September 2017

Mocapping a few animations that end up blending into other animations is all fine and good, because its usually a brief second or two of animation that your anim team has to hand scrub anyway.

Mocapping an entire performance gets tricky. If you’re not 100% confident of the take, you can have a lot of problems. You get weird wandering heads, eye darting, jiggling jowls, hands and arms and legs clipping through clothes and backgrounds and other characters and a whole lotta other weird shit you gotta clean up by hand. These happen no matter how good your take is anyway, but the problems get more severe the less you understand about the technology and the more you utilize it. What might look great on the screen can be very, very hard to translate into a great performance.

What you end up doing, usually, is doing small point captures of various scenes. What no one has fucking done because its goddamn stupid, is record 20+ hours of mocapped data. Especially if you don’t have the model dimensions down, the scenery already fleshed out. Every rewrite or change is another huge amount of time, money and energy wasted.

So in walks Chris Roberts with his directorial dreams, not understanding the following:

• for every second of footage you shoot in the mocap rigs, it can take up to a ten minutes of dev time per character to fix (sometimes more)
• some scenes were shot with many, many characters (up to six to eight)
• multiple clothing changes or scene changes can increase this time
• the more characters interacting together in a scene, the more time it takes per character to animate correctly

You’re talking with that 20+ hours of mocap footage alone, something like 12,000 hours of manpower at the very minimum. But wait, this only really works if these are all entirely cutscene type deals with 0 player interaction. Because then you need programmers to script the triggers for the 20+ hours of conversation you have going on.

To get that into a fully working state for 20+ hours of mocap, I’d say that’s three to five years of work across art and programming teams, after the principle mocap shoot was completed. It’s about fifteen times longer than your average cartoon 3d animated film AND you’re trying to hit the highest fidelity ever seen in this media. That means extra work on hair, clothing, textures, shaders, everything for every single character and every single costume has to be absolutely perfect in every. single. fucking. scene.

This also means any script changes or rewrites or other problems after the principle shooting has to be reshot, completely redone by the art team and then rejiggered by the programming team.

This also means that the game you’re building to showcase this amazing twenty hour long opus needs to be built as well. And you’re not just building a single player game, but a heavily multiplayer driven MMO style FPS action game too, with hundreds of not entirely fleshed out mechanics. And if you fuck up and realize “Shit, we can’t get this to work right, but we have an hour+ of footage important to the game that needs that feature,” you need to go back and edit and reshoot and have your artists and programmers redo a bunch of work again and again and again and again and again and again

I have posted it so many times; how can any coder of any level think that making three games “modules” by three disparate teams and then merging them together later could work? Why didn’t anyone fucking stop this retard idea? Can a journalist actually pin him down on this one, because it keeps me up at night wondering?

Ecosystems and planet terrain: Chris: “We’re planning to have…” “The concept is that…” “We’re definitely going to have…” “And I think that’d be cool, and longer term we’re hoping to make it so there will be…”

Implementing ArcCorp, a planet entirely covered in factories: TonyZ: “We’ve talked about this in the past and basically the idea is that…”

Handling disconnections in multicrew scenarios or players logging in and out on long-term guild run campaigns: Chris: “The concept we’re going with is that…”

Ship security: TonyZ: “Eventually we’re going to have…” “I can see…”

Stealing ships: Chris: “We will have those systems in.” “We wanna make it so…”

Scaling mission difficulty: TonyZ: “Yeah, what we have right now is actually far simpler than what we’re gonna have very shortly…”

Environmental or manmade risks in the PU: Todd Papy: “From a design standpoint we want to be able to create…”

Ship maintenance, components wearing out: Chris: “We’re also gonna have…” “We’ve talked about – it’s not in…” “The idea is that…”

Throughout: TonyZ: “Y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know…”

STILL EARLY DAYS

Even the dream of Star Citizen is kinda crappy. People overlook it because everybody thinks they’ll be Han Solo and never be dumb enough to be killed. They think they’re going to play the heroic savior or kind benefactor or impossible to stop pirate, while avoiding these huge pitfalls. There is cognitive dissonance between looking at what CIG is implying and saying “and what will this be like to actually play?” and since nobody seems to stop dreaming about the impossible long enough, thinking the AIs will be anything more than walking on a track and doing canned animations every few steps, everybody seems to overlook that the game just sounds not fun to play. It sounds punishing. Which might be good for a Pay2Win game though. Suffer on a planet for 10 hours or pay $5 for a miraculous rescue taxi!

