The Star Citizen Thread v5

[lysan]

Here, take a look at yourself: https://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen/v/84518331
Skip to 1hr 28min mark.

There was a lot of tickling sounds....I guess

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I remember vividly that PG was a stretch goal in the sens of "we'll spend some time looking into this, but no promises" for SC. Back then, the cultists proclaimed that handcrafted is better than PG in every way, and that PG could not possibly bring anything worthwhile to the game.

Ya hear me, cultists? I'm saying that CIG did the right thing in bringing PG into the fold.

Looking at the transitions in the 3.0 demo makes it obvious that it was staged as hell. They did what they could to make it look like actual gameplay, but for the most part it's only bits and pieces held together by cutscenes. I stand by my earlier statements: I'll believe 3.0 when I see it, and I am not going to get overly excited again like back when they showed Star Marine.

They should bring that back. Maybe they could hire someone who's good at that stuff? Like, I dunno, some small studio that already exists and that has a lot of experience with CE?

That december release date? No way it's gonna have trading, piracy and all that stuff in it. Well maybe in embryonic form with randomized pricings and a prototype UI, but no full fledged implementation. Kinda like the system map they showed in 3.0, which was just a few circles and a few spheres, and had the crowd cheer for some weird reason.

http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20160819_221357.jpg

Seriously, that has these guys cheering?

LOL that HUD is a 100% ripoff of ED LMAO, well that is just a feather in David and teams hat I guess.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Ouch. That's a lot of dev hours put into a propaganda show it seems.

And the comments in that video pretty much show the video creator to be wrong.

 

[Komemiute]

Oh look!!



You will of course be able to provide citations for your next responses won't you because so far, you've both been wrong on your assertions.

It's pretty obvious you have never launched Falcon 4.0 once in your life.
Also you never found out about BMS. Or Red Viper. Or Open Falcon.

Basically you have no idea what you're saying.

Falcon 4.0 was made in four years and after release was upkept by costumers. For over 16 years. Modded, improved and brought to todays wonderful state.
Plus the rights finally bought by someone and being rightfully sold on GOG.COM.

You're welcome.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Did I believe that the game would come out in 2 years as promised in 2012? No. In fact even though I was very interested in the game and followed it daily I didn't back until 2015. Chris is no doubt a smart guy and a respected game developer, but there was 0% chance the game would be complete in 2 years.

I'm suspecting he never thought in his wildest dreams he'd get so much money, either. It's one thing to say, OK we'll do this in 3 years if we get 6 million and we'd be lucky to get that.

Suddenly he was 10 mill, 20 mill, 50 mill, 100 ill.....

If anybody here thinks the game is going to stay at the imagined point at the beginning is seriously hating on SC. How many people here would love to make a game? What game would you make with 6 million? Then after you start it you get 120 million? My game would change dramatically after such an influx of money and anyone saying otherwsie lacks imagination.

 

[Asylum]

Did I believe that the game would come out in 2 years as promised in 2012? No. In fact even though I was very interested in the game and followed it daily I didn't back until 2015. Chris is no doubt a smart guy and a respected game developer, but there was 0% chance the game would be complete in 2 years.

1) Chris was coming back from an extremely long hiatus in game development, and had little to no knowledge of the ins and outs of the CryEngine or modern game engines in general. He coded much of the pitch demo himself, with help from Crytek, but if you actually watch the video the demo is some basic scripting in the CryEngine with no significant changes to any sort of physics or gameplay mechanics that are not already available in the CryEngine.

2) CIG was a team of like 14 people, half of which weren't game developers (Ben, Sandi, Eric, etc.). It would have taken more than a year (and it did) to grow the company to a decent size and hire the people to make the game, and it's not an easy task to add people to a development team, especially in the software engineering field. The engineers need to get acquainted with code, get used to the development pipeline, etc. It's a huge logistical task to manage software development. If I can put it as an analogy, it's like dozens of people trying to paint the same picture. The more people you have, the more repo managers you need, and the merge requests just get piled up and you start having merge issues and it's all a giant mess.

3) Call of Duty, even with established studios, take 3 years to make. This should give you a perspective on how long game development really takes. The Division took 7 years to build, if you include the time they spent on making their Snowdrop engine, similarly to how CIG is building their engine right now.

