Posted on November 26, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 8
Posted on November 26, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 8
I’ve managed to fit 8 deskeletonized children into one SCU. They are arranged facing out from the center (they each understand they are alone). The largest ones are in the corners. Some of them will die, but it’s normal so long as it doesn’t happen too soon into the journey because they are Meat. Place into the refrigerated portion of the Cargo Grid that will kill the rest of them because they are Meat. Stack the partially skeletonized Slaves (bones relevant to Functions) in the corners of the hold and in the corridors so they don’t occlude the Cargo Grid and prevent Commodities loading.
You are next. Duck your head so the box can close. You will be treated as Dead so the player can Respawn. Stat points are withdrawn. You don’t whimper to avoid suffering the indignity of betraying distress to yourself. The box is ventilated your soul will linger for as long as possible before the Air Conditioning.
Fuck shit piss. Bitch bitch bitch bitch angler shunt bitch. Bitch, the children will die when they pick up the Rock. The children will die when they flee from the Rock. The albino children will be taken to be raised properly in a healthy, nurturing environment and groomed for the Professions. If the mother resists she will be put down. If the mother flees her legs will be removed.
For those Outside you have at hand at least one instrument or circumstance (a high place, a bottle of pills, a large quantity of liquor, etc) that will end you with little effort. You’ve known this would happen for some time. All of your responsibilities are relieved. The Org is grateful for your service.
Doody.
Disclosures upfront:
1) I have never told another person to get a refund, though I’m friends with many who have, including Beet. I do however support backers’ rights to seek them for non-delivery of promised gameplay features.
2) I am a frequent poster on SomethingAwful, I (re)joined in early 2015, in large part due to my personal respect for Beer4theBeerGod, who at the time was responsible for some of the most incisive pieces of constructive criticism offered to CIG on their own forums. (He was also the SC thread moderator on SA at the time.)
3) I have had occasional interactions with present and past staff. This has only reinforced my previously held and exceedingly dim opinions of senior leadership.
—
I take as a given that Star Citizen will fall woefully short of the hopes raised for it by the claims of Chris Roberts and the cinematic fundraising teasers created under his direction by CIG. Whether the game fails catastrophically (such as by bankruptcy and shutdown) or fails by delivering a half-baked, underwhelming fraction of its promised Kickstarter features, failure seems a far safer bet than anything resembling success.
Chris Roberts is a man of overrated talents and underestimated mendacity. At this point even his most fierce defenders admit he has what might charitably be called an “overpromising / underdelivering” problem, yet neither skeptic nor believer would ever accuse him over having an over-apologizing problem, for he is a man incapable of the act.
Exaggerated claims, missed release dates, and outright falsehoods have been his stepping stones over the last five years to profound personal enrichment for himself and his formerly secret wife and yet his conscience is untroubled by his inability to deliver upon the promises that have proven so personally profitable to him.
Perhaps at this point it might seem I’m being overly harsh, so let me offer some helpful documentation to help better illustrate what I see as proof of his pathological practices:
1) Alpha 3.0 Infographic - Measuring the alpha against prior public claims by Chris Roberts
I could go on at greater length than you might believe. His lies are a Tower of Babble twisting towards the heavens like the foolish ziggurat of legend — defiant, deluded and worthy of divine judgment.
For his character defects alone, he should not succeed, yet we live in a fallen world where wretched men of cunning actually are advantaged in their pursuits by virtue of not having to abide by ethics or altruism.
Yet Roberts is no such person, for what he lacks in character he lacks even moreso in competence. In his role as Chairman and Chief Executive of Cloud Imperium Games, his role demands of him to be a Macro-manager — yet he shrinks from such demands to instead thrive as one of the gaming industry’s all time masters in Micromanagement.
Consider what this article reveals about Roberts profound deficiencies as the chief project manager for the organization:
It is a lengthy read yet gives you absolutely everything you need to know about his priorities and his insufficiencies. Pay particular mind to the section that reveals for the first time what actually went wrong with Star Marine.
