Yes. It means that as long there's money pouring in, there's no reigning in the scope and no target will be met because everything has to be built in parallel, according to the CIG way of doing things.
The Star Citizen Thread v5
- Thread starter Brett C
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Yes. It means that as long there's money pouring in, there's no reigning in the scope and no target will be met because everything has to be built in parallel, according to the CIG way of doing things.
Star Citizen does not have an unlimited budget. It may seem like it, but if you look at the product life cycle Star Citizen is clearly in the plateau stage if not entering the decline stage. The academic in me finds it fascinating as this is going to be a case study taught in every MBA program worth a damn 10 years from now. I think it would make a hell of a thesis or dissertation. As of this month I've spent two decades in this business minus a couple years I tried to get out and went to law school only to get sucked back in. I've gone from a networking/server admin grunt to learning mainframes & databases to programming to project design & management to executive management. I've worked on good projects and bad ones at multiple levels. The warning bells for me began in 2014 when I first learned of what happened with Freelancer and saw many of the same problems happening again. And I've watched that those problems seemingly continue over the past two years to the present.
When I owned a software company there was a sign in my office that I stole from my Father's office after he retired from McDonnell Douglas. It read: "There comes a time in every project when you have to shoot the engineer and get on with production." You can replace engineer with programmer or artist, but the point remains the same: at some point you have to release something. Because if you give an engineer an unlimited amount of time and budget they'll never finish. Because there is always something that can be done "better" or "a different way". This may be great for the home work bench tinkerer, but you do not have that luxury in the business world. What happens when your competitor releases a bronze plated product first and manages to capture the market? Now what happens when your competitor has released a product, but has had feedback to improve upon it and ends of delivering a product very close to what your original proposed, but your engineers still think they should be using 18k Gold instead of 24k gold and go back to the drawing board?
One of the forecasts that CIG made back in 2012 was their estimated market for this game was around 1.5M people, maybe maxing out at 2M world wide. Given the sales of Elite: Dangerous I'd say that estimation of market size still holds to be fairly accurate. If that is the case they've already gotten pledges from a majority of their potential market. At some point those who have already backed will also reach their limit on what they are willing to spend. Looking at general funding trends, although without a complete understanding of how their on sight metrics work, the pace at which revenue is coming in is falling. Their cash outflow is roughly $3M/month. So subtract how much they raise in any given month and the difference is how much cash they've bled. The only thing that keeps things afloat is the Q4 Anniversary & Holiday sales that has typically brought in around $15M. One of these days that number is not going to be reached.
When? My bet is when the next market correction hits and we're due for one in the next 18 - 24 months. That's just historical cycles and my guess is when that happens the funding for Star Citizen will dry up as well. Disposable income goes away when people lose jobs or see their nest egg loose half its value.
Agree completely.
Welcome to the club
OK, I'm gonna look stupid now, but... what ?
Aaaah... I have a question.
Aside from the in lore explanation where the ships don't use their main thrusters during local flight (and in combat) therefore having the same amount of thrust in every direction, is there a backend reason for the flight mechanics of SC that anyone knows of?
Or is it just because they use the standard first person controller (in engine entity containing the scripts governing player movement, not the control device) already present in CryEngine. As far as I know, the player controller in CE is already optimised for zero G control (even the first Crysis had it) and is capable of running 6 DoF aircraft (again present in Crysis games), so it would make sense as a shortcut to use it until an actual universal ship controller is written.
Is it this?
Aside from the in lore explanation where the ships don't use their main thrusters during local flight (and in combat) therefore having the same amount of thrust in every direction, is there a backend reason for the flight mechanics of SC that anyone knows of?
Or is it just because they use the standard first person controller (in engine entity containing the scripts governing player movement, not the control device) already present in CryEngine. As far as I know, the player controller in CE is already optimised for zero G control (even the first Crysis had it) and is capable of running 6 DoF aircraft (again present in Crysis games), so it would make sense as a shortcut to use it until an actual universal ship controller is written.