To put it frankly, I had never worked in game development and I knew making the game even with the original pitch would have been impossible to make in 2 years. While Chris might have learned a lot about modern game development the past 2-3 years leading the project at CIG, his release dates were extremely optimistic. Use my Call of Duty example as a yard stick, compare the engine features and gameplay mechanics of Star Citizen and COD and make your own assumptions about the release date. I'm not going to say it's not CIG's own fault for putting out false expectations, but if you've followed the game for a decent amount of time you should know better than to keep believing in their release date goals. The release dates will stabilize as major engine changes are implemented, as R&D work is extremely hard to gauge the deadlines of.

So with that said, let's be precise. It was my impression that henry1491 was referring to people getting frustrated after 5-ish years of waiting, when it's been less than 4 years since KS. You can't really wait for something you don't know about.

You can't your right and I shared your point of SC not dropping in the timeframe CR gave even at that scope.

The fact is he was so off, they have yet to deliver even the fundamental elements in a convincing, organic and remotely fun way I think is the burn people feel.

Honestly yes it takes awhile to develope a game, especially one as complex as CR was pitching in 2012.

They also took pledge amounts based on a fictional timeline and they need to absorb some of that responsibility instead of constantly deflecting it. No money exchanged and frontline given, less backers would lash out. Some invested based on the timeline, it's CR who said it and he's the chairman.

It's disingenuous and that as wel bothers me. SM perfect example of pR trumping "respect for backers".

My only issue with what you initially said was studio building. That should have been factored in from the start...it wasn't even with the increased scope...it wasn't...bad management or terrible expectation setting..either way it's on CIG.

It was a reality yes but it was poorly communicated.

All in all you make some good points so just want to make sure I reiterate that. No disrespect intended.

 

[Jex =TE=]

It's pretty obvious you have never launched Falcon 4.0 once in your life.
Also you never found out about BMS. Or Red Viper. Or Open Falcon.

Basically you have no idea what you're saying.

Falcon 4.0 was made in four years and after release was upkept by costumers. For over 16 years. Modded, improved and brought to todays wonderful state.
Plus the rights finally bought by someone and being rightfully sold on GOG.COM.

You're welcome.

See my reply above I've played falcon 4, AF and BMS. If you have a source that says Facon 4 was developed from scratch and wasn't patched after release then go ahead and provide it - if you can't then your blowing hot air.

Good for GOG getting the rights though! that's great news

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Does anyone here criticising SC own the game?

 

[Esvandiary]

Does anyone here criticising SC own the game?

This question has been asked numerous times, and the conclusion each time was that the majority did own the game. That may slowly be changing as people request refunds, but I suspect it's still the majority of posters here who do (myself included).

 

[Asylum]

I'm suspecting he never thought in his wildest dreams he'd get so much money, either. It's one thing to say, OK we'll do this in 3 years if we get 6 million and we'd be lucky to get that.

Suddenly he was 10 mill, 20 mill, 50 mill, 100 ill.....

If anybody here thinks the game is going to stay at the imagined point at the beginning is seriously hating on SC. How many people here would love to make a game? What game would you make with 6 million? Then after you start it you get 120 million? My game would change dramatically after such an influx of money and anyone saying otherwsie lacks imagination.

6 million was to kick in investor money, the game was never going to be made with only 6 million.

Never.

Proof to investors there is a market "investors".

If you're going to use numbers to prove a point I suggest understanding those numbers to the best of your ability.

No offence.

 

[Pharaelga]

I recently downloaded the Stars Citizen Alpha and spent hours just EVAing out of my ship and repairing/turning on Comm Arrays. Then I randomly saved some guy who's ship blew up next to the station. This seemingly very simple game play mechanic gave me everything I felt I had been missing in Elite.... a person could physically board my vessel and wasn't just some text or picture...

The level of detail in this game already is mind boggling.... I haven't had this much fun with an unfinished product or space game in general since the X series.

While Elite is a cool space sim that I absolutely loved in the Oculus I just never felt attached to it.... this is where Elite has fallen short.

When Elite ever finally has space legs there will be no real reason to get up because all functions trade/mining can be done from the seat. Having it be some contrived expansion that the core of the game can do without is probably Elites greatest mistake...

 

[Toumal]

[h=1]Star Citizen: Bugsmashers - Episode 31[/h]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rviZvBdJOUs

So...

if (.... m_lastServerTick > state.lastServerTick)

Right. Two things about this:

1) Don't write your own middleware. It's a common mistake though because at my current job there's also teams that do this, and they are going to pay for this mistake the same way I did when I wrote my own messaging middleware about 15 years ago.

2) There's a bunch of properties you can select on most messaging middlewares to tell it how you want your messages to be transported: Best effort / guaranteed delivery, at least once / at most once / exactly once, and you can opt to have it arrive unordered or "in sequence".

So if you receive a state that's older than what you have, you're obviously making a mistake that's not to be fixed inside your actual application code with an if-statement like that. And if your middleware doesn't support in-sequence messaging but your application relies on it, you have a problem with your middleware.


Also...

Important Callouts: In order to help us address the current performance issues, we are introducing several intentional crashes and errors into the game to generate log data. We understand that this will cause some frustrations and appreciate your patience.

That is not how profiling works. You simply cannot tell me you need to crash an application to get profiling logs. This is an excuse.

 

[Asylum]

See my reply above I've played falcon 4, AF and BMS. If you have a source that says Facon 4 was developed from scratch and wasn't patched after release then go ahead and provide it - if you can't then your blowing hot air.

Good for GOG getting the rights though! that's great news

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Does anyone here criticising SC own the game?

I own it, admittedly from $1143 (2012-end of 2014...2015 the sell off began.)down to a $45 pledge.

 

[Tippis]

So no sources then

You provided the source. You did read your source, right? Or are you going to say that your source should not be trusted?

And yes, Falcon AT and 3.0 were complex simulations. You'll remember that the question was how long it took to develop a complex flight sim, and those qualify. Falcon 4.0 was also complex — even more so — and it's still in the same ballpark of 3–4 years. Oh, and if you want to go for the “…but existing code” gambit, then surely you will agree that Star Citizen has been in development for at least 17 years by now.

Was Falcon 4 released complete?

Yes. Buggy, but complete. It has since been expanded but that does not alter the release state. It was developed in 4 years.

 

[Backer42]

I'm suspecting he never thought in his wildest dreams he'd get so much money, either.
It's one thing to say, OK we'll do this in 3 years if we get 6 million and we'd be lucky to get that.

Chris Roberts planned for 30+ millions from the start, just with investor money and a few millions from backers. He never planned to make a movie with just 2+4 millions.

Of course, no large venture capitalist fell for his scheme, because real investors are called "smart money" for a reason. So few weeks after the Kickstarter the minions set up the DLC pre-order store and the complementing "grey market" to get the big money rolling from elsewhere (aka "dumb money"). It worked, but it was not accidental!

 

[Zetta]

I'm suspecting he never thought in his wildest dreams he'd get so much money, either. It's one thing to say, OK we'll do this in 3 years if we get 6 million and we'd be lucky to get that.

Suddenly he was 10 mill, 20 mill, 50 mill, 100 ill.....

If anybody here thinks the game is going to stay at the imagined point at the beginning is seriously hating on SC. How many people here would love to make a game? What game would you make with 6 million? Then after you start it you get 120 million? My game would change dramatically after such an influx of money and anyone saying otherwsie lacks imagination.

Sorry but it did not just suddenly become 10 mill, 20 mill, 50 mill, 100 mill....

It has taken 4 years of extensive marketing and usage of all the tricks in the book to pull in that money.

 

[kilvenny]

I recently downloaded the Stars Citizen Alpha and spent hours just EVAing out of my ship and repairing/turning on Comm Arrays. Then I randomly saved some guy who's ship blew up next to the station. This seemingly very simple game play mechanic gave me everything I felt I had been missing in Elite.... a person could physically board my vessel and wasn't just some text or picture...

The level of detail in this game already is mind boggling.... I haven't had this much fun with an unfinished product or space game in general since the X series.

While Elite is a cool space sim that I absolutely loved in the Oculus I just never felt attached to it.... this is where Elite has fallen short.

