January Set 10
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15666-Bugsmashers
At 2:25 there’s some code on screen, which looks very much like CryEngine code and not Lumberyard. CE uses scaleform UI, which is basically flash. LY does not have this, does not come with a scaleform license, and uses a different UI system. So 2.6 was CryEngine, and not Lumberyard. The switch never happened. Called it. They just cherrypicked network stuff from LY onto their codebase, keeping CE specific stuff, essentially still being CryEngine.
Called it.
didn’t they get Amazon engineers on site? seeing as how cig appear to have no competence at any aspect of game development and can only deliver when outside contractors do all the work that would be an advantage going into the switch.
Amazon on site was an Agent leak/rumour
Brian Chambers said they were getting zero support from Crytek and moving to Amazon would fix that and give them access to new tech.
My issues with that explanation are:
1. Crytek’s support only covers what the engine is documented to do (ie not spaceships and planets)
2. Crytek’s support is limited to training and standard tech support for the engine as documented
3. Lumberyard is an fps engine with basic networking, wtf are Amazon going to be able to do if someone tries to make a space mmo with it?
In other words there was nothing to be gained apart from “access to new LY tech” which I have not seen any evidence for and which makes NO SENSE as CIG have claimed for 2 years they consider the engine to be Star Engine as it has been so dramatically customised.
Nothing these guys have been saying regarding the engine change stands up to scrutiny.
-Everybody else is just a pre-investor!
-Your investment will grow with the galaxy, right now we have 1⁄9 of a system… out of a hundred! That’s a 900% growth-chance.
-Generations from now, people will see your name attached to the greatest game in history
-Chris would only extend this special one-of-a-kind offer to his most trusted friends.
-And so does Sandi, if you know what we mean.
-Opportunities to invest into a C.R. game have not happened since the 90s.
-Bezos is a fan and wanted to invest but we feel indebted to our real supporters.
-Get this… Citizencoin!
-If you can convince another 2 people to invest, and they convince a mere other 2 people, then, thanks to your upline, you’ll be getting more than enough after a mere 17 levels.
-Finally, a qualified investor will be allowed to buy a (ahem), sorry, I am not allowed to disclose this information until the next meeting.
Ships Alone, Sorted by Class:
CAPITAL CLASS:
Total: 11
Flight Ready: 0
Percentage Complete: 0%
LARGE:
Total: 13
Flight Ready: 6
Percentage Complete: 46.2%
MEDIUM
Total: 16
Flight Ready: 5
Percentage Complete: 31.3%
SMALL:
Total: 45
Flight Ready: 35
Percentage Complete: 77.8%
SNUB:
Total: 12
Flight Ready: 4
Percentage Complete: 33.4%
**ANALYSIS**
Those big Capital Class fuckers ain’t ever happening.
Openly selling shares to backers is one of the things that will split the community in half and turn on Chris. It is one step below a EALE (Electronic Arts Level Event). Bowtie is mad about spending $35 on shipping, how do you think he will feel about ‘profitable’ shares after they have already spent thousands on jpgs.
I don’t disagree that it would be controversial but it didn’t stop Garriott. Roberts has never minded splitting backers down the middle or favoring new money over old. Erris of all people would hock his possessions to get in on the action without a second thought. He’s incapable of any persistent course correction and there is no indignity or betrayal he will not happily endure and eventually defend. He would chomp at the bit to put even more money where his mouth is and consider it an opportunity of a lifetime — a ground floor investment in the workd’s first Quadruple A Studio.
I don’t assume it’s happening, but if more attractive alternatives weren’t available to Roberts he would surely escalate his panhandling efforts and wave off any backlash as just so much noise. It is the whales who are obligated to him, to let him make the game he wants to make and run the operation however he sees fit at any given time.
As much as I love your charts, I’ve always had a slight issue with this one for two technicalities.