Is it this?
That can't be right! I thought the unemployed were SC's most vocal fans
My anecdotal experience has been those who can afford Star Citizen the least are the ones that have spent the most money on the game. I set a personal limit 3 years ago +/- $50 and have stuck to that. Thought I might like to spend more if things went well and put $50 - $100 a month or more away in a savings account. Decided things had gotten to the point this year it was time empty that piggy bank and buy an M1A and join a flying club and take advantage of the cheapest Avgas I've seen in more than a decade.
Question the great Chris Robers and the development of SC and you are a hater...easy isnt it? Much easier to quench critiques and people that want accountablitly from SC. Its always easier to just nod everything the man says off and not being mature and able to have a discussion about the problems in SC. Its always how good everything will be, CR cant do wrong, i have "faith". If i want to have faith in something i go to a church thats the only place "faith" has a place.
What i want from SC is condifence that the money i put into end up in something. So far in the past 4 years, outside the marketing loop and with my small 40€ package from kickstarter, NOTHING CR delivered so far gave me any confidence towards SC. But i am clearly a hater that follows a agenda to hate on the great Chris and his Church of Citizens.
At this point i cant comprehend how people get suckered into his scheme, pulling for 4 years so far. The insane amount of pre-order money put into game assets while after 4 years it still fells like a overambitous crisis mod.
I remember the NMS crowed:"It will be the best game EVER! It will WRECK ED! Sean is a genius and unfailable! Look what features the game will have noone did it so far and this small team has achived more then a big game developer!"
People buy even more into that promise because they ahve faith..or because they already pumped so much money into and dont want to face reality.
SC has gone for me from interesting->no interest->to a complete joke.
The worst part is you, coming into this thread calling everybody hater and inmature...really?You are a prime example of a missionary that points at heretics to be burned.
Damn, those last ten pages were a waste of electricity.
Nah, early versions of AC had some complexity in the flight model, though I think the generally low ship masses and massively overpowered thrusters weren't helping with the 'floaty' physics.
My personal opinion is that developers have noticed that the whole thruster modelling business doesn't mesh with how the flight model was supposed to be, and something was simplified. I remember reading the old post, where some guy (Pritchett or whatever his name was?) wanted to differentiate between maneuvering thrusters (pitch, yaw, roll) and translational thrusters (strafing), but I'm not sure what happened to it. All I know is that neither that unsymmetrical Vandal fighter nor Mustang should be able to fly in a straight line, and until anyone explains it to me in a satisfactory manner, I can't call the flight model realistic in any way.
Nah, early versions of AC had some complexity in the flight model, though I think the generally low ship masses and massively overpowered thrusters weren't helping with the 'floaty' physics.
My personal opinion is that developers have noticed that the whole thruster modelling business doesn't mesh with how the flight model was supposed to be, and something was simplified. I remember reading the old post, where some guy (Pritchett or whatever his name was?) wanted to differentiate between maneuvering thrusters (pitch, yaw, roll) and translational thrusters (strafing), but I'm not sure what happened to it. All I know is that neither that unsymmetrical Vandal fighter nor Mustang should be able to fly in a straight line, and until anyone explains it to me in a satisfactory manner, I can't call the flight model realistic in any way.
Dint know tanks could fly
Of course they can! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_A-40
Back on topic, another year another fancy tech-demo another delay. SQ42 in 2017-2018 will make it a mere 3 years late and counting. Looks like ME4 and COD IW have a clear run before SQ42 and I can't see the storytelling being better in SQ42 than ME4. I imagine the gun play in COD IW will blow the socks off anything CIG can offer from what I have seen thus far, even the spaceflight in that FPS looks more fun than point and click massless movement that CIG offers up. Really hard to see what space in the market is left for Star Citizen if there is ever is an end product at all.
