seeing problems that Heretic Beer4theBeerGod had written extensive warnings about three years ago. Good thing CIG drove out such voices and left the community a safe space for asskissers and theorycrafters — they’ll have only each other to feed on as they get exactly what they asked for all along, Chris Roberts’s unalloyed vision of the Best drat Space Sim Ever.

The malaise is everywhere — the sense that things have gone horribly wrong is widely felt though not widely acknowledged. It’s the subtext of nearly all discussions about the game between fans and streamers and even from CIG themselves yet never the text save for places like here, or Frontier forums, Derek’s blogs, the refunds subreddit, MassivelyOP or other little heretical outposts here and there. (There’s another very interesting one but I’ll write about that later.)

If the thread feels like a broken record, MoMA well, it’s in part because malaise has been the story here for years.

CIG really seems to be shrinking before our eyes and putting greater distance between leadership and the public than in the dumb ol’ days. Most of the energy and enthusiasm these days has shifted to arguing about the Crytek lawsuit because at least that has a wide range of possible outcomes and will make winners and losers of those playing prediction games. That game has no designer, it’s been improvised on the fly by critics and fans serving their time-honored roles on a new battlefield, yet even that game is a better game than Chris has managed to put out after $180 Million and six years of effort. Seems like that says quite a lot, little of it good.

I still enjoy your participation in the thread, MoMA. How you spend your money is your business and if you want to use big $0.25 words in effort posts I’m hardly one to throw stones. You do you, even if you like to rock the maybe more than you should and the not enough.

Xaerael posted:

IS A CITIZEN NOT ENTITLED TO THE JPEGS HE PURCHASED?

No, says Chris Roberts. That was a pledge, and no refunds. Game delivered.

ComfyPants posted:

Polygon: Star Citizen’s developers met with nation’s leading consumer protection group

Charlie posted:

Roberts’ team at CIG and RSI has become a target of abuse and harassment these past few years, because their game projects are not yet finished. This is despite their being supported by the single most heavily-funded crowdfunding campaign of any kind, on any platform, for any thing.

Virtual Captain posted:

“Since we are making Star Citizen with funds from our backers, we don’t feel we can currently use those funds for anything other than developing the game,” CIG said.

G0RF posted:

at Charlie Hall LARPing as investigative reporter.

Clackity-clack-clack DING!

“Is CIG AOK with the BBB — our team investigates because we’re keeping them honest!”

Clackity-clack-clack DING!

Get real, man. You’re a stenographer sitting between two PR flacks crafting a mutually negotiated press release meant to turn controversy to nontroversy. As usual.

Sarsapariller posted:

"HA!" I say, pounding the desk so hard that my keyboard launches into orbit harder than Elon Musk's last ride. "BBB says that Star Citizen is an A+ safety rating! Take that, Derek Smart." I grin and lean back in the security of my ten thousand dollar homemade sim pit, built specifically to play a game that doesn't exist. "How can you possibly come back against an ironclad endorsement like that?" I gesticulate wildly, knocking over the statue of the RSI Constellation MK IV, a cheap chinese piece-of-poo poo model of a ship that cost me one hundred real American dollars and represents an art asset that was refactored so many times that it no longer bears any resemblance to the thing I received, that I cannot even use in game, because the game doesn't exist. "Wait until I tell all the guys on discord about this gaffe! We're gonna bury Chris in money." I pull my Star Citizen t-shirt over my Squadron 42 t-shirt, which I embarrassingly had embroidered with "Answer the call- 2014" and knock aside my Star Citizen joystick, a rebranded Thrustmaster that Chris announced one year in a dream frenzy, endorsed by no less than POLYGON even, before quietly selling the sole demo unit on ebay- good thing I'd been there to snipe it before some unbeliever could! Spittle flying from my unshaven face as I really lean over my now rapidly discoloring Star Citizen mousepad, really getting into my rant, I continue. "drat goons have been trying to say this game can't deliver and is basically just selling us garbage but I think the Better Business Bureau knows a thing or two about selling garbage!" I hold my hand up to shield my Javelin poster from the deluge- it is one of a kind, a real-life representation of the $2,500 dollar spaceship that bought but cannot actually fly because the game doesn't function and the ship itself will never, ever be released; This precious real-life version of the sales brochure jpg is likely the only contact I will ever have with an item that cost me as much as a used car. "Star Citizen can only get better from here, you loving FUD spreaders!" I shout, now apoplectic with rage, so swollen with anger that the Star Citizen badge I have sewn on my Star Citizen track jacket pops off and busts through my monitor. In my paroxysms I accidentally knock my Star Citizen travel mug over and like the horseshit piece of crap that it is, it shatters, sending mountain dew into my expensive gaming rig. Sparks fly as I wave my tiny hands in anger.

I sigh, finally coming back down, and survey the ruins. "Oh well, I've got three or four years to build another computer before the game's really playable." I tighten my kickstarted belt. "In the meantime, I'd better go post on the SA thread. Sounds like some motherfuckers need to get defenestrated."

Breetai posted:

MOMA, I hope that someone cuts off your fenestrates.

...


Sorry. That last comment was a bit...

(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)

below the belt.

Pixelate posted:

Krycek posted:

It's a pledge, but is also an "order." How is an order not a purchase? On that's right, CIG is full of poo poo.

AP posted:

(tweet: Taking a break from #StarCitizen today. Star Citizen isn't dead, its just resting today.)

Malachite_Dragon posted:

Not dead, just resting. And gently decomposing.

G0RF posted:

Speaking of break takers...

I tried to watch Captain Richard earlier since he was one of the regulars I’d not checked on recently. I felt honestly bad for him. He was trying to slog through 12 FPS and perform a mission. Got a location for a cargo pickup on a moon. Noted for viewers that you can’t tell which side of the moon the location is on due to poor design cues (they’ll steal Elite’s broken line approach eventually, surely.)

He descended to his pickup location then almost bit the dust when he realized that oops, he’s on the wrong side after all. It was all soooooo joyless. Even if it had been 100 frames per second it would’ve been boring enough to put Sandro to sleep. Richard was speaking longingly of giving Kingdom Come a shot since AstroPub had hooked him up.

It’s sad that 3.1 is just around the corner and yet it seems like it’s a tourniquet more than much else. They’re losing their reliable streaming ambassadors left and right due to burnout, frustration, or self-preservation but honestly, given how miserable the play experience is right now, maybe the less people streaming it the better.

How there can be any organic demand for the game at this point is beyond me. The year end 11th hour miracle turnaround was suspicious enough but the holiday hype halo was brighter then. The Squadron livestream. The year end ship reveals. The habituated seasonal enthusiasm.

All are faded now... There’s no Gamescom this year, there’s a serious lawsuit that didn’t get slam dunk dismissed as theorycrafted, the streamers all have wandering eyes or feet. And this after CIG delivered the almighty game-changing 3.0.

TheAgent’s leaker or LARPer spoke of needing another $200 Million. Call me crazy here but if you’re at $180 Million and 6 years of work and still ain’t found the Fun yet, maybe that money would be better spent on game developers who make that a year one priority not a problem to tackle in late Beta?

Codezombie posted:

This is the game dev that never ends...
It goes on and on my friends
Some people backed because they didn't know it was
And now they'll pledge forever just because.

(Ad Nausium... )

The Titanic posted:

His ignorant belief of “why has nobody thought of this?” Got him where he’s at. Because people had, and likely threw his idea away 10 years ago as stupid. And he’s basically been rediscovering failure at every turn because of ego and pride at thinking he’s smarter than everybody else in the world. It’s a galaxy of hubris and he’s the star in the middle.

IcarusUpHigh posted:

Regarding the beautiful forests in Kingdom Come Deliverance:


They did the same with the Nemesis system from Mordor. Chris Roberts says "Oh we'll have that but it'll be even better" without any concept or thought into what it involves or the amount of work the programmers and designers went in to making it and balancing it...No, just a simple thing for the fans to go "Oh we'll have this as well!".

Cut my life into pieces.

posted:

Some of you may have heard of BitCoin, Etherium etc, and specifically Javascript based CryptoCurrency miners that can be embedded into a website enabling viewers on a website to earn coins for the owners of the site.

Using some back of the napkin math from this article, it is possible for a single user keeping a page open for a 24 hour period could earn ~60 cents or 1000 people each contributing for an average of 8 hours at a time could earn $190 per day for SC development. Assuming of course my math is correct.

would you take advantage of that to help continue providing funding to SC?

tuo posted:

Imo, Chris would say yes to anything, as long as it might provoke a backer to pledge more.

Backer: "Chris, do we have to load our cargo manually, or pay someone to do it, and watch it beeing done, instead of cargo just appearing as a number in a menu? Because that's very realistic!"

Chris: "Yes" *waves hands

Another Backer: "Chris, will I be able to buy cargo and have it transfered into my ship automatically, in a short amount of time, to have as much fun as possible?"

Chris: "Yes" *waves hands

Yet another Backer: "Chris, when I grow tomatoes in my veggie ship, and I choose to put a bulb with the wrong color temperatur over them, will the time I spend at light speed prevent them from getting leggy due to the color temperature beeing corrected?"

Chris: "Yes" *waves hands

Bootcha posted:

https://twitter.com/mjnairborne/status/963705588206198784

G0RF posted:

There are so many great writers in the thread and I feel grateful to contribute. I try to drop 10000 ft. editorial comments in often, in part for the silent lurkers and newer members who might not yet have a big picture grasp on the Counter-narratives we all take for granted at this point.

I remember when I first joined the thread. Mostly lurking, infrequently commenting. I’d heard things, seen some warning signs, but it was hard to get a handle on what was true because CIG’s Triumphalist Narrative was so dominant. Yet even before Derek launched his July blog there were warning signs, troubling indicators, online gossip, little intrigues. There wasn’t yet a true thread consensus — guys like Octopode and others saw “situation normal everything under control” while voices like AP, Beer, Bootcha, OhDearGodNo, Sorla78 were giving voice to far dimmer and more subversive theories. For me, the Zapruder film was the June 19th 2015 episode of Reverse the Verse. It captured the dichotomy perfectly — in the foreground, happiness and deference to the wonderful talented VP of Marketing. In the background, perturbation, disgust, intimidation. Even CIG eventually realized how dangerous it was and purged it from their archives, and there we see revisionism, suppression...

It very quickly became clear just by watching CIG’s propaganda reels that something really is wrong here and they don’t want us to know it. It was all shadows through dark glass back then, at least to me, yet now it’s crystal clear and brightly lit. You just have to care enough to educate yourself and be willing to commit to the effort and you’re rewarded with the decryption key to make sense of the incoherence and contradictions that define CIG’s schizoid tale.

Anyway, knowing that there are people visiting or lurking here who’ve lost faith in the Triumphalist view yet don’t really yet have a coherent counter theory together, I try to offer summaries here and there. I know I’m not enlightening the regulars by doing so but it’s easy to take for granted what might’ve taken years for regulars here to fully apprehend. I’m just only too grateful the master storytellers in CIG LA spent years too stubborn to change and too proud to back down because the years have been such a bounty of riches and the thread memory and archivists retain it all.

Many of histories heresies get reclassified as the unspeakable truths of their time and the thread’s will as well. It’s growing obvious to more and more despite the valiant efforts of the Charlie Halls, the David Swoffords, the Joe Blobers, the Gremliches and all the rest who keep fighting to hold the crumbling ruins of the old faith together. Sooner or later there’s too little left to even prop up; it’s just fools and liars pushing dust piles around until the winds finish the job.

Virtual Captain posted:

I had a very boring 3 hour skype meeting

boviscopophobic posted:

Oh hey there was that big hubbub over the Squadron 42 mailing list, wasn't there? How is that getting along?

... 31267 recruits?

... a recent average signup rate of 1.35 per hour?

At this rate it will take 18.4 years to get the in-game T-shirt reward for 250K signups. I'm a little worried that the Monday January 15 deadline might be in danger of being missed.

G0RF posted:

However badly I long to see and play it, Squadron 42 seems certain to go down as the very biggest mistake made by Chris Roberts in the last 6 years. It could’ve and should’ve been a cakewalk but with a wave of Chris’s wand he turned it into their costliest death march, and that’s no trivial feat considering. Tens of millions wasted and goodness knows how much time. They could’ve been used to improve their money maker but went instead to his money taker. ROI seems impossible at this point, a second game even moreso, and the demands still ahead just to get it to a releasable, Metacritic 60 state seem so onerous.

For what? Lawsuit trouble, mo-cap trouble, celebrity trouble, all at so dear a price for the hope at grabbing a very narrow slice of the PC gaming market.

Niche kitsch is all it needed to be but he mistook himself for an auteur genius with a story that must be told. Now we’ll be lucky if we see even a fraction of it and it’s a drat shame.

AP posted:

(tweet: If there's one thing that stands a chance at curing depression, it's Star Citizen!)

Scruffpuff posted:

https://twitter.com/RobertsSpaceInd/status/963594545802948608

These types of tweets probably get to me more than any other kind. They're the most arrogant kind of lie - without outright saying it, CIG implies with tweets like this that not only is the game nearly complete, it's also got layers and layers of fully functional, deep features. "While most pilots view..." makes it sound like there's a healthy pilot community in this game who are so sophisticated that they have "views" on different aspects of the gameplay. The separate mentions of "fuel, arming, and repair" do well to hide that none of those systems are in the game, nor are they designed yet. "Saving credits and time" implies the existence of a sophisticated economy including the time/money underpinnings required to make financial decisions.

With just one bullshit tweet, CIG makes Star Citizen look like it's been done for years, rather than being a model-viewer with no game design document or plans for such. These people can't burn fast enough.

Goons posted:

BEER: Well, Christopher, I made it. Despite your crowd funding site going down.

CHRISTOPHER: Ah. Superintendent Beer! Welcome.
I hope you're prepared for an unforgettable space simulator!

BEER: Mm. Yeah...

*CHRISTOPHER goes to check on his space simulator in another room. It is on fire.*

CHRISTOPHER: Oh, egads! My game is ruined!
But what if ... I were to employ Crytek to develop a demo and disguise it as my own game?
Delightfully devilish, Christopher!

*BEER walks in and sees CHRISTOPHER attempting to climb out the window*

CHRISTOPHER: Um...

♪ ♫ Roberts with his crazy explanations ♩ ♪
♫♩ The superintendent's gonna need his medication 🎝
♪♩ When he hears Roberts' hand waving exaggerations ♬♩
🎝♪ There'll be trouble on the forums tonight! ♪🎝

CHRISTOPHER: Superintendent, I was just- uh, just developing the game.
Isometric game development. Care to join me?

BEER: Why is there smoke coming out of that studio, Christopher?

CHRISTOPHER: Uh... Oh. That isn't smoke... It's fidelity!
Fidelity from the fidelitous space simulation we're developing!
Mmm. Fidelitous space simulators!

*BEER leaves the room*

*CHRISTOPHER shows BEER 1000 youtube videos*

BEER: "GOOD LORD WHAT IS HAPPENING BACK THERE!"

ROBERTS: "The best drat space simulator ever."

BEER: "The best-- The best drat space simulator ever? At this time of year? With this little progress? With this many promotional videos? Localized entirely within your game engine?"

ROBERTS: "Yes!"

BEER: "...May I see it?"

ROBERTS: "No."

GOONS: Christopher! Your game is shiiiiiiiiiiiit! HELP!!!!

CHRISTOPHER: No, goons! That's just the non-public build.

*BEER eyes Christopher suspiciously*

*CHRISTOPHER gives him a thumbs up*

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Star Citizen: Mouth-Watering Steamed Scams!

Cao Ni Ma posted:

Saying "enjoy your game" to a cultist is secretly a high level troll. You are demanding the impossible to them, and they know it. You couldn't enjoy SC two years ago, and its no better right now. Likewise, its no closer to being a game yet.

Virtual Captain posted:

The Road To Eternity team on team size:
"We try to keep the team as small as possible, figure it out first. Then once we enter production we can add more people to the team."


CIG on team size in (2014):

2014 Bootcha posted:

EdEddnEddy posted:

If anything you can say Chris has kickstarted a small economy with the number of people and talent he is hiring not to mention the equipment and facilities he is also having to buy/rent/lease. With all the money spent and people put to work, I really doubt he is going to let it all be for naught in the end. But at this point, its literally the gearing up phase that the game really needs to get some groundwork done and it really shouldn't be rushed since a lot of the game may end up being built on top of it. Hence the drive to make good netcode now rather than later.

I think the most I can say is this:

The first year was spent reeling from how much money was coming in. This year is about putting rubber to the road, and spending that money as best (not as fast) as possible. The sheer amount of art assets needed to fill in the game wasn't fully realized until mid-last year, at which point the Santa Monica office became firmly established and the other freelance studios were hired on to start work in earnest. There is a fuckton of ships to make for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, not to mention texture work, spites, human and alien avatars, animation (eased by the mo-cap studio), weapons (both FPS and spaceships), equipment, and flair. The fear last year was utterly blowing all the money on stupid poo poo that would take development down the road Double Fine encountered going over-budget on Broken Age, so spending was conservative (admittedly to a fault, if you consider the DFM delays a fault).

This all led to the current problem of not having enough staff to produce art and assets at the pace that pledgers/fans/fence-sitters wanted (and ultimately what Roberts wants as well). Pretty much a quarter of all the artists were working on modeling one ship, sending it up to Roberts for approval on a regular basis. If Roberts didn't like what he saw and sent it back, you have a quarter of your entire art department on a task that went nowhere, and no other new ship assets coming in until the team finished the current one after who knows how many more send-backs. Not just for ships, but guns, hangars, CGI adverts, clothes, anything that'd be up for public consumption in a hangar patch or YouTube video. Due to the requirement of having such high fidelity assets for SC/SQ42, fucktons of time are spent on detailing that in yesteryear could be solved with a fuddled texture over merged vertices. I mean, seemingly small stuff like landing gear goes under Roberts' microscope. You think we're spergs talking about how this ship look like poo poo because this and that, Roberts is the sperg king when it comes to details, and to his credit (or fault depending on which side of the workflow you're on) he does not let much of anything visual proceed without his approval.

NINJA EDIT: The above predicament isn't a bad one if you're producing at most 7 player small ships, 2 player-flyable "capships" and maybe 3 alien ships per race, with all the fidelity and flair promised. But all that was slated for the 6mil goal. Right now we're sitting at over 37.5mil. The project is WELL into double digit ships.

While programmers are still being hired, the work that has been done on the netcoding, back end, servers, and tools has been going very well. However coding and programming progress is such a hard thing to demonstrate without provided visualization, (sure there are those who would understand, but let's face it that'd reach maybe 20% of the audience as raw data dumps). Galway and Pedro continue to work on the music. Zane's got some stuff brewing. The Manchester office has hit the ground running and are taking on as much asset responsibility as Roberts will give/let/dump on them. With the massive art hiring going on, the pace should pick up such that more assets can be done alongside the primary milestone needs.

