December Set 6

CIG forked CryEngine 3.7 and modified it by over 50%.

Amazon forked CryEngine 3.8 and modified it by over 50%.

CIG rebased their branch onto Amazon’s branch of CryEngine.

Miraculously this took ‘a couple’ of developers, ‘a couple’ of days.

Of course this is how code works.

Welcome to Star Citizen.

did anyone make a joke about going from face over ip to case over ip?

more like hand over IP

I liked the games that Erin Roberts produced and always held out this idea that he was a good candidate for making Sq42 and somehow a beacon of sanity.

Will you tell us all the ghost stories and reasons why that isn’t so?

Here’s the hilarious breakdown of Erin Roberts:

Fucks off from Tt fusion to join up with his brother Chris Roberts, killing most of the company by poaching any single fucking person that would go with him

Before that works at Tt fusion making some parts of Lego games

Tt fusion is actually just a renamed company called Embryonic Studios Limited

Embryonic Studios Limited is actually just Warthog Games (same people heading it, including the much lovely named Derek Senior)

Warthog Games is basically just Gizmondo Europe

if you don’t know what the gizmondo is

well

The Gizmondo was further overshadowed when Swedish press revealed criminal pasts of several executives, causing their resignations including Tiger CEO Carl Freer. Director of Gizmondo Europe Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the “Uppsalamaffian” (the Uppsala mafia). By February 2006, the company was forced into bankruptcy after amassing US$300 million debt, and the Gizmondo stopped production. Weeks thereafter Eriksson crashed a rare Ferrari Enzo driving at 162 mph in California, and was later jailed for the crash and his criminal offenses.

like how anyone could look at Erin and think “golly gee, the guy who helped scam 100s of millions from investors can sure produce a game” just lol

I expect that I’m going to be busy with interviews, streams, my Star Citizen book (talking to Amazon Publishing and others) etc.

At my current company, every single programming language, library, package, etc has to be cleared with legal. This is a Java shop, with a Node-based front-end, so… that’s a lot. Every class file has to have an up-to-date copyright header. I leave comments in code reviews all the time to the tune of “please update the copyright header.” Now, the punk-ass “fuck yeah!” skateboarder rebel in me is like “jesus christ this corporate shit is a stupid waste of time,” but the professional adult knows that when you screw this kind of thing up, you put your company and everyone that works there at risk.

My hot take, CIG thinks of themselves as this plucky hotshot hacker kid with business savvy that’s going to “disrupt” the big pub stranglehold like Uber or some shit. Well Chris, welcome to Earf. You’re not very important, you’re not very smart, and you have fucked up far too hard for far too long. Hold on to your butt.

Amazon has no dog in this fight. It could arise that someone at Amazon induced a breach of contract, but that should be unimaginably stupid that in this saga where there’s always more and it’s even dumber then you could have imagined, I draw the line there.

Even if all the stupid fell out of CIG’s head and landed in a puddle at Amazon’s feet, the damages likely won’t amount to too much as it’s not like Amazon’s made a lot of money off Lumberyard. There’s no unjust enrichment by Amazon, they don’t seem to have diverted profit that would have gone to Crytek but for their theoretical interference.

Crytek is going for the jugular. Amazon didn’t get to where they are by jumping in between a pitbull and one of the millions of vendors that happen to be using their platform. Indeed, it’s more likely they’ll shove CIG in front as an ablative meat shield if it came to it.

Skadden and Crytek have just gone all in with a two-pair and a Queen and we haven’t even seen the flop yet. Ortwin and Chris are sitting across the table with a sheet of paper with the WingDings font printed out on it.

Star Citizen: Around the Verse

Dec 14 2017

Clive Johnson (Lead Network Programmer):

Last week we’ve been fixing issues, em, probably most notably there was a bug were if the server had been running for about 6 hours the PHYSICS TIME WOULD START GOING BACKWARDS

One of our network guys spotted the issue, put a fix in, and now time always goes forwards… which is good to know

So that’s why development has only started yesterday. Fucking time has been running backwards.