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Do you know what an Alpha means? No seriously do you have any idea how that term is even arrived at these days in an executive board room? Even been present when that sausage is being made? No? Well let me enlighten you:
Sales Guy: "We have a big <<Tradeshow>> or <<Big Potential Client>> to demo. I need to show them a Beta of our latest product in three weeks".
Lead Developer: "Beta? We're not even to an Alpha...<<proceeds to ramble of lots of tech jargon about all the reasons why it's not Beta>>".
Legal: "Developer is right. Going in and calling that a 'Beta' could cause unreasonable customer expectations and might cause contract problems down the road".
CEO: "Okay, so could we have at least an Alpha ready to demo?"
Sales Guy: "No that won't do. If I tell them it's an Alpha, they'll not be interested and will just ignore the product until next year. There is no way I can whet the apatite of potential customers with an Alpha. "
CEO: "Hmm, Sales Guy is right. Well what if we have our current product and then we bring a 'Preview Version' to the trade show. Maybe show one or two of the new features that is working?"
Lead Developer: *Shrugs* "Yeah, sure, that doesn't mean anything and we have new feature x and y works much better now than it did in 1.0. We can work up a build that will do that, but it might not do much else."
Sales Guy: "I can make that work. And if we don't use any of those Greek Letters customer has no expectations. If they like what they see we can start the sales process, maybe even get them involved earlier<<yada, yada, typical sales >>".
And we were in a business that was technical sales mostly to other technically minded people. When you start dealing with small business owners and consumers they care about greek letters even less. Spent part of 2014 and 2015 turning a start up around long enough to get it sold who was losing their customer base, which means disaster when you have a SAAS business model. Why were the losing customers? Because their product had features that didn't work well or were not being improved that their customers needed. Instead they were too busy adding features the management cared about, but not their customers. And when their customers called them on it Management's excuse was: "It's a Beta. Don't they know what that means." I had to be the one to tell them in front of their investors that their customers didn't give a damn about greek letters. They were small business owners paying a lot of money each month for a product that wasn't delivering value to them. With terms like "early access" in the gaming industry it's gotten even worse in that regard. Today if things are locked behind a paywall people have a certain level of expectation to be met. What you believe greek letters in software development to mean is irrelevant.
This weekend there is an Open Beta for Battlefield 1 going on. They didn't charge money to access that and between DDOS problems, glitches, etc. I can forgive that they can use any greek letters they want as I haven't pre-ordered and didn't pay a dime if I wanted to play. We're also talking about a product with a definitive release date with BF1.
CIG does the same thing when deciding the magic patch that will fix things will be 2.4....errr um, 2.5....no 2.7.....no wait we'll fix it all with "3.0". Want access to that? Buy a game package! Want earlier access? Buy a subscription. Well that's fine all well and good and all...but when you start charging for that access is when you'd better be ready to receive legitimate criticism because you have a product on the market like it or not. You may not want to call it that, but everyone else will.
SkUnimatrix, don't bother, no amount of reasoning will change their opinion.
It's funny reading the back-and-forth here, with the staunch incumbents beating back wave after wave of marauding invaders. I don't really care to get involved in that, but thought I might tackle one of the arguments that's often employed as a defence of CIG and SC, and elaborate on exactly why I don't believe my pledge is or has been well-managed. That argument is the one about only game devs being able to understand game development. This is a point that I vehemently disagree with.
I am a software engineer, and have been since graduating from university. As I understand it, a "game" is a piece of "software" and as such is "engineered" in much the same way as any other piece of software. Having said that, a game engine and its accompanying game logic and art / audio assets are generally toward the top end of complexity. Game engines are multithreaded (and anyone who's written any kind of software will understand the nature of that problem) mammoth amalgamations of code that are designed to take creative and logical input from game designers and programmers and deliver it to a computer's output devices in such a way as to be both pleasant to the eye and ear, and to match the intentions of the designers with a minimum of fuss. Add in asynchronous and unpredictable external inputs (networking being the big one) and you have a problem that is very hard to solve. For what they do, and the hours that they're expected to work, game engine programmers are both underpaid and undervalued.
