1 - “When will Persistence log us back in to the last place we logged out of?” Chad McKinney (who seems like a cool guy) explains that it formerly did work via a Rube Goldberg machine of code but several changes to Persistence broke it and it will need to be re-fixed. McKinney says the fix will come by 3.1, yet in the wrap-up Lando — sensing the obvious, terrifying threat of unambiguous commitments to fix that which formerly worked via the next patch — helpfully corrects him, saying “You said it will definitely be in by 3.1 — I do wanna say ‘It is definitely our intention to have it in by 3.1.”
Lando knows the drill by now and negotiated their escape route in advance on the good chance that the re-fix for a much-needed feature which formerly worked doesn’t make it back in at the next fixed deadline.
2 - “How will the mechanics for multiple character slots work?” - In a surprise twist, Lando dons his developer cap to answer this one himself. And the answer is basically classic Lando, invoking the challenges of ad hoc, er sorry, Active Game Development as precursor to a long punt of the feature into 2019 or beyond territory… **‘no plans to implement multiple character slots in 2018’
Now, let’s take a moment to revisit one of my favorite videos of the CIG catalog, The Road to CitizenCon, for a year and a half ago, a wonderfully telling exchange took place between Chris Roberts and Foundry’s Director of Cinematics Hannes Appell. Ironically, the viz guy was apparently proposing to the Game Director that they include some approximation of a Scanning system in their Sandworm demo. The demo was ostensibly about giving players a feeling for the wonders of 3.0 (). How perfectly typical that Chris — who was fixated at the time on nailing the realism of the fictive sandworm’s wriggling animations — comes across as disinterested in worrying too much about how they’ll depict an actual new mechanic needed for 3.x.
Here we are, a year and a half later and Scanning is finally on the design table. Chris Roberts could barely be bothered with Game Design for 3.0 back when they were supposedly hard at work on it. He just really wanted to wriggle his big fictive worm as fidelitiously as possible in the dazzle reel for 3.0. What a Visionary.
END FLASHBACK
Punchline to Maiden’s update, “I can’t really say when (Scanning)’s getting through but that’s where our heads are at at the moment for both Scanning and Mining.”
this leaves CIG 4 for 4 on non-commital replies with respect to release targets for features or ships the actual Devs were asked about.
“Keep doing what you’re doing, CIG!”
G0RF
Eric’s Burndown duties represented the final step of what we’ve been now told is The Old Way of things, right? We were told by CIG directly that they were switching to quarterly releases because they didn’t want a repeat of the entire 3.0 cycle of misery. Burndown was a late chapter in that process, and somebody needed to do it.
Watching Ask The Devs is very different. Davis was explaining why something expected in late 2016 still wasn’t released. But Devs on Ask The Devs have the freedom to say (as Will Maiden did just this morning) “‘When?’ questions to the left please!”
Lando explained it further by saying that those who can answer the What? questions frequently aren’t those who can answer the When? questions. (In this case, Papy is probably the authority.)
This is very different than what Davis had to do because the When and What both had been declared in advance by Chris and proved painfully inaccurate. Devs weren’t given a chance to counter those claims yet surely none believed full Stanton by December 2016 was realistic.
I made note in my 9 Voices infographic of just how critical the Past and Future end up being in Star Citizen debates, and the distinction between what Davis was doing and what Maiden did today is a temporal one. Davis was explaining remaining impediments to hit a Past target long missed. Maiden (or Papy, or whoever) have the freedom to say “we don’t have a date yet”. Surely you see the distinction?
Of the first 4 answers given on today’s “Ask a Dev”, we saw that freedom liberally exercised:
1 - Chad McKinney said they hoped to have Ship Persistence on logout back in by 3.1 but Lando reminded people it was their intention not a commitment to deliver.
2 - Lando said Multiple Character slots were not a 2018 target.
3 - Will Maiden talked plans for Scanning mechanics yet expressly declined to talk When.
4 - Kirk Tome said he didn’t have any dates to give on the Merchantman.
If it’s not clear, I consider this a positive.
I know there is this overwhelming fantasy amongst many critics that publishers are a necessary requirement for games to stay on course and on budget - but they’re also the greatest failing to advancement of gaming by only focusing on profit and marketability over all else.