“Chris really wants it that you can basically hit aerodynamic limits […] and I think that’s what Chris would wants us to get towards. It’s quite complicated to try and work out where those forces are because we don’t have like a full on fluid simulation that you would have in like [a] professional flight simulator“

Nobody will ever ask “so uh… why didn’t you just adhere to your written contractual agreements?” Because that’s simply absurd!

I think it’s glorious that Chris Roberts’ lack of ability to estimate project lengths is really what has killed him here. This project wasn’t supposed to last this long, and he screwed it up. :)

I want to picture him lording over an ungodly jira backlog, shouting at it and waving his hands, “why can’t I fucking estimate you right!!!” As he has “Redefine Internet Communication” with 6 story points. “Human Like AI” with 4 story points. And one “Build Game” thing that has 10.

According to fucking jira it’s already done!!! Ggrrarr!!!

The way CR designs games is similar to that picture of a really complex drawing that has two frames of “use a few basic shapes to get your bearings” and then the second picture is the complete version with “finish the fucking drawing”.

Here is one of them. This is the Chris Roberts development method. There’s no connection between the start and the end, shit just fucking Magic’s itself together and presto you done redefined and saved PC gaming!

(tweet: I’m looking at Star Citizen again and breathing in and out of a paper bag to calm down image of $13,000 expresso installation)

I always love when somebody says “I just know those dirty goons and Derek are lying… I’m going to just do a little tiny bit of research here to prove them wrong and- oh my fucking god.”

RSI Site

The team will continue looking into performance aspects, so that we can ship the initial version of 3.0 without disastrous client performance.

Client now runs better than disastrous. It is slightly better than a catastrophe but still not good enough to be considered a clusterfuck. Catastrophuck stage if you will

Promises!

• No publishers.

• The crowdfunded money are way better utilized

• Shorter development time

• No focus on bogus demos for big gaming conferences

• Delivery on (2) games within 2-3 years, otherwise things become stale

Reality:

• partnerships with (at the least) Amazon, Intel, AMD, and arguably Crytek who provided additional funds. Signed contracts have started to backfire.

• Development hell, investments on 3rd parties that were commissioned to do work were thrown to the fire pit, numerous companies started all around the world for no apparent reason. Backers are expected to keep funding at a regular basis to get “the better experience possible”.

• Five to six years in development, still in pre-alpha, non-existent gameplay loop.

• Plenty of bogus demos, unrelated to whatever turds they actually “release”. Marketing tactics that are way past borderline sleazy.

• Backers get to play the broken pre-alpha demo, which is laggy, buggy, crashy and choppy as hell and on top of that they are segmented in tiers of Avocados, Subscribers and plebs who still don’t get to play the 3.0 pre-alpha. Feature creep is out of control.

This is all good for Star Citizen because at least CIG tries, Crobblz is a genious and, most importantly, DREAMS.

• Coutts did their due diligence, Coutts was aware when they handed over the dosh for Sq42 rights

• But SQ42 is essentially running on an unlicensed engine, Coutts knew this, CIG knew this

• Crytek threatening SQ42 maybe have been “encouraged” by Coutts

• Coutts now take SC ownership since that was the collateral offered and CIG took the loan under false pretences

• Crytek, due to previously signed deal, force CIG to back SC out of Lumberyard

• Ben Parry has to draw a new diagram to show how easy this is

• SC drags on whales being milked for eternity

?

I pray that this goes to trial because that is the funniest option

I’ve been involved in a few patent and civil liability suits, and those rarely go to trial, but they do often involve a lot of discovery and depositions and reports before they settle. A lot of the time, the two sides consider it worth going through those initial expenses to size up their chances, and also to try to get a better settlement, so it’s not uncommon for settlements to be reached the day before the start of the full trial.