Game development. It's loving hard to do everything right.

Tinfoil Papercut posted:

I was surprised to see the date on that quote above being FOUR loving YEARS AGO considering it seems like a thing that could be said today.

Scruffpuff posted:

It's amazing to reflect on how far CIG hasn't come.

Dark Off posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWJy0jnFZE&t=204s
from this weeks bugsmashers

I wonder what is causing that crash.
Surely it isnt caused by CIG_hack_begin

Scruffpuff posted:

These types of tweets probably get to me more than any other kind. They're the most arrogant kind of lie - without outright saying it, CIG implies with tweets like this that not only is the game nearly complete, it's also got layers and layers of fully functional, deep features. "While most pilots view..." makes it sound like there's a healthy pilot community in this game who are so sophisticated that they have "views" on different aspects of the gameplay. The separate mentions of "fuel, arming, and repair" do well to hide that none of those systems are in the game, nor are they designed yet. "Saving credits and time" implies the existence of a sophisticated economy including the time/money underpinnings required to make financial decisions.

With just one bullshit tweet, CIG makes Star Citizen look like it's been done for years, rather than being a model-viewer with no game design document or plans for such. These people can't burn fast enough.

TheAgent posted:

welp Faceware Tech Inc is actually Cubic Motion

Executives
Faceware Tech Inc: Co-Founder CEO Dr Gareth Edwards
Cubic Motion: Co-Founder CEO Dr Gareth Edwards

Offices
Faceware Tech Inc: Santa Monica, Manchester
Cubic Motion: Santa Monica, Manchester

The Saddest Robot posted:

Chris Roberts: Would you like this fun, totally awesome sounding feature?

Backer: Yeah, that sounds interesting.

Chris Roberts: The backers keep demanding more features and buying things that I chose to sell to them. I am a powerless participant in this brutal cycle of insane promises and feature creep.

SomethingJones posted:

Has Derek's Smart' s criticism of Star Citizen gained credibility?

*points to 3.01*

Why yes, yes it has

The Kins posted:

I was reading a magazine article about the brief rise and prolonged fall of Looking Glass Studios, and this bit stood out:

G0RF posted:

YOUTUBE: Around the Verse - The Vulcan Hello

(No, I’m not kidding.)


you’re over 100 ships in a space sim set in a micro-verse with only 3 core mechanics. Well played.

A starter ship for those who long to be Space mechanic / refuelers / re-armers in the verse. (Note: game does not include refueling, repair or re-arming mechanics yet.)

So they’re once again mining Elite’s mechanics for guidance. Your drones (Limpets) get fired out to stranded ships to refuel, re-arm, repair them. I guess the dream of getting under the hood with a wrench and a golf swing mechanics to BE a mechanic will remain unsatisfied...

How does this tiny little drone carry enough fuel to refill big rear end space tanks?

Uh, okay.

Oh Paul, you have our sympathies.

Even Lando has a hard time shoveling this crap sometimes...

Sandi’s hair has a blue sheen this week. I like it. She and Chris are surprisingly giggly this week. Must be the buzz of Valentine’s Day romance in the air. A couple of crazy little lovebirds those two.

Preen Dog posted:

AbstractNapper posted:

I don't know how all these videos aren't people crying and apologizing for their incompetence and inability to make a game, but here we are, and there they are.

• If I admit the project is stalled I will be punished for it. Other people are responsible for the project being stalled. It's their fault I have to lie.
  
  
• If I am honest, the project will lose funding, and the backers will be even less likely get a game. I must lie to the backers to make them spend more for their own good.
  
  
• It's the backers fault for being so gullible. If they are not fleeced by us, they will be fleeced by someone else. Our scam at least has more merit than other scams.
  
  
• Cargo-cult gamedev theatre is what the backers really want. Optimistic promises are part of the experience they demand.
  
  
• Working on this project has hurt my employment opportunities, and I must lie to remain employed here. I am the victim.
  
  
• I'm not a liar fundamentally; I was made into one gradually by pressure from my boss and coworkers. Any person in the same situation would do the same thing.
  
  
• When the project tanks, the backers will become hostile to me. Every paycheque I steal from them is a righteous preemptive revenge.
  
  
• I am not functional enough to get what I want from life being honest. I like money and being on TV. If you don't want me to have these things you are the bad guy.
  

Thoatse posted:

amd's Letter is the pisstape of star citizen

Virtual Captain posted:

The AMD Letter will be bright, loud and glorious. It cannot be hidden forever.

AMD dude who is part the AMD game promo thing posted:

We're partnered with them [CIG], of course. We are. It's four months before E3 and we're getting our PC showcase set up. We're reaching out to get demos, sizzle reels, all kinds of different promo stuff. We hear back from a lot of people; there's some new stuff, new games, new partners, all that. Absent is a response from CIG.

Someone else here handles all that, she's calling and calling thinking there's some mistake or she's not getting through to the right people. It's now three months until the PC Gamer showcase and there's nothing on the table from CIG. She's trying to set up a conf call or a face to face with CIG and there's nothing solid set up.

She finally talks to someone over there and is assured we'll get a slice of scripted gameplay and some cutscene stuff with the big name A listers on the project. E3 is what, six weeks away? Maybe seven at this point.

A week later what we get a package with a disc, no explanation, table of contents, nothing. On it, there's nothing new, [its] a mashup of all their previous trailers. It's not even cut differently. We have the Hamil one, the Oldman speech, some fighters shooting things and some FPS segments that were lifted straight out of the last con they did. They're all just dumped into a "Promo" folder on a blu-ray.

She's thinking this is a mistake, they sent us the wrong material -- easy mistake to make, you throw in an old disc instead of the one you just cut, it got handled differently, an intern misunderstood what we wanted, whatever. So she calls them up again, no response, emails, nothing.

Two weeks later we get what is referred to around here as the "Letter." Capital "L" letter. The email is addressed to everyone high up at AMD, not even the gaming guys but the chip designers and the heads of departments. The PDF attachment is a rambling statement from Chris about how we're pushing him into something he doesn't think is necessary, he has a vision and that it's "too important" to be disrespected like this.

The decision was made to drop them from the show after that. Probably from our partnership as well, but that's above my head.

Beet Wagon posted:

Wait wait wait, what? You're telling me CIG copy/pasted a Type 6, called it a "starter ship" and now they're selling it for 185 loving dollars?

Jesus Christ lmao

boviscopophobic posted:

Scruffpuff posted:

2018 does seem to be the year to reclaim the narrative - most of what is visible coming out of CIG are efforts to that end. The employment counts (which only fool the very dumbest), the constant mentioning of features that don't exist in a context that makes it sound like they do (which fools new blood), and so on.

Of course if CIG had anything worth showing that would speak for itself. It's almost as if they're trying to draw attention away from "3.0", contrary to almost 2 years of effort claiming it would heal all ills.

Meanwhile Chris pours all resources into a bottom-tier "cinematic" shitshow that nobody asked for or wants, misappropriating funds in the funniest way possible. Backers have a fetish about getting robbed, and CIG delivers on that.

G0RF posted:

Their “road maps” are ad hoc ad absurdity and their “project plans” have the highest infant mortality rate in industry. Jeez Moma, how can you have been a thread participant since before the “Big MoMA’s House” day’s and at least not see that much?

Star Marine’s project plan: outsourcing project mismanaged, work unfit for use, Illfonic’s work trashed for a complete do-over.

Alpha 3.x: Roadmap unveiled at Gamescom 2016. 3.0 arrives a year late at 25% of the original Road Map’s scale.

Squadron 42: Watch Phil Meller talking with Wingman three years ago about them hoping to deliver the first 10 levels by the end of 2014 and tell me how great their project planning is.

Watch Brian Chambers tell Batgirl about how PG came along far earlier than planned, and when management saw it, the entire “limited landing zone” model of Planetary travel for Squadron and Star Citizen got thrown out. More Road Maps tossed on a rash “game!changing” impulse, more project plans dead in their cribs while newer ones were adopted.

I get that you’ve got a quota to meet but any attempt to weaponize Chris Roberts’ greatest weaknesses (project management) can’t help but harm the effort because it becomes it leads to self-ownage. CIG is not without its strengths but project plans and management are not among them.

posted:

Some interesting things about this week's changes. Some of the "Progress" On 3.1.0 comes from a reduction in total tasks rather than having had more tasks completed.

posted:

I love you SC, but I think we need to take a break.
You are beautiful and full of wonder and surprises. We have been though good times and hard times together. It is amazing to look back at where we started and how far we have come over these years. But I have had enough. Disappoinment has snuck in. There are nights when I cry myself to sleep. Something between us just can't be worked out right now. I do love you SC, but I think we need to take a break. I will let you know when I am ready to get back together. To be honest though, that time might not be until 4.0. Again, I love you. Good bye for now dear friend.

posted:

One of my worst SC gaming sessions in over two years of backing
6 of my org got together to play tonight and after about 20 crashes, a dozen suicides, and countless other issues, we surrendered. That’s the first time I remember our entire group being in a foul mood or quitting before midnight on an org game night. We love the team at CIG, but the current status is flat out bad and seemingly getting worse with each fix.

UNCUT PHILISTINE posted:

I love the disclaimers that always accompany anything approaching criticism

"playing this game is worse than boiled sewage being injected down my throat... But I love CIG and they're doing an amazing job!"

Virtual Captain posted:

MedicineHut posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCog7Tqsgpg&t=430s

Bug makes ship to quantum in reverse and player stays on the ride for several minutes (reaching 500 billion Km, equivalent to the distance from the sun to somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn). Towards the end you can see how everything jitters like mad. IANAGD but it seems to me a clear example of the 64bit jittery shenanigans if you are too far away from origin of coordinates?

Jump to 34:00 to see how jittery this gets. You can practically hear the code churning to update the pistols position every 2 seconds.

Avalanche posted:

Playing the gently caress out of Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) makes it really apparent that this game is never ever coming out.

KCD Cryengine jank is pretty bad, but I have yet to run into a situation where I couldn't get around a game breaking bug by loading a save 30min-1 hour back. It's still a game with a story that's really fun to play. The 1 vs. 1 combat is really really fun and Warhorse should consider making a standalone multiplayer version of it.

It seems like most of the bugs in KCD are due to Cryengine being a gigantic piece of bloated poo poo that can't handle anything larger than shoebox sized maps. The poo poo in KCD is even a little worse than Fallout 3 Gamebroyo jank. Somehow the KCD devs were able to 'kind of' work around all of this, but there's only so much even competent devs can do and I imagine they are now in a situation where they are saying to themselves: "gently caress, why couldn't UE4 been a thing back when we first started coding this game!"

SC has no loving hope.

Pilz posted:

THEY SHOULD HAVE CHOSEN AN ENGINE THAT WAS APPROPRIATE TO THE WORK THEY WERE DOING TO START WITH


THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO loving WORK AROUND IT

here's a loving hot tip for everyone: If you're making ANYTHING but a first-person or team-based shooter with small map sizes and a desperate, clawing need for *fidelity*, then you should not use cryengine! If you are, in fact, making one of the above, then you should. still don't use cryengine because there's a reason the company's gone bankrupt like eight times by now god loving damnit

PederP posted:

And yes, I am baffled by the KCD developers going with CryEngine. Wolcen is also using CryEngine - for an ARPG of all things, and it does not look to be doing them any services. I also think Lumberyard is dead man walking. The codebase is sick, and it doesn't matter that Amazon big bucks are behind it. I don't think they have any long term hopes for it. It's just a vehicle to work on their game server services. They can reuse the servers, protocols, etc. with different engines.

Fargin Icehole posted:

Throughout the years laughing at this game, the CryEngine thing is what puzzled me the most, because CryEngine as a whole might look very pretty, but has never really ran well, and even on the pretty side, it is a dated engine and the Unity and newly licensed Unreal 4 Engine are much more popular and less resource intensive.


This lawsuit brought the real reason to light. They used CryEngine as their preview on the condition that they will be using it to make the entire game. I keep thinking Kingdom Come had a similar situation only this time they actually released the game.

Scruffpuff posted:

What was promised on the Kickstarter was abandoned long ago. The shifting amorphous mass of bullshit that became Star Citizen, different in every backers' imagination, held the high ground for a couple years. Now, it's changed again, and nobody's really sure where this is going, but we can safely conclude a few things based on the observable evidence:

What's no longer a priority:
- Promised stretch goals
- FPS twitch gameplay "more lethal than COD"
- Flight model based on physics and realistic thruster modeling
- Any trapping of an MMO (combat, economy, repair, pirating, bounty hunting, PVP, PVE, core game loop, etc.)
- Any part of the PU not related to macrotransactions

What is still a priority:
- High-fidelity assets for screenshots
- Major-league macrotransactions
- Gameplay developments focused on monetization rather than gameplay
- Focus on SQ42

This is now SOTA in space. Gameplay will always take a back seat to macrotransactions; gameplay will be informed by which promises of ship "functions" will open the backers' wallets the widest. If they can't sell bounty hunting ships, but ambulance ships for some reason sell like hotcakes, expect all hands on deck to suddenly focus on ambulance mechanics. At least on the shows - they can't seem to do anything at all with the game code.

Virtual Captain posted:

Jobbo_Fett posted:

I just like seeing yellow posts.


Oh and bumping threads.

General Probe posted:

Easily one of the best and most important threads on the forum.

Facebook Aunt posted:

Same.

G0RF posted:

YOUTUBE: Calling All Devs

1) “When will Persistence log us back in to the last place we logged out of?” Chad McKinney (who seems like a cool guy) explains that it formerly did work via a Rube Goldberg machine of code but several changes to Persistence broke it and it will need to be re-fixed. McKinney says the fix will come by 3.1, yet in the wrap-up Lando — sensing the obvious, terrifying threat of unambiguous commitments to fix that which formerly worked via the next patch — helpfully corrects him, saying “You said it will definitely be in by 3.1 — I do wanna say ‘It is definitely our intention to have it in by 3.1.”

Lando knows the drill by now and negotiated their escape route in advance on the good chance that the re-fix for a much-needed feature which formerly worked doesn’t make it back in at the next fixed deadline.

2) “How will the mechanics for multiple character slots work?” - In a surprise twist, Lando dons his developer cap to answer this one himself. And the answer is basically classic Lando, invoking the challenges of ad hoc, er sorry, Active Game Development as precursor to a long punt of the feature into 2019 or beyond territory... 'no plans to implement multiple character slots in 2018'

3) “Are Scanning Mechanics, beyond salvage, in the works?“ - Lando further clarifies that this is a “When?” question, which Foundry UK dev Will Maiden deftly redirects via verbal judo, “When questions to the left please...”

FLASHBACK!
Now, let’s take a moment to revisit one of my favorite videos of the CIG catalog, The Road to CitizenCon, for a year and a half ago, a wonderfully telling exchange took place between Chris Roberts and Foundry’s Director of Cinematics Hannes Appell. Ironically, the viz guy was apparently proposing to the Game Director that they include some approximation of a Scanning system in their Sandworm demo. The demo was ostensibly about giving players a feeling for the wonders of 3.0 (). How perfectly typical that Chris — who was fixated at the time on nailing the realism of the fictive sandworm’s wriggling animations — comes across as disinterested in worrying too much about how they’ll depict an actual new mechanic needed for 3.x.

Here we are, a year and a half later and Scanning is finally on the design table. Chris Roberts could barely be bothered with Game Design for 3.0 back when they were supposedly hard at work on it. He just really wanted to wriggle his big fictive worm as fidelitiously as possible in the dazzle reel for 3.0. What a Visionary.
END FLASHBACK

Punchline to Maiden’s update, “I can’t really say when (Scanning)’s getting through but that’s where our heads are at at the moment for both Scanning and Mining.”

4) “Any news at all about the Banu Merchantman?” - 'Uhh bad news guys its not being worked on at all atm. We need more RESOURCES'

5) “Why do I have to go to Reddit, Twitter, etc. to find official answers that should’ve been posted on Spectrum?” Good question. Answer is “adaptive something something”. This answer is the longest one provided during this show, and not from a Dev but a Community Manager.

this leaves CIG 4 for 4 on non-commital replies with respect to release targets for features or ships the actual Devs were asked about.

“Keep doing what you’re doing, CIG!”

GORFisTYPING posted:

Eric’s Burndown duties represented the final step of what we’ve been now told is The Old Way of things, right? We were told by CIG directly that they were switching to quarterly releases because they didn’t want a repeat of the entire 3.0 cycle of misery. Burndown was a late chapter in that process, and somebody needed to do it.

Watching Ask The Devs is very different. Davis was explaining why something expected in late 2016 still wasn’t released. But Devs on Ask The Devs have the freedom to say (as Will Maiden did just this morning) “‘When?’ questions to the left please!”

Lando explained it further by saying that those who can answer the What? questions frequently aren’t those who can answer the When? questions. (In this case, Papy is probably the authority.)

This is very different than what Davis had to do because the When and What both had been declared in advance by Chris and proved painfully inaccurate. Devs weren’t given a chance to counter those claims yet surely none believed full Stanton by December 2016 was realistic.

I made note in my 9 Voices infographic of just how critical the Past and Future end up being in Star Citizen debates, and the distinction between what Davis was doing and what Maiden did today is a temporal one. Davis was explaining remaining impediments to hit a Past target long missed. Maiden (or Papy, or whoever) have the freedom to say “we don’t have a date yet”. Surely you see the distinction?

Of the first 4 answers given on today’s “Ask a Dev”, we saw that freedom liberally exercised:

1) Chad McKinney said they hoped to have Ship Persistence on logout back in by 3.1 but Lando reminded people it was their intention not a commitment to deliver.

2) Lando said Multiple Character slots were not a 2018 target.

3) Will Maiden talked plans for Scanning mechanics yet expressly declined to talk When.

4) Kirk Tome said he didn’t have any dates to give on the Merchantman.

If it’s not clear, I consider this a positive.

quote:

I know there is this overwhelming fantasy amongst many critics that publishers are a necessary requirement for games to stay on course and on budget - but they're also the greatest failing to advancement of gaming by only focusing on profit and marketability over all else.

quote:

Publishers have cost the gaming community many potentially great games because instead of making all the money they'd only make some of the money. We have a bunch of gamers willing to put their money where their mouth is and essentially give someone a chance to build the game they and we want.

Well now you’re getting a little surly, Cymelion, and I’m not sure why. I’m not many critics and I’m not subscribing to false dichotomies.

I reject absolutist claims about Publishers Pro or Con. As horrifying as it might sound to admit, some of the greatest games I’ve ever played have actually been put out through the traditional Publisher / Developer model. What say we of all the wonderful titles of the last 3 decades? That they were all compromised by the corruptions of the process? Of course not.

