Posted on November 28, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 9
Posted on November 28, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 9
Derek Smart
3.0 is such a shit-show, I don’t even want to write about it.
This is the end times.
The Titanic
i see a lot of tweets chock full of reasons why star citizen is great and still coming out and derek is the worst, but i don’t see a lot of cool star citizen gameplay videos
This has been The Star Citizen Paradox for a few years now. Lots of photos, lots of renders of high definition models, lots of weird commentary about how complete and great the game is… but nothing to actually back those claims up.
Better check trusted news outlet pixelemonade to see if they’ve broken this case wide open yet.
The Titanic
Maybe modelling the ships as hundreds of components that have to be individually synchronized across the network for all players was not the best idea?
No, that’s definitely not it. That would imply Chris Roberts is a dipshit who doesn’t understand basic networking and video game practices for handling objects.
It’s definitely some other person who failed to do what Chris’ Golden advice said to do and went off on her or his own.
Scruffpuff
The major misconception from backers is that they’re trying to compare Star Citizen to game publishers, and Chris Roberts to a game developer. These are very dangerous assumptions. In competent companies run by competent individuals, bugs like this show up early, and get fixed over time.
The backers are applying this pattern to Star Citizen, assuming these are bugs that will be fixed over time.
What we have with Star Citizen is the opposite situation. It’s a horribly-written, badly-coded, Chris-Roberts-Ineptly-Micromanaged disaster that gets weaker and weaker every time they try to do something meaningful with its peanut-brittle foundation. This game isn’t going to get “fixed over time.” This game is fucking terminal, and all they’re doing is a Weekend at Bernie’s act with it.
[(“RSI”, “we”, “us”, “our”). If you would like to contact us or make a complaint about any of the RSI Services, please contact us by mail at the foregoing address or via email: support//robertsspaceindustries.com/privacy)
They literally attempted the wrong company defense because people contacted CIG instead of RSI, yet they’ve joined the two together for customer service right here.
Haha MoMA was seriously in here defending the shell companies as typos? Yes a normal, decent, non-scamming company, with good customer service will reply to a CIG email with:
“We’re sorry but our sister company RSI handles these kinds of requests so we forwarded your request to them! Have a nice day!”
and not with:
“It looks like your purchase was from different company that we have no association with. This here is CIG and we don’t sell any space ships here. Bye”.
Fuck off MoMa.
2.0 wasn’t very good and bumped their daily (non sale days) income from ~30k to ~70k for about 3 months. That was two years ago though, are Citizens dumb enough to fall for it a second time?
! YS
Every stream I check out I accidentally read chat and always see some fucking dickhead going “This game has more content than Battlefront 2/Skyrim/Witcher 3/almost any other game ever and it’s only in alpha!”
Meanwhile I’m watching some fucking guy running around a dead base trying to find a door to the hangar where his ship is for 20 minutes. Then he clips through the railing of a starcase he’s on and dies from blood loss moments later.
Comments like that make me unreasonably angry. What fucking content, you little turd? It’s a fucking insult to developers who spend years crafting interactive worlds with complete gameplay loops. No one actually gives a fuck how many Skyrims you can fit in the puckered anus-crater of a shitty planetoid devoid of life, because it’s only surface area. You can fit a billion Star Citizen into Elite: Dangerous, and people still grow tired of that game after 30 hours.
If I had to have this discussion with an actual person in real life it would immediately result in a hectic argument and I wouldn’t stop until we were physically fighting. And yes, I own the fact that I’m the psycho in this scenario.
Whenever the SC community is confronted with painful reality, there’s always a golden period of a few days before the narrative reforms where the Citizenry have to deal with the simple day-to-day reality of what they’ve sunk their money into. Shit don’t work. You can tell yourself it’s the best damn space sim ever as you sit on a black screen for 15+ minutes and then clip through the floor again, but it starts to sound hollow and that opens up a huge dark yawning pit in even the most cultish citizen’s soul. So the community goes oddly quiet. The usual suspects actually shut up (right now they’re switching between awe at the streamer vids and stewing with rage over still not being sufficiently devout to be blessed by the Crobbler with alpha access).
CIG themselves have worked this out. The edited version of a presentation video usually serves this role. Even the Gamescon ramp disaster was followed up a few days later by a sanitised video so the cultists could tell themselves “that’s what I really saw, not what those filthy refunders said I saw”. Then they can pledge more and Buy More Ships secure in the knowledge that the painful world they glimpsed momentarily was a lie that has been washed away.
What will ultimately kill Star Citizen and turn the mob on CIG (assuming the money doesn’t run out) is when the reality of the game is so bad that there aren’t any kernels left to reform around. That might well be because CIG have shat out an MVP and don’t bother followups, or it might be because of some kind of slip-up or misjudgment.
An amusing thing about the whole subsumption thing, is the wildly optimistic expectations many seem to have for it. It’s just a variation of an old school behavior tree, but explicitly without a world model. So these NPCs have no memories, do not have any abstract processing of the world (or even their basic surroundings), etc. It’s all lizard-brain. Behavior trees in combination with scripting has been at the core of game AI for decades. There is nothing revolutionary or innovative about it. But CIG certainly hasn’t dispelled the backer notion that subsumption is cutting-edge AI. I’d be fine with them stating they had an ambition to create cutting-edge AI, but they’re talking about it like they have this special subsumption sauce, that’s gonna make all the difference. It’s complete nonsense and deceptive marketing.
Well, that didn’t last long, CIG released a patch and FTR is firmly back in the Star Citizen camp
Sarsapariller
So I guess the Banu Merchantman is back up for sale today? Just yesterday they put out some turret ship for $600 that nobody had ever seen before, and it was already in-engine with truckloads of beauty shots and will probably be out in the coming months. But the BMM is 4+ years old and they don’t even have new concept art for it. How can anyone who bought that ship originally be okay with that? Why the hell would anyone buy one today? It kind of feels like most of the remaining old ships just got dropped in a memory hole, except they keep selling them.
Sarsapariller
The weirdest thing, to me, is the actual size of the moons. They’re all really tiny, like just a few hundred km in size, and it seems like the only reason for that is that some moron decided to distinguish the game from Elite Dangerous by only having two flying speeds- quantum travel, and dogfighting speed. You have to fly around the planets at dogfighting speed where it takes literally 10-15 minutes to get anywhere, and if you use afterburners you’ll run out of fuel in a couple of minutes. So instead they made all the moons super small but with earthlike atmosphere and gravity.The whole thing reeks of bad design decisions compounding each other.
Scruffpuff
nobody who backed Star Citizen in any way, shape, or form was paying for CIG to develop the game.
They were paying CIG to figure out how to develop the game. It sounds like a semantic difference but it’s not.
CIG further muddies the waters by claiming that they’re “pushing the limits”, or “aiming high”. There’s a distinct difference between “aiming high”, and “being too dumb to know what’s feasible and what’s stupid” and that’s a difference Chris Roberts certainly does not grasp.
Another smoke bomb they like to drop is that they have to “invent new tech” to achieve their “vision.” You’ve heard plenty of this bullshit so far - subsumption, server mesh, inner thought, etc. Some people, myself included, think it’s just a way to hide the fact that they’re reinventing the wheel, but I’ve started to think there may be more to it than that. When you’re building a cult-like environment, or simply trying to engender support to keep people pledging money to feel like they’re part of something, it’s important to create a lexicon that only those on the “inside” will recognize. Those meaningless terms fill that need, and there’s no shortage of backers tossing them around as a dog-whistle to other backers to let them know that they’re in the same club.
There’s more clique development than game development at CIG.
I didn’t pay $250 to loose a race to a fart powered commando.
Derek Smart
For those of us who have developed multiplayer games, it almost always starts out as a single player session with stub code for all the networking bits which you later fill in. And that off-line mode is valuable for testing because without the actual data set earlier on, you have no idea how you need to streamline your code down the road.
