The Star Citizen Thread v8

Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
So, 9 options on that list. Mining is up next, so that's 3 months, and they seem to be saying that each feature will be 3 months.

So, 2.5 years to get those things in game, not to mention all the other features that need to be in game before it can be called a release.

Wow, i was thinking maybe 2 years and maybe there could be a barebones release. Think i'll revise that upwards now to another 5 years.
 
I mean, you know... SEA OF THIEVES just came out and, you know, we have like MORE VARIETY OF MISSIONS, a HELL OF A LOT MORE SHIPS, a BUNCH MORE STUFF that you can do, and a LOT MORE AREA TO PLAY IN

Very nice Chris, but SoT does have one thing you don't have... a game.
 
You didn't feel a sudden inexplicable urge to buy a mining ship or a land claim stick?

aka not a chosen one :)

The survey is kind of a smart move as it does several things at once.

- sedating the whales as it hints at immediate changes and improvements
- giving the community something else to talk about then recent hick-ups and all the arguing points
- buying CiG more time after this they can afford to go back to doing nothing for another 2-3 months
- ties in nicely with the ship sales which a lot of people were going to pass on but in light of all the "good stuff" coming soon(tm) I m sure many jumped boat and got themselves another pressy :)

Thanks Dooguk, that transcript is painful to read. I am more and more reminded of a blabbering idiot using terms and trying to explain things he has no idea about. With all the money in his lap he should really think about taking courses "how to speak freely and confidently". It worked great for Mark Zuckerberg. Tho you could argue that one was a young idealistic newb while CRoberts claims to be a genre veteran with decades of experience. Listening to him talk you wonder if thats true.

With expertise usually comes a different level of expression in body language and words. Its the same with this forum when you have people posting things they have no idea about.....immediately recognizable :)


So, 9 options on that list. Mining is up next, so that's 3 months, and they seem to be saying that each feature will be 3 months.

So, 2.5 years to get those things in game, not to mention all the other features that need to be in game before it can be called a release.

Wow, i was thinking maybe 2 years and maybe there could be a barebones release. Think i'll revise that upwards now to another 5 years.

It was mentioned several times that 2020 is too optimistic :)
 
Terrible. He literally didn't stop blabbering about virtually nothing barely taking a breath for 4 mins. He may may well have carried on but I had to turn it off. I was getting some sort if aural nausea from it.

The guy is a plonker.

I wouldn't say blabbering on about nothing.

He admitted the game wasn't built around multithreading and that "refactoring" it will take a huge amount of work.

Translation.....the game is poorly designed and coded around the wrong set of criteria and specs.
 
I mean, you know... SEA OF THIEVES just came out and, you know, we have like MORE VARIETY OF MISSIONS, a HELL OF A LOT MORE SHIPS, a BUNCH MORE STUFF that you can do, and a LOT MORE AREA TO PLAY IN

I cannot belive he actually said that, what a twerp! What's to stop Rare adding a whole buch of stuff to their released game over the next 12 months while CIG flounder away with their janky, crashing tech demo, "hurr durr we've got more space" what an idiotic thing to say.

I would love to meet CR irl and slap him with a smelly wet kipper everytime he opens his mouth.

Uh, uhrr, uhmm... so you know we say we're doing QUARTERLIES we actually do QUARTERLIES,

In 2016 they were doing monthly patches which they managed for 3 months before dwindling off to nothing.
In 2017 they were meant to be doing quarterly patches and delivered zero patches.
What is coming this year (excluding a significant amount of features) was meant to be coming last year and you're crowing about it as though the past never happened, what a revisionistic idiot.
 
In other news.....Epic Games have been busy showing off the capabilities on Unreal Engine 4 during GDC this week unveiling an Cool real-time ray Star Wars tech demo using NEW Nvidia’s RTX technology....by the time SC getting finished and ready to play(If ever)in many other new games this kind of tech will probably become standard....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ue35ago3Y

Ahh, ahhh! This is like healing salve on my shattered soul. The return of the elevator music! Excellent design! Love it!
 
I would love to meet CR irl and slap him with a smelly wet kipper everytime he opens his mouth.

Almost impossible by now without intensive subterfuge and "playing people".