Inversely, what day we off all the Crowdfunding failures? The recent SystemShock setbacks? The myriad disappointments of SOTA? The absence of a Publisher didn’t guarantee them anything and may have cost them some decent counsel. In SystemShock’s case, a Publisher might’ve said “stick to the plan you pitched and stop trying to reinvent what you originally intended to just remaster.”

Crowdfunding is such a recent disruption to the old model that anyone who has played games as long as I have (since loading them of cassette tape on a TI-99/4a) has countless memories of perfect, wonderful gaming experiences produced by the traditional model.

In some cases, Developers released masterpieces and even credited Publishers for their patience, largesse or for believing enough in their scrappy little title to push it to massive retail distribution making both parties successful.

Are EA and Activision greedy? Hell yes. Has their greed screwed up things? Absolutely. It kills me just badly they botched Battlefront 2— and maybe you as well. That’s a perfect example of Publisher interventions pissing away a dozen incredible advantages — the talent of DICE, the power of Frostbite, the Star Wars franchise itself, the Battlefront legacy — Publisher greed made a damning botch of what should’ve been a home run for all of us who love Space Games and a pox on them for that

So here we are. Publishers can be great or terrible. Crowdfunding can be liberating or lackluster. But broadsides about either are easily falsifiable and no more appropriate for conversation than hatchets are for surgery. They’re crude, blunt tools where precision instruments are required; required because we need sharp points and clean cuts to make good work of the job. And the job here is not choosing between a false dichotomy of Publishers vs Crowdfunding, the job in this subreddit and discussion is very specifically about the good and bad of Star Citizen’s Development history. I think despite being a Goon I have a pretty good handle on both and even in my comments in this discussion and other reddit and SA ones I’m not stingy with praise of the good.

On that matter, I assume you know my position of things but if it isn’t clear by now I’d like to be explicit. I’m not one throwing hatchets as CIG wholesale and hoping to cause as much damage as I can. I’m no troll and no hater. Ask any Goon and they‘ll tell you I don’t root for the failure of Star Citizen, I’ve always been more than happy to praise developers and have written many a kind thing about specific employees over the years because the good works deserve praise even at our dead comedy forums just as surely as bad deeds (dishonest marketing, overpromising / underdelivering, Orwellian moderation, etc) deserve condemnation here.

Clive Johnson CIG posted:

For the first-pass version we'll probably divide the Stanton system into sections and have one server manage each section. So we might have a Port Olisar server, another for Yela, and so on. Migration between servers would only happen as players QT from one location to another (although if you had the patience to do so you would also be able to fly between servers at sub-quantum speeds). We won't be connecting game servers across server regions (US, EU, etc) in this version. It also seems likely that each server region will still have multiple instances of the Stanton system.

Obviously this is a much simplified implementation compared to what we eventually want to achieve but it is still complex enough that we will need to deliver several key pieces of the technology. First among these is the ability to connect multiple game servers in the same simulation. Next, seamlessly transitioning entities and clients between servers. We'll also need changes to our backend services to keep track of which players are on which server and determine when they need to transition to another. The services may also have to handle spinning up and shutting down new game servers on demand, as we'd like to avoid running a server for a section (e.g. Daymar) unless some players are actually there. Finally, game code will most likely have to undergo some changes to ensure that things like missions and the economy continue to function correctly even though the entities involved may be spread among multiple servers.

Once the initial version has been put through its paces we will continue to improve and refine the technology with future pre-alpha releases, incrementally bringing us closer to the final goal of a single shard universe.

Sectopod posted:

at them admitting that they have to rewrite (again) most of their backend code to enable even the most basic form of inter-server connections. It's as if they wrote their current system without any planning of how this byzantine mess of code would work with this fabulous "server-mesh" technology.

Chin posted:

"what we eventually want to achieve"

D_Smart posted:

So they're no longer building the MMO as promised.

My take on this recent hilarity:

ANOTHER LOFTY PROMISE BITES THE DUST
Even though Chris Roberts stated back in 2012 that they were not building an MMO, over the years, after figuring out that the only way to continue ripping off backers was under the premise of building an MMO in which they could fly their chariots, live a virtual life etc – now it’s back to square one.

They are now – at this stage – claiming that they are going to be implementing a hybrid method of how Elite Dangerous handles its massive world – in a client-server environment. I ran out of lols.

Chris Roberts – AUG 5, 2016 posted:

“We’re going to have this mesh of servers, so we’ll be able to have – hopefully you know – a large amount of players all in the same area, so we don’t have to instance it in a way that originally we were thinking we were gonna have to instance it; we have a kinda different kind of server design now that could potentially have thousands of players all in the same sort of area – uhm at the same time; which would be really cool cuz that’s something – again – something you could get a while, a year ago or ten years ago, but with sort of the newer tech, the power of machines, uh, the kinda stuff you can do in the cloud, the possibility has sort of opened up, we wanna utilize it.”

Now, seven years in, and almost $180M raised, these chuckleheads are basically rolling back the clock to 2012. They finally realized they can’t do what they promised, due to how they designed the game, as well as the features they have been touting, while hobbled with a sub-par engine and a woefully inexperienced dev team who have never built anything like this

So basically, that’s the end of 1000 player instances. Assuming they can solve the performance issues in the game and the networking – which they can’t – they would be lucky to have even 16 clients in an instance. And if they stick around long enough to even manage connecting instances to each other, ask yourself this: How on this God’s Earth are they going to handle restrictions on the massive ships in the game and keeping them from transitioning instances? Imagine two capital ships in instance A, now connecting those players to instance B which also has even more of those. And here you thought they were ever going to solve performance issues. Good luck with the grouping. LOL!!

They keep making promises in order to keep kicking the can down the road in order to get the gullible backers giving them money. The “game”, how ever it turns out by the time the whole thing collapses, will never – ever – be the MMO+ they promised. Not only have they just confirmed it, but they’ve basically also now confirmed that it’s going to remain a session based instanced game, which hopefully they will figure out how to connect instances to each other. Hopefully.

It’s hilarious when I think about it because back when we were designing Line Of Defense, I knew this was going to be a problem. That’s why we designed the network (Wide Span Global) the way that we did, while partitioning the game world with controls that allow us to restrict the number of clients in a scene. This is the sort of thing you build from the ground up – and right from the start. You just can’t tack that on at any time. Most especially when using an engine like CryEngine and it’s derivative Lumberyard – neither of which were designed for MMOs (those who tried, found out the hard way).

They have yet to build a SINGLE star system. They’re still screwing around with a couple moons in Stanton.


The Crytek lawsuit has revealed a lot of previously unknown things about this project – and there’s a LOT more to come from what I have learned. For one thing, we learned that Crytek – not CIG/F42 – built all the tech demos that they were passing off as the “game prototype”. So, if you saw this Kickstarter update of Nov 18, 2012, and you were wondering why it looks and plays so differently, it’s because it was – again – created by Crytek as a proof-of-concept tech demo used to inspire confidence and to sell the “game” to backers. Chris and his crew passed it off as the game prototype.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

They're avoiding admitting it because what they're implementing is the exact same loving thing they said they would do back in 2012. The original scope was instance-based with scenes roughly the size of an Arena Commander match. You go into, have a dynamically generated encounter designed to be more narrative and immersive than the relatively sterile approach from Elite, and then when the instance was emptied the resulting information would be applied to the primary database to generate more encounters.

Unfortunately Chris never fleshed things out sufficiently because he's an incompetent hack with a toddler-grade attention span and most of the competent developers who were around when this concept was viable left to make actual games for actual game companies.

Beet Wagon posted:

I can't tell you how many posts I've made or seen guys like Beer make on reddit going "Dude, you guys know they're just gonna end up doing instances, right?" only to get literally bowled over with people actually furious that you'd dare impugn Chris Roberts's honor.

CR and his crew sold Star Citizen as revolutionary, as a universe that's the next best thing to whatever they call that dumb bullshit in Ready Player One. Every time they have to make an announcement of a shortcut they're taking or a feature they're cutting, it reminds all the backers of the reality: it's just a game. There's nothing revolutionary about it, and it's not gonna change the world, and that's not what they've been telling people for years.

Virtual Captain posted:

Fangrim posted:

Now I am wondering... What does Chris Roberts think when he boots up SC and see the shitfest it is?

* snip *

If TheAgent's leaks are anything to go by^{(1, 2)} Chris expects backers to continue funding the project indefinitely. I don't think they will, but they are very stupid.





Taking into consideration everything they've shown publicly, I believe strongly the progress on the game as pitched is 0% done. Except maybe 3D assets; but even in that case, they seem to have gone with a very manual process that doesn't scale at all. Artists spend literally years perfecting the appearance, damage states, animations, etc. In the recent AtV this artist talks about manually placing all the different wires and spark effects that you'll see when a section blows off. Uhhh What!? If you have a hundred ships left to do wouldn't it be wiser to make a handful of 'critical damage here' effects and apply them as needed? Imagine painting blood on every possible damage location for a counter strike character. It wouldn't make sense right? Same principle, just apply the decal anywhere damage impacts. Does Chris think that wouldn't be detailed enough? Perhaps that is difficult to impossible with the vehicle model in CryEngine? I don't know the answer.

Ok let's pretend you wanna spend another four years pixel perfecting every ship because your boss is an incredible sperg who thinks there is no limit on scope, scale, or funding. The other scalability problem becomes apparent, once you get a couple of these 100,000 poly ships on screen, the client and/or server start making GBS threads themselves. You just destroyed the possibility of massive player battles everyone is expecting by putting more emphasis on the art than the gameplay design. Backers will of course handwave this away thinking all performance problems can be solved later. That is a fantasy of software optimization, There are a multitude of reasons as to why you can't simply bolt on better perfomance if the design is poor or bloated.

PederP posted:

Indeed. Anyone with actual (non-trivial) development experience knows that there is a certain point when it becomes harder and more expensive to optimize. And that point is long past on Star Citizen. I wouldn't mind if Chris and Co. admitted that they are accruing technical debt and making the final product more expensive, in order to make money now and keep the project alive. But admitting that would cause the whole house of cards to collapse, so they're cultivating this weird notion that they're sitting on in-progress revolutionary technology, when in fact they're sitting on a pile of hacks and kludges, that will either have to be thrown away or infect anything put on top. This is becoming increasingly obvious even to non-tech savvy outsiders, leading to backers becoming increasingly isolated in a greater gaming community that once had a fairly positive outlook on the future of this project, but now, at best consider it an unremarkable P2W game in the making, and at worst a downright scam.

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

In you go, thinking you have a handle on some part of the project, right? You have this thing nailed and yet it's totally gone when you get in. Tons of problems, that. You see it across every department, yeah? When one thing finishes climbing the stairs, Chris kicks it back down. Dragging it back up again and again, you feel like you've climbed a skyscraper but you're still on the first floor. Over and over. Some type of special developer hell, that. Some special circle, yeah? *laughs*

The thing that pisses me off most about that is how people defend it as Chris "being a perfectionist." First of all, even if you could take that at face value, it's just bad management all around. If Chris were so loving perfect everyone under him would already have effective marching orders and work being redone would be the exception, not the rule. Second, Chris is about the least perfect person I can think of. What does "perfection" mean to an idiot? If Chris is such a perfectionist, why has everything CIG has released suck so bad? I'm not a perfectionist, but I'd have been embarrassed to release anything CIG has released so far. I'd be hiding under a goddamned rock hoping it all just went away.

Which means either Chris is not a perfectionist like his defenders claim, or the freak show that is Star Citizen is his idea of perfect. Perfect poo poo.

kw0134 posted:

You can show me individual components, you can show me assets, but you have no way putting it together into a cohesive product. To steal someone's analogy, you showing me a complete car door with fidelitious window and latches doesn't put you 5% closer to a flying car. It puts you 0% of the way there because the important things are not only incomplete but physically impossible. The tracker is predicated on there being connective tissue between everything, but there's nothing there.

Others have made this point, but what they're trying to build has zero relation to what they've sold. Photoshopping brochures for an apartment at the top of a thousand story building, selling the different drawer pulls for the home of your dreams while the project site is a sand pit.

Virtual Captain posted:

TheAgent posted:

"Nothing is voluntarily bad. Except Star Citizen. lol what a stinker"

--Socrates, Tweeting to his Students 1/52, Prior to Blog Entry

posted:

Im disgusted by the incompetent moron running the show and annoyed how such a great concept can be completely f-ing mishandled right from the start in so many ways all at the full expense of the backers. Theres no excuse for where this project currently stands. No matter what fans care to claim, if it was a game and not a complete mess mired in perpetual development hell (thanks CR) I just might buy it. As it stands IMO CR has run out of fingers to stick in the dyke. Poke me IF, and its a huge IF this project ever becomes a solid cohesive and fun experience, but as of right now and for the long foreseeable future Im not giving money to fund this jackass' mismanaged dream, but by all means you kids have fun with it. SC just cant sustain itself at this rate, an imbecile could realize this sad but true fact. Space opera? Ok if you say so. Currently Id equate it to a tragic comedy.

Scruffpuff posted:

There are so many clues if you play on the PTU, or watch any of the footage, that this game was created, from the ground up, by people who have no idea how to do this, led by a thumb who actually has negative knowledge of how to do it. I've seen poo poo on the PTU happen that I've never seen before - things break in ways I didn't even know they could break. You watch these little jitters and problems and think "wait, the only way that could happen is if... no, that's can't be it..." but that thought you push back, that thought you can't let yourself have because you can't allow yourself to think they could possibly be that stupid.

They are that stupid.

Virtual Captain posted:

posted:

instead of normal instancing where youd see people disappear, your client would receive information from both servers, so you would still see people even if they are in a zone handled by a different server. and not only that, you could fire projectiles at them, seemlessly transfer onto their server, etc. it has to work this way or else it would affect gameplay negatively once they make it dynamic. If it works perfectly you wont even notice that its there. Its obviously quite difficult to get to that point tho.

The only game ive seen using this tech is another crowdfunded game that is currently in developement. they use static zones tho.

That is an impressive level of delusion. There are reasons server transfers are hidden behind loading screens or long hallways. I have doubts it is even possible with CryEngine.

I really recommend pointing and laughing. Trying to converse with backers is an exercise in frustration. Even if backers collectively agreed the project was in jeopardy, they have ZERO control over Chris. A thousand screaming nerds were powerless against land sales and the referral contest. Beer called it:

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

At this stage it doesn't matter. There is no game. There never will be a game. There will only be a continuation of CIG's failures, incompetence, and pathetic mismanagement until the money runs out.

Experimental Skin posted:

I've seen this often in my line of work. People such as him don't have any particular strong artistic talent and cannot accept anything, concept, work in progress or whole, with out altering it in some fashion so they can rationalize the "I Made This" cloud they function in.

Some mistake this pathological meddling with perfectionism. It's not even close.

His psychology is so damaged in this fashion, he can't function in his "Game Visionary" persona without this constant poking and prodding at other peoples work and ideas, simply to appear to be the one in charge. He does not know what he is doing, so this is all he CAN do.

quote:

CHAPTER I Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you
disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he
questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your
point.

We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a
strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some
investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of in-
genious defenses with which people protect their convictions,
managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating
attacks.

But man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a
belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole
heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief,
that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose
that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable
evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The indi-
vidual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more
convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he
may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting
other people to his view.

G0RF posted:

Gabe Newell’s son plans a Space MMO called Fury; cites Star Citizen, Titanfall as partial inspirations.

quote:

He said this game idea is inspired from some concepts from Titanfall, Spore, Garry's mod, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. But specifically mentioned he's more inspired by Star Citizen to me. He did an AMA in the comment section on the Youtube video. But he's also planning an AMA in 9pm EST on Twitch

VealCutlet posted:

posted:

"we're planning on having it be open world with planetary exploration and player created cities and objectives."
* Raises eyebrow *

posted:

Watching the stream now. It's... difficult to listen to. He's clearly a passionate SC fan and gamer, but he's got very little experience or clout.

Zombie Squared posted:

Is there actually someone with the username GORFisTYPING? Because if so you are definately funding Lowtax's ritzy lifestyle.

Zombie Squared posted:

Is there actually someone with the username GORFisTYPING? Because if so you are definately funding Lowtax's ritzy lifestyle.

G0RF posted:

It’s my Reddit account for Goon diplomatic efforts. It feels futile and not especially goonish but I’m going to keep at it in hopes I occasionally change a mind here and there...

G0RF posted:

It’s my Reddit account for Goon diplomatic efforts. It feels futile and not especially goonish but I’m going to keep at it in hopes I occasionally change a mind here and there...

Bootcha posted:

Iymarra posted:

Any word on why Bootcha stopped uploading videos?

I don't know if this is an answer.

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiSIFjmPYy4 (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy Interlude 1: Salt Cook Travesty)

The Titanic posted:

https://twitter.com/SHACKLETON_ENT/status/966058536345116673

“Hello legitimate Star Citizen game players! It’s me, also a legitimate Star Citizen game player! I’m here with yet another totally not paid for article that looks suspiciously like marketing but haha, I am only a legitimate Star Citizen game player doing this on my own without being paid by CIG!”

posted:

Stop building ships and move those resources to finishing this drat game

posted:

im going to rant based on this bit of news on the interweb is true and not bs so if it turns out to be bs just ignore me.
cig if bind culling isnt going to be in 3.1 dont loving bother releasing a loving patch as no matter what you put in there it wont change the fact that many of us cant play whats there due to all the issues.
you made your selves look loving retarded not going with a 2.7 patch and pushing on with a 3.0 patch that was stripped down and then performance was loving poo poo in 3.0 (due to extra load of the map and more players) imo upping the player count to 50 people was a mistake being it had a massive negative effect on the player base. i get it dev takes time but keep telling us an update the game desperatly needs is in the next patch only to be pushed back to a later patch then pushed back to a later patch and so on is a joke.
you have been doing it since 2.6.1 how about dont list it and drop it in when its done. oh and you may as well push the reclaimer back as well, as soon as 3 people spawn theres in at the same time the servers will take a poo poo due to there size and if i wanrted to play at 0 fps i would turn my pc off.
im guessing that being pushed back has pushed all the planned improvments back so thats another 6 months of not playing/testing the game

posted:

It's not a matter of how long poo poo takes, it's them never meeting expectations. Cig hasn't met a date in literally years. Delays, major delays, should be the exception not the rule. I'm sick and tired of looking at a new and "more transparent" schedule, reading the loving caviots and thinking "this time for sure." Seriously, how can anyone be this bad at predictions? Surely they'd eventually get it right by sheer luck, but no. And this isn't even major content, it's a vital fix needed to make the game playable.

SomethingJones posted:

Network bind culling was in their schedule in June 2017, it "just missed" 2.6, was 1/10 tasks completed in Jan 2018, went up to 7/10 tasks completed in Feb 2018, and is now back to 1/10 tasks complete and pushed out to 3.2

They haven't touched it. Every single schedule, roadmap, powerpoint slide and every single date given by CIG has been pure fiction without exception.

posted:

In an effort to White-knight this game you missed the point and are trying to distort/spin it in a positive way for CIG.

