The Star Citizen Thread v8
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Answers on a postcard to BBC TV Studios, Wood Lane, W12 7RJ...
Anthea Turner, given $170 million, a couple of toilet roll tubes and some sticky backed plastic, would have produced a better Star Citizen than CIG
Which is why some of what CIG is doing is puzzling. CIG had a chance to create real excitement with 3.0. And the simplest thing they could have done to maintain that buzz would be to actually implement the entire system. They wouldn't need content per se, but simply having the planets and moons and being able to visit them, even just orbit them, would have shown that they were making progress. That their procedural generation systems were working.
PG has been a thing since the 80s. It isn't rocket science to get it up and working. It would have enabled them to provide the entire system, to claim that progress was being made, to keep the buzz.
That they didn't do it suggests that, for some reason, their PG systems aren't working. That the Stanton system wasn't added because they cannot add it. But if they cannot add it, if their procedural generation isn't working even now...
And, to be honest, I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't, unless they cannot.
Not too much longer. Maybe it's just me, but IMO the hype machine seems to have stalled. Expectations are much lower than they were, I've seen more and more criticism. 3.0 was not the patch people expected, and it was not the patch CIG needed to release. Indeed, it seems 3.4 will be the patch when we have everything 3.0 was supposed to have, with 3.1 and 3.2 mostly adding bug fixes and performance enhancers. And even then, the features are starting to slide which will, in turn, bump features off the next patch. That stuff promised for 3.4 might appear in a future 3.5 or 4.0.
There isn't enough gameplay or content to keep people happy, and CIG again overpromised and under delivered with 3.0. And it is their own fault....I could suppose part of the reason 3.0 was late is because they spent time transferring everything over to LY but they really shouldn't have launched 3.0 without all the promised features. Instead, it appears likely they released it partially to spike EDs new content but also to provide something to head off a backer revolt at their cons.
Further, with their new Delta patcher, it seems unwise to limit themselves to major patches every three months. If they have performance and bug fixes, why not add them now? That's one of the reasons to use a Delta Patcher...so you can add in minor updates and fixes. I'm not sure of the rationale behind saving them for later.
As I see it, CIG has one chance - just one - to get the buzz rolling again. It needs to release Squadron 42, and Squadron 42 needs to be great. Unfortunately, S42 didn't look anywhere near ready, and there were several flaws affecting issues such as mechanics and gameplay that really look like they'll drag the game down. I'm not certain, but I don't think releasing S42 as a "good" game instead of "great" will be enough to save things. S42 will sell a lot...because a lot have ben presold...but CIG needs new blood to buy the game. And right now, it looks like it'll be an overpriced mess.
The Star Citizen tracker now reports 17% completion on 545 intended features after 1934 days:
https://starcitizentracker.github.io/
In other news, Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are expected by some to come out this year:
http://abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/Culture/2018-oscar-winners/story?id=53562886
https://starcitizentracker.github.io/
In other news, Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are expected by some to come out this year:
ABCnews; said:
http://abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/Culture/2018-oscar-winners/story?id=53562886
Anthea Turner, given $170 million, a couple of toilet roll tubes and some sticky backed plastic, would have produced a better Star Citizen than CIG
Other than multiplayer, No Mans Sky delivers pretty much everything SC promised and reportedly did so for less than $10 million.
OK - some elements aren't that great and NMS did underdeliver, and there is certainly much that can be criticised....but it also has a game engine, and game mechanics, FPS and space systems/combat, aliens and trade and resource gathering, planetary landings and exploration.
Elite? Reportedly less than £8 million, plus additional costs for Beyond and Horizons. Delivers most of what Star Citizen promises except FPS and atmospheric landings. And those are planned. And, it's much more restrained in the multiplayer/MMO aspect, using a P2P model than allows for fewer players in an instance, but which is also far, far cheaper and simpler to run.
CIGs problems doesn't seem to be money - it is how they are spending it.
When that's pretty much all you've got left for 3.1 it'll look like more's been achieved if it arrives all at once perhaps?
This seems very unlikely sadly. I'm not sure anyone's expecting much more than COD:IW2
They're expecting far too much in that case.
You have to remember that COD:IW was a “failure” only from the perspective that these are companies that are so adept at making shooters (space or otherwise) that they instinctively and habitually expect to make 40 umptillion monetary units on each title, and in this case they “only” made a bajillion.
CIG has neither that competence nor the customer base to support that level of quality.
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The longer it goes on the more it seems to come down to that;
Chris has been winging it for years - the answer is yes - what's the question?
But when it comes down to it and they have to come up with the goods it's just not happening because they just can't make it happen.
*gasp* let me get by handbag
But yeah I have to agree - tbh though they probably do individually but there's not the experience to pull it off. It's their first game and it's got to be a spectacular block buster
I must have missed the news that a pre alpha can be considered completion of a game.
Perhaps because for going on close to 2 years we were hearing how 3.0 was going to be the Jesus patch. When 3.0 didn't add much and performance tanked... well, no surprise that people are not happy.
For CIG to release SQ42 it still needs lots of things from SC finishing like Item 2.0, subsibblysumption, ships, planets, locations, and of course, decent performance. You could see watching the SQ42 demo from Christmas that performance is an issue there, even when they carefully pre-record everything on a good machine.
It'll continue to be an issue until CIG "refactor" a core component of their network timeline initialization.
The won't do it of course, because it will require a complete rewrite of their socketing. I don't believe they actually know how to do it. Looking at the actual calls and packet path, it's not just a complete mess, it's complete garbage.
I thought that SQ42 was going to be single-player?
Though come to think of it, it is always possible that CIG are using 'networking not being fixed yet' as an excuse for other parts of the application running so slow...
Is it Squadron 42 you're talking about? Does it use network connections much, as a single player game? I know you can connect to (for example) an Oracle database on the same computer as the client using TCP loopback, but that's presumably an inefficient mechanism to use for a game. I can't say I understand much about game technology though.
Not sure if you're just acting the innocent, but I thought it was common knowledge that having a local client connect to a local server to provide a scripted singleplayer/campaign mode, then connect to an internet server for multiplayer has been usual practice in FPS and RTS for decades.
I have no idea about how games are constructed (well, not since the BBC Micro at any rate). So is traversing a TCP stack normal, or can a faster client/server interconnect be implemented for a purely single-player game (S42)?
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