I'm not sure I follow your logic or understand it properly, but Frontier First Encounters and Frontier: Elite II had completely seamless planetary landings.
I should probably have been a bit more clear. When I said that I don't know of any game which is completely seamless with no on-rails sequences, I weren't just talking about planetary landings, but about all aspects of the game (hence the "completely" in there). The two games you mentioned (elite 2 and 3), for instance both required hyperdrives to travel between stars, and as such weren't seamless in this regard.
I should probably also note that when I said "of comparable scale", I wasn't just thinking size wise, but also production value wise. In other words a modern open world game of comparable scale, scope and quality.
I was just correcting you as you seemed to completely misread what ianw was asking.
If you read it, he's actually asking whether the whole "interactive cut scene for landing" thing was just a prototype, or the plan for how things will be (ie. not being able to "fly around the scenery"), and we 100% know that the plan for planetary landings is that they will always be these on-rail interactive cut scenes. In fact, Chris Roberts has re-iterated this multiple times recently to try and manage expectations, because of so many people on the Star Citizen forums were getting carried away.
Thats great and all, but I never said that they would do away with the on-rails landing sequence, so I don't really understand why you keep mentioning that (nor why you were inferring that my original answer was incorrect).
And honestly Ianw's post can be read either way (he did put the lines in separate paragraphs after all).
Thanks for your detailed & reasonable reply... however, I'm puzzled how you can strongly criticise DS's figure of $3 million, and then later conclude that the worst-case reasonable figure is $2.5 million. That's a difference of 17% (or 20%, depending on how you calculate it).
I shall have to disagree. If take YOUR worst-case figure of $2.5 million per month, and use that for the calculations I made in my earlier post that you criticised, it doesn't change things that much:
Assuming they have a monthly burn rate of $2.5 million, that equates to $30 million per year. Then assuming they maintain $0.9 mil pledges per month (optimistic IMHO), that's $11 million per year in pledges. So $30-$11 = $19 million of capital spent per year.
They've raised $87 million of total funds. I don't know how much they've already spent, but they've been going for nearly 3 years (since the Kickstarter). If SC took until the end of 2017 to be released (i.e. 2 more years), that would require $38 million of capital for those 2 years. Which means they'd need to have spent less than $87-$38 = $49 million in the last 3 years (including the expensive Squadron 42 filming), i.e. $49/3 = $16.3 million per year. That's not really plausible (when compared to the current rate of $30 million per year).
On the other hand, they must have averaged LESS than $87/3 = $29 million per year for the last 3 years, or they would have already spent their entire funds. Since $29 < $30 (million per year), it does not seem unreasonable that they might have already spent the majority of their $87 million of funds. How much longer can they go on for, given current pledge levels? I have no idea, but way less than 2 years. They are aiming for end of 2016 (i.e. 1 year), which might suggest that's about how much funding they have left to burn (i.e. $19 million in the bank).
EDIT: Corrected my messed-up calculations.
When I first did the calculations I got under $2 million and my comment on DS's figure was based on this. I subsequently realised that I had made the mistake of using european values for stuff like wages and rent. After correcting for this I got a number of $2.25 million (the $2.5 million number is rounded up from this, just for the hell of it), and DS's number is still 33% higher than that, so quite a large discrepancy. Either way the biggest issue is still his $0.5 million number for monthly pledges.
It's important to note that CIG does not have a burn rate of $2.5 million, they have expenses of $2.5 million. Their burn rate would then be their expenses minus their intake (pledges). So if they have expenses of $2.5 million per month and take in $2.7 million per month in pledges (current count for August), they would have a negative burn rate of $0.2 million per month, and of course a negative burn rate is the same as positive cash flow, so their capital would in fact be growing by $0.2 million per month.
And honestly I don't know how you can possibly say that maintaining $0.9 million is somehow optimistic, if anything it's extremely pessimistic. The only two months where they dipped this low was June and July, both of which stood out based on the fact that neither month had any major announcements nor ship sales (only thing was the genesis sale, which has been far and away the weakest sale ever, I guess people aren't too hot on playing a stewardess ingame
). August on the other hand is pretty much a return to form, having so far taken in about $2.7 million.
As far as how much they have spent to date goes, I would say that $16.3 million for the first two years are not just plausible, but in fact quite likely. Remember that CIG was much much smaller in the past, as they have been continuously building up the studio, and it wasn't until recently that they hit the 300 employees number (in fact they were at just
180 at the start of this year). The same goes for your last paragraph, just because they might be have yearly expenses equalling $30 million today, does not mean that they would have had equivalent expenses in the past, when they were a much smaller company.
All in all I don't really find your numbers realistic, but at the end of the day we're all guessing, so who knows.
I was actually looking at a performance review in Tom's Hardware recently. Where they were comparing several recent generations of Graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD and I was surprised to see that the HD6950 was still rated in top 25% performance wise. It is certainly not on the Bleeding Edge but it performs quite well. I get 75fps all day long at 1920x1080. That is more than good enough for my use. I am not interested bragging rights. When the HD6950 is no longer fast enough I will buy something faster. For now though, I have no reason to change.
You should take the THG chart with a grain of salt. Basically they pad out the chart with a bunch of ancient cards (like the Riva TNT and Rage 128, both of which are over 15 years old), and as a result newer cards look better than they arguably are.
A better idea would probably be to look at the chart and find a modern card in the same bracket as the 6950, and then look up a current review to see how your card stacks up. For instance THG lists the 750 Ti in the same bracket as the 6950. You can then look at a current review like
this and see how it stacks up (not particularly well, to be honest. The 750 Ti is the second slowest card in their
1080p chart)