Publishers have cost the gaming community many potentially great games because instead of making all the money they’d only make some of the money. We have a bunch of gamers willing to put their money where their mouth is and essentially give someone a chance to build the game they and we want.
Well now you’re getting a little surly, Cymelion, and I’m not sure why. I’m not many critics and I’m not subscribing to false dichotomies.
I reject absolutist claims about Publishers Pro or Con. As horrifying as it might sound to admit, some of the greatest games I’ve ever played have actually been put out through the traditional Publisher / Developer model. What say we of all the wonderful titles of the last 3 decades? That they were all compromised by the corruptions of the process? Of course not.
Inversely, what day we off all the Crowdfunding failures? The recent SystemShock setbacks? The myriad disappointments of SOTA? The absence of a Publisher didn’t guarantee them anything and may have cost them some decent counsel. In SystemShock’s case, a Publisher might’ve said “stick to the plan you pitched and stop trying to reinvent what you originally intended to just remaster.”
Crowdfunding is such a recent disruption to the old model that anyone who has played games as long as I have (since loading them of cassette tape on a TI-99/4a) has countless memories of perfect, wonderful gaming experiences produced by the traditional model.
In some cases, Developers released masterpieces and even credited Publishers for their patience, largesse or for believing enough in their scrappy little title to push it to massive retail distribution making both parties successful.
Are EA and Activision greedy? Hell yes. Has their greed screwed up things? Absolutely. It kills me just badly they botched _Battlefront 2_— and maybe you as well. That’s a perfect example of Publisher interventions pissing away a dozen incredible advantages — the talent of DICE, the power of Frostbite, the Star Wars franchise itself, the Battlefront legacy — Publisher greed made a damning botch of what should’ve been a home run for all of us who love Space Games and a pox on them for that
So here we are. Publishers can be great or terrible. Crowdfunding can be liberating or lackluster. But broadsides about either are easily falsifiable and no more appropriate for conversation than hatchets are for surgery. They’re crude, blunt tools where precision instruments are required; required because we need sharp points and clean cuts to make good work of the job. And the job here is not choosing between a false dichotomy of Publishers vs Crowdfunding, the job in this subreddit and discussion is very specifically about the good and bad of Star Citizen’s Development history. I think despite being a Goon I have a pretty good handle on both and even in my comments in this discussion and other reddit and SA ones I’m not stingy with praise of the good.
On that matter, I assume you know my position of things but if it isn’t clear by now I’d like to be explicit. I’m not one throwing hatchets as CIG wholesale and hoping to cause as much damage as I can. I’m no troll and no hater. Ask any Goon and they‘ll tell you I don’t root for the failure of Star Citizen, I’ve always been more than happy to praise developers and have written many a kind thing about specific employees over the years because the good works deserve praise even at our dead comedy forums just as surely as bad deeds (dishonest marketing, overpromising / underdelivering, Orwellian moderation, etc) deserve condemnation here.
For the first-pass version we’ll probably divide the Stanton system into sections and have one server manage each section. So we might have a Port Olisar server, another for Yela, and so on. Migration between servers would only happen as players QT from one location to another (although if you had the patience to do so you would also be able to fly between servers at sub-quantum speeds). We won’t be connecting game servers across server regions (US, EU, etc) in this version. It also seems likely that each server region will still have multiple instances of the Stanton system.
Obviously this is a much simplified implementation compared to what we eventually want to achieve but it is still complex enough that we will need to deliver several key pieces of the technology. First among these is the ability to connect multiple game servers in the same simulation. Next, seamlessly transitioning entities and clients between servers. We’ll also need changes to our backend services to keep track of which players are on which server and determine when they need to transition to another. The services may also have to handle spinning up and shutting down new game servers on demand, as we’d like to avoid running a server for a section (e.g. Daymar) unless some players are actually there. Finally, game code will most likely have to undergo some changes to ensure that things like missions and the economy continue to function correctly even though the entities involved may be spread among multiple servers.
Once the initial version has been put through its paces we will continue to improve and refine the technology with future pre-alpha releases, incrementally bringing us closer to the final goal of a single shard universe.
at them admitting that they have to rewrite (again) most of their backend code to enable even the most basic form of inter-server connections. It’s as if they wrote their current system without any planning of how this byzantine mess of code would work with this fabulous “server-mesh” technology.
“what we eventually want to achieve”
Derek Smart
So they’re no longer building the MMO as promised.
Even though Chris Roberts stated back in 2012 that they were not building an MMO, over the years, after figuring out that the only way to continue ripping off backers was under the premise of building an MMO in which they could fly their chariots, live a virtual life etc – now it’s back to square one.
They are now – at this stage – claiming that they are going to be implementing a hybrid method of how Elite Dangerous handles its massive world – in a client-server environment. I ran out of lols.
Now, seven years in, and almost $180M raised, these chuckleheads are basically rolling back the clock to 2012. They finally realized they can’t do what they promised, due to how they designed the game, as well as the features they have been touting, while hobbled with a sub-par engine and a woefully inexperienced dev team who have never built anything like this
So basically, that’s the end of 1000 player instances. Assuming they can solve the performance issues in the game and the networking – which they can’t – they would be lucky to have even 16 clients in an instance. And if they stick around long enough to even manage connecting instances to each other, ask yourself this: How on this God’s Earth are they going to handle restrictions on the massive ships in the game and keeping them from transitioning instances? Imagine two capital ships in instance A, now connecting those players to instance B which also has even more of those. And here you thought they were ever going to solve performance issues. Good luck with the grouping. LOL!!
They keep making promises in order to keep kicking the can down the road in order to get the gullible backers giving them money. The “game”, how ever it turns out by the time the whole thing collapses, will never – ever – be the MMO+ they promised. Not only have they just confirmed it, but they’ve basically also now confirmed that it’s going to remain a session based instanced game, which hopefully they will figure out how to connect instances to each other. Hopefully.
It’s hilarious when I think about it because back when we were designing Line Of Defense, I knew this was going to be a problem. That’s why we designed the network (Wide Span Global) the way that we did, while partitioning the game world with controls that allow us to restrict the number of clients in a scene. This is the sort of thing you build from the ground up – and right from the start. You just can’t tack that on at any time. Most especially when using an engine like CryEngine and it’s derivative Lumberyard – neither of which were designed for MMOs (those who tried, found out the hard way).
They have yet to build a SINGLE star system. They’re still screwing around with a couple moons in Stanton.
The Crytek lawsuit has revealed a lot of previously unknown things about this project – and there’s a LOT more to come from what I have learned. For one thing, we learned that Crytek – not CIG/F42 – built all the tech demos that they were passing off as the “game prototype”. So, if you saw this Kickstarter update of Nov 18, 2012, and you were wondering why it looks and plays so differently, it’s because it was – again – created by Crytek as a proof-of-concept tech demo used to inspire confidence and to sell the “game” to backers. Chris and his crew passed it off as the game prototype.
Beer4theBeerGod
They’re avoiding admitting it because what they’re implementing is the exact same fucking thing they said they would do back in 2012. The original scope was instance-based with scenes roughly the size of an Arena Commander match. You go into, have a dynamically generated encounter designed to be more narrative and immersive than the relatively sterile approach from Elite, and then when the instance was emptied the resulting information would be applied to the primary database to generate more encounters.
Unfortunately Chris never fleshed things out sufficiently because he’s an incompetent hack with a toddler-grade attention span and most of the competent developers who were around when this concept was viable left to make actual games for actual game companies.
Beet Wagon
I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve made or seen guys like Beer make on reddit going “Dude, you guys know they’re just gonna end up doing instances, right?” only to get literally bowled over with people actually furious that you’d dare impugn Chris Roberts’s honor.
CR and his crew sold Star Citizen as revolutionary, as a universe that’s the next best thing to whatever they call that dumb bullshit in Ready Player One. Every time they have to make an announcement of a shortcut they’re taking or a feature they’re cutting, it reminds all the backers of the reality: it’s just a game. There’s nothing revolutionary about it, and it’s not gonna change the world, and that’s not what they’ve been telling people for years.
