“We try to keep the team as small as possible, figure it out first. Then once we enter production we can add more people to the team.”
CIG on team size in (2014):
If anything you can say Chris has kickstarted a small economy with the number of people and talent he is hiring not to mention the equipment and facilities he is also having to buy/rent/lease. With all the money spent and people put to work, I really doubt he is going to let it all be for naught in the end. But at this point, its literally the gearing up phase that the game really needs to get some groundwork done and it really shouldn’t be rushed since a lot of the game may end up being built on top of it. Hence the drive to make good netcode now rather than later.
I think the most I can say is this:
The first year was spent reeling from how much money was coming in. This year is about putting rubber to the road, and spending that money as best (not as fast) as possible. The sheer amount of art assets needed to fill in the game wasn’t fully realized until mid-last year, at which point the Santa Monica office became firmly established and the other freelance studios were hired on to start work in earnest. There is a fuckton of ships to make for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, not to mention texture work, spites, human and alien avatars, animation (eased by the mo-cap studio), weapons (both FPS and spaceships), equipment, and flair. The fear last year was utterly blowing all the money on stupid shit that would take development down the road Double Fine encountered going over-budget on Broken Age, so spending was conservative (admittedly to a fault, if you consider the DFM delays a fault).
This all led to the current problem of not having enough staff to produce art and assets at the pace that pledgers/fans/fence-sitters wanted (and ultimately what Roberts wants as well). Pretty much a quarter of all the artists were working on modeling one ship, sending it up to Roberts for approval on a regular basis. If Roberts didn’t like what he saw and sent it back, you have a quarter of your entire art department on a task that went nowhere, and no other new ship assets coming in until the team finished the current one after who knows how many more send-backs. Not just for ships, but guns, hangars, CGI adverts, clothes, anything that’d be up for public consumption in a hangar patch or YouTube video. Due to the requirement of having such high fidelity assets for SC/SQ42, fucktons of time are spent on detailing that in yesteryear could be solved with a fuddled texture over merged vertices. I mean, seemingly small stuff like landing gear goes under Roberts’ microscope. You think we’re spergs talking about how this ship look like shit because this and that, Roberts is the sperg king when it comes to details, and to his credit (or fault depending on which side of the workflow you’re on) he does not let much of anything visual proceed without his approval.
NINJA EDIT: The above predicament isn’t a bad one if you’re producing at most 7 player small ships, 2 player-flyable “capships” and maybe 3 alien ships per race, with all the fidelity and flair promised. But all that was slated for the 6mil goal. Right now we’re sitting at over 37.5mil. The project is WELL into double digit ships.
While programmers are still being hired, the work that has been done on the netcoding, back end, servers, and tools has been going very well. However coding and programming progress is such a hard thing to demonstrate without provided visualization, (sure there are those who would understand, but let’s face it that’d reach maybe 20% of the audience as raw data dumps). Galway and Pedro continue to work on the music. Zane’s got some stuff brewing. The Manchester office has hit the ground running and are taking on as much asset responsibility as Roberts will give/let/dump on them. With the massive art hiring going on, the pace should pick up such that more assets can be done alongside the primary milestone needs.
Game development. It’s fucking hard to do everything right.
I was surprised to see the date on that quote above being FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO considering it seems like a thing that could be said today.
Scruffpuff
It’s amazing to reflect on how far CIG hasn’t come.
While most pilots view fuel, arming and repair as an ‘any port in the storm’ situation, familiarizing yourself with possible options ahead of time can save credits and time.
These types of tweets probably get to me more than any other kind. They’re the most arrogant kind of lie - without outright saying it, CIG implies with tweets like this that not only is the game nearly complete, it’s also got layers and layers of fully functional, deep features. “While most pilots view…” makes it sound like there’s a healthy pilot community in this game who are so sophisticated that they have “views” on different aspects of the gameplay. The separate mentions of “fuel, arming, and repair” do well to hide that none of those systems are in the game, nor are they designed yet. “Saving credits and time” implies the existence of a sophisticated economy including the time/money underpinnings required to make financial decisions.
With just one bullshit tweet, CIG makes Star Citizen look like it’s been done for years, rather than being a model-viewer with no game design document or plans for such. These people can’t burn fast enough.
TheAgent
welp Faceware Tech Inc is actually Cubic Motion
Executives
Faceware Tech Inc: Co-Founder CEO Dr Gareth Edwards
Cubic Motion: Co-Founder CEO Dr Gareth Edwards
Offices
Faceware Tech Inc: Santa Monica, Manchester
Cubic Motion: Santa Monica, Manchester
Chris Roberts: Would you like this fun, totally awesome sounding feature?
Backer: Yeah, that sounds interesting.
Chris Roberts: The backers keep demanding more features and buying things that I chose to sell to them. I am a powerless participant in this brutal cycle of insane promises and feature creep.