All this talk about “discovery” can someone enlighten me? Is it a new ship?

I just saw the argument that CIG can settle by giving CryTek a portion of sales of only the game packages. All the ship sales are separate, so they don’t have to give any of that money. Therefore it will only be a few million.

Crytek: Hello your client broke the contract.

CIG lawyers who also worked at Crytek which is fun: Yes that is correct.

Crytek: We want X money or we go to trial. Do you want trial?

CIG lawyers: We do not want trial. No one wants trial. Trials are expensive and everyone loses money.

Crytek: Ok yes, give us money.

CIG lawyers: Ok here is money/we do not have money take something else which you can turn into money.

Probably going to go something like that. Like 90% of civil cases that never go further than a tastefully decorated office in a nice building somewhere in LA.

Right now, the plan is for hardcover, paperback and Kindle. So anyone buying and send me their copy in a self-addressed return mailer, will get it signed.

And I don’t care how many pages it takes, all Goons actively involved in this drama since The July Blog, will be listed individually. I am still waiting on legal to let me know if I can in fact use the memes which have become part of the drama culture. Though they are in public domain, the ones I use, I may just need a waiver from the creators. But I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

I am also considering doing an audio book of all the blogs, and all the key articles I have written. Just need to figure out if I am going to narrate it, of have a voice actor do it; since I know several who have worked with me on games over the years.

I don’t care about the law stuff, it’ll get funny on its own.

What is currently tickling me is:

CryTek made the entirety of the Kickstarter stuff that backers swooned over

Backers now hate CryTek

By extension they hate Star Citizen

Every insider should have seen this suit coming. These aren’t obscure clauses like the infamous “bowl of M&Ms without any brown ones,” these would go to the very heart of why there’s a commercial relationship between the two parties. And at least on the allegations, everyone’s seen that CIG has very loudly advertised what in retrospect is rather damning evidence. We’re not testing the limits of IP law or needing to go on fishing expeditions through the parties’ paper trail, Crytek is alleging that anyone with a pair of eyes would be seeing enormous breaches of the contract, things that are still happening to this day with the latest release of Bugsmashers.

CIG, given some rope, crafted an elaborate noose with flashing LED lights and a pyre to burn the entire gallows in a fantastic display of light and sound. It’s legal self immolation on a ridiculous level.

I’ve probably put maybe 15-20 hrs into 3.0 and filed dozens of issues. I’ve never actually completed a mission. Not one. Comedy of errors:

• Pick up cargo, get the glitch where it attaches to my hand, cannot place it

• Pick up a black box, it is bugged and cannot pick up

• Pick up cargo correctly, unable to place it anywhere on my Connie

• Connie ladder of death

• Try and zero G out of my Titan cockpit, get glitched and am unable to EVA anywhere

• Finally pick up cargo, place it, game crashes

• Finally pick up cargo, place it, mission never updates

• Try and find missing crew, mission just ends while I am roaming the wreckage

• EVA into my Titan with cargo, glitch and die

• EVA into my Cutlass with cargo, glitch and die

• EVA out of my Titan, grab cargo, return to Titan to see it doing the fun pre 3.0 spin of death

• Grab cargo, EVA back into my Cutlass, place it, doorway to cockpit won’t open

Never mind the undestroyable pirates. I just spent 20 min dogfighting a cutlass only to have it finally just disappear. I know it’s alpha, I am just wondering if others suffer the same degree of fail.

Star Citizen is the used-car dealership of video games. The perpetually delayed MMO still has no release date in sight, but the online store is doing gangbusters! In it the suckers players can purchase dozens of ships, ranging from $20 to $3,000. Maybe they’ll even get to play the game someday!

My favorite thing thats happened in the last few days is that when the Shitizens quote CIGs response to crytek, they’ve edited out the infringing part.