And that’s typically the problem that Star Citizen has. They somehow figured that - untouched - the baseline CryEngine network layer was adequate. It wasn’t - as anyone who has played a CryEngine multiplayer game will tell you. But they decided, wtf, we’re just going to make an MMO anyway.
Having done that, knowing that they’re never - ever - getting an MMO out of this shit-show, they decided to focus on other things, while making minor to subtle revisions to the network layer in order to be able to actually come up with a proper client-server (FYI CryEngine base networking is peer-to-peer, but you can hack in a client-server model if you wanted to). It’s how the PU came to be, whereby they were touting “persistence” despite the fact that there was nothing actually persistent (db store and pulls are not persistence) about it.
**So, right now in 3.0, hype aside - with zero optimizations to their networking - each client in a serssion sends in excess of 4K bytes (I shit you not, fire up Wireshark and see) per second to the server. The server response is over 160K bytes - to every fucking client. This is only part of the reason why the server shits itself so frequently.**
The end result? As I’ve written over and over, they’re never - ever - getting an MMO out of this. If they don’t collapse in the short-term, and somehow limp along putting bandaid on the PU until they shit out SQ42, the closest they’re ever going to get to meaningful multiplayer, is precisely where they are right now, but with fewer clients.
890 Jump back on sale, they are throwing absolutely everything at this.
Limited editions, you thought? Oh, they found a few more in the back.
Disregarding that, the community is so detached from reality and so ignorant to concepts of software development that it hurts. ‘I’m just backing the MOST AMBITIOUS GAME EVER’ is neither a good idea or relevant defense when the scope of your ambitious game is ‘all the stuff’. That talk is cheap, but delivering on that, even for the an experienced and talented studio proves to be really hard. It just stuns me that is a nontrivial number of people can be promised absolutely everything and they don’t have the introspection or sense to examine those claims and say, ‘maybe I’m being lied to for money…’
Thoatse
No archer, no archer, you’re the archer!
i_thought_the_hammerhead_looked_familiar/
here is a very star citizen screenshot
Lol I couldn’t be fucked to watch their dumb Grand Tour ripoff video for the new jpeg until just now. Jesus Christ it’s smoothbrains all the way down.
Why would you need to do a daily visual inspection on the entire outside of your futuristic space warship?
Why would you need to do it floating like 60 feet above the things you’re gonna be looking at?
Why would you only send one fucking guy to do the whole thing?
WHY WOULDN’T HE BE TETHERED IN SOME KIND OF WAY?
It’s actually really simple: the “it’s a broken down piece of shit but it’s got character and I love it” sci-fi tech trope. Serenity from Firefly and the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars are the obvious two, but it’s not uncommon to have “this piece of shit ship broke down again” as the Problem Of The Week in other sci-fi series. Both are “pieces of shit” in their own established universes, beloved by their owners despite their quirks, and beloved by the fanbases of both shows. **People are literally daydreaming about “how cool it would be to have a ship like that IRL, and everyone who thinks it’s a piece of shit can go fuck themselves because it’s got ~character~” and don’t spend a second of time thinking about the actual offscreen pain-in-the-ass maintenance time involved for either.
So basically another iteration of “it works in movies but trying to put it into a game is going to make your game suck”** realism simulation. But they’re never going to learn that it sucks because it’s not actually ever going to end up in the game, so they’re just going to fall for the next game that promises exactly the same thing.
The Titanic
1: Those missions we told you about? Lying.
2: Remember that persistence thing we had two years ago? Well we lied, sorry.
3: A ship has no real attachment to you, even though we told you it was a big part of the game. Sorry, we lied again! Oopsy daisy!
4: All those awesome videos of mobiglass customizing of- fuck guys, we don’t even have genders for characters yet, of course we’re lying to you. Gosh.
5: Remember those awesome repair mechanics with picking out materials and focusing repair arms and- come on guys, of course it’s not in because we literally have no idea how to do any of this. We just lie… about everything.