When Elite ever finally has space legs there will be no real reason to get up because all functions trade/mining can be done from the seat. Having it be some contrived expansion that the core of the game can do without is probably Elites greatest mistake...

Welcome to the forums! It would be somewhat strange when ED provides space legs that there would be no reason to get out of the commanders seat. It's a good point you make though that many activities should be capable of being done from my seat. eg I have no interest in manually loading containers of 200T of slaves into an Annie

 

[Pharaelga]

Welcome to the forums! It would be somewhat strange when ED provides space legs that there would be no reason to get out of the commanders seat. It's a good point you make though that many activities should be capable of being done from my seat. eg I have no interest in manually loading containers of 200T of slaves into an Annie

Cargo interaction would make the transport of slaves far more visceral. One may even have an in game moral dilemma. This type of interaction shouldn't be downplayed because it could really flesh out something a little more mundane like trading.

Elite seems to be dropping the ball with the direction they are going. Playing an unfinished buggy alpha gave me game play elements with crew interaction that can not be replicated in Elite....

 

[MarktJones]

Cargo interaction would make the transport of slaves far more visceral. One may even have an in game moral dilemma. This type of interaction shouldn't be downplayed because it could really flesh out something a little more mundane like trading.

Elite seems to be dropping the ball with the direction they are going. Playing an unfinished buggy alpha gave me game play elements with crew interaction that can not be replicated in Elite....

I'm glad you registered today to tell us this.

 

[Pharaelga]

Welcome to the forums! It would be somewhat strange when ED provides space legs that there would be no reason to get out of the commanders seat. It's a good point you make though that many activities should be capable of being done from my seat. eg I have no interest in manually loading containers of 200T of slaves into an Annie

I'm glad you registered today to tell us this.

Well I was impressed by the 736 pages on this forum on the topic of Star Citizen so I tried it.

All negative press aside I was rather impressed by the buggy alpha and would love it if Elite could take pages from that playbook in regards to crew interaction.

 

[frostypaw]

Cargo interaction would make the transport of slaves far more visceral. One may even have an in game moral dilemma. This type of interaction shouldn't be downplayed because it could really flesh out something a little more mundane like trading.

Elite seems to be dropping the ball with the direction they are going. Playing an unfinished buggy alpha gave me game play elements with crew interaction that can not be replicated in Elite....

Really?

So how's this work - people fly along listening to their slave cargo groaning and moaning away then one pipes up so you wander back? then we gotta plan, design, animate some bunch of slaves and create storylines for them all or does just one pipe up and has some sob story etc etc...... remarkably quickly we're stuck in some on-rails movie of flashbacks and story to tug at the heartstrings then you decide and blah and off.

Then next slave transport what - the same happens? i think maybe you just turn off the sound from the slave transport pod. why would you have comms through to them anyway? you're getting all excited about the potential for maybe one mission - it makes as much sense as the excitement at the double cross before the enemy fighters drop into camera from where they were hovering silently and invisibly for movie purposes and excuses.

 

[Vasious]

I have a question about the planet landings in SC.

If I remember correctly, they were only proposed as cutscene landings on pre made areas on otherwise inaccessible planets, which was cool in the design philosophy of the original pitch.

However, then David Braben up and promised full scale planets which are fully accessible, that you could roam about even if there's nothing on them.

It was only after FD actually got very close to doing that and they rightfully bragged about it with a few teaser tech videos that PG planet landings became a promise for SC.

Am I wrong about this? Or was it a promise from before that.

I'm absolutely certain FD promised the free form planet landings first and CR came later cause he couldn't stand being one upped but I'm not sure about the exact gap between the promises.

IIRC it was Auto Pilot to Landing zones and Land anywhere after release on non settled worlds for exploration

There was a divide on the Fan base (what is the right word? Player base/Backer base?) about if Auto Pilot Landing was a good thing.
Pros it allow you to leave the Pilots seat
Con it was on rails

We might still see the Auto pilot to land on the Ecumenopoleis due to there being no where but the landing zones to land, and Air Traffic control would likely restrict fly paths.

What we have seen with the Nyx Landing zone is the "Land anywhere" for non settled planets, due to PG tech applied to planets with open, unbuilt up terrain