I've worked on a wide range of software products, some successful and some not so much. Invariably the ones that were most successful were the ones where requirements were well-managed, where scope creep was contained and where time and budget were key drivers for delivery. When you design a piece of software, you typically have a high-level set of requirements. In SC's case, those requirements were fairly well laid out in the Kickstarter and were the basis of the initial round of funding. Clearly game development is relatively fluid, but the product as sold was intended to be a particular thing. In a fairly rigid software development, these high-level requirements would typically be broken down into more achievable -- and importantly, measurable -- lower-level requirements. These in turn would then be agreed upon by all stakeholders (typically in game development, the publisher(s)), estimated for time and budget and funding laid out. If you don't already have a team, this is when the HR machine rolls out.
Once you've got your key designers on-board and bought into your vision and the requirements for the game, you'll outline your high-level design. You'll probably do some storyboarding and get some UX people involved. But with the best will in the world, fun is subjective so you'll keep an open mind and be ready to be flexible with your vision. You'll identify the biggest risks to achieving your goals, and you'll put plans in place to mitigate them. You'll decide whether you're going to base your software on existing products or whether you're going to roll-your-own. From the Star Citizen point-of-view, all this means that CIG should have identified that networking would be one of the most critical components, and should have been one of the first things to have been nailed down (as unfun as that is for the backers). Knowing that 'fidelity' is a key requirement, and knowing that this is essentially a multiplayer game, early work should have been targeted at identifying the key state information that would need to persisted across connected clients, and identifying a budget for both that and extras. I, like many others, was wowed by CIG's demonstration of procedural damage states but concerned about the implications of persisting those states across potentially hundreds of clients in real-time. I'm not convinced that when CIG were designing that feature, networking was taken into account at all. It was more driven by a technical desire to deliver more than any other game has delivered, regardless of how feasible that was. If they'd look at their networking budget they might have scrapped the idea before going full out implementing it. Even if the networking budget was good, how about processing and graphical budgets? If all those are good, does the gameplay justify such a complex mechanic? [Given your design for the flight model, will you ever actually see bits of spaceship fly off and if you do will you notice that they were broken off realistically in the heat of battle? Therefore is it worth the expense?]
I digress. One of the important things about a game is that it's fun to play. It's a fundamental requirement. If you fail to meet this requirement, your product will fail. The great thing about the games industry is that it's full of tropes, so it's fairly straightforward to pick and choose tropes that are considered fun. It's not *innovative* but it's easy. We know that FPS gameplay with cover and stealth dynamics are generally fun. We know that flying a spaceship is generally fun. We know that noodling around large MMO environments can be fun. So a game that incorporates all those things should, strictly speaking, be fun. But there's a lot of nuance to taking something that *should* be fund and actually delivering on it. Flying a spaceship could mean anything from point-and-shoot to full management of systems. How an FPS (particularly a single-player) one is fun depends on your interaction with the environment, and the balance between challenge and obstacle to progress. Noodling around in a huge MMO environment requires more than just being able to dance (emote). That doesn't even touch on *innovation*. CR has always been about innovating and pushing what's possible. FPS in zero-g is *not* a common trope so there's little in the way of evidence to show what is and what isn't fun. Flying spaceships is somewhat common, but being able to get up and walk around them while in flight, and the activities therein are *not*. Elite innovated somewhat with its space travel so CIG have something of a yardstick of fun, but in terms of the FPS element of it, there's really nothing.