One of the reasons why the people in this thread are so resentful of the project is that pretty much everyone here believed in it in the past. There was a time where the goons had the largest “fleet” in the game.

We believed in the game until it became clear that we were being lied to, tricked into giving money to fund an egotist’s voyage of discovery to find out that actually he’s not a genius or even particularly visionary.

It’s ironic that the continued support of a minority of backers makes us angry at their stupidity, because without them we wouldn’t have been able to get almost all of our money refunded. $300,000+ has been refunded to just the people on this site.

I guess it’s only fair that we try our best to discourage people from spending more money on the game. Every time they do, they pay money directly into the pockets of people who are smart enough to get a refund. Eventually, probably within the next 12 months, the funding is going to stop and so will the refunds. When that happens, there are going to be a large group of backers left holding the bag - the least we can do is discourage everyone we encounter from being in that group.

I haven’t lost faith in CIG yet. But that’s all it is at this point. Faith. A belief that something exists without real evidence that it actually does. With the last minute pull on the demo at citcon, and the unbelievably embarrassing livestream that was supposed to be the end of the year assurance, that faith is quickly fading.

I think the safest criticism is that it’s a legitimate enterprise that has devolved into something of a Ponzi scheme. From Wikipedia:

“Ponzi schemes occasionally begin as legitimate businesses, until the business fails to achieve the returns expected. The business becomes a Ponzi scheme if it then continues under fraudulent terms. Whatever the initial situation, the perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the scheme.”

AKA “We failed to build what we thought we could with your money because we’re mind-bogglingly incompetent - please buy more ships so we can finish designing the ones earlier backers already paid for.”

Unlike a Ponzi scheme, where the guys in charge at some point realize what they’re doing, Chris Roberts is too stupid to understand even the most elementary principles of almost any subject imaginable. As a result, you can’t even really call this a Ponzi scheme - just an idiot burning other people’s money.

For fuck sake CIG. You’re 4 years into development and you have nothing to show. A 30 minute video of 4 middle-aged nerds sat in director’s chairs talking about vague ideas of ‘this might happen’ or ‘we’re thinking it could be like…’ or ‘maybe it works like…’.

You’ve blown through ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!! Stop fucking talking. Go and show me these systems, show me the work in progress, show me the proof of concept, hell show me the fucking design documents.

You’re promising to make the most ambitious and complex game ever created and you’re still talking about concepts for basic functionality like a fucking logoff timer… or fuel rods for ships… after 4 fucking years!

Do you know what I thought of when I was watching that? Those ‘Relay’ nerds or whatever they’re called. Tell me, what is the difference between Crobbler and Tony Z sitting there talking you through their DREAMS and Dolvak or bowtie dude talking you through his? Neither are gonna fucking happen! It’s pie-in-the-sky, ‘imagine how cool in would be’ bullshit which they ask you to pledge hundreds of dollars to prove that you believe.

Don’t give them any money. If you’ve ever given them any money apply for a refund to get it back. This is my Star Citizen meltdown and you can have it for free.

Fuck Chris Roberts.

1. Sunk cost mentality. Most of the more emphatic backers have put in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars into “supporting” the game through the purchase of digital ships and game packages. The money itself becomes justification that things will succeed, as the backer considers themselves a smart person and smart people don’t pay for scams. This is true for both the individual investment as well as the communal investment of over $140 million.

2. Cargo cult community. At this point the community is largely self-policing, aided by the draconian moderation of the main forums and the inherent structure of Reddit that silences unpopular opinions. They are convinced that Chris Roberts will deliver the promised game in the same way that they remember the original Wing Commander and Privateer with nostalgia. Anyone with a dissenting opinion is either ignored, or has already received a refund and is therefore unlikely to interact with those still immersed in the project.

3. Predatory marketing. CIG’s marketing methods are incredibly predatory. They routinely use high pressure tactics surrounding “limited” features or content (LTI, concept sales, alpha access, limited ships) to encourage backers to spend more. They also wall off early access behind a subscription (subscribers get access to the Player Test Universe, the testing server updates go to before they hit the live testing server but after they hit the invite-only testing server), devalue previous purchases by offering cash-only sales, and push the concept of “open development” as a mantra even as they wait to reveal significant information such as delays or a major engine switch.

4. Chris Roberts. For whatever reason Chris Roberts has mastered the art of telling people what they want to hear, especially when it comes to nerds and space sims. Backers are convinced that the game Chris Roberts is developing will be their perfect game, even as more of the game is revealed and is shown to be a shallow, insipid, milquetoast experience. He has a history of doing this in a variety of fields, and backers are all too willing to fool themselves to believe they’ll get what they want.

5. Lies. One of the biggest things that CIG has done is created the myth that the community supported CIG expanding the scope and schedule of Star Citizen through additional funding. In reality backers supported CIG expanding scope without increasing schedule through the use of additional funds to generate more content. CIG has repeated the lie so many times that backers believe it to be true.

Remember when they sold a $2000 ship that can carry 70 players and each will play a separate role and this was all part of a massive MMO and people said yup that’s possible?

And then someone was like but I don’t have 70 friends? and they said well you can fill it with 69 completely autonomous NPCs that will behave exactly like humans to a degree where you cannot even tell, and people said yup that sounds good?

Some of the smarter people asked ‘hey man how is that possible?’ and the answer was ‘it’s Chris Roberts!’.

I remember, just lol man.

I’m glad CIG gave the thread one last big cup of coffee before Christmas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management)

In project management, a death march is a project that the participants feel is destined to fail, or that requires a stretch of unsustainable overwork. The general feel of the project reflects that of an actual death march because project members are forced to continue the project by their superiors against their better judgment.

Software development and software engineering are the fields in which practitioners first applied the term to these project management practices. Other fields have since recognized the same occurrence in their own spheres and have adopted the name.

Death marches of the destined-to-fail type usually are a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often include lack of appropriate documentation or relevant training and outside expertise that would be needed to accomplish the task successfully. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching themselves and their coworkers being forced to torture themselves and march toward death. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours (14-hour days, 7-day weeks, etc.) or by attempting to “throw (enough) bodies at the problem”, often causing burnout.

Often, the discomfort is heightened by the knowledge that “it didn’t have to be this way”; that is, that if the company wanted to achieve the goal of the project, it could have done so in a successful way had it been managed competently

I will fight this to the very bitter end and at whatever cost.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MattBrady/20170901/304964/Star_Citizen_A_Close_Look_at_the_Cash.php

If CIG scales back their staff during development it will be a disaster. MBAs and execs tried this during the mergers and acquisitions craze in the 80s and 90s. The logic went like this. Sales are down 50%, we need to cut labor cost by 50%, so we cut out the low performing 50% of employees: The remaining staff should be able to produce at 50% to 60% of capacity (since we got rid of the poor performers). Here’s what actually happens: Your good employees that you kept on, jump ship immediately because they worry about job security and want to be on projects with upward momentum. They have to be replaced and hiring costs soar. Those that stay, spend a good portion of their day gossiping and worrying about whether they will still have a job next month. Productivity drops, and that 50% workforce cut leads to 30% to 40% capacity as morale sinks. This has been tried again, and again and again. Scaling work forces like this causes enormous morale issues, which leads to high turnover and low productivity.

As Seen on SOMETHINGAWFULDOTCOM