1) The description of “flyable” for a ship. What that basically equates to is: can you move the model around the map. The flight model is still not technically functional. I know there is some debate, but take a look at the .gif a few pages back with the ship jittering around nose-down on the planet. Take a look at literally any video of SC ships in action. Play the game. The ships - none of them - are attached to a space game flight model. There is no mass, inertia, thrust, or anything that gives each ship heft and a unique feel. So to say the ship is “flyable” is making the game look much farther along than it really is. In a sense, none of the ships are flyable until they put in a flight model.
If the “flight model” in the game now is what they’re keeping, then fucking
- no amount of “tweaking” will fix it. This game is a model viewer at best.
2) Just an extension of #1 - the chart farthest to the right mentions game mechanics, and space combat is complete. Without a flight model, is it really space combat?
So I think your chart is actually exceptionally generous and doesn’t actually reflect the true state of CIG’s progress, which is essentially none.
That’s the hardest thing to explain about this game to the uninitiated - even the parts that are there aren’t there. It’s smoke and mirrors where even the smoke and mirrors are fake.
Worth Clicking: timestamped youtube link (2115) (video: Warren Spector: Setting a creative box is not telling people “Make that pixel blue, not green”)
Probably posted before, but watch a bit to see a dig at Chris Roberts.
No engine could have allowed Star Citizen to exist.
Chris Roberts could have taken anything and destroyed it.
In face, CryTek built the pitch demo. Chances are better than odd they also have that code to Roberts as a groundwork. CryTek was in trouble at the time, but that’s a pretty damn good thing to start with.
Imagine going to an engine company with nothing but an idea for a game you think would be cool, and they are all “Yeah we totally see that! Oh, you don’t know how to program and have nothing but your idea? Well well just build it for you to get started!!”
CryTek might suck, but without them all Star Citizen would be would be the fever dream of some 13 year old kid for his “totally awesome rpg space game where you can live in it and do everything!”
It was real dumb of CR to slap away the hand that fed him, but he’s good at that. You could say he’s got a long history of taking advantage of people and not knowing when to stop.
I’m the dudes talking about how this is good gameplay on reddit lol
https://clips.twitch.tv/PlainPlausibleNigiriPoooound (video: Commando’s ship stolen with high value ore on-board. Reddit calls this a glimpse of future gameplay)
In your face goonie cuniflas
“At face value, it’s difficult to describe this whole situation as something other than Crytek’s legal team stepping directly into a bucket of shit, comically hopping up and down while shaking its fist for a moment, and then simply falling over backwards. I’m hard-pressed to think of a bigger loser of a suit than this, assuming CIG’s documentation is correct.”
Calling All Devs
CIG has a new youtube series where Disco Lando skype calls different people in the company and they ‘um… and… um… we do…’ at the camera until he gives up. They are really boring but highlight the scattered thoughts of the people working on this project. Star Citizen streamers have called it Non-informational: “Kinda cute, the whole skype calling thing and everything. But not really much information there”
Calling All Devs
Q: How many land claim licenses will fit on a planet or moon?
Dave Haddock:
Uhm… that is a… very good question, uh… we have… when we were actually doing the um… sort of, the… the BUILD to the… um… the… the ANNIVERSARY SALE like that…
Q: The inner thought system and player interaction in general, is that it? Are we done?
Calix Reneau:
Yeah, as usual, as usual we’re finished from the gate… no, that’s, ah… so much of… of this is coming together still, um… we’re… we’re ITERATING ON IT and doing all kinds of things and doing a whole other ASPECT to it, basically, ah, the interaction system is really good for finding things in the world to click on and… and… interacting with them in bespoke ways, just… go out there and see what you get, um…
Q: I don’t suppose you want to answer a question about dance emotes do you?
Todd Papy:
No
Q: Tell us about 3.1, what are we looking at for 3.1?
Todd Papy:
Well… I think… haha… well, for us… uhm… we saw 3.0 and… and… as Erin stated and… and, um… there… basically we stated in development letter, that… you know, in order for us to move over to this, ah, DATE DRIVEN RELEASE, you know we needed to get 3.0 out the door.