So how do you go about determining what does and what doesn't work? Well, rather than dreaming up fantastical notions like carting cargo around by hand one piece at a time or being a space waiter, you *prototype*. This is no different from any software development where requirements are fluid. You skip the onerous audio and artistic work, you say to hell with the fidelity and you throw something together that quickly demonstrates the idea and you focus group the heck out of it. The biggest asset that CIG have is its backers, so getting gameplay out to them as early as possible should have been the goal. But that's really where things started to go wrong for me. CIG (and CR in particular) are so driven by fidelity and by perception that I suspect they didn't feel they could throw prototypes out there like that. Everything released to the backers had to be polished. We can see that they've changed tack on that of late, with the illuminati (or whatever they're called) being effective surrogates for gameplay testers. But that's still too little, too late.
Because of this blinkered approach to development, the game has iterated slowly -- glacially even -- to where it is now. It's at a point where what's been implemented is sort of fun to play for a bit, but that is fundamentally missing most of its gameplay. Gameplay that's slowly being added, polished, changed, polished again, etc. when it's the gameplay that should have been nailed down at the front-end of the project and fripperies like ship variants and clothing should have been implemented toward the back end. Beyond a certain point, budget (and therefore scope) should have been fixed. After even a year in development, the requirements for this game should have been nailed down, but even now they're fluid. Everything I see about this project speaks to a hugely creative mind who wants their game to be the biggest and best out there, but who should *not* be in control of budget or delivery. Chris Roberts should ideally be lead designer of this game with a management team who have experience in delivering games on-time and on-budget. I'm happy that the whales continue to fund the game; it increases the chance that I'll eventually see a completed game for my piddly contribution. But I don't think anyone can look at this project in hindsight and say "job well done".
But I'm not a game developer, so what do I know?
I am a software engineer, and have been since graduating from university. As I understand it, a "game" is a piece of "software" and as such is "engineered" in much the same way as any other piece of software. Having said that, a game engine and its accompanying game logic and art / audio assets are generally toward the top end of complexity. Game engines are multithreaded (and anyone who's written any kind of software will understand the nature of that problem) mammoth amalgamations of code that are designed to take creative and logical input from game designers and programmers and deliver it to a computer's output devices in such a way as to be both pleasant to the eye and ear, and to match the intentions of the designers with a minimum of fuss. Add in asynchronous and unpredictable external inputs (networking being the big one) and you have a problem that is very hard to solve. For what they do, and the hours that they're expected to work, game engine programmers are both underpaid and undervalued.
I've worked on a wide range of software products, some successful and some not so much. Invariably the ones that were most successful were the ones where requirements were well-managed, where scope creep was contained and where time and budget were key drivers for delivery. When you design a piece of software, you typically have a high-level set of requirements. In SC's case, those requirements were fairly well laid out in the Kickstarter and were the basis of the initial round of funding. Clearly game development is relatively fluid, but the product as sold was intended to be a particular thing. In a fairly rigid software development, these high-level requirements would typically be broken down into more achievable -- and importantly, measurable -- lower-level requirements. These in turn would then be agreed upon by all stakeholders (typically in game development, the publisher(s)), estimated for time and budget and funding laid out. If you don't already have a team, this is when the HR machine rolls out.
Once you've got your key designers on-board and bought into your vision and the requirements for the game, you'll outline your high-level design. You'll probably do some storyboarding and get some UX people involved. But with the best will in the world, fun is subjective so you'll keep an open mind and be ready to be flexible with your vision. You'll identify the biggest risks to achieving your goals, and you'll put plans in place to mitigate them. You'll decide whether you're going to base your software on existing products or whether you're going to roll-your-own. From the Star Citizen point-of-view, all this means that CIG should have identified that networking would be one of the most critical components, and should have been one of the first things to have been nailed down (as unfun as that is for the backers). Knowing that 'fidelity' is a key requirement, and knowing that this is essentially a multiplayer game, early work should have been targeted at identifying the key state information that would need to persisted across connected clients, and identifying a budget for both that and extras. I, like many others, was wowed by CIG's demonstration of procedural damage states but concerned about the implications of persisting those states across potentially hundreds of clients in real-time. I'm not convinced that when CIG were designing that feature, networking was taken into account at all. It was more driven by a technical desire to deliver more than any other game has delivered, regardless of how feasible that was. If they'd look at their networking budget they might have scrapped the idea before going full out implementing it. Even if the networking budget was good, how about processing and graphical budgets? If all those are good, does the gameplay justify such a complex mechanic? [Given your design for the flight model, will you ever actually see bits of spaceship fly off and if you do will you notice that they were broken off realistically in the heat of battle? Therefore is it worth the expense?]