I m sure the toxic whip swings both ways. If you have people openly attacking naysayers personally imagine how Chris Roberts email inbox looks like. By now theres bound to be a sizable number of disgruntled ex-backers writing him what they really think and considering the wording of some of these available posts he would be a fool to disregard them as being without merit. The worse this project gets the more pressure he ll get under. Recent events and conventions already hit me as being "selective" when it comes to the target audience like making sure you get the fanboys only so you get serve them whatever and they ll lap it up. Shots taken never show the security on stage but I m sure they have them around just in case to get rid of any troublemakers quickly
 
Only some. Some of them are beautiful (so long as you don't look too closely in some cases) and quite a bit are average.

Meh. Some of it could conceivably be considered technically interesting, if it weren't for the fact that it's Cryengine and that's it's whole schtick. So they get zero credit for that one. The rest is just mediocre, derivative, poorly executed, devoid of any artistry, and — in a shocking number of instances, mostly anything related to all those fancy character models they wasted untold millions to (utterly fail to) mocap — just plain old last-gen… and some of that would be insulting to the capabilities of the PS3 and 360.

All of CIG's graphics work is pants. The only parts that aren't are the ones they didn't have anything to do with. And that's not even getting into the art that they flat out stole before being called out and forced to pay for it.

e: Ok, not to be completely mean about it. What they have to their credit is that some of it is high detail. This means that it's incompetently done because that's not something they should be doing for yet another half-decade. So plot-twist, I'm actually completely mean about all of it. :D
 
Last edited:
Someone with some kind of software development competence and experience needs to sift through this immense pile of detritus to see if there's anything salvageable left from Chris' years of mismanagement (chances of that are slim to none).

The game is being developed without a fully functional engine. I'm not saying the engine should be locked into place before development starts....improvements and refinements can and should happen....but the capabilities and functionality of the engine should be in place so everyone knows what it is capable of, everyone knows what it can handle, everyone knows they can work on their own module content and secure that they can slot it back into the game and still work with everything else and everyone knows the specifications they need to meet and which the game and gameplay is being designed around....such as how many players in an instance.

The game is being developed through the open use of bandaid kludges rather than long term fixes. Serialized culling for example.

The game is being developed by a team whose duties include keeping a preAlpha playable and polished so the general public can play it and expect/receive performance expected from a Gold release. More, such activity appears to be being prioritised over actual development.

The game is being developed on the fly, without gameplay mechanics and features mapped and detailed.

The game is being developed haphazardly, with features and mechanics promised more because they seem "cool" rather than because they are a necessary or desirable addition to the game

The game is being developed with priorities set by players rather than on what the game needs

Chris Roberts admitted to a need to refactor the games huge codebase to allow for multithreading.

I could go on.

I don't think there is much to salvage.

IMO....and I say this without seeing be code...the entire game would need to be junked. Art assets, music and the like might be salvageable. The engine they are using might have some value, depending on the quality of the coding but its also useless for the game they want with proper netcode and servercode....and they don't seem to have even simple procedural generation up and running.

Funny thing is.....if CIG were to sack half their devs, change management, drop the needless emphasis on needless detail and fidelity and started working on game development, they probably could have the entire game reworked and finished in 2 or 3 years, even if they started work from scratch, and do so at a fraction of the cost.

For all they keep harping on about 500 employees, that's still too small for a AAA game, especially if we assume many of them are support staff rather than devs...management, HR, technical support, community managers, marketing and the like.

The 18 firms they manage would have to go as well. Hollywood accounting is great for eating up cash and hiding it away but it really has no business in game development...or indeed, anywhere (it being a sleazy practise at the best of times) and I cannot think of any legitimate reason why CIG would need more than one. Maybe two if you want to keep a presence in both the EU and US.
 
Last edited:
In other news.....Epic Games have been busy showing off the capabilities on Unreal Engine 4 during GDC this week unveiling an Cool real-time ray Star Wars tech demo using NEW Nvidia’s RTX technology....by the time SC getting finished and ready to play(If ever)in many other new games this kind of tech will probably become standard....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ue35ago3Y


PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE! Someone, ANYONE! Show that to Crobertz and record the reaction of his face! PLEASE!
 