“We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. CIG hasn’t used the CryEngine for quite some time since we switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter.”

becomes

“We are aware of the Crytek complaint having been filed in the US District Court. This is a meritless lawsuit that we will defend vigorously against, including recovering from Crytek any costs incurred in this matter.”

Because thats totally how the law works.

In his hour of triumph, I’d like to devote an effortpost to Derek Smart himself. A dangerous past-time, perhaps, but an important question to ask. I’m here for the laughs like most of the thread but I also want to see CIG pulled apart and picked over. I want to read Coutts’ debtor reports, see the forensic accountants go over the books, get as many backers out as are willing to be saved. Taking CIG apart properly means doing ballistic analysis of the huge great burning trail blasted through it by one man.

So who IS that masked warlord? More to the point, why did one guy with a twitter account end up a furious lightning-rod for the hatred of hundreds of backers, single-handedly attracting the ire of a massive community that should (and once did) have had more than enough to amuse itself with throughout Star Citizen’s development.

It’s been pointed out, more than once, that there wouldn’t be a cult without Derek. That the existence of an active hate figure to strive against was what was needed to push a mildly toxic fandom into a full-blown horror where people compete to throw all their worldly goods as fast as possible into the gaping maw of CIG. I don’t actually agree with this sentiment. For one thing the fandom was toxic from the start, but I think even without Derek we’d still see a cult of some form. The cult is a side-effect of CIG’s marketing techniques. They needed to milk their whales, to find people who will spend large sums of money and keep spending those sums without complaint as the game gets delayed again and again. That’s not to say Derek hasn’t left a massive mark on Star Citizen, of course. But he stepped into a role that was ready and waiting. If Derek did not exist it would have been necessary for the Citizens to create him.

I’m going to adopt some terminology here because it’s crucial we (as obviously disinterested goons of Science ) keep two concepts separate. One of them is Derek Smart, human being with a twitter account. The other is THE SMART. Great Beast Who Is Called Warlord. Avatar of Big Publishing. The terrible being with eyes of fire and tongues of flame who rose from Internet Hell to destroy Dreams, who travels in a shrieking cloud of circling bats accompanied by the wails of the goons and dramatic choirs chanting in Latin.

That entity doesn’t exist anywhere outside the Citizens’ collective nightmares (and this thread’s half-serious injokes), but it was already there long before Derek typed his first blog. He just put a name and a face to it. THE SMART is, of course, the personification of backer nervousness. Their fear the game genuinely is impossible to make, that Chris is overpromising, that the funding won’t hold up. The entirely rational fears it is quite normal to hold even if one has plenty of faith in the project. It might not work out, and if it doesn’t…well, there goes their dream and their money too. A lot of their money. Life-changing, farm-mortgaging, marriage-ending amounts.

I’d bet that same money that the first thing many citizens said to themselves when Derek first crossed their radar was “Of course…”. Of course there would be an Anti-Crobbler. Of course someone would rise to fight the glorious promise of Star Citizen. Of course there would be someone that evil, that diabolical, that beholden to dark powers, to try and take away their Dreams. He fits the worldview of a frustrated, aging nerd all too well. The reason I don’t have nice things is because The Man keeps me down, and here he is right now tryin’ to stop this Glorious Thing.

The real dark whisper of THE SMART (choirs) is that Star Citizen is never coming out. Your money has bought you nothing except a terrible tech demo and Chris’s instagram gallery. You’re not Han Solo, Captain Kirk, OR Mal Reynolds, you’re still whoever you were before you bought your first ship.

That’s bad. For some citizens - the saddest ones, the ones most in need of help - that’s terrible. Hateful. Evil. It’s also tremendously painful.

But it’s also an entirely natural thing to think, just with basic human critical faculties. The ones CIG and one’s fellow cultists spend so much time and energy suppressing. Cultists aren’t (all) dumb, they’re just caught in a system designed to switch their critical thinking off.

So THE SMART (choirs)’s real purpose, his real utility in the minds of Citizens, is as something to sublimate their misgivings onto. When CIG rides high, the Citizens are dismissive. When CIG hits trouble, they go fight Derek. When the crazier backers disappear from the fandom during a marketing fuckup, some of them go off and spout hate at Derek for a bit thinking that this would drive back THE SMART and make Star Citizen good again. I’ve talked about how Elite and Line of Defence are where the citizens project problems with the game; Derek is where they put their problems with themselves. A classic scapegoat. When a Citizen triumphs against Derek, he triumphs against the part of his brain that is saying “hold on, why are we spending so much cash here?”

Now, the man behind the mask didn’t have to be Derek Smart. It was well on the way to being Beer4thebeergod for a while. The role would have fit any charismatic backer who pulled out early or any outsider who spoke out too loudly. David Braben would have fit (he’s basically the current understudy). If nobody stepped forward to take the role, sooner or later it would have been Big Publishing or someone like Bobby Kotick. The cult would be much the same externally, spite pledges and all.

Derek proved an excellent candidate for the mantle. It requires a certain level of independence and thick skin just to sustain the requirements of the post. Someone with a day job would be at risk from being harassed so hard they actually stopped warlording (witness the Escapist and their poor journalist who was just too early). Derek has time and an independent income and a very thick skin indeed; he’s pretty much immune to any weapon in the backer arsenal and that makes him a perfect Dark Lord.

Derek also knows his lines. He can sneer, he can mock, he fits the role of playground bully and he can be baited. He spouts heresies (leaks! ex-CIG employees saying nasty things!), he attracts followers (goons!), he plays the role of a cartoon villain excellently. Citizens naturally want to fight him to exorcise the cognitive dissonance, and as it happens Derek’s up for the fight. The key is to remember that the Citizens already wanted someone to fight. They wanted to go find someone to dump their fears onto and vent their anger at. Derek was in the right place at the wrong time.

He doesn’t fight fair though. He doesn’t meet them on the field at dawn wearing black armour and carrying a sword of crying souls, then battle them for a day and night under a burning sky. Or at least he doesn’t stop tweeting when a Citizen sends him what all his fellow Citizens assure him are SICK OWNS. The Citizenry resent that (then tell themselves that it’s just proof of his treachery). The SMART role (choirs) includes striving to defeat CIG and all their works - but it doesn’t include actually undermining CIG and their works or making the citizens ask themselves awkward existential questions. That’s when they really, really loathe him.

And so Derek Smart the person is given an absurd level of power by citizens, elevated into a dark figure whose very existence harms Star Citizen…while at the same time, that harm is used to explain why Star Citizen isn’t living up to their dreams yet. The Man, keeping them down. Remember, the key to the spite pledge is that proving THE SMART (choirs) wrong makes Star Citizen itself better. Because it makes the voices in the individual backers’ heads shut up.

Of course THE SMART cannot be truly defeated until the Great Day of Release when Chris descends from Heaven etc etc - which is to say, it would come on the day Chris finally disproves the backers’ misgivings by releasing the game - but surely He should have been forced into retreat by the same arguments the citizens use to reassure each other. That apocalyptic rhetoric was telling.

Now the game is facing an actual apocalypse we’re not seeing any of this cartoon stuff anymore . We’re seeing resentment and rage and threats of Internet Violence. Attempts to claim power over the situation with weird legal terminology and “affidavits”. In other words, the standard reactions of obsessed, angry nerds when their worldview starts to falter. This is no longer a situation THE SMART (choirs) can help backers mentally come to terms with. It’ll be interesting to see if they try to build a new one to encompass Skadden and Crytek.