Has Derek’s Smart’ s criticism of Star Citizen gained credibility?
points to 3.01
Why yes, yes it has
I was reading a magazine article about the brief rise and prolonged fall of Looking Glass Studios, and this bit stood out:
So they’re once again mining Elite’s mechanics for guidance. Your drones (Limpets) get fired out to stranded ships to refuel, re-arm, repair them. I guess the dream of getting under the hood with a wrench and a golf swing mechanics to BE a mechanic will remain unsatisfied…
I don’t know how all these videos aren’t people crying and apologizing for their incompetence and inability to make a game, but here we are, and there they are.
If I admit the project is stalled I will be punished for it. Other people are responsible for the project being stalled. It’s their fault I have to lie.
If I am honest, the project will lose funding, and the backers will be even less likely get a game. I must lie to the backers to make them spend more for their own good.
It’s the backers fault for being so gullible. If they are not fleeced by us, they will be fleeced by someone else. Our scam at least has more merit than other scams.
Cargo-cult gamedev theatre is what the backers really want. Optimistic promises are part of the experience they demand.
Working on this project has hurt my employment opportunities, and I must lie to remain employed here. I am the victim.
I’m not a liar fundamentally; I was made into one gradually by pressure from my boss and coworkers. Any person in the same situation would do the same thing.
When the project tanks, the backers will become hostile to me. Every paycheque I steal from them is a righteous preemptive revenge.
I am not functional enough to get what I want from life being honest. I like money and being on TV. If you don’t want me to have these things you are the bad guy.
Thoatse
amd’s Letter is the pisstape of star citizen
Virtual Captain
The AMD Letter will be bright, loud and glorious. It cannot be hidden forever.
We’re partnered with them [CIG], of course. We are. It’s four months before E3 and we’re getting our PC showcase set up. We’re reaching out to get demos, sizzle reels, all kinds of different promo stuff. We hear back from a lot of people; there’s some new stuff, new games, new partners, all that. Absent is a response from CIG.
Someone else here handles all that, she’s calling and calling thinking there’s some mistake or she’s not getting through to the right people. It’s now three months until the PC Gamer showcase and there’s nothing on the table from CIG. She’s trying to set up a conf call or a face to face with CIG and there’s nothing solid set up.
She finally talks to someone over there and is assured we’ll get a slice of scripted gameplay and some cutscene stuff with the big name A listers on the project. E3 is what, six weeks away? Maybe seven at this point.
A week later what we get a package with a disc, no explanation, table of contents, nothing. On it, there’s nothing new, [its] a mashup of all their previous trailers. It’s not even cut differently. We have the Hamil one, the Oldman speech, some fighters shooting things and some FPS segments that were lifted straight out of the last con they did. They’re all just dumped into a “Promo” folder on a blu-ray.
She’s thinking this is a mistake, they sent us the wrong material – easy mistake to make, you throw in an old disc instead of the one you just cut, it got handled differently, an intern misunderstood what we wanted, whatever. So she calls them up again, no response, emails, nothing.
Two weeks later we get what is referred to around here as the “Letter.” Capital “L” letter. The email is addressed to everyone high up at AMD, not even the gaming guys but the chip designers and the heads of departments. The PDF attachment is a rambling statement from Chris about how we’re pushing him into something he doesn’t think is necessary, he has a vision and that it’s “too important” to be disrespected like this.
The decision was made to drop them from the show after that. Probably from our partnership as well, but that’s above my head.
Beet Wagon
Wait wait wait, what? You’re telling me CIG copy/pasted a Type 6, called it a “starter ship” and now they’re selling it for 185 fucking dollars?
Jesus Christ lmao
Scruffpuff
2018 does seem to be the year to reclaim the narrative - most of what is visible coming out of CIG are efforts to that end. The employment counts (which only fool the very dumbest), the constant mentioning of features that don’t exist in a context that makes it sound like they do (which fools new blood), and so on.
Of course if CIG had anything worth showing that would speak for itself. It’s almost as if they’re trying to draw attention away from “3.0”, contrary to almost 2 years of effort claiming it would heal all ills.
Meanwhile Chris pours all resources into a bottom-tier “cinematic” shitshow that nobody asked for or wants, misappropriating funds in the funniest way possible. Backers have a fetish about getting robbed, and CIG delivers on that.
G0RF
Their “road maps” are ad hoc ad absurdity and their “project plans” have the highest infant mortality rate in industry. Jeez Moma, how can you have been a thread participant since before the “Big MoMA’s House” day’s and at least not see that much?
Star Marine’s project plan: outsourcing project mismanaged, work unfit for use, Illfonic’s work trashed for a complete do-over.
Alpha 3.x: Roadmap unveiled at Gamescom 2016. 3.0 arrives a year late at 25% of the original Road Map’s scale.
Watch Brian Chambers tell Batgirl about how PG came along far earlier than planned, and when management saw it, the entire “limited landing zone” model of Planetary travel for Squadron and Star Citizen got thrown out. More Road Maps tossed on a rash “game!changing” impulse, more project plans dead in their cribs while newer ones were adopted.
I get that you’ve got a quota to meet but any attempt to weaponize Chris Roberts’ greatest weaknesses (project management) can’t help but harm the effort because it becomes it leads to self-ownage. CIG is not without its strengths but project plans and management are not among them.
