November 2019 Set 1

Secret build looking huge and good. When it will enter the pipelines the video game world gonna stagger.

I opened my Star Citizen account 6 ¹⁄₂ years ago. You plan on giving me ¹⁄₃ of the game I was promised over a year from now. If we don’t get the ENTIRE game we were promises, I will be suing you into oblivion!!! And I will be one among many! Get your act together

CIG steals from people by stealing technology concepts from real game developers and failing to implement them. It’s a hell of a trick - it’s like getting rich in the old west by falling off stagecoaches and getting run over by steam locomotives. I’m not sure whether to point and laugh at the ineptitude and absurdity of it all, or to be soberly impressed by the fact that year after year, it’s working, and shows no signs of slowing down.

let’s get back to this again: is the jiterring because of the bullets? I know it might be the NPC walking into the ship but I’ve been thinking - since we know everything is shrunk down, how small is the bullet? How small of an object can you track in Cryengine? How can you have any kind of precision with let’s say, everything shrunk down 200 times? Assuming that you’d use 9mm bullets, that would make them 0.000045m, or 45 µm (micrometers). That is stupid small, and I doubt that the engine can handle sub-milimeter precision. So, how can the game know where the bullets actually are and have any sort of reliable gunplay, if it has to kinda guess every bullet position?

The answer is “it can’t” and it is the most satisfying thing to uncover another layer of their design flaws and technical debt.

lifts working as planned

I finally figured out what CIG’s written reports remind me of: those student projects where nobody did anything meaningful for a few weeks and now have to give a progress report in front of the class. A lot of ”the team started learning” and trying to twist basic shit into something revolutionary in an attempt to make ”copy pasted some basic code from Stackoverflow into a file and it kinda compiled?” sound like a time-consuming task and significant progress.

I also know how these student projects tend to end up, and it does not bode well for CIG.

I like how their alien typeface is just “Chinese, reproduced from memory by someone who doesn’t actually read or write Chinese.”

You know, in addition to literally naming the alien race after a real city in China.

“Ni hao” - traditional Xi’An greeting

https://scfocus.org/star-citizen-myths/

Star Citizen Lied About Release Dates - Myth

Squadron 42 And Star Citizen Are Developed In Parallel - Myth

Gamescom And Community Events Do Not Cause Development Delays - Myth

Star Citizen Is A Scam - Myth

CIG Will Stop Selling Concept Ships After Launch - Myth

LTI Gives Players An Advantage - Myth

Star Citizen Is Pay 2 Win - Myth

Star Citizen Will Release With 5 to 10 Systems - Myth

Star Citizen Uses A Paywall For Mining - Myth

All Ships Can Be Purchased In Game - Misconception

Chris Roberts Should Be Replaced As CEO / Star Citizen is Badly Managed - Myth

Star Citizen Has Bad Marketing - Myth

Star Citizen Ships Are Digital JPEGS - Myth

In-Game Ship Sales and Rentals Will Negatively Affect Funding - Myth

Star Citizen is Not A Game Yet - Misconception

Star Citizen Is Never Going To Release - Myth

Whoever is running that site is an absolute legend.

and an idiot

Someone’s forgetting about the little ace Chris kept up his sleeve. An ace called Squadron 42. He’s all in on this bet, and when the chips are down, he’s gonna play that card and win the whole damn pot.

With an estimated 10 million NEW copies sold at launch, he’s gonna get a cash infusion of $500 million. And then it’s “bye bye Calders”, “bye bye competitors”, as the money just never stops rolling in.

“We have won!”

This is the funniest thing about this project, and that’s saying something. Chris 100% believes this. It’s incredible. I want SQ42 to come out just so I can get front row seats to watch this not happen.

My brother told me that SC now does everything ED does. I replied with the squinting Thor meme.

Who on earth would buy SQ42 that isn’t already a backer? Haha

I don’t think you understand game development. Everyone who loves AAA games like COD will buy it, because it’s the world’s first AAAA game.

Brain: Star Citizen Good

Me: Star Citizen Good

Sensible Person: Star Citizen is bad and here’s a mountain of evidense why.

Brain: (still saying Star Citizen Good)

Me: shits verbal diarrhea trying to justify a completely irrational brain fart that’s not based on logic or reason

The citizens are always calling for every sort of weird and creepy sexuality imaginable to be put into the game. But what exists of the SC “universe” is bizarrely sexless and sterile to the point of going to the other extreme. Maybe Chris is just prudish or the people at CIG know just how loathsome some of their whales are and don’t want to open that door even a crack.

Originally planned for a 2014 release, Star Citizen has had a rocky development and is nowhere close to finished.

I’m so sorry:

Dang it Bobby, where is my Carrack?

they’ve pissed away a lot of that calder money and have almost nothing to show for it

they can’t keep people because the entire company is toxic as fuck, can’t hire anyone besides entry level dudes (sometimes in senior positions), are wasting at least $15m a year on outside companies to produce art assets and fix their mocap animation issues, don’t have a whole lot of people with 3d engine programming experience left, and pretty much the entire mocap/cinematics dev group has been churned and refreshed in the span of 24 months

god knows what kind of devils bargain they made with that billionaire and his son, but Q2/Q3 2020 is going to be an absolutely fun time. not only will you get your intrepid reporter here at space court, but it’s also 24 months since the calders gave em an entire years worth of operating expenses. I’m guessing “we’ve refactored basic fucking movement to Q2 2020” isn’t going to fly when the investors want crobbers insane promises finally fulfilled

We need two Star Citizens…

Rogue Edition. Gore, sex, seeing drug use and violent fights. Kidnapping, black mailing, underground fighting, lap dances, throat slicing, head piking, slaves to mine for you, gun to the head hostage taking after pirating, stealing peoples prosthetics, traveling the stars in an 890 brothel, Etc etc etc.

they still make the planets actual spheres and not rounded cubes, like it would be sensible to do, since with spheres the pole of it ends in 1 vertex which has however many divisions the original sphere has connected to it. making the topology /UV map all fucked up. For some reason their planet tech still uses this instead of rounding a cube, which is what most other planet generators use.

and it is very much problematic since it will always leave fed up areas on every planet.

They’ve heard the cry for adult content and have responded by giving the planets buttholes.

Star Citizen: I moved on from CIG a few months ago :)

As much as I am a sucker for open-world style games most of them have a serious content problem.

Warren Spector hit on this awhile ago in a big way, and has been stressing that a “mile deep” game is way, way better than a “mile wide” game.

His ultimate game is to do “one city block” to complete detail, kinda like yakuza but even smaller.

Roberts understands none of this whatsoever.

Citcon

The engine may be blinking “torture”

They kept this in the YT upload.

I relistened to the wrap up. Chris thanks some woman named Leah for all the CitizenCon planning work. So it’s not just that Sandi is out, it’s that other individuals are being acknowledged for doing what was formerly her job.

The movement on the Cryrekt lawsuit may be why Squadron had to pull a disappearing act again.

A WORKING THEORY OF THE PRESENT

This is sloppy but figured I’d throw it out there.

Squadron was the centerpiece of Citcon 2015 and 2018. It completely and conspicuously vanished in 2016 (thanks Infinite Warfare!) and 2019.

I’m going to assume the Calders invested because they were sincerely sold on the pitch of a can’t fail, celebrity packed single player game from the creator of Wing Commander. There’s a chance they had more nefarious reasons, of the sort that Cayman Island money is famous for, but the Holiday 2017 Livestream sure looked like an earnest, maybe desperate all-hands-on-deck sales pitch from Chris and his entire leadership team. The awkward nervousness of it, the weird unsolicited assurances (like Chambers assurance that the cinematics team was exclusively a Squadron resource and not used on Star Citizen), it felt pretty authentic and a little desperate.

So if you’re a reclusive and historically ruthless billionaire dropping $46 million into what you think is going to be a single player movie game, you’re not doing a handshake deal. You’re going to protect yourself and your filmmaker son from getting chumpatized.

Only weeks after the check clears, CIG has a string of big publicity problems. If the Calders weren’t familiar with its notoriety before this, they sure are now. Chris stumbles through them all summer, but decides, in the interest of proving to the Calders that CIG is the next big thing, he’s going to stage the biggest CitizenCon ever. He’s even going to throw some money at the Redbull infotainment team and have a slick advertorial doc shot during the show. Chris buys a full marketing package from them to do what Sandi can’t. As part of the deal, Redbull is also going to deploy a battle-tested, high octane streamer to hype this turkey to the max after the documentary drops at year end, and they’ll pump more advertorials about Rex In 2019 to Newsweek and Polygon and anyone else selling adspace designed as light news. This will serve to reassure backers and the Investors alike eventually. (No Jade, Rex didn’t play 6 hours a day for months on end in 2019 because he didn’t have anything better to play. Sorry, Astro girl!)

Back to the summer of 2018.

Because Chris is spending so very much on this whole confidence projection effort (huge venue, slick doc, future streamer and advertorials), he gets the brilliant idea he should paywall the Citcon event and get some of that money back. This brilliant idea outrages fans and average gamers alike and thrusts CIG right back into the self-own spotlight Chris was trying to get out of. It produces even worse PR than Chris got in the summer and eventually he’s forced to back off the plan. So CitCon turns out costly both to the company and to its reputation with its new billionaire investor.

“Get your crap together, Chris.”

Stuff happens. Controls are asserted. Sandi’s on the way out by the end of 2018, though no official announcement has been made even a year later. 2018 sees Chris downsizing their weekly fan content, with ATV turning into a dimlit, low-budget Landoshow. 2019 crawls along, with CIG missing their less ambitious targets and Squadron stalling and entering radio silence mode one year after it was the centerpiece of CIG’s marketing AND investor pitch. But Chris did at least task his Devteam at the end of 2018 with building a new game mode just for Rex and future Rexes. Chris wants and needs a better game for hucksters for hire to pitch, something that cuts out all the bloat of SPAAAAACE! and keeps the tempo up for viewers. We got a glimpse of this nearly yearlong development priority at CitCon and, well, if it isn’t exactly Planetside 2 level fun yet, it’ll at least solve design problems made obvious during Rex’s year of streaming. (The dude spent more time pacing the decks of his ships while in transit to battle zones than actually fighting).

Crytek’s lawsuit moves slowly in the background, presenting its own battery of risks, including to Squadron’s release. But like Sandi’s forced removal, it’s unspeakable, so he takes the stage and pretends two of the most important things of the last 7 years of CIG’s life don’t exist and he hypes their tailored made streamer game that nobody expected or asked for. (He’s going to need it in 2020 because his hucksters for hire will if they’re gonna talk new backers into this psychological macrotransaction trap.)

Whatever is really going on behind the scenes at CIG, it seems like we’re seeing a weakened Chris. Controls are being asserted and risks are finally being felt. After years of chest pounding and crap talking, years of date hyping and target missing, a humbler Chris has emerged.

I wonder how the board meeting went, and what the Calders are thinking about their $46 million dollar experiment about now?

I won’t go overboard and say they’ll be out of business in 3 months or something like that, but I think it’s pretty obvious where things are.

• They still can’t make the game. So now they’re making an unrelated type of game that’s built into the engine more or less. Just to make something.

• The likelihood of new investor money is near zero. The Forbes article helped with that, as well as aforementioned evidence of Calder money tightening the thumbscrews.

• They are operating in the red. It doesn’t matter if they have $30 million left or whatever, and it doesn’t matter how many years that “buys them,” because they’re going to bail before they hit insolvency.

The only real question is how many millions, or tens of millions, the people in charge will accept as their consolation prize when they decide to cut their losses. The question all companies in this condition ask, or the question the shareholders ask, is “can we turn this around?” Otherwise it’s better to liquidate and walk away with $30 million, losing $16 million, then it is to ride it into the dirt and walk away with nothing.

If Chris were running the show he’d run it into the red. I don’t think he’s running it any more.

There are literally FPS games from a decade ago built by 5 guys in a basement that play better than this.

After a point it’s just hard for me to fathom how 500 people with a 300 million dollar budget can’t even get basic FPS combat working in an engine that was explicitly built for it.

Did he just throw a JPEG at someone?

Sean Tracy is a hero, and the new game mode will revive Star Citizen

the technical aspect of Star Citizen is lightyears ahead of what other games devs are doing.

Star Citizen: Crouching Bagman, Hidden Crobear

Before: legal threats and 8-hour diatribes in response to an Escapist article that lightly questions the project

Now: utter silence in response to a Forbes article that outs Sandi as a stalking strangler and makes the entire management team look like career criminals

Before: near-instantaneous response to anything posted in the thread, from renaming the Aegis Potato to us catching artistic plagiarism; every crime and misstep was quickly walked back and/or covered, sometimes aggressively

Now: a CitizenCon mosaic featuring Crobear is proudly posted to their own Twitter feed, and left there indefinitely in that state

Before: promises of an all-encompassing life in space with real physics and derelict vessels with life support and boarding and huge fleet battles and literally everything else every space fan ever wanted

Now: a poor man’s battle royale that doesn’t work, has no space game elements, and no promises of ever becoming anything more

Before: 10 for the Chairman, wavy hands, “yes,” “Maybe Rockstar can match us”

Now: Bagman

There’s no energy in this project any more. It’s over.

Checking in on the citcon thread on the largest gaming news site in my country, and the cultists are out in full force. They were all blown away by the fidelity and quality, and mesmerized by the panels. One of them called ”Tony ’THE GOD’ Z”, and said that his faith was now entirely restored after that panel.

I found a primordial state of the mosaic, already featuring Crobear.

It shows something about how it was made.

four jackets

What’s been sticking out to me lately is how… “bad” the human models look. They’ve got this really creepy possessed-Ken-doll look to them.

All planet and VFX code from the demo will be in the release, so it’s very close to completion, however finely tuning the visuals takes time and the tech has only recently been finished so VFX haven’t had time to tune severe wind in all scenarios (beyond snowy mountains we have deserts, ice fields, Savannah, trash, etc). But it’s certainly a priority to get as much of this in your hands as possible in 3.8 and 3.9.

There is no global weather simulation at the moment, the demo used a fixed ‘wind map’ which rotated around the planet, though even this simple setup is surprisingly effective. I’d imagine we’ll release a simple setup such as this before introducing a full sim.

The visor and canopy effects are only set up on specific ships and helmets thus far, so won’t make it for 3.8 (at least not on all helmets and ships), but hopefully soon after (just a question of art resources).

The biome accumulation system has only just started work, and frost on the players suit was the first use of it. We hope this system to roll out in 3.9, thought this hasn’t been confirmed yet.

Loved the Citcon shitshow, so boring and janky.

My favorite part was the NPC guard clipping through the door and the player desperately moving the camera away to hide the fact they still can’t get doors to work.

Around 53:40 mark

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