If Derek really wanted the Citizens to love him forever, all he needs to do is don spiky black armour, wear a skull mask, then ride into CIG HQ by shattering the Space Door and carry off Sandi on a dark steed with glowing eyes. Citizens would pledge their entire worldly goods on the spot to form a Space Posse to go after him. If he then finished the storyline in their heads and shook his fist in defiance from the bridge of an exploding skull-faced Vanduul supercarrier (no doubt begging his dark EA masters for mercy as the ship burned around him), then he’d claim a world record for the most human beings simultaneously brought to orgasm in a 24-hour period and could single-handedly fund Star Citizen’s development until 2025. Choirs.

Annoyingly however the Derek Smart who actually exists doesn’t live in that world. He is a flawed Internet Satan. He lives over in reality, where the average citizen is that 43-year-old wages clerk in Idaho. He may be a single-minded old cuss who sustains himself on the rage of others (and he appears to be just fine with that), but his greatest sin is not playing along. Not actually being a proper scapegoat. Derek might actually win, and that’s not in the Great Book of Crobblers at all.

I love the “I’m not in a cult, YOU’RE in a cult!” response. It’s the perfect amalgamation of self delusion, sunk cost fallacy, and deflection.

Is there anything funnier than CIG being sued by CryTek for not fixing bugs in a timely manner?

Yes - CIG ran a series of videos called Bugsmashers throughout the entire time period in question

CIG made a big fuss about their ground breaking hologram technology where they could create holograms of other game characters, claiming it had never been done before. As you can see from that footage, all they’ve really done is put a shitty hologram shader over the top half of a character model and clipped it half way through a table. Unfortunately they also failed to make it stop casting shadows so you see a full shadow of the entire model the whole time.

This it the thing about Chris, and CIG, that just blows me away every time. He literally reinvents the wheel every goddamed time. “Well our first “rotational transport facilitator” was a triangle, but it was kinda bumpy, but we iterated on the design and now we’re on “rotational transport facilitator 2.0” which is an octagon. We’ve learned that the more sides it has, the smoother the sides, and less disruptive the “roll”. Thanks for staying patient with us as we are developing technologies that have never been seen before.“

Relay Station | ANNIVERSARY MADNESS 1 year OMG!

Oh hell what a sight! Erris — just sitting there like a child in his Star Wars jammies and being told “Santa Claus is a lie - you think a fat guy is really sliding down billions of chimneys in a single night, delivering gifts to good little boys and girls? Really kid?”

Watching him try to handwave IP rights away as utterly inconsequential because IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO COME UP WITH THE IDEAS WHO REALLY MATTER is like a flustered child pushing back with, “… Santa has a magic sleigh that’s REALLY FAST and LITTLE ELVES that work for him and when he can’t fit down a chimney he sends them down or uses some other CHRISTMAS MAGIC to make it happen! You gotta believe!”

Here’s a 90 second summary of the world we actually live in, Erris.

Erris, you’re a grown man. Take off your Star Wars jammies and join us in the grown-up world. You’ve put it off long enough, man, it’s time. You can be an adult and still have childlike wonder, man — the world is full of moments of beauty, truth and goodness that can make even a cynic tear-up at the sight. But Star Citizen can not and will not be the machine that delivers them to you. You cling desperately to the promises of a man you know to be dishonest — brazenly deceitful yet you take consolation in the hope that he’s only delusional. But you know what kind of lunatic puts his trust in delusional men? A delusional man.

”Search your feelings, Erris… you know this be true.”

Ben on reddit:“]

Why is Star Citizen being split from Squadron 42?

Hello! The split is just for future purchases - they’re separate games, so they’ll be sold separately in the future. It doesn’t impact any existing backers, who already have both in their packages. Basically, current backers got in early and got two games for the price of one. Folks in the future aren’t as lucky. (As it should be… it was the early support from our original backers who made the game possible in the first place!)

every word these incompetent buffoons have spouted will help tighten the judicial noose

its kind of amazing. beautiful in a way

Thank you all for a better than expected year. It’s ending with a bang, and you can’t ask for more. So in the spirit of the season, I give you:

lyrics

As Seen on SOMETHINGAWFULDOTCOM