Mind you, consider this in the context of the “Just A Game Mode” Timeline above. In doing so you will see that Chris Roberts scolded backers for raising questions about a wildly late gaming module that he himself knew at the time was already trashed due to CIG’s terrible oversight of the outsourced development!”
There you have it — Chris’s deficiencies of competence and character on perfect collaborative display, and like the vain, entitled fool he is, rather than apologize (for the terrible guidance, for not better managing the funds backers had given him when outsourcing a key project, etc.), he shrugs the matter off and washes his hands of any real blame and expects backers to do the very same.
There are other ways to approach the question, “Why might the project fail?”
Another might focus on the backassward development priorities of Chris Roberts — who has overseen countless revamps and rebuilds of in-game assets while ignoring game loops and core mechanics….
Yet still others might point towards the rising overhead and falling revenues, the potential death spiral caused by projecting endless growth when you’re too arrogant to see you’re building a niche game, have saturated the niche market with no hopes of a crossover to the mass market due to purist design choices that exclude them…
But as for me, I feel the best argument against Star Citizen’s success — and by that I mean that the game delivers on prior promises made of it — is the fact that Roberts has spent the last 5 years perfecting the art of enrichment while falling so far short of his claims and yet he somehow sees a genius worthy of the faith and funds of others looking back at him in the mirror.
Whatever his past triumphs, he like his very game itself is built on the emptiest and most unstable of foundations. His word is worthless, his vision myopic, and his conscience deafened by voices of vanity forever shouting “you are the GREATEST DEVELOPER EVER” in his ear.
Whatever else he might be, such a person, no matter his age, has failed to truly become a man just as surely as Star Citizen will fail to truly become a game.
I’m taking a moment here to enjoy the comparison between G0rf’s stylish, rhythmic, dramatic, sharp writing in a couple of transient reddit posts to Chris Roberts’ trashy dialogue committed to tape by trained actors.
I need to stop following this project before i have a brain aneurysm.
Just when you think it can’t, it simply CAN’T get any more money and suck any more people in, they defy expectations.
Reading that /r/Games thread, so many defenders of the earth, so many defenders of the saviour. It’s an army. An impossibly stupid army that’s so resolute in its conviction that it simply cannot be stopped, shouting down every dissenting opinion with “you know nothing about games development” and “good things take time!”.
I get stoopider every day reading Star Citizen fan comments. They make more money and the charade continues.
I applied to CIG for a copywriter position they had advertised earlier in the year partially because I was offended by the quality of prose on display, and partly because I really want to turn far too many years of writing and editing into profit. When I checked back a long time after to see what was up (I didn’t even get a rejection letter from an HR robot) they denied that there was ever such a listing after making me get an account on their HR system.
Chris Roberts eats his editorial staff.
I like how howls of “You’ll see how wrong you are when 3.0 lands!” have turned back into “It’s alphaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!”
G0RF
I think lowballing predictions on sale revenues — as depicted by the tracker — presumes too much about Roberts’ personal character.
Annual revenues are perhaps the single most important metric there is when setting forward-looking narratives of expectation and backward-looking assessments of historic trends. And as the year-end nears, the season of such assessments returns — for backers, the media and the broader gaming public at large.
Having already made the history books…
Having blown past years of worth deadlines…
Having made hugely embarrassing gaffes in their highest profile events…
Having experienced in-depth media critiques of their various development problems…
Having become an industry whisper-net case study “File Under: Here lies Chris Roberts, again”
Having lost the benefit of the doubt and presumptions of triumphant success…
Having given indicators of waning demand via the same tracker for the majority of the year…
CIG approaches the year-end in an extremely vulnerable state. Without Herculean course-corrections, they face the very real prospects of ending the year with a marked decline in revenues. The development of both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 already appear victims of development hell — the absence (again) of Squadron 42 despite claims by Roberts (again) it was nearing release is bad enough. The ICU state of the prematurely born yet 10 months late 3.0 only darkens their optics further.