Bind-Culling was suppose to be released in 2.6.1 hell, I think it was suppose to come out earlier.

posted:

It's not that I'm not patient. Patience is my middle name. I don't care if the game will not be playable until the end of the year, I have other stuff in my life to do in the meantime (I'm studying medicine, I don't know if I'll have time at all, not to mention play SC).
As I watched the last ATV episode, I got a big slap in my face - Chris Roberts has a huge problem as a visionary and a director of this game.
You can shout "Fidelity" as much as you want. This is not fidelity, its straightforward a man who do not know when to stop, and what's important to have that game finished eventually.
At this current path, we'll never see a finished product.
Why in the hell do you need to keep all of the NPC's inside a ship all the time active, even if you're not looking at them? (or more specifically, not in the same room with them)
Why do you make them look at every unimportant imaginary hole in the ship?
Why make hundreds of your employees do unnecessary overcomplicated work and basically guarantee that it will never end?
Some more examples: - Wildly-over-complicated "Item 2.0". Really? is it necessary to disassemble every pixel in a ship/character/element to a component with sub-items?
Every screen HAS to have a function?
Ridiculously over-analyzed schedule of every NPC?
Who gets to process all of that information? my average computer or NASA supercluster mega processing farm?
Nobody (in this case, just me in the meantime) cares if the NPC's on a ship have a life, as long as I don't see them (or see them exactly 5 seconds). Why make them still doing stuff while its not IMPORTANT? This is the reason its taking too much time. THIS IS UNIMPORTANT. And it's only the tip of the iceberg.
SC and S42 COULD have been finished and RELEASED until now.
But no, we still don't have a brand new shiny system, that make every NPC in the game itch his head, because of lice in hair, so we don't get enough FIDELITY. They might feel uncomfortable while talking to us! (excuse my sarcasm and over-exaggeration, it's only to make a point)
I have plenty of respect to Ms. Roberts. He did what nobody else could have until now (unless we compare him to Elon Musk, Hm..). BUT, from the beginning it was apparent that he have a Future-creep Issue. I thought that he will calm down eventually, but no, the appetite grew stronger. I predict that we'll get some kind of playable content (working playable content, unlike the current state) only in about 2 years from now. And even then, it still will be Pre-Pre-Alpha.

**Disclaimer: Just before everyone downvote me into oblivion because I have the audacity to raise some criticism and concern, let me just say - I've invested well above 500$ in this game until last year. No, that's doesn't makes me an owner of CIG, I KNOW. I've been following this project since day 0, well before it even started- since the days of Freelancer I was waiting for this game to happen. I only talk because I care.
Thank you.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

The Titanic posted:

The magic of Star Citizen is as if backers got a peak behind a magic trick to see the magician is just hiding behind a mirror and didn't actually vanished into a tiny box. But then they willfully stop looking and return to the other side and gasp “he’s in the box!!! How did you do that!!!???” and pretty much repeat this process infinitely, constantly paying to see the same fake trick over and over.

Nonononono.

Its like your sweaty, smelly, unlikeable uncle doing the coin-behind-the-ear trick to you except its the fifth time this hour and you're running out of quarters to give him.

quote:

im concierge Star Citizen redchris18 but you can call me Legatus Navium. i first started buying ships when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of "immersion" and buying Star Citizen ships constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like "you know... PHYSICS PROCESSING" and "LAY the CODE" in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing my hands clip through things etc, basically stimperial schizophrenia. im now seeking a refund. i always wondered what the "server mesh" actually was all about; i think it's the power of machines leaking in to the cloud, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenic and schizotypal syptoms. i would advise all people who buy multiple ships a week to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to being scammed. parp.

Scruffpuff posted:

Worth Clicking: Something Awful: Star Wars: Galaxies and the Joy of Being a Big Dumb Baby

It discusses the allure of a new MMO before people fully understand the game systems. The appeal of the unknown when everything still seems possible, because nobody knows any better yet.

This article really nails down exactly why the backers act like they do. They're in permanent "anything is possible" heaven. With no game coming out, they'll never crash to Earth.

TheAgent posted:

(tweet: I'm constantly amazed by those people who are calling the #StarCitizen flight model "unrealistic" -- it's amazing to see just how many people have been to space and have piloted such a large number of different spacecraft that they've become this qualified to judge the system.)

yeah the realistic flight model of crashing into a planet surface at 400m/s and bouncing off like a squeak toy cannot be proven or disproved until the year 3000

posted:

$3,300.00
is actually not that much, if you compare it to the War Pack, or Completionist Pack, or any of the previous Mega packs.

G0RF posted:

Meller stuck reading cue cards like a Taliban hostage.

D_Smart posted:

We like Phil. So it bothers me that I was laughing so hard at the fact that they have a LEAD DESIGNER reading off a f*cking cue card during an update on a project he SHOULD know about.

MilesK posted:

SQ42 lookin sexy

https://i.imgur.com/85j7DMs.gifv

Virtual Captain posted:

D_Smart posted:

I'm the debug info where an NPC has like 6 or 7 states. Hygiene? For an NPC? Like no loving wonder they can't get a game - any game - done.

Hygiene is being tracked for every NPC? On the client? That sounds nuts.

Let us remember what Chris said concerning showering
2014 Chris: "if you don't shower for a while some NPCs won't want to talk to you 'cause you smell"

I'm having one of those they can't possibly be this stupid thoughts here. Track that on the player, if this is somehow still something you want in the game. If you want it on every NPC, do it on the server and query during conversation. Don't burden the client with this stuff for every NPC on the ship. The only thing I can say in their defense is that obviously this is a Squadron 42 mission. But if they're sharing code heavily between the two? (As often speculated) They're bonkers because that's going to need syncing with the server. Dumb, bad, shtawp. I had the illegal thought, help.


I'm guessing they are using whatever default conversation system CryEngine provides and just plugged in Hygiene like you would Charisma. The client just needs it all the time. lol. None of this has been thought through at all. babby's first Crysis mod.

XK posted:

The hygiene interacts with the argon, so It's important they get these systems in early.

PederP posted:

Regarding "bind culling", there is an actual reason for the idiosyncratic naming. In CryEngine the term "bind" refers to the process of delegating control of an entity to some other authority, such as a script, physics, AI, or a server. In the case of a network bound entity, the server will handle all state of the entity and synchronize with all connected clients.

Out-of-the-box CryEngine doesn't have any granularity for this. You send all updates to all clients and there is no way to vary update frequency by importance, distance, etc. So CIG want to "cull" the updates of distant/unimportant entitities. There are several ways to accomplish this - but they all hinge on adding more fine-grained control over synchronization of entity updates. I would think "bind/unbind" refers to synchronizing on a per-player basis, completing turning on/off updates of irrelevant entities. "Bind culling" refers to controlling the frequency of updates on a per-player basis.

Normally when engineers use very technology-specific names for such things, marketing and community management will translate it in more generic terms. But sometimes the terms bleed into common usage - "Unit Frames" from World of Warcraft is an example. There are no "units" in WoW, but it was based on the WC3 engine, so a Unit Frame is the healthbars of a character or monster.

Bind culling should have been named something with advanced entity synchronization, selective update frequency, or similar. But I agree that marketing has recognized the benefit of having a unique name for a very mundane problem. The technical newspeak helps create the illusion of innovation and mask the actual problems with just how ill-suited CryEngine is to handle the PU.

The Titanic posted:

posted:

I feel like this is probably how the year will be shaping up. Quarterly releases, but with everything substantial gradually moving one patch along until it all piles up into one big dump at the end of the year.

So basically the same as last year, only this time instead of pretending there's going to be one big update that continually fails to appear, we now have four smaller patches that will appear but fail to have anything in them.

PederP posted:

CryEngine/LumberYard does have culling at the render level, but the clients and "server" (which is essentially a modified client running on their end) are getting CPU-choked from redundant entity state synchronization and physics simulation.

Their network engine doesn't support ANY KIND of culling. That's why they are talking about replacing state synchronization and remote method invocations with custom code. They're still coding the building blocks needed for actual distance-based culling / interest management. If bind culling ever arrives, nothing will improve, there will be tons of new bugs, and a new jesus network feature will take its place.

PederP posted:

The thing to understand about StarEngine Bind Culling™ is that it's not an optimization, it's a core engine feature, and one that is a hard requirement to ever make this more than a CryEngine mod masquerading as a space MMO.

It's not network culling, it's not interest management, it's not innovative, it's been in every single MMO since they grew out of MUDS.

It's embarassing that they're hyping the work on this as a "good thing", but it's impressive how they can turn this very "bad thing" into marketing spiel

G0RF posted:

I had this playing in the background last night while Overwatching. To hear Erris recount at some point how people like he and his were putting CIG’s feet to the fire for missed dates and disappointments was just too much. More like they’ve held Chris’s buttcheeks to the lips after drinking Love Potion #9.

More noteworthy — and stated in The Captain’s Table as well — are concessions on the part of these stalwarts of faithfulness of getting burned out on the game. I was too busy junkratting to note the time stamp, but I’ve heard this confession on multiple streams in the new year.

It’s not that we don’t know they’re burned out — they’re not playing the game even on their streams. They’re playing Tarkov, Sea of Thieves, KCD and other honest to goodness games even though so often we’ve read / heard the refrain “Star Citizen has more content than most AAA games I’ve played!”

Even as it’s becoming safer to admit sheer exhaustion from the 6 year cycle of overpromising, underdelivering, and theorycrafting to fill the yawning gap between the two, the old habits die hard. The shows spend very little time seeking anything like accountability. Theorycrafting fills the void of actual news. Lengthy discussions about footage and whatever gameplay they think it implies...

On that note... I guess at this point there’s no harm in sharing the letter I sent to Erris last year.. I’d attempted a dialogue with Jake on Discord but he and Dolvak jetted before I’d barely exchanged a couple of sentences.

Hopefully it’s at least good for some Goon laughs:

quote:

Star Citizer: REPENT YOU BOW-TIED HERETIC!!!

The Titanic posted:

This all came to a head when Beer4TheBeerGod went toe to toe with Sandi and made her dreams of being the smartest person in the room look very fraudulent. I feel like this hurt her because all along the way she genuinely started to believe the lies she told everybody around her about herself.

There was a very distinct change at this period. Everything changed from "this is personal to me!" to "its not personal at all and I don't really care what you think". (Bear in mind marketing people care, and people watching the money, because the money is the important aspect here. It's flow cannot be jeopardized and all hell will be refuted or backed up over if it looks like something slipped out that may jeopardize that flow.)

This is kind of an important bit though, because it gave them an ability to no longer care about what they were saying. There was no longer this responsibility feeling that "yeah I'm actually going to do this thing I'm telling you because I think in my head it's not a lie at all!" Now there can be lies, with not even an iota of thinking or believing they will ever be honored at all. There's not as much of a personal defense going on, and it's certainly not from CR or his wife unless it's some kind of a video they are starring in for YouTube and only to save the money flow as referenced above.

This disconnect makes it easier to sell lies, distance themselves from the reality of the project vs the marketing needs of the project. It lets marketers go full on bullshit and the Roberts don't need to care or address it.

This is probably an important turning point in the project as well. It's where the game part stopped, and the marketing engine became important. It's why today we have land sales, and tank sales, and anything and everything else sales. The game is the marketing engine. Everything else is there just to support it, with the game itself on a constant maintenance mode that it will never get out of.

Even right now, they're probably working on another 100% fake demo that will look great either as a video or as "people playing" it. It'll never go public though, and no normal people will get their hands on it... but it'll create more sales, and that's what's important right now.

It's a high profile cash grab, with a ton of work put into marketing and faking progress, or outright lying about progress, and minimal work actually being done on the product itself. Just enough that it still looks like it's moving forwards, and trying hard to keep people from paying attention to time.

It's one thing to load up the game and see it's a wreck and say "180+ million dollars, over 5 years development, a multinational staff across multiple studios with over 400 employees!" and have people not go "what the gently caress are you guys really doing because this is not representative of that!!!"

But if development time is always obfuscated, and it's always just starting, then it looks like great progress is being made.

CIGs primarily marketing goal is information overload, and fact obfuscation. Be it about the status of the game or it's condition or what's coming next. You'll both never know, never be right, and somebody can always point you at some random video where they ironed out that exact question and you're a fool for not seeing it yourself.

Virtual Captain posted:

You're 100% right about Sandi, she checked out a long time ago and it's frankly surprising there isn't more pressure from her to get SQ42 on more than just youtube demo reels. Maybe she knows the character and/or performance sucks.

But I don't think Chris was actively lying prior to 2016. He believes his own hype. He believes his schedules (except the ones he grandstands on stage). no feature is a lie when development will continue forever.

TheAgent posted:

quote:

In an alternate universe Chris Roberts and Derek Smart reconciled their differences and are best friends

Please use spoiler tags when discussing key plot elements of Love Pledge. Thank you.

Virtual Captain posted:

quote:

This is how it's always been described. Subsumption is purely a buzzword.

Haha good one.

2014 Chris: "my goal actually is for the NPC's in the game to sort of feel and appear much like real people"

quote:

Is Star Citizen the Future of Gaming?
Many backers have become dissatisfied with the progress on Star Citizen. Similarly to Elon Musk. Roberts is uncompromising in his vision.

Golli posted:

"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

quote:

The promises in regards to features are laughable.

The microtransactions for not existent things are laughable.

Every single demonstration of this game has been laughable.

The actual current playable incarnation is laughable.

That people actively defend Chris Roberts over This is laughable

quote:

I am seeing parallel to how a real cult in my hometown never stop asking for more money from the believers to keep building bigger

temples, with the promise of a spot in heaven. It's their money, for sure, but you can't just feel some resentment growing inside. Absolutely

gorgeous temples, with air conditioned buildings and lots of green surrounding, but still.

quote:

I actually feel pretty uncomfortable with it right now as a long time backer. The emails they send out advertising their ships just

feel kind of weird and predatory in how they are worded. I still think it will end up being an interesting game and that it will finish

production, but the methods they've used to get there don't sit well with me. I also think it will be clunky as all hell for years.

quote:

Don't follow the game other than what makes the news, but people voluntarily buy into the project so I say to each their own. I am,

however, surprised by the resiliency of people's faith. All that's left now is to see if ol' Musky makes it to Mars before SC does.

quote:

I feel like the backlash of SC’s release will make No man sky’s launch drama look tame in comparison.

quote:

"Open Development" is not a magic shield towards criticism of the insane feature creep and constantly shifting release date this project has, along with the slowly increasing trail of MIA features and broken promises. SQ42 (only the first episode) went from a late 2015 release to "At some point this will be finished", 3.0 didn't launch with a fraction of the features it was advertised to. It really doesn't matter how "open" this development is or "No one has ever tried to do anything like this before" when you are actively selling products to the consumer, and constantly having to walk back the features and deadlines that you sold them on in the first place.

How about the man stop making promises he knows he can't keep, and maybe the reaction from fans wouldn't be so negative all the time.

I'm glad to be proven wrong, and if on release this game is everything the hype lives up to be, I'll gladly buy in and play. But dismissing those who haven't already paid, especially with the almost instant "Do you own the game? Do you follow the weekly updates? Have you watched every con keynote?" is sad. Because none of those actually alleviate any concerns that this project is ever going to finish in a reasonable timeframe.

quote:

The tactics used by CIG are not good. They're predatory in fact. Yeah other people are putting their own money into that hole and they're free to do that but that doesn't mean it can't be called out and others warned. I've thought for a long time the management of this project has been horrible, the wrong things prioritized and championed, and they reached well beyond their means with the level of talent and tech they have. I feel even more strongly about that by what they've shown and what I've played. The term "Alpha" is not a catchall or an excuse at this point. Basic stuff was worse off than how it was when I had played earlier. That's just insane and my PC is significantly better as well.

I do think some people are so finically and emotionally invested to the point where they can not see how bad it is. Some refuse to see how CIG is stringing them alone with promise after promise that gets broken almost every time. They simply can not push away from the table , stand up, and take a hard look around. That's not at all something that is limited to Star Citizen. There are many situations in life that result in the same thing. Be it other investments or personal relationships. In all those other situations it takes people from the outside looking in to see the real problem and even danger that exist and those involved dragged away for their own good. If this fails tomorrow I think people will better for it in the end.

quote:

Star Citizen lives in a very specific bubble and caters to a very specific niche audience that would probably cut off their own leg to get the game they are imagining.
I just hope the developers are not maliciously abusing of their patience and goodwill to feature scope the game until eternity until one day they close the shop. They created insane expectations and asked for crazy amounts of money throughout the years, they better deliver, even if in 12 years. They're playing with the hearts of "obsessive" fans who really want this to become real, if it doesn't happen I expect similarly vehement negative reactions by them.

Thoatse posted:

AP posted:

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUIJ3EO-Lv4&t=692s (video: Erris fantasies about launching other steam games from inside Star Citizen)

posted:

Are the servers worse and worse everyday ?
i have the feeling that severs state is getting worse and worse fays after days. When i had some constant 25+ fps some weeks a go, actually i never reached a server with more than 15-18 fps with some big freezes.

Plus, on top of that, i encounter more and more bugs that were supossedly fixed, aka:

• duplicated ships
• impossibility to claim some ships
• the come back of the multi interdictions (6 interditions to day to do Olisar >>Yela
• missing parts on ships.

Maybe am i wrong and had bad luck these last weeks, but i'm wooried of the state of the servers with so "low" gameplay and features on the 3.0.1 and was wondering if any of you encountered the same issues. Gn citizens

posted:

It has taken a nosedive in performance since 3.0.1, it isn't a lot of fun to play right now.

posted:

Pirate swarm is so refreshing after PU with 80+ fps. But it also had some bugs, end even final wave killed themselves by flying out of bounds...

posted:

The sad thing is some of this is indeed supposed to have been fixed. Then again, what do you expect from the fine folks who apparently still can't prevent Olisar airlocks from locking up...

Virtual Captain posted:

D_Smart posted:

ANY implementation of a radar scan HAS to know the position of an entity being scanned, that location data not only needs to be obtained, stored, and updated - in real time - but that CANNOT be done without actually having accurate position data for the entity being scanned.

Back in 2014 when Chris and backers were figuratively intoxicated with dreams they thought they would be able to code all of this in non-Speed of light communications. I of course heard about it was after the fact but that still stands out to me as one of the most absurd dreams.

2014 Chris: "in our universe there is no FTL communication. Basically communication happens at the speed the ship can travel or a radio wave can travel in system."