Virtual Captain
Now I am wondering… What does Chris Roberts think when he boots up SC and see the shitfest it is?
* snip *
If TheAgent’s leaks are anything to go by (1, 2) Chris expects backers to continue funding the project indefinitely. I don’t think they will, but they are very stupid.
Taking into consideration everything they’ve shown publicly, I believe strongly the progress on the game as pitched is 0% done. Except maybe 3D assets; but even in that case, they seem to have gone with a very manual process that doesn’t scale at all. Artists spend literally years perfecting the appearance, damage states, animations, etc. In the recent AtV this artist talks about manually placing all the different wires and spark effects that you’ll see when a section blows off. Uhhh What!? If you have a hundred ships left to do wouldn’t it be wiser to make a handful of ‘critical damage here’ effects and apply them as needed? Imagine painting blood on every possible damage location for a counter strike character. It wouldn’t make sense right? Same principle, just apply the decal anywhere damage impacts. Does Chris think that wouldn’t be detailed enough? Perhaps that is difficult to impossible with the vehicle model in CryEngine? I don’t know the answer.
Ok let’s pretend you wanna spend another four years pixel perfecting every ship because your boss is an incredible sperg who thinks there is no limit on scope, scale, or funding. The other scalability problem becomes apparent, once you get a couple of these 100,000 poly ships on screen, the client and/or server start shitting themselves. You just destroyed the possibility of massive player battles everyone is expecting by putting more emphasis on the art than the gameplay design. Backers will of course handwave this away thinking all performance problems can be solved later. That is a fantasy of software optimization, There are a multitude of reasons as to why you can’t simply bolt on better perfomance if the design is poor or bloated.
Indeed. Anyone with actual (non-trivial) development experience knows that there is a certain point when it becomes harder and more expensive to optimize. And that point is long past on Star Citizen. I wouldn’t mind if Chris and Co. admitted that they are accruing technical debt and making the final product more expensive, in order to make money now and keep the project alive. But admitting that would cause the whole house of cards to collapse, so they’re cultivating this weird notion that they’re sitting on in-progress revolutionary technology, when in fact they’re sitting on a pile of hacks and kludges, that will either have to be thrown away or infect anything put on top. This is becoming increasingly obvious even to non-tech savvy outsiders, leading to backers becoming increasingly isolated in a greater gaming community that once had a fairly positive outlook on the future of this project, but now, at best consider it an unremarkable P2W game in the making, and at worst a downright scam.
Scruffpuff
In you go, thinking you have a handle on some part of the project, right? You have this thing nailed and yet it’s totally gone when you get in. Tons of problems, that. You see it across every department, yeah? When one thing finishes climbing the stairs, Chris kicks it back down. Dragging it back up again and again, you feel like you’ve climbed a skyscraper but you’re still on the first floor. Over and over. Some type of special developer hell, that. Some special circle, yeah? laughs
The thing that pisses me off most about that is how people defend it as Chris “being a perfectionist.” First of all, even if you could take that at face value, it’s just bad management all around. If Chris were so fucking perfect everyone under him would already have effective marching orders and work being redone would be the exception, not the rule. Second, Chris is about the least perfect person I can think of. What does “perfection” mean to an idiot? If Chris is such a perfectionist, why has everything CIG has released suck so bad? I’m not a perfectionist, but I’d have been embarrassed to release anything CIG has released so far. I’d be hiding under a goddamned rock hoping it all just went away.
Which means either Chris is not a perfectionist like his defenders claim, or the freak show that is Star Citizen is his idea of perfect. Perfect shit.
You can show me individual components, you can show me assets, but you have no way putting it together into a cohesive product. To steal someone’s analogy, you showing me a complete car door with fidelitious window and latches doesn’t put you 5% closer to a flying car. It puts you 0% of the way there because the important things are not only incomplete but physically impossible. The tracker is predicated on there being connective tissue between everything, but there’s nothing there.
Others have made this point, but what they’re trying to build has zero relation to what they’ve sold. Photoshopping brochures for an apartment at the top of a thousand story building, selling the different drawer pulls for the home of your dreams while the project site is a sand pit.