Putting aside whatever their short term financial needs are, the success of the Anniversary Sale is therefore of paramount symbolic importance. A narrative of declining fortunes and waning public demand is widely-presumed and already much discussed. It hasn’t yet become the lede for their story, yet the presumptions are widespread that such a chapter is due to begin in their tale — too much do they now resemble past archetypical development hell DOAs.
Given CIG’s absolute control without oversight of their sales ticker and given Chris Roberts complete ethical bankruptcy, does anyone seriously believe he would sit idly by and let organic demand as reflected by an honest tracker dictate his entire future? If private manipulations can escape the scrutiny of their backers and the media, postpone his overdue public reckoning and preserve the confidence of his most critical financial supporters, does anyone really believe this pathological deceiver would not pursue them?
As with every word that spatters and spittles out of his mouth, I just find that very hard to believe. If ever there was a time to bend truth towards his warped intentions, it is now. His need to preserve his colossal ego and the massive self-deluding distortion field that protects it from unvarnished reality has never been greater and where there’s a will, there’s a way.
The tracker is his last chance after an inarguably lousy year to tell the tale anew, and I believe Chris Roberts would move Heaven and Earth to ensure that the tale it will tell is the very same one no less than Daztek himself often repeats.
”Star Citizen is good.”
(I could of course be wrong but that’s how I feel.)
VictorianQueerLit
I like how the most visible “professional” star citizen streamer is talking endlessly about the games he really likes to play like Warframe.
“This has been my off-stream obsession for weeks now”
No they aren’t being paid to struggle through a barely working tech demo to try and sell millions of dollars of lies, why would you think that? This is just a cool dude playing the game he loves and not at all a job.
He’s better at pretending he doesn’t hate the game than WTFOSaurus though. That guy looks like a prisoner of war all the time.
I was watching WFTOsaurus the other day and, honest to God, I didn’t know that the Twitch streamers can see the comments on the right side (I thought it was just for spectators to chat in, and that the streamers got their questions and comments through a different system).
So I asked in the chat ‘how much do these internet beggars get paid?’ Then WTFO makes a disgusted face and tells me to fuck off, and bans me. I almost fell out of my chair, I was so surprised the man in the TV had suddenly said my name. Like imagine if you were watching Oprah and Oprah looked at you from out of the screen and spoke at you directly.
He looked sad for the rest of the stream. I hope it wasn’t because what I said.
From today’s video about the bounty hunting profession:
What we’ll be doing in the future is releasing bounty hunting mechanics that will be focused on, uhh, subduing the player or actually, umm, when you kill them and getting, umm, payment back [hard edit] In the future when you subdue a player, the idea would be that you would take their body, umm, put them into the cargo hold or into the, the stasis, umm, containers that we have and then, uhh, basically deliver them to the Advocacy Office for your payment and that payment will be different than if you actually kill them and then, uhh, return them that way.
So, if a player is captured, umm, and then they are taken back to the Advocacy Office, the idea would be that you are waking up inside a prison and at that point you will have to serve your time. So whether that is, uhh, breaking rocks or doing other menial tasks around the prison, umm, then you’ll have to do that or you can risk, uhh, actual jail break, and, uhh, if you and your friends want to try to break yourself out and then from there you’ll continue as a wanted man.
Sarsapariller
Worth Clicking: (3.0 in a nutshell)
Sarsapariller
SALE SALE SALE
Judging from the recent streams, the new “Ship Boarding 3.0” tech is in and is very consistent now.
“And…and keep in mind I have actually paid…PLAYED…every single patch”
So have CIG changed to every time frame possible now then and missed them all? How is that possible?
Practice.
I know it’s an alpha and furthermore a Test server on an alpha game but i think they really should’nt release it before a good month at least.
Here my feedback on my first hour, i am curious about yours.
The moons are just fucking ugly. The rocks have nintendo 64 textures. The game is way too bright, you cant see shit when it’s plain day.
It’s bug as HELL. The starmap keeps constantly poping. Your ship is flying backward when you are pressing the interact mode while trying to land (and it’s not a config problem)
The starmap is horrible. it’s one of the worst interface i seen in my life on video games. When you select a mission, the game dont tell you where you are supposed to go so you have to check everyyyyy moon to look at every angle to see if you find the name mentionned in the mission. it’s really really annoying The “set to destination” just dont work. and you can’t never clearly understand if the location you are aiming is one side or ther other side of the moon.