2014 Chris: "The way that the communications are gonna work is that it travels our in-fiction communication's speed. Which means that when you're in-system and someone beams a message, it gets beamed at the speed of light, and it gets beamed to a relay station, or a message station. This is in the structured universe where the UEE runs it and there's a lot of infrastructure. So one of these stations is right by a jump point so it gets all the information and then it will launch out a message drone or a messenger ship. It goes through the jump point to the other side, where there's probably another relay station, it's collected, then the data gets beamed across to another relay station and so-on and so-forth if it has to go multiple systems."


Not surprisingly that didn't work out, I think a dev said something or all the talk about Spectrum made it clear. Communications were going to be instant even across long distances.

D_Smart posted:

frontier forums

quote:

Quite remarkable is not only to read this article today, about four years later and comparing what was promised or was said to be right around the corner, and what is here today. But in particular a picture in the article that might be the perfectly condensed image of the relationship between the CIG and the big players in the gaming press in the early days in particular. The journalist of the magazine (left) literally went to bed with the Roberts brothers to get a glimpse of the newest, hottest Star Citizen software. This was and is the quality journalism in the gaming media offering its readers grounded and critical analysis of what is going on. Although as someone who teaches social science methodology including qualitative interview techniques I have to admit there might be a minor risk about losing the ability to critically reflect the positions of your informants http://www.gamestar.de/artikel/star-citizen-chris-roberts-greift-nach-den-sternen,3056240,seite3.html

Virtual Captain posted:

Another Star Citizen parody?
Former lead technical designer on Star Citizen reveals new six-degrees-of-freedom space combat game

VictorianQueerLit posted:

When accelewrath, who later "did security" for CitCons, was sexually harassing women on the official forums and using them to send pictures of his dick, Ben Lesnick banned the victims. When goons complained about this happening Ben Lesnick called out all goons publicly and threatened to ban every single person from Something Awful because we wouldn't drop the sexual harassment issue.

Backers took this as "Pushing our Agenda" some of them have said "Pushing our SJW Agenda" and it's evolved into a nefarious plot to control the game that only failed when the Benjamin Lesnick stood up to us by punishing the victims of sexual harassment to spite goons.

This has passed into the realm of myth and legend where the heroic CIG used a seer to see the direction the evil goon forces were trying to take their game and they declared for all of midgard to hear "NO! We Shall NOT cater to yon evil! We shall NOT waver in our resolve!" before defeating the armies of darkness and evil for all time.

TheAgent posted:

yea it's really weird how all this started over trying to defend people from being harassed, including the whole accelewrath thing and the whole dunking on gay people on their official forums

it turned from that into "swj goons were baiting people into getting banned" or whatever the gently caress that means because ben posted about that specifically

then it turned into "well they were sad/mad because they couldn't control the game" and has stayed there

G0RF posted:

I laughed out loud when I heard Twerk a few weeks back complaining that the larger ships needed to be designed with FPS concerns in mind because they suck as battle maps. That was exactly the kind of stuff Beer was warning about ages ago to no apparent avail.

Mne nravitsya posted:

Without too much identifying information on a board that goes public (dropping the paywall) on a regular basis - Freelancer was in a very similar state to where Star Citizen is right now. They had a pre-alpha type of engine and overall was more or less an interesting tech demo that lacked any form of design mechanics in it. Microsoft's arrival (and reset of the project) started the game on an actual design path. Prior to the buyout, the team was mostly focused on the endlessly refactoring of Chris's favorite area to drive people crazy: Art

It also had lots of stunning previsualization and pre rendered hires videos (done by the very talented internal VFX team) showing off what it was going to become if given unlimited time and money: Which MS wised upped to after so many years of stalling and sizzle videos. Most of that team knew this was never going to happen, so the exodus of staff from DA was very quick and very large around the time MS came into play.

Virtual Captain posted:

So, how to we stop RSI from scamming us?

Stop paying them for the pleasure would probably be a good start.

posted:

I don't intend to start a flaming war out of no where, but the situation I've been in really angry me.
I've got my first ship over 2 years ago with a subscription. Since then, I've slowly bought many ship. 6 months ago, I was at way over 2000$ worth of ship, I can't even remember the value of all those other game account I exchanged for the ships.
Around Christmas, I was offered ships, some which I already had, at low price, from 2 seller. I jumped on them and had them transfered to me. Few hours later, RSIi contacted me saying I had stolen ships and deleted my account. I have had a ticket open without reply from them and left with no account after spending over 4000$ total on those. How can they ignore more for almost 6 weeks ?
This is really starting to look like a scam from RSI, allowing transfer of ship that are supposely irreversible, and then locking account which paid for them.
I resent a message in the ticket but have got no reply. Am I really to hire a lawyer over this? Because I'll do, simply for the sake of integrity, if it needs to be done.

This joke has been going on for long enough, I paid thousands for those ships.

quote:

Crytek's Position:
The primary issues in this case are (i) whether the Defendants breached the Game License Agreement; whether Defendants infringed upon Crytek's copyrighted work; and the amount of damages to which Crytek may be entitled

quote:

Defendants' Position:
CIG and Crytek entered into a binding and enforceable GLA under which CIG
has fully performed. The threshold legal issue is for Crytek to articulate, in a manner
sufficient under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the pleading standards set
by the Supreme Court in Twombly and Iqbal: what if any promises Crytek alleges
were not performed, and which of Defendants' works, if any, infringe which of
Crytek's registered copyright-protected works, if any — subject to all defenses
including those under the Copyright Act and the GLA

Bayonnefrog posted:

Crytek position on discovery:

At this time, Crytek contends that discovery will be needed on at least the
following subjects:
• Defendants' products, including Star Citizen and Squadron 42;
• marketing and promotion of Defendants' products;
• revenue, profits, and crowdfunding obtained by Defendants;
• Defendants' use of Crytek property, including CryEngine;
• contracts and communications between the Defendants;
• ownership, management, and structure of Defendants;
• Defendants' communications with its customers;
• operative contracts between Crytek and Defendants; and
• technology transferred from Crytek to Defendants.

Beet Wagon posted:

Hoo boy, can't wait to still be reading arguments about this in 2019 lol

AP posted:

"Crytek's counsel stated that Crytek was open both to mediation with a neutral from the Court Meditation Panel or with a private mediator, but declined to respond to Defendants' insistence that Crytek make a settlement demand"

AP posted:

"Defendants asked Crytek what it wanted from this case and whether it had a settlement demand. Crytek said it was not prepared to make a settlement demand or tell Defendants what it hoped to achieve from the lawsuit. Defendants asked Crytek what method of settlement procedure Crytek preferred; Crytek would not state."

posted:

The initial filing of the lawsuit will have kicked off a timetable of events. One of those is the scheduling of the discovery process. This is a joint effort by both CIG and Crytek, and a meeting was held in person between both parties (or their representatives) and it just happens that it was Crytek's lawyers who documented and submitted the report on that meeting.
There is no conspiracy here. This is not Crytek trying to force the judge to do anything. It's just a procedural element of the lawsuit. We're exactly where we were before this document was published: waiting for the judge to rule on the motion to dismiss.

quote:

Crytek/Skadden: Here is what we want and need, here is the timetables we find acceptable.
CIG/FKKS: We don't know why Crytek is filing any of these claims and need them to explicitly clarify this for us before we can come up with anything. Why are we being sued again?

quote:

how is lawsuit formed

Latin Pheonix posted:

Seriously, this response essentially boils down to:

Crytek: "we're suing for x, y and z"
CIG: "Why are you suing us, though?!?"

(Discovery plan is filed)
Crytek: "We propose that the following documents be disclosed in discovery: [...]"
CIG: "Why are you suing us, though?!?"

Crytek: "Also, we propose the following schedule for the court: [...]"
CIG: "Why are you suing us, though?!?"

posted:

I loved how CIG laid the smack down on Crytek in its filling. It was awesome to see them say that they signed a 2 million dollar contact with a sinking ship in its filling to the judge. But if you have 178 mill who cares about wasting 2mill if it helps speed up the development and better fidelity. Looks like crytek is on the ropes trying to get access to ly so they can help develop there own engine is how I see it. One thing this is bothersome is why did Chris deleted the agreement to show were all the money went if he did not produce the game in the time he allotted? I'm sure he had a good reason to withhold the financials from us since he so open on everything else. Maybe the discovery will help show that they have spent very little since Chris stated he's so efficient he can operate on fifth of the money compared to any other AAA studio.

Virtual Captain posted:

"Defendants deduce that Crytek sues out of: wounded
pride resulting from Defendants' move from CryEngine to Lumberyard; rapacity
toward the crowdfunding amounts raised by Defendants to develop and produce the
products; hope that filing this lawsuit will cause Defendants so much distraction and
legal expense that they would rather pay Crytek, a company that has experienced a
significant financial downturn in the last several years, a much-needed infusion of
capital to make the lawsuit go away; and resentment over the fact that many of its
employees abandoned Crytek which could not afford to pay them."

Whaaaa-HAHAHAHAHA

I thought this had to be goonie FUD when I saw it on discord. NOPE. pdf page 4.

trucutru posted:

CIG is writing these things for their moronic userbase to go "daaaaamn! sick burns yo!"

D_Smart posted:

CIG knows they're hosed.

My analysis of the latest filing:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/968845172279783456.html

quote:

That Crytek opted to start the discovery ball rolling ahead of the judge's MtD ruling, shows that they are confident that she will toss it in part or in whole.

This Crytek filing is also a sort of complaint/notice to the court that CIG are not only being abusive to the process, but are also stonewalling the process by raising the same ludicrous points they did in the previous filings - and indeed the MtD itself.
Stalling and stonewalling tactics during discovery, are classic. It's one way of not only delaying the process, while racking up legal bills for the opposition, but also a way to frustrate the opposition.

quote:

can't believe CIG used hodgepodge in an official document to the court

Bootcha posted:

I am not a lawyer.

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76VwCNZvQ1g (video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 4: The Ecstasy of JPEGs)

I am a broken, mouth-breathing, obsessive troll with nothing better to do than make my opinion heard


here's the calendar from the video: https://i.imgur.com/I7CQWnm.png
Green line was the initial crowdfunding drive.
Red lines are for any time "something is on sale"
Preaching man is for a major presentation event, like Gamescon or Citcon.
The present is for major module releases, like AC, SM, and 3.0.
The little patches are for, well, minor patches to the public builds.

G0RF posted:

I know I’m biased (particularly about this one) but I really do feel it’s a serious heavy-hitter from start to finish. I am sure it will infuriate Zealots but I’m hard pressed to see how the core arguments can be refuted aside from “Goooooons!” There’s just too much that’s too heavy to brush off.

In this new era of hypersensitivity about Microtransactions, Chris Roberts’ shamelessness about Macrotransactions hasn’t yet be subjected to the new harder scrutiny. Only earlier today, Kotaku addressed the new climate and its impact on the DICE crew making the next Battlefield game. They seem a little shell shocked still.

Chris’s business model has, for the most part, been tacitly tolerated even as its excesses horrify many and the abuses of trust mount. He’s overdue for a re-evaluation and it’s clearer than ever why. I personally believe this year will not be a steady state year for CIG as the last many largely have. 2018 doesn’t end without the old, dead Thesis of Chris Roberts 6 year sales pitch giving way completely to the Antithesis of it. This video shows very clearly exactly why this must be so.

Potato Salad posted:

Dementropy posted:

Bootcha's tetris scene has unsettled a lot of redditors, god drat.

TheAgent posted:

I've backed star citizen for over $14,000 but let me give you my fair, balanced, and unbiased view on the state of the game

Virtual Captain posted:

Someone filled out the form saying 'Nyx landing zone' should be marked as Completed. I'm gonna go with In alpha at best.

Expectation 2015:



Deliverable LATE 2017:




I seems clear to me the original video was an on rails tour; practically a cutscene. I've NEVER seen a ship move so smoothly. It looks like they just plopped most of that cutscenes model right onto the moon. without any of the gas or atmosphere effects.

Virtual Captain posted:

XK posted:

The Nyx landing zone is what is currently known as Levski, on the asteroid Delamar. This is where 3 jacket Miles Eckhart hangs out. It's on an asteroid that is supposed to be in another planetary system (Nyx system), but has "temporarily" been relocated to the Stanton system. It's basically a transplanted demo area.

Hahaha. Well that explains how I got confused. * Realism Intensifies *

Jobbo_Fett posted:

BUT HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE I WAS TOLD BY REDDIT THAT SANDWORM CANT BE PLACED IN STANTON!?

The Saddest Robot posted:

I'm the tools that they've almost finished that will allow them to start working on something that they showed as complete 3 years ago.

ComfyPants posted:

Nope'n development.

Pixelate posted:

quote:

Mne nravitsya posted:

In regards to stress eating: This was the Erin I knew from Digital Anvil (who the other dude in the pic is, I do not know). And back then he wasn’t the ordained right hand to the king of sperg mountain (the king had others he treated much better). But Erin was held in captivity by his brother, to serve as the cleanup guy for Chris’s bullshit. For what it’s worth (totally contrary to his brothers demeanor) Erin came to office every day, Erin was always approachable and fun to be around, and Erin did not demand that he have an entourage of henchmen follow him around all day to intimidate the workforce.




Then Erin left the business of working with his brother (and started making lego games, and was quite financially successful in that endeavor) and Voila! He became healthy, found new self esteem, and looked better then I had ever seen him look. I was happy he had found success on his own merits, and conquered his demons. Escaping his brother seemed to be exactly what he needed



But once again, His brother came calling and sucked him back into the vortex. Now we are seeing the real AOE damage that Crob does to his brother’s wellbeing - those photos are very sad of where he must be mentally again.. Erin looks exhausted, sad, and desperate to not make a blunder - or lest he be dragged before the royal couple to be brow beaten, yelled at, and told how worthless and untalented he is in comparison to the lord And lady.

Say what you want about about Erin. I like him on a personal level, and would gladly have a pint with the man at any time.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

I mean who wouldn't want tech from a company that is doing the impossible and is 7 years into their project and still can't figure out how mining is going to loving work.

Really gives me the confidence and peace of mind to believe that they created the best possible 64-bit positioning coding of all time!

Sarsapariller posted:

posted:

3.0 is boring now
Yes, yes, I know. "It's an Alpha Test!" That's why I've said "3.0", not "Star Citizen".
Even with the amount of moons we have to explore, there's just nothing to do. The sights are pretty, but they get old after about the 300th time you've seen them. The game chugs at places that were stable in 2.6, making you not want to go back to them. Aside from trading there's nothing to do, and trading gets old and useless, especially after you have bought everything and still have over a million credits.
I just feel like I've done everything the game has to offer, and I haven't experienced any bugs aside just general server lag. There isn't anything left to do, in game or bug reporting.
I'll see you guys around when we get Corusant.

We've really entered the barren midyear stretch now. March 2nd and no patch in sight, Citizens are getting restless.

Virtual Captain posted:

MilesK posted:

Everything in Star Citizen vibrates. This is why ever since 2015 parked spaceships slowly spin and glide around the landing pad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=165H_5jgE5g&t=571s

I hope someone familiar enough with CryEngine chimes in with exactly how insane this is. My guess would be this kind of stuff make it difficult to gauge what needs to be updated over the network because presumably, everything has a new location from the last update. lol

Preen Dog posted:

Can't say if Crysis is bad for this, but It's pretty common that physics objects resting on other objects will jitter or slide. Especially if they're on a slope, and the objects ping-pong between being 'stationary' in one update, then 'sliding' the next update. I've never seen a physics engine that doesn't have this problem, at least a little.

The developer has to be diligent in keeping the physics objects simple, using as few physically simulated objects as possible, and clearly define when and why they should move, and when and why they should be stationary. If it's not possible to rigidly lock an object, the jittering needs to be smoothed, clamped or hidden somehow. For example, in KSP, ships had a tendency to jitter and slide down slopes. So if you park your spaceship on a slope, the game will apply a deliberate counter-force to stop this. I've had success with monitoring a physics object for small angular accelerations, and if the accelerations are small enough, just applying a make-believe torque to stop it. It's particularly hard to stop jitter whenever a force and counterforce equilibrium needs to be achieved, like in the case of a suspension spring pushing back against gravity, or a car sitting on a boat that is held up by buoyancy. Ideally, you just want to declare when an object is 'stationary' and freeze it.

SC is turbofucked because the ship is a collection of physical objects (many of which interpenetrate), the players are also physical objects, you can park vehicles in ships, and the landing gear suspension is never is allowed to 'lock' like in ED. The ship always has a bunch of erratic forces acting on it, with a bunch of erratic counterforces and, like you said, these counterforces can be delayed by an update or have a discrepancy with the server.

AP posted:

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opdNVWIireQ (video: ship violently shaking)

Pixelate posted:

Sunswipe posted:

Redditor 1: I think it's gotten so bad that his wife has left him, he is completely off his meds (his own admission), and literally has locked himself away in his apartment.
Redditor 2: He may not have an apartment for much longer. Not sure how much more I can say without getting in trouble. PM me if you want more details.
Goon: lol i thought doxxing was bad
Redditor 2: Careful with the mental gymnastics. You aren't good at them, and might hurt yourself.

The lack of self-awareness amongst Citizens is simply staggering. "We did a reverse Google image search to ID this woman, found out what she did for a living and then traced her social media, because her husband is a FILTHY DOXXER!!!!" What will it take for these morons to have a "Are we the baddies?" moment?

Virtual Captain posted:

posted:

I got about as far as 2:07 but it left me with little more than a sense of consternation as to why someone would go to all of the trouble to make the fourth part (and counting) of a series about something he hates. I'm sure that the goons will love it. After all, that's how they get their kicks. But I really don't care what his particular thoughts on SC are.

Broadcasting to the rest of the group that you are so repulsed by the opposition that you cannot stomach their voice, an idea, or a person is a tell. It lets everyone know that they haven't been speaking to anyone outside the cult and they are protecting themselves from anything that might dis-confirm what the cult has been teaching.

Eric Weinstein spoke about this at length. I think it was on Joe Rogan's podcast.

his nibs posted:

Worth Clicking: https://clips.twitch.tv/SlickHelpfulPepperoniResidentSleeper (video: Streamer says he is playing 2.0 instead of the latest patch. "The things I like to do is just nothing")

jfc

Virtual Captain posted:

SomethingJones posted:

I didn't think that was public knowledge yet, but it is now so gently caress it.

The dude who figured out a way to do planets was told to not let Chris see any of it, because Chris would freak out and all the plans and schedules and teams would be changed again to prioritise planets, surfaces, surface vehicles

Can you guess what the guy did, what do you think he did

Next thing you know there's a trailer for it

Anyone who thinks they're working to any kind of roadmap or schedule is deluded, the roadmaps are just for the backers

I don't think there is a single aspect of this that is well managed. Not even the art, maybe they have concepts that sell well. But if t takes you nearly a year to model one vehicle into the game you are loving up somewhere. Go back an watch that Overwatch prototyping video. Star Citizen is not even at the stage you would need textured assets.

