Quavers posted:

quote:

Todd says that what people need to understand is that in normal game development a company would just "run" until they reach Alpha, at which point they'd look at what they've done and realise that they've made a huge mess that the need to clean up before Beta, which is when they have to polish and tune the game, and have an aspect of iteration. In their case, having a Live product since very early on in its development creates challenges that sometimes they're used to and sometimes they're not, so it's a learning process for all of them regardless of how long individual people have been making games for, because Star Citizen is "a very unique beast".

DigitalPenny posted:

No profits, just a purchased a 4.7 million dollar mansion....

What is profit?

Quavers posted:

Roadmap Roundup September 20th 2019

Notable Changes for September 20th, 2019

The Vanguard Harbinger and Vanguard Sentinel have gone into polishing in preparation for their launch in Star Citizen Alpha 3.7.

Arena Commander: Pirate Swarm Improvements
We’ve added this card to the 3.7 column, which introduces an overhaul of the Pirate Swarm waves and difficulty curve to offer a true challenge to novice and experienced pilots alike.

Star Marine: The Good Doctor
We’ve added this card to the 3.7 column, which introduces a new Star Marine map. The Good Doctor has been designed and created from the ground up to offer a new and clean look for Star Marine. The map aims to offer fast, frantic and close quarter combat.

Glowsticks
We’ve added this card to the 3.7 column, which introduces the ability for a player to purchase, stow and throw a glowstick. With a wider light than the torch, the glowstick illuminates its immediate surroundings and can be thrown and placed in the environment to aid in player exploration through dark areas.


They've named a Star Marine map after Derek Smart

Dementropy posted:

https://twitter.com/RobertsSpaceInd/status/1189282065293991938

Agony Aunt posted:

Huh? When?

TheAgent posted:

its been completely boring and nothing new besides the 20v20 has been announced

Dwesa posted:

Also, BF4 came out in 2013...

quote:

Sorry, hahaha, I dont play many other games so I pulled from what I knew in the moment.

Sample_text posted:

A story told in 4 jpegs.

quote:

... I find it kinda silly to get all worked up about things not working in a super early alpha,like did you expect a full game? You're paying into what is essentially a continuation of the kick starter that made the creation of this game possible.

quote:

Interesting here. If you look at the recent Cyberpunk 2077 footage, you'll notice the bartender mixes the drink behind the bar, probably because it's not an actual animation.

That's probably the standard for big-budget games this year and it's interesting to see that that is generally the go-to.

It's not a big deal, and it doesn't make any game better or worse, but it *does* speak to the priorities that either studio sets.

​

That being said, I could go without seeing my drink being made, but it's cool.

quote:

I wouldn't normally do this but I know you've invested a lot of time into Star Citizen, including on the testing and community content creation so I'm going to take your reply to as a sign of frustration and try to add a little more context to help you see a bigger picture.

What were you hoping to get from your Original Post? I was assuming it was -
“I was wondering where we are almost 4 years later, tested a few things and made a video.”

I shared information on where we are, and why you don't see something you thought you should. Part of my motivation for answering is that I commonly see people assume things that aren't true like the room system not being in the game because one aspect of the system doesn't have the behavior that they think it should. I wanted to give you extra context and information so you (and others in this thread) had a better understanding of what is in, what isn't and why it isn't and what is left to do.

If you want to encourage me or other developers to answer questions then it helps to not turn around and question people's professionalism or make sweeping statements. If someone did that to you in your job I am sure it would be irritating. I have a thicker skin than most of the developers at CIG, and realize that not everyone is speaking in their first language or realizes how they phrased things may not have been the best, but in general it is best to approach things with constructive criticism, leaving the ad hominems out. You wouldn't be putting this much time into something if you didn't care, so why put energy into posting something that a developer will dismiss because it feels like an attack? I can tell you that being considerate of someone and treating them with respect will get you much further than than being dismissive. The development team reads these forums and other places like reddit, and the community's feedback really helps, but the feedback that gets actioned on, that gets passed around internally and is discussed is the constructive type, not the overly negative type. Just saying something sucks isn't helpful. Explaining why it sucks for that user, and their ideas to potentially rectify it is helpful.

My biggest disappointment with modern internet discourse is that there's a significant amount of cynicism, especially in forum or reddit debates, and a portion of people assume the worst. If a feature is missing, late or buggy it's because the company or the developer lied and or / is incompetent as opposed to the fact that it just took longer and had more problems than the team thought it would when they originally set out to build it. Developers by their very nature are optimistic. You have to be to build things that haven't ever been built before. Otherwise the sheer weight of what is needed to be done can crush you. But being optimistic or not foreseeing issues isn't the same as lying or deliberately misleading people. Everyone at CIG is incredibly passionate about making Star Citizen the most immersive massively multiplayer first person universe sandbox, and everyone works very hard to deliver that. If we could deliver harder, faster, better we would. We get just as frustrated with the time things take. We practice bottom up task estimation where the team implementing the feature breaks it down and gives their estimates of how long it will take them. Management doesn't dictate timelines, we just set priorities for the teams as there are always a lot more things to do at any one time than we have people to do them. We are constantly reviewing and trying to improve our AGILE development process and how we estimate sprints. As the code, feature and content base grows there is more maintenance and support needed for the existing features and content, which can eat into the time a team has for new feature development, meaning you always have the push and pull of current quality of life in a release versus delivering new features and content. The same push and pull exists in the community as there is a strong desire for polished bug free gameplay now but also new features and content, often from the very same people.

