WTFo: “Like I said before [server meshing] is the biggest thing that Star Citizen has to overcome. Everything else they want it to do they’ve been able to do uhhhh..b but this is the one thing that will allow the amount of players they want ummmmm.. It’ll have an effect on the framerate and stuff but how the system work and how it’s going to feel like one single shard or one single universe.”
Of course they have only completed 18 percent and the 3.0 release almost two years late was missing 70 to 90 percent of the content. The performance was abysmal and interdiction was off the charts but they are working hard. Many people have complained about doors still not function 6 years in or clipping issues 7 years into dev. Considering the scope of the project is expect for minor things to not work only 7 years into development is super impatient. Think about it 7 years in and many base mechanics are not working yet they remind me of Apple. Apple was brave enough to remove the headphone jack. CIG 7 years in and missing major working game mechanics and technology are open about reworking the skin shader again and that is bravery. They have done a great job of continuing to capitalize on the game with so many new digital pre-purchases and merchandising and no one should worry about CR not meeting every one of the stretch goal promises. Even if should fail everyone should stand tall and salute the CR CMD for trying to do something that has never been done before and not think to ask for refunds back.
G0RF
I was re-reading Kotaku UK’s primary story recently and it’s quite worth a re-read in light of the Crytek lawsuit. The entire piece is even harsher than I remembered, particularly on Chris, but also in how it exposes an organization simmering with intra-studio conflicts, internal power struggles, and resentments of Roberts’ tyrannical ego and tornadic managerial dysfunction.
The origin of their demo is discussed in well-rounded detail. With Benson talking to so many different sources — present and past employees, employees at present and past subcontractors — the tale is well rounded.
At the same time as choosing an engine to run his prototype, Roberts was building the team that would help him make it. With no idea of whether the prototype would be a success, it didn’t make sense to set up a studio and hire staff at the beginning. Instead, Roberts set up his studio virtually and, besides a few freelancers, delegated a lot of the grunt work to third-party contractors who already had established teams of developers. He contacted Sergio Rosas, Roberts’ art director back in the 1990s, who now ran an outsourcing company called CGBot in Austin, Texas. He also hired a studio called Behaviour to create assets for the prototype.
As this small team started to work on the prototype, the project attracted the attention of a couple of people working over at Crytek, the game engine’s developer. Sean Tracey, Paul Reindell and Hannes Appell were all fans of the Wing Commander games and lent a hand where they could. Appell, for instance, who is now director of cinematics on Star Citizen, created videos to show off the prototype to investors using the assets that were created by Behaviour and CGBot.
Even as a prototype, Star Citizen was a global game. Chris, working out of LA, was joined by developers in San Francisco, Austin, Montreal, and Mexico (with a little help from Crytek out in Frankfurt). This early remote setup “made me think well, maybe we don’t need to have one centralised studio”, Roberts told me. “Maybe we can spread this out and we can collaborate across the different areas and go to where the talent is.”
This setup, however, would be the start of another set of desires issues during Star Citizen’s early development: a spread-out set of developers with oceans between them faced challenges that a more centralised studio wouldn’t have. From the very beginning, CIG was using third-party contractors, remote studios, and virtual collaboration. All those choices made sense when developing the prototype, but as the team, scope, and budget of Star Citizen grew, the studio structure would have to radically adapt.
My theory is that Chris no longer exists. You see, shortly after the birth of their children, Sandi devoured his entire head in one bite. The Chris Roberts who has been selling jpegs to nerds, therefore, is just a super high-fidelity 3d model mocapped from the inflatable sock man outside his used car dealership. The turtlenecks were to conceal the seam between the model’s head and torso. It was a nice try but you gotta wake up pretty early in the morning to pull the wool over my eyes.
I’ve been a backer since the lightspeed LTI package came out. Still no computer, but I have an Origin 350R that I’m itching to jump in and cruise the universe with. Every video and newsletter that I look at, has me excited. I’m with you guys!
Where we’re going, we don’t need computers to dream!
! Just a credit card
That’s the funny thing about citizens and CIG waffling on about 64 bit positioning in SC. No one in the industry cares. The vast majority of games don’t even approach needing it and those that do would use a more suitable engine than CryEngine in the first place and would have better results with less effort.
64-bit physics libraries are a thing. When dealing with physics there can be really good reasons to use double precision floating point. But to enabled “large maps”? Not how it’s done in proper engines.
64 bit as the foundation of a space sim? Not as important as they claim. It’s relevant because they want to hack this into CryEngine without changing the map-based paradigm of that engine. It’s not a hard requirement to make an interstellar-scale space sim. Many have been made in the past with 32 or even 16 bit based engines.
The actual challenge of space sim position systems is handling the different scales and relativity/transitions between them. Trying to use a unified coordinate system for commandos, star ships, procedural birds and gas giants is wrong. There are a number of solutions, and Derek Smart among others, have succesfully implemented these in the past. The one used for StarEngine is naive, imo. And they’re not being entirely truthful about having a seamless world, I suspect.
Beer4theBeerGod
In November 2016 they had some convention or some other bullshit that I made the poor life choice to watch. A lot of people were expecting this to be the reveal for Squadron 42, since their stupid little webpage still said “2016” for the release date and they had been silent about things before that. Instead they spent the entire event talking about a myriad of bullshit ship sales and incredibly stupid features that nobody gave a shit about and then at the very end dropped something meaningless about SQ42 (I think it was a single slide or something). Meanwhile their page still said 2016, and did so for several days until finally changing to… 2017. Then they deleted the date.
At this point I had already studiously avoided playing the game since June when they had finally changed the TOS to eliminate the provision of a refund, so within a month I finally accepted that the risk of CIG disappearing with my money was greater than the chance of Star Citizen being remotely worth it and I got a full refund. Since then CIG has done nothing but validate my decision.
Em… to… to… em… persistence and stuff yes there’s a lot of improvements to persistence, there’s improvements to ECONOMY, so we make it so, you know… you know… so… you know… it… it’s gonna be, you know… uhm… the, you know… no… eeehhh CARRYING CARGO to make it on your map and stuff, how that works is gonna be different in terms of what you do and how you’re doing things like that.
So THAT sort of level of stuff will come in, and then obviously the next BIG iteration for all that kind of stuff will be 3.2… um… where we’re gonna add a BUNCH of new FEATURES such as mining, um… and SALVAGING and stuff like that.
So people can go and MINE and make money that way, um, SALVAGE and um… things like that.
Q:
So you’ve chosen to not have a presentation at Gamescom this year, can you tell me more about that decision?
Erin Roberts:
Eh, well ah… the MAIN reason was uh, was… it was actually uh… that was more ME than anybody else, because every year at Gamescom, even though it’s really COOL and we love doing it and the big th…
I mean look, ah… we… we… LOOK, to start with we WILL be at Gamescom, we’re gonna be, I mean… I will actually be there and some other people and so forth, em, so we do our sort of like our um… COMMUNITY EVENTS so we’ll have like big ARTS and stuff and like MEETINGS and there will be some extra (unintelligible) there
What we’re NOT doing is the big presentation and the main reason for that is it’s a HUGE uhm… DEV DRAIN… which, ah.. because THIS year we’re really trying to get this CADENCE of delivering constant um… ah… eh… you know… STUFF to the community, we want to basically make sure that we have, uhm…
Uh, we… we… you know… we’re delivering, um, you know… like I said… you know… you know… you know… EVERY QUARTER plus you know, any other PATCHES we’re doing between SO FORTH, the… you know, having to DEAL WITH both a CITCON and a GAMESCOM is a HUGE ISSUE because it takes you OFF what you’re trying to do, the CADENCE of what you’re doing of trying to deliver this kind of STUFF and then you’ve to go, ‘OK what’s the DEMO we’re gonna do’ and all this kind of STUFF
And it… it’s the SAME PEOPLE who are trying to actually get the STUFF… all these FEATURES out to the community who are also putting these PRESENTATIONS together to show where the TECH’s going and so forth, so…
The decision was made well, you know, um… you know… based on… THANKFULLY for me because I was really pushing for it was that, ‘OK well we WON’T do Gamescom this year’, ah… and so that really allows us to concentrate on THIS stuff and also it means we can really concentrate on a new format for Citizencon which is, which… which we did last year, um…
We really enjoyed and we think the community did as well and we can actually get a lot more of our people over and we can have a lot of oh… chom-pu-ooa… THIS YEAR… we’re… we’re doing it in AUSTIN THIS YEAR um… ehm… you know the DATES will soon be, uhm, going out to people and SO FORTH AND THINGS but…
The plan is to… uhm… we’re gonna go BIGGER, we’re gonna basically have… have a lot of uhm… ah… MORE, you know… PEOPLE involved… in terms of doing TALKS and stuff like that, you know at that kinda LEVEL… and obviously you know, and of course there’ll always be a KEYNOTE from CHRIS and all that kind of stuff.
Sarsapariller
State of the game: nervous stammering
I feel like the language here is super telling. “Obviously any gameplay features are pushed out to the next patch, whichever patch that is…” like that people listening should realize nothing of substance is ever delivered right now.
It’s the same stuff Chris has been saying for years. All these FEATURES are coming in 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 3.0, and now 3.2
For the last five and half years, Defendants Cloud Imperium games Corp. and Roberts Space Industries Corp. have been developing a multiplayer science fiction videogame of unprecedented scale
I backed the Kickstarter based on false information of a video game already being in development for at least a year needing a few millions to be finished, as being told by CIG through the media.
At least that case is finally settled. I always asked myself if it was the fancy sci-fi buzz, which sneaked past my due diligence. Turns out, it was just common fraudsters. I have nothing to blame myself for, as I was deliberately deceived with criminal intent to get my money. Thankfully with some pressure I got it back, but I would have never funded this without being lied to in the first place.
TheAgent
wait, are we saying that star citizen might be in some kind of financial trouble and chris roberts is an incompetent nincompoop and sandi isn’t the best marketer since she was a little girl and that you should get a refund and ben is fat and also a creep and despised completely by his colleagues and erin roberts is just as fucking dumb as his brother and that they won’t hit their quarterly patch goals and that ship sales will continue and that backers are upset but somehow they still keep making about $35m a year which ain’t enough to develop a game like this, let alone two of them, and that while 400 people seems like a lot they are all kids hired or promoted to do jobs they don’t understand and have no experience doing?
jesus christ maybe star citizen is bad
next you’ll tell me that turbulent did a bunch of work on the mocap and directed sizzle reels or something insane
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. CIG’s defence strategy is to shout HOW DARE YOU as loudly as possible. Riles up the backers, generates some spite pledges, tells investors and Coutts that they’re confident and fighting hard. Never, ever, for one single second, acknowledge Crytek or their case as legitimate in any way.
Then offer Crytek a settlement behind the scenes. Case withdrawn, CIG get to posture, the fanbase announces that Crytek are filthy moneygrubbing whores (and CIG can say “wasn’t us saying that, bless their overenthusiastic hearts”).
CIG stated it in this very document; they were shocked and appalling when Crytek didn’t settle at the first meeting.
From the Theranos case:
“Innovators who seek to revolutionise and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today - not just what they hope it might do someday,” said Jina Choi, director of the SEC’s San Francisco regional office.
2018 Erin: …