IMO....and I say this without seeing be code...the entire game would need to be junked. Art assets, music and the like might be salvageable. The engine they are using might have some value, depending on the quality of the coding but its also useless for the game they want with proper netcode and servercode....and they don't seem to have even simple procedural generation up and running.

Heres the thing.

With experts on his payroll I am pretty sure he has been warned, briefed whatever you want to call it that these are real dangers, likely scenarios etc. So chances are CRoberts, even if he refused to listen initially comes to the realization that these descriptions are real risks and hes full bore in em right now facing the consequences.

"I didnt know" or
"nobody told me"

doesnt really cut it anymore after 6 years when even fans of the project come to these conclusions with only a fraction of all available information. Following this line of thought I can only assume once again that Chris is by now running a project he knows he cannot complete, doesnt give a damn but plays his remaining backers as the cash cows they are. He will literally say anything to get more time running this show regardless how stupid or hilarious it is. Getting money trumps making yourself a clown every single time. And while we could discuss the legality of the use "scam" its what it is for me as I understand it. It certainly is not morally right, fair, transparent or respectful.
 
In fairness, adding RTX support to existing engines shouldn't be too hard, as long as the support is there on the hardware and driver side - might even be trivial. Most games these days use a PBR pipeline for their materials anyway.

I could see both ED and SC supporting it once it becomes available.
 
Check out Rogue System! Closest you can currently get to flying a near future/hard scifi space craft.

I have, and like, RS, but it's more about running through endless sequences of airliner-type checklists than actually zooming around in free-roaming mayhem.

The most promising Elite alternative remains Pioneer, although, frustratingly, it still lacks fixed-beam CQB - the cornerstone of the Elite experience, for me - 'combat' in Pioneer is basically flinging loose snowballs at each other at ridiculous ranges... hence it's trivially easy to dodge incoming fire, and virtually impossible to land a hit. More people need to pressure Pioneer's devs about this, because they don't seem to realise what's missing and how much more fun it could be..

..the ultimate benchmark for which, remains FFED3DAJ:

[video=youtube_share;igfDFBPLe-4]https://youtu.be/igfDFBPLe-4[/video]

Real, actual spaceflight, with real spaceships in real space (or what ED afficionados hesitatingly refer to as "full Newtonian", LOL, as if being stuck in a semi-immobilised bathtub in custard was a perfectly reasonable alternative "flight model" (sic))..

The bottom line is that if you actually like spaceflight (weirdo) and also like arcade pew pew (savage!), then there is only Elite 2 & 3 - nothing else comes close. ED isn't even a contender, and i very much doubt SC will be either..
 
The survey is kind of a smart move as it does several things at once.

- sedating the whales as it hints at immediate changes and improvements
- giving the community something else to talk about then recent hick-ups and all the arguing points
- buying CiG more time after this they can afford to go back to doing nothing for another 2-3 months
- ties in nicely with the ship sales which a lot of people were going to pass on but in light of all the "good stuff" coming soon(tm) I m sure many jumped boat and got themselves another pressy :)

It also offers fans the illusion of being involved in the development process, although it's about as meaningful as the legendary "would you like the scope to increase?" forum poll. What it really does is highlight the hopeless lack of direction, vision and leadership coming from the top management.

I see salvage is in the lead, and that doesn't surprise me one bit because it's basically a trivial remix of the few systems they already have (go to location X and pick up some boxes), so it's not exactly an ambitious goal. Unlike repairs, which would expose the limitations of their ship systems, and of item 2.0 which is amazingly still in development after all these years. Or refuelling, which would ideally require some sort of pseudo ship-to-ship docking, when I seem to recall they ditched the idea of ships being able to dock with each other ages ago because it was too difficult. Although that will probably also end up being implemented as carrying boxes (of fuel) around.
 
In fairness, adding RTX support to existing engines shouldn't be too hard, as long as the support is there on the hardware and driver side - might even be trivial. Most games these days use a PBR pipeline for their materials anyway.

I could see both ED and SC supporting it once it becomes available.

I could see Crytek Amazon doing the heavy lifting and adding it to the engine, and then CIG patching those updates into StarEngine (poorly) and then acting as if they invented it. Before announcing they have to refactor all the assets to be compatible with it. Couple of days, flip a switch etc.
 
Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom