Neurotic Roleplay posted:

jesus christ how broke is your brain if you keep up with and talk about this dumb loving game. and no, you aren't doing it "ironically"

Tolth posted:

What the hell is wrong with people who fall for this? How much of a mark do you have to be?

Hav posted:

Nonono, you misunderstand; Neurotic Roleplay is actually giving a medical diagnosis and has wandered into the somethingawful.com games section by accident, wandering past the awful Skyrim mods and terrible hentai games on Steam to point out that enjoying the slow-motion collapse of the largest crowd-funding 'game' is somehow more broken-brained than....<checks notes>....'tit spikes'? Do I have that right?

It makes you really think.

Tippis posted:

To be fair, irrespective of the backers' protestations to the contrary, it's quite likely they're no longer accumulating new suckers at any useful rate. If they were, it would still be a prominent part of their marketing like it was in the early years (2012–2017 or so), but now it's all about the total sum raised. So the people who fell for it did so long ago and are now just stuck in a deep sunk-cost hole where they must believe it to be true because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.


After all, this timeframe is completely normal and you know nothing of game development.



For the newcomers: CIG has consistently gotten the same tax credit for a game that's roughly as “culturally British” as… oh, let's say bratwurst. The payday loan the OP mentions happened a couple of years back when they were running dry close to account reporting time because they couldn't quite be sleazy enough to go full Enron and report uncertain future backer funds as income, and instead got Coutts to cover them until the tax rebate for that year kicked in. Their financial position was so solid that they had to throw in the entirety of their main IP rights as a collateral to cover that £3M shotfall for about 6 months.

Dementropy posted:

Bargearse posted:

Oh gently caress I just figured out exactly why Sandi Gardiner bothers me so much. She looks way, way too much like my ex girlfriend from like years ago.

Cameroon_TLPC posted:

Friend and fellow Gamers,

Good evening! I am happy to continue answer all questions about progress of <3Pledge (Love Pledge). We are working hard, as evidenced by our online presence!

No need to try and refund your monies. They are all for development and in our good hands.

When Oleg comes back from vacation in Brno, we will have major update!

OK OK I cannot wait! See you at Gamescom 2020 with full gameplay trailer.
https://twitter.com/PledgeTeam/status/1170029056055578625

Cameroon_TLPC posted:

I assure you, we are working very hard to make sure every pledge dollar is carefully applied. Even as CEO I am refactoring lots of code on a daily basis!
https://twitter.com/PledgeTeam/status/1009494494612340736
Once Oleg returns I will promptly and severely ask him the status of your pledge package, as Fluffer is high tier and is very respected. Thank you for your continued support and I assure you more ways to pledge are in the works!

Snazzy Frocks posted:

my advice for this thread is to keep it more about the game and less about the private individuals supporting the game. things get weird when you start examining peoples personal lives and choices and mock that stuff instead of the bad game

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Is he also the bunny ears cosplay guy?

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Now I'm trying to figure out if that's a prop gun or a real one...

Beet Wagon posted:

"What's a three month delay for never?" holy gently caress

Thoatse posted:

TonyMcS posted:

IT APPEARS SQ42 IS POWERING ALONG.

I present the following word salad as the latest info on SQ42. Basically it's a list of things not working. However one phrase has been added to the SC lexicon.

The Character Team finished the first hairstyle under the finalized hair creation pipeline.

I'm sure there are other gems in there but I'll let you discover them yourselves


Attention Recruits,

What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we've uncovered intel on operations concerning cinematic techniques, the creation of derelict ships, and a new Vulkan-friendly pipeline.

The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.

UEE Naval High Command

AI
Character AI worked towards completing the first pass on the new iteration of combat behaviors. This implementation includes better structural organization of the different tactics characters can evaluate during combat and helps the programmers to implement and test all possible options. It’s also great for the player as it makes the overall combat experience more stable and interesting. For example, enemies now have proper tactics for handling open spaces and have a better selection of cover options when fighting in locations with multiple floors. They also started implementing different weapon fire modes so that NPCs can decide which one best suits their current situation. The choice is also affected by the AI’s ‘experience’ – so a scared, inexperienced soldier might shoot as much as possible with reduced accuracy and bullet conservation. Several fixes were made to ensure aiming and shooting syncs correctly between the client and server too.

Ship AI worked on behavior and technical improvements. So of these allow the designers to access more behavior parameters, such as the option to look at a target while flying to a specific offset or to the beginning of a Track View scene. They implemented the first version of the Defend Target behavior that makes great use of the new target selection functionalities – the designers can now customize weights and threat scores to enable the AI to select the most appropriate target. This selection is influenced by several factors, such as the enemy ship’s threat score, the number of enemies targeting a specific entity, or damage inflicted. This provides a more realistic fight experience and allows players to witness more meaningful decisions during firefights.

Further progress was made towards the new ship 3D pathfinding implementation. This new approach has two basic control modes: position and velocity. Positional control means that a spaceship wants to reach a specific location, so a path will be generated incrementally as it moves in space. Velocity control means that a spaceship is going to maneuver related to a specific target or location. Both approaches make use of the physical data stored in the signed distance fields (SDF).


Animation
Animation continued R&D into the motion matching tech mentioned last month, including looking at how seamlessly it can transition from locomotion into a usable enter animation. They also looked into interrupt and resume tech for story scenes, which will allow a player to leave a scene, have the characters pause naturally, and start again seamlessly when they rejoin. The SQ42 Feature Team also started implementing a firing range.


Art (Characters)
The Character Team finished the first hairstyle under the finalized hair creation pipeline, and while they’re still expecting updates on the tech end, the artists are ready to start working through the remaining tasks. They also made revisions to various uniforms and wrapped up a key piece of enemy armor. An extremely important character concept was also completed and will soon move into the implementation phase.


Art (Environment)
Archon Station’s interiors progressed well throughout August - the social hub is coming to a close and many of the team have moved onto the engineering sections seen during key parts of the campaign.
The exterior of the comms array was tweaked slightly and work continued on the geometry and shaders. The station is about to receive a lighting pass and has been handed to the Space Scaping Team for placing.
The development of derelict ships began, with a few interesting variations created, including rotting, frozen, and attacked - all of which are being hand-sculpted to give maximum visual and emotional impact.

Cinematics
SQ42 allows players to create a character at the beginning of the story. This presents a unique challenge for cinematics and narrative, as most things relating to the story feature full performance capture and one of the team’s goals is to keep all cinematic sequences unified. To test this, they picked sequences they’re currently working on and switched between the male and female facial performance capture and evaluated where they can keep the player body motion unified, where they can edit and adjust, and where they have to split the performances. To help, Tech Art unified the player actor records and loadout options and now have an easy way to change the tag from male to female. A lot of scenes worked well with slight adjustment and polish, but areas benefiting from the individual actor’s performance will be split. Audio timing and syncing were also considered. The team don’t want direct copies of line readings and want to give the actors freedom of expression, but the overall cadence and timing must match, particularly the start times for each capture.
The female character model is also smaller than the male version, both in terms of body size and camera framing. So, further adjustments to the character motions were made, such as adjusting the hands and back to fit in chairs properly. To solve the framing issue, a camera tag was created to reduce the “tripod” height by 10cm in scenes that show the female player close up.


Engineering
The Engine Team finished supporting tri-mesh splitting, which optimizes collisions and intersection tests, implements collision filtering and collision merging, and fixes foliage skinning. They also made batch process physics proxy updates which now don’t update the physics proxy if the entity has network serialization disabled.
Rendering wise, the first draft of the new graphics pipeline was submitted. The goal is to gradually transition to a Vulkan/DX12-friendly pipeline and the implement the Vulkan backend. The first pass includes initial interfaces and implementation, tone mapping, and the first Vulkan code added to renderer. For planet rendering, they moved from the explicit table-based evaluation of atmosphere inscatter to an incremental raymarch stepping process. This now allows additional evaluation of ground fog density samples (and clouds at a later stage) and incorporates them into the scatter equations.


Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story Team made progress on a wide range of scenes last month. Some had already been worked on and only required modest updates, while others were new so were built up from scratch. Mo-cap was delivered quickly throughout the month and enabled the team to make progress at an impressive pace. The also worked closely with Props to finalize several handheld objects and complete all scenes they’re included in.


Graphics
The Graphics Team continued with the same core features as last month, including gas cloud sun shadows. Volumetric sun shadows are now computed on the GPU and correctly account for shadows between adjacent and parented gas clouds. The remaining work involves factoring these volumetric shadows into the general lighting equation for opaque meshes. Alongside this, improvements were made to the glass shader refraction effect, which is used to render plastic sheets and icicles. Work also continued on the updated renderer design. This will continue over the next few months alongside a huge clean-up of old code and redundant features.


Level Design
The Social Team continued to work on narrative scenes, working out conversation breaks and re-joins, directional triggers, and other specific details relating to social AI and player conversations. Most of the Level Design Team worked with Art to finalize the layout and AI operation of a major FPS combat zone. The Dogfight Team is still focused on the various use-cases for the more complicated AI requirements of space combat, while the Tech Team finalized the templates for various crew behaviors.


Narrative
As levels continue to be refined and the pacing of gameplay is solidified, the Narrative Team worked closely with Design to identify areas where additional narrative moments could help to flesh out the world and story. After creating scripts, they worked with Animation, Audio, and Design to implement placeholder assets for playtesting and polishing. Last month also saw the team assisting Environment Art by providing additional environmental storytelling and props documentation. These writeups provide detailed backstory and references for everything from key hero assets intended to catch players’ eyes to small props that make the universe feel more alive. Additionally, they continued writing all the text that players will encounter throughout the game.


QA
QA’s August support predominantly went to Cinematics, who are working on a wide range of cutscenes. A new level was created for the testing of ship explosions and AA-turret setup via Track View to make it easier to quickly test any issues they encounter. Work on a new level to test character animations and lighting began too.
Testing for the newest AI collision avoidance changes is also underway. While AI testing in DE is primarily done for the Persistent Universe, any new AI issues are cross-checked with the SQ42 test team in the UK as there’s often overlap.


Tech Animation
Tech Animation supported the Social AI Team with in-engine animation setups and animation rigs for a wide variety of props. They completed technical setups for new weapon attachment types and bugs were fixed for the animation, design, and art teams.


Tech Art
Tech Art revisited the facial expression scanning pipeline and evaluated various new photogrammetry-based scan solutions. Since highly detailed scans of facial expressions are the core of the new in-house rigging pipeline, efficient creation, processing, and manual touch-ups of the scan meshes are crucial for quick turnaround. This new solution will ultimately help the team expand the character creator’s ‘DNA’ gene pool and give both the designers and players more options to create unique and interesting faces.


VFX
The VFX Team continued their close collaboration with Art and Design on some of the key space environments. As part of this, they added improvements to the ‘VFX transparent shader', which is used to fill environments with moving dust and debris. The VFX tech artists continued to work with the graphics engineers to improve the gas cloud tools and began investigating the destruction pipeline to further improve the campaigns more epic destruction events. They also started developing effects for a new rocket launcher, including the muzzle flashes, backblast, missile trails, and missile impact on various surfaces.

Bumble He posted:

Bumble He is curious if the move to games will bring some fresh blood in here.
if not, then Bumble is also fine with the same ole mofos rubbing forever

i'm not a vampire by the way

Agony Aunt posted:

> “I believe that Ms. Gardiner is not emotionally stable.”

He then married her and made her Chief Marketing Officer of his company.

Perfectly rational thing to do with someone who isn't emotionally stable.

skeletors_condom posted:

One notion presented in this thread that I strongly disagree with is the idea that some SC fanboys lean alt-right.

All in all, I would say they are just nerds. They don't support the ethno-state or "peaceful ethnic cleansing," they are more about a faux-great Gatsby spaceship and some marketing talking points about immersion and fidelity. Alt-righters (even ones who play video games) aren't about that.

Mirificus posted:

Mr. Carlisle posted:

So "SSOCS" is the latest buzzword they've thrown out there to continue milking idiot whales?