But 3.0 going out the door there was a lot of stuff that we felt, um… WASN’T UP TO SNUFF and… and we needed to get optimisations better… ah… uhm… just because the overall frame rate, ah… then there were other, ah… I think USABILITY, ah, aspects that we felt we needed to improve… uhm…
Q: The 300i, where is it, where’s our rework? What’s happening, when?
Eric Kieron Davies:
It’s a GREAT question, ah, the REWORK is… I believe the last of our original FIVE PLEDGE SHIPS and from what I understand it’s one of the most owned ships… so there’s a few people interested in what’s going on with the 300i, fair enough…
So, the 300i… I’m going to have SO much information for you, ah… is DEFINITELY ON OUR RADAR, it’s definitely one that we wanna REWORK, it is on the AGENDA to work on as you’d expect
**Calling All Devs
Jan 22 2018**
Q:
Is buying ships with uAEC still a planned feature for alpha 3.1?
Todd Papy:
It is a planned feature, however with our current OPTIMISATION PLAN and everything like that I don’t think it will be hitting in 3.1.
Q:
What are the plans for adding uAEC transfers between player characters?
Todd Papy:
So, ah, we actually already have that in the… in one of the DESIGNS for SERVICE BEACON, um… we understands… like… you know… if you go out on a mission with multiple characters… or multiple PLAYERS you want to be actually able to, ah… um… be able to go through and… and say, ‘Hey, you know, I will give you a CUT of this’, and… right now… we know you can’t do that… the plan is… is to be part of the SERVICE BEACON design, whether or not that is the… the first TIER that ROLLS OUT, that’s… that’s… something that, um, basically Tony and I are still discussing.
Q:
What about plans for a traditional MMO trade window?
Todd Papy:
The… the… that is basically be a MOBIGLASS, that is… that is kinda SERVICE BEACON DESIGN of you know, hey, with the MOBIGLASS this is how I, um… basically, ah… create CONTRACTS, so on and so forth, we call it a SERVICE BEACON but it’s… it’s part of the MOBIGLASS and… and how that would work were, um… it’s PLAYER INITIATED CONTRACTS so if you, um… are a HAULER and you want to hire a bunch of MERCHS or you’re a PIRATE and you wanna be able to PAY… you know… basically people for a day’s work… you know, that’s… that’s what will… we’ll be WORKING TOWARDS
Q:
Will we see hotfixes between 3.0 and 3.1 and 3.2?
Jeffrey Pease (DevOps Engineer):
Ok, ah… to answer that question probably the first thing we need to do is establish what we consider a hotfix because different software companies and even different videogame companies have different definitions for what a hotfix is.
For CIG typically we consider the term HOTFIX to be for something we apply to an ENVIRONMENT that’s already been DEPLOYED… but where the fix isn’t something that’s normally included… that… for the build that environment’s hosting… so like in a worst case scenario if… if we were to RE-DEPLOY the exact same CHANGELIST that our backers can see in the LAUNCHER for the version of the game, those fixes wouldn’t be included for a re-deployed version of that game because they were added after the fact…
What this tends to mean is that… the fixes can go into the game without players actually noticing that they’ve been added UNLESS we specifically tell them… ah, to answer the question as to whether we will SEE any hotfixes… the plain fact is that we have already hotfixed a number of problems that were encountered over the holiday break, Ahmed and Bryce as well as Tony and some of our other engineers and programmers were looking into several issues that… were happening with… the DIFFUSION GATEWAY and… our SHOPPING SYSTEM and… the PROBABILITY VOLUME SERVICE because we had a bunch of problems where… gameservers weren’t recovering their ability to list items in the SHOPS… we had a bu… a problem where… the PROBABILITY VOLUME SERVICE was spawning a mission that was causing the gameservers to deadlock, uh…