Fuel is consumed way too fast. you can’t do 2 consecutive mission witouth having to refuel your ship.
G0RF
That moon looks so incredibly cinematic. It’s like I’m watching a scene from a movie…
TheAgent
oh and also
Wing Commander IV - $10 million - A 1996 Texas Monthly profile claimed the space combat sequel had a $10 million budget. Of that $10 million, $8.5 million was spent on live-action video sequences, according to Jamie Russell’s Generation Xbox.
so yeah, pretty sure 80% or more of Star Citizen’s budget is going directly to finance cutscenes
lol
Scruffpuff
I just watched a fat person wearing cat ears stare at the keybindings for a couple of minutes, get stuck in a doorway, and run a memory defragmenter (how is that even a thing) a bunch of times before I closed Twitch again while the comments were all singing the game’s praises.
This thing is never going to die.
It’s true. This is a religion now, not a game. You’re witnessing the birth of Scientology Lite. In a manner of speaking, Derek is indirectly responsible for this being elevated into immortality in the way it has. You can’t have God without a Devil.
Had Derek never bothered getting involved, the game would be dead right now. But the humor would have never reached these levels, and CIG would not have created a voluntary online pedophile quarantine zone. So I think it’s probably a net gain.
We’re having fun, we’re having fun!! said the bowtie man as they fail to get a couple of space bikes into the ship hold.
Beet Wagon
big problems with phantom players, apparently. None of the Relay crew can see each other.
Take this patch, but beware it carries a terrible curse!
Ooh, that’s bad.
But it comes with improved netcode!
That’s good.
The netcode is also cursed.
That’s bad.
But you get your choice of ships.
That’s good!
The ships contain game breaking bugs. …That’s bad.
I truly don’t understand. I mean, what kind of hyper-pushover do you have to be to be fed shit for 5 years and still be all peppy and “gee, what a cute little bug”?. Like, what the fuck, you have paid thousands of dollars for the experience, at least demand piss.
Eat your words doubters
Holy insert any word you like 3.0 is astounding, to all the doom Sayers on the development of this game i hope many of you have been silenced and will now finally get back on board and support this project. REDACTED The years of hard work and dogged determination have finally started to bear fruits am i a fanboy hell yeah. have i had my gripes hell yeah to that but the one thing that has never wavered is my love of this. i have gone through a number of emotions and probably still will as a human that is my nature. but along the way i have seen many things this game inspires drives and consumes in some cases many peoples lives its not just a game its a family a community a journey and one that, through all of us will play out, the sheer depth and love in this project when you really take the time to look is like no other game i have seen. I tip my hat to each and every one of you and thank you all for the experience that has become and is my star citizen journey.
FailureToReports gg video
Sarsapariller
Video: (30minutes) (FailureToReport - this is pretty much the end for Star Citizen and I. I officially feel zero attachment to this project.)
its worth the watch
You should watch the video — he went from cautious skeptic to firebreathing warlord-in-training after finally playing 3.0. It’s a rage-a-thon that pulls no punches, most of them aimed right at Chris Roberts glass jowl.
I watched the entire video. He made some great points, but the problem with FTR is his bipolar behavior. He’s done, done, done with SC… until he’s not – and then we’re back to a lovefest all over agin.
I’ll be honest, I was only able to get about halfway through it. I mean I’m glad the dude is woke up, but… I could do without personalities like that championing the anti-SC cause. The kind of foul-mouthed tantrumming focus on little glitches and inconveniences is funny, but I think it dilutes the general message that this game is a scam. They know they can’t make it, but they’re lying to their employees, backers, investors, and themselves. That’s the scandal here- people can excuse bugs and glitches all day, and if they’re fixed it’s likely that this guy will flip back. But the heart of the Star Citizen outrage is that CIG is selling something they can never make, and they know it.
He directly calls Chris Roberts a narcissistic fat faced fuck.
“I feel like I just watched someone kill my toddler son in front of me like real slow and torturously”
I’m playing that FailureToReport guy’s Twitch streams from last night on my second monitor while doing some work (They’re around 7 hours). I can see why he’s so fucking pissed in that video. This stream is a nightmare.
In this portion of the stream, he continued with still being held hostage for 5 minutes by the new nemesis, the ladder. Then he and a friend managed to meet up at Olisar, after the friend getting killed the first time by the landing pad. This is where I noticed the stars are twinkling like strobe lights. Then they went to Daymar, and spent 30 minutes flying in atmosphere trying to reach a mining colony, when all of sudden the ship just fell out of the sky and started skipping across the ground. They ran out of fuel, and had no idea because there’s too much glare and too little contrast to read any of the displays.
Between EVERY Evocati tester I know saying they are completely shocked CIG released 3.0 to PTU, the fact that it just magically happened as the Anniversary Sale kicked off, the price increases for no other reason than they talked about some of the ships in a video, a dozen other shady things CIG has done this year, playing 3.0 was officially the end for me. I’m done making videos about it, I’m done playing it and I’m done backing it.
if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone tell me I “don’t understand game development” I’d be able to afford some sweet ass JPEGs or one Ben Lesnick dinner order.
It’s honestly legit cult levels
Then gets into an internet argument with Derek and you can guess how that goes.
The whales don’t want the penalty mechanics for them. The whales want the penalty mechanics for the filthy poors they’re going to lord it over on release.
There’s always been a juuuust-stated implication that the full verse will be full of peons to beat aside with your riding-crop or enslave to man your turrets and scrub your hot tub. That’s the just fate of all the faithless masses who didn’t back early but will buy in when they see the divine glory of Star Citizen when it finally hits the high street. CRoberts sold it free with every early starter package, every big ship…he sold it again with the Pioneer with “orgs will seek you out if you own one of these”. Buy more ships or it might be you too!
Take for instance that Fandred1 character. Two days ago he was bitching about the game non-stop, bitching about CIG allowing other people to play the game and how that was complete bullshit, and fantasizing about becoming a “goon”. Today? After subscribing to get access to the game other people can’t play? Total 180, he’s in fucking Nirvana.
You’re missing something important: Not even under ideal network conditions would these systems function correctly. All of the useless, annoying fidelity isn’t technologically feasible in an MMO architecture. What makes it more hilarious is that Star Citizen doesn’t even have an MMO architecture, it’s still pretty basic multi-player FPS netcode, with some flagrant hacks to support big maps. All the cringeworthy animation triggers need to be synced. Ships’ rotating modular components, ladders, doors, ramps, elevators, chair slides, landing gear animations, fuckin’ kick ass helmet flips, all that needs to be synced. The collisions are permanently broken because their models and colliders are too complicated. Their poly count is still way too high.
And to top it all off…. there is no gameplay. None of the things above support gameplay. The things that are breaking the game are only there because Chris Roberts is an imbecile and thinks they’re cool, and all that stupid, complicated fluff is the only thing in the game. I mean, they spent all this time getting “render to texture” working so they could display picture-in-picture with “high fidelity” but trading, mining, bounty hunting, repair, salvage, exploration, aliens, etc… still afterthoughts.
And don’t even get me started on the flight model.
Scruffpuff
Nothing about Star Citizen works on any level. Just pick a single aspect - it can be anything, really - and think about it for more than 1 minute and congratulations: you’ve discovered that Star Citizen can’t be made.
Example: Let’s say they managed to get their “100 people on a server” (ROFL - work with me.) World of Warcraft has around 100 zones, not counting instances. If everyone spread out, they’d never run into another player.
Ah, but Star Citizen is not WoW, it’s a living breathing universe world. It has planets and moons and stars and shitloads of space everywhere - totally realistic because of fidelity. (Let’s skip the rather obvious fact that fidelity, which is how closely something resembles reality, cannot be applied to things that are not real.) Houston, TX has a little over 2 million people. That’s 1 city. If there were 100 people in the city, they’d only see each other occasionally. Houston is just a dot on the map of Texas, which contains it. If 100 people lived in Texas, they might literally never see each other unless they started out together and stayed that way. Texas is one state, the US is one country, etc. etc.