Virtual Captain
TheAgent
“Nothing is voluntarily bad. Except Star Citizen. lol what a stinker”
–Socrates, Tweeting to his Students 1⁄52, Prior to Blog Entry
Im disgusted by the incompetent moron running the show and annoyed how such a great concept can be completely f-ing mishandled right from the start in so many ways all at the full expense of the backers. Theres no excuse for where this project currently stands. No matter what fans care to claim, if it was a game and not a complete mess mired in perpetual development hell (thanks CR) I just might buy it. As it stands IMO CR has run out of fingers to stick in the dyke. Poke me IF, and its a huge IF this project ever becomes a solid cohesive and fun experience, but as of right now and for the long foreseeable future Im not giving money to fund this jackass’ mismanaged dream, but by all means you kids have fun with it. SC just cant sustain itself at this rate, an imbecile could realize this sad but true fact. Space opera? Ok if you say so. Currently Id equate it to a tragic comedy.
Scruffpuff
There are so many clues if you play on the PTU, or watch any of the footage, that this game was created, from the ground up, by people who have no idea how to do this, led by a thumb who actually has negative knowledge of how to do it. **I’ve seen shit on the PTU happen that I’ve never seen before - things break in ways I didn’t even know they could break. You watch these little jitters and problems and think “wait, the only way that could happen is if… no, that’s can’t be it…” but that thought you push back, that thought you can’t let yourself have because you can’t allow yourself to think they could possibly be that stupid.
They are that stupid.**
Virtual Captain
instead of normal instancing where youd see people disappear, your client would receive information from both servers, so you would still see people even if they are in a zone handled by a different server. and not only that, you could fire projectiles at them, seemlessly transfer onto their server, etc. it has to work this way or else it would affect gameplay negatively once they make it dynamic. If it works perfectly you wont even notice that its there. Its obviously quite difficult to get to that point tho.
The only game ive seen using this tech is another crowdfunded game that is currently in developement. they use static zones tho.
That is an impressive level of delusion. There are reasons server transfers are hidden behind loading screens or long hallways. I have doubts it is even possible with CryEngine.
I really recommend pointing and laughing. Trying to converse with backers is an exercise in frustration. Even if backers collectively agreed the project was in jeopardy, they have ZERO control over Chris. A thousand screaming nerds were powerless against land sales and the referral contest. Beer called it:
Beer4theBeerGod
At this stage it doesn’t matter. There is no game. There never will be a game. There will only be a continuation of CIG’s failures, incompetence, and pathetic mismanagement until the money runs out.
I’ve seen this often in my line of work. People such as him don’t have any particular strong artistic talent and cannot accept anything, concept, work in progress or whole, with out altering it in some fashion so they can rationalize the “I Made This” cloud they function in.
Some mistake this pathological meddling with perfectionism. It’s not even close.
His psychology is so damaged in this fashion, he can’t function in his “Game Visionary” persona without this constant poking and prodding at other peoples work and ideas, simply to appear to be the one in charge. He does not know what he is doing, so this is all he CAN do.
CHAPTER I Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you
disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he
questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your
point.
We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a
strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some
investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of in-
genious defenses with which people protect their convictions,
managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating
attacks.
But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a
belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole
heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief,
that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose
that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable
evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The indi-
vidual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more
convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he
may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting
other people to his view.
G0RF
Gabe Newell’s son plans a Space MMO called Fury; cites Star Citizen, Titanfall as partial inspirations.
He said this game idea is inspired from some concepts from Titanfall, Spore, Garry’s mod, No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen. But specifically mentioned he’s more inspired by Star Citizen to me. He did an AMA in the comment section on the Youtube video. But he’s also planning an AMA in 9pm EST on Twitch
“we’re planning on having it be open world with planetary exploration and player created cities and objectives.”
Raises eyebrow
Watching the stream now. It’s… difficult to listen to. He’s clearly a passionate SC fan and gamer, but he’s got very little experience or clout.
). How perfectly typical that Chris — who was fixated at the time on nailing the realism of the fictive sandworm’s wriggling animations — comes across as disinterested in worrying too much about how they’ll depict an actual new mechanic needed for 3.x.
“what we eventually want to achieve”