Things like Salvage haven't been pushed back on a whim, but because in terms of priority we felt that it would premature to work on Salvage before the iCache and physical damage system is implemented in the game as this fundamentally changes how we manage state, handle damage and debris. So when presented with a priority call to make on resource allocation we deprioritized Salvage in order to build the infrastructure to really make it sing, as opposed to working on a system we will have to refactor when the iCache and new damage system came on line.

We have also decided we wanted to invest more time into the quality of life, performance and stability in Star Citizen as it is actively played every day by tens of thousands of people; on normal days we have an average of over 30,000 different people playing and at the peak during events this year we've hit 100,000 unique accounts playing in one day which is pretty impressive for a game in an early Alpha state. We are on track to have over one million unique players this year. Star Citizen already has the main gameloops of a space sim; cargo hauling, commodity trading, mercenary, pirate, bounty hunting and mining. Just spending time refining and finishing out these would make Star Citizen with all it's detail and fidelity more engrossing than any "finished" space sim you can play today.

We've shown a preview of the new roadmap format ( https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/17727-Star-Citizen-Squadron-42-Roadmap-Update ) that we are working on. Part of the motivation for changing how we share the tasks we are working on and their progress is so the community can get better visibility into the hard choices that we face everyday on the project and see what exactly every team is working on as opposed to just the few tasks we feel comfortable sharing because we think have a high probability to make that quarter. When we make a priority call and move up or add a task there is always something that needs to be pushed back. The new format which tracks our 58 feature and content teams that work on Star Citizen and Squadron 42, will be able to show what each team is working on and if a new initiative like improving the cargo hauling experience gets added you'll see the tasks that get pushed back on the teams that will work on this new initiative. As a point of data these teams can be anywhere from 4 people to over 20 people and of the 58 teams only 11 are exclusively dedicated to Squadron 42 and 12 for Star Citizen and the rest are shared (things like graphics, engine, actor, vehicle, AI, VFX, sound and so on), although a lot of the priorities for things like actor, vehicle and AI are driven by what Squadron needs.

Henry Scorpio posted:

I have really fond memories of this game, but I think it was because my parents had forbidden me from playing it and it was one of the first SVGA games I played. And the fact that weapon misses affected the environment was pretty novel at the time. Hilarious that this guy put his name on the game like he’s Sid Meier.

Gravity_Storm posted:

This made me laugh over on Spectrum... it's Star Citizen in a nutshell. Behold the Xeno Threat event.

Clipping through something - CHECK
Unintended consequences of poor design - CHECK
Amazing potential for griefing - CHECK

"During a Xenothreat even, I went to Jericho Station to see a Javelin. I had a crimestat, so everyone started to shoot at me. I ejected and EVA to have a closer look at this majestic capital ship. While walking on its hull, accidentialy I have slightly glitched through a floor and joined a ship, which has enabled a station defenses, which started to shoot Javelin, heavily damaged it and it has canceled entire event on the server. I'm really, really sorry for ruining this event for 40 people, it was really not my intention."

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/criminal-walking-on-javelin-can-cancel-entire-even

https://www.filfre.net/2021/03/wing-commander-iii/ posted:

Amidst all the hype, peculiarly little attention was paid to the other part of Wing Commander III, the ostensible heart of the experience: the actual missions you flew behind the controls of an outer-space fighter plane. This applied perhaps as much inside Origin as it did anywhere else. Chris Roberts was a talented game designer and programmer — he had, after all, been responsible for the original Wing Commander engine which had so wowed gamers back in 1990 — but his attention was now given over almost entirely to script consultations, film shoots, and virtual set design. Tellingly, Origin devoted far more resources to the technology needed to make the full-motion video go than they did to that behind the space simulator.

Dwesa posted:

SC has new trailer

What is Star Citizen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Rz5PTMuaw


Universe at the scale of one half-finished system at 1:16 scale. Unprecedented in how small this "universe" is, I guess.

serious norman posted:

Is the game out yet?

Colostomy Bag posted:

For some reason I'm reminded of Morrowind or Kotor.

Dwesa posted:

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Star Citizen was meant to have thousands of players interacting with each other in real time through server meshing. Star Citizen was always meant to have 50 player instances or shards with players not interacting with each other.

Also this awkward thing:
Tony Z talks as fast as he does because he perceives time at half the rate we do

quote:

dozens of screens of useful key binds

quote:

One of this patch’s greatest features is cynics being just a little quieter.

This game gets a lot of hate from a small portion of very passionate ”fans” that find every flaw and every bug and every unknown and just laser beam focus on those negative aspects while essentially denying that progress is being made. Well, with 3.15, I think it’s pretty undeniable, even to the most boring vapid complainers, that progress is indeed being made. The development is in a place where it’s clear that the software and maybe even the development itself is running smoother than ever. The improvements in general performance as well as the depth provided by the new inventory and medical systems (not without flaw, of course) have made it into much more of a playable game seemingly all at once, and I’m seeing a little more optimism come of it. Do I think it’s wrong to have criticisms and concerns? No. Do I think it’s interesting or good for the community when people are devoting their time to complaining and naysaying and just being needlessly cynical? No. It’s exhausting, and I’m seeing a bit less of it now. This patch is refreshing.