100 people.
Now add just the meager amount of “content” Star Citizen has - what, a space station? A “moon”? Whatever generic absolute garbage Chris and his team of invalids shat out, imagine spreading out 100 people across it. He thinks he’s going to create what, quintillions of NPCs to fill in this crap?
100 players. They can’t even get that many on and working, but just think about the ridiculously low population that is at any rate. So if he can’t get more than 100 people in an instance, what’s the solution? Spinning up even more fucking universes, all with their own “millions of subsumpion AI” NPCs sitting around in their virtual wank pods?
At what point does Chris realize that he’s proposing a virtual reality that’s infinitely larger than the goddamned Matrix? Did he think that film was a documentary, and that the guys who build the Matrix just weren’t thinking big enough?
Nothing in this game works. Not conceptually, and not literally. What exactly this game would be, how it would play out, what parts would be built and which not, and deciding on the gameplay surface area should have been locked down before Chris even opened his Sloth-like face and asked for his first penny. But it didn’t, so now a collection of pedophiles and malcontents are waiting for Captain Fuckstick to deliver the impossible.
Even the name “Star Citizen” is goddamned stupid, and just oozes “Heaven’s Gate” cult-speak.
I don’t know if it’s been explained here, so here goes.
Lets say that your ship position variable has enough precision for 1000 steps across the universe. So, each X/Y/Z dimension has 1000 places a object can be placed. Objects cannot be placed between steps. Bigger universes require more steps.
The way decimal numbers work in programming is, the closer you are to 0, the smaller the steps are. This makes sense because, reasonably, numbers near 0 will be far more likely to be used than numbers at the extreme edge of the scale. Near 0,0,0, the steps might only be a millimeter big. at 700, 700, 700 the steps might be over a meter. If you fly your spaceship near 0,0,0, the ship can be placed more or less exactly where it’s supposed to be.
If you fly your spaceship to the outer reaches of the coordinate system, the steps become bigger. So, when the pieces of your ship are nailed down onto the steps, they don’t fit quite right. 64 bits gives you a lot of steps, but they still get bigger at long distance from 0,0,0. If the size of a step is, say, a meter, then the parts of your ship might be up to a meter incorrect in their apparent position. The ship looks like it’s coming apart at the seams. The easiest way to do this in most games is to fall through the world. Once you fall low enough on the Y axis, you’ll start to see the vehicle come apart.
This gets worse when you consider that ship parts are connected to each other in a hierarchy, and each part position is expressed relative to it’s parent. So, your fuselage is connected to the object root, the wings are connected to the fuselage, the guns are connected to the wings, etc. This means every part has a position inaccuracy up to a full meter for each parent hierarchy level above it.
So this is why, for example, the guns on that ship, and the winglet, at really screwed up, but the core of the ship is mostly ok. Note that these parts will be jittering like crazy every frame, as the game tries to nail each piece down onto the steps that happened to be nearest at that moment in time.
There is no way to fix this, as any size variable will lose precision near the edges. It’s proper to simply not use big numbers for positions. For example, you could divide your universe into a grid of cells, and then store the position of objects relative to the center of the cell they are in. This would keep the position numbers small. You might also store your ship’s universal position in one coordinate system, but the actual ship model parts would have a position relative to that universal position, so position numbers of the things you can actually see around you would remain small (I think KSP does something like this). In a game like the original Starfox and Starfox II, the coordinate system only had something like 256 (or 1024?) steps in each direction. So, the player’s ship was basically the center of the coordinate system, and everything else in the world had to be expressed relative to it.
edit: It’s also possible that some parts of the game still use 32 bit position steps (like in physics?), and they get converted to 64 bits at various points. This will break it even more. Rather than come up with an elegant solution from the beginning, CiG has been hacking in additional precision in stages as they make their tech demo bigger. It will continue to cause problems until they gut it completely, which they won’t and can’t do.
