“Soon there will be a jump gate that can take me to the Helios system! I bet we’ll have underwater vehicles by then and I can explore the vast depths of Helios II! I’m going to set up deep sea mining operations as soon as its live so I can get a head start carving out my thrilling future as an Oceanic Mining Tycoon!”
But there is no jump gate, there is no Helios, there is no mining, there is no economy. The adventure of a thousand lifetimes starts and ends in your head. But fear not, there is something original already in the game. Consider it a goodfaith down payment on the wonderland of creative treasures inbound soon, the stuff that’s going to leave Rockstar, Bethesda, and everyone else in the industry in the dust. Do you like noodle-dispensers with immersion-breaking nods to real employees working for this gaming studio? Capital! You’ll find them pretty much everywhere and we’ve even arranged them into a Stonehenge structure to destroy your immersion and our creative credibility even further…
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Star Citizen.
The problem is crisp crobblers should never have been in a management role to begin with
If he had just been a consultant, I bet there would have been a game to play by now
Hey guys make me a successor to wing commander and make it an open world sim, I’ll check in every 6 months from my villa in Monaco to offer some advice on direction
you hired all these supposed experts in their field and you just micromanage the living shit out of them. I’m surprised more haven’t walked out, no one likes to be micromanaged let alone by the likes of a washed up wannabe movie director
Please Chris for the love of god go away for a long time (And never come back)
star citizen is my eternal gamer valhalla
So they were trying to achieve this internally using ASIO and attempting to animate based on audio recognition. Needless to say it was a complete waste of time and money.
Shortly after that poll they showed a demo of their new audio system on ATV. They recorded lots of audio of clothing rustling, dog tags jingling, ammo packs clicky clacking - every limb on the model had a wav assigned to its animation.
It was a disaster. They used a stereo mic to record the foley, and because they had so many individual wavs playing when the commando ran down the corridor they had to pan some of them hard left and hard right - already a big no-no for the player character - on top of them already being in stereo.
Even now, with a third party library and sdk handling the positional voice in their 3.0 presentation - the left & right audio channels are the wrong way round.
Character walks to the left, her voice moves off to the right.
So that nice Behringer powered desk that some of you spotted? Yeah, they had the line out hooked up the wrong way round for the stream. Didn’t even test their channels. And the big new feature was positional audio. I mean come on.
I’m waiting for CIG to show me one single thing that even reaches amateur level, just one thing.
This a main core gameplay loop issue. Which is baffling because nobody knows what its supposed to be. In all the showing which CIG has done, its all with spectacular explosions and easy to kill ships. i.e Railgun missing the cutlass and exploding ($125 maybe?).
Comparing apples to apples, ED’s time to kill for class vs class, i.e cobra vs cobra can vary between 5 mins and 30 mins, given both pilots know how to deploy stealth (silent running), recharge shields with boosting out of firing range, use chaff, countermeasures and etc.
In SC however, this is rarely expressed on with $250 ships just exploding in 5 min battles (gamescome 2014 multicrew reveal?), superhornets ripping aurora ($45) to shreds with a single burst, cutlass ($125) doing a 180 without the pilot blacking out and blowing up a $350 glaive with its own missiles. Aside from showing off awesome cockpit animations, bells and whistles, ship ladder animations, cockpit startup animations, all which lend zero to actual gameplay, We don’t know or have not been shown actual in-game value of these ships, value in terms of actual combat capability, trading capability, and even stealth capabilities. What CIG often stresses on are how cool or rather how much your signature is dampened by this awesome +$100 hull, and how awesome this ship’s engines are or how capable a ship is in combat, without actually demonstrating anything.
Its car salesmanship at its best.
What’s troubles me is that it was a tech demo more than a gameplay demo. One year to add one mission to a NPC? We’re screwed at this pace. What about Cargo? Mining? Wild life? Storytelling? Purpose for anything in the game aside that using a fighter ship?
Scruffpuff
how? how do you blow so much company money, without breaking the law?
In short, the most extreme cart-before-the-horse development the world has ever seen. Chris Roberts paid several A-List Hollywood actors millions of dollars to get on camera next to his unfortunate wife, and paid tens of millions of dollars for motion capture before they had a functioning game engine and before they knew if they could use any of it.
He spent millions more creating, throwing away, recreating, re-throwing away, and creating yet again several spaceship assets before he had a functioning game engine, and with no consideration as to whether or not those assets would work with each other, the engine, or the aforementioned motion capture. Spoiler: it didn’t.
He also spend untold millions of dollars building 4 studios around the world, because successful game development studios have that. The fact that real publishers earned them over time by actually creating and releasing games is lost on him.
They also spent millions of dollars creating a real-life Truman Show analogue consisting of constant video feeds, “behind the scenes”, “lore”, fake world assets, and thousands of hours of complete bullshit video intended to make it look like they’re making progress on a “game.”