Some interesting things about this week’s changes. Some of the “Progress” On 3.1.0 comes from a reduction in total tasks rather than having had more tasks completed.
You are beautiful and full of wonder and surprises. We have been though good times and hard times together. It is amazing to look back at where we started and how far we have come over these years. But I have had enough. Disappoinment has snuck in. There are nights when I cry myself to sleep. Something between us just can’t be worked out right now. I do love you SC, but I think we need to take a break. I will let you know when I am ready to get back together. To be honest though, that time might not be until 4.0. Again, I love you. Good bye for now dear friend.
6 of my org got together to play tonight and after about 20 crashes, a dozen suicides, and countless other issues, we surrendered. That’s the first time I remember our entire group being in a foul mood or quitting before midnight on an org game night. We love the team at CIG, but the current status is flat out bad and seemingly getting worse with each fix.
I love the disclaimers that always accompany anything approaching criticism
“playing this game is worse than boiled sewage being injected down my throat… But I love CIG and they’re doing an amazing job!”
Bug makes ship to quantum in reverse and player stays on the ride for several minutes (reaching 500 billion Km, equivalent to the distance from the sun to somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn). Towards the end you can see how everything jitters like mad. IANAGD but it seems to me a clear example of the 64bit jittery shenanigans if you are too far away from origin of coordinates?
Jump to 34:00 to see how jittery this gets. You can practically hear the code churning to update the pistols position every 2 seconds.
Playing the fuck out of Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) makes it really apparent that this game is never ever coming out.
KCD Cryengine jank is pretty bad, but I have yet to run into a situation where I couldn’t get around a game breaking bug by loading a save 30min-1 hour back. It’s still a game with a story that’s really fun to play. The 1 vs. 1 combat is really really fun and Warhorse should consider making a standalone multiplayer version of it.
It seems like most of the bugs in KCD are due to Cryengine being a gigantic piece of bloated shit that can’t handle anything larger than shoebox sized maps. The shit in KCD is even a little worse than Fallout 3 Gamebroyo jank. Somehow the KCD devs were able to ‘kind of’ work around all of this, but there’s only so much even competent devs can do and I imagine they are now in a situation where they are saying to themselves: “Fuck, why couldn’t UE4 been a thing back when we first started coding this game!”
SC has no fucking hope.
THEY SHOULD HAVE CHOSEN AN ENGINE THAT WAS APPROPRIATE TO THE WORK THEY WERE DOING TO START WITH
THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE HAD TO FUCKING WORK AROUND IT
here’s a fucking hot tip for everyone: If you’re making ANYTHING but a first-person or team-based shooter with small map sizes and a desperate, clawing need for fidelity, then you should not use cryengine! If you are, in fact, making one of the above, then you should. still don’t use cryengine because there’s a reason the company’s gone bankrupt like eight times by now god fucking damnit
And yes, I am baffled by the KCD developers going with CryEngine. Wolcen is also using CryEngine - for an ARPG of all things, and it does not look to be doing them any services. I also think Lumberyard is dead man walking. The codebase is sick, and it doesn’t matter that Amazon big bucks are behind it. I don’t think they have any long term hopes for it. It’s just a vehicle to work on their game server services. They can reuse the servers, protocols, etc. with different engines.
Throughout the years laughing at this game, the CryEngine thing is what puzzled me the most, because CryEngine as a whole might look very pretty, but has never really ran well, and even on the pretty side, it is a dated engine and the Unity and newly licensed Unreal 4 Engine are much more popular and less resource intensive.
This lawsuit brought the real reason to light. They used CryEngine as their preview on the condition that they will be using it to make the entire game. I keep thinking Kingdom Come had a similar situation only this time they actually released the game.
Scruffpuff
What was promised on the Kickstarter was abandoned long ago. The shifting amorphous mass of bullshit that became Star Citizen, different in every backers’ imagination, held the high ground for a couple years. Now, it’s changed again, and nobody’s really sure where this is going, but we can safely conclude a few things based on the observable evidence:
What’s no longer a priority:
Promised stretch goals
FPS twitch gameplay “more lethal than COD”
Flight model based on physics and realistic thruster modeling
Any trapping of an MMO (combat, economy, repair, pirating, bounty hunting, PVP, PVE, core game loop, etc.)
Any part of the PU not related to macrotransactions
What is still a priority:
High-fidelity assets for screenshots
Major-league macrotransactions
Gameplay developments focused on monetization rather than gameplay
Focus on SQ42
This is now SOTA in space. Gameplay will always take a back seat to macrotransactions; gameplay will be informed by which promises of ship “functions” will open the backers’ wallets the widest. If they can’t sell bounty hunting ships, but ambulance ships for some reason sell like hotcakes, expect all hands on deck to suddenly focus on ambulance mechanics. At least on the shows - they can’t seem to do anything at all with the game code.
I wonder what is causing that crash.
quota to meet but any attempt to weaponize Chris Roberts’ greatest weaknesses (project management) can’t help but harm the effort because it becomes it leads to self-ownage. CIG is not without its strengths but project plans and management are not among them.
