So I’ve been a long time lurker but had to grit my teeth and pay up just to explain….well gloat on all you clowns,
Like how does it taste? The biggest event of the year where you guys were sourly clenching your fingers in anticipation of mocking something better than yourselves.
But Chris delivered. Showing Dereek Farts and you idiots what is possible in gaming.
You guys are pretty much silent, trying anything in your power to smear this accomplishment and its ugly. You have nothing solid to point at and say this is bad. Its all supposition and honestly, lies.
See you in the fucking Verse friends.
Derek Smart
I am in an OpenHouse stream
Me and the missus watched citizencon last night and it was a pretty good laugh, extremely dull but footage of SC always is.
I liked when Sandi came on at the start to be like “just so you know, we weren’t late, but then we had to start later than planned”, that got a good laugh from us.
also when they had to open it with a real life popup ad from intel my favourite bit was when the intel guy was like “so chris, what can this partnership do for you?” expecting a short snappy “it’ll make the game better!” before he could continue his marketing speil, but croberts just rambles for like 10 straight minutes making shit up off the top of his head like a kid improvising an essay because Croberts knows nothing about modern tech or how the game is being made and brings everything to a screeching halt.
also it all sorta ended in them making no mans sky but with buildings and i laughed so hard when i realised they had to cut away from a 10 MINUTE ftl jump that my throat still hurts today
the whole city thing though with like millions of simulated NPCs lmao why? why would you ever do that???
it really is just talented kids making proofs of concepts of insanely impractical extravagances to scam money off of whales to fluff crobert’s ego
G0RF
The only thing I laughed out loud at was Chris’s string of “no other game can do this” type backpats. Big talk from a guy whose actual game still doesn’t let players land on planets nearly two years after “Pupil to Planet” and celebrated it’s 4th anniversary of not being able to add female player characters to the game back in the spring…
Beet Wagon
The thing about the procedural cities deal is that yes it does look cool, but they’ve implemented it in a way that doesn’t make the game better. You can’t go walk around any of them. You can fly through them and land at your little designated landing point on the outskirts, but the ability to fly through them actually highlights the fact that they’re not real - it makes the divide between “real” (places you can walk around) and “fake” way way more obvious than if they did something like making it so you couldn’t free-fly in the airspace around cities, and locking you to your little landing zone. I don’t think anybody at CIG realizes it yet (and I know none of the fans do) but what they’ve done is to take the old problem of a player looking at something on the skybox and thinking “man how come I can’t go there” and magnified it a thousand times. That feeling that you get when you land in a station in Elite and wish you could go drive around in one of the little trucks is going to be nothing compared to the first time Star Citizen slaps you with how fake the city is.
Not interiors in every building scattered across the EcoSystems
Hey guys,
For the sake of clarity (and my own sanity) really want to clarify something from our tools presentation in the keynote at citizen con.
Those specific tools have progressed like this.
1. Outposts (procedural assistance to make tons of them) already in 3.0.0
2. Truckstops aka: small space stations (now filling those out the same way we do outposts). Beyond 3.0.0
3. Landing Zone areas, further beyond 3.0.0
Basically yes we can create interiors very quickly and relatively easily but there is not much gained from filling ALL of the buildings in the whole planet and it’d make very little sense to do! We’d need SO many variations to avoid art fatigue (see the same casaba type outlet in every commercial center etc..)
We will absolutely fill out landing zones using tools like this but yeah but please don’t expect a planet filled with buildings to be completely filled also with interiors. Hell planet earth isn’t covered with buildings every square meter and even if you spent your whole life going into every single building on earth you wouldn’t have enough time in your life to cover all of them!
Might we spawn a room in a building somewhere to do a mission or to meet a specific character or get a specific object…perhaps, but not every single building.
My apologies if my wording caused any confusion! I really don’t want you guys to have that impression.
There is no intention at this time to fill every single building scattered across the ecosystems with interiors, some perhaps and some might even be spawned but absolutely not every single one of them!
We were all very happy with the event and can’t thank you guys enough for the support and hope that you guys enjoyed it as much as we had making and showing it to you.
Fun. Times. Ahead.
-Sean “Criminal” Tracy
Sean “Criminal” Tracy eh? Think you’ve got the order wrong there mate.
If chris fired everybody now and just kept pocketing all the money himself he could probably make it to citizencon of next year before the backers would ever know
WTF is up with the Pioneer commercial? Why so lo-fi? They show off mocap shit again?
Honestly that was brutally boring. I can’t imagine not being able to skip during ShitCon.
POI’s in Elite are already a pain in the ass to navigate. How the hell are these “pioneer stations” going to show up on navigation? I was part of a team that went barnacle hunting and we had to use our eyes and fly between 6KM and 30KM above the planet to look for these POI’s before FD did anything about them, does SC have some sort of auto navigation / POI system available? If there are 300 of these things on a said system how would it look like? Would you HUD be dotted (pun intended) with all these pioneer outposts for you to trade in? How would you know what faction / alignment they’re from? What would you find when you land or how would you know what they’re selling / buying / trading / whatever?
This game is stuff of dreams.
Buy a Pioneer Today!
: How long will it take for people to realize that CIG demos are just concepts and have nothing to do with what’s actually completed and working?
: Adorable, the CitCon 2017 demo is exactly what their builds are capable of and working using in-game assets. In essence, their concepts made virtually “real”. Did you think that was a Maya rendered cutscene? And, as a non-backer, your uninformed POV on SC and SQ42 don’t actually matter.
: About as real as the sand worm or their other countless demos. And it’s not like your opinion matters either, so not sure what that was about.
Hello, I’m back.
I watched the 1 hour trimmed stream of Nothing But The Steak that CIG put up on Twitch, and here are my thoughts:
1. the ‘game’ as presented looks nice. The city looks great, and there’s a good number of NPCs wandering about or standing on chairs as dictated by their incredible AI that for some reason the further out the ‘player’ gets from the centre of the station the more it seems to choose just standing in one place occupying space almost as if all of the animations are hand-crafted and they ran out of time.
2. Honestly, the city looks great when he’s on foot. Especially helpful is that the stamina system is disabled within it so you can sprint from one end to the other without having a heart attack. It’s single-player RPG-level quality in terms of visuals.
3. Their interaction system is still shit and unintuitive where you have to know what’s interactable before you can focus on it to get interactions. This is seriously awful and I have no idea how people haven’t made a fuss about having to ‘look’ at some random button on your spaceship to get an Engine On option that also allows you to turn the Engine Off when it already is.
4. Flying slowly around buildings making it painfully obvious there is no code to handle collisions with them.
5. Surface of the planet looks nice.
6. Time to travel for EIGHT FUCKING MINUTES!?!? Who the fuck designed this, and Chris says it will actually take EVEN LONGER to get to a quest destination in the real game. Lmao, and they make fun of Elite for not having content.
7. Break time for tools discussion. This where shit gets real.
8. The planet-spanning city is procedurally generated because otherwise it would be completely impossible to physically do - however, the tool they present is painfully labour-intensive in terms of putting down height maps and dictating zones and stuff. Why would you need this tool if it’s procedural? You wouldn’t, it would be a list of rules about how buildings clump and how landing zones are spaced and what they contain. They demonstrate ‘reseeding’ a neighbourhood outside of whatever Blade Runner City is called - why are the neighbourhoods generated on a different seed? The whole planet should be one seed that dictates everything. They are ‘procedurally’ populating the planet with manually created content. That is buttfucking insane, and explains why previous planets were obviously copy-and-paste tiles. Visually it’s more excusable when it’s man-made objects that could be standardised like buildings, but the previous crater repetition makes it obvious this is how they’re doing their generation.
9. They don’t mention how the interior tool is connected to the building assets at all, so I’m entirely convinced it can create impossible spaces. They have probably worked around this by giving it a smaller footprint than any of their possible buildings, or making buildings just massive squares at the street level. It’s nothing amazing, but watching it manually place pipe assets and shit during generation is insane. Again, hugely manual labour intensive despite being sold as a time saver it is just a basic level editor with automated decoration placement.
10. I forget the other tool they showed but it had the same issues of not actually saving any labour costs above having basic tools for designing a game. Certainly not on the level that you need to generate planet-wide amounts of content.
11. Talking about placing more landing zones and populating them. The whole planet is uninteractable window-dressing outside of these landing zones, so no talk about how they’re going to restrict people to the zones they have manually created to interact with. No reason to go to other zones because all of them will have the same basic content just shuffled a little more.
12. Wow we’re on another planet that’s largely the same as all the other planets we’ve seen down to using the same smoggy smokestacks we just saw on Coruscan’t. Apparently this is a planet where there’s no federal oversight so there’s some wildlife here that drifts around and eats garbage. I have named them Citizens.
I can’t do this anymore
Fuck these people
They even archered the goddamn box in another pic
cr explaining about realistic simulation of gravity. and how its “weaker” 25km up
Yes and I indeed just returned from my trip there.
After catching up with the thread again I see some of the pictures I took did entertain the thread quite a bit :)
I’m sorry I can’t update too much on my personal con of the citizens experience (which was fabulous) here without doxxing myself hardcore. I will say however that I disagree with beers assessment that cig calmed the woes of the citizens enough to keep it up for the foreseeable future, after watching the reactions of the people there. “where the fuck is the gameplay” has been tossed around like a greeting sentence.
The only female I saw was a hooker
E: I wasn’t the only goon there by the way
The only female I saw was a hooker
Seriously did someone tip her off to the fact she could make thousands selling jpegs of her space ships and promising to blow their minds later
Cloud Imperium Brothels: We’re working on the most amazing blowjob ever! Just $500, delivery SOON.
3 years later
Buyer: Uh, I bought the blowjob three years ago. Now I’ve been sent a jpeg of a dog’s testicle. WTF?
CIB: One of our whores changed it during development and they’ve since left the company. No refunds!
Derek Smart
even the tools they showed, weren't even live. It was pre-recorded (they got busted when the cam showed the media player)
Now, as much as I agree that it wouldn’t make sense to show that live, there’s still the point that 1) don’t show the media controls during a presentation, and 2) citizens will point to that demo and dribble “see, it’s all in the game already”.
“The surface of Arc Corporation, while interesting, isn’t intended for players to interact with in-game. In the future, Roberts said, Arc Corporation may include more than one location where players can land their ships and engage with vendors and quest givers in a fixed, social hub with other players. But, for now, the goal is to design an interesting landscape and nothing more.
The demo included no combat, no quests and no traditional, linear narrative of any kind. It was effectively a demonstration of environmental storytelling.”
“The 3.0 version of the project’s PU is currently in an advanced testing stage, and is expected to be in the hands of backers imminently, though no release date has been given.
After the 3.0 update, Roberts said his team would be focusing on “date-driven, not feature or content-driven” updates in order to give the community a “more regular experience.” Neither the Squadron 42 single-player game nor the Star Citizen PU have a release date of any kind.”
No, I reckon most “potential” backers who worked in the financial systems industry heard Roberts’ idiotic initial project plan, sized it up as bullshit right away, and steered clear. I mean, that sales pitch. Multiple teams/contractors developing modules in parallel, then slotting them together to make an integrated product? Sure, there are established ways to do that - it’s a pretty commonplace project approach, after all.
But they fucked it up right at the start. Star Citizen was easy to classify as doomed/fucked/development-hell/comedy-fail/textbook-how-not-to-do-it. CIG broke the most basic rule, right from the get-go…
DO:
Write a detailed functional spec for each module, and for the interactions between each module.
DONT:
Let any team start coding their module until the functional specs are done.
CIG didn’t go away into squirrel mode, into back rooms, planning their shit, nailing down their project. They didn’t speak once on the boring but vital work being done, hammering together boring docs. No, they were OFF AND RUNNING, developing! So exciting! So marketable! So impossible to build into one cohesive product without proper advance planning!
Note: We’re talking 2012⁄2013 here. At the time, CIG’s end product pretty much involved a pilot-focused spaceflight module, a “landing zone FPS” module and a “boarding FPS” module”. It was abundantly clear then that those modules wouldn’t come together if they were going to be cowboys about doing it seat-of-the-pants.
True to form, they went off the rails, making the spaceflight module suddenly involving non-pilot focused gameplay - passenger, flight attendant, crew member doing turrets, repairs. Huge spec change, on-the-fly.
Even back then, it wasn’t like CIG was trying to get a 100% free-walk spaceflight environment seamlessly integrated with atmospheric reentry, planetary landings, exploring on foot and in wheeled/hovering vehicles, orbital mechanics and day/night cycles.
How much shit has this company written and then discarded, all because they had (have) no development documentation discipline?
MoMA
Comparatively, communication still remains more open and public than pretty much any other title I’ve seen - and I’m glad of it.
Thank you about not gloating (lol, how could you?) but you must be shitting us with that sentence, right? Like, do a direct comparison between citcon and, dunno, every other fucking video game conference? Compare it directly to the Frontier one. The dates announced, the detailed development charts, the explanation behind design decisions, the showcase of gameplay? That’s also open and public, but more importantly informative in a way that SC’s vague promises are not.
SC may be very open and public, but it’s open and public in the same way an encrypted message posted on a forum is. Everybody can read the gibberish but no info can be extracted from it.
i’ve been following since 2015, lot of people saying time will tell about various things
major spoiler time has told
it’s the end of 2017, there’s no game and no reason to expect a game anytime soon
there’s no argument to be had here
it’s not a game that’s overdue at this point; forget the years of shenanigans and just looking at the 3.0 timeline - you have, not a game, but a slice of a pre-alpha literally a year overdue on top of six billion other delays
this is it; this is all the evidence anyone should need. if the restaurant can’t even do the chips and salsa right how the fuck they gonna bring you the best damn fajitas ever?
you spend several years waiting for the chips and salsa you know damn well you ain’t getting those fajitas no matter how much you paid for them
Running game servers for a non-turn based game on cloud services designed for web services and sites is not feasible. Especially not for an MMO or a shooter/space sim. While getting the servers hosted and (physically) maintained by a third party is a great idea, you do not want them running in someone else’s infrastructure. You want full control down of the servers and the network infrastructure.
Game servers in the cloud are a cost-cutting measure, with a significant impact on stability and performance. It is not an advantage.
The cloud is still struggling to be viable for many enterprise-level business systems. Various cloud vendors are trying hard to get their foot into the financial industry, and fighting for every inch. MMO servers are more complicated to develop and maintain than anything in the financial industry. Amazon may be able to provide a solution for lumberyard match-based games with straightforward requirements - but I am beyond skeptical they can provide anything useful for an MMO. The notion that they would be able provide something which is better than a bespoke, self-managed solution is ludicrous.
Using Amazon will add complexity to the already herculean task it is to keep an MMO running. The ability to “spin up servers as needed” is vastly overrated, and plain websites regularly struggle to scale properly in the cloud. You can’t “spin up” your way out of the bottlenecks which are typically the issue when player activity peaks and stuff starts breaking - there are always subsystems which can’t simple scale by adding more instances on more hardware. It’s cutting costs at the expense of a worse product and a shitty time for the engineers. So it will be popular, and it will make games bad.
Amazon is trying to get into the game development business so they are definitely going to offer servers that work well with their lumberyard engine. Of course, for most games, the virtual machines do not have to talk to each other as each one only cares about their own game instances. The clusterfuck arising from having multiple interdependent servers running on virtual machines, handling a MMO with FPS requirements (of all things) is gonna be, as the good doctor would say, glorious.
All of these silly “bandwidth” and “speed” questions will be solved with Telepathy 2.0 so maybe you guys just need to wait and see.
MoMA
Yeah. AWS servers are comprised of 10 u chassis, 16 blades per chassis (4 in a rack), total of 64 blades per rack. At 1 server a blade, that’s essentially 64 servers per rack, give or take how they are managing their virtual machines.
STOP TALKING!
I’m sad I wasn’t here for MoMA’s AWS posting, because those are some really good posts to make fun of somebody for fundamentally misunderstanding how a technology works.
How many units of rack space does AWS give me when it spins up servers? Wooo
Derek Smart
MoMA
How much bandwidth per client do you suppose is actually necessary if we’re talking about refined serialized variables that now only transmit the deltas for each client instead of whole models like in the past (40-60 mb per ship down to less than 4-5mb)? Or, with zoning that was described as only exhibiting the physics, models, variables, etc for a particular zone in a particular instance as the client travels through? Are you saying that Amazon compute is incapable or that the requirements are so outlandish that it’s not possible?
That’s a load of bollocks. And as I’m on mobile, I don’t have time to write up a 1000 character word salad to educate on it.
This is the thing with you guys. You read shit from CIG, either don’t understand it, or use their bullshit explanation for it. Then go utter it with the most proud proclamation.
Derek Smart
Agreed, I don’t see AWS as a viable option for this sort of a deployment. Taking into account that this will be one of the most resource intense MMO’s to ever be released I can’t see it being operable on anything less that a specifically architected hardware solution. There are a very small number of hosting companies that can bring this to fruition and the costs are going to be huge for start up and maintenance of this game.
With the design costs for this game as large as they must be there is no room for the hardware solution.
Correct. And that’s where they screwed up. All they had to do was implement private servers and matchmaking, right off the bat. They could have made available to backers the same console server they are running. With that, backers could run and host their own fucking servers without ANY costs to CIG.
Then, like what ED did, they could use AWS for transaction, database, and master server (for the matchmaking) stuff on the backend.
But had they done that, they won’t be selling an MMO. They’d be selling a session based game with a cap of about 32 clients. And then all those JPEGs they’ve been selling under the guise of building an MMO, would never have been sold. And they probably would never gotten past $65M. Let alone to $163M.
They made their bed. And they’re going to get kicked out of it because croberts is a fucking, incompetent moron.
TheAgent
they are going through $50m a year, easy
like a single studio in the UK is burning through half that in a year and its documented and online and you can view that shit with your own eyeballs
Four years ago, backers knew (well, they thought they knew) the release date of SQ42, the overall scope of SC, and had a general idea of the gameplay involving professions.
Today, after thousands of days of development, they don’t know anything for sure about those points, besides the fact that the game will be the best ever and has the most open development.
Virtual Captain
JLee is a concept artist or something for CIG and is understandably obsessed with every tree in the forest.
JLee: ‘I understand why Chris would say this, we might not want players to get too close to the population. I would rather not lock players into certain areas, maybe security drones stop you if you fly too close or blow you up. I dunno how we’re going to do it. I think we’re kind torn with making that decision.‘
JLee: ‘Are we going to get 500v500 player battles with good fps? I’m not on netcode. The theory breakdown is to have massive battles. Currently, we do not have that. We wanna have players on different instances but still see each other. I dunno how it works.’
JLee: ‘Let me show you. See these screens? An artist has to come in an fill in what shows on those screens. So we can’t just generate an entire level.‘
JLee: ‘Will stock and stores will be automatically filled with economy system as well as the type of items will be sold in each area? Ummm.. Uhh.. That’s more of a Tony Z question. From what I know, it won’t be automatic.’
I had children to be my spaceship crew, but the game’s been delayed so long they’ve all gone off to college. My main turret gunner finished packing up all his belongings, mocked my Consolidated Outland Pioneer to my face, then said, “Fuck you dad.”, before driving away.
Anyone want to join my org?
VictorianQueerLit
This is Star Citizen. Literally anything you can imagine will be possible. Lifetimes worth of gameplay for anyone doing anything they could want.
Want to mine procedural asteroids like a 4k minecraft? Want to fly on the frontlines against the VAHNDOOHL? Want to haul rocks other people mine? Want to run a space refinery intricately breaking down every rock into it’s constituent components? Want to be a space news anchor always traveling to the newest story? Want to be a space cruise liner employee mixing drinks? Want to be a space farmer or space particle accelerator….ist? Want to do space search and rescue? Want to haul physical information around?
The first thing you do is ignore how actual games work and what is actually possible and then everything is possible.
None of these things will just be a shallow minigame mechanic where you just hit a button, and will instead be lifetimes worth of gameplay. You are stupid for not building a sim pit. By the time you realize “Space News Van” comes with such intricate and in-depth mechanics that you start building your own sim pit to live your new life in the Verse this guy will be on his 3rd or 4th revision and be living comfortably in his new life where he is finally happy and doesn’t have to worry about bills or responsibility FUCK YOU MOM I PAY RENT IT’S MY ROOM I CAN BUILD WHAT I WANT I’M A SPACE STEWARDESS
Derek Smart
check out the scale of that ship. Everything is scaled down
Took a moment to realize that the other spaceship passes between the camera and the smoke trail effect.
The Aurora is 8m wide so the ship would have to be less than a meter wide. This might also be a draw order problem, because the small ship -seems- to be further away than that?
The ship passing between the cam and effect is draw order problem.
The ship in the foreground being large in comparison to the one passing underneath is due to the view frustum camera zoom on the foreground ship.
The ships appear to be at scale.
Jobbo_Fett
Oh yeah Chris totally refuted that like years ago haha wow I cant believe goons are so behind the times welp anyways I dont have a source so dont even bother trying to argue against me have you seen the new ATV pretty cool huh alright time to go byeeeeee
: How long will it take for people to realize that CIG demos are just concepts and have nothing to do with what’s actually completed and working?
: Adorable, the CitCon 2017 demo is exactly what their builds are capable of and working using in-game assets. In essence, their concepts made virtually “real”. Did you think that was a Maya rendered cutscene? And, as a non-backer, your uninformed POV on SC and SQ42 don’t actually matter.
major spoiler