It'd be amazing to see a list of all the terms they've either invented or renamed something else to in order to have a fresh excuse for endless delays

Agony Aunt posted:

They aren't though. They could weasel their way out of even the kickstarter stuff with a "well, we tried, but we just couldn't make it happen", but don't worry, because here is another concept ship!

Beet Wagon posted:

It's absolutely wild how lovely their city planet looks. All that work to make it happen and it looks like something out of Grand Theft Auto 3. Shame.

Sarsapariller posted:

I'll have you know that you can land in a very exciting spaceport, and take a bus ride to a CryEngine shopping mall level that is almost a full square kilometer in size! There are three or four whole stores to shop at! You can also land in like 12 other places on the planet but it's just rooftop landing pads there, you can't get down off the buildings.

In any case it's extremely good and I'm happy to wait ten more years to see the other hundred planets.

Grubby Hobo posted:

This staggered development crap...

If you are doing releases every quarter, NOTHING IN THE WORLD keeps your developers from working on a branch and not shipping in one of your quarterly releases. It's just a common sense thing to do for some things, and really obvious.

So naturally we get told that it is a brilliant idea that CI(G) has put into place, and of course it is a complete smoke screen excuse for delays and crappy releases, and of course the backers are totally fine with that. Sometimes I think CI(G) could shut the whole thing down, and if they came up with a new name for it, like Liquidation Pipeline Physicalized Asset Disposal, the backers would be totally happy.

The real staggered development is that Chris staggers up and impedes development by issuing random orders.

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/rmwarnick/status/1170102525967527936
https://twitter.com/MadMaxiMoxie/status/1170104343942402048
https://twitter.com/GrathTelkin/status/1170121717177602048

Kikas posted:

So if they land, that 870 owner can sell the ship that landed on it, right?

tooterfish posted:

It's a shame those old Atari joysticks weren't natively compatible with the human hand.

loving torture devices.

Mirificus posted:

Agony Aunt posted:

I think the real question posed by this post is, has Dementropy become a bot?

Jonny Shiloh posted:

Dr Kay Ross was Dr Anthony Ross, right? Help me out here, I'm trying to imagine the Star Citizen community's reaction if Jane Crewe or Mary Sue Abent turned up on Inside Star Citizen, and I'm failing.

Maybe they'd be welcoming and non-judgemental?

Scruffpuff posted:

Yeah that's pretty raw poo poo. Remember, this is someone's dream - their idealized version of what the game could become - and it's insipid.

Let's see if I can do better:

"It's the year 2030 and Star Citizen is a terminally broken failed model-viewer app running as a private server on an old PC in the basement of a neckbeard who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation. His grandmother didn't notice the PC running when she went down there to collect and burn his semen-stained anime pillows some 5 years earlier, and somehow it's still chugging along. A handful of unemployed, filthy men ranging from 50-70, each the center of a physically visible aura of unidentifiable yet highly acetic odor, imagine that they're in an "org" and log on to "play." After some 15 to 20 crashes, one of them manages to spawn in a ship. It rotates and jitters around its axis sporadically, devoid of any mass or inertia. A second logon is successful, and the server dumps them both, leaving the others on a loading screen indefinitely. They spend the rest of their lives in this endless loop, sending checks to an address long ago vacated by Roberts, and die forgotten and alone.

Fin."

MilesK posted:

AlbieQuirky posted:

What if the US economy crashes but Germany does fine? Will be a different game if so.

Sarsapariller posted:

Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

Mr Fronts posted:

Would you take a grey market Idris? Its value can only go up! Who knows how valuable it could turn out to be in the year 2456, when Star Citizen goes into early beta...

Bootcha posted:

What does your heart tell you?

Dooguk posted:

Which of the world's great chess players will they have to mocap?

Popete posted:

What's the point of hand mining rocks in a cave in a game were you can effectively mine entire asteroids in space? It makes no sense.

It makes at least some sense in NMS where you are a stranded solo survivor making their way thru the galaxy scraping together fuel but it also doesn't bill itself as a high fidelity space sim either.

Dementropy posted: