I am not discussing the ongoing legal battle. I will not and won’t ever utter a word about that. What I will talk about is scope and it’s ongoing reduction; something our backers should know and understand now, and not when it suddenly confronts them.
I want to discuss the often quoted “game development,” specifically when I see our backers pair this with “you don’t understand.” Game development is volatile, undoubtably; the mechanics you most want in are often the the mechanics left on the cutting room floor.
Before I get into why this is dangerous – especially for our product – I want to talk about why I am posting this anonymously through a source that has their own complications. I don’t think [TheAgent] is the most objective source, nor do I consider them without bias. I admit [they] have an overloaded sense of the dramatic which often borders the absurd. [They] don’t, however, post this across the internet. It seems this is something of a Something Awful “exclusive,” meant for a certain reader. It can be taken jokingly and dismissed, but still read; which is my intention. By informing some backers slowly of the why of these changes are happening, I hope to prevent shock when the eventual happens.
Let me be clear and plain: mechanics for space flight, ground and space combat, trading and basic professions are 18 to 24 months away. This means out of our pre-alpha testbed and working how we want them to work. Notice that this might clash with how you, the backer, wants them to work.
18 to 24 months. For basic things. What this means, ultimately, is that things we’ve sold you – things you have already purchased – will have drastic changes and reductions. I’m not suggesting you refund; in fact, quite the opposite. In order to fulfil your earlier purchases – even in reduced form – we need you to pledge more. By internal estimates, we have another $200 million worth of tech that needs to be created, implemented, tested and released. This can take anywhere from 4 to 8 more years. 4 is best case, expecting no turnovers or unexpected problems – which their always are.
Creating ground combat on a massive scale hasn’t begun prototyping. We dont have any idea how space combat could change ground combat or vice versa. These things are years and years out; just getting to the point where we are now has been a massive undertaking.
What you are expecting – to be frank, let me use some colorful language – tone it the fuck down. You are not going to have 1,000 player battles by the end of the decade. You are not going to have AI crew on your ships by the end of the decade. You are not going to have an entire universe to explore by the end of the decade.
What you will have – what we hope you’ll have – is a great, fun and exciting space game that seamlessly blends combat, exploration, trading and socializing.
I want to take a sec to remind each and every one of you how much you mean to us, this project, and even Chris himself. We get painted in a negative light across a lot of different places, but we are not, and never have been, anything but 100% dedicated to this project and it’s fans.
I want to personally – and anonymously – thank you. Thank you for believing in us. For keeping us working, for keeping us dreaming, and keeping us dedicated to making the greatest space game that’s ever been created.
Thank you.
Virtual Captain
Reminder for the CIG intern and the guy checking how his e-mail was received:
Scruffpuff
CIG keeps showing these small, incremental pieces of complete bullshit, and passes each and every one of them off as progress toward some amorphous goal and endpoint. No, CIG, you’re not X% completed - you’re 0% completed, and you’ll always be 0% completed no matter how much work you do, because your core technology is impossible as designed and built. You fucked up from the jump, and now you’re full-on fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it except scrap everything, fire Chris, start all over again, and plan it right. That’s how you get past 0%.
But be my guest and spend another $200 million figuring that out.
TheAgent
[Project is dead]
We know.
The Titanic
Sounds mostly accurate, but I still think those dates are super super conservative. In 8 years you may be getting close to something like a rough “beta-like” state of the product.
The problem with this is as the unknown dev says, it’s going to take a constant influx of money like they were seeing a year ago. People will need to continue to pay for nothing now, and in high volumes and amounts, for the possibility that at some point over the next 10 year span something somewhat resembling the dream will happen.
True to my prediction of CiG deliberately keeping the PU unplayable, threads on the spectrum report dozens of AI ships constantly spawning, bringing the servers to their knees. Days later, not fixed, when commenting one line would probably do it. Somehow they even managed to create a bug that resembles a defective video card, but isn’t, because multiple people have reported it.
Fucking
I love it when ships become jpegs :D
Awww, this game. So long as citizen’s keep sacrificing themselves, it will give unto us the lols.
Scruffpuff
This is really the reasonable thing to hope for:
Accusations of bribery or coersion
Letter writing campaign to the court
Some in-too-deep citizen will probably actually suggest harm to the judge.
An extended campaign of harassment against anything Crytek is tangentially involved with (except Lumberyard)
Maybe even bugging Bezos to save them.
None of this is far-fetched. The truly amazing thing to me, and this comes back to haunt me again and again, is the nagging feeling that the backers do not actually want the game. Here is how I come by that realization:
**- The biggest obstacle keeping Star Citizen from being released; in fact, the one and only reason it’s literally impossible for it to be released in any way resembling the backers’ wishes, is Chris Roberts himself
If backers truly wanted this game, they would rage hard against Chris - they would demand his removal and his replacement
Backers do not do this - rather they defend and protect him (by extension defending and protecting the one man completely destroying their dream game)
Hence they do not want Star Citizen released**
So if they don’t want the game released, the best way to do that is to make sure Chris Roberts stays where he is, continues his staggering and unprecedented levels of ineptitude, continues his lying, scamming, and stealing, and just generally continues to get on with the behavior that has defined his parasitic life.
It’s basically a cult dedicated to negating its own existence. Rather high-concept for a collection of furries and pedophiles.
Beer4theBeerGod
Consider that people are still taking Star Citizen seriously. Chris certainly isn’t. The developers certainly aren’t. The only people who still care about this abortion and think it has a chance in hell of coming out are the backers who “will never know”.
There is nothing left about Star Citizen that should be taken seriously. Chris is a joke. Derek is a broken clock. The rest of the staff stopped giving a shit and are just trying to collect a paycheck. The product is an unsustainable mess. The backers who are left have proven themselves to be insufferable fools who deserve to have their money wasted… assuming they’re not paid shills.
There’s no reason to counter their arguments. They don’t care any more than I do about hearing about how great Star Citizen is. There’s no reason to listen to anything CIG says; it’s all lies with the sole purpose of exploiting the gullible. It’s all a giant joke and the punchline is Chris’s bank account.
I think a large problem with SC that people take issue with is that you have a company that is constantly generating engineering debt to obtain more funding for development of a game that appears to be in perpetual alpha with no end in sight. Every deadline has been missed by months, every statement about the current status of the project and expected releases has been demonstrably false to the point that they had to know they were lying when they made those statements, and literally you have what appears to be the most heinous rabid fanbase on the planet that goes out of their way to promote SC in a way that makes bitcoin shittards look like normal people.
How do you explain what looks like the complete inability for fans to have introspection into why they make the statements they do, or why they have what looks like a cult-like following for a game?
And it never will end. Amen.
[Source: A3ATOT channelling AdzAdama]
The Titanic
You seem to forget once again and rather conveniently I may add, that when Chris decided to beg the internet for money since no publisher would touch him with a ten foot pole he told everyone that he had been working on it for a year prior to that. So which is it? Did it start in 2011 or is Chris a liar? It’ cannot be both.
CR is.. a man of his word! He tells it as he believes it 100% of the time!
You can’t just say “this is a lie” or “that is a lie” because really who’s to say what a lie is? Can CR define a lie simply by stating what he’s thinking or feeling? It’s like opinions really, and he has an opinion of his words and those words are the truth as he sees it within that opinion.
You’re all missing the point people. VR will be in by at least 2020. Can’t wait!
It is funny to see them try to ride the wave of success from space x …. hey you know that cool thing someone else did ? Well check out this janky ass game we are building #wemadeit #actress #buyinganelectricporsche #s42
Chris should’ve paid SpaceX to have a HD containing SC so he could claim it’s finally launched.
G0RF
Detractor: SC is a huge scam and full of bugs.
TARKOSHE: You slimy hypocrites will play the game one day!
10 years pass and SC releases to luke warm reviews.
Detractor: This game sucks.
TARKOSHE: I KNEW IT U SLIMEBALL HYPOCRITE
Virtual Captain
FYI SomethingJones don’t hurt yourself transcribing this AtV. Relay already took the bullet for you.
What we did was we took the health down and put the armour on so even though there’s less health it still takes roughly the same amount of time to kill the ship. And then shields on top of that.
There’s pirates in the PU that are supposed to be weaker than player ships. So instead of giving them less health - which requires an entirely separate ship - we can have the same ship the player has and just fit a weaker version of the armour to it.
So they were fixing everything manually and bloating the download with an entire ship copy? lol
a common one people say, “The weapons don’t feel like they’re doing enough damage,” and aside from the weapons perhaps not doing enough damage, that is quite often from network desync - your pips are on something as a client and you feel you should be hitting them but somewhere between the client and the server it goes slightly amiss and then suddenly you’re not hitting anything. You feel as a player that you should be hitting them but you’re not. Your first instinct is to go, “Well, the weapons are wrong” and there’s tons and tons of other scenarios like that where it’s something else that’s actually causing the issue rather than the weapons
Blame the networking team, everyone does.
could be as simple as someone’s just put the wrong number in the XML; put a decimal point in the wrong place.
For the longest time - pretty much since the game first came out - all the ships had the same armour values and their toughness was determined in their health. We decided that was incorrect
Almost like you gummed up a fake demo that just barely works and are now trying to make a sane game with different armor values. Quick question, has anyone done this before or is CIG still breaking new ground? It sounds suspiciously like leather armor vs plate mail.
Beet Wagon
CIG actually did just fuck up - simplified ship damage represents a huge departure from their promises - but it’s such a mundane and expected fuckup that none of us lunatics even bothered to write an effortpost about it because we’re completely acclimated and only get excited about apocalyptic mistakes.
Star Citizex: Now with X-Com 2’s health system
Thoatse
should hire to get component destruction working. At this point they are literally better at Cryengine.
The way armour works it’s a multiplier on the damage the ships taking. We gave the civilian armours a multiplier of 0.9 so that times the damage by 0.9 so that lessens it a bit. But military ships would have 0.7 or 0.6 so the would take less damage overall. So even if the ships … the Gladius and, say, the 300 they’re roughly the same size with the same amount of health but the Gladius will take more hits because it’s got better armour on. That’s … we prefer to have that rather than just giving Gladius an extra 3000 health because it’s tidier at the end of the day.
What they are doing seems a little backwards to me. 0.7 is armor than 0.9? Maybe they are doing this but 0 for no armor and 1 for perfect armor makes more sense to programmers, then find the inverse in the dmg logic or at compile. But the way they’re speaking about it multiple times this way makes me think they’re not.
Strikes me as someone trying to be ‘clever’ with optimization. “This way we only have to do damage = baseDamage * armour rather than damage = baseDamage - armour * baseDamage, omg the CPU cycle savings”
What’s far, far worse IMHO is how the whole design will work in practice. To use a deliberately exaggerated example, if I fire my super badass Star Blazers wave motion gun at a ship with 0.5 armor, only half the damage gets through. But if some n00b fires his plebe starting pew pew laser at the same ship, half of their damage also gets through. How the hell does that play with the crowd that’s put time and effort (or pledges their fucking money) into getting top-of-the-line ship builds?
It’s awful. The high end weapons, which are typically exponentially more “expensive”, provide less value on the virtual dollar against good armor reduction than the cheap crap. And if you can bring enough of that cheap firepower to bear, then it’s also exploitable. Nice.
And this is the sort of shit that a competent designer should be thinking about, and that a competent… anyone else really… should be noticing and bringing to their attention. It took me literally moments after reading this post to realize it was a problem (and probably most of you thought of it too- I fear that someone’s already called it).
In short CIG sucks
>! , Ben fat.
You’ll have components, and various systems. They can all be damaged in a fight. Your underlings will have to run around the ship replacing blade servers, splicing wires, plumbing pipes. Like a crew in a submarine movie trying to deal with the water gushing in after a near hit from a depth charge.
Nevermind, that was too hard. Nobody had any idea how to do that. We’re doing health bars.
G0RF
Massively has pretty much joined SA and Frontier as a mockery booster.
You really need to make haste on your settlement plans, CIG. The Crytek lawsuit is the dominant CIG narrative of 2018. The primary energy, interest, and chatter about your studio needs to be your Games, not your legal dramas. The longer this stretches on, the longer it’ll take to clear the air.
Case in point:
[MASSIVELYOP: Star Citizen is balancing the crap out of ship weapons as the Crytek lawsuit drags on
Is it normal to develop sequential patches in parallel other than shit like DLC/additional content for actual released and fully working software?
I don’t understand game development.
I’ve never seen any studio try to develop content like this before, and that is because it’s a dumb fuck idea that will never work.
I’m very excited to see months of updates that consist of “Still trying to merge the 3.3 features into the 3.2 and 3.1 branches which were all based off the 3.0 branch but diverged heavily. I am trying not to kill myself but outcome is uncertain at this point. Back to you, Sandi!
Beer4theBeerGod
There is nothing left about Star Citizen that should be taken seriously. Chris is a joke. Derek is a broken clock. The rest of the staff stopped giving a shit and are just trying to collect a paycheck. The product is an unsustainable mess. The backers who are left have proven themselves to be insufferable fools who deserve to have their money wasted… assuming they’re not paid shills.
There’s no reason to counter their arguments. They don’t care any more than I do about hearing about how great Star Citizen is. There’s no reason to listen to anything CIG says; it’s all lies with the sole purpose of exploiting the gullible. It’s all a giant joke and the punchline is Chris’s bank account.
The Mittani 2014: ‘oh I’m watching Star Citizen. I mean everybody who plays EVE is keeping their eye on Star Citizen but only to point and laugh at the fanfiction and the sort of religious fervor that people have for a game that doesn’t exist’
magnetic boots were working in 2014, then mysteriously stopped working ever since. I don’t have a strong grasp on the “gravity zones” timeline but I remember it was a technical hurdle that any backer will tell you was solved a long time ago.
If the short term fake-it-for-now solution was to make each gravity object (station, ships, bennyhenge, etc) a floating 2d plane; it may have displaced the more complex logic that controlled anchoring a player to an arbitrary surface. A year or two passes and now it’s too difficult to take out the short term solution because every ship seemingly takes months to implement thanks to whatever horrible manual process they have.
Don’t call it a comeback.
But seriously don’t remind backers this has been broken for over a year.
Star Citizen: Episode IV - A New Feature
Star Citizen: Episode V - The Chairman Takes it Back
Star Citizen: Episode VI - Return of the Mag Boot
It is
(Return of the Mag) come on
(Return of the Mag) oh my God
(You know it’s in the bag) here I am
(Return of the Mag) once again
(Return of the Mag) pump up the world
(Return of the Mag) watch my flow
(You know it’s in the bag) here I go
Virtual Captain
Todd Papy:
So… it WAS taken out of context, um… haha! First and foremost, ah… from there… ah… what Chris’s HIGH LEVEL VISION is, is that he DOES want you to be able to steal ships, and have the, um… CAPACITY to actually hold on to them for as long as you possibly can.
However that’s gonna require… ah… you know… you jump through certain HOOPS, we haven’t figured out what those HOOPS are yet, but, ah… think of it as like, you know, GRAND THEFT AUTO or in this case it’ll be GRAND THEFT SPACESHIP, and therefore if you’re ever CAUGHT with this then it would, um… basically… um… be… considered a FELONY and you’d go to jail for long time… in the game
Or you’d… or… you’d be, ah… CHASED DOWN, you know, HUNTED, um… possibly put up as, um… as a BOUNTY and… pay it THAT WAY.
What do you mean you haven’t figured out the hoops for keeping stolen ships Papy? Have you already forgotten about faking hull IDs? You seem confused for someone who is supposedly a Design Director.
You will be able to fly a “hot” ship to the less savory parts of the Star Citizen universe, where you will probably be able to land and may be able to purchase a fake hull id code, but it will take effort and not necessarily be cheap.
You’re a good guy Jarus but you’re wasting your time. Star Citizen isn’t a game. It’s a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It’s basically This is Spinal Tap except people think the band is real. The flight model is never going to get resolved for the same reason Gilligan can never get off the Island. If it gets resolved the show is over. Our debating this on the forums has just become part of the show. It gives legitimacy to all this. We are arguing about hypotheticals for a game that doesn’t exist. If we take Chris’s demo at face value the combat experience will be little more than a mini game for an interactive movie anyway, of the hour and a half of gameplay we saw combat was what, a minute and a half of the experience give or take? It does make you wonder about how people devote themselves to it. It’s like devoting your life to bejeweled or something.
If this shit was real all this would have been laid out day one. Instead we get “Wing Commander with physics,” Switching between PVP and PVE without affecting other players, Control schemes for different types of game active at the same time, the loudest Rock and Roll band in history! etc. All these impossible completely mutually exclusive concepts that we only accept due to the human propensity towards confirmation bias. I’ve been playing Hellion quite a bit lately. It’s not even a popular game really but I like it. Once you spend some time outside the bubble and interact with a normal community you look back and wonder wtf is going on here. It’s like battered wife syndrome. People over there give feedback and bitch like any community but everyone knows what game they’re making. Feedback is focused and makes sense. Here everyone just believes it’s going to be whatever they want it to be. The greatest space sim ever made and exactly what we all want. Even though we’re all different. I’d seriously recommend getting out of the bubble for a while. When you’re outside the bubble and you think about how “the team” worked for years on revolutionary technology that would allow the game to update to a new version without having to download the whole game or about how they have been working for years on groundbreaking unheard of technology like the ability to play as either a man or a woman, in the same game! When you start buying into all this you need to step back and think about things. Not you personally but every one of us. Of the 400 employees they have what, 3 people that work on net code? For a supposed MMO? It’s just a show. Speaking of 3 people the 4 or so dudes making Hellion sailed past Star Citizen long ago in terms of features and it’s only been in development for less than 2 years.
If a game comes of this it will be because so much money has been thrown at the show that it just ends up getting made. The Monkees had a hit song and they weren’t a real band. The song was made for the show but it wasn’t the point. The point of the Monkees was the show about the band not the band actually touring. The problem is what kind of game will it end up being? I don’t think anyone gives a shit really. That’s why everything can be everything to everyone and seasoned game developers act like it’s ok. Because it ultimately doesn’t matter in the end. If the game ever got made the shows over. They’d have picked a control scheme long ago for example if they honestly wanted to make a real game. Just keep the fantasy going. Maybe the Castaways will get off the Island in next weeks episode. Just stay tuned.
should hire
to get component destruction working. At this point they are literally better at Cryengine.