What Chris did not do - what nobody in CIG has ever done - is decide what Star Citizen is. Nobody has created a game design, nobody has proposed a core game loop, nobody has considered even one single moment of gameplay or how any of this will work. It’s just Chris Roberts continuing to exist as the genetic error he was born as. Stupidity is expensive.
The Titanic
Now when he was inventing render to technology for his holograms, it’s very critical to understand that this is video games.
If you want a hologram, you clone your model and give it a snazzy “I’m a hologram!” Shader so it looks super cool.
Easy to use anywhere? Heck yes! Just add your “hologram-guy.character” to your scene.
Development time? You’ve already got the model, just build the shader and textures for it. Maybe what, 2 weeks to make it look like something straight out of a Hollywood movie?
Difficulty in implementation? Equally as difficult as animating any other characters in your game. Shouldn’t be hard hopefully if you’ve got a handle on animation.
Hardware overhead? As much as a character plus that shader, shouldn’t be enough to kill a scene where you want a hologram to be. Spawn holo guy in the player’s room, then when done despawn it.
That’s the logical way, because it’s a video game, where “cheating” doesn’t exist, only how you creatively do a thing.
Now compare this to CIGs version:
Easy to use anywhere? Need to set up an extra camera and extra entire area around the character in the scene. Basically, it can’t be a spur of the moment thing since the scene will need to be built around it.
Development time? Probably between 8-20 months.
Difficulty in implementation? Each scene using a hologram will need the hologram character spawned in some special area other players can’t find it, including an additional camera and linking. Every player using it will somehow need to not overlap wherever the hologram guy is at in the world. Will be complex to figure out in a multiplayer setting, and I have a feeling CIG hasn’t gotten far enough to figure out how this is actually going to work.
Hardware overhead? Entire character and additional scene needs to be rendered on screen, then rendered again to a texture. A single scene will need at least 3 times the amount of work per frame to render, more depending on how shaders or scene filters are implemented.
Overall CIG spent tons of effort to overcomplicate something that will not add anything that cloning a character in a location would have done.
I guess the only real added benefit is instead of just getting “a character” hologram you can also see the surroundings of that character too since it’s a scene with another camera. But that may make the hologram not stand out and look busy, so it they may end up turning off the background scene, effectively wiping out the only real “benefit”.
Also it will probably help to kill your frame rate, which for Star Citizen is kind of an expected feature at this point for everything they do.
TheAgent
This is what happens when you outsource big portions of a massive project. This is what happens when all experienced developers with shipped games leave your project. This is what happens when you’ve been stuck in perpetual crunch mode. This is what happens when you promise, collect pre-orders for said promises, and then begin to try and prototype those promises into existence. This is what happens when you have no firm design docs to guide your project. This is what happens when you put graphics above gameplay. This is what happens when you pick your engine for cinematic feel. This is what happens when you constantly redesign existing assets because they “aren’t good enough.”
Star Citizen is what happens.
When you can’t even deliver half the things promised by a snarky goon in a leak shitpost from 7 months ago it really is time to pack up your JPEGs and go home
Sandi walks awkwardly onto the stage and picks up a still-warm corncob.
CIG has done this many, many times, it’s their M.O. They hype things hard and delay by months, if not years. Chris Roberts said we would be playing 3.0 in December 2016. Then CIG showed up hat-in-hand and said sorry guys, it’s gonna be June 2017! Now it’s almost September. What will happen next is CIG will go silent and the weeks will tick by, no game. They’ll change the narrative to make us focus on something else (like Squadron 42, which had a release date of 2015. Then 2016. Now ?). A handful of SC white-knights will attack anyone who questions the new narrative. They will talk in the present-tense about features that don’t exist. It’s a cycle I’ve been observing for years. I want Star Citizen to succeed, I really do. But I cannot ignore the enormity of CIG’s incompetence, and I make it a point to balance the narrative away from blind faith towards the middle ground.
You miss one deadline, it’s a tragedy. You miss a million, it’s a comedy.
There are countless people promising the world or the sky and often enough there are people who so desperately want that vision to become true that they will donate or give money to it. Most of these scams are short-lived tho because people stop caring if nothing ever comes to fruitation. A well managed scam lives from a carrot on a stick and this is something Chris Roberts and his family are pretty proficient in sad as it is. We are basically talking about extortion by now. CR lost my trust back in 2014 and everything he has done since then only confirms my initial impression. I am always amazed how people are willing and able to twist their own perception and willfully ignore obvious flaws and hints in order to “keep the dream alive”. Due to the short attention span of todays population the frequent release of ATVs is an absolute MUST to keep the money-train going.
You always have to wake up eventually tho. A dream is just that, a dream and eventually even this one will come to an end.
Star Citizen reminds me of a delicate crystal statue. Its looks beautiful but touch it and it falls apart. Its meant to be watched, not played with. Wouldnt that be a shame for Star Citizen?
Star Citizen needs your help commandos. 1 JPEG = 1 prayer.