We had… a really strange issue where the gameservers were causing the SHIPS to become PARENTS and CHILDREN of OTHER SHIPS which caused the CIRCULAR REFERENCE… and then when the CACHE tried to clear the data, because it was a circular reference, the cache would DEADLOCK because it was just keep going ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND and uh…
And then… uh… another one that actually… some of the hotfixes for the PERSISTENCE CACHE that we did were to put in additional LOGGING so that we could figure out what was causing it to deadlock and then TOM SAWYER ended up figuring out that the deadlock was being caused by that CYCLICAL REFERENCE and then we also did a hotfix to the GENERAL INSTANCE MANAGER because I discovered that it was trying to matchmake people into matches… that weren’t supposed to let people in once they’d already started… so for example for VANDUUL SWARM and um… PIRATE SWARM and… RACE MODES… once the game would START, people can’t join, but it was trying to put them IN and it was telling them, ‘you can’t join that because it’s already started’, so another one of the hotfixes we put in was to make it so that the GIM would stop doing that…
And uh… we also have… this… new FEATURE… for 3.0… for the BACKEND SERVICES where we… have… a DEDICATED PROCESS that will take all of the items that people have purchased on our PLATFORM… and… add them to their ACCOUNT in game… originally the servers that would do that would be the same servers players were ON and if one of those servers CRASHED it would cause problems with items being missing and stuff
So now we have a dedicated process for THAT… that… because it’s not shared with instances that players are playing on we don’t have to worry about it crashing in the middle of someone getting the items into their account… one of the GIM hotfixes that we added was to exclude those specific processes from the ROLLING RESTARTS THAT WE DO TO THE GAMESERVERS… uh, I think that covered most if not all of the hotfixes that we did.
Q:
What is the plan for our Freelancer variants?
Kirk Tome (Lead Tech Designer):
Ah, the FREELANCER, ahm… OK well, uh… it… it IS one of the original five ships for Star Citizen that were planned, um… and we do know that backers are waiting for them, uh… ah… for the… for them… so for that we do apologize… uhm… I do know that they are scheduled to BEGIN WORK, uh, in the LATTER HALF OF THE YEAR, um.. by the… uh… UK TEAM, um… this… um… doesn’t, uh, GUARANTEE that they’ll be DONE by… by the end of the year but… uh… we are STRIVING to make that happen… um… and… um… we do… we do know how much the um… the ah… the (mumble mumble mumble) so we… we ARE working on them and we, ah… DO (mumble) to get them STARTED… and we’ll TRY to get them COMPLETED um…
Unfortunately as you know um… we do have a lot of ships that we’re uh… MAKING and a lot of FEATURES that need to go in the game that also require artists and design and engineering work, so… things do get pushed back but um… but they’re on the SCHEDULE so uh… we’ll… we’ll… TRY to get them OUT, ah… by… by the end of this year
Um… also uh… something that in OTHER NEWS the 300 SERIES rework uh, is also on the schedule for this year and uh, that will be done by the team in LA so um… we’ll um… we’ll be working on it here locally
Q:
Is the current way we spawn ships and vehicles in game the FINAL implementation? IE, using a terminal and popping them in?
Luke Pressley (Lead Designer):
Um, there are definitely further plans for development, ehrm… So, the TERMINAL probably, like… the notion of going to a TERMINAL probably won’t change, eh… ehm… the TERMINAL will definitely change, the UI on there will get major improvements… ehm… and the kind of FLOW of it… but… as for like POPPING IN AND OUT? I guess the reason you’re seeing so much popping in and out is because places like OLISAR and GRIMHEX… ah… it only has landing pads right now it doesn’t have the HANGARS… Erm… URH!
You see these things pop in and out on these landing pads it SHOULD be a hangar.
It… wuh… lak… eh OLISAR is like a LEGACY kind of thing we just build on and build on until we finally get like the TRUCK STOP and uh, you know, we’ll get a… a FINAL HOTEL eventually and it’ll have some HANGARS and that means that all of this popping in and out will happen AWAY from the player, you know, he won’t be able to go in that hangar before he has access to the ship and then he’ll be granted access to the hangar and he’ll go in… now, that’s not to say that we can ever completely get rid of popping in and out, ehm…
I mean for instance when a player logs out, you know, his ship hangs around for an amount of time and then it has to go somewhere, ehm… and then a player logging in, I mean obviously that ship has to come in… some… I mean… where he parked it before, if he left it, up… you know… on his… um… NOT STORED
So I don’t think we’ll get rid of it entirely, we are a game after all, but… we, you know… you won’t be seeing them popping in and out on the landing pads as often as you do now.
OLISAR is a MONSTROSITY, I mean, you’re about to see something that’s about to get even WORSE because you know, the RECLAIMER is HUGE, it’s… it’s almost the size of the IDRIS and… eh… that’s coming soon, so we’ve had to just… the LARGE landing pad that is already like a football field is now gonna be like two football fields on there…
So I mean it’s good because we don’t, we don’t WASTE like final art or anything like that, we just, you know EXPAND UPON this thing until we’ve got… until we KNOW all the things that it needs to do, ehm… and then… and once we’ve got that we can build this thing PROPERLY, knowing all the pieces
I’m shocked, apparently the ability to buy ships with game credits won’t make 3.1
SPOILER THAT SURPRISING NEWS: >! And don’t get your hopes up for 3.2 either. There’s absolutely no rush on that particular feature. No rush at all.
THE OLD WAY CIG LET BACKERS DOWN: Give dates, profit, miss dates,
THE NEW WAY CIG LETS BACKERS DOWN: Give features, profit, miss features,
This is the second Calling All Devs I’ve done and I’ve not seen a single hint of progress from either of them yet. It’s all in the future, coming soon, right around the corner, just as it has been since 2014. These answers were not off the cuff this time, you can take my word for that. In fact you can see Kirk Tome reading his points off the screen. I’d love to know who sent him those points…
Honest feedback to Jared (yes we know you read the thread) - why not get one of these guys to talk about what HAS been achieved, what IS progressing, something, anything. That’s what would separate these things from marketing, that’s really what you should be at.
And what’s happening to the questions about networking? That’s been the elephant in the room for so long that the fucking elephant has had baby elephants and is now a small family of elephants
Hmm I skipped through that mostly, but half the people look surprised to even be there, the 2nd to last dude Hobo has to ask him 2 or 3 times if he is ready ‘remember we spoke about this… do you have time for me now?’ like fuck guys, get it together
If you’re not going to tape things a day or two in advance, at least get everyone on board
It’s funny how their production quality has gone from wannabe AAA studio now it’s sliding downhill to crappy webcam videos with a hobo sitting 2 inches from the camera
CR had an idea. He didn’t have the skills to even build himself a baby demo to show off. He relied on the shoulders of CryTek to make his dream come true. But he lied about it all. Even showed videos of himself “programming”, had his wife talk about his late night power coding sprees (while she herself not joking talked about her multiple degrees, hilarious marine biology and shoes and marketing stories the likes of which were hugely unbelievable).
So, there you go. A company built on lies from day zero. With CRs hubris and complete lack of appreciation, he decided it was a good idea to piss all over the people who got him where he was.
While I understand and agree with your point, claiming that Chris had an idea is a little generous. He had an inkling, at best a notion. The rest of this mess was just a perfect storm of people, at every step along the way, failing to rein him in. Like a giant toddler who finally gets to dress himself and ends up choking on a sock.
These are the ideas Chris Roberts has had in his life:
Cinematic space sim
Cinematic space sim 2
Cinematic flight sim
Cinematic space sim + Elite
Cinematic space sim + Elite 2
Cinematic space sim 3, 4 etc.
with Microsoft:
Off-brand cinematic space sim
Off-brand cinematic space sim 2
And now,
Cinematic space sim + multiplayer
Where does he get all these ideas!?