I have a leak about tomorrow’s land claim sale:
UEC purchasable ‘Pioneer’ land claims (such as the ones bundled with the Pioneer) will only be valid for uninhabited areas. If you want to build near a landing zone, you’ll need to pay real cash for a premium ‘UEE’ land claim. You’ll be provided perks such as priority docking at the LZ, listing player owned store inventory directly on LZ kiosks, having delivery drones for cargo/sales between player base and LZ, chauffeured transport between player base and LZ, access to the champagne room at the LZ, etc. Of course the more popular a LZ is in lore, the more cash you’ll have to pay for a claim. Chris is expecting the land claim sale to break previous holiday funding records.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but I read this a while back (when I was still a backer) and it was one of a few things that really started me on my slope of giving up on CIG and the SC Community.
So I came here like 2 or 3 months ago after star citizen was posted on the shittykickstarters subreddit. Before that day I had heard about star citizen to the extent that I knew it was a game and that it was popular. (When they introduced their subreddit bot they had a “upvote this post so our bot gets karma” post that hit the front of r all)
Anyways, in doing my due diligence to see whether or not they were a scam/failure as I do with all the kickstarters that get posted I noticed a fascinating trend that you really don’t see with any other game or even subreddit for that matter.
I went to their subreddit and sorted by top+all time and didn’t really see anything out of the ordinary. But when I went to sort by controversial I noticed that you couldn’t even do that because they’ve disabled to option. Name one other subreddit on this entire site that does that. But luckily you can just type the url in manually and view the most controversial threads, so I did, and it was quite a different scene.
This game’s community is about as close as you can get to a cult without actually having the elements needed for the official label. Everything else is there.
• Controversial filter is disabled
• Automatic flair of ‘new user/low karma’
• Calls for users with said flair to be prevented from posting
• Constant celebrations for new funding milestones (a tactic done by multi-level marketing companies to encourage sales)
• Automatic dismissal of criticisms from users who haven’t earned the right to
• Automatic acceptance of criticisms from users who have (implying that they are not actually concerned with the validity of the criticisms but rather the need to appease)
• Telling concerned users to take a break and check back in a few months (dilutes the voice of like-minded users)
I can’t help but wonder if the community’s refusal to hold the developers’s feet to the fire has enabled the developers to drag their feet in completing the project. Moreover, I think they take backers-turned-doubters like you guys for granted because you provide a necessary leverage against the developers that may not be there should the community one day need it.
The last bullet point was one that really stood out to me, because you see that thrown out in the SC subreddit religiously. If someone starts up a thread that doesn’t immediately get killed in it’s crib, it eventually gets loaded with “you should take a healthy break and come back later”.
It’s amazing how CIG gives them a little detail on something and suddenly there’s all these dreams about what they can do with their multi thousand dollar pretend fleet, it builds and builds until “it’s a bit like firefly”.
This is a big part of how people get caught up in it honestly, I’ve seen so many people come across my channel with this grand fully worked out scenarios they 100% expect to be in game based off a tiny snippet that Chris or someone else at CIG says about a mechanic they would like to one day make.
I kept trying to think of a term to use for these players because Carebear isn’t really what I want to call them, but there are thousands and thousands of backers who imagine they are going to call up their entire purchased “fleet” and roll out into the universe and have these super fucking complex gameplay experiences that are more in depth than anything even remotely feasible.
Just had a thought on Discord this morning. That giant footprint that appears when you shoot the railgun at the ground; the decal itself might be an error, but what I found odd was just how big it was. Then it struck me: Wasn’t there a theory that in order to make planets on SC, everything on Cryengine was scaled-down from a normal map size? If so, maybe the footprint isn’t big, they just forgot to downscale it?
This has been my working theory for a long time. Scaling down all game objects is a cheap way to make your levels “bigger,” but it has disastrous effects, including breaking collisions (you can clip through things easily because your player character is approaching the collider’s error margin), and breaking physics (mass gets screwy and everything tends to behave like balsa wood).