I digress. One of the important things about a game is that it's fun to play. It's a fundamental requirement. If you fail to meet this requirement, your product will fail. The great thing about the games industry is that it's full of tropes, so it's fairly straightforward to pick and choose tropes that are considered fun. It's not *innovative* but it's easy. We know that FPS gameplay with cover and stealth dynamics are generally fun. We know that flying a spaceship is generally fun. We know that noodling around large MMO environments can be fun. So a game that incorporates all those things should, strictly speaking, be fun. But there's a lot of nuance to taking something that *should* be fund and actually delivering on it. Flying a spaceship could mean anything from point-and-shoot to full management of systems. How an FPS (particularly a single-player) one is fun depends on your interaction with the environment, and the balance between challenge and obstacle to progress. Noodling around in a huge MMO environment requires more than just being able to dance (emote). That doesn't even touch on *innovation*. CR has always been about innovating and pushing what's possible. FPS in zero-g is *not* a common trope so there's little in the way of evidence to show what is and what isn't fun. Flying spaceships is somewhat common, but being able to get up and walk around them while in flight, and the activities therein are *not*. Elite innovated somewhat with its space travel so CIG have something of a yardstick of fun, but in terms of the FPS element of it, there's really nothing.
So how do you go about determining what does and what doesn't work? Well, rather than dreaming up fantastical notions like carting cargo around by hand one piece at a time or being a space waiter, you *prototype*. This is no different from any software development where requirements are fluid. You skip the onerous audio and artistic work, you say to hell with the fidelity and you throw something together that quickly demonstrates the idea and you focus group the heck out of it. The biggest asset that CIG have is its backers, so getting gameplay out to them as early as possible should have been the goal. But that's really where things started to go wrong for me. CIG (and CR in particular) are so driven by fidelity and by perception that I suspect they didn't feel they could throw prototypes out there like that. Everything released to the backers had to be polished. We can see that they've changed tack on that of late, with the illuminati (or whatever they're called) being effective surrogates for gameplay testers. But that's still too little, too late.
Because of this blinkered approach to development, the game has iterated slowly -- glacially even -- to where it is now. It's at a point where what's been implemented is sort of fun to play for a bit, but that is fundamentally missing most of its gameplay. Gameplay that's slowly being added, polished, changed, polished again, etc. when it's the gameplay that should have been nailed down at the front-end of the project and fripperies like ship variants and clothing should have been implemented toward the back end. Beyond a certain point, budget (and therefore scope) should have been fixed. After even a year in development, the requirements for this game should have been nailed down, but even now they're fluid. Everything I see about this project speaks to a hugely creative mind who wants their game to be the biggest and best out there, but who should *not* be in control of budget or delivery. Chris Roberts should ideally be lead designer of this game with a management team who have experience in delivering games on-time and on-budget. I'm happy that the whales continue to fund the game; it increases the chance that I'll eventually see a completed game for my piddly contribution. But I don't think anyone can look at this project in hindsight and say "job well done".
But I'm not a game developer, so what do I know?
Dint know tanks could fly
M1A: http://www.springfield-armory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NA9102_1200x3061.png
There are many like it, but this one is mine...
[video=youtube;Hjirp9fzDnA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjirp9fzDnA[/video]
[video=youtube;KtlNbmlvGM8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtlNbmlvGM8[/video]
[video=youtube;G97uuygdJ38]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G97uuygdJ38[/video]
and finally trailers without chris roberts. At helms
[video=youtube;PlgBT-wGAVY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlgBT-wGAVY[/video]
[video=youtube;4vGIkq-bTA4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGIkq-bTA4[/video] (im uncertain when this trailer aired but since its close to final product they delivered i think its after chris roberts had left the company)
I now ask which one of these 2 games looks like more fun? which one tells more about the actual gameplay?
[video=youtube;PUcMsPt68Ws]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUcMsPt68Ws[/video]
To me it looks like chris roberts was making different game. It was not the freelancer everyone knew.
You can also see same elements in star citizen. It looks pretty darn similar to that old freelancer. You know the one that nobody outside the dev team and press got to play.
I kinda wish that the team that made freelancer got together again and that they would make true sequel to freelancer.
You know the freelancer that chris roberts didnt get to direct.The freelancer where chris roberts was only credited as a creator of original concept (the ideas guy).
[video=youtube;KtlNbmlvGM8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtlNbmlvGM8[/video]
[video=youtube;G97uuygdJ38]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G97uuygdJ38[/video]
and finally trailers without chris roberts. At helms
[video=youtube;PlgBT-wGAVY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlgBT-wGAVY[/video]
[video=youtube;4vGIkq-bTA4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGIkq-bTA4[/video] (im uncertain when this trailer aired but since its close to final product they delivered i think its after chris roberts had left the company)
I now ask which one of these 2 games looks like more fun? which one tells more about the actual gameplay?
[video=youtube;PUcMsPt68Ws]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUcMsPt68Ws[/video]
To me it looks like chris roberts was making different game. It was not the freelancer everyone knew.
You can also see same elements in star citizen. It looks pretty darn similar to that old freelancer. You know the one that nobody outside the dev team and press got to play.
I kinda wish that the team that made freelancer got together again and that they would make true sequel to freelancer.
You know the freelancer that chris roberts didnt get to direct.The freelancer where chris roberts was only credited as a creator of original concept (the ideas guy).
Back in 2013 when the initial reason for delaying the Dog Fighting Module was so they could start with their own networking code from day 1 I was one of those standing up and defending that decision for the reasons you mentioned. Only apparently by June 2014 when AC 0.8 was released that actually didn't happened and what was released was a cobbled together version of cryengine's default netcode. That was really the turning point for me with the project from defending their decisions to starting to be critical. Then took a few months away and came back last summer only to see what had happened. Instead of months worth of improvements what I saw was more of the same. Critical issues not even being remotely addressed and always "reasons" why they were still fundamentally broken. What really got me was to see people asking perfectly valid questions getting exiled from the community by CIG staff. And I wasn't personally a fan of said people getting hit with bans, but I recognized what was going on.
It's simple really.
They didn't bother laying down a foundation because CryEngine (erroneously) was going to do all the work for them.
When they realized that about the mustang reality took a back seat to the rule of cool and thus the addition of "ghost thrusters" were added to the XML's to hide/fix those problems.
I'm glad I'm not the only one shrugging their shoulders...
Chris Roberts climbs into the back of a taxi. The driver turns around and asks "Where to guv?"
Chris Roberts opens up his wallet and checks the contents. "Take me... erm.. 58 Dollars' worth."
For what it's worth, Shattered Horizon (by Futuremark, of 3DMark fame) was a surprisingly good zero-g FPS some years back. It had the inevitable 6DOF issues - such as it being quite tricky to accurately display where you're getting shot from - but on the whole was quite immersive and pretty.
See also: Epic Games with the new Unreal Tournament. They've had the community playing on greybox maps for well over a year now, nailing down the gameplay and basic mechanics. That seems to be doing wonders for them, as even in its current state the game is by all accounts very good fun and more levels/art are now starting to come together. As a longtime UT fan I'm very much looking forward to where it's going.
You, like me, are a software engineer looking at this project wondering how they ever thought this order of operations was a good idea.
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