G0RF posted:

Sterling has been told for years he should cover the project and has so long ignored it, though he was a natural guy for the job. But I expect he’s getting pinged a lot more now and will see the traction Bootcha’s increasingly getting, he will be dizzied and intimidated by the material already being collated into critique, will let out a big whiny sigh and be finally prompted to summon his schtick and shine his spotlight on the project in the not too distant future. I don’t think it will come out of eagerness for the job but more out of competitive defensiveness, a protection of his mindshare and brand. It just seems inevitable.

Bootcha’s latest video seems to be on a faster viewcount growth clip and will become his most popular entry I assume very soon. And that’s all via the grassroots — it hasn’t been plugged in to higher traffic feeds, yet it’s uniquely suited to. The inspired Tetris segment is pure goon showstopper — both hilarious yet unbelievably true. The Macrotransaction stuff feeds too neatly into “the big conversation” the industry and gaming press have been unhappily consumed with in the wake of Battlefront 2’s woes. And the sheer absurdity of Chris Roberts model of “the spaceship jpeg” as primary source of income for the biggest consumer funded gaming project in history makes loot boxes for shipped games look puritanical by comparison.

The AAA Dev and Publisher industry itself, much derided as greedy, will find much to laugh at in it and I’d not be surprised if the video finds special traction there. Very easy to picture that happening in email forwards, group texts, slack messages with the incredulous consolations of “Well at least we’re not doing that!”

Maybe I’m wrong about both and Sterling will stay quiet and the video top out soon but I dunno. It feels different this time.

Yeah there’s been some real displeasure in the Citizenry. So many refuse to even watch it or finish it but I guess that’s not too surprising. I was surprised that it didn’t get purged from the subreddit — it sure won’t be tolerated on Spectrum. Then again, moderator Dolvak is talking a lot more about CIG and accountability these days. I’d not at all be surprised if he laughed long and hard at the video and would resist demands it be removed.

The industry microtransaction backlash was so massive and still generates so much animated discussion. The shellshock is palpable. Yet as we’ve long known there is more and worse in Chris Roberts business model. It seems overdue for a big re-evaluation in light of the new reality.

Maybe it’s just a blip and the status quo just keeps on rocking. But I dunno, it’s getting harder to see how that happens in this current climate.

D_Smart posted:

(tweet: Everywhere Games, who use Lumberyard are aggressively recruiting - CIG/RSI freaking out and offering a lot of incentives for people to stay.)

stingtwo posted:

When Star Citizen has all the nails stamped into it's coffin, it won't have an effect on the broader gaming industry, it's a multibillion dollar industry. So many huge rear end companies have gone under it doesn't register in this world, Nintendo could decide to move away from video games tomorrow and nothing will change.

Having said that, this game, Shroud of the Avatar and even the System Shock remake(plus a few others) are making gamers cautious of what to offer a few dollars to fund, cause lets face it, when you have a set of industry veterans basically lying their loving asses off at the state of a project and milking the faithful into spending more money into a sinkhole, now you have to put blind faith into something you kinda seem interested in playing and hoping those people don't spend it on hookers.

big nipples big life posted:

https://twitter.com/TarkaRoshe/status/970673821731704832

How do they not notice themselves doing this?

If only self owning actually caused pain.

The Titanic posted:

posted:

I'm worried about wall clipping in the final build / Squadron 42

I know many of you are worried about the FPS of the game itself, whatever the gently caress that is, but let me assure you that we've got this ironed out. First we're going to motion capture the IT guy laying cable, then we're going to motion capture some people using the internet. We're going to run these things together until the motion capture resolves the issues for us.

We're pretty confident this is going to work, but the only way to realize that goal is to stay on top of the motion capture market pretty much to the brink of insanity and maybe a lot further. The only thing that's going to really make this video movie happen is the motion capture, and the animation, and the intricate graphics.

This is our middle finger to all the lame, scared developers who are stuck in the box of "wah wah I need my low polygon assets to function because of my high network traffic load" and "wah wah I want my models to have proper lod and utilize normal mapping technology" and "wah wah I want my AI to be almost as smart as a real human but not quite because I'm too scared to actually do it" and of course my favorite "wah wah lets just use basic graphics and figure out how the game will play before we start in on making expensive models and animation."

Well let me just tell you that your weak minded ways aren't going to pull movies into the next generation of video computer technology. Your 1980's think is gone, and this is the new loving generation where Voodoo cards are here to loving stay and I know you got run over at the pass there with your weak knowledge and fearful methods of not just doing it (lookin at you Rockstar you "almost as good as us" developers)!

So I'm happy to say that we're going to motion capture bar and raise it as much as Roy can raise his arms because also gently caress your IK bullshit in this real world. If a real person can't do it it's not Star Citizen. If it can't be motion captured it's not Star Citizen. If it is a game with depth and functionality it's not Star Citizen. So get your heads out of your collective behinds and get ready for the motion capture event of this next upcoming decade because let me tell you how much stock CryEngine is going to be awesome in another 7 years when we can release a non playable (are you stupid? If it's playable it's not Star Citizen) demo your socks will be blown the gently caress off.

We are motion capturing trees and water, and also blood splatters. Have you ever motion captured blood before? I think not because you don't know how to develop games. So stand out of the way big companies and hold my loving ping pong ball laced beer because we're about to kill it.

So here's our latest Jira roadmap:

2 weeks: Remotion capture internet traffic
1 month: Motion capture humans for their AI
1 month: Rework skeleton for motion capture 3.0
1.2 months: Motion capture all the missions of Sq42
2 months: Chump run
2.5 months: Motion capture motion capture because this is how you build a system smart enough to build itself with procedural motion capturing
3 months: Motion capture 3.1
3.5 months: Release all the video game movies and cash in

So there you have it. This is our roadmap and as you can see we're releasing everything in less than six months. In fact by month 6 we're releasing the first DLC pack that will connect your computer to your webcam so you can motion capture yourself watching YouTube videos of us watching our videos of our game in action. How awesome will that be?

Well you'll know soon, friend. Because we're doing it all here. We have the talent and the dubious and questionably legal shell motion capture studios around the world to pull it off.

So put on your ping pong balls and get ready to have your real balls blown away because this train can't be stopped, it can only be... captured!

peter gabriel posted:

G0RF posted:

Anybody who can make it through the bootcha's video and not have any idea what is being said or why what’s being said might be alarming should definitely load up on some more spaceships. I recommend the Endeavor with the Science/Research/Telescopic modules, then they should proceed in an epic hunt throughout Chris Roberts First Person Universe for a clue.

GORFisTYPING posted:

I’m afraid I don’t agree with you and have documented the matter pretty extensively. Chris Roberts generalized claims about his ambitious intentions are not a license to constantly offer dishonest guidance about his games, and yet he has.

I could cite dozens from memory. The Alpha 3.0 infographic provided about does a decent enough job of summarizing the manner in which that particular deliverable was misleadingly oversold at Gamescom 2016. What was claimed to include the whole of Stanton by December 2016 ended up 25% of Stanton a year later. It lacked many promised professions, did not include the “30 to 40 space stations”, and was missing 3 planets and 9 moons.

Here is a more stark example:

Star Citizen Pax East Presentation - March 2015

There are a few things here worth pointing out. The biggest is the claim that Squadron 42 - Pt. 1 would release by end of 2015.

Chris Roberts hadn’t even shot his motion capture yet. Then as now, they still don’t have robust combat AI nor any combat AI for ground-based FPS. The flight model is still under serious revision.

Yet he made that claim up on the stage at Pax East 3 years ago and looked right in the camera and repeated it again on 10 for the Chairman the following month, further adding:

quote:

”each (Squadron Episode) is the equivalent of a huge triple A "Call of Duty" or better because we have a much bigger campaign.”

Rather bold talk and aggressive timelines, and of course we see now that he was either intentionally misleading or completely delusional. Was there any apology when Q4 2015 came and went without a release? No, instead, there was a cinematic trailer boldly claiming 2016 would be the year of Squadron 42. This too shall pass and did. We were then told to expect to see a vertical slice of a game that was supposed to be done in 2014 & 2015 & 2016 at CitizenCon 2016. Do you recall what happened to that vertical slice?

In case you don’t, CIG can refresh our memories. They pulled the slice altogether, and we got an apology documentary a couple of weeks later that explained they couldn’t get a stable slice together despite two months of work on it.

January of 2017 saw the illusion of good news as Chris Roberts gave interviews suggestive that Squadron 42 was nearing completion for release in 2017. But alas, for the fourth year in a row, his guidance was wrong.

At the end of 2017, we finally at least saw that vertical slice we were supposed to see the year prior. It openly states that the game is in Pre-Alpha.

It was beautiful, had some nice cinematic exchanges, along with protracted five minute stretches where nothing happened. Given the incomplete state of AI in year 6, its probably not surprising that it’s hard to keep the pace up in the pre-alpha in between the movie like dialogue scenes. It’s a very safe bet that Squadron isn’t coming out this year either and indeed, not even Chris Roberts is claiming otherwise. After four years of being wrong, who can believe him?

As an aside, we also now have a frame of reference for what a “Call of Duty equivalent” campaign might look like because Infinite Warfare delivered what CIG Community Manager Ben Lesnick praisingly described as “like a modern day Wing Commander” experience a month after CIG failed to show their vertical slice.

There’s a tendency to make sneering dismissals of Call of Duty, yet as you know if you’ve followed the community discussions about that title, reactions were far more complex. Despite the anti-futuretech backlash that Infinite Warfare met with from day 1, the actual missions and campaign dropped jaws at Sony’s E3 reveal. Critics praised its World War 2 story in space straightforwardness, and the surprisingly moving and downbeat story conclusion.

I would hope after this in-depth history lesson you might better understand why it is I used the term “pathologically inaccurate” to describe their marketing. I recognize that many backers are happy to excuse this, happy to excuse the same handling of Alpha 3.0, happy to do the same for Star Marine, too.

Yet a high tolerance for inaccurate guidance shouldn’t be confused with the moral acceptability of it. There has never once been an apology for any of the aforementioned examples, yet if I were to treat another human being the way Chris has treated his backers I’d rightly be considered an unreliable flake unworthy of trust. It is unlikely you’d tolerate similar treatment from other products or services companies out there.

The contentiousness of Star Citizen debates is very much tied up in the collision of worldviews over the acceptability of such practices. Yet outside of the small bubbles where these debates rage, there are generally agreed upon notions about these matters. Most people looking at a project with a Troubled Development history and years of mismanaged expectations would not like race to the defense of the man primarily responsible for both. Particularly after learning he’s been given the largest independent game Development budget in history — $180 million. After six years and that much money, expectations should be raised not lowered in commensurate degree.

As the old parable goes, “to whom much is given, much is expected” and it seems to me, independent of whatever qualitative expectations might be merited, the right to expect honest guidance goes without saying.

SomethingJones posted:

So Crytek suing CIG for breach of contract is a 'cash grab', but CIG selling land sticks and tanks is perfectly ok because 5/11 tasks on a basic networking feature after 9 months is 'progress'

CrazyLoon posted:

quote:

* Sunk Cost Galaxy Episode 4 *

Holy poo poo, 2014 onward got busy busy busyyy. I'm willing to accept the fact that back in 2012/2013 CIG and CRobblers may have genuinely had good intentions, but from mid 2014 onward looking at that...they just morphed into the black hole sucking up money and spewing out hype.

These vids are giving me some much needed closure. So brave onwards...

veiled boner fuel posted:

It basically is a Ponzi though. At some point, probably 3+ years and 80 million plus dollars ago, Crobberts realized that he needed A LOT more money just to deliver the absolute basics of all the poo poo he had already sold. Having to continue taking in more money to deliver to the previous “investors” is basically the definition of a Ponzi.

He didn’t set out to do this from the start but he absolutely realized it at some point during development. The honest thing to do would have been to explain the situation and throw yourself on the mercy of the backers (wallets) and hope they’d continue to fund you. And they would have. Maybe they woulda lost some income but there’s plenty of true believers and those wallowing in the depths of sunk cost fallacy.

But they didn’t do that, they doubled down on sleazy marketing 101 tactics and continued on business as usual.

I think it’s pointless to call it a scam because then you devolve into meaningless discussions of what exactly a scam is, but I also don’t think calling it a scam is incorrect.

Coolness Averted posted:

I actually found out a buddy of mine briefly worked on this game. What's sad is it really does have artists and coders working on stuff just they'll never be able to live up to whatever croberts latest crazy promise is, and constantly have to start over again.

Tortolia posted:

I didn't pay much money for my ticket on this luxury cruise liner, and I'm not sure why some guy is pointing out that the captain keeps steering us back into that group of icebergs we passed earlier, but I'm sure there isn't anything to be concerned about. I have a degree in sailboats after all, and I can't see the port we left from so we're making progress!

quote:

I only play the best game, Star Citizen
2018 is the best season yet.

Mendrian posted:

Anybody who tries to defend SC by arguing it's in 'early development' has no idea what early development is even supposed to look like. If SC was in 'early development' I'd expect things like untextured hallways and generic ship-boxes of various sizes. But I'd also expect there to be more development on the gameplay side of things - the FPS stuff would be further along, the ship abilities and differentiation would be in place, if only mechanically, a variety of mission types would probably exist, and there would be at least one example of each major gameplay loop in place to test its viability.

You don't typically see massive poly models in a early development because of all the ways that can gently caress with you. The fact that anybody thinks that's a normal way to develop a game is ridiculous. SC has, at every step of the way, tried to convince people it looks like a completed game and that new features are being added. That's not how development works.

a cyberpunk goose posted:

The PU should be grey boxes in space pushing their promises to their limits for like a decade before you hire swathes of artists to contribute to your pyramid scheme. This is why SC looks, waddles and quacks like a scam or something effectively similar to anyone who has seen what it takes to ship polished technical products in modern content pipelines. which we now know thanks to SC, is a position it’s really easy to trick yourself into feeling like an expert about.

I think a lot of people grew up wishing game development is as easy as being an ideas guy who can simply throw money around and roll up your sleeves. So they project themselves and that belief into Chris. He makes it looks and feel so easy—and the results! All these polygons! Those dummies are fooling themselves for not literally SEEING all this progress.

The truth is there are real limits to what is possible both in consumer grade hardware and what kind of work your teams need to structure and in what order. Many a talented developers code themselves into corners by not having the project management discipline to not focus on the super fun flashy content. And it’s easy to!! Getting models in game and animated feels incredibly rewarding even when it’s just T poses. But you gotta solve the hard problems as early as possible, the ones your promises to backers depend on. Complex models, mocap and shaders have been solved problems for a long, long time. A huge persistent high fidelity multiplayer PU with “mesh networks” and “subsistence” and “no instancing” and “permadeath” and “insurance” and “prisoners” and “ai crew”—and tons more—are so, SO outside of the realm of Chris’s own expertise, but also what anyone ever has pulled off technically and actually had be capital F Fun, that it’s no wonder a community of train wreck witnesses like ourselves has formed.

an actual frog posted:

quote:

SC has, at every step of the way, tried to convince people it looks like a completed game and that new features are being added. That's not how development works.

This still blows my mind. How many years of development and they've been pimping polished, complete assets since day one?

This is what an "early in development" AAA title should look like. Full of rough, placeholder assets that vaguely resemble what you want to achieve but are cheap and quick to iterate on as required by your evolving gameplay and tech.



You build gameplay first, then fill it with shinies. But I guess graybox doesn't help sell JPEGs

Kosumo posted:

Agreed

Like, why did they not make their flight model and capital ship combat four years ago ...... why do you need a 700,000,000* ploy Idris model to do that?

Why would you want a 700,000,000* ploy model to do that with when you could have simple white low ploy white box models to sort that out with?

Chris Roberts is a scummy oval office who is NOT a gamer and only cares about himself.

Chris Roberts deserves what is coming to him. (totally bankruptcy for him and his family and hopefully jail time for him.)

*number out of my rear end, I'm sure its way more but you know what I mean.

Mne nravitsya posted:

This is EXACTLY how it’s done in many of the studios that are continually successful. I personally refer to this style of prototyping and development as the “Nintendo Method”. That was the first time I had ever seen things done this way (and that was decades ago when a family member worked there) experiencing Miyamoto, Ken Lobb, and couple others in Nintendo during Super Mario 64: built somewhere in the mid 90’s. It was just boxes, and there was a bunch of designers driving them around on flat surfaces, trying to tune the jump/air hang timing so it felt satisfying, and how bounce backs work when colliding with others. Jump/hang/bounce are absolute foundational pillars when making a new one.

Anyways, this method of finding your gameplay loops (metas, micros, etc.)and continually evaluating, tweaking, and adjusting them is (in my opinion) the way to do it. No one should be making any semblance of final content at this time. The art team should be extremely small (maybe an AD and a couple concept guys) and they’re just working on style guides and visual targets, while engineering and design are continually scrumming over loops, setting engine budgets for everything (with art etc) and developing the GDD so you don’t end of up with the perfect example of how to do it completely wrong on all fronts: Star Citizen

Mne nravitsya posted:

quote:

It just mind-boggling how CIG approaches this, with finished game assets (that will have to be redone again and again, see item 2.0) but nearly no gameplay mechanics to speak of. How people cannot see how this evolved into a scam is beyond me. They have like, what, 50 devs, and like 350 artists?

Yeah, sometimes we refer to this method of development as the “lightning strike”. It’s definitely the absolute worst way to do things and have any level of predictability for your game. Essentially you make a poo poo ton of hi-res art to wow the publishers and buy some time. Then, behind the scenes in the studio, designers are ripping their hair out, having nervous breakdowns, or quitting because they can’t find a way to shoe-horn design loops into finished art - and are being blamed for everything. And meanwhile art is screaming about not wanting to redo all their assets, so, design better figure this poo poo out with what they have.

All the while, the product director or EP is yelling at design that they better hurry up and figure this poo poo out, because they are now blocking the (too many too fast scaled) art team from moving forward on the schedule and the games phase gate dates are starting to slip, and the burn rate is hovering at 2-3+ million a month.No pressure lol

Why it’s called lightning strike is because on the rarest of occasions - the designers find something that suddenly feels really good and then the game is saved by that hail mary/lightning strike moment.

Perfect lightning strikes are ridiculously rare, and hence when you see studios shut down all the time: They most often went this route, and never got the magical bolt they were hoping would show up. Or, they hit a lightning strike early, had massive success, and could never figure out how to repeat it. Rovio comes to mind, along with a handful of other places that are trying to make a followup to a single smash hit, but have yet to repeat their original strike.

hot balls man no homo posted:

quote:

Seemingly former Star Citizen stream DeejayKnight is now doing something cool and good by streaming with FIRST Robotics Competition. I volunteer for FIRST. It's a lot of fun.

We're seeing a lot more Star Citizen fans and streamers quietly slip away lately. The ones that are left are becoming increasingly agitated and perturbed. Eventually the Brown Sea will be distilled down to a single fan, a single solitary drop of pure rage certain that Star Citizen is coming soon.

Virtual Captain posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/231741622?t=12m10s
WTFo: "I feel like I've lost a lot of drive for the stream. Iuhhhhh.. a lot uhhhh... well, nothing really going on with Star Citizen."

G0RF posted:

posted:

https://i.imgur.com/D1FUVw9.mp4

no_recall posted:

What we were shown in KS was the assumption, that this game could be finished with the KS funds with what Chris was showing us. Not "early days" or something to begin development with. If you review the media, he show's ship in ship (i.e. oh wow we have physical grids now) landing. 6DOF flight, IFCS Flight, the Vanduul, a big as base, NPC's in a ship to interact with. All the mechanics in working order, and a game that needs funding to be completed. And the best part, it all looked FUN to play with.

However, this is not the case. It seems that Chris caught on with the "ship bug" and just made ships, refactoring the "game" everytime. This is to make it shiner as its current competitors without fully realizing any "game". Elite is in v3.0, looks good as hell, and here we have Star Citizen, barely a playable shell, with screenshots, artwork and a presentation that rivals a fully working and developed game. How can these games even compete? The illusion of progress because the art is buffed everytime masks the engineering debt that it has accumulated over the years. Star Citizen still looks current gen, regardless of how you spin it. Does it work? No. But will the graphics sell? Yes.

As long as CIG keeps this "curren gen" polish going. The funding will keep flowing.

AbstractNapper posted:

quote:

abcnews: What's next for the 2018 Oscar winners
Oldman will be voicing Admiral Bishop in two video games, "Squadron 42" and "Star Citizen," both out in 2018.

"Both out in 2018"
What sort of new fud is this?
The games are already out. Backers have been playing Star Citizen for years, it just keeps getting better and better with every patch. Ben has already played SQ42 to the end and Gary Oldman has been parping in that one since 2013 (?).

Just buy a ship and play.
Buy more though to make all your dreams come true.
The expensive ships buy you happiness as well.

WLMortis posted:

"I refuse to prove I exist," says Star Citizen, "for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing."

"Oh," says Derek, "but what about Around the Verse? It proves you exist and therefore you don't. QED."

"I hadn't thought of that" says Star Citizen, and promptly vanishes in a puff of motion capture.

"Well, that was easy" says Derek, who goes on to prove that bad gameplay is good gameplay and is killed at the next E3.

The Titanic posted:

And as is reminiscent of how Chris Roberts believed modern programming to function, each of these totally separate components would just click together like LEGO bricks.

This harkens back to the entire problem with Illfonic, and other studios since then, where everything they worked on simply was not a compile away from joining hands in a happy computer program that knew how to be friends immediately.

His AI will be perceptive if the environment they are in and actually see and hear and react to these sensory inputs naturally because why not. You just build one AI to be the all AI and next thing he expects is Boston Dynamics sending him mail asking to please share his wealth of knowledge with them.

This is also why there is no design document. Why all the ships are basically self contained entire games. Why a single stretch goal could be a hugely complex Command and Conquer game. Why he can suddenly believe in tanks. Why procedurally wildlife can totally just appear on a planet that looks like a hand made Crysis map within a few short algorithms. He has absolutely zero comprehension of how these huge, enormous, and basically silly things will ever actually interact with each other ever. He doesn't even know how to start thinking this big.

And that's why after 5 and some change years people have a borderline poo poo tier FPS game and a no clip space flight experience where you can land on a planet. I'll give them credit for the planet thing; although it hasn't made the game any better at all, as everybody had said. Nobody is forgiving the sub 15 FPS because they can slowly judder across an empty planet.

Chris Roberts is the perfect squirrel. Always chasing the next shiny object. When it comes to management, this is exactly the kind of personality you don't want associated with any kind of long term project. You will get nowhere fast, everybody will be pissed, and he'll never understand why the shareholders are furious because his years overdue barcode scanner can now also take pictures and upload them to Instagram while being connected to a cellular tower by itself.

quote:

Streetroller posted:

Cali Lawyer: fired off motion to dismiss,
Judge: See you in court

PederP posted:

Some of the hardcore backers probably think that having big dreams and the force of personality to order others to carry them out to the letter, instead of making these annoyingly trivial and boring things they tend to do on their own. Chris is their proxy dreamer - his vision is so grand it can encompass any vision of their own. Even the biggest whale doesn't have the personal wealth and chutzpah to make a start-up, hire actual staff and start telling the minions how it's done. But this crowdfunding is a way to make it happen anyway!

When it fails, they'll blame the stupid minions, Derek Smart, the gaming press, CryTek, goons, filthy leavers, anyone but Chris. Even if CIG comes out of the legal battle unscathed, if funding keeps flowing in, and we all get to witness an actual release of a buggy and unfun product - they'll still not blame Chris. He can ship a crappy game with pride or brazenly quit the project ahead of time and they'll still not blame him. Because he is their proxy. Some of these people have no point where the incompetence and absurdity becomes apparent to them - any problem is caused by bad minions or outside influence. It is far more likely that they get lured away by better proxies or run out of money.

It's not really a huge problem when incompetent visionaries waste money chasing dreams. People get paid and the money flows from stupid whales to the economy as a whole. But when the workplace is toxic, workers are taken advantage of, etc. - then the dreamers are feeding a beast that needs to be put out of it's misery. I see a lot of signs that CIG and F42 aren't great places to work. I hope I am wrong, because then this is a great comedy and people get paid. Everyone wins. But the faces in those videos look stressed and overworked. It's not the backers I feel empathy towards. It's the studio staff who could've been employed under better conditions, had the money flowed to less abusive dream factories.

Is this a scam? Not really at this point. It's not hard to find a video showing what the product is actually like at this point, and it's no secret that it's late, buggy, etc. A few vulnerable backers probably get taken advantage of to a degree they don't deserve, but they could be in much worse hands. But overworked game developers watching cronies make it rich, while they slave to produce smoke and mirrors for the dreamers. That irks me.

Scruffpuff posted:

If CIG put half as much effort into making a game as they do into scamming people, making shell companies, reneging on their own terms of service, denying refunds, selling nonexistent products, loving over their partners, violating contracts, and attempting to defraud the court system itself in order to protect their ill-gotten gains, we still wouldn't be playing anything, because Chris Roberts is in charge.

quote:

Major Known Issues:

40014 will cause a client crash. W/A: If this occurs, wait 10 minutes and relaunch.
The missing person/crew missions immediately abandon after accepting.
ESP is currently not behaving as intended and IFCS fixes are still pending.
The new ships and vehicles are incomplete and may be missing certain functionality.
Drake Cutlass rear ramp and side doors can not be opened.
A target ship despawning will cause the player to crash.


Testing Focus
For the purposes of testing, ETF will be restricted to certain ships uniformly that will not include the new ships/vehicles yet. For this initial phase, we would like you to play as normal to test stability, focus on regression testing of the numerous bug fixes, and help with the following test request:

Implemented service beacons (Currently disabled, but below is how it should work).

Colostomy Bag posted:

What an underwhelming turd of an update.

New ships: Don't fly them.
Some ships: Doors don't work.
Crashes?: Wait ten minutes.

What a disaster. lol

gooncati posted:

for those interested in performance news, the new patch doesn't offer much. Remember that fresh servers always perform better due to low player numbers and low NPC/physics clutter.

I have seen averages in the 20 fps range with dips below 10 fps so far on aging servers with a regular number of players. Pretty much 3.01 business as usual

You also have to remember that given the current state of the patch with general instability, memory leaking and rather quick gameplay degradation, many players only access a server for a few minutes which leaves population and load lower than on the average live server

Amazing Zimmo posted:

The watermarking of evocati stuff is still going strong.

This is a leaked screen cap of the reclaimer (taken from reddit) showing the watermark:

Beet Wagon posted:

posted:

(Honest Concern) Isn't it a bit worrying that 5 years into development the game isn't fun at all to play beyond its awe-inspiring moments?

Daztek posted:

Implemented service beacons (Currently disabled, but below is how it should work).

Ships and Vehicles (comming soon, but not part of initial focus)

Scruffpuff posted:

You have to be loving kidding me.

So the patch notes are basically "Here's what we'd have done if we'd done anything."

Brownhat posted:

Implemented fun (Currently disabled, but below is how it should work)

SomethingJones posted:

The word "should" appears an alarming number of times for a changelist

Are we sure these people know what they are doing

SomethingJones posted:

Star Citizen should now be good

No Mods No Masters posted:

It's feast or famine in the star citizen laughing scene

Today it's a feast

Virtual Captain posted:

https://youtu.be/EU0sMZbhqoU?t=1311
Clive: "in theory the client should receive an update for entities every two frames, so it has to kind of guess what's happened in the middle frame. So basically what it's doing is it's locally simulating all the entities."

https://youtu.be/EU0sMZbhqoU?t=2102
Clive: "we've had to change assumptions on the networking code side where previously it would say, “Okay, I've got an entity, it's a networked entity, every client needs to know about this,” there would be be assumptions all the way through the network code that relied on that being true so we'd have to change all those and so it's a bit by bit process that we've kind of unraveled stuff and add new stuff and optimized stuff that would allow bind culling to be possible and we're almost there."

https://youtu.be/EU0sMZbhqoU?t=2301
Clive: "There's a couple of different ways we could deal with that situation but until we do we can't really put bind culling in because it could break the gameplay."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU0sMZbhqoU&t=2161s
Clive: "Up until now, all of the entity spawning has been synchronous or what we call blocking which means that the point in the code where it says that I need this entity, it'll basically stop whatever it's doing, it'll go and load the data in for that entity, create the entity itself, register it with physics and whatever else it needs to do, and then go,”Okay, this function can exit. Let's carry on and do the rest of the game. So, we need asynchronous entity spawning which is also known as object container streaming."

So the 10 year old engine is not at all designed for modern multiplayer, why did you do this to backers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU0sMZbhqoU&t=1510s
Matthew: "We have about a budget of about 2500 draw calls for all ships on screen at one time and a ship can be anywhere between 500 draw calls to 800 draw calls at its highest resolution."

Anything over 5 ships will start to impact performance? but we are still going to have big fleet battles right>?

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

I don't think this was ever answered by Chris but yesterday we got our answer. Will Star Citizen players all be on one giant server?

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/236884786?t=36m51s
Clive: "We are planning on attempting a single shard"

Planning on attempting.

Genius

Virtual Captain posted:

SomethingJones posted:

Q: Will server meshing be used to attempt a single world wide server shard, or is PING the unbreakable barrier?

Clive Johnson: Ah, well, PING's definitely an unbreakable barrier... ehm... we are PLANNING on ATTEMPTING a single shard, ehm... but PING's definitely gonna be the big OBSTACLE that we're gonna have to FACE. Ehm... so... (gulp) a number that I've kinda got in mind, it's... I think it's ehm... Australia to parts of the US is something like a typically, like a 200ms PING... ehm... from EU to US something around 100ms or so

So they're not insignificant latencies... so potentially what we COULD do is try and find, ehm... a SERVER that's geographically in the MIDDLE of the players who are interacting at that point and try and locate all the players who are interacting, so all the players who are on Port Olisar are on the same server and people would be in the geographic middle somewhere where all the player who are at Port Olisar at that point at that time

Ah, and try and optimise the PING that way for as many people as possible, ehm...

The biggest challenge they are thinking about in terms of a single shard is ping. It's loving hilarious.

Virtual Captain posted:

FAKER DETECTED
Chris fire this rear end in a top hat plz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU0sMZbhqoU&t=1533s
Matthew: "Another trick that we do is with our vis areas and portal culling. So, when we're on the outside of the ship we don't want to draw the interior and even when you're in another room in the ship, we don't want to draw the next room."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU0sMZbhqoU&t=1530s
Matthew: "We have a few tricks in our bag to do that. One of the things is LODs - we have artists creating level of detail meshes which reduce the number of polygons and reduce the materials as you go into the distance. These are being hand done and also generated by our Simplygon tool."

Hav posted:

When they say 'our', they mean Microsofts https://www.simplygon.com/

quote:

Beet_Wagon posted:

Actually, Chris regularly stated throughout the campaign that more funds would mean they could get content out faster, while at the same time expanding stretch goals.

You can see here in the $21M Letter From The Chairman (one of the polls about expanded stretch goals) that CR says:
"Finally there is one very important element – the more funds we can raise in the pre-launch phase, the more we can invest in additional content (more ships, characters etc.) and perhaps more importantly we can apply greater number of resources to the various tasks to ensure we deliver the full functionality sooner rather than later."
The idea that when backers "voted" for more stretch goals Chris Roberts warned anyone "Okay but it's going to take longer" is a fiction. He actually told us things would happen faster.

posted:

No it isn't. I was there, I voted and I read everything he wrote about it.

Which is exactly the truth and exactly what they are doing. More funding means a bigger team which they have hired to make the game come out sooner rather than later. I know exactly how you are trying to spin words and it doesn't work with me and you know it. You prey on the ignorance of others to make your FUD work. Luckily most people aren't as gullible as the few who actually believe you.

Beet_Wagon posted:

"out of context"

Okay dude. lmao

posted:

lol...go back to your little refunds hate sub. I am having fun calling out you Star Citizen detractors that enjoy coming in here and causing drama because you can't get anybody to believe your FUD.

Beet_Wagon posted:

I’m sorry your brain is so broken. I hope you get better soon.

quote:

Your interpretation that Chris meant he was going to miss the 2014 release date intentionally by 8 or more years if people just pledged more money when he said: "the more funds we can raise.. we can apply greater number of resources to the various tasks to ensure we deliver the full functionality sooner rather than later."

is just full on crazy - no sane backer would have given him a single dollar if this was the case.

It is hilarious seeing you call other people here detractors while poisoning the sub with this kind of insane claims.

quote:

Chris said loud and clear that the more nerds he fleeced the faster he could make this game . Chris lied, nerds cried. Then true to form, instead of saying 'yeah we got that wrong' the backers doubled down, cried their hearts out and revamped history to make drat sure they could look each other in their four eyes and say 'we're still right'

SomethingJones posted:

Ben Lesnick played through all of Squadron 42 and Chris Roberts can't even come up with its 2018 roadmap.

And a SQ42 roadmap won't be published btw. Because it'll be added straight into the lawsuit as evidence that there's a second title in development. That's why I've been banging on about it, there's the Chris transcript THERE in which he says the roadmap will be a realtime mirror of the internal JIRA, and here is Skadden HERE saying that a second title is in breach of the licence.

So it took CIG 3 months to realise what I realised in 2 minutes. They can't publish a SQ42 roadmap, you will never see a SQ42 roadmap because CIG know loving rightly they don't have a license to develop SQ42 on CryEngine.



If you are a Star Citizen backer right now, this is what you believe:

Derek Smart is wrong
Goons are wrong
Skadden Arp are wrong
Crytek are wrong
Chris Roberts is not a liar
Ben Lesnick is not a liar
Star Citizen is good

IrvingWashington posted:

Elman posted:

I saw The Disaster Artist recently and I think Star Citizen will make for a great movie.

Daztek posted:

Documents:

NOTICE OF MOTION AND MOTION for Protective Order for CONTROLLING TIMING AND SCOPE OF DISCOVERY PENDING RESOLUTION OF MOTION TO DISMISS

Att: 1 Memorandum OF POINTS AND AUTHORITIES IN SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER,

Att: 2 Declaration OF JEREMY GOLDMAN IN SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER,

Att: 3 Proposed Order RE MOTION FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER

Beet Wagon posted:

"Please God don't let them see how broke we are."

Streetroller posted:

Truga posted:

i like how there's quotes around product, build, and version.
https://i.imgur.com/P7IbTEV.mp4

posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

http://guardfrequency.com/203
25:30 - 32:00 is about Crytek vs CIG. These guys are Derek alting FUD Buddies now.
"Usually that's a routine document, unless you have CIG on the other side of the v"
"CIG goes 'WELL!!!' then goes off on a paragraph or two about its so unfair that they're even in this case; which is not what this filing is for."
'Crytek may want to get further into discovery to find out just exactly what you've been doing.'
Crytek thinking "the more facts we get, the worse CIG looks and the more [money] we can ask for with a straight face"
'I think they will aim for injunctive relief as well'
'Crytek says they're not ready for numbers yet, that to me says this may not be just about the money.'
'But all you can get in court is money right?'
'Well..... That's legal relief, there's also something called equitable relief, commonly injunctive relief'
"What would it be about really? I don't get it"
"Well there is some history between these guys" 'the injunction people are most familiar with is a restraining order'
"So 'we're gonna get paid and you can't do this anymore'? Awww that sucks!"
In the worst case scenario 'You may not use this technology anymore to make Star Citizen'

daztek posted:

Virtual Captain posted:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/231099842?t=18m04s
WTFo: "Like I said before [server meshing] is the biggest thing that Star Citizen has to overcome. Everything else they want it to do they've been able to do uhhhh..b but this is the one thing that will allow the amount of players they want ummmmm.. It'll have an effect on the framerate and stuff but how the system work and how it's going to feel like one single shard or one single universe."


"Everything else they want it to do they've been able to do"

reddit griefer posted:

Of course they have only completed 18 percent and the 3.0 release almost two years late was missing 70 to 90 percent of the content. The performance was abysmal and interdiction was off the charts but they are working hard. Many people have complained about doors still not function 6 years in or clipping issues 7 years into dev. Considering the scope of the project is expect for minor things to not work only 7 years into development is super impatient. Think about it 7 years in and many base mechanics are not working yet they remind me of Apple. Apple was brave enough to remove the headphone jack. CIG 7 years in and missing major working game mechanics and technology are open about reworking the skin shader again and that is bravery. They have done a great job of continuing to capitalize on the game with so many new digital pre-purchases and merchandising and no one should worry about CR not meeting every one of the stretch goal promises. Even if should fail everyone should stand tall and salute the CR CMD for trying to do something that has never been done before and not think to ask for refunds back.

G0RF posted:

I was re-reading Kotaku UK’s primary story recently and it’s quite worth a re-read in light of the Crytek lawsuit. The entire piece is even harsher than I remembered, particularly on Chris, but also in how it exposes an organization simmering with intra-studio conflicts, internal power struggles, and resentments of Roberts’ tyrannical ego and tornadic managerial dysfunction.

The origin of their demo is discussed in well-rounded detail. With Benson talking to so many different sources — present and past employees, employees at present and past subcontractors — the tale is well rounded.

quote:

At the same time as choosing an engine to run his prototype, Roberts was building the team that would help him make it. With no idea of whether the prototype would be a success, it didn’t make sense to set up a studio and hire staff at the beginning. Instead, Roberts set up his studio virtually and, besides a few freelancers, delegated a lot of the grunt work to third-party contractors who already had established teams of developers. He contacted Sergio Rosas, Roberts’ art director back in the 1990s, who now ran an outsourcing company called CGBot in Austin, Texas. He also hired a studio called Behaviour to create assets for the prototype.

As this small team started to work on the prototype, the project attracted the attention of a couple of people working over at Crytek, the game engine’s developer. Sean Tracey, Paul Reindell and Hannes Appell were all fans of the Wing Commander games and lent a hand where they could. Appell, for instance, who is now director of cinematics on Star Citizen, created videos to show off the prototype to investors using the assets that were created by Behaviour and CGBot.

Even as a prototype, Star Citizen was a global game. Chris, working out of LA, was joined by developers in San Francisco, Austin, Montreal, and Mexico (with a little help from Crytek out in Frankfurt). This early remote setup “made me think well, maybe we don't need to have one centralised studio”, Roberts told me. “Maybe we can spread this out and we can collaborate across the different areas and go to where the talent is.”

This setup, however, would be the start of another set of desires issues during Star Citizen’s early development: a spread-out set of developers with oceans between them faced challenges that a more centralised studio wouldn’t have. From the very beginning, CIG was using third-party contractors, remote studios, and virtual collaboration. All those choices made sense when developing the prototype, but as the team, scope, and budget of Star Citizen grew, the studio structure would have to radically adapt.

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

My theory is that Chris no longer exists. You see, shortly after the birth of their children, Sandi devoured his entire head in one bite. The Chris Roberts who has been selling jpegs to nerds, therefore, is just a super high-fidelity 3d model mocapped from the inflatable sock man outside his used car dealership. The turtlenecks were to conceal the seam between the model's head and torso. It was a nice try but you gotta wake up pretty early in the morning to pull the wool over my eyes.

CrazyLoon posted:

posted:

I've been a backer since the lightspeed LTI package came out. Still no computer, but I have an Origin 350R that I'm itching to jump in and cruise the universe with. Every video and newsletter that I look at, has me excited. I'm with you guys!

Where we're going, we don't need computers to dream!

Just a credit card

PederP posted:

kilus aof posted:

That's the funny thing about citizens and CIG waffling on about 64 bit positioning in SC. No one in the industry cares. The vast majority of games don't even approach needing it and those that do would use a more suitable engine than CryEngine in the first place and would have better results with less effort.

64-bit physics libraries are a thing. When dealing with physics there can be really good reasons to use double precision floating point. But to enabled "large maps"? Not how it's done in proper engines.

64 bit as the foundation of a space sim? Not as important as they claim. It's relevant because they want to hack this into CryEngine without changing the map-based paradigm of that engine. It's not a hard requirement to make an interstellar-scale space sim. Many have been made in the past with 32 or even 16 bit based engines.

The actual challenge of space sim position systems is handling the different scales and relativity/transitions between them. Trying to use a unified coordinate system for commandos, star ships, procedural birds and gas giants is wrong. There are a number of solutions, and Derek Smart among others, have succesfully implemented these in the past. The one used for StarEngine is naive, imo. And they're not being entirely truthful about having a seamless world, I suspect.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

In November 2016 they had some convention or some other bullshit that I made the poor life choice to watch. A lot of people were expecting this to be the reveal for Squadron 42, since their stupid little webpage still said "2016" for the release date and they had been silent about things before that. Instead they spent the entire event talking about a myriad of bullshit ship sales and incredibly stupid features that nobody gave a poo poo about and then at the very end dropped something meaningless about SQ42 (I think it was a single slide or something). Meanwhile their page still said 2016, and did so for several days until finally changing to... 2017. Then they deleted the date.

At this point I had already studiously avoided playing the game since June when they had finally changed the TOS to eliminate the provision of a refund, so within a month I finally accepted that the risk of CIG disappearing with my money was greater than the chance of Star Citizen being remotely worth it and I got a full refund. Since then CIG has done nothing but validate my decision.

SomethingJones posted:

Worth Clicking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkteNWutOz8&t=396s (video: Erin stammers the entire paragraph)
Q:And improvements to persistence as well?

Erin Roberts:
Em... to... to... em... persistence and stuff yes there's a lot of improvements to persistence, there's improvements to ECONOMY, so we make it so, you know... you know... so... you know... it... it's gonna be, you know... uhm... the, you know... no... eeehhh CARRYING CARGO to make it on your map and stuff, how that works is gonna be different in terms of what you do and how you're doing things like that.

So THAT sort of level of stuff will come in, and then obviously the next BIG iteration for all that kind of stuff will be 3.2... um... where we're gonna add a BUNCH of new FEATURES such as mining, um... and SALVAGING and stuff like that.

So people can go and MINE and make money that way, um, SALVAGE and um... things like that.



Q:
So you've chosen to not have a presentation at Gamescom this year, can you tell me more about that decision?

Erin Roberts:
Eh, well ah... the MAIN reason was uh, was... it was actually uh... that was more ME than anybody else, because every year at Gamescom, even though it's really COOL and we love doing it and the big th...

I mean look, ah... we... we... LOOK, to start with we WILL be at Gamescom, we're gonna be, I mean... I will actually be there and some other people and so forth, em, so we do our sort of like our um... COMMUNITY EVENTS so we'll have like big ARTS and stuff and like MEETINGS and there will be some extra (unintelligible) there

What we're NOT doing is the big presentation and the main reason for that is it's a HUGE uhm... DEV DRAIN... which, ah.. because THIS year we're really trying to get this CADENCE of delivering constant um... ah... eh... you know... STUFF to the community, we want to basically make sure that we have, uhm...

Uh, we... we... you know... we're delivering, um, you know... like I said... you know... you know... you know... EVERY QUARTER plus you know, any other PATCHES we're doing between SO FORTH, the... you know, having to DEAL WITH both a CITCON and a GAMESCOM is a HUGE ISSUE because it takes you OFF what you're trying to do, the CADENCE of what you're doing of trying to deliver this kind of STUFF and then you've to go, 'OK what's the DEMO we're gonna do' and all this kind of STUFF

And it... it's the SAME PEOPLE who are trying to actually get the STUFF... all these FEATURES out to the community who are also putting these PRESENTATIONS together to show where the TECH's going and so forth, so...

The decision was made well, you know, um... you know... based on... THANKFULLY for me because I was really pushing for it was that, 'OK well we WON'T do Gamescom this year', ah... and so that really allows us to concentrate on THIS stuff and also it means we can really concentrate on a new format for Citizencon which is, which... which we did last year, um...

We really enjoyed and we think the community did as well and we can actually get a lot more of our people over and we can have a lot of oh... chom-pu-ooa... THIS YEAR... we're... we're doing it in AUSTIN THIS YEAR um... ehm... you know the DATES will soon be, uhm, going out to people and SO FORTH AND THINGS but...

The plan is to... uhm... we're gonna go BIGGER, we're gonna basically have... have a lot of uhm... ah... MORE, you know... PEOPLE involved... in terms of doing TALKS and stuff like that, you know at that kinda LEVEL... and obviously you know, and of course there'll always be a KEYNOTE from CHRIS and all that kind of stuff.

Sarsapariller posted:

State of the game: nervous stammering

SomethingJones posted:

SoftNum posted:

I feel like the language here is super telling. "Obviously any gameplay features are pushed out to the next patch, whichever patch that is..." like that people listening should realize nothing of substance is ever delivered right now.

It's the same stuff Chris has been saying for years. All these FEATURES are coming in 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 3.0, and now 3.2

Same poo poo, different version number.

Virtual Captain posted:

https://youtu.be/qkteNWutOz8?t=1083
Is there potential to have thousands of people in a shard[...]?
2018 Erin: ...

Beet Wagon posted:

At this point Erin is more culpable than Chris in my opinion. Chris believes he can do it, Erin knows it’s all bullshit.

Pharohman777 posted:

Star Citizen: so, you know...em...to...er...uh

zcrow posted:

quote:

https://twitter.com/public_Function/status/973506050753224704
(tweet: "So, no Evocati for me... I don't own a Driving Licence nor do I have a passport for photo ID. This decision makes me sad.")

Parpers, Please.

backer posted:

quote:

For the last five and half years, Defendants Cloud Imperium games Corp. and Roberts Space Industries Corp. have been developing a multiplayer science fiction videogame of unprecedented scale

I backed the Kickstarter based on false information of a video game already being in development for at least a year needing a few millions to be finished, as being told by CIG through the media.

At least that case is finally settled. I always asked myself if it was the fancy sci-fi buzz, which sneaked past my due diligence. Turns out, it was just common fraudsters. I have nothing to blame myself for, as I was deliberately deceived with criminal intent to get my money. Thankfully with some pressure I got it back, but I would have never funded this without being lied to in the first place.

TheAgent posted:

wait, are we saying that star citizen might be in some kind of financial trouble and chris roberts is an incompetent nincompoop and sandi isn't the best marketer since she was a little girl and that you should get a refund and ben is fat and also a creep and despised completely by his colleagues and erin roberts is just as loving dumb as his brother and that they won't hit their quarterly patch goals and that ship sales will continue and that backers are upset but somehow they still keep making about $35m a year which ain't enough to develop a game like this, let alone two of them, and that while 400 people seems like a lot they are all kids hired or promoted to do jobs they don't understand and have no experience doing?

jesus christ maybe star citizen is bad


next you'll tell me that turbulent did a bunch of work on the mocap and directed sizzle reels or something insane

Loxbourne posted:

I've said it before and I'll say it again. CIG's defence strategy is to shout HOW DARE YOU as loudly as possible. Riles up the backers, generates some spite pledges, tells investors and Coutts that they're confident and fighting hard. Never, ever, for one single second, acknowledge Crytek or their case as legitimate in any way.

Then offer Crytek a settlement behind the scenes. Case withdrawn, CIG get to posture, the fanbase announces that Crytek are filthy moneygrubbing whores (and CIG can say "wasn't us saying that, bless their overenthusiastic hearts").

CIG stated it in this very document; they were shocked and appalling when Crytek didn't settle at the first meeting.

SomethingJones posted:

From the Theranos case:

"Innovators who seek to revolutionise and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today - not just what they hope it might do someday," said Jina Choi, director of the SEC's San Francisco regional office.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

I think I was the kind of player they originally wanted to have, but not the kind of player they eventually wanted to have. When you look at the original days, back when Rob Irving and Eric Peterson were running things in Austin and the scope was impressive but arguably manageable, I think they really did appreciate having me around. I've talked with a lot of former developers who all said the same thing; they thought I was a complete rear end at times but the kind of rear end who challenged them and forced them to make a better game. Probably the nicest thing I heard was Travis Day's comment that I was a "lovable prick". And for the most part I genuinely loved it. I knew exactly what I wanted to be; the guy on the fringe making life hell for everyone else. I wanted to be the bad guy, and I can't recall anyone from Goonrathi not wanting the same. This not only enraged backers who thought it was horrifying that I genuinely wanted to steal their poo poo and pilot a Bengal into a sun, but also gave me a clarity of focus when it came to criticizing the game.

Unfortunately over time it became clear that Chris wasn't interested in actually delivering a game, and that requires a different kind of fan. You can't have people criticizing dates, or asking difficult questions about gameplay, because that affects the income stream. You need people who are bought in to the "vision" of Star Citizen, the ideal of a perfect game that immerses you and allows you to do whatever you want. People who wouldn't know a sunk cost fallacy if it robbed them blind and left them dead in a ditch. People who see the dream and not the reality. The kind of people who have been conned, scammed, and taken advantage of since the dawn of mankind. Hell I like to think of myself as a fairly high functioning skeptic and it took me years to accept things were hosed.

Scruffpuff posted:

The winning, most greatest thing about Star Citizen, is that they don't have a publisher. To the backers, that means the obvious bullshit they spout every 5 seconds. But to those of us who see what's happening, the lack of a publisher is a 100% slam-dunk guarantee of classic humor. See, if an idea isn't working, Sony or Blizzard or EA will see that and scrap the project before it's a colossal embarrassment and eventual total collapse, which robs us of LOLs. Chris Roberts has no such misgivings. The entire idea of Star Citizen (whatever the gently caress it is) is an epic shitbomb and there's nobody to stop it. It's the Armageddon asteroid of games and there's no Bruce Willis here - this fucker is gonna hit and the shitstorm is going to be apocalyptic. Even if they die before a release - the insanity of backers assures that any result it good for those of us in the observation seats.

Spectrum posted:

I´m not sure this game will be any fun, like in any fun at all. I was going to Levsky with some goods and BAM, some rear end in a top hat was waiting and killed me. That was fun. This was his job that day. Killing nice people, killing transporters with weak defences.

I get it, this is an action game like Call of Duty lets say. But why can´t it be more like some truck simulator or something. I just wan´t to make some money and not have to worry about Joe rear end in a top hat waiting for me everywhere!

Ok, ok, just hire somebody to protect you and my problem are solved? Well if I don´t have any money for that or all my friends are sleeping or if I don´t have any friends. What then. Buy better ship!

Make sure players have always the option to run away or avoid ganking assholes and their buddies.

The Titanic posted:

I kind of sort of want to put in my useless opinion here.

I doubt CIG was afraid of the legal issues Derek would or would not raise. But I think at around this time the seeds were planted that this "game" was going to live or die very fast around public opinion.

If I recall, around this time Beer4TheBeerGod was really starting to poke holes in everything. The tide was starting to turn from "yay I love Star Citizen!" Into "uhhh... guys I don't think this is happening the way it's being told to us..."

And this was a very big, very major shift. Right in the middle of the 10ftC episodes where Chris went on camera and promised the impossible on a weekly basis to help keep money flowing and people "feeling excited and interested and involved", suddenly out of nowhere there it is:

Derek Smart with a bomb from left field.

Confidence was shaking. The community was starting to rip at the seams. Loyal backers were starting to shift. Derek and Something Awful opinions were beginning to sway, and we know they were closely monitoring (and still are) all social media outlets and popular opinion.

Chris Roberts and Sandi, at that time, had their finger on the pulse. They probably very, very quickly knee-jerked a fast "refund that fucker so he hasn't got a leg to stand on! Now now now!" And it was so, and then in natural form Ben, who was helping to destroy the community, also had to try to refute this, and it was way out of his league.

The Roberts were in a panic mode now. They saw this getting picked up by big news agencies, goons were basically turning, social media was going upside down on them. So Chris did what any manager who thinks he's a genius does, and probably did personally write a letter that he genuinely felt came from the heart and stabbed at news agencies like The Escapist and Derek and goons as being pure evil.

And that probably solidified the end times cascade of "us vs them". Goons were thrown out, detractors became marked. Their forums became even more of a battleground, but it was a losing battleground for detractors because now the staff were fast of the lookout for newly determined "FUD campaigns" and just made it all vanish.

And this began the era where CIG shut down public opinion if it was negative, made it vanish, marked users who were known anti-CIG groups and cataloged their social media monikers, and ultimately lead to CIG shutting down their forums entirely and taking it all off the grid basically and only allowing controlled transmissions and specific marketing campaigns to see the light of day.

It was a perfect storm, but I also feel that while Beer4TheBeerGod may not have written a blog at the time, his parallel actions of a similar nature also helped CIG to grow into an alarm condition and when Derek blew the top, it was a combination of problems that caused CIG to hugely gently caress up and go places they could never have recovered from.

Loxbourne posted:

I still think the ultimate reason for Beer's banning was Sandi either coming across, or being handed in a weekly summary, his post saying she had a responsibility to the backers as a collapse of CIG would lead to suicides. The timing was simply too perfect, and her subsequent need to berate and humiliate him too strong, for it to just be his position as a prominent asker of awkward questions. Beer very specifically made Sandi look and feel bad, and that could not be tolerated.

Not the public callouts and criticism of Ben. Not the rallying point for growing skepticism (although those made him an irritant, and Sandi did like hunting down naysayers). I think it was posting the new SC thread with the pixel artwork of ships and price tags replaced with "expect a refund of $X", thereby directly threatening the Roberts cashflow. That put him on the shitlist, and then he said exactly the kind of thing a narcissist cannot bear to hear about themselves.

Make him stop saying the bad thing!

posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/843ypx/jeff_goldblum_is_voicing_ian_malcolm_in_jurassic/dvrjtik/?context=3

quote:

Wait, if cig 'actively works on delivering its promises' why have they produced absolutely nothing in 6 years?

quote:

"absolutely nothing".. good bye troll

guess what, there are more features in SC ALPHA than in this 3 years ago released poo poo show Elite Dangerous, but nice bait mate

6 years after their scam Kickstarter, Frontier don't even have a loving prototype of walking or FPS

quote:

Star Citizen is a barely functioning tech demo that struggles to run at 20 fps or host a dozen people without the server crashing. Lol that you list something enabled in cryengine by default as if it's a major achievement of cig, instead of something they got for free from a more competent company. How's the VR and 1000 player instances coming along?

quote:

it's sad that there are still people defending a lazy rear end company like Frontier, while bashing the 100 times more ambitious and detailed project coming from CIG. Enjoy that stuff but they'll never play in the same league with this low motivation grind simulator that has you pinned down in a tiny orange cockpit., looking at pointless grind meters. Sad.

quote:

You are right on that E:D and Star Citizen will never be in the league. E:D is an actual game with content. Star Citizen is vaporware with lots of youtube videos telling suckers to give them more money. I am seriously impressed CIG keeps getting idiots to believe that the patch right after the next patch will have everything you want!!

Chris Roberts truly is a genius. Who knew you could get so rich by not creating the game?!

quote:

Seriously, this level of reality denial isn't healthy. I'm glad that even the most delusional backers are starting to tacitly acknowledge that the claims about VR and 1000 player instances are bullshit though, well done on making a tiny amount of intellectual progress.

SpaceCurtisLeMay posted:

there were some other things as I saw people on disability basically spending every spare dime they had on ships and such then complaining about not having money for other things in life. I've known two people who have died while waiting for the game. I one of the guys was in his late 70's. It was no surprise when he passed away. The other was only 34 and was shockingly sudden last year, and his death really took any wind left in the hype sails away. Honestly he was dealt a poo poo hand in life and was planning to use SC as a kind of escape after an allergic reaction to anesthesia for a routine surgery left him blind in one eye and kidney damage that required dialysis 3 times a week. That I could understand...kept his mind off pain and what not. But there were others who spent so much it led to divorces or law suits even when they spent $10k on star citizen instead of contributing to their kids' college fund as they were required to by custody agreements.

Virtual Captain posted:

15:37 - 'ark survival evolved was targeted with a lawsuit for just their CEO breaching a non-compete clause. That little oops cost wildcard to the tune of 40 million and that was just their CEO. Crytek is saying the entire development of Star Citizen violates numerous agreements anyone who thinks the damages Crytek is going after is just going to put a little dent in CIG's wallet is either insane or shilling super loving hard for CIG. Guys please don't be ignorant the idea that this is just gonna be like a little a little bump in the road for CIG is just insane.'

D_Smart posted:

Thoatse posted:

Wow, blind culling is not